The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales
Author: Edmond Hamilton
Date: 2013-10-01 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories; pulp fiction; Space Opera; Sci-Fi; Science Fiction
Description: Edmond Hamilton. For most people, this name conjures visions of two-fisted space opera -- pure pulp science fiction. And Hamilton -- known as the author of the "Captain Future" series -- was indeed one of the foremost writers of pulp space opera. Over the years, as his work became more polished and sophisticated, he evolved into far more than that: a visionary of the future whose imagination knew no bounds. He was truly a cosmic writer, as stories such as "Devolution" (in this collection) demonstrate. If you are interested in pulp science fiction at its pulpiest, look no farther. Edmond Hamilt
Publisher: Wildside Press
Rights: Copyright © 2013 by Wildside Press

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFO

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

THE DOOR INTO INFINITY

THE LEGION OF LAZARUS

DREAMER’S WORLDS

THE CITY AT WORLD’S END

THE WORLD WITH A THOUSAND MOONS

THE STARS, MY BROTHERS

THE SARGASSO OF SPACE

THE MAN WHO SAW THE FUTURE

THE MONSTER-GOD OF MAMURTH

THE MAN WHO RETURNED

THE SECOND SATELLITE

MONSTERS OF MARS

THE MAN WHO EVOLVED

DEVOLUTION

THE BIRTHPLACE OF CREATION

CORRIDORS OF THE STARS

The Edmond Hamilton Megapack

Version 1.0

COPYRIGHT INFO

The Edmond Hamilton Megapack is copyright © 2013 by Wildside Press LLC. Cover art © Andrea Danti / Fotolia. All rights reserved. For more information, contact the publisher.

“The Door into Infinity” originally appeared in Weird Tales, August-September 1936.

“The Legion of Lazarus” originally appeared in Imagination, April 1956.

“Dreamer’s Worlds” originally appeared in Weird Tales, November-December 1941.

The City at World’s End originally appeared in 1951.

The World with a Thousand Moons originally appeared in Amazing Stories, December 1942.

The Stars, My Brothers originally appeared in Amazing Stories Fact and Science Fiction May 1962.

“The Sargasso of Space” originally appeared in Astounding Stories, September 1931.

“The Man Who Saw the Future” originally appeared in Amazing Stories, October 1930.

“The Monster-God of Mamurth” originally appeared in Weird Tales, September 1935.

“The Man Who Returned” originally appeared in Weird Tales, February 1934.

“The Second Satellite” originally appeared in Astounding Stories
of Super-Science, August 1930.

“Monsters of Mars” originally appeared in Astounding Stories
of Super-Science, April 1931.

“Devolution” originally appeared in Amazing Stories, December 1936.

“The Birthplace of Creation” originally appeared in Startling Stories, May 1951.

“Corridor of the Stars” originally appeared in Imagination, April 1958.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Edmond Hamilton. For most people, this name conjures visions of two-fisted space opera—pure pulp science fiction. And Hamilton—known as the author of the Captain Future series—was indeed one of the foremost writers of pulp space opera. Over the years, as his work became more polished and sophisticated, he became far more than that: a visionary of the future whose imagination knew no bounds. He was truly a cosmic writer, as stories such as “Devolution” (in this collection) demonstrate.

If you are interested in pulp science fiction at its pulpiest—look no farther. Edmond Hamilton is the author for you.

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com

ABOUT THE MEGAPACK SERIES

Over the last few years, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has proved to be one of our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt, Mary Wickizer Burgess, Sam Cooper, Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, Robert Reginald. A. E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!).

A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS

The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)

RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

TYPOS

Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at wildsidepress@yahoo.com or use the message boards above.

THE MEGAPACK SERIES

MYSTERY

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The Charlie Chan Megapack

The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

The Detective Megapack

The Father Brown Megapack

The Girl Detectives Megapack

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack

The First Mystery Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Raffles Megapack

The Victorian Mystery Megapack

The Wilkie Collins Megapack

GENERAL INTEREST

The Adventure Megapack

The Baseball Megapack

The Cat Story Megapack

The Second Cat Story Megapack

The Christmas Megapack

The Second Christmas Megapack

The Classic American Short Stories Megapack, Vol. 1.

The Classic Humor Megapack

The Dog Story Megapack

The Doll Story Megapack

The Horse Story Megapack

The Military Megapack

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

The Edward Bellamy Megapack

The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

The Ray Cummings Megapack

The Philip K. Dick Megapack

The Randall Garrett Megapack

The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

The Martian Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The H. Beam Piper Megapack

The Pulp Fiction Megapack

The Mack Reynolds Megapack

The Science-Fantasy Megapack

The First Science Fiction Megapack

The Second Science Fiction Megapack

The Third Science Fiction Megapack

The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack

The Robert Sheckley Megapack

The Steampunk Megapack

The Time Travel Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

HORROR

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The E.F. Benson Megapack

The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack

The Ghost Story Megapack

The Second Ghost Story Megapack

The Third Ghost Story Megapack

The Haunts & Horrors Megapack

The Horror Megapack

The M.R. James Megapack

The Macabre Megapack

The Second Macabre Megapack

The Mummy Megapack

The Vampire Megapack

The Werewolf Megapack

WESTERNS

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The Buffalo Bill Megapack

The Cowboy Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Western Megapack

The Second Western Megapack

The Wizard of Oz Megapack

YOUNG ADULT

The Boys’ Adventure Megapack

The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

The Doll Story Megapack

The G.A. Henty Megapack

The Girl Detectives Megapack

The Penny Parker Megapack

The Pinocchio Megapack

The Rover Boys Megapack

The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

The Tom Swift Megapack

AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

The Edward Bellamy Megapack

The B.M. Bower Megapack

The E.F. Benson Megapack

The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

The Max Brand Megapack

The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

The Wilkie Collins Megapack

The Ray Cummings Megapack

The Guy de Maupassant Megapack

The Philip K. Dick Megapack

The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack

The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

The Randall Garrett Megapack

The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

The Anna Katharine Green Megapack

The Zane Grey Megapack

The Dashiell Hammett Megapack

The M.R. James Megapack

The Selma Lagerlof Megapack

The Murray Leinster Megapack

The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack

The Talbot Mundy Megapack

The Andre Norton Megapack

The H. Beam Piper Megapack

The Mack Reynolds Megapack

The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

The Saki Megapack

The Robert Sheckley Megapack

OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY

The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)

The Wildside Book of Fantasy

The Wildside Book of Science Fiction

Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories

Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories

X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries

THE DOOR INTO INFINITY

CHAPTER 1

The Brotherhood of the Door

“Where leads the Door?”

“It leads outside our world.”

“Who taught our forefathers to open the Door?”

“They Beyond the Door taught them.”

“To whom do we bring these sacrifices?”

“We bring them to Those Beyond the Door.”

“Shall the Door be opened that They may take them?”

“Let the Door be opened!”

Paul Ennis had listened thus far, his haggard face uncomprehending in expression, but now he interrupted the speaker.

“But what does it all mean, inspector? Why are you repeating this to me?”

“Did you ever hear anyone speak words like that?” asked Inspector Pierce Campbell, leaning tautly forward for the answer.

“Of course not—it just sounds like gibberish to me,” Ennis exclaimed. “What connection can it have with my wife?”

He had risen to his feet, a tall, blond young American whose good-looking face was drawn and worn by inward agony, whose crisp yellow hair was brushed back from his forehead in disorder, and whose blue eyes were haunted with an anguished dread.

He kicked back his chair and strode across the gloomy little office, whose single window looked out on the thickening, foggy twilight of London. He bent across the dingy desk, gripping its edges with his hands as he spoke tensely to the man sitting behind it.

“Why are we wasting time talking here?” Ennis cried. “Sitting here talking, when anything may be happening to Ruth!

“It’s been hours since she was kidnapped. They may have taken her anywhere, even outside of London by now. And instead of searching for her, you sit here and talk gibberish about Doors!”

Inspector Campbell seemed unmoved by Ennis’ passion. A bulky, almost bald man, he looked up with his colorless, sagging face, in which his eyes gleamed like two crumbs of bright brown glass.

“You’re not helping me much by giving way to your emotions, Mr. Ennis,” he said in his flat voice.

“Give way? Who wouldn’t give way?” cried Ennis. “Don’t you understand, man, it’s Ruth that’s gone—my wife! Why, we were married only last week in New York. And on our second day here in London, I see her whisked into a limousine and carried away before my eyes! I thought you men at Scotland Yard here would surely act, do something. Instead you talk crazy gibberish to me!”

“Those words are not gibberish,” said Pierce Campbell quietly. “And I think they’re related to the abduction of your wife.”

“What do you mean? How could they be related?”

The inspector’s bright little brown eyes held Ennis’. “Did you ever hear of an organization called the Brotherhood of the Door?”

Ennis shook his head, and Campbell continued, “Well, I am certain your wife was kidnapped by members of the Brotherhood.”

“What kind of an organization is it?” the young American demanded. “A band of criminals?”

“No, it is no ordinary criminal organization,” the detective said. His sagging face set strangely. “Unless I am mistaken, the Brotherhood of the Door is the most unholy and blackly evil organization that has ever existed on this earth. Almost nothing is known of it outside its circle. I myself in twenty years have learned little except its existence and name. That ritual I just repeated to you, I heard from the lips of a dying member of the Brotherhood, who repeated the words in his delirium.”

Campbell leaned forward. “But I know that every year about this time the Brotherhood come from all over the world and gather at some secret center here in England. And every year, before that gathering, scores of people are kidnapped and never heard of again. I believe that all those people are kidnapped by this mysterious Brotherhood.”

“But what becomes of the people they kidnap?” cried the pale young American. “What do they do with them?”

Inspector Campbell’s bright brown eyes showed a hint of hooded horror, yet he shook his head. “I know no more than you. But whatever they do to the victims, they are never heard of again.”

“But you must know something more!” Ennis protested. “What is this Door?”

Campbell again shook his head. “That too I don’t know, but whatever it is, the Door is utterly sacred to the members of the Brotherhood, and whomever they mean by They Beyond the Door, they dread and venerate to the utmost.”

“Where leads the Door? It leads outside our world,” repeated Ennis. “What can that mean?”

“It might have a symbolic meaning, referring to some secluded fastness of the order which is away from the rest of the world,” the inspector said. “Or it might—”

He stopped. “Or it might what?” pressed Ennis, his pale face thrust forward.

“It might mean, literally, that the Door leads outside our world and universe,” finished the inspector.

Ennis’ haunted eyes stared. “You mean that this Door might somehow lead into another universe? But that’s impossible!”

“Perhaps unlikely,” Campbell said quietly, “but not impossible. Modern science has taught us that there are other universes than the one we live in, universes congruent and coincident with our own in space and time, yet separated from our own by the impassable barrier of totally different dimensions. It is not entirely impossible that a greater science than ours might find a way to pierce that barrier between our universe and one of those outside ones, that a Door should be opened from ours into one of those others in the infinite outside.”

“A door into the infinite outside,” repeated Ennis broodingly, looking past the inspector. Then he made a sudden movement of wild impatience, the dread leaping back strong in his eyes again.

“Oh, what good is all this talk about Doors and infinite universes doing in finding Ruth? I want to do something! If you think this mysterious Brotherhood has taken her, you must surely have some idea of how we can get her back from them? You must know something more about them than you’ve told.”

“I don’t know anything more certainly, but I’ve certain suspicions that amount to convictions,” Inspector Campbell said. “I’ve been working on this Brotherhood for many years, and block after block I’ve narrowed down to the place I think the order’s local center, the London headquarters of the Brotherhood of the Door.”

“Where is the place?” asked Ennis tensely.

“It is the waterfront café of one Chandra Dass, a Hindoo, down by East India Docks,” said the detective officer. “I’ve been there in disguise more than once, watching the place. This Chandra Dass I’ve found to be immensely feared by everyone in the quarter, which strengthens my belief that he’s one of the high officers of the Brotherhood. He’s too exceptional a man to be really running such a place.”

“Then if the Brotherhood took Ruth, she may be at that place now!” cried the young American, electrified.

Campbell nodded his bald head. “She may very likely be. Tonight I’m going there again in disguise, and have men ready to raid the place. If Chandra Dass has your wife there, we’ll get her before he can get her away. Whatever way it turns out, we’ll let you know at once.”

“Like hell you will!” exploded the pale young Ennis. “Do you think I’m going to twiddle my thumbs while you’re down there? I’m going with you. And if you refuse to let me, by heaven I’ll go there myself!”

Inspector Pierce Campbell gave the haggard, fiercely determined face of the young man a long look, and then his own colorless countenance seemed to soften a little.

“All right,” he said quietly. “I can disguise you so you’ll not be recognized. But you’ll have to follow my orders exactly, or death will result for both of us.”

That strange, hooded dread flickered again in his eyes, as though he saw through shrouding mists the outline of dim horror.

“It may be,” he added slowly, “that something worse even than death awaits those who try to oppose the Brotherhood of the Door—something that would explain the unearthly, superhuman dread that enwraps the secret mysteries of the order. We’re taking more than our lives in our hands, I think, in trying to unveil those mysteries, to regain your wife. But we’ve got to act quickly, at all costs. We’ve got to find her before the great gathering of the Brotherhood takes place, or we’ll never find her.”

Two hours before midnight found Campbell and Ennis passing along a cobble-paved waterfront street north of the great East India Docks. Big warehouses towered black and silent in the darkness on one side, and on the other were old, rotting docks beyond which Ennis glimpsed the black water and gliding lights of the river.

As they straggled beneath the infrequent lights of the ill-lit street, they were utterly changed in appearance. Inspector Campbell, dressed in a shabby suit and rusty bowler, his dirty white shirt innocent of tie, had acquired a new face, a bright red, oily, eager one, and a high, squeaky voice. Ennis wore a rough blue seaman’s jacket and a vizored cap pulled down over his head. His unshaven-looking face and subtly altered features made him seem a half-intoxicated seaman off his ship, as he stumbled unsteadily along. Campbell clung to him in true land-shark fashion, plucking his arm and talking wheedlingly to him.

They came into a more populous section of the evil old waterfront street, and passed fried-fish shops giving off the strong smell of hot fat, and the dirty, lighted windows of a half-dozen waterfront saloons, loud with sordid argument or merriment.

Campbell led past them until they reached one built upon an abandoned, moldering pier, a ramshackle frame structure extending some distance back out on the pier. Its window was curtained, but dull red light glowed through the glass window of the door.

A few shabby men were lounging in front of the place but Campbell paid them no attention, tugging Ennis inside by the arm.

“Carm on in!” he wheedled shrilly. “The night ain’t ’alf over yet—we’ll ’ave just one more.”

“Don’t want any more,” muttered Ennis drunkenly, swaying on his feet inside. “Get away, you damned old shark.”

Yet he suffered himself to be led by Campbell to a table, where he slumped heavily into a chair. His stare swung vacantly.

The café of Chandra Dass was a red-lit, smoke-filled cave with cheap black curtains on the walls and windows, and other curtains cutting off the back part of the building from view. The dim room was jammed with tables crowded with patrons whose babel of tongues made an unceasing din, to which a three-string guitar somewhere added a wailing undertone. The waiters were dark-skinned and tiger-footed Malays, while the patrons seemed drawn from every nation east and west.

Ennis’ glazed eyes saw dandified Chinese from Limehouse and Pennyfields, dark little Levantins from Soho, rough-looking Cockneys in shabby caps, a few crazily laughing blacks. From sly white faces, taut brown ones and impassive yellow ones came a dozen different languages. The air was thick with queer food-smells and the acrid smoke.

Campbell had selected a table near the back curtain, and now stridently ordered one of the Malay waiters to bring gin. He leaned forward with an oily smile to the drunken-looking Ennis, and spoke to him in a wheedling undertone.

“Don’t look for a minute, but that’s Chandra Dass over in the corner, and he’s watching us,” he said.

Ennis shook his clutching hand away. “Damned old shark!” he muttered again.

He turned his swaying head slowly, letting his eyes rest a moment on the man in the corner. That man was looking straight at him.

Chandra Dass was tall, dressed in spotless white from his shoes to the turban on his head. The white made his dark, impassive, aquiline face stand out in chiseled relief. His eyes were coal-black, large, coldly searching, as they met Ennis’ bleared gaze.

Ennis felt a strange chill as he met those eyes. There was something alien and unhuman, something uncannily disturbing, behind the Hindoo’s stare. He turned his gaze vacantly from Chandra Dass to the black curtains at the rear, and then back to his companion.

The silent Malay waiter had brought the liquor, and Campbell pressed a glass toward his companion. “’Ere, matey, take this.”

“Don’t want it,” muttered Ennis, pushing it away. Still in the same mutter, he added, “If Ruth’s here, she’s somewhere in the back there. I’m going back and find out.”

“Don’t try it that way, for God’s sake!” said Campbell in the wheedling undertone. “Chandra Dass is still watching, and those Malays would be on you in a minute. Wait until I give the word.

“All right, then,” Campbell added in a louder, injured tone. “If you don’t want it, I’ll drink it myself.”

He tossed off the glass of gin and set the glass down on the table, looking at his drunken companion with righteous indignation.

“Think I’m tryin’ to bilk yer, eh?” he added. “That’s a fine way to treat a pal!”

He added in the coaxing lower tone, “All right, I’m going to try it. Be ready to move when I light my cigarette.”

He fished a soiled package of Gold Flakes from his pocket and put one in his mouth. Ennis waited, every muscle taut.

The inspector, his red, oily face still injured in expression, struck a match to his cigarette. Almost at once there was a loud oath from one of the shabby loungers outside the front of the building, and the sound of angry voices and blows.

The patrons of Chandra Dass looked toward the door, and one of the Malay waiters went hastily out to quiet the fight. But it grew swiftly, sounded in a moment like a small riot. Crash—someone was pushed through the front window. The excited patrons pressed toward the front. Chandra Dass pushed through them, issuing quick orders to his servants.

For the time being the back of the café was deserted and unnoticed. Campbell sprang to his feet, and with Ennis close behind him, darted through the black curtains. They found themselves in a black corridor at the end of which a red bulb burned dimly. They could still hear the uproar.

Campbell’s gun was in his hand, and the American’s in his.

“We dare only stay here a few moments,” the inspector cried. “Look in those rooms along the corridor here.”

Ennis frantically tore open a door and peered into a dark room smelling of drugs. “Ruth!” he cried softly. “Ruth!”

CHAPTER 2

Death Trap

There was no answer. The light in the corridor behind him suddenly went out, plunging him into pitch-black darkness. He jumped back into the dark corridor, and as he did so, heard a sudden scuffle further along it.

“Campbell!” he exclaimed, lunging forward in the black passageway. There was no answer.

He pitched forward through stygian obscurity, his hands searching ahead of him for the inspector. In the dark something whipped smoothly around his throat, tightened there like a slender, contracting tentacle.

Ennis tore frenziedly at the thing, which he felt to be a slender silken cord, but he could not loosen it. It was choking him. He tried to cry out again to Campbell, but his throat could not emit the sounds. He thrashed, twisted helplessly, hearing a loud roaring in his ears, consciousness receding. Then, dimly as though in a dream, Ennis was aware of being lowered to the floor, of being half carried and half dragged along. The constriction around his throat was gone and rapidly his brain began to clear. He opened his eyes.

He found himself lying on the floor of a room illuminated by a great hanging brass lamp of ornate design. The walls of the room were hung with rich, grotesquely worked red silk Indian draperies. His hands and feet were bound behind him, and beside him, tied in the same manner, lay Inspector Campbell. Over them stood Chandra Dass and two of the Malay servants. The faces of the servants were tigerish in their menace, but Chandra Dass’ face was one of dark, impassive scorn.

“So you misguided fools thought you could deceive me so easily as that?” he said in a strong, vibrant voice. “Why, we knew hours ago that you, Inspector Campbell, and you, Mr. Ennis, were coming here tonight. We let you get this far only because it was evident that somehow you had learned too much about us, and that it would be best to let you come here and meet your deaths.”

“Chandra Dass, I’ve men outside,” rasped Campbell. “If we don’t come out, they’ll come in after us.”

The Hindoo’s proud, dark face did not change its scorn. “They will not come in for a little while, inspector. By that time you two will be dead and we shall be gone with our captives. Yes, Mr. Ennis, your wife is one of those captives,” he added to the prostrate young American. “It is too bad we cannot take you and the inspector to share her glorious destiny, but then our accommodations of transport are limited.”

“Ruth here?” Ennis’ face flamed at the words, and he raised himself a little from the floor on his elbows.

“Then you’ll let her go if I pay you? I’ll raise any amount, I’ll do anything you ask, if you’ll set her free.”

“No amount of money in the world could buy her from the Brotherhood of the Door,” answered Chandra Dass steadily. “For she belongs now, not to us, but to They Beyond the Door. Within a few hours she and many others shall stand before the Door, and They Beyond the Door shall take them.”

“What are you going to do to her?” cried Ennis. “What is this damned Door and who are They Beyond it?”

“I do not think that even if I told you, your little mind would be able to accept the mighty truth,” Chandra Dass said calmly. His coal-black eyes suddenly flashed with fanatic, frenetic light. “How could your poor, earth-bound little intelligences conceive the true nature of the Door and of those who dwell beyond it? Your puny brains would be stricken senseless by mere apprehension of them, They who are mighty and crafty and dreadful beyond anything on earth.”

A cold wind from the alien unknown seemed to sweep the lamplit room with the Hindoo’s passionate words. Then that rapt, fanatic exaltation dropped from him as suddenly as it had come, and he spoke in his ordinary vibrant tones.

“But enough of this parley with blind worms of the dust. Bring the weights!”

The last words were addressed to the Malay servants, who sprang to a closet in the corner of the room.

Inspector Campbell said steadily, “If my men find us dead when they come in here, they’ll leave none of you living.”

Chandra Dass did not even listen to him, but ordered the dark servants sharply, “Attach the weights!”

The Malays had brought from the closet two fifty-pound lead balls, and now they proceeded quickly to tie these to the feet of the two men. Then one of them rolled back the brilliant red Indian rug from the rough pine floor. A square trap-door was disclosed, and at Chandra Dass’ order, it was swung upward and open.

Up through the open square came the sound of waves slap-slapping against the piles of the old pier, and the heavy odors of salt water and of rotting wood invaded the room.

“The water under this pier is twenty feet deep,” Chandra Dass told the two prisoners. “I regret to give you so easy a death, but there is no opportunity to take you to the fate you deserve.”

Ennis, his skin crawling on his flesh, nevertheless spoke rapidly and as steadily as possible to the Hindoo.

“Listen, I don’t ask you to let me go, but I’ll do anything you want, let you kill me any way you want, if you’ll let Ruth—”

Sheer horror cut short his words. The Malay servants had dragged Campbell’s bound body to the door in the floor. They shoved him over the edge. Ennis had one glimpse of the inspector’s taut, strange face falling out of sight. Then a dull splash sounded instantly below, and then silence.

He felt hands upon himself, dragging him across the floor. He fought, crazily, hopelessly, twisting his body in its bonds, thrashing his bound limbs wildly.

He saw the dark, unmoved face of Chandra Dass, the brass lamp over his head, the red hangings. Then his head dangled over the opening, a shove sent his body scraping over the edge, and he plunged downward through dank darkness. With a splash he hit the icy water and went under. The heavy weight at his ankles dragged him irresistibly downward. Instinctively he held his breath as the water rushed upward around him.

His feet struck oozy bottom. His body swayed there, chained by the lead weight to the bottom. His lungs already were bursting to draw in air, slow fires seeming to creep through his breast as he held his breath.

Ennis knew that in a moment or two more he would inhale the strangling waters and die. The thought-picture of Ruth flashed across his despairing mind, wild with hopeless regret. He could no longer hold his breath, felt his muscles relaxing against his will, tasted the stinging salt water at the back of his nose.

Then it was a bursting confusion of swift sensations, the choking water in his nose and throat, the roaring in his ears. A scroll of flame unrolled slowly in his brain and a voice shouted there, “You’re dying!” He felt dimly a plucking at his ankles.

Abruptly Ennis’ dimming mind was aware that he now was shooting upward through the water. His head burst into open air and he choked, strangled and gasped, his tortured lungs gulping the damp, heavy air. He opened his eyes, and shook the water from them.

He was floating in the darkness at the surface of the water. Someone was floating beside him, supporting him. Ennis’ chin bumped the other’s shoulder, and he heard a familiar voice.

“Easy, now,” said Inspector Campbell. “Wait till I cut your hands loose.”

“Campbell!” Ennis choked. “How did you get loose?”

“Never mind that now,” the inspector answered. “Don’t make any noise, or they may hear us up there.”

Ennis felt a knife-blade slashing the bonds at his wrists. Then, the inspector’s arm helping him, he and his companion paddled weakly through the darkness under the rotting pier. They bumped against the slimy, moldering piles, threaded through them toward the side of the pier. The waves of the flooding tide washed them up and down as Campbell led the way.

They passed out from under the old pier into the comparative illumination of the stars. Looking back up, Ennis saw the long, black mass of the house of Chandra Dass, resting on the black pier, ruddy light glowing from window-cracks. He collided with something and found that Campbell had led toward a little floating dock where some skiffs were moored. They scrambled up onto it from the water, and lay panting for a few moments.

Campbell had something in his hand, a thin, razor-edged steel blade several inches long. Its hilt was an ordinary leather shoe-heel.

The inspector turned up one of his feet and Ennis saw that the heel was missing from that shoe. Carefully Campbell slid the steel blade beneath the shoe-sole, the heel-hilt sliding into place and seeming merely the innocent heel of the shoe.

“So that’s how you got loose down in the water!” Ennis exclaimed, and the inspector nodded briefly.

“That trick’s done me good service before—even with your hands tied behind your back you can get out that knife and use it. It was touch and go, though, whether I could get it out and cut myself loose in the water in time enough to free you.”

Ennis gripped the inspector’s shoulder. “Campbell, Ruth is in there! By heaven, we’ve found her and now we can get her out!”

“Right!” said the officer grimly. “We’ll go around to the front and in two minutes we’ll be in there with my men.”

They climbed dripping to their feet, and hastened from the little floating dock up onto the shore, through the darkness to the cobbled street.

The shabbily disguised men of Inspector Campbell were not now in front of Chandra Dass’ café, but lurking in the shadows across the street. They came running toward Campbell and Ennis.

“All right, we’re going in there,” Campbell exclaimed in steely tones. “Get Chandra Dass, whatever you do, but see that his prisoners are not harmed.”

He snapped a word and one of the men handed pistols to him and to Ennis. Then they leaped toward the door of the Hindoo’s café, from which still streamed ruddy light and the babel of many voices.

A kick from Inspector Campbell sent the door flying inward, and they burst in with guns gleaming wickedly in the ruddy light. Ennis’ face was a quivering mask of desperate resolve.

The motley patrons jumped up with yells of alarm at their entrance. The hand of a Malay waiter jerked and a thrown knife thudded into the wall beside them. Ennis yelled as he saw Chandra Dass, his dark face startled, leaping back with his servants through the black curtains.

He and Campbell drove through the squealing patrons toward the back. The Malay who had thrown the knife rushed to bar the way, another dagger uplifted. Campbell’s gun coughed and the Malay reeled and stumbled. The inspector and Ennis threw themselves at the black curtains—and were dashed back.

They tore aside the black folds. A dull steel door had been lowered behind them, barring the way to the back rooms. Ennis beat crazily upon it with his pistol-butt, but it remained immovable.

“No use—we can’t break that down!” yelled Campbell, over the uproar. “Outside, and around to the other end of the building!”

They burst back out through that madhouse, into the dark of the street. They started along the side of the pier toward the river-end, edging forward on a narrow ledge but inches wide. As they reached the back of the building, Ennis shouted and pointed to dark figures at the end of the pier. There were two of them, lowering shapeless, wrapped forms over the end of the pier.

“There they are!” he cried. “They’ve got their prisoners out there with them.”

Campbell’s pistol leveled, but Ennis swiftly struck it up. “No, you might hit Ruth.”

He and the inspector bounded forward along the pier. Fire streaked from the dark ahead and bullets thumped the rotting boards around them.

Suddenly the loud roar of an accelerated motor drowned out all other sounds. It came from the river at the pier’s end.

Campbell and Ennis reached the end in time to see a long, powerful, gray motor-boat dash out into the black obscurity of the river, and roar eastward with gathering speed.

“There they go—they’re getting away!” cried the agonized young American.

Inspector Campbell cupped his hands and shouted out into the darkness, “River police, ahoy! Ahoy there!”

He rasped to Ennis. “The river police were to have a cutter here tonight. We can still catch them.”

With swiftly rising roar of speeded motors, a big cutter drove in from the darkness. Its searchlight snapped on, bathing the two men on the pier in a blinding glare.

“Ahoy, there!” called a stentorian voice over the roar of the motors. “Is that Inspector Campbell?”

“Yes. Come alongside,” yelled the inspector, and as the big cutter shot close to the end of the pier, its reversing propellers churning the dark water to foam, Ennis and Campbell leaped.

They landed amid unseen men in the cockpit, and as he scrambled to his feet the inspector cried, “Follow that boat that just went down-river. But no shooting!”

With thunderous drumfire from its exhausts, the cutter jerked forward so rapidly that it almost threw them from their feet again. It shot out onto the bosom of the dark river that flowed like a black sea between the banks of scattered lights that were London.

The moving lights of yachts and barges coming up-river could be seen gliding in that darkness. The captain of the cutter barked an order and one of his three men, the one crouched at the searchlight, switched its powerful beam out over the waters ahead.

In a moment it picked up a distant gray spot racing eastward on the black river, leaving a white trail of foam.

“There she is!” bawled the man at the searchlight. “She’s running without lights!”

“Keep her in the searchlight,” ordered the captain. “Sound our siren, and give the cutter her head.”

Swaying, rocking, the cutter roared on through the darkness on the trail of that distant fleeing speck. As they raced down Blackwall Reach, the distance between the two craft had already begun to lessen.

“We’re overtaking him!” cried Campbell, clutching a stanchion and peering ahead against the rush of wind and spray. “He must be making for whatever spot it is in England that is the center of the Brotherhood of the Door—but he’ll never reach it.”

“He said that within a few hours Ruth would go with the others through the Door!” cried Ennis, clinging beside him. “Campbell, we mustn’t let them get away now!”

Pursuers and pursued flashed on down the dark, broadening river, through mazes of shipping, the cutter hanging doggedly to the motor-boat’s trail. The lights of London had dropped behind and those of Tilbury now gleamed away on their left.

Bigger, stronger waves now tossed and pounded the cutter as it raced out of the river mouth toward the heaving black expanse of the sea. The Kent coast was a black blur on their right; the gray motor-boat followed it closely, grazing almost beneath the Sheerness lights.

“He’s heading to round North Foreland and follow the coast south to Ramsgate or Dover,” the cutter captain cried to Campbell. “But we’ll catch him before he passes Margate.”

The quarry was now but a quarter-mile ahead. Steadily as they roared onward the gap narrowed, until in the glare of the searchlight they could make out every detail of the powerful gray motor-boat plunging through the tossing black waves.

They saw Chandra Dass’ dark face turn and look back at them, and the cutter captain raised his speaking-trumpet to his lips and shouted over the roar of motors and dash of waves.

“Stand by or we’ll fire at you!”

“He won’t obey,” muttered Campbell between his teeth. “He knows we daren’t fire with the girl in the boat.”

“Yes, blast him!” exclaimed the captain. “But we’ll have him in a few minutes, anyway.”

The thundering chase had brought them into sight of the lights of Margate on the dark coast to their right. Now only a few hundred feet of black water separated them from the fleeing craft.

Ennis and the inspector, gripping the stanchions of the rushing cutter, saw a white figure suddenly stand erect in the boat ahead and wave its arms to them. The gray motor-boat slowed.

“It’s Chandra Dass, and he’s signaling that he’s giving up!” Ennis cried. “He’s stopping!”

“By heavens, he is!” Campbell said. “Drive alongside him, and we’ll soon have the irons on him.”

The cutter, its own motors hastily throttled down, shot through the water toward the slowing gray craft. Ennis saw Chandra Dass standing erect, awaiting their coming, he and the two Malays beside him holding their hands in the air. He saw a half-dozen or more white-wrapped forms in the bottom of the boat, lying motionless.

“There are their prisoners!” he cried. “Bring the boat closer so we can jump in!”

He and Campbell, their pistols out, hunched to jump as the cutter drove closer to the gray motor-boat. The sides of the two craft bumped, the motors of both idling noisily. Then before Ennis and Campbell could jump into the motor-boat, things happened with cinema-like rapidity. Two of the still white forms at the bottom of the motor-boat leaped up and like suddenly uncoiled springs shot through the air into the cutter. They were two other Malays, their dark faces flaming with fanatic light, keen daggers glinting in their upraised hands.

“’Ware a trick!” yelled Campbell. His gun barked, but the bullet missed and a dagger slit his sleeve.

The Malays, with wild, screeching yells, were laying about them with their daggers in the cutter, insanely.

“God in heaven, they’re running amok!” choked the cutter captain.

His slashed neck spurting blood and his face livid, he fell. One of his men slumped coughing beside him, another victim of the crazy daggers.

CHAPTER 3

Up the Water-Tunnel

The man at the searchlight sprang for the maddened Malays, tugging at his pistol as he jumped. Before he got the weapon out, a dagger slashed his jugular and he went down gurgling in death. One of the Malays meanwhile had knocked Inspector Campbell from his feet, his knife-hand swooping down, his eyes blazing.

Ennis’ gun roared and the bullet hit the Malay between the eyes. But as he slumped limply, the other fanatic was upon Ennis from the side. Before Ennis could whirl to meet him, the attacker’s knife grazed down past his cheek like a brand of living fire. He was borne backward by the rush, felt the hot breath of the crazed Malay in his face, the dagger-point at his throat.

Shots roared quickly, one after another, and with each shot the Malay pressing Ennis back jerked convulsively. With the light of murderous madness fading from his eyes, he still strove to drive the dagger home into the American’s throat. But a hand jerked him back and he lay prostrate and still.

Ennis scrambled up to find Inspector Campbell, pale and determined, over him. The detective had shot the attacker from behind.

The captain of the cutter and two of his men lay dead in the cockpit beside the two Malays. The remaining seaman, the helmsman, held his shoulder and groaned.

Ennis whirled. The motor-boat of Chandra Dass was no longer beside the cutter, and there was no sight of it anywhere on the black sea ahead. The Hindoo had taken advantage of the fight to make good his escape with his two other servants and their prisoners.

“Campbell, he’s gone!” cried the young American frantically. “He’s got away!”

The inspector’s eyes were bright with cold flame of anger. “Yes, Chandra Dass sacrificed these two Malays to hold us up long enough for him to escape.”

Campbell whirled to the helmsman. “You’re not badly hurt?”

“Only a scratch, but I nearly broke my shoulder when I fell,” answered the man.

“Then head on around North Foreland!” Campbell cried. “We may still be able to catch up to them.”

“But Captain Wilson and the others are killed,” protested the helmsman. “I’ve got to report—”

“You can report later,” rasped the inspector. “Do as I say—I’ll be responsible.”

“Very well, sir,” said the helmsman, and jumped back to the wheel.

In a minute the big cutter was roaring ahead over the heaving black waves, its searchlight clawing the darkness ahead. There was no sign now of the craft of Chandra Dass ahead. They raced abreast of the lights of Margate, started rounding the North Foreland, pounded by bigger seas.

Inspector Campbell had dragged the bodies of the dead policemen and their two slayers down into the cabin of the cutter. He came up and crouched down with Ennis beside Sturt, the helmsman.

“I found these on the two Malays,” Campbell shouted to the American, holding out two little objects in his spray-wet hand.

Each was a flat star of gray metal in which was set a large oval, cabochon-cut jewel. The jewels flashed and dazzled with deep color, but it was a color wholly unfamiliar and alien to their eyes.

“They’re not any color we know on earth,” Campbell shouted. “I believe these jewels came from somewhere beyond the Door, and that these are badges of the Brotherhood of the Door.”

Sturt, the helmsman, leaned toward the inspector. “We’ve rounded North Foreland, sir,” he cried. “Head straight south along the coast,” Campbell ordered. “Chandra Dass must have gone this way. No doubt he thinks he’s shaken us off, and is making for the gathering-place of the Brotherhood, wherever that may be.”

“The cutter isn’t built for seas like this,” Sturt said, shaking his head. “But I’ll do it.”

They were now following the coast southward, the lights of Ramsgate dropping back on their right. The waters out here in the Channel were wilder, great black waves tossing the cutter to the sky one moment, and then dropping it sickeningly the next. Frequently its screws raced loudly as they encountered no resistance but air.

Ennis, clinging precariously on the foredeck, turned the searchlight’s stabbing white beam back and forth on the heaving dark sea ahead, but without any sign of their quarry disclosed.

White foam of breaking waves began to show around them like bared teeth, and there was a humming in the air.

“Storm coming up the Channel,” Sturt exclaimed. “It’ll do for us if it catches us out here.”

“We’ve got to keep on,” Ennis told him desperately. “We must come up with them soon!”

The coast on their right was now one of black, rocky cliffs, towering all along the shore in a jagged, frowning wall against which the waves dashed foamy white. The cutter crept southward over the wild waters, tossed like a chip upon the great waves. Sturt was having a hard time holding the craft out from the rocks, and had its prow pointed obliquely away from them.

The humming in the air changed to a shrill whistling as the outrider winds of the storm came upon them. The cutter tossed still more wildly and black masses of water smashed in upon them from the darkness, dazing and drenching them.

Suddenly Ennis yelled, “There’s the lights of a boat ahead! There, moving in toward the cliffs!”

He pointed ahead, and Campbell and the helmsman peered through the blinding spray and darkness. A pair of low lights were moving at high speed on the waters there, straight toward the towering black cliffs. Then they vanished suddenly from sight.

“There must be a hidden opening or harbor of some kind in the cliffs!” Inspector Campbell exclaimed. “But that can’t be Chandra Dass’ boat, for it carried no lights.”

“It might be others of the Brotherhood going to the meeting-place!” Ennis exclaimed. “We can follow and see.”

Sturt thrust his head through the flying spray and shouted, “There are openings and water-caverns in plenty along these cliffs, but there’s nothing in any of them.”

“We’ll find out,” Campbell said. “Head straight toward the cliffs in there where that boat vanished.”

“If we can’t find the opening we’ll be smashed to flinders on those cliffs,” Sturt warned.

“I’m gambling that we’ll find the opening,” Campbell told him. “Go ahead.”

Sturt’s face set stolidly and he said, “Yes, sir.”

He turned the prow of the cutter toward the cliffs. Instantly they dashed forward toward the rock walls with greatly increased speed, wild waves bearing them onward like charging stallions of the sea.

Hunched beside the helmsman, the searchlight stabbing the dark wildly as the cutter was flung forward by the waves, Ennis and the inspector watched as the cliffs loomed closer ahead. The brilliant white beam struck across the rushing, mountainous waves and showed only the towering barriers of rock, battered and smitten by the raving waters that frothed white. They could hear the booming thunder of the raging ocean striking the rock.

Like a projectile hurled by a giant hand, the cutter fairly flew now toward the cliffs. They now could see even the little streams that ran off the rough rock wall as each giant wave broke against it. They were almost upon it.

Sturt’s face was deathly. “I don’t see any opening!” he yelled. “And we’re going to hit in a moment!”

“To your left!” screamed Inspector Campbell over the booming thunder. “There’s an arched opening there.”

Now Ennis saw it also, a huge arch-like opening in the cliff that had been concealed by an angle of the wall. Sturt tried frantically to head the cutter toward it, but the wheel was useless as the great waves bore the craft along. Ennis saw they would strike a little to the side of the opening. The cliff loomed ahead, and he closed his eyes to the impact.

There was no impact. And as he heard a hoarse cry from Inspector Campbell, he opened his eyes.

The cutter was flying in through the mighty opening, snatched into it by powerful currents. They were whirled irresistibly forward under the huge rock arch, which loomed forty feet over their heads. Before them stretched a winding water-tunnel inside the cliff.

And now they were out of the wild uproar of the storming waters outside, and in an almost stupefying silence. Smoothly, resistlessly, the current bore them on in the tunnel, whose winding turns ahead were lit up by their searchlight.

“God, that was close!” exclaimed Inspector Campbell.

His eyes flashed. “Ennis, I believe that we have found the gathering-place of the Brotherhood. That boat we sighted is somewhere ahead in here, and so must be Chandra Dass, and your wife.”

Ennis’ hand tightened on his gun-butt. “If that’s so—if we can just find them—”

“Blind action won’t help if we do,” said the inspector swiftly. “There must be all the number of the Brotherhood’s members assembled here, and we can’t fight them all.”

His eyes suddenly lit and he took the blazing jeweled stars from his pocket. “These badges! With them we can pose as members of the Brotherhood, perhaps long enough to find your wife.”

“But Chandra Dass will be there, and if he sees us—”

Campbell shrugged. “We’ll have to take that chance. It’s the only course open to us.”

The current of the inflowing tide was still bearing them smoothly onward through the winding water-tunnel, around bends and angles where they scraped the rock, down long straight stretches. Sturt used the motors to guide them around the turns. Meanwhile, Inspector Campbell and Ennis quickly ripped from the cutter its police-insignia and covered all evidences of its being a police craft.

Sturt suddenly snicked off the searchlight. “Light ahead there!” he exclaimed.

Around the next turn of the water-tunnel showed a gleam of strange, soft light.

“Careful, now!” cautioned the inspector. “Sturt, whatever we do, you stay in the cutter. And try to have it ready for a quick getaway, if we leave it.”

Sturt nodded silently. The helmsman’s stolid face had become a little pale, but he showed no sign of losing his courage.

The cutter sped around the next turn of the tunnel and emerged into a huge, softly lit cavern. Sturt’s eyes bulged and Campbell uttered an exclamation of amazement. For in this mighty water-cavern there floated in a great mass, scores of sea-going craft, large and small.

All of them were capable of breasting storm and wind, and some were so large they could barely have entered. There were small yachts, big motor-cruisers, sea-going launches, cutters larger than their own, and among them the gray motor-launch of Chandra Dass.

They were massed together here, those with masts having lowered them to enter, floating and rubbing sides, quite unoccupied. Around the edges of the water-cavern ran a wide rock ledge. But no living person was visible and there was no visible source for the soft, strange white light that filled the astounding place.

“These craft must have come here from all over earth!” Campbell muttered. “The Brotherhood of the Door has assembled here—we’ve found their gathering-place all right.”

“But where are they?” exclaimed Ennis. “I don’t see anyone.”

“We’ll soon find out,” the inspector said. “Sturt, run close to the ledge there and we’ll get out on it.”

Sturt obeyed, and as the cutter bumped the ledge, Campbell and Ennis leaped out onto it. They looked this way and that along it, but no one was in sight. The weirdness of it was unnerving, the strangely lit, mighty cavern, the assembled boats, the utter silence.

“Follow me,” Campbell said in a low voice. “They must all be somewhere near.”

He and Ennis walked a few steps along the ledge, when the American stopped. “Campbell, listen!” he whispered.

Dimly there whispered to them, as though from a distance and through great walls, a swelling sound of chanting. As they listened, hearts beating rapidly, a square of the rock wall of the cavern abruptly flew open beside them, as though hinged like a door. Inside it was the mouth of a soft-lit, man-high tunnel, and in its opening stood two men. They wore over their clothing shroud-like, loose-hanging robes of gray, asbestos-like material. They wore hoods of the same gray stuff over their heads, pierced with slits at the eyes and mouth. And each wore on his breast the blazing star-badge.

Through the eye-slits the eyes of the two surveyed Campbell and Ennis as they halted, transfixed by the sudden apparition. Then one of the hooded men spoke measuredly in a hissing, Mongolian voice.

“Are you who come here of the Brotherhood of the Door?” he asked, apparently repeating a customary challenge.

Campbell answered, his flat voice tremorless. “We are of the Brotherhood.”

“Why do you not wear the badge of the Brotherhood, then?”

For answer, the inspector reached in his pocket for the strange emblem and fastened it to his lapel. Ennis did the same.

“Enter, brothers,” said the hissing, hooded shape, standing aside to let them pass.

As they stepped into the tunnel, the hooded guard added in slightly more natural tones, “Brothers, you two are late. You must hurry to get your protective robes, for the ceremony soon begins.”

Campbell inclined his head without speaking, and he and Ennis started along the tunnel. Its light, as sourceless as that of the great water-cavern, revealed that it was chiseled from solid rock and that it wound downward.

When they were out of sight of the two hooded guards, Ennis clutched the detective’s arm convulsively.

“Campbell,” he said, “the ceremony begins soon! We’ve got to find Ruth first!”

“We’ll try,” the inspector answered swiftly. “Those hooded robes are apparently issued to all the members to be worn during the ceremony as protection, for some reason, and once we get robes and get them on, Chandra Dass won’t be able to spot us.

“Look out!” he added an instant later. “Here’s the place where the robes are issued!”

The tunnel had debouched suddenly into a wider space in which were a group of men. Several were wearing the concealing hoods and robes, and one of these hooded figures was handing out, from a large rack of the robes, three of the garments to three dark Easterners who had apparently entered in the boat just ahead of the cutter.

The three dark Orientals, their faces gleaming with strange fanaticism, quickly donned the robes and hoods and passed hurriedly on down the tunnel. At once Campbell and Ennis stepped calmly up to the hooded custodians of the robes, and extended their hands.

One of the hooded figures took down two robes and handed them to them. But suddenly one of the other hooded men spoke sharply.

Instantly all the hooded men but the one who had spoken, with loud cries, threw themselves forward on Campbell and Paul Ennis.

Taken utterly by surprize, the two had no chance to draw their guns. They were smothered by gray-robed men, held helpless before they could move, a half-dozen pistols jammed into their bodies.

Stupefied by the sudden dashing of their hopes, the detective and the young American saw the hooded man who had spoken slowly lift the concealing gray cowl from his face. It was the dark, coldly contemptuous face of Chandra Dass.

CHAPTER 4

The Cavern of the Door

Chandra Dass spoke, and his strong, vibrant voice held a scorn that was almost pitying.

“It occurred to me that your enterprise might enable you to escape the daggers of my followers, and that you might trail us here,” he said. “That is why I waited here to see if you came.

“Search them,” he told the other hooded figures. “Take anything that looks like a weapon from them.”

Ennis stared, stupefied, as the gray-hooded men obeyed. He was unable to believe entirely in the abrupt reversal of all their hopes, of their desperate attempt.

The hooded men took their pistols from Ennis and Campbell, and even the small gold knife attached to the chain of the inspector’s big, old-fashioned gold watch. Then they stepped back, the pistols of two of them leveled at the hearts of the captives.

Chandra Dass had watched impassively. Ennis, staring dazedly, noted that the Hindoo wore on his breast a different jewel-emblem from the others, a double star instead of a single one.

Ennis’ dazed eyes lifted from the blazing badge to the Hindoo’s dark face. “Where’s Ruth?” he asked a little shrilly, and then his voice cracked and he cried, “You damned fiend, where’s my wife?”

“Be comforted, Mr. Ennis,” came Chandra Dass’ chill voice. “You are going now to join your wife, and to share her fate. You two are going with her and the other sacrifices through the Door when it opens. It is not usual,” he added in cold mockery, “for our sacrificial victims to walk directly into our hands. We ordinarily have a more difficult time securing them.”

He made a gesture to the two hooded men with pistols, and they ranged themselves close behind Campbell and Ennis.

“We are going to the Cavern of the Door,” said the Hindoo. “Inspector Campbell, I know and respect your resourcefulness. Be warned that your slightest attempt to escape means a bullet in your back. You two will march ahead of us,” he said, and added mockingly, “Remember, while you live you can cling to the shadow of hope, but if these guns speak, it ends even that shadow.”

Ennis and Inspector Campbell, keeping their hands elevated, started at the Hindoo’s command down the softly lit rock tunnel. Chandra Dass and the two hooded men with pistols followed.

Ennis saw that the inspector’s sagging face was expressionless, and knew that behind that colorless mask, Campbell’s brain was racing in an attempt to find a method of escape. For himself, the young American had almost forgotten all else in his eagerness to reach his wife. Whatever happened to Ruth, whatever mysterious horror lay in wait for her and the other victims, he would be there beside her, sharing it!

The tunnel wound a little further downward, then straightened out and ran straight for a considerable length. In this straight section of the rock passage, Ennis and Campbell for the first time perceived that the walls of the tunnel bore crowding, deeply chiseled inscriptions. They had not time to read them in passing, but Ennis saw that they were in many different languages, and that some of the characters were wholly unfamiliar.

“God, some of those inscriptions are in Egyptian hieroglyphics!” muttered Inspector Campbell.

The cool voice of Chandra Dass said, behind them, “There are pre-Egyptian inscriptions on these walls, inspector, could you but recognize them, carven in languages that perished from the face of earth before Egypt was born. Yes, back through time, back through mediæval and Roman and Egyptian and pre-Egyptian ages, the Brotherhood of the Door has existed and has each year gathered in this place to open the Door and worship with sacrifices They Beyond it.”

The fanatic note of unearthly devotion was in his voice now, and Ennis shuddered with a cold not of the tunnel.

As they proceeded, they heard a muffled, hoarse booming somewhere over their heads, a dull, rhythmic thunder that echoed along the long passageway. The walls of the tunnel now were damp and glistening in the sourceless soft light, tiny trickles running down them.

“You hear the ocean over us,” came Chandra Dass’ voice. “The Cavern of the Door lies several hundred yards out from shore, beneath the rock floor of the sea.”

They passed the dark mouths of unlit tunnels branching ahead from this illuminated one. Then over the booming of the raging sea above them, there came to Ennis’ ears the distant, swelling chant they had heard in the water-cavern above. But now it was louder, nearer. At the sound of it, Chandra Dass quickened their pace.

Suddenly Inspector Campbell stumbled on the slippery rock floor and went down in a heap. Instantly Chandra Dass and his two followers recoiled from them, the two pistols trained on the detective as he scrambled up.

“Do not do that again, inspector,” warned the Hindoo in a deadly voice. “All tricks are useless now.”

“I couldn’t help slipping on this wet floor,” complained Inspector Campbell.

“The next time you make a wrong step of any kind, a bullet will smash your spine,” Chandra Dass told him. “Quick—march!”

The tunnel turned sharply, turned again. As they rounded the turns, Ennis saw with a sudden electric thrill of hope that Campbell held clutched in his hand, concealed by his sleeve, the heel-hilted knife from his shoe. He had drawn it when he stumbled.

Campbell edged a little closer to the young American as they were hastening onward, and whispered to him, a word at a time.

“Be—ready—to jump—them—”

“But they’ll shoot, your first move—” whispered Ennis agonizedly.

Campbell did not answer. But Ennis sensed the detective’s body tautening.

They came to another turn, the strong, swelling chant coming loud from ahead. They started around that turn.

Then Inspector Campbell acted. He whirled as though on a pivot, the heel-knife flashing toward the men behind them.

Shots coughed from the pistols that were pressed almost against his stomach. His body jerked as the bullets struck it, yet he remained erect, his knife stabbing with lightning rapidity.

One of the hooded men slumped down with a pierced throat, and as Campbell sprang at the other, Ennis desperately launched himself at Chandra Dass. He bore the Hindoo from his feet, but it was as though he was fighting a demon. Inside his gray robe, Chandra Dass writhed with fiendish strength.

Ennis could not hold him, the Hindoo’s body seeming of spring-steel. He rolled over, dashed the young American to the floor, and leaped up, his dark face and great black eyes blazing.

Then, halfway erect, he suddenly crumpled, the fire in his eyes dulling, a call for help smothered on his lips. He fell on his face, and Ennis saw that the heel-knife was stuck in his back. Inspector Campbell jerked it out, and put it back into his shoe. And now Ennis, staggering up, saw that Campbell had knifed the two hooded guards and that they lay in a dead heap.

“Campbell!” cried the American, gripping the detective’s arm. “They’ve wounded you—I saw them shoot you.”

Campbell’s bruised face grinned briefly. “Nothing of the kind,” he said, and tapped the soiled gray vest he wore beneath his coat. “Chandra Dass didn’t know this vest is bullet-proof.”

He darted an alert glance up and down the lighted tunnel. “We can’t stay here or let these bodies lie here. They may be discovered at any moment.”

“Listen!” said Ennis, turning.

The chanting from ahead swelled down the tunnel, louder than at any time yet, waxing and waxing, reaching a triumphant crescendo, then again dying away.

“Campbell, they’re going on with the ceremony now!” Ennis cried. “Ruth!”

The detective’s desperate glance fastened on the dark mouth of one of the branching tunnels, a little ahead.

“That side tunnel—we’ll pull the bodies in there!” he exclaimed.

Taking the pistols of the dead men for themselves, they rapidly dragged the three bodies into the darkness of the unlit branching tunnel.

“Quick, on with two of these robes,” rasped Inspector Campbell. “They’ll give us a little better chance.”

Hastily Ennis jerked the gray robe and hood from Chandra Dass’ dead body and donned it, while Campbell struggled into one of the others. In the robes and concealing hoods, they could not be told from any other two members of the Brotherhood, except that the badge on Ennis’ breast was the double star instead of the single one.

Ennis then spun toward the main, lighted tunnel, Campbell close behind him. They recoiled suddenly into the darkness of the branching way, as they heard hurrying steps out in the lighted passage. Flattened in the darkness against the wall, they saw several of the gray-hooded members of the Brotherhood hasten past them from above, hurrying toward the gathering-place.

“The guards and robe-issuers we saw above!” Campbell said quickly when they were passed. “Come on, now.”

He and Ennis slipped out into the lighted tunnel and hastened along it after the others.

Boom of thundering ocean over their heads and rising and falling of the tremendous chanting ahead filled their ears as they hurried around the last turns of the tunnel. The passage widened, and ahead they saw a massive rock portal through whose opening they glimpsed an immense, lighted space.

Campbell and Ennis, two comparatively tiny gray-hooded figures, hastened through the mighty portal. Then they stopped. Ennis felt frozen with the dazing shock of it. He heard the detective whisper fiercely beside him.

“It’s the Cavern, all right—the Cavern of the Door!”

They looked across a colossal rock chamber hollowed out beneath the floor of ocean. It was elliptical in shape, three hundred feet by its longer axis. Its black basalt sides, towering, rough-hewn walls, rose sheer and supported the rock ceiling which was the ocean floor, a hundred feet over their heads.

This mighty cathedral hewn from inside the rock of earth was lit by a soft, white, sourceless light like that in the main tunnel. Upon the floor of the cavern, in regular rows across it, stood hundreds on hundreds of human figures, all gray-robed and gray-hooded, all with their backs to Campbell and Ennis, looking across the cavern to its farther end. At that farther end was a flat dais of black basalt upon which stood five hooded men, four wearing the blazing double-star on their breasts, the fifth, a triple-star. Two of them stood beside a cubical, weird-looking gray metal mechanism from which upreared a spherical web of countless fine wires, unthinkably intricate in their network, many of them pulsing with glowing force. The sourceless light of the cavern and the tunnel seemed to pulse from that weird mechanism.

Up from that machine, if machine it was, soared the black basalt wall of that end of the cavern. But there above the gray mechanism the rough wall had been carved with a great, smooth facet, a giant, gleaming black oval face as smooth as though planed and polished. Only, at the middle of the glistening black oval face, were carven deeply four large and wholly unfamiliar characters. As Ennis and Campbell stared frozenly across the awe-inspiring place, sound swelled from the hundreds of throats. A slow, rising chant, it climbed and climbed until the basalt roof above seemed to quiver to it, crashing out with stupendous effect, a weird litany in an unknown tongue. Then it began to fall.

Ennis clutched the inspector’s gray-robed arm. “Where’s Ruth?” he whispered frantically. “I don’t see any prisoners.”

“They must be somewhere here,” Campbell said swiftly. “Listen—”

As the chant died to silence, on the dais at the farther end of the cavern the hooded man who wore the triple-jeweled star stepped forward and spoke. His deep, heavy voice rolled out and echoed across the cavern, flung back and forth from wall to rocky wall.

“Brothers of the Door,” he said, “we meet again here in the Cavern of the Door this year, as for ten thousand years past our forefathers have met here to worship They Beyond the Door, and bring them the sacrifices They love.

“A hundred centuries have gone by since first They Beyond the Door sent their wisdom through the barrier between their universe and ours, a barrier which even They could not open from their side, but which their wisdom taught our fathers how to open.

“Each year since then have we opened the Door which They taught us how to build. Each year we have brought them sacrifices. And in return They have given us of their wisdom and power. They have taught us things that lie hidden from other men, and They have given us powers that other men have not.

“Now again comes the time appointed for the opening of the Door. In their universe on the other side of it, They are waiting now to take the sacrifices which we have procured for them. The hour strikes, so let the sacrifices be brought.”

As though at a signal, from a small opening at one side of the cavern a triple file of marchers entered. A file of hooded gray members of the Brotherhood flanked on either side a line of men and women who did not wear the hoods or robes. They were thirty or forty in number. These men and women were of almost all races and classes, but all of them walked stiffly, mechanically, staring ahead with unseeing, distended eyes, like living corpses.

“Drugged!” came Campbell’s shaken voice. “They’re all drugged, and don’t know what is going on.”

Ennis’ eyes fastened on a small, slender girl with chestnut hair who walked at the end of the line, a girl in a straight tan dress, whose face was white, stiff, like those of the others.

“There’s Ruth!” he exclaimed frantically, his cry muffled by his hood.

He plunged in that direction, but Campbell held him back.

“No!” rasped the inspector. “You can’t help her by simply getting yourself captured!”

“I can at least go with her!” Ennis exclaimed. “Let me go!”

Inspector Campbell’s iron grip held him. “Wait, Ennis!” said the detective. “You’ve no chance that way. That robe of Chandra Dass’ you’re wearing has a double-star badge like those of the men up there on the dais. That means that as Chandra Dass you’re entitled to be up there with them. Go up there and take your place as though you were Chandra Dass—with the hood on, they can’t tell the difference. I’ll slip around to that side door out of which they brought the prisoners. It must connect with the tunnels, and it’s not far from the dais. When I fire my pistol from there, you grab your wife and try to get to that door with her. If you can do it, we’ll have a chance to get up through the tunnels and escape.”

Ennis wrung the inspector’s hand. Then, without further reply, he walked boldly with measured steps up the main aisle of the cavern, through the gray ranks to the dais. He stepped up onto it, his heart racing. The chief priest, he of the triple-star, gave him only a glance, as of annoyance at his lateness. Ennis saw Campbell’s gray figure slipping round to the side door.

The gray-hooded hundreds before him had paid no attention to either of them. Their attention was utterly, eagerly, fixed upon the stiff-moving prisoners now being marched up onto the dais. Ennis saw Ruth pass him, her white face an unfamiliar, staring mask.

The prisoners were ranged at the back of the dais, just beneath the great, gleaming black oval facet. The guards stepped back from them, and they remained standing stiffly there. Ennis edged a little toward Ruth, who stood at the end of that line of stiff figures. As he moved imperceptibly closer to her, he saw the two priests beside the gray mechanism reaching toward knurled knobs of ebonite affixed to its side, beneath the spherical web of pulsing wires.

The chief priest, at the front of the dais, raised his hands. His voice rolled out, heavy, commanding, reverberating again through all the cavern.

CHAPTER 5

The Door Opens

“Where leads the Door?” rolled the chief priest’s voice.

Back up to him came the reply of hundreds of voices, muffled by the hoods but loud, echoing to the roof of the cavern in a thunderous response.

“It leads outside our world!”

The chief priest waited until the echoes died before his deep voice rolled on in the ritual.

“Who taught our forefathers to open the Door?”

Ennis, edging desperately closer and closer to the line of victims, felt the mighty response reverberate about him.

“They Beyond the Door taught them!”

Now Ennis was apart from the other priests on the dais, within a few yards of the captives, of the small figure of Ruth.

“To whom do we bring these sacrifices?”

As the high priest uttered the words, and before the booming answer came, a hand grasped Ennis and pulled him back from the line of victims. He spun round to find that it was one of the other priests who had jerked him back.

“We bring them to Those Beyond the Door!”

As the colossal response thundered, the priest who had jerked Ennis back whispered urgently to him. “You go too close to the victims, Chandra Dass! Do you wish to be taken with them?”

The fellow had a tight grip on Ennis’ arm. Desperate, tensed, Ennis heard the chief priest roll forth the last of the ritual.

“Shall the Door be opened that They may take the sacrifices?”

Stunning, mighty, a tremendous shout that mingled in it worshipping awe and superhuman dread, the answer crashed back.

“Let the Door be opened!”

The chief priest turned and his up-flung arms whirled in a signal. Ennis, tensing to spring toward Ruth, saw the two priests at the gray mechanism swiftly turn the knurled black knobs. Then Ennis, like all else in the vast cavern, was held frozen and spellbound by what followed.

The spherical web of wires pulsed up madly with shining force. And up at the center of the gleaming black oval facet on the wall, there appeared a spark of unearthly green light. It blossomed outward, expanded, an awful viridescent flower blooming quickly outward farther and farther. And as it expanded, Ennis saw that he could look through that green light! He looked through into another universe, a universe lying infinitely far across alien dimensions from our own, yet one that could be reached through this door between dimensions. It was a green universe, flooded with an awful green light that was somehow more akin to darkness than to light, a throbbing, baleful luminescence.

Ennis saw dimly through green-lit spaces a city in the near distance, an unholy city of emerald hue whose unsymmetrical, twisted towers and minarets aspired into heavens of hellish viridity. The towers of that city swayed to and fro and writhed in the air. And Ennis saw that here and there in the soft green substance of that restless city were circles of lurid light that were like yellow eyes.

In ghastly, soul-shaking apprehension of the utterly alien, Ennis knew that the yellow circles were eyes—that that hell-spawned city of another universe was living—that its unfamiliar life was single yet multiple, that its lurid eyes looked now through the Door!

Out from the insane living metropolis glided pseudopods of its green substance, glided toward the Door. Ennis saw that in the end of each pseudopod was one of the lurid eyes. He saw those eyed pseudopods come questing through the Door, onto the dais.

The yellow eyes of light seemed fixed on the row of stiff victims, and the pseudopods glided toward them. Through the open door was beating wave on wave of unfamiliar, tingling forces that Ennis felt even through the protective robe.

The hooded multitude bent in awe as the green pseudopods glided toward the victims faster, with avid eagerness. Ennis saw them reaching for the prisoners, for Ruth, and he made a tremendous mental effort to break the spell that froze him. In that moment pistolshots crashed across the cavern and a stream of bullets smashed the pulsing web of wires!

The Door began instantly to close. Darkness crept back around the edges of the mighty oval. As though alarmed, the lurid-eyed pseudopods of that hell-city recoiled from the victims, back through the dwindling Door. And as the Door dwindled, the light in the cavern was failing.

“Ruth!” yelled Ennis madly, and sprang forward and grasped her, his pistol leaping into his other hand.

“Ennis—quick!” shouted Campbell’s voice across the cavern.

The Door dwindled away altogether; the great oval facet was completely black. The light was fast dying too.

The chief priest sprang madly toward Ennis, and as he did so, the hooded hordes of the Brotherhood recovered from their paralysis of horror and surged madly toward the dais.

“The Door is closed! Death to the blasphemers!” cried the chief priest as he plunged forward.

“Death to the blasphemers!” shrieked the crazed horde below.

Ennis’ pistol roared and the chief priest went down. The light in the cavern died completely at that moment.

In the dark a torrent of bodies catapulted against Ennis, screaming vengeance. He struck out with his pistol-barrel in the mad mêlée, holding Ruth’s stiff form close with his other hand. He heard the other drugged, helpless victims crushed down and trampled under foot by the surging horde of vengeance-mad members.

Clinging to the girl, Ennis fought like a madman through a darkness in which none could distinguish friend or foe, toward the door at the side from which Campbell had fired. He smashed down the pistol-barrel on all before him, as hands sought to grab him in the dark. He knew sickeningly that he was lost in the combat, with no sense of the direction of the door.

Then a voice roared loud across the wild din, “Ennis, this way! This way, Ennis!” yelled Inspector Campbell, again and again.

Ennis plunged through the whirl of unseen bodies in the direction of the detective’s shouting voice. He smashed through, half dragging and half carrying the girl, until Campbell’s voice was close ahead in the dark. He fumbled at the rock wall, found the door opening, and then Campbell’s hands grasped him to pull him inside.

Hands grabbed him from behind, striving to tear Ruth from him, to jerk him back. Voices shrieked for help.

Campbell’s pistol blazed in the dark and the hands released their grip. Ennis stumbled with the girl through the door into a dark tunnel. He heard Campbell slam a door shut, and heard a bar fall with a clang.

“Quick, for God’s sake!” panted Campbell in the dark. “They’ll follow us—we’ve got to get up through the tunnels to the water-cavern!”

They raced along the pitch-dark tunnel, Campbell now carrying the girl, Ennis reeling drunkenly along.

They heard a mounting roar behind them, and as they burst into the main tunnel, no longer lighted but dark like the others, they looked back and saw a flickering of light coming up the passage.

“They’re after us and they’ve got lights!” Campbell cried. “Hurry!”

It was nightmare, this mad flight on stumbling feet up through the dark tunnels where they could hear the sea booming close overhead, and could hear the wild pursuit behind.

Their feet slipped on the damp floor and they crashed into the walls of the tunnel at the turns. The pursuit was closer behind—as they started climbing the last passages to the water-cavern, the torchlight behind showed them to their pursuers and wild yells came to their ears.

They had before them only the last ascent to the water-cavern when Ennis stumbled and went down. He swayed up a little, yelled to Campbell. “Go on—get Ruth out! I’ll try to hold them back a moment!”

“No!” rasped Campbell. “There’s another way—one that may mean the end for us too, but our only chance!”

The inspector thrust his hand into his pocket, snatched out his big, old-fashioned gold watch.

He tore it from its chain, turned the stem of it twice around. Then he hurled it back down the tunnel with all his force.

“Quick—out of the tunnels now or we’ll die right here!” he yelled.

They lunged forward, Campbell dragging both the girl and the exhausted Ennis, and emerged a moment later into the great water-cavern. It was now lit only by the searchlight of their waiting cutter.

As they emerged into the cavern, they were thrown flat on the rock ledge by a violent movement of it under them. An awful detonation and thunderous crashing of falling rock smote their ears.

Following that first tremendous crash, giant rumbling of collapsing rock shook the water-cavern.

“To the cutter!” Campbell cried. “That watch of mine was filled with the most concentrated high-explosive known, and it’s blown up the tunnels. Now it’s touched off more collapses and all these caverns and passages will fall in on us at any moment!”

The awful rumbling and crashing of collapsing rock masses was deafening in their ears as they lurched toward the cutter. Great chunks of rock were falling from the cavern roof into the water.

Sturt, white-faced but asking no questions, had the motor of the cutter running, and helped them pull the unconscious girl aboard.

“Out of the tunnel at once!” Campbell ordered. “Full speed!”

They roared down the water-tunnel at crazy velocity, the searchlight beam stabbing ahead. The tide had reached flood and turned, increasing the speed with which they dashed through the tunnel.

Masses of rock fell with loud splashes behind them, and all around them was still the ominous grinding of mighty weights of rock. The walls of the tunnel quivered repeatedly.

Sturt suddenly reversed the propellers, but in spite of his action the cutter smashed a moment later into a solid rock wall. It was a mass of rock forming an unbroken barrier across the water-tunnel, extending beneath the surface of the water.

“We’re trapped!” cried Sturt. “A mass of the rock has settled here and blocked the tunnel.”

“It can’t be completely blocked!” Campbell exclaimed. “See, the tide still runs out beneath it. Our one chance is to swim out under the blocking mass of rock, before the whole cliff gives way!”

“But there’s no telling how far the block may extend—” Sturt cried.

Then as Campbell and Ennis stripped off their coats and shoes, he followed their example. The rumble of grinding rock around them was now continuous and nerve-shattering.

Campbell helped Ennis lower Ruth’s unconscious form into the water.

“Keep your hand over her nose and mouth!” cried the inspector. “Come on, now!”

Sturt went first, his face pale in the searchlight beam as he dived under the rock mass. The tidal current carried him out of sight in a moment.

Then, holding the girl between them, and with Ennis’ hand covering her mouth and nostrils, the other two dived. Down through the cold waters they shot, and then the swift current was carrying them forward like a millrace, their bodies bumping and scraping against the rock mass overhead.

Ennis’ lungs began to burn, his brain to reel, as they rushed on in the waters, still holding the girl tightly. They struck solid rock, a wall across their way. The current sucked them downward, to a small opening at the bottom. They wedged in it, struggled fiercely, then tore through it. They rose on the other side of it into pure air. They were in the darkness, floating in the tunnel beyond the block, the current carrying them swiftly onward.

The walls were shaking and roaring frightfully about them as they were borne round the turns of the tunnel. Then they saw ahead of them a circle of dim light, pricked with white stars.

The current bore them out into that starlight, into the open sea. Before them in the water floated Sturt, and they swam with him out from the shaking, grinding cliffs.

The girl stirred a little in Ennis’ grasp, and he saw in the starlight that her face was no longer dazed.

“Paul—” she muttered, clinging close to Ennis in the water.

“She’s coming back to consciousness—the water must have revived her from that drug!” he cried.

But he was cut short by Campbell’s cry. “Look! Look!” cried the inspector, pointing back at the black cliffs.

In the starlight the whole cliff was collapsing, with a prolonged, terrible roar as of grinding planets, its face breaking and buckling. The waters around them boiled furiously, whirling them this way and that.

Then the waters quieted. They found they had been flung near a sandy spit beyond the shattered cliffs, and they swam toward it.

“The whole underground honeycomb of caverns and tunnels gave way and the sea poured in!” Campbell cried. “The Door, and the Brotherhood of the Door, are ended for ever!”

THE LEGION OF LAZARUS

It isn’t the dying itself. It’s what comes before. The waiting, alone in a room without windows, trying to think. The opening of the door, the voices of the men who are going with you but not all the way, the walk down the corridor to the airlock room, the faces of the men, closed and impersonal. They do not enjoy this. Neither do they shrink from it. It’s their job.

This is the room. It is small and it has a window. Outside there is no friendly sky, no clouds. There is space, and there is the huge red circle of Mars filling the sky, looking down like an enormous eye upon this tiny moon. But you do not look up. You look out.

There are men out there. They are quite naked. They sleep upon the barren plain, drowsing in a timeless ocean. Their bodies are white as ivory and their hair is loose across their faces. Some of them seem to smile. They lie, and sleep, and the great red eye looks at them forever as they are borne around it.

“It isn’t so bad,” says one of the men who are with you inside this ultimate room. “Fifty years from now, the rest of us will all be old, or dead.”

It is small comfort.

The one garment you have worn is taken from you and the lock door opens, and the fear that cannot possibly become greater does become greater, and then suddenly that terrible crescendo is past. There is no longer any hope, and you learn that without hope there is little to be afraid of. You want now only to get it over with.

You step forward into the lock.

The door behind you shuts. You sense that the one before you is opening, but there is not much time. The burst of air carries you forward. Perhaps you scream, but you are now beyond sound, beyond sight, beyond everything. You do not even feel that it is cold.

CHAPTER I

There is a time for sleep, and a time for waking. But Hyrst had slept heavily, and the waking was hard. He had slept long, and the waking was slow. Fifty years, said the dim voice of remembrance. But another part of his mind said, No, it is only tomorrow morning.

Another part of his mind. That was strange. There seemed to be more parts to his mind than he remembered having had before, but they were all confused and hidden behind a veil of mist. Perhaps they were not really there at all. Perhaps—

Fifty years. I have been dead, he thought, and now I live again. Half a century. Strange.

Hyrst lay on a narrow bed, in a place of subdued light and antiseptic-smelling air. There was no one else in the room. There was no sound.

Fifty years, he thought. What is it like now, the house where I lived once, the country, the planet? Where are my children, where are my friends, my enemies, the people I loved, the people I hated?

Where is Elena? Where is my wife?

A whisper out of nowhere, sad, remote. Your wife is dead and your children are old. Forget them. Forget the friends and the enemies.

But I can’t forget! cried Hyrst silently in the spaces of his own mind. It was only yesterday—

Fifty years, said the whisper. And you must forget.

MacDonald, said Hyrst suddenly. I didn’t kill him. I was innocent. I can’t forget that.

Careful, said the whisper. Watch out.

I didn’t kill MacDonald. Somebody did. Somebody let me pay for it. Who? Was it Landers? Was it Saul? We four were together out there on Titan, when he died.

Careful, Hyrst. They’re coming. Listen to me. You think this is your own mind speaking, question-and-answer. But it isn’t.

Hyrst sprang upright on the narrow bed, his heart pounding, the sweat running cold on his skin. Who are you? Where are you? How—

They’re here, said the whisper calmly. Be quiet.

Two men came into the ward. “I am Dr. Merridew,” said the one in the white coverall, smiling at Hyrst with a brisk professional smile. “This is Warden Meister. We didn’t mean to startle you. There are a few questions, before we release you—”

Merridew, said the whisper in Hyrst’s mind, is a psychiatrist. Let me handle this.

Hyrst sat still, his hands lax between his knees, his eyes wide and fixed in astonishment. He heard the psychiatrist’s questions, and he heard the answers he gave to them, but he was merely an instrument, with no conscious volition, it was the whisperer in his mind who was answering. Then the warden shuffled some papers he held in his hand and asked questions of his own.

“You underwent the Humane Penalty without admitting your guilt. For the record, now that the penalty has been paid, do you wish to change your final statements?”

The voice in Hyrst’s mind, the secret voice, said swiftly to him. Don’t argue with them, don’t get angry, or they’ll keep you on and on here.

“But—” thought Hyrst.

I know you’re innocent, but they’ll never believe it. They’ll keep you on for further psychiatric tests. They might get near the truth, Hyrst—the truth about us.

Suddenly Hyrst began to understand, not all and not clearly, something of what had happened to him. The obscuring mists began to lift from the borders of his mind.

“What is the truth,” he asked in that inner quiet, “about us?”

You’ve spent fifty years in the Valley of the Shadow. You’re changed, Hyrst. You’re not quite human any more. No one is, who goes through the freeze. But they don’t know that.

“Then you too—”

Yes. And I too changed. And that is why our minds can speak, even though I am on Mars and you are on its moon. But they must not know that. So don’t argue, don’t show emotion!

The warden was waiting. Hyrst said aloud to him, slowly. “I have no statement to make.”

The warden did not seem surprised. He went on, “According to your papers here you also denied knowing the location of the Titanite for which MacDonald was presumably murdered. Do you still deny that?”

Hyrst was honestly surprised. “But surely, by now—”

The warden shrugged. “According to this data, it never came to light.”

“I never knew,” said Hyrst, “where it was.”

“Well,” said the warden, “I’ve asked the question and that’s as far as my responsibility goes. But there’s a visitor who has permission to see you.”

He and the doctor went out. Hyrst watched them go. He thought, So I’m not quite human. Not quite human any more. Does that make me more, or less, than a man?

Both, said the secret voice. Their minds are still closed to you. Only our minds—we who have changed too—are open.

“Who are you?” asked Hyrst.

My name is Shearing. Now listen. When you are released, they’ll bring you down here to Mars. I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll help you.

“Why? What do you care about me, or a murder fifty years old?”

I’ll tell you why later, said the whisper of Shearing. But you must follow my guidance. There’s danger for you, Hyrst, from the moment you’re released! There are those who have been waiting for you.

“Danger? But—”

The door opened, and Hyrst’s visitor came in. He was a man something over sixty but the deep lines in his face made him look older. His face was gray and drawn and twitching, but it became perfectly rigid and white when he came to the foot of the bed and looked at Hyrst. There was rage in his eyes, a rage so old and weary that it brought tears to them.

“You should have stayed dead,” he said to Hyrst. “Why couldn’t they let you stay dead?”

Hyrst was shocked and startled. “Who are you? And why—”

The other man was not even listening. His eyelids had closed, and when they opened again they looked on naked agony. “It isn’t right,” he said. “A murderer should die, and stay dead. Not come back.”

“I didn’t murder MacDonald,” Hyrst said, with the beginnings of anger. “And I don’t know why you—”

He stopped. The white, aging face, the tear-filled, furious eyes, he did not quite know what there was about them but it was there, like an old remembered face peeping up through a blur of water for a moment, and then withdrawing again.

After a moment, Hyrst said hoarsely, “What’s your name?”

“You wouldn’t know it,” said the other. “I changed it, long ago.”

Hyrst felt a cold, and it seemed that he could not breathe. He said, “But you were only eleven—”

He could not go on. There was a terrible silence between them. He must break it, he could not let it go on. He must speak. But all he could say was to whisper, “I’m not a murderer. You must believe it. I’m going to prove it—”

“You murdered MacDonald. And you murdered my mother. I watched her age and die, spending every penny, spending every drop of her blood and ours, to get you back again. I pretended for fifty years that I too believed you were innocent, when all the time I knew.”

Hyrst said, “I’m innocent.” He tried to say a name, too, but he could not speak the word.

“No. You’re lying, as you lied then. We found out. Mother hired detectives, experts. Over and over, for decades—and always they found the same thing. Landers and Saul could not possibly have killed MacDonald, and you were the only other human being there. Proof? I can show you barrels of it. And all of it proof that my father was a murderer.”

He leaned a little toward Hyrst, and the tears ran down his lined, careworn face. He said, “All right, you’ve come back. Alive, still young. But I’m warning you. If you try again to get that Titanite, if you shame us all again after all this time, if you even come near us, I’ll kill you.”

He went out. Hyrst sat, looking after him, and he thought that no man before him had ever felt what tore him now.

Inside his mind came Shearing’s whisper, with a totally unexpected note of compassion. But some of us have, Hyrst. Welcome to the brotherhood. Welcome to the Legion of Lazarus.

CHAPTER II

Mars roared and glittered tonight. And how was a man to stand the faces and lights and sounds, when he had come back from the silence of eternity?

Hyrst walked through the flaring streets of Syrtis City with slow and dragging steps. It was like being back on Earth. For this city was not really part of the old dead planet, of the dark barrens that rolled away beneath the night. This was the place of the rocket-men, the miners, the schemers, the workers, who had come from another, younger world. Their bars and entertainment houses flung a sunlike brilliance. Their ships, lifting majestically skyward from the distant spaceport, wrote their flaming sign on the sky. Only here and there moved one of the hooded, robed humanoids who had once owned this world.

The next corner, said the whisper in Hyrst’s mind. Turn there. No, not toward the spaceport. The other way.

Hyrst thought suddenly, “Shearing.”

Yes?

“I am being followed.”

His physical ears heard nothing but the voices and music. His physical eyes saw only the street crowd. Yet he knew. He knew it by a picture that kept coming into his mind, of a blurred shape moving always behind him.

Of course you’re being followed, came Shearing’s thought. I told you they’ve been waiting for you. This is the corner. Turn.

Hyrst turned. It was a darker street, running away from the lights through black warehouses and on the labyrinthine monolithic houses of the humanoids.

Now look back, Shearing commanded. No, not with your eyes! With your mind. Learn to use your talents.

Hyrst tried. The blurred image in his mind came clearer, and clearer still, and it was a young man with a vicious mouth and flat uncaring eyes. Hyrst shivered. “Who is he?”

He works for the men who have been waiting for you, Hyrst. Bring him this way.

“This—way?”

Look ahead. With your mind. Can’t you learn?

Stung to sudden anger, Hyrst flung out a mental probe with a power he hadn’t known he possessed. In a place of total darkness between two warehouses ahead, he saw a tall man lounging at his ease. Shearing laughed.

Yes, it’s me. Just walk past me. Don’t hurry.

Hyrst glanced backward, mentally at the man following him through the shadows. He was closer now, and quite silent. His face was tight and secret. Hyrst thought, How do I know this Shearing isn’t in it with him, taking me into a place where they can both get at me—

He went past the two warehouses and he did not turn his head but his mind saw Shearing waiting in the darkness. Then there was a soft, shapeless sound, and he turned and saw Shearing bending over a huddled form.

“That was unkind of you,” said Shearing, speaking aloud but not loudly.

Hyrst, still shaking, said, “But not exactly strange. I’ve never seen you before. And I still don’t know what this is all about.”

Shearing smiled, as he knelt beside the prone, unmoving body. Even here in the shadows, Hyrst could see him with these new eyes of the mind. Shearing was a big man. His hair was grizzled along the sides of his head, and his eyes were dark and very keen. He reached out one hand and turned the head of the prone young man, and they looked at the lax, loose face.

“He’s not dead?” said Hyrst.

“Of course not. But it will be a while before he wakes.”

“But who is he?”

Shearing stood up. “I never saw him before. But I know who he’s working for.”

Hyrst flung a sudden question at Shearing, and almost without thinking he followed it to surprise the answer in Shearing’s mind. The question was, Who are you working for? And the answer was a woman, a tall and handsome woman with angry eyes, standing against a drift of stars. There was a ship, all lonely on a dark plain, and she was pointing to it, and somehow Hyrst knew that it was vitally important to her, and to Shearing, and perhaps even to himself. But before he could do more than register this fleeting vision on his own consciousness, Shearing’s mind slammed shut with exactly the same violent effect as a door slammed in his face. He reeled back, throwing up his arms in a futile but instinctive gesture, and Shearing said angrily,

“You’re getting too good. I’ll give you a social hint—it’s customary to knock before you enter.”

Hyrst said, still holding the pieces of his head together, “All right—sorry. So who is she?”

“She’s one of us. She wants what we want.”

“I want only to find out who murdered MacDonald!”

“You want more than that, Hyrst, though you don’t know it yet. But MacDonald’s murderer is part of what we’re after.”

He took Hyrst’s arm. “We don’t have long. Thanks to my guidance, you slipped them all except this one. But they’ll be hounding after our trail very quickly.”

They went on along the shadowed street. The glare of the lights died back behind them, and they moved in darkness with only the keen stars to watch them, and the cold, gritty wind blowing in from the barrens, and the dark doorways of the mastaba-like monolithic houses of the humanoids staring at them like sightless eyes. Hyrst looked up at the bright, tiny moon that crept amid the stars, and a deep shaking took him as he thought of men lying up there in the deathly sleep, of himself lying there year after year.…

“In here,” said Shearing. It was one of the frigid, musty tombs that the humanoids called home. It was dark and there was nothing in it at all. “We can’t risk a light. We don’t need it, anyway.”

They sat down. Hyrst said desperately, “Listen, I want to know some things. Exactly what are we doing here?”

Shearing answered deliberately, “We are hiding from those who want you, and we are waiting for a chance to go to our friends.”

“Our friends? Your friends, maybe. That woman—I don’t know her, and—”

“Now you listen, Hyrst. I’ll tell you this much about us now. We’re Lazarites, like you, with the same powers as you. But all Lazarites are not on our side.”

Hyrst thought about that. “Then those others who are hunting us—”

“There are Lazarites among them, too. Not many, but a few. You don’t know us, you don’t know them. Do you want to leave me and go back out and let them have you?”

Hyrst remembered the adder-like face of the young man who had come after him through the shadows. After a long moment he said, “Well. But what are you after?”

“The thing that MacDonald was killed for, fifty years ago.”

Hyrst said, “The Titanite? They said it hadn’t ever been found. But how it could have remained hidden so long—”

“I want you,” Shearing said, “to tell me all about how MacDonald died. Everything you can remember.”

Hyrst asked eagerly, “You think we can find out who killed him? After all this time? God, if we could—my son—”

“Quiet, Hyrst. Go ahead and tell me. Not in words. Just remember what happened, and I’ll get it.”

Yet, by sheer lifetime habit, Hyrst could not remember without first putting it into words in his own mind, as they two sat in the cold, whispering darkness.

“There were four of us out there on Titan, you must already know that. And only four—”

Four men. And one was named MacDonald, an engineer, a secretive, selfish and enormously greedy man. MacDonald was the man who found a fortune, and kept it secret, and died.

Landers was one. A lean, brown, lively man, an excellent physicist with a friendly manner and no obvious ambitions.

Saul was one, and he was big and blond and quiet, a good drinking companion, a good geologist, a lover of good music. If he had any darker passions, he kept them hidden.

Hyrst was the fourth man, and the only one of the four still living.…

He remembered now. He saw the black and bitter crags of Titan stark against the glory of the Rings, and he saw two figures moving across a plain of methane snow, their helmets gleaming in the Saturn-light. Behind them in the plain were the flat, half-buried concrete structures of the little refinery, and all around them were the spidery roads where the big half-tracs dragged their loads of uranium ore from the enchaining mountains.

The two men were quarrelling.

“You’re angry,” MacDonald was saying, “because it was I who found it.”

“Listen,” Hyrst said. “We’re sick, all three of us, of hearing you brag about it.”

“I’ll bet you are,” said MacDonald smugly. “The first find of a Titanite pocket for years. The rarest, costliest stuff in the System. If you know the way they’ve been bidding to buy it from me—”

“I do know,” Hyrst said. “You’ve done nothing for weeks but give forth mysterious hints—”

“And you don’t like that,” MacDonald said. “Of course you don’t! It’s no part of our refinery deal, it’s mine, I’ve got it and it’s hidden where nobody can find it till I sell it. Naturally, you don’t like that.”

“All right,” said Hyrst. “So the Titanite find is all yours. You’re still a partner in the refinery, remember. And you’ve still got an obligation to the rest of us, so you can damn well get in and do your job.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve always done my job.”

“More or less,” said Hyrst. “For your information, I’ve seen better engineers in grade-school. There’s Number Three hoist. It’s been busted for a week. Now let’s get in there and fix it.”

The two figures in Hyrst’s memory toiled on, out of the area of roads to the edge of the landing field, where the ships come to take away the refined uranium. Number Three hoist rose in a stiff, ugly column from the ground. It was supposed to fetch the uranium up from the underground storage bins and load it into a specially-built hot-tank ship in position at the dock. But Number Three had balked and refused to perform its task. In this completely automated plant, men were only important when something went wrong. Now something was wrong, and it was up to MacDonald, the mechanical engineer, and Hyrst, the electronics man, to set it right.

Hyrst opened the hatch, and they climbed the metal stairs to the upper chamber. Number Three’s brain was here, its scanners, its tabulating and recording apparatus, its signal system. A red light pulsated on a panel, alone in a string of white ones.

“Trouble’s in the hoist-mechanism,” said Hyrst. “That’s your department.” He smiled and sat down on a metal bench in the center of the room, with his back to the stair. “D Level.”

MacDonald grumbled, and went to a skeletal cage built over a round segment of the floor. Various tools were clipped to the ribs of the cage. MacDonald pulled an extra rayproof protectall over his vac-suit and stepped inside the cage, pressing a button. The cage dropped, into a circular shaft that paralleled the hoist right down to the feeder mechanism.

Hyrst waited. Inside his helmet he could hear MacDonald breathing and grumbling as he worked away, repairing a break in the belt. He did not hear anything else. Then something happened, so swiftly that he had never had any memory of it, and some time later he came to and looked for MacDonald. The cage was way down at the bottom of the shaft and MacDonald was in it, with a very massive pedestal-block on top of him. The block had been unbolted from the floor and dragged to the edge of the shaft, and it could not possibly have been an accident that it tumbled in, between the wide-apart ribs of the cage.

And that’s how MacDonald died, Hyrst thought—and so I died. They said I forced the secret of his Titanite find out of him, and then killed him.

Shearing asked swiftly, “MacDonald never gave you any hint of where he’d hidden the Titanite?”

“No,” said Hyrst. He paused, and then said, “It’s the Titanite you’re after?”

Shearing answered carefully. “In a way, yes. But we didn’t kill MacDonald for it. Those who did kill him are the men who are after you now. They’re afraid you might lead us to the stuff.”

Hyrst swore, shaking with sudden anger. “Damn it, I won’t be treated like a child. Not by you, by anyone. I want—”

“You want the men who killed MacDonald,” said Shearing. “I know. I remember what was in your mind when you met your son.”

A weakness took Hyrst and he leaned his forehead against the cold stone wall.

“I’m sorry,” said Shearing. “But we want what you want—and more. So much more that you can’t dream it. You must trust us.”

“Us? That woman?”

Once again in Shearing’s mind Hyrst saw the woman with her head against the stars, and the ship looming darkly. He saw the woman much more clearly, and she was like a fire, burning with anger, burning with a single-minded, dedicated purpose. She was beautiful, and frightening.

“She, and others,” said Shearing. “Listen. We must go soon. We’re to be picked up, secretly. Will you trust us—or would you rather trust yourself to those who are hunting you?”

Hyrst was silent. Shearing said, “Well?”

“I’ll go with you,” said Hyrst.

They went out into the cold darkness, and Hyrst heard Shearing say in his mind, “I wouldn’t try to run—”

But it wasn’t Shearing speaking in his mind now, it was a third man.

“I wouldn’t try to run—”

Frantically startled, Hyrst threw out his mental vision and saw the men who stood around them in the darkness, four men, three of them holding the wicked little weapons called bee-guns in their hands. The fourth man came closer, a dark slender man with a face like a fox, high-boned, narrow-eyed, smiling. It came to Hyrst that the three with weapons were only ordinary men, and that it was this fourth man whose mind had spoken.

He was speaking aloud now. “I want you alive, believe me—but there are endless gradations between alive and dead. My men are very accurate.”

Shearing’s face was suddenly drawn and exhausted. “Don’t try anything,” he warned Hyrst wearily. “He means it.”

The dark man shook his head at Shearing. “This wasn’t nice of you. You knew we had a particular interest in Mr. Hyrst.” He turned to Hyrst and smiled. His teeth were small and very neat and white. “Did you know that Shearing has been keeping a shield over your mind as well as his? A little too large a task for him. When you jarred his mind open for an instant, it was all we needed to lead us here.”

He went on. “Mr. Hyrst, my name is Vernon. We’d like you to come with us.”

Vernon nodded to the three accurate men, and the whole little group began to walk in the direction of the spaceport. Shearing seemed almost asleep on his feet now. It was as though he had expended all his energy on a task, and failed at it, and was now quiescent, like an empty well waiting to fill again.

“Where are we going?” Hyrst asked, and Vernon answered:

“To see a gentleman you’ve never heard of, in a place you’ve never been.” He added, with easy friendliness, “Don’t worry, Mr. Hyrst, we have nothing against you. You’re new to this—ah—state of life. You shouldn’t be asked to make decisions or agreements until you know both sides of the question. Mr. Shearing was taking an unfair advantage.”

Remembering the dark hard purpose Shearing had let him see in his mind, Hyrst could not readily dispute that. But he put out an exploring probe in the direction of Vernon’s mind.

It was shut tight.

They walked on, toward the spaceport gates.

CHAPTER III

All space was before him, hung with the many-colored lights of the stars, intensely brilliant in the black nothing. It was incredibly splendid, but it was too much like what he had looked at with his cold unseeing eyes for fifty years. He looked down—down being relative to where he was standing in the blister-window—and saw the whole Belt swarming by under him like a drift of fireflies. He quivered inwardly with a chill vertigo, and turned away.

Vernon was talking aloud. He had been talking for some time. He was stretched out on a soft, deep lounge, smoking, pretending to sip from a tall glass.

“So you see, Mr. Hyrst, we can help you a lot. It’s not easy for a Lazarite—for one of us—to get a job. I know. People have a—well, a feeling. Now Mr. Bellaver—”

“Where is Shearing?” asked Hyrst. He came and stood in the center of the room, with the soft lights in his eyes and the soft carpets under his feet. His mind reached out, uneasy and restless, but it seemed to be surrounded by a zone of fog that tangled and confused and deflected it. He could not find Shearing.

“We’ve been here for hours,” he said. “Where is he?”

“Probably talking a deal with Mr. Bellaver. I wouldn’t worry. As I was saying, Bellaver Incorporated is interested in men like you. We’re the largest builders of spacecraft in the System, and we can afford—”

“I know all about it,” said Hyrst impatiently. “Old Quentin Bellaver was busy swallowing up his rivals when I went through the door.”

“Then,” said Vernon imperturbably, “you should realize how much we can do for you. Electronics is a vital branch—”

Hyrst moved erratically around the room, looking at things and not really seeing them, hearing Vernon’s voice but not understanding what it said. He was growing more and more uneasy. It was as though someone was calling to him, urgently, but just out of earshot. He kept straining, with his ears and his mind, and Vernon’s voice babbled on, and the barrier was like a wall around his thoughts.

They had been aboard this ship for a long time now, and he had not seen Shearing since they came through the hatch. It was not really a ship, of course. It had no power of its own, depending on powerful tugs to tow it. It was Walter Bellaver’s floating pleasure-palace, and the damnedest thing Hyrst had ever seen. Vernon said it could and often did accommodate three or four hundred guests in the utmost luxury. There was nobody aboard it now but Bellaver, Vernon, Hyrst and Shearing, the three very accurate men, and perhaps a dozen others including stewards and the crews of the tugs and Bellaver’s yacht. It was named the Happy Dream, and it was presently drifting in an excessively lonely orbit high above the ecliptic, between nothing and nowhere.

Vernon had been with him almost constantly. He was getting tired of Vernon. Vernon talked too much.

“Listen,” he said. “You can stop selling Bellaver. I’m not looking for a job. Where’s Shearing?”

“Oh, forget Shearing,” said Vernon, impatient in his turn. “You never heard of him until a few days ago.”

“He helped me.”

“For reasons of his own.”

“What’s your reason? And Bellaver’s?”

“Mr. Bellaver is interested in all social problems. And I’m a Lazarite myself, so naturally I have a sympathy for others like me.” Vernon sat up, putting his glass aside on a low table. He had drunk hardly any of the contents.

“Shearing,” he said, “is a member of a gang who some time ago stole a particular property of Bellaver Incorporated. You’re not involved in the quarrel, Mr. Hyrst. I’d advise you, as a friend, to stay not involved.”

Hyrst’s mind and his ears were stretched and quivering, straining to hear a cry for help just a little too far away.

“What kind of a property?” asked Hyrst.

Vernon shrugged. “The Bellavers have never said what kind, for fairly obvious reasons.”

“Something to do with ships?”

“I suppose so. It isn’t important to me. Nor to you, Mr. Hyrst.”

“Will you pour me a drink?” said Hyrst, pointing to the cellaret close beside Vernon. “Yes, that’s fine. How long ago?”

“What?” asked Vernon, measuring whisky into a glass.

“The theft,” said Hyrst, and threw his mind suddenly against the barrier. For one fleeting second he forced a crack in it. “Something over fifty—”, said Vernon, and let the glass fall. He spun around from the cellaret and was halfway to his feet when Hyrst hit him. He hit him three or four times before he would stay down, and three or four more before he would lie quiet. Hyrst straightened up, breathing hard. His lip was bleeding and he wiped it with the back of his hand. “That was a little too big a job for you, Mr. Vernon,” he said viciously. “Trying to keep my mind blanked and under control for hours.” He stuffed a handkerchief into Vernon’s mouth, and tied him up with his own cummerbund, and shoved him out of sight behind an enormous bed. Then he opened the door carefully, and went out.

There was nobody in the corridor. This was wide and ornate, with doors opening off it, and nothing to show what was behind them or which way to go. Hyrst stood still a minute, getting control of himself. The barrier no longer obscured his mind. He let it rove, finding that every time he did that it was easier, and the images clearer. He heard Shearing again, as he had heard him in that one second when Vernon’s guard had faltered. His face became set and ugly. He began to move toward the stern of the Happy Dream.

Heavy metal-cloth curtains closed this end of the corridor. Beyond them was a ballroom in which only one dim light now burned, a vastness of black polished floors and crystal windows looking upon space. Hyrst’s footsteps were hushed and swallowed up in whispering echoes. He made his way across to another set of curtains, edged between them with infinite caution, and found himself in the upper aisle of an amphitheater.

It was pitch dark where he was, and he stood perfectly still, exploring with his mind. He could not see any guards. The rows of empty seats were arranged in circles around a central pit, large enough for any entertainment Mr. Bellaver might decide to give. The pit was brilliantly lighted, and from somewhere lower down came the intermittent sound of voices.

Also from the pit came Shearing’s cries. Hyrst began to tremble with outrage and anger, and his still-uncertain mental control faltered dangerously. Then from out of nowhere, a voice spoke in his mind, and he saw the face of the woman he had seen twice before, the woman Shearing served.

“Careful,” she said. “There is a Lazarite with Bellaver. His attention is all on Shearing, but you must keep your mind shielded. I’ll help you.”

Hyrst whispered. “Thanks.” He felt calm now, alert and capable. He crept along the dark aisle, toward the pit.

Mr. Bellaver’s theater lacked nothing. The large circular stage area was fitted with upper and lower electromagnets for the use of acrobats and dancers with null-grav specialties. They could perform without disturbing the regular grav-field of the Happy Dream, thus keeping the guests comfortable, and by skillful manipulation of the magnetic fields more spectacular stunts were possible than in ordinary no-gravity.

Shearing was in the pit, between the upper and lower magnets. He wore an acrobat’s metal attraction-harness, strapped on over his clothes. When Hyrst looked over the rail he was hanging at the central point of weightlessness, where everything in a man floats free and his senses are lost in a dreadful vertigo unless he has been conditioned over a long period of time to get used to it. Shearing had not been conditioned.

“Careful,” said the woman’s warning voice in his mind. “His life depends on you. No, don’t try to make contact with him! The Lazarite would sense you—”

Shearing began a slow ascension toward the upper magnet as the current was increased, from some unseen control board. He moved convulsively turning horizontally around the axis of his own middle like a toy spun on a string. His back was uppermost, and Hyrst could not see his face.

“Bellaver and the Lazarite,” said the woman quietly, “are trying to learn from Shearing where our ship is. He has been able so far to keep his mind shielded. He is—a very brave man. But you’ll have to hurry. He’s near the breaking point.”

Shearing was now almost level with Hyrst, suspended over that open pit, looking down, a long way.

“You’ll have to be quick, Hyrst. Please. Please get him out of there before we have to kill him.”

The current in the magnet was cut and Shearing fell, with a long neighing scream.

Hyrst looked down. The repelling force of the lower magnet cushioned the fall, and the upper magnet took hold, hard. Shearing stopped about three feet above the stage floor and started slowly to rise again. He seemed to be crying. Hyrst turned and ran back to the top of the aisle. Halfway around the circle he found steps and went tearing down them. On the next level—there were three—he saw two men leaning over the broad rail, watching Shearing.

“Yes, there they are. You must find a weapon—”

Hyrst looked around, blinking like a mole in the dark. Seats, nothing but seats. Ornamentation, but all solid. Small metal cylinder, set in a wall niche. Chemical extinguisher. Yes. Compact and heavy. He took it.

“Hurry. He’s almost through—”

The two men were tense and hungry, eager as wolves. One was the Lazarite, a grey man, old and seamed with living and none of it good. The other was Bellaver, and he was young. He was tall and fresh-faced, impeccably shaven, impeccably dressed, the keen, clean, public-spirited executive.

“I can give you more if you want it, Shearing,” Bellaver said, his fingers ready on a control-plate set into the broad rail. “How about it?”

“Shut up, Bellaver,” whispered the Lazarite aloud. “I’ve almost got it. Almost—” His face was agonized with concentration.

“Now!”

The woman’s voiceless cry in his mind sent Hyrst forward. His hand swung up and then down in a crashing arc, elongated by the heavy cylinder. The Lazarite fell without a sound. He fell across Bellaver, pushing him back from the control-plate, and lay over his feet, bleeding gently into the thick pile of the carpet. Bellaver’s mouth and eyes opened wide. He looked at the Lazarite and then at Hyrst. He leaped backward, away from the encumbrance at his ankles, making the first hoarse effort at a shout for help. Hyrst did not give him time to finish it. The first row of seats caught Bellaver and threw him, and Hyrst swung the cylinder again. Bellaver collapsed.

“Was I in time?” Hyrst asked of the woman, in his mind. He thought she was crying when she answered, “Yes.” He smiled. He stepped over the Lazarite and went to the control-plate and began to work with it until he had Shearing safely on the floor of the stage. Then he cut the power and ran down another flight of steps to the bottom level. His mind was able to range free now. He could not sense anyone close at hand. Bellaver seemed to have sent underlings elsewhere in the Happy Dream while he worked on Shearing. It was nothing for which a man would seek witnesses. Hyrst vaulted the rail onto the stage and dragged Shearing away from the magnet. He felt uncomfortable in all that glare of light. He hauled and grunted until he got Shearing over the rail into the dark. Then he wrestled the harness off him. Shearing sobbed feebly, and retched.

“Can you stand up?” said Hyrst. “Hey. Shearing.” He shook him, hard. “Stand up.”

He got Shearing up, a one-hundred-and-ninety pound rag doll draped over his shoulders. He began to walk him out of the theater. “Are you still there?” he asked of the woman.

The answer came into his mind swiftly. “Yes. I’ll help you watch. Do you see where the skiff is?”

It was in a pod under the belly of the Happy Dream. “I see it,” said Hyrst.

“Take that. Bellaver’s yacht is faster, but you’d need the crew. The skiff you can handle yourself.”

He walked Shearing into a fore-and-aft corridor. Shearing’s feet were beginning to move of their own accord, and he had stopped retching. But his eyes were still blank and he staggered aimlessly. Hyrst’s nerves were prickling with a mixture of fierce satisfaction and fear. Far above in the lush suite he felt Vernon stir and come to. There were men somewhere closer, quite close. He forced his mind to see. Two of the very accurate men who had been with Vernon were playing cards with two others who were apparently stewards. The third one lolled in a chair, smoking. All five were in a lounge just around the corner of a transverse corridor. The door was open.

Without realizing that he had done so, Hyrst took control of Shearing’s mind. “Steady, now. We’re going past that corner without a sound. You hear me, Shearing? Not a sound.”

Shearing’s eyes flickered vaguely. He frowned, and his step became steadier. The floor of the corridor was covered in a tough resilient plastic that deadened footsteps. They passed the corner. The men continued to play cards. Hyrst sent up a derisive insult to Vernon and told Shearing to hurry a little. The stair leading down into the pod was just ahead, ten yards, five—

A man appeared in the corridor ahead, coming from some storeroom with a rack of plastic bottles in his hand.

“You’ll have to run now,” came the woman’s thought, coolly. “Don’t panic. You can still make it.”

The man with the bottles yelled. He began to run toward Hyrst and Shearing, dropping the rack to leave his hands free. In the loungeroom behind them the card-party broke up. Hyrst took Shearing by the arm and clamped down even tighter on his mind, giving him a single command. They ran together, fast.

The men from the lounge poured out into the main corridor. Their voices were confused and very loud. Ahead, the man who had been bringing the bottles was now between Hyrst and the stair. He was a brown, hard man who looked like a pilot. He said, “You better stop,” and then he grappled with Hyrst and Shearing. The three of them spun around in a clumsy dance, Shearing moving like an automaton. Hyrst and the pilot flailing away with their fists, and then the pilot fell back hard on the seat of his pants, with the blood bursting out of his nose and his eyes glazing. Hyrst raced for the stair, propelling Shearing. They tumbled down it with a shot from a bee-gun buzzing over their heads. It was a short stair with a double-hatch door at the bottom. They fell through it, and Hyrst slammed it shut almost on the toes of a man coming down the stair behind them. The automatic lock took hold. Hyrst told Shearing, “You can stop now.”

A few minutes later, from the great swag belly of the Happy Dream, a small space-skiff shot away and was quickly lost in the star-shot immensity above the Belt.

CHAPTER IV

It did not stay lost for long. Shearing was at the controls. The chronometer showed fourteen hours and twenty-seven minutes since they left the Happy Dream. Shearing had spent eight of those hours in a species of comatose slumber, from which he had roused out practically normal. Now Hyrst was heavily asleep in the pneumo-chair beside him.

Shearing punched him. “Wake up.”

After several more punches Hyrst groaned and opened his eyes. He mumbled a question, and Shearing pointed out the wide curved port that gave full vision forward and on both sides.

“It was a good try,” he said, “but I don’t think we’re going to make it. Look there. No, farther back. See it? Now the other side. And there’s one astern.”

Still sleepy, but alarmed, Hyrst swung his mental vision around. It was easier than looking. Two fast, powerful tugs from the Happy Dream, and Bellaver’s yacht. He frowned in heavy concentration. “Bellaver’s aboard. He’s got a mighty goose-egg on his head. Vernon too, with his shields up tight. The three accurate men and the pilot—his nose is a thing of beauty—plus crew. Nine in all. Two men each to the tugs. The other Lazarite, the one I laid out—he’s not along.”

Shearing nodded approvingly. “You’re getting good. Now take a glance at our fuel-tanks and tell me what you see.”

Hyrst sat up straight, fully awake. “Practically,” he said, “nothing.”

“This skiff was meant for short hops only. We’ve got enough for perhaps another forty-five minutes, less if we get too involved. They’re faster than we are, so they’ll catch up to us—oh, say in about half an hour. We have friends coming—”

“Friends?”

“Certainly. You don’t think we let each other down, do you? Not the brotherhood. But they had to come from a long way off. We can’t possibly rendezvous under an hour and a half, maybe more if—”

“I know,” said Hyrst. “If we all get involved.” He looked out the port. In the beginning, following directions from the young woman—whose name he had never thought to ask—he had set a course that plunged him deep into one of the wildest sectors of the Belt. He was not a pilot. He could, like most men of his time, handle a simple craft under simple conditions, but these conditions were not simple. The skiff’s radar was short-range and it had no automatic deflection reflexes. Hyrst had had to fly on ESP, spotting meteor swarms, asteroids, debris of all sorts in this poetically named hell-hole, the Path of Minor Worlds, and then figuring out how to get by, through, or over them without a crash. Shearing had relieved him just in time.

He glowered at the whirling, glittering mess outside, the dust, the shards and fragments of a shattered world. It merged into mist and his mind was roving again. Shearing jockeyed the controls. He was flying esper too. The tugs and Bellaver’s fast yacht were closing up the gap. The level in the tanks went down, used up not in free fall but in the constant maneuvering.

Hyrst swung mentally inboard to check vac-suits and equipment in the locker, and then out again. His vision was strong and free. He could look at the Sun, and see the splendid fires of the corona. He could look at Mars, old and cold and dried-up, and at Jupiter, massive and sullen and totally useless except as an anchor for its family of crazy moons. He could look farther than that. He could look at the stars. In a little while, he thought, he could look at whole galaxies. His heart pounded and the breath came hot and hard into his lungs. It was a good feeling. It made all that had gone before almost worthwhile. The primal immensities drew him, the black gulfs lit with gold and crimson and peacock-colored flames. He wanted to go farther and farther, into—

“You’re learning too fast,” said Shearing dryly. “Stick to something small and close and sordid, namely an asteroid where we can land.”

“I found one,” said Hyrst. “There.”

Shearing followed his mental nudge. “Hell,” he said, “couldn’t you have spotted something better? These Valhallas give me the creeps.”

“The others within reach are too small, or there’s no cover. We’ll have quite a little time to wait. I take it you would like to be alive when your friends come.”

Vernon’s thought broke in on them abruptly. “You have just one chance of that, and that’s to give yourselves up, right now.”

“Does the socially-conscious Mr. Bellaver still want to give me that job?” asked Hyrst.

“I’m warning you,” said Vernon.

“Your mind is full of hate,” said Hyrst. “Cleanse it.” He shut Vernon out as easily as hanging up a phone. Under stress, his new powers were developing rapidly. He felt a little drunk with them. Shearing said, “Don’t get above yourself, boy. You’re still a cub, you know.” Then he grinned briefly and added, “By the way, thanks.”

Hyrst said, “I owed it to you. And you can thank your lady friend, too. She had a big hand in it.”

“Christina,” said Shearing softly. “Yes.”

He dropped the skiff sharply in a descending curve, toward the asteroid.

“Do you think,” said Hyrst, “you could now tell me what the devil this is all about?”

Shearing said, “We’ve got a starship.”

Hyrst stared. For a long time he didn’t say anything. Then, “You’ve got a starship? But nobody has! People talk of someday reaching other stars, but nobody tried yet, nobody could try—” He broke off, suddenly remembering a dark, lonely ship, and a woman with angry eyes watching it. Even in his astonishment, things began to come clearer to him. “So that’s it—a starship. And Bellaver wants it?”

Shearing nodded.

“Well,” said Hyrst. “Go on.”

“You’ve already developed some amazing mental capabilities since you came back from beyond the door. You’ll find that’s only the beginning. The radiation, the exposure—something. The simple act of pseudo-death, perhaps. Anyway, the brain is altered, stepped up, a great deal of its normally unused potential released. You’ve always been a fair-to-middling technician. You’ll find your rating boosted, eventually, to the genius level.”

The skiff veered wildly as Shearing dodged a whizzing chunk of rock the size of a skyscraper.

“That’s one reason,” he said, “why we wanted to get you before Bellaver did. The number of technicians undergoing the Humane Penalty is quite small. We—the brotherhood—need all of them we can get.”

“But that wasn’t the main reason you wanted me?” pressed Hyrst.

Shearing looked at him. “No. We wanted you mainly because you were present when MacDonald died. Handled right—”

He paused. The asteroid was rushing at them, and Bellaver’s ships were close behind. Hyrst was already in a vac-suit, all but the helmet.

“Take the controls,” said Shearing. “As she goes. Don’t worry, I’ll make the landing.” He pulled the vac-suit on. “Handled right,” he said, “you might be the key to that murder, and to the mystery behind it that the brotherhood must solve.”

He took the controls again. They helped each other on with their helmets. The asteroid filled the port, a wild, weird jumble of vari-colored rock.

“I don’t see how,” said Hyrst, into his helmet mike.

“Latent impressions,” answered Shearing briefly, and sent the skiff skittering in between two great black monoliths, to settle with a jar on a pan of rock as smooth and naked as a ballroom floor.

“Make it fast,” said Shearing. “They’re right on top of us.”

The skiff, designed as Sheering had said for short hops, could not accommodate the extra weight and bulk of an airlock. You were supposed to land in atmosphere. If you didn’t, you just pushed a release-button and hung on. The air was exhausted in one whistling swoosh that took with it everything loose. The moisture in it crystallized instantly, and before this frozen drift had even begun to settle, Hyrst and Shearing were on their way.

They crossed the rock pan in great swaggering bounds. The gravity was light, the horizon only twenty or so miles away. Literally in his mind’s eye Hyrst could see the three ships arrowing at them. He opened contact with Vernon, knowing Shearing had done so too. Vernon had been looking for them.

“Mr. Bellaver still prefers to have you alive,” he said. “If you’ll wait quietly beside the skiff, we’ll take you aboard.”

Shearing gave him a hard answer.

“Very well,” said Vernon. “Mr. Bellaver wants me to make it clear to you that he doesn’t intend for you to get away. So you can interpret that as you please. Be seeing you.”

He broke contact, knowing that Hyrst and Shearing would close him out. From now on, Hyrst realized, he would keep track of them the way he and Shearing had kept track of obstructions in the path of flight, by mental “sight”. The yacht was extremely close. Suddenly Hyrst had a confused glimpse of a hand on a control-lever over-lapped by a view of the black-mouthed tubes of the yacht’s belly-jets. He dived, literally, into a crack between one of the monoliths and a slab that leaned against its base, dragging Shearing with him.

The yacht swept over. Nothing happened. It dropped out of sight, braking for a landing.

“Imagination,” said Shearing. “You realize a possibility, and you think it’s so. Tricky. But I don’t blame you. The safe side is the best one.”

Hyrst looked out the crack. One of the tugs was coming in to land beside the skiff, while the other one circled.

“Now what?” he said. “I suppose we can dodge them for a while, but we can’t hide from Vernon.”

Shearing chuckled. He had got his look of tough competence back. He seemed almost to be enjoying himself. “I told you you were only a cub. How do you suppose we’ve kept the starship hidden all these years? Watch.”

In the flick of a second Hyrst went blind and deaf. Then he realized that it was only his mental eyes and ears that were blanked out as though a curtain had been drawn across them. His physical eyes were still clear and sharp, and when Shearing’s voice came over the helmet audio he heard it without trouble.

“This is called the cloak. I suppose you could call it an extension of the shield, though it’s more like a force field. It’s no bar to physical vision, and it has the one great disadvantage of being opaque both ways to mental energy. But it does act as a deflector. If Vernon follows us now, he’ll have to do it the hard way. Stick close by me, so I don’t have too wide a spread. And it’ll be up to you to lead. I can’t do both. Let’s go.”

Hyrst had, unconsciously, become so used to his new perceptions that it made him feel dull and helpless to be without them. He led off down one of the smooth rock avenues, going away from the skiff and the tug which had just landed.

On either side of the avenue were monoliths, irregularly spaced and of different sizes and heights but following an apparently orderly plan. The light of the distant sun lay raw and blinding on them, casting shadows as black and sharp-edged as though drawn upon the rock with india ink.

You could see faces in the monoliths. You could see mighty outlines, singly and in groups, of gods and beasts and men, in combat, in suppliance, in death and burial. That was why these asteroids were called Valhallas. Twenty-six of them had been found so far, and studied, and still no one could say certainly whether or not the hands of any living beings had fashioned them. They might be actual monuments, defaced by cosmic dust, by collision with the myriad fragments of the Belt, by time. They might be one of Nature’s casual jokes, created by the same agencies. No actual tombs had been found, nor tools, nor definitely identifiable artifacts. But still the feeling persisted, in the airless silence of the avenues, that some passing race had paused and wrought for itself a memorial more enduring than its fame, and then gone on into the great galactic sea, never to return.

Hyrst had never been on a Valhalla before. He understood why Shearing had not wanted to land and he wished now that they hadn’t. There was something overwhelmingly sad and awesome about these leaning, towering figures of stone, moving forever in their lonely orbit, going nowhere, returning to nowhere.

Then he saw the second tug overhead. He forgot his daydreams. “They’re going to act as a spotter,” he said. Shearing grunted but did not speak. His whole mind was concentrated on maintaining the cloak. Hyrst stopped him still in the pitchy shadow under what might have been a kneeling woman sixty feet high. He watched the tug. It lazed away, circling slowly, and he did not think it had seen them. He could not any longer see the place where they had landed, but he assumed that by now the yacht had looped back and come in—if not there somewhere close by. They could figure on nine to eleven men hunting them, depending on whether they left the ships guarded or not. Either way, it was too many.

“Listen,” he said aloud to Shearing. “Listen, I want to ask you. What you said about latent impressions—you think I might have seen and heard the killer even though I was unconscious?”

“Especially heard. Possible. With your increased power, and ours, impressions received through sense-channels but not recognized at the time or remembered later might be recovered.” He shook his head. “Don’t bother me.”

“I just wanted to know,” said Hyrst. He thought of his son, and the two daughters he hoped he would never see. He thought of Elena. It was too late to do anything for her, but the others were still living. So was he, and he intended to stay that way, at least until he had done what he set out to do.

“Old Bellaver was behind that killing, wasn’t he? Old Quentin, this one’s grandfather.”

“Yes. Don’t bother me.”

“One thing more. Do we Lazarites live longer than men?”

Shearing gave him a curious, brief look. “Yes.”

The tug was out of sight behind a massive rearing shape that seemed to clutch a broken ship between its paws. Symbolic, perhaps, of space? Who knew? Hyrst led Shearing in wild impala-like leaps across an open space, and into a narrow way that twisted, filled with darkness, among the bases of a group that resembled an outlandish procession following a king.

“How much longer?”

“Humane Penalty first came in a hundred and fourteen years ago, right? After Seitz’ method was perfected for saving spacemen. I was one of the first they used it on.”

“My God,” said Hyrst. Yet, somehow, he was not as surprised as he might have been.

“I’ve aged,” said Shearing apologetically. “I was only twenty-seven then.”

They crouched, beside a humped shape like a gigantic lizard with a long tail. The tug swung overhead and slowly on.

Hyrst said, “Then it’s possible the one who killed MacDonald is still alive?”

“Possible. Probable.”

Hyrst bared his teeth, in what was not at all like a smile. “Good,” he said. “That makes me happy.”

They did not do any talking after that. They had had their helmet radios operating on practically no power at all, so that they couldn’t be picked up outside a radius of a few yards, but even that might be too close, now that Bellaver’s men had had time to get suited and fan out. They shut them off entirely, communicating by yanks and nudges.

For what seemed to Hyrst like a very long time, but which was probably less than half an hour in measured minutes, they dodged from one patch of shadow to another, following an erratic course that Hyrst thought would lead them away from the ships. Once more the tug went over, slow, and then Hyrst didn’t see it again. The idea that they might have given up occurred to him but he dismissed it as absurd. With the helmet mike shut off, the silence was beginning to get on his nerves. Once he looked up and saw a piece of cosmic debris smash into a monolith. Dust and splinters flew, and a great fragment broke off and fell slowly downward, bumping and rebounding, and all of it as soundless as a dream. You couldn’t hear yourself walk, you couldn’t hear anything but the roar of your own breathing and the pounding of your own blood. The grotesque rocky avenues could hide an army, stealthy, creeping—

There was a hill, or at least a higher eminence, crowned with what might have been the cyclopean image of a man stretched out on a noble catafalque, with hooded giants standing by in attitudes of mourning. It seemed like the best place to stop that Hyrst had seen, with plenty of cover and a view of the surrounding area. With luck, you might stay hidden there a long time. He jogged Shearing’s elbow and pointed, and Shearing nodded. There was a wide, almost circular sweep of open rock around the base of the hill. Hyrst looked carefully for the tug. There was no sign of it. He tore out across the open, with Shearing at his heels.

The tug swooped over, going fast this time. It could not possibly have missed them. Shearing dropped the cloak with a grunt. “No use for that any more,” he said. They bounded up the hillside and in among the mourning figures. The tug whipped around in a tight spiral and hung over the hill. Hyrst shook the sweat out of his eyes. His mind was clear again. The tug’s skipper was babbling into his communicator, and in another place on the asteroid Hyrst could mentally see a thin skirmish line spread out, and in still another four men in a bunch. They all picked up and began to move, toward the hill.

Shearing said, nodding spaceward, “Our friends are on the way. If we can hold out—”

“Fat chance,” said Hyrst. “They’re armed, and all we’ve got is flare-pistols.” But he looked around. His eyes detected nothing but rock, hard sunlight, and deep shadow, but his mind saw that one of the black blots at the base of the main block, the catafalque, was more than a shadow. He slid into a crack that resembled a passage, being rounded rather than ragged. Shearing was right behind him. “I don’t like this,” he said, “but I suppose there’s no help for it.”

The crack led down into a cave, or chamber, too irregularly shaped to be artificial, too smoothly surfaced and floored to be natural. There was nothing in it but a block of stone, nine feet or so long and about four feet wide by five feet high. It seemed to be a natural part of the floor, but Hyrst avoided it. On the opposite, the sunward side, there was a small windowlike aperture that admitted a ray of blinding radiance, sharply defined and doing nothing to illumine the dark on either side of it.

Vernon’s thought came to them, hard, triumphant, peremptory. “Mr. Bellaver says you have ten minutes to come out. After that, no mercy.”

CHAPTER V

The minutes slid past, sections of eternity arbitrarily measured by the standards of another planet and having no relevance at all on this tiny whirling rock. The beam of light from the small aperture moved visibly across the opposite wall. Hyrst watched it, blinking. Outside, Bellaver’s men were drawn up in a wide crescent across the hill in front of the catafalque. They waited.

“No mercy,” said Hyrst softly. “No mercy, is it?” He bent over and began to loosen the clamps that held the lead weights to the soles of his boots.

“It isn’t mercy we need,” said Shearing. “It’s time.”

“How much?”

“Look for yourself.”

Hyrst shifted his attention to space. There was a ship in it, heading toward the asteroid, and coming fast. Hyrst frowned, doing in his head without thinking about it a calculation that would have required a computer in his former life.

“Twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds,” he said, “inclusive of the four remaining.”

He finished getting the weights off his boots. He handed one to Shearing. Then he half-climbed, half-floated up the wall and settled himself above the entrance, where there was a slight concavity in the rock to give him hold.

“Shearing,” he said.

“What?” He was settling himself beside the mouth of the crack, where a man would have to come clear inside to get a shot at him.

“A starship implies the intention to go to the stars. Why haven’t you?”

“For the simplest reason in the world,” said Shearing bitterly. “The damn thing can’t fly.”

“But—” said Hyrst, in astonishment.

“It isn’t finished. It’s been building for over seventy years now, and a long and painful process that’s been, too, Hyrst—doing it bit by bit in secret, and every bit having to be dreamed up out of whole cloth, and often discarded and dreamed up again, because the principle of a workable stardrive has never been formulated before. And it still isn’t finished. It can’t be finished, unless—”

He stopped, and both men turned their attention to the outside.

“Bellaver’s looking at his chrono,” said Hyrst. “Go ahead, we’ve got a minute.”

Shearing continued, “unless we can get hold of enough Titanite to build the hyper-shift relays. Nothing else has a fast enough reaction time, and the necessary load-capacity. We must have burned out a thousand different test-boards, trying.”

“Can’t you buy it?” asked Hyrst. The question sounded reasonable, but he knew as he said it that it was a foolish one. “I mean, I know the stuff is scarcer than virtue and worth astronomical sums—that’s what MacDonald was so happy about—but—”

“The Bellaver Corporation had a corner on the stuff before our ship was even thought of. That’s what brought this whole damned mess about. Some of our people—not saying why they wanted it, of course—tried to buy some from Bellaver in the usual way, and one of them must have been incautious about his shield. Because a Lazarite working for Bellaver caught a mental hint of the starship, and the reason for the Titanite, and that was it. Three generations of Bellavers have been after us for the stardrive, and it’s developed into a secret war as bitter as any ever fought on the battlefield. They hold all the Titanite, we hold the ship, and perhaps now you’re beginning to see why MacDonald was killed, and why you’re so important to both sides.”

“Beginning to,” said Hyrst. “But only beginning.”

“MacDonald found a Titanite pocket. And as you know, a Titanite pocket isn’t very big. One man can break the crude stuff, fill a sack with it, and tote it on his own back if he doesn’t have a power-sled.”

“MacDonald had a sled.”

“And he used it. He cleaned out his pocket, afraid somebody else would track him to it, and he hid the wretched ore somewhere. Then he began to dicker. He approached the Bellaver Corporation, and we heard of it and approached him. He tried playing us off against Bellaver to boost the price, and suddenly he was dead and you were accused of his murder. We thought you really had done it, because no Titanite turned up, and we knew Bellaver hadn’t gotten it from him. We’d watched too closely. It wasn’t until some years later that one of our people learned that MacDonald had threatened a little too loudly to sell to us unless Bellaver practically tripled his offer—and of course Bellaver didn’t dare do that. A price so much out of line even for Titanite would have stirred all the rival shipbuilders to unwelcome curiosity. So, we figured, Bellaver had had him killed.”

“But what happened to the Titanite?”

“That,” said Shearing, “is what nobody knows. Bellaver must have figured that if his tame Lazarites couldn’t find where MacDonald had put it, we couldn’t either. He was right. With all our combined mental probes and conventional detectors we haven’t been able to track it down. And we haven’t been able to find any more pockets, either. Bellaver Corporation got exclusive mineral rights to the whole damned moon. They even own the refinery now.”

Hyrst shook his head. “Latent impressions or not, I don’t see how I can help on that. If MacDonald had given the killer any clue—”

A beam of bright blue light no thicker than a pencil struck in through the mouth of the passage. It touched the side of the large stone block. The stone turned molten and ran, and then the beam flicked off, leaving a place that glowed briefly red. Shearing said, “I guess our ten minutes are up.”

They were. For a second or two nothing more happened and then Hyrst saw something come sailing in through the crack. His mind told him what it was just barely in time to shut his eyes. There was a flash that dazzled him even through his closed lids, and the flash became a glare that did not lessen. Bellaver’s men had tossed in a long-term flare, and almost at once someone followed it, in the hope of catching Hyrst and Shearing blinded and off guard. The eyes of Hyrst’s mind, unaffected by light, clearly showed him the suited figure just below him, with its bubble helmet covered by a glare-shield. They directed him with perfect accuracy in the downward sweep of the lead weight he had taken from his boot, and which he still held in his hand. The bubble helmet was very strong, and the gravity very light, but the concussion was enough to drop the man unconscious. Just about thought Hyrst, what happened to me there in the hoist tower, when MacDonald died. Shearing, who had by now adjusted his own glare-shield stooped quickly and took the man’s gun.

He said aloud, over the helmet communicator, “The next one that steps through here gets it. Do you hear that, Bellaver?”

Bellaver’s voice answered. “Listen, Shearing, I was wrong. I admit it. Let’s calm down and start over again. I—”

“Ten minutes ago it was no mercy.”

“It’s hard for me to behave reasonably about this business. You know what it means to me, what it meant to my father and his father. But I’m willing to do anything, Shearing, if you’ll make a deal.”

“I’ll make a deal. Readily. Eagerly. Give back what your grandfather stole from us, and we’ll call it square.”

“Oh no we won’t,” said Hyrst grimly, breaking in. “Not until I find who killed MacDonald.”

“All right,” said Bellaver. “Wilson, break out the grenades.”

The entire surface of Hyrst’s body burst into a flaring sweat. For one panic-stricken second he wanted to rush out the crack pleading for mercy. Then he got his feet against the wall and pushed hard, and went plunging across the chamber in a sort of floating dive. Shearing got there at the same time and helped to pull him down. They huddled together on the floor, with the coffin-shaped block between them and the crack. Hyrst sent out a frantic mental call to hurry, directed at the spaceship of the brotherhood.

“They’re all going to hurry,” said Shearing. “Vernon has found the ship now. He’s telling Bellaver. Here comes the grenade—”

Small round glittering thing of death, curving light and graceful through the airless gloom. It comes so slowly, and the flesh shrinks quivering upon itself until it is nothing more than a handful of simple fear. Outside the men are running away, and the one who has thrown the grenade from the cramped, constructing vantage of the crack is running after them, and Shearing is crying with his mind Will it to fall short, will it to fall sh—

There is a great brilliance, and the rock leaps, but there is not the slightest sound.

CHAPTER VI

“The Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,

And next the Crab the Lion Shine.

The Virgin and the Scales—”

The old zodiacal rhyme was running through Hyrst’s mind, and that was the only thing that was in his mind.

The Virgin and the Scales.

Yes. And she’s very beautiful, too, thought Hyrst. But she shouldn’t be holding the Scales. That’s all wrong. The Scales come next, and then the Scorpion—Scorpio—and the Archer—Sagittarius—

And anyway they aren’t scales, they’re a pair of big golden stars, and she’s putting them down, and they’re melting together. There’s only one of them, and it’s not a star at all, really. It’s a polished metal jug, reflecting the light, and—

The Virgin smiled. “The doctor said you were coming around. I brought you something to drink.”

Reality returned to Hyrst with a rush. “You’re Christina,” he said, and tried to sit up. He was dizzy, and she helped him, and he said, “I guess it did fall short.”

“What?”

“The grenade. The last thing I remember is Shearing—Wait. Where is Shearing?”

“Sitting up in the lounge, nursing his bruises. Yes, it fell short, but I don’t think telekinetics had much to do with that. We’ve never been able to control matter convincingly. There. All right?”

“Fine. How did you get us out?”

“Of course the grenade had made the entrance impassible—we had to cut our way in through the outer wall. We had a clear field. Bellaver’s men had all gone back to their ships. They thought you were dead, and to tell you the truth we thought you must be, too. But you didn’t quite ‘feel’ dead, so we dug you out.”

“Thanks,” said Hyrst. “I suppose they know different now.”

He was in a ship’s sick-bay. From the erratic crash and shudder of the lateral jets, they were beating their way through the Belt, and at a high rate of speed. Hyrst sent a glance back into space. The tugs and Bellaver’s yacht were following, but this time only the yacht had a chance. The tugs were dropping hopelessly behind.

“Yes, they soon found out once we got you out, but with any luck we’ll lose them,” said Christina. She sat down beside the bunk, where she could see his face. “Shearing told you about the ship.”

“The starship. Yes.” He looked at her. Suddenly he laughed. “You’re not a goddess at all.”

“Who said I was?”

“Shearing. Or anyway, his mind. Ten feet tall, and crowned with stars—I was afraid of you.” He leaned closer. “Your eyes, though. They are angry.”

“So will yours be,” she said, “when you’ve fought the Bellavers as long as we have.”

“There are still things I don’t understand. Why you built the ship, why you’ve kept it secret from everyone, not just Bellaver, what you plan to do with it—how you came to be one of the Brotherhood.”

She smiled. “The Seitz method was originated to save wreck-victims frozen in deep space. Remember? Quite a few of us never went through the door at all, innocent or guilty. But that makes no difference, once you’ve come back from out there.” She put her hand on his. “You’ve learned fast, but you’re only on the threshold. There’s no need for words with us. Open your mind—”

He did so. At first it was no different from the contact he had had with Shearing’s mind, or with Christina’s before on the Happy Dream. Thoughts came to him clearly phrased—You want to know why we built the ship, what we plan to do with it—and it was only after some time that he realized the words had stopped and he was receiving Christina’s emotions, her memories and opinions, her disappointments and her dreams, as simply and directly as though they were his own.

You haven’t had time yet, they told him without words, to realize how alone you are. You haven’t tried, as most of us do at first, to be human again, to fit yourself into life as though the gap of time was not there, as though nothing had changed. You haven’t watched people getting old around you while you have hardly added a gray hair. You haven’t had to move from one place to another, one job, one group of friends to another, because sooner or later they sense something wrong about you. You haven’t had to hide your new powers as you would hide a disease because people would fear and hate you, perhaps even kill you, if they knew. That’s why there is a brotherhood. And that’s why we built the ship.

Symbol of flight. Symbol of freedom. A universe wide beyond imagining, thronging with many colored guns, with new worlds where men in a human society could build a society of their own. No boundaries beyond which the mind cannot dare to go. All space, all time, all knowledge—free!

Once more he saw those wide dark seas between the suns. His mind raced with hers through the cold-flaming nebulae, wheeled blinded and stunned past the hiving stars of Hercules, looked in eager fascination at the splendid spiral of Andromeda—no longer, perhaps, beyond reach, for what are time and space to the intangible forces of the mind?

Then that wild flight ceased, and instead there was a smaller vision, misty and only half realized, of houses and streets, a place where they could live and be what they were, openly and without fear.

Can you understand now, she asked him, what they would think if they knew about the ship? Can you understand that they would be afraid to have us colonizing out there, afraid of what we might do?

He understood. At the very least, if the truth were known, the Lazarites would never be free again. They would be taken and tested and examined and lectured about, legislated over, restricted, governed, and used. They might be fairly paid for their ship and whatever other advancements they might develop, but they would never be permitted to use them.

With sudden savage eagerness Hyrst said, “But first of all I must know who killed MacDonald. Shearing explained about the latent impressions. I’m ready.”

She stood up, regarding him with grave eyes. “There’s no guarantee it will work. Sometimes it does. Sometimes not.”

Hyrst thought about the tired, gray-haired man who had stood at the foot of his bed. “It’ll work. It’s got to.”

He added, “If it doesn’t, I’ll tear the truth out of Bellaver with my hands.”

“It may come to that,” she said grimly. “But we’ll hope. Lie quiet. I’ll make the arrangements.”

An hour later Hyrst lay on the padded table in the middle of the sick-bay. The ship spun and whirled and leaped in a sort of insane dance, and Hyrst was strapped to the table to prevent his being thrown off. He had known that the ship was maneuvering in the thickest swarm area of the Belt with four pilots mind-linked and flying esper, trying to out-dare Bellaver. Two others were keeping Vernon blanked, and they hoped that either Bellaver himself or his radar-deflector system would give up. Hyrst had known this, but now he was no longer interested. He was barely conscious of the lurching of the ship. They had given him some sort of a drug, and he lay relaxed and pliant in a pleasant suspension of all worries, looking vaguely up at the faces that were bent over him. Finally he closed his eyes, and even they were gone.

He was crossing the plain of methane snow with MacDonald, under the glowing Rings. At first it was all a little blurred, but gradually the memory cleared until he was aware of each tiny detail far more clearly than he had been at the time—the texture of the material from which MacDonald’s suit was made, the infinitesimal shadow underscoring every roughness of the snow, the exact sensation of walking in his leaded boots, the whisper and whistle of his oxygen system. He quarreled again with MacDonald, not missing a word. He climbed with him into the tower of Number Three hoist and examined the signal lights, and sat down on the bench, smiling, to wait.

He sweated inside his suit. He would take a shower when he got back to quarters. He wished for a smoke. MacDonald’s steady grumbling and cursing filled his helmet. He listened, enjoying it. Hope you bang yourself with your own clumsy hammer. And I wish you joy of your fortune. If you have as many friends rich as you had poor you won’t have any. There was an itch under his left arm. He pressed the suit in with his right and wriggled his body against it. It didn’t do any good. Damn suits. Damn Titan. Lucky Elena, back on Earth with the kids. Making good money, though. Won’t be long before I can go back and live like a human being. Now his nose itched, and MacDonald was still grumbling. There was the faintest ghost of a sound and then crack, then nothing, dark, cold, sinking, very weak, gone. Nothing, nothing. I come to in the cold silence and look down the shaft at MacDonald and he is dead.

Go back a bit. Slow. That’s right. Easy. Back to Elena and the kids.

Lucky Elena, in the sun and the warm sweet air. Lucky kids. But I’m lucky too. I can go back to them soon. My nose itches. Why does your nose always itch when you’ve got a helmet on, or your hands all over grease? Listen to MacDonald, damning the belt, damning the tools, damning everything in sight. Is that a footstep? The air is thin and poisonous, but it carries sound. Somebody coming behind me? Split second, no time to look or think. Crack. Cold. Dark. Nothing.

Let’s go back again. Don’t hurry. We’ve all the time in the world. Go back to the footsteps you heard behind you.

Almost heard. And then I black and cold. Heavy. Flat. Face heavy against helmet, cold. Lying down. Must get up, must get up, danger. Far away. Can’t. MacDonald is screaming. Let the lift alone, what are you doing, Hyrst? Hyrst! Shut up, you greedy little man, and listen. You’re not Hyrst—who are you? That doesn’t matter. I know, you’re from Bellaver. Bellaver sent you to steal the Titanite. Well, you won’t get it. It’s where nobody will ever get it unless I show them how. Good. That’s good, MacDonald. That’s what I wanted to know. You see, we don’t need the Titanite.

MacDonald screams again and the lift goes down with a roar and a rattle of severed chain.

Heavy footsteps, shaking the floor by my head. Someone turns me over, speaks to me, bending close. Light is gray and strange. I try to rouse. I can’t. The man is satisfied. He drops me and goes away, but I have seen his face inside his helmet. I hear him working on some metal thing with a tool. He is whistling a little under his breath. MacDonald is not screaming now. From time to time he whimpers. But I have seen the killer’s face.

I have seen his face.

I have seen—

Take it easy, Hyrst. Take your time.

Elena is dead, and this is Christina bending over me.

I have seen the killer’s face.

It is the face of Vernon.

CHAPTER VII

There was Christina, and there was Shearing, and there were two more he did not know, leaning over him. The drug was wearing off a little, and Hyrst could see them more clearly, see the bitter disappointment in their eyes.

“Is that all?” Christina said. “Are you sure? Go back again—”

They took him back again, and it was the same.

“That’s all MacDonald said? Then we’re no closer to the Titanite than we were before.”

Hyrst was not interested in the Titanite. “Vernon,” he said. Something red and wild rose up in him, and he tried to tear away the straps that held him. “Vernon. I’ll get him—”

“Later, Hyrst,” said Shearing, and sighed. “Lie still a bit. He’s on Bellaver’s yacht, remember? Quite out of reach. Now think. MacDonald said, You won’t get it, it’s where nobody will ever get it—”

“What’s the use?” said Christina, turning away. “It was a faint hope anyway. Dying men don’t draw obliging maps for you.” She sat down on the edge of a bunk and put her head in her hands. “We might as well give up. You know that.”

One of the two Lazarites who had done the latent probe on Hyrst said with hollow hopefulness, “Perhaps if we let him rest a while and then go over it again—”

“Let me up out of here,” said Hyrst, still groggy with the drug. “I want Vernon.”

“I’ll help you get him,” said Shearing, “if you’ll tell me what MacDonald meant when he said nobody will ever get it unless I show them how.”

“How the devil do I know?” Hyrst tugged at the straps, raging. “Let me up.”

“But you knew MacDonald well. You worked with him and beside him for years.”

“Does that tell me where he hid the Titanite? Don’t be an ass, Shearing. Let me up.”

“But,” said Shearing equably, “he didn’t say where. He said how.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Is it? Listen. Nobody will ever get it unless I show them where. Nobody will ever get it unless I show them how.”

Hyrst stopped fighting the straps. He began to frown. Christina lifted her head again. She did not say anything. The two Lazarites who had done the probe stood still and held their breath.

Shearing’s mind touched Hyrst’s stroking it as with soothing fingers. “Let’s think about that for a minute. Let your thoughts move freely. MacDonald was an engineer. The engineer. Of the four, he alone knew every inch of the physical set-up of the refinery. So?”

“Yes. That’s right. But that doesn’t say where—Wait a minute, though. If he’d just shoved it in a crack somewhere in the mountains, he’d know a detector might find it, more easily than before it was dug. He’d have put it some where deep, deeper than he could possibly dig. Maybe in an abandoned mine?”

“No place,” said Shearing, “is too deep for us to probe. We’ve examined every abandoned mine on that side of Titan. And it doesn’t fit, anyway. No. Try again.”

“He wouldn’t have brought it back to the refinery. One of us would be sure to find it. Unless, of course—”

Hyrst stopped, and the tension in the sick-bay tightened another notch. The ship lurched sharply, swerved, and shot upward with a deafening thunder of rocket-blasts. Hyrst shut his eyes, thinking hard.

“Unless he put it in some place so dangerous that nobody ever went there. A place where even he didn’t go, but which he would know about being the engineer.”

“Can you think of any place that would answer that description?”

“Yes,” said Hyrst slowly. “The underground storage bins. They’re always hot, even when they’re empty. Anything hidden near them would be blanketed by radiation. No detector would see anything but uranium. Probably even you wouldn’t.”

“No,” said Shearing, looking amazed. “Probably we wouldn’t. The radioactive disturbance would be too strong to get through, even if we were looking for something beyond it, which we weren’t.”

Christina had sprung up. Now she bent over Hyrst and said, “But is there a way it could have been done? Obviously, the Titanite couldn’t have been put directly into the bin with the uranium—if nothing else, it would have been shipped out in the next tanker.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hyrst. “There would be several ways. I can think of a couple myself, and I’ve never even see the layout. The repair-lift shaft, I know, goes clear down to the feeder mechanism, and there’s some kind of a system of dispersal tunnels and an emergency gadget that trips automatically to release a liquid-graphite damping material into them in case the radiation level gets too high. I don’t remember that it ever did, but it’s a safeguard. There’d be plenty of places to hide a lead box full of Titanite.”

“Unless I show them how,” repeated Shearing slowly, and began to undo the straps that held Hyrst to the table. “It has an ominous sound. I’ll bet you that locating the Titanite will be child’s play compared to getting it out. Well, we’ll do what we can.”

“The first thing,” said Christina grimly, “is to get rid of Bellaver. If he has the slightest suspicion where we’re headed he’ll radio ahead and have all Titan alerted.”

Hyrst, sitting up now on the edge of the table, hanging on against the lurching of the ship, said, “That’s right—he owns the refinery now, doesn’t he? Is it still working?”

“No. The mines around there played out, oh, ten, fifteen years ago. The activity’s shifted to the north and east on the other side of the range. That is what may possibly give us a chance.” Shearing staggered with Hyrst across the bucking deck and sat tailor-fashion in the bunk, his eyes intent. “Hyrst, I want you to remember everything you can about the refinery. The ground plan, exactly where the buildings are, the hoists, the landing field. Everything.”

Hyrst said, showing the edges of his teeth, “When do I get Vernon?”

“You’ll get him. I promise you.”

“What about Bellaver? He’s still behind us.”

Shearing smiled. “That’s Christina’s job! Let her worry.”

Hyrst nodded. He began to remember the refinery. Christina and the other two went out.

A short while later a number of things happened, violently, and in quick succession. The ship of the Lazarites, pursuing its wild and headlong course through the swarming debris of the Belt, was far ahead of Bellaver’s yacht but still within instrument range. Apparently in desperation it plunged suddenly on a tangential course into a cluster of great jagged rocks all travelling together at a furious rate of speed. The cluster was perhaps two hundred miles across. The Lazarite ship twisted and turned, and then there was a swift bright flowering of flame, and then nothing.

“She’s blown her tubes,” said Bellaver exultantly, on the bridge of his yacht. The instruments had lost contact, chiefly because the cluster was so thick that it was impossible to separate one body from another.

Vernon said, “They’re not blanking my mind any more. It stopped, like that.”

But he was still doubtful.

“Can you locate the ship?” asked Bellaver.

“I’m trying.”

Bellaver caught his arm. “Look there!”

There was a second, larger and more brilliant, flash of flame.

“They’ve hit an asteroid,” he said. “They’re done for.”

“I can’t locate them,” Vernon said. “No ship, no wreckage. It could be a trick. They could be holding a cloak.”

“A trick?” said Bellaver. “I doubt it. Anyway, we’re running low on fuel, and I’m not going to go into that cluster and risk my own neck to find out. If by any chance they do come out again later on, we’ll deal with them.”

But they both watched the cluster until it had whirled on out of sight. And neither eye nor instrument nor Vernon’s probing mind could distinguish any sign of life.

CHAPTER VIII

Titan lay below them in the Saturn-glow, under the fantastic glory of the Rings. A bitter, repellent world of jagged peaks and glimmering plains of poison snow. The tiny life-raft dropped toward it, skittering nervously as it hit the thin atmosphere. Hyrst clung hard to the handholds, trying not to retch. He was not habituated to space anyway, and the skiff had been bad enough. Now, without any hull around him and nothing but a curved shield in front of him, he felt like an ant on a flying leaf.

“I don’t like it either.” Shearing said. “But it gives us a fifty-fifty chance of getting through unnoticed. Radar usually isn’t looking for anything so small.”

“I understand all the reasons,” Hyrst said. “It’s my stomach that’s obtuse.”

He could make out the pattern of the refinery now, a million miles of vertigo below him. The Lazarite ship was somewhere up and out behind them, hiding in the Rings. The trick had worked with Bellaver out there in the Belt, and they hoped now that it would work with Bellaver’s observers on Titan. There was no need for any fake explosions this time, to give the impression of destruction. Secrecy was the watch-word, all lights out and jet-blasts muffled to a spark. Later, when Hyrst and Shearing had accomplished their mission, the ship would drop down fast and take them off, with the Titanite, before any patrol craft would have time to arrive.

They hoped.

The buildings of the refinery were dark and cold, drifted out of shape by an accumulation of the thin, evil snow. The spiderweb of roads had faded from the plain, and the landing field was smooth and unmarked. Around its perimeter the six stiff towers of the hoists stood up like lonely sentinels, hooded and cloaked.

Hyrst felt a sudden tightening of his throat, and this was a thing he had not expected. A refinery on Titan was hardly a thing to be sentimental about. But it was bound up so intimately with other things, with hopes for a future that was now far behind him, with plans for Elena and the kids that were now a cruel mockery, with friendly memories of Saul and Landers, now long dead, that he could not look at it unmoved.

“Let’s try again,” said Shearing quietly. “If we could locate the Titanite definitely it might make all the difference. We’ll hardly have time to search all six of the bins.”

Glad of the distraction, Hyrst tried. He linked his mind to Shearing’s and they probed with this double probe, one after the other, the six hoists and the bins beneath them, while the raft fell whistling down the air.

It was the same as all the tries before. The bins had been empty for more than a decade, but the residual radiation was still hot enough to present a luminous haze to the eyes of the mind, fogging everything around it.

“Wait a minute,” Hyrst said. “Let’s use our wits. Look at the way those hoists are placed, in a wide crescent. Now if I was MacDonald, coming in from the mountains with a load of Titanite, and I wanted not to be seen, which one would I pick?”

“Either One or Six,” said Shearing, without hesitation. “They’re the farthest away from the buildings.”

“But Number Six is at the west end of the crescent, and to reach it you would have to go clear across the landing field.” He pointed mentally to Number One. “I’ll bet on that one. Shall we give it another try?”

They did. This time, for a fleeting second, Hyrst thought he had something.

“So did I,” said Shearing. “Sort of down under and behind.”

“Yes,” said Hyrst. “Look out!” His involuntary cry was caused by the sudden collision of the life-raft with a cloud. The vapor was very thick, and after the cruel clarity of space it made Hyrst feel that he was smothering. Shearing jockeyed the raft’s meagre controls, and in a minute or two they were below the cloud and spiralling down toward the landing field. It was snowing.

“Good,” said Shearing. “We’ll hope it keeps up.”

They landed close to Number One Hoist and floundered rapidly through the shallow drifts, carrying some things. The hatch had been sealed with a plastic spray to prevent corrosion, and it took them several minutes to get it open. Inside the tower it was pitch black, but they did not need lights. Their other senses showed them the worn metal treads of the steps quite clearly. In the upper chamber the indicator panels were dark and dead. Hyrst shivered inside his suit. He had been here so many times before, so long ago.

“Let’s get busy,” Shearing said.

They pulled on the rayproofs they had brought with them from the raft. Without power the lift was useless, but the skeleton cage, stripped of all its tools, was not too heavy for two strong men to swing clear of the shaft top. They made sure it would stay clear, and then sent down a light collapsible ladder. Hyrst slid down first into the smooth, round, totally unlighted hole, that had one segment of it open paralleling the machinery of the hoist.

“Take it carefully,” Shearing said, and slid after him.

Clumsy in vac-suit and rayproof, Hyrst descended the ladder with agonizing slowness. Every impulse cried out for haste, but he knew if he hurried he would wind up at the bottom of the shaft as dead as MacDonald. The banging and knocking of their passage against the metal wall made a somber, hollow booming in that enclosed space, and it seemed to Hyrst that the silent belts and cables of the hoist hummed a little in sympathy. It was probably only the blood humming in his own ears.

“See anything yet?”

“No.”

The vast strange glowing of the bin grew brighter as they approached it. The hoist was still “hot,” and it glowed too, but nothing like the concentration in the bin.

“Even with rayproofs, we can’t stay close to that too long.”

“I don’t think we’ll have to. MacDonald was only human, and the bin was full then. He couldn’t have stayed long either.”

“See anything yet?”

“Nothing but fog. When you hit bottom, better use your light.”

At long last Hyrst felt the bottom of the shaft under his boots. He stood aside from the ladder and switched on his belt lamp. In this case the physical eyes were better than the mental, being insensitive to radiation. Instantly the gears and cams of the feeder assembly sprang into sharp relief on the open side of the shaft. Shearing stumbled down off the ladder and switched on his own light.

“Where was it we thought we saw something?”

“Down under and behind.” Hyrst turned slowly around, questing. The shaft was unbroken except by the repair opening. He climbed through it, with some difficulty, because nobody was supposed to climb through it and the machinery was placed for easy access with extension tools from the lift. The bin itself was now directly opposite them, a big hopper cut deep in the solid rock and serving the feeder by simple gravity. The feeder pretty well filled its own rocky chamber. A place might have been found beside it for something not too big, but the first man who came down on the lift would have seen it whether he was looking for it or not.

Shearing pointed. A dark opening pierced the rock at one side. Hyrst tried to see into it with his mental eyes, but the “fog” was so dense and bright—

He saw it, an unsubstantial ghostly shadow, but there. A square box some twenty feet down the tunnel.

Shearing drew a quick sharp breath “Let’s go.”

They went into the tunnel, crouching, scraping against the narrow sides.

“Look out for booby traps.”

“I don’t see any—yet.”

The box sat in the middle of the tunnel. There was no way to get around it, no way to see over it without lying on its top and wriggling between it and the low roof. Hyrst and Shearing shut their eyes.

“I’m not sure, but I think I see a wire. Damn the fog. Can’t tell where it goes—”

Hyrst took cutters from his belt and slithered cautiously over the box. His heart was hammering very hard and his hand shook so that he had great difficulty getting the cutters and the wire together. The wire was attached to the back of the box, very crudely and hastily attached with a blob of plastic solder. It was not until he had pinched the wire with the sharp metal cutter-teeth that he realized the plastic was non-metallic and the wire bare. And then, of course, it was too late.

There must have been a simple energizer somewhere up ahead, still charging itself from the ample radiation source. The cutters flew out of Hyrst’s hand in a shower of sparks, and in the darkness of the tunnel ahead there was a sudden wild flare of light, and an explosion of dust. A shock wave, not too great, hammered past Hyrst’s helmet. Shearing yelled once, a protest broken short in mid-cry. Then they waited.

The dust settled. The brief tremor of the rock was stilled.

In the roof of the tunnel, where the blast had been, a broken dump-trap hung open, but nothing poured out of it but a handful of black dust.

Hyrst began to laugh. He lay on his belly on top of the box of Titanite and laughed. The tears ran out of his eyes and down his nose and dropped onto the inside of his helmet. Shearing hit him from behind. He hit him until he stopped laughing, and then Hyrst shook his head and said.

“Poor MacDonald.”

“Yeah. Go ahead, you can cut the wire now.”

“Such a lovely booby trap. But he wasn’t figuring on time. They went away from here, Shearing, you see? And when they went they drained off the liquid graphite and took it with them. So there isn’t anything left to flood the tunnel. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

Shearing hit him again. “Cut the wire.”

He cut it. They scuffled backward down the tunnel, dragging the box. When they got back into the shaft where there was room to do it they opened up the box.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it, for all the trouble it’s made?”

“No, it doesn’t. But then gold doesn’t look like much, or uranium, or a handful of little dry seeds.” Shearing picked up a chunk of the rough, grayish ore. “You know what that is, Hyrst? That’s the stars.”

It was Hyrst’s turn to prod Shearing into quiet. The starship and the dream that went with it were still only an intellectual interest to him. They shared out the Titanite into two webbing sacks. It made a light load for each, hardly noticeable when clipped to a belt-ring at the back.

Hyrst felt suddenly very nervous. Perhaps it was reaction, perhaps it was the memory of having been trapped in a similar hole on the Valhalla asteroid. Perhaps it was a mental premonition, obscured by the radioactive “fog”. At any rate, he started to climb the ladder with almost suicidal haste, urging Shearing on after him. The shaft seemed to be a mile high. It seemed to lengthen ahead of him as he climbed, so that he was never any nearer the top. He knew it was only imagination, because he passed the level markers, but it was the closest thing to a nightmare he had ever experienced when he was broad awake. Just after they had passed the E Level mark, Shearing spoke.

“A ship has landed.”

Hyrst looked mentally. The fog-effect was not so great now, and he could see quite clearly. It was a small ship, and two men were getting out of it. It had stopped snowing.

“Radar must have picked up the raft after all,” said Shearing. “Or else somebody spotted the jet-flares.” He began to climb faster. “We better get out of this before they come in.”

D Level. Hyrst’s hands were cold and stiff inside his gauntlets, clumsy hooks to catch the slender rungs. The two men were standing outside in the snow, peering around.

C Level. One of the two men saw the raft parked by the hoist tower. He pointed, and they moved toward it.

B Level. Hyrst’s boots slipped and scrambled, banging the shaft wall. “Christ,” said Shearing. “You sound like a temple gong. What are you trying to do, alarm the whole moon?”

The men outside bent over the raft. They looked at it. Then they looked at the hoist tower. They left the raft and began to run, pulling guns out of their belts.

A Level. Hyrst’s breath roared in his helmet like a great wind. He thought of the long dark way down that was below them, and how MacDonald had looked at the bottom of the shaft, and how he would take Shearing with him if he fell, and nobody would get to the stars, and Vernon would go free. He set his teeth, and sobbed, and climbed. Outside, the two men cautiously removed the hatch and stepped into the tower.

End of the ladder. A level floor to sprawl on. Hyrst squirmed away from the shaft. He thought for a minute he was going to pass out, and he fumbled with the oxygen valve, making the mixture richer. His head began to clear. Shearing was now beside him. This time they had guns, too. Shearing gave him a quick mental caution, Not unless you have to. One of the two men was placing a tentative foot on the stair that led up to where they were. The other man was close behind him. Shearing took careful aim and fired, at half power.

The harsh blue bolt did not strike either man. But they went reeling back in a cloud of burning flakes, and when Shearing shouted to them to drop their weapons and get out they did so, half stunned from the shock. Hyrst and Shearing leaped down the stairs, stopping only long enough to pick up the guns. Then they scrambled outside. The two men were running as hard as they could for their ship, but they had not gone far and Shearing stopped them with another shot that sent a geyser of methane steam puffing up practically under their feet.

“Not yet,” he said. “Later.”

The two men stood, sullenly obedient. They were both young, and not bad looking. Just doing a job, Hyrst thought. No real harm in them, just doing a job, like so many people who never stop to worry about what the job means. They both wore Bellaver’s insigne on their vac-suits.

One of them said, as though he were reciting a lesson in which he had no real personal interest, “You’re trespassing on private property. You’ll be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

“Sure,” said Shearing. He motioned to the hoist tower. “Back inside.”

The young men hesitated. “What you going to do?”

“Nothing fatal. It shouldn’t take you more than half an hour to break out again.”

He marched them to the hatch and saw them inside it. Hyrst was watching the sky, the black star-glittering sky with the glorious arch of the Rings across it and one milky-bright curve of Saturn visible and growing above the eastern horizon.

“They’re coming,” he said mentally to Shearing.

“Good.” He started to close the hatch, and one of the young men pointed suddenly to the sack clipped to Shearing’s belt.

“You’ve been stealing something.”

“Tell that to Bellaver.”

“You bet I will. The fullest extent of the law, mister! The fullest extent—”

The hatch closed. Shearing jammed the fastening mechanism so it could not be turned from the inside. Then he went and stood beside Hyrst in the glimmering plain, watching the ship drop down out of the Rings.

Hyrst said, “They’ll tell Bellaver.”

“Naturally.”

“What will Bellaver do?”

“I’m not sure. Something drastic. He wants our starship so hard he’d murder his own children to get it. You can see why. In itself it’s priceless, a hundred years ahead of its time, but that’s not all. It’s what it stands for. To us it means freedom and safety. To Bellaver it means—”

He gestured toward the sky, and Hyrst nodded, seeing in Shearing’s mind the image of a gigantic Bellaver, ten times bigger than God, gathering the whole galaxy into his arms.

“I wish you luck,” said Hyrst. He unhooked the sack of Titanite from his belt and gave it to Shearing. “It’ll take a little while to refine the stuff and build the relays, even so. That may be time enough. Come back for me if you can.”

“Vernon?”

“Yes.”

Shearing nodded. “I said I’d help you get him. I will.”

“No. This is my job. I’ll do it alone. You belong there, with them. With Christina.”

“Hyrst. Listen—”

“Don’t tell me where the starship is. I might not hold out as well as you.”

“All right, but Hyrst—in case we can’t get back—look for us away from the Sun. Not toward it.”

“I’ll remember.”

The ship landed. Shearing entered it, carrying the Titanite. And Hyrst walked away, toward the closed and buried buildings of the refinery.

It had begun to snow again.

CHAPTER IX

It was cold and dark and infinitely sad. Hyrst wandered through the rooms, feeling like a ghost, thinking like one. Everything had been removed from the buildings. The living quarters were now mere cubicular tombs for a lot of memories, absolutely bare of any human or familiar touch. It felt very strange to Hyrst. He kept telling himself that fifty years had passed, but he could not believe it. It seemed only a few months since MacDonald’s death, months occupied by investigation and trial and the raging, futile anguish of the unjustly accused. The long interval of the pseudo-death was no more than a night’s sleep, to a mind unconscious of passing time. Now it seemed that Saul and Landers should still be here, and there should be lights and warmth and movement.

There was nothing. He could not bring himself to stay in the living quarters. He went into one of the storerooms and sat on a concrete buttress and waited. It was a long and dreadful wait. During it all the emotional storms occasioned by the murder and its aftermath passed through his mind. Scenes with Saul and Landers. Scenes with the investigators, with MacDonald’s family, with lawyers and reporters. Scenes with Elena. The whole terrible nightmare, leading inevitably to that culminating moment when the door of the airlock opened and he joined the sleepers on the plain. When it was all over Hyrst felt shaken and exhausted, but calm. The face of Vernon burned brightly in his mind’s eye.

Without bothering to open the steel-shuttered windows, he watched the two young men force their way out of the hoist tower. He watched them run to their ship and chatter excitedly over their radio. By the time, much later, that Bellaver’s yacht came screaming down to the landing field on a flaming burst of jets, he could watch it with almost the cool detachment of a spectator. He was careful to keep his shields up tight against Vernon, and he did not think the other Lazarite would be likely to look for him. Vernon seemed to be fully occupied with Bellaver.

“What else would they be stealing, you fool? You should have, killed Hyrst before, when you had the chance.”

“Somebody had to take the blame for MacDonald. Anyway, you had him aboard the Happy Dream. Why didn’t you hang onto him?”

“Don’t get insolent with me, Vernon. I can turn you over to the police anytime, for any one of a hundred things.”

“Not without tipping your hand, Bellaver.”

“It would be worth it.” A string of foul names, delivered in a furious scream. “You couldn’t locate the Titanite, but they did, just as soon as they got hold of Hyrst.”

“All right, Mr. God Almighty Bellaver, turn me in. But if it was the Titanite they took, you haven’t a chance of finding that starship without me.”

“You haven’t done very well at it so far.”

“In the excitement, they may get careless. But it’s up to you.”

More foul language, but Bellaver did not repeat his threat. He and Vernon, with a couple of other men, got into vac-suits and lumbered across the snow to the hoist tower. From inside the cold dark buried building, Hyrst watched them, and thought hard and fast, and smiled. Presently he left the building and circled cautiously through the snowy gloom until he was in range of their helmet-communicators. He could hear them aurally now, but he kept watching them, esper-fashion.

They inspected the empty lead box, and the young men told what had happened, and Bellaver turned his raging fury against them. There was no longer any doubt that the Titanite had been found and taken away, and Bellaver saw the stars and worlds and moons, the bright glowing plunder of a galaxy, slipping away from him. He threatened the two young men with every punishment he could think of for not having stopped the thieves, and one of the young men turned white and anxious, and the other one flushed brick red and shook his fist close to Bellaver’s helmet.

“You go to hell,” he said. “I don’t care who you are. You go to hell.”

He walked out of the hoist tower, with his companion stumbling at his heels, and Bellaver screamed after them, and behind him the crewmen looked shocked and contemptuous, and Vernon laughed openly, showing the edges of his teeth.

The two young men got into their ship and went away. Bellaver turned and stood looking at the empty box. He seemed exhausted now, hopeless, like a child about to break down and cry. Vernon went over and kicked the box.

“Hyrst had the advantage,” he said. “He knew MacDonald and he knew the refinery. Even so, it must have been pure guesswork. Nobody could probe through that fog.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Bellaver. “Vernon, what are we going to do?”

Hyrst spoke for the first time, his voice ringing loud and startling in their ears.

“Don’t ask Vernon,” he said. “Ask me.”

There was a moment of complete silence. Hyrst felt Vernon’s mind brush his, and he permitted himself one cruel flash of triumph. Then everybody spoke at once, Vernon explaining why he hadn’t spotted Hyrst—who could have figured he’d stay behind at a time like this?—the crew-members nervously fingering their guns, and Bellaver crying,

“Hyrst! Is that you, Hyrst? Where are you?”

“Where I can get the first shot at anybody coming out of the tower, and where nobody from the yacht will ever reach me. Tell them all to stay put. Go ahead, Bellaver, you want to hear me out, don’t you?”

“What do you want to say?”

“I can find you that starship. Tell them, Bellaver.”

He told them. And Vernon said to Bellaver, “If he’s willing to betray his friends, why would he get them the Titanite?” He laughed. “It isn’t even a good trick.”

“Oh, yes, it is,” said Hyrst softly. “It’s a very good one. The best. You see, I don’t care about the starship or the Titanite. All I care about is the man who killed MacDonald. They were sort of bound up together. Ever hear of latent impressions, Vernon? I was unconscious, but my ears heard and my eyes saw, and my brain remembered, when it was shown how.”

“That was fifty years ago,” said Vernon. “People don’t understand about us. Nobody would believe you if you told them.”

“They would if Bellaver told them. They would if Bellaver explained out loud about the Lazarites, about what happens to men when they go through the door. They’d listen to him. And there must be others who know, or at least suspect.” Hyrst paused, long enough to smile. “The beauty of that is, Bellaver, that you’re in the clear. You’re not responsible for a murder your grandfather had done. You could swear you didn’t even know about it until now.”

Vernon said to Bellaver, “If you do this to me, I’ll blast you wide open.”

“What can he do, Bellaver?” Hyrst shouted. “He can talk, but you have the money, the position, the legal powers. You can talk louder. And when they know the truth, will anybody take the word of a Lazarite against a human man?”

His voice rose higher and louder, drowning out Vernon’s cry.

“Are you afraid of him, Bellaver? Are you so afraid of him you’ll let the starship go?”

“Hold him.” Bellaver said, and the crewmen held Vernon fast. “Wait a minute, Hyrst,” he said. “What’s your angle? Is it just revenge? Are you selling out your friends for something over and done half a century ago? I don’t believe it, Hyrst.”

Hyrst said slowly, “I can answer that, so even you will understand. I have children. They’re getting old now. They’ve lived all their lives thinking their father killed a man, not for love or for justice or in self-defense, but for sheer cold-blooded greed. I want them to know it wasn’t so.”

“Hold him!” Bellaver said. The crewmen struggled with Vernon, and Vernon said viciously to Bellaver,

“He’ll never lead you to the starship. I can read his mind. When you’ve turned me in and blackened your grandfather’s name to clear him, he’ll laugh in your face. What are you, Bellaver, a fool?”

“Am I, Hyrst?”

“That’s for you to find out. I’m offering you the starship for Vernon, and that’s fair enough, because I want him as bad as you want it. And I can tell you, Bellaver, if you decide to play it smart and call in your guards to hunt me down, it will do you no good. I won’t be alive when they take me.”

Silence. In his mind’s eye Hyrst could see the beads of sweat running down Bellaver’s face behind his helmet. He could see Vernon’s face, too. It gave him pleasure.

“It should be an easy decision, Bellaver,” he said. “After all, suppose I am lying. What have you got to lose but Vernon? And with his record, that isn’t much.”

“Hold him,” said Bellaver. “All right, Hyrst. I’ll do it. But I’ll tell you now. If you lie to me, there won’t be any re-awakening in another fifty years. This will be for good.”

“Fair enough,” said Hyrst. “I’m putting my gun away. I’m coming in.”

He walked quickly through the snow toward the tower.

CHAPTER X

On the bridge of his yacht, Bellaver turned to Hyrst and said,

“I’ve done what you wanted. Now find me that starship.”

Hyrst nodded. “Take off.”

The rockets roared and thundered, and the swift yacht leaped quivering into the sky.

Hyrst sat quietly in his recoil chair. He felt a different man, changed entirely in the last few days. Much had happened in those days.

Bellaver had got busy on the radio even before his yacht left Titan, and the story of the Lazarites had burst like a nova upon the Solar System. Already there were instances of suspected Lazarites being mobbed by their neighbors, and Government was frantically concerning itself with all the new, far-reaching implications of the Humane Penalty.

Close on the heels of this bomb-shell had come Vernon’s angry accusations against Bellaver, delivered as soon as he was given to the authorities on Mars. During the twenty Martian hours necessary for formal charge and the taking of depositions, and while Bellaver’s yacht was being refueled, Vernon’s story of the starship went out on all the interworld circuits. And it had been as Christina had said. The whole Solar System was frantic to have the Lazarites caught and stopped, and every man in space became a self-appointed searcher for the hidden starship. Bellaver, letting his lawyers worry about Vernon’s accusations, had already laid formal claim to that ship, based on the value of the stolen Titanite.

“Where?” demanded Bellaver now, in a fury of impatience. “Where?”

“Wait,” said Hyrst. “There are too many watching, ready to follow you. They know what you’re after. Wait till we’re clear of Mars.”

He sat in his chair, looking into space. His drive was all gone, and the anger that had fed it. Somewhere his son and his two daughters were drawing their first free breaths relieved of a burden they should never have had to carry. They knew now that he was innocent, and they could think of him now without bitterness, speak his name without hate. He had done what he had set out to do, and he was finished. He knew what was ahead of him, but he was too tired to care.

The yacht went fast, away from the old red weary planet. Hyrst thought of Shearing and Christina and the others, laboring over their ship on the dark plain. He felt safe in doing this, because Vernon was gone and the gray evil man who had helped to torture Shearing aboard the Happy Dream was still in an Earth hospital recovering from the blow Hyrst had given him. They were out of reach, and Hyrst was the only Lazarite Bellaver had.

He did not try to get through to Shearing because he knew that was impossible, and there was no reason for it anyway. He let his mind stretch out and rove through the nighted spaces beyond Saturn, beyond Uranus and Neptune, beyond the black and frigid bulk of Pluto. He did not see the ship nor touch a Lazarite mind, and so he knew that they were still holding the cloak, still hiding from possible betrayal. He withdrew his mind, and wished them luck.

“We’re clear of Mars,” said Bellaver. “Which way?”

“That way,” said Hyrst, and pointed. “Toward the Sun.”

The yacht swerved and steadied on a new course, toward the distant glare of Sol. And Bellaver said,

“What’s the exact location?”

“Can you trust every man in this crew?” asked Hyrst. “Can you be sure not one of them would give it away, when we stop to refuel? You’re not the only one that knows about the starship now, remember.”

“You could tell me.”

“You’re too impatient, Bellaver. You’d want to head straight there, and it won’t be that easy. They have defenses. We have to be careful, or they’ll destroy the ship before we reach it.”

“Or finish their relays and go.” Bellaver gave Hyrst a long look. “I’ll trust you because I have to. But I wasn’t making an empty threat. And I’ll do it so there won’t be any thought of murder. You’d better find me that ship, Hyrst.”

From then on, Bellaver hardly slept. He paced the corridors and haunted the control room and watched Hyrst with a gnawing, agonizing doubt. Hyrst began to feel for him a distant sort of pity, as he might have felt for a man afflicted by some disease brought on by his own excesses.

The yacht passed the orbit of Earth, refueled at an obscure space station, and sped on. Hyrst continued to stall Bellaver, ordering a change of course from time to time to keep him happy. At intervals he let his mind rove through those dark spaces they were leaving farther behind with every passing second. Each time it was a greater effort, but still there was no sign of the starship or its base, and so he knew that the labor still went on.

By the time the yacht reached the orbit of Venus a fan-shaped cordon of other ships had collected around and behind her drawn by the word that Bellaver was on his way to find the starship. Government patrols were in constant touch.

“They can’t interfere,” said Bellaver. “I’ve got a lien on that ship, a formal claim.”

“Sure,” said Hyrst. “But you’d better be the first to find it. Possession, you know. Bear off a bit. Mislead them. They’re sure now they know where you’re going.”

“Don’t they?” said Bellaver, looking ahead at the glittering spark that was Mercury. “There isn’t anyplace else to go.”

“Isn’t there?”

Bellaver stared at him, narrow-eyed. “The legend of the Vulcan was exploded by the first explorers. There is no intra-Mercurial world.”

Hyrst shot a swift stabbing mental glance toward Pluto. Still nothing. He sighed and said easily,

“There wasn’t then. There is now.”

He brazened out the look of incredulity on Bellaver’s face.

“These are Lazarites, remember, not men. They built a place for themselves where nobody would ever think to look. Not a planet, of course, just a floating workshop. A satellite. And now you know. So you can let them beat you to Mercury.”

“All right,” said Bellaver softly. “All right.”

They passed Mercury, lost in the blaze of the Sun, and only a few ships followed them, far behind. The rest stopped to search the craggy valleys of the Twilight Belt, and the bleak icefields of the Dark Side.

And now Hyrst had run his string out, and he knew it. When no intra-Mercurial satellite showed up, physically or on detector-screens, there was no further lie to tell. He drove his mind out and away, to the cold planets wheeling on the fringes of Sol’s light, and he sweated, and prayed, and hoped that nothing had gone wrong. And suddenly the cloak was dropped, and he saw a lonesome chip of rock beyond Pluto, all hollowed out for shops and living quarters, and the great ship standing in the mile-long plain, with the stars all drifted overhead. And the ship lifted from the plain, circled upward, and suddenly was not.

Hyrst was bitterly sorry that he was not aboard. But he told Bellaver, “You can stop looking now. They’ve got away.”

He watched Bellaver die, standing erect on his feet, still breathing, but dying inside with the last outgoing of hope.

“I thought you were lying,” he said, “but it was the only chance I had.” He nodded, looking toward the shuttered port with the insufferable blaze outside. He said, in a flat, dead voice, “If you were put out here, bound, in a lifeboat, headed toward the Sun—Yes. I could make up a story to fit that.”

In the same toneless voice, he called his men. And suddenly the yacht lurched over shuddering in the backwash of some tremendous energy. Hyrst and the others were flung scattering against the bulkheads, and the lights went out, and the instruments went dead.

Beyond the port, on the unshuttered side away from the Sun, a vast dark shape had materialized out of nothing, to hang close in space beside the yacht.

Hyrst heard in his mind, strong and clear, the voice of Shearing saying, “Didn’t I tell you the brotherhood stands by its own? Besides, we couldn’t make a liar out of you, now could we?”

Hyrst began to laugh, just a little bit hysterically. He told Bellaver, “There’s your starship. And Shearing says if I’m not alive when he comes aboard to get me, that they won’t be as careful about warping space when they go away as they were when they came.”

Bellaver did not say anything. He sat on the deck where the shock had thrown him, not speaking. He was still sitting there when Hyrst passed through the airlock into the starship’s boat, and he did not move even when the great ship vanished silently into whatever mysterious ultra-space the minds of the Lazarites had unlocked, outbound for the limitless freedom of the universe, where the wheeling galaxies thunder on forever across infinity and the stars burn bright, and there is nothing to stop the march of the Legion of Lazarus. And who knew, who could tell, where that march would end?

Aboard the starship, already a million miles away, Hyrst said to Christina. “When they brought me back from beyond the door, that was re-awakening. But this—this is being born again.”

She did not answer that. But she took his hand and smiled.

DREAMER’S WORLDS

Reining in his pony on the ridge, Khal Kan pointed down across the other sands of the drylands that stretched in the glare of the crimson, sinking sun.

“There we are, my lads!” he announced heartily. “See yonder black blobs on the desert? They’re the tents of the drylanders.”

His tall young figure was straining in the saddle, and there was a keen anticipation on his hard, merry young face.

But Brusul, the squat warrior in blue leather beside him, and little Zoor, the wizened third member of the trio, looked uneasily.

“We’ve no business meddling with the drylanders!” accused brawny Brusul loudly. “Your father the king said we were to scout only as far west as the Dragal Mountains. We’ve done that f and haven’t found any sign of the cursed Bunts in them. Our business is to ride back to Jotan now and report.”

“Why, what are you afraid of?” demanded Khal Kan scoffingly. “We’re wearing nondescript leather and weapons—we can pass ourselves off to the drylanders as mercenaries from Kaubos.”

“Why should we go bothering the damned desert-folk at all?” Brusul demanded violently. “They’ve got nothing we want.”

Little Zoor broke into sniggering laughter. His wizened, frog-like face was creased by wrinkles of mirth.

“Our prince has heard of that dryland princess—old Bladomir’s daughter that they call Golden Wings,” he chuckled.

“I’ll be damned!” exploded Brusul. “I might have known it was a woman! Well, if you think I’m going to let you endanger our lives and the success of our reconnaissance for a look at some desert wench, you—”

“My sentiments exactly, Brusul!” cried Khal Kan merrily, and spurred forward. His pony galloped crazily down the crimson ridge, and his voice came back to them singing.

“The Bunts came up to Jotan,

Long ago!

The Bunts fled back on the homeward track

When blood did flow!”

“Oh, damn all wenches, here’s an end of us because of your fool’s madness,” groaned Brusul as he caught up. “If those drylanders find us out, we’ll make fine sport for them.”

Khal Kan grinned at the brawny warrior and the wizened little spy. “We’ll not stay long. Just long enough to see what she looks like—this Golden Wings the desert tribes all rave about.”

They rode forward over the ocher desert. The huge red orb of the sun was full in their faces as it sank toward the west. Already, the two moons Qui and Quilus were rising like dull pink shields in the east.

Shadows lengthened colossal across the yellow sands. The wind was keen, blowing from the far polar lands of this world of Thar. Behind them rose the vast, dull red shoulders of the Dragal Mountains, that separated the drylands from their own coastal country of Jotanland.

A nomad town rose ahead, scores of flat-topped pavilions of woven black hyrk-hair. Great herds of horses of the black desert strain were under the care of whooping herdsboys. Smoke of fires rose along the streets.

Fierce, swarthy drylanders whose skins were darker than the bronze faces of Khal Kan and his companions, looked at the trio with narrowed eyes as they rode in. Dryland warriors fell in behind them, riding casually after them toward die big pavilion at the camp’s center.

“We’re nicely in the trap,” grunted Brusul. “Now only wit will get us out. Which means we can’t depend on you, Khal Kan.”

Khal Kan laughed. “A good sword can take a man where wit will stumble. Remember, now, we’re from Kaubos.”

They dismounted outside the great pavilion and walked into it past cat-eyed dryland sentries.

Torches spilled a red flare over the interior of the big tent. Here along rows, on their mats, sat the chiefs of the desert folk, feasting, drinking and quarreling.

Upon a low dais sat old Bladomir, their highest chief. The old desert ruler was a bearded, steel-eyed warrior of sixty whose yellow skin was grizzled by sandstorm and sun. His curved sword leaned against his knee, and he was drinking from a flagon of purple Lurian wine.

Khal Kan’s eyes flew to the girl sitting beside the chief. He felt disappointment. Was this the famous Golden Wings, this small, slight, slender dark-haired girl in black leather? Why, she was nothing much—mildly attractive with her smooth black hair and fine, golden-skinned features—but not as pretty by half as many a wench he knew.

The girl looked up. Her eyes met Khal Kan’s. The stab of those midnight-black eyes was like the impact of sword-shock. For a moment, the Jotan prince glimpsed? a spirit thrilling as a lightning-flash.

“Why, I see now why they rave about her!” he thought delightedly. “She’s a tiger-cat, dangerous as hell and twice as beautiful!”

Golden Wings’ black brows drew together angrily at the open, insolent admiration on the face of Khal Kan. She spoke to her father.

Bladomir looked down frowningly at the tall, grinning young warrior and his two companions.

“Watermen!” grunted the dryland chief contemptuously, using the desert-folk’s name for the coast peoples. “What do you want here?”

“We’re from Kaubos,” Brusul answered quickly. “We had to leave there when the Bunts took our city last year. Being men without a country now, we thought we’d offer our swords to you.”

Bladomir spat. “We of the desert don’t need to hire swords. You can have tent-hospitality tonight. Tomorrow, be gone.”

It was what Khal Kan had expected. He was hardly listening. His eyes, insolent in admiration, had never left the girl Golden Wings.

A shrill voice yelled from the drylanders feasting in the big torchlit tent. A thin, squint-eyed desert warrior had jumped to his feet and was pointing at Khal Kan.

“That’s no Kaubian!” he cried. “It’s the prince of Jotan! I saw him with the king his father, two years ago in Jotan city!”

Khal Kan’s sword sang out of its sheath with blurring speed—but too late. Drylanders had leaped on the three instantly, pinioning their arms. Old Bladomir arose, his hawk-eyes narrowing ominously.

“So you’re that hell’s brand, young Khal Kan of Jotan?” he snarled. “Spying on us, are you?”

Khal Kan answered coolly. “We’re not spying on you. My father sent us into the Dragals to see if the Bunts were in the mountains. He feared that traitor Egir might lead the green men north that way.”

“Then what are you doing here in our camp?” Bladomir demanded.

Khal Kan looked calmly at the girl. “I’d heard of your daughter and wanted to look at her, to see if she was all they say.”

Golden Wing’s black eyes flared, but her voice was silky. “And now that you have looked, Jotanian, do you approve?”

Khal Kan laughed. “Yes, I do. I think you’re a tiger-cat as would make me a fit mate. I shall do you the honor of making you princess of Jotan.”

Swords of a score of dryland warriors flashed toward the three captives, as the desert warriors leaped to avenge the insult.

“Wait!” called Golden Wings’ dear voice. There was a glint of mocking humor in her black eyes as she looked down at Khal Kan. “No swords for this princeling—the whip’s more suited to him. Tie him up.”

A roar of applause went up from the drylanders. In a moment, Khal Kan had been strung up to a tent-pole, his hands dragged up above his head. His leather jacket was ripped off and his yellow shirt torn away.

Brusul, bound and helpless, was roaring like a trapped lion as he saw what was coming. A tall drylander with a lash had come.

Swish—crack! Roar of howling laughter crashed on the echo, as Khal Kan felt the leather bite into his flesh. He winced inwardly from the pain, but kept his insolent smile unchanged.

Again the lash cracked. And on its echo came the voice of Golden Wings, silvery and taunting.

“Do you still want me for a mate, princeling?”

“More than ever,” laughed Khan Kan. “I wouldn’t have a wench without spirit.”

“More!” flashed Golden Wings’ furious voice to the flogger.

The lash hissed and exploded in red pain along Khal Kan’s back. Still he would not flinch or wince. His mind was doggedly set.

Through crimson pain-mists came the girl’s voice again. “You have thought better of your desire now, Jotanian?”

Khal Kan heard his own laughter as a harsh, remote sound. “Not in the least, darling. For every lash-stroke you order now, you’ll seek later to win my forgiveness with a hundred kisses.”

“Twenty more strokes!” flared the girl’s hot voice.

The whole world seemed pure pain to Khal Kan, and his back was a numbed torment, but he kept his face immobile. He was aware that the fierce laughter had ceased, that the dryland warriors were watching him in a silence tinged with respect.

The lashes ceased. Khal Kan jeered over his shoulder.

“What, no more? I thought you had more spirit, my sweet.”

Golden Wings’ voice was raging. “There’s still whips for you unless you beg pardon for your insolence.”

“No, no more,” rumbled old Bladomir. “This princeling’s wit-struck, it’s plain to see. Tie them all up tightly and we’ll send to Jotan demanding heavy ransom for them.”

Khal Kan hardly felt them carrying him away to a dark, small tent, his body was so bathed in pain. He did feel the gasping agony of the jolt as he was flung down beside Brusul and Zoor.

They three, bound hand and foot with thongs of tough sandcat leather, were left in the tent by guards who posted themselves outside.

“What a girl!” exclaimed Khal Kan. “Brusul, for the first time in my life, I’ve met a woman who isn’t all tears and weakness.”

“You’re wit-struck, indeed!” flared Brusul. “I’d as lief fall in love with a sandcat as that wench. And look at the mess you’ve got us into here! Your father awaiting our report—and we prisoned here. Faugh.’”

“We’ll get out of this some way,” muttered Khal Kan. He felt a reaction of exhaustion. “Tomorrow will bring counsel—”

He heard Brusul grumbling on, but he was drifting now into sleep.

Golden Wings’ face floated before him as sleep overtook him. He felt again the strong emotion with which the dryland girl had inspired him.

Then he was asleep, and was beginning to dream. It was the same dream as always that came quickly to Khal Kan.

He dreamed, first, that he was awaking—

He was awaking—in fact, he was now awake. He yawned, opened his eyes, and lay looking up at the white-papered bedroom ceiling.

He knew, as always, that he was no longer Khal Kan, prince of Jotan. He knew that he was now Henry Stevens, of Midland City, Illinois.

Henry Stevens lay looking up at the ceiling of his neat maple bedroom, and thinking of the dream he had just had—the dream in which, as Khal Kan, he had been flogged by the drylanders.

“I’ve got myself in a real fix, now,” Henry muttered. “How am I going to get back to Jotan? But that girl Golden Wings is a darling—”

Beside him, his wife’s plump figure stirred drowsily. “What is it, Henry?” she asked sleepily.

“Nothing, Emma,” he replied dutifully. He swung out of bed. “You don’t need to get up. I’ll get my own breakfast.”

On slippered feet, Henry Stevens plodded across the neat bedroom. As he carefully shaved, his mind was busy with remote things.

“Even if Jotan can pay the ransom, it’ll be a week before I can get back there,” he thought “And who knows what the Bunts will be up to in that time?”

Out of the mirror, his own newly-shaven face regarded him. It was the thin, commonplace face of Henry Stevens, thirty-year-old insurance official of Midland City—a face far different from Khal Kan’s hard, bronzed, merry visage.

“I suppose I’m crazy to worry about Jotan, when it may be all a dream,” Henry muttered thoughtfully. “Or is it this that’s the dream, after all? Will I ever know?”

He was facing the mystery that had baffled him all his life.

Was Khal Kan a dream—or was Henry Stevens the dream?

All his life, Henry Stevens had been beset by that riddle. It was one that had begun with his earliest childish memories.

As far back as he could remember, Henry had had the dream. As a child, he had every night dreamed that he was a child in a different world far removed from Midland City.

Each night, when little Henry Stevens had lain down to sleep, he had at once slipped into the dream. In that dream, he was a boy in the city Jotan, on the shore of the Zambrian Sea, on the world of Thar. He was Khal Kan, prince of Jotan, son of the king, Kan Abul.

All through his years of youth and manhood, the dream had persisted. Every night, as soon as he slept, he dreamed that he was awaking. And then, in the dream, he seemed to be Khal Kan again. As Khal Kan, he lived through the day on Thar. And when Khal Kan lay down to sleep, he dreamed that he awoke as Henry Stevens, of Earth!

The dream was continuous. There was nothing incoherent or jerky about it. Day followed day consecutively in the life of Khal Kan, as logically as in the life of Henry Stevens.

Henry Stevens grew up through boyhood and youth, attending his school and playing his games and going off to college, and finally getting a job with the insurance company, and marrying.

And each night, in Henry’s dream Khal Kan was similarly pursuing his life—was learning to ride and wield a sword, and explore the mountains west of Jotanland, and go forth in patrol expeditions against the hated Bunts of the south who were the great enemies of Jotan.

When he was awake and living the life of Henry Stevens, it always seemed to him that Khal Kan and his colorful, dangerous world of Thar were nothing but an extraordinarily vivid dream. All that world, with its strange cities and enormous mountains and forests and alien races, its turquoise seas and crimson sun, were surely nothing but dream.

That was how it seemed to Henry Stevens. But when he was Khal Kan, in the nightly dream, it was exactly the opposite. Then it seemed to Khal Kan that Henry Stevens and his strange world of Earth were the dream.

Khal Kan seldom doubted that. The hardy young prince of Jotan knew there could be no such world as this Earth he dreamed about each night. A world where he was a timid little man who worked with papers at a desk all day long, a world where men dressed and acted differently, where even the sun was not red but yellow. Surely, Khal Kan thought, that could be nothing but a dream that somehow had oppressed him all his life.

Henry Stevens was, not so sure about which was real. There were many times when it seemed to Henry that maybe Thar was the real world, and that Earth and Henry Stevens were die dream.

They couldn’t both be real! One of these existences of his must be the real one, and the other a strange continued dream. But which?

“If I only knew that,” Henry muttered to his reflection in the mirror. “Then, whichever one is the dream, wouldn’t bother me much—I’d know that it wasn’t real, whatever happened.”

He looked ruefully at himself. “As it is, I’ve got two lives to worry about. Not that Khal Kan does much worrying!”

His puzzled reverie was broken by the sleepy voice of his wife, calling a mechanical warning from the bedroom.

“Henry, you’d better hurry or you’ll be late at the office.”

“Yes, Emma,” he replied dutifully, and hastened his toilet.

He loved his wife. At least, Henry Stevens loved her—whether or not Henry was real.

But Golden Wings! There was a girl! His pulse still raced as he remembered her beauty, when he had seen her through Khal Kan’s eyes.

How the devil was Khal Kan going to get out of the trap into which the girl’s beauty had led him?

He couldn’t guess what the reckless young prince would do—for Khal Kan and Henry Stevens had nothing in common in their personalities.

“Oh, forget it!” Henry advised himself irritably. “Thar must be a dream. Let Khal Kan worry about it, when the dream comes back tonight.”

But he couldn’t forget so easily. As he drove to town in his sedate black coupe, he kept turning the problem over in his mind. And he found himself brooding about it that afternoon over his statements, at his desk in the big insurance office.

If Khal Kan didn’t get away, his father might send an expedition out of Jotan to search for him. And that would weaken Jotan at a time when the Bunts were menacing it. He must—

“Stevens, haven’t you finished that Blaine statement yet?” demanded a loud voice beside his desk.

Henry started guiltily. It was Carson, the wasp-like little office manager, who stood glowering down at him.

“I—I was just starting it,” Henry said hastily, grabbing the neglected papers.

“Just starting it?” Carson’s thin lips tightened. “Stevens, you’ve got to pull yourself up. You’re getting entirely too dreamy and inefficient lately. I see you sitting here and staring at the wall for hours. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

“Nothing, Mr. Carson,” Henry said panically. Then he amended, “I’ve had a few troubles on my mind lately. But I won’t let them interfere with my work again.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” advised the waspish little man ominously, and departed.

Henry felt a cold chill. There had been a significant glitter in Carson’s spectacled eyes. He sensed himself on the verge of a terrifying precipice—of losing his job.

“If I don’t forget about Thar, I will be in trouble,” he muttered to himself. “I can’t go on this way.”

As he mechanically added figures, he was alarmedly trying to figure out a way to rid himself of this obsession.

If he only knew which was reality and which was dream! That was what his mind always came back to, that was the key of his troubles.

If, for instance, he could learn for a certainty that Khal Kan and his life in Thar were merely a dream, as they seemed, then he wouldn’t brood about them. There wouldn’t be any point in worrying about what happened in a dream.

On the other hand, if he should learn that his life as Khal Kan was real, and that Henry Stevens and his world were the dream, then that too would relieve his worries. It wouldn’t matter much if Henry Stevens lost his job—if Henry were only a dream.

Henry was fascinated, as always, by that thought. He looked around the sunlit office, the neat desks and busy men and girls, with a flash of derisive superiority.

You may none of you be real at all,” he thought. “You may all just be part of Khal Kan’s nightly dream.”

That was always a queer thought, that idea that Earth and all its people, including himself, were just a dream of the prince of Jotan.

“I wish to heaven I knew,” Henry muttered baffledly for the thousandth time. “There must be some way to find out which is real.”

Yet he could see no test that would give proof. He had thought of and had tried many things during his life, to test the matter.

Several times, he had stayed up all night without sleep. He had thought that if he did not sleep and hence did not dream, it would break the continuity of the dreamlife of Khal Kan.

But it had had no effect. For when he finally did sleep, and dreamed that he awoke as Khal Kan, it merely seemed to Khal Kan that he had dreamed he was Henry Stevens, staying up a night without sleep—that he had dreamed two days and a night of the unreal life of Henry Stevens.

No, that had failed as a test. Nor was there any other way. If he could be sure that while he was sleeping and living the dreamlife of Khal Kan, the rest of Earth remained real—that would solve the problem.

The other people of Earth were sure they had remained in existence during his sleep. But, if they were all just figments of dream, their certainty of existence was merely part of the dream.

It was maddening, this uncertainty! He felt that it would drive him to insanity if the puzzle persisted much longer. Yet how was he to solve the riddle?

“Maybe a good psychoanalyst,” Henry thought doubtfully. “A fellow like that might be able to help.”

He shrank from his own idea. It would mean telling the psychoanalyst all about his dreamlife. And that was something he had not done for years, not since he was a small boy.

When he was a boy, Henry Stevens had confidendy told his family and chums all about his strange dreams—how each night when he slept he was another boy, the boy Khal Kan in Jotan, on the world Thar. He had told them in detail of his life as Khal Kan, of the wonderful black city Jotan, of the red sun and the two pink moons.

His parents had at first laughed at his stories, then had become worried, and finally had forbidden him to tell any more such falsehoods. They had put it all down to a too-vivid imagination.

And his boyhood chums had jeered at his tales, admiring his ability as a liar but rudely expressing their opinions when he had earnestly maintained that he did dream it all, every night.

So Henry had learned not to tell of his dreamlife. He had kept that part of his life locked away, and even Emma had never heard of it.

“But still, if a psychoanalyst could help me find out which is real,” he thought desperately, “it’d be worth trying—”

That afternoon when his work was finished, Henry found himself entering the offices of a Doctor Willis Thorn whom he had heard of as the best psychoalanlyst in the city. He had made an appointment by telephone.

Doctor Thorn wis a solidly built man of forty, with the body of a football player, and calm, friendly eyes. He listened with quiet attention as Henry Stevens, slowly at first and then more eagerly, poured out his story.

“And you say the dream continues logically, from night to night?” Doctor Thorn asked. “That’s strange. I’ve never heard of a psychosis quite like that.”

“What I want to know is—which is real?” Henry blurted. “Is there any way in which you could tell me whether it’s Thar or Earth that’s real?”

Doctor Thorn smiled quietly. “I’m not a figment of a dream, I assure you. You see me sitting here, quite real and solid. Too solid, I’m afraid—I’ve been putting on weight lately.”

Henry, puzzledly thoughtful, missed the pleasantry. “You seem real and solid,” he admitted, “and so does’ this office and everything else, to me. But then I, Henry Stevens, may only be a part of the dream myself—Khal Kan’s dream.”

Doctor Thorn’s brow wrinkled. “I see your point. It’s logical enough, from a certain standpoint. But it’s also logical that you and I and Earth are real, and that Khal Kan and his world are only an extraordinarily vivid dream your mind has developed as compensation for a monotonous life.”

“I don’t know,” Henry muttered. “When I’m Khai Kan, I’m pretty sure that Henry Stevens is just a dream. But I, Henry Stevens, am not so sure. Of course, Khal Kan isn’t the kind of man to brood or doubt much about anything—he’s a fighter and reckless adventurer.”

Doctor Thorn was definitely interested. “Look here, Mr. Stevens, suppose you write out a complete history of this dreamlife of yours—this life as Khal Kan—and bring it with you the next time. It may help me.”

Henry left the office, with his new hope on the wane. He didn’t think the psychoanalyst could do much to solve his problem.

After all, he thought depressedly as he drove homeward, there was hardly any way in which you could prove that you really existed. You felt you did exist, everyone around you was sure they did too, but there was no real proof that that whole existence was not just a dream.

His mind came back to Khal Kan’s present predicament. How was he going to escape from the drylanders? He brooded on that, through dinner.

“Henry Stevens, you haven’t been listening to one word!” his wife’s voice aroused him.

Emma’s plump, good-natured face was a little exasperated as she peered across the table at him.

“I declare, you’re getting more dopey every day!” she told him snappily.

“I’m just sleepy, I guess,” Henry apologized. “I think I’ll turn in.”

She shook her head. “You go to bed earlier every night. It’s not eight o’clock yet.”

Henry finally was permitted to retire. He felt an apprehensive eagerness as he undressed. What was going to happen to Khal Kan?

He stretched out and lay in the dark room, half dreading and half anticipating the coming of sleep. Finally the dark tide of drowsiness began to roll across his mind.

He knew vaguely that he was falling asleep. He slipped into darkness. And, as always, the dream came at once. As always, he dreamed that he was awaking—

Khal Kan awoke, in the dark, cold tent. His whole back was a throbbing pain, and his bound arms and legs were numb.

He lay thinking a moment of his dream. How real it always seemed, the nightly dream in which he was a timid little man named Henry Stevens, on a queer, drab world called Earth! When he was dreaming—when he was the man Henry Stevens—he even thought that he, Khal Kan, was a dream!

Dreams within dreams—but they meant nothing. Khal Kan had long ago quit worrying about his strange dreamlife, The wise men of Jotan whom he had consulted had spoken doubtfully of witchcraft Their explanations had explained nothing. And life was too short, there were too many enemies to slay and girls to kiss and flagons to drink, to worry much about dreams.

“But this is no dream, worse luck!” thought Khal Kan, testing his bonds. “The prince of Jotan, trussed up like a damned hyrk—”

He stiffened. A shadow was moving toward him in the dark tent. It bent over him and there was a muffled flash of steel. Amazedly, Khal Kan felt the bonds of his wrists and ankles relax. They had been cut.

The shadow sniggered. “What would you do without little Zoor to take care of you, Prince?”

“Zoor?” Khal Kan’s whisper was astonished. “How in the name of—”

“Easily, Prince,” sniggered Zoor. “I always carry a flat blade in the sole of my sandal. But it took me all night to get it out and cut myself free. It’s almost dawn.”

The cold in the tent was piercing. Through a crack in the flap, Khal Kan could see the eastern sky beginning to pale a little. He could also hear the drylanders on guard out there, shuffling to keep warm.

Khal Kan got to his feet while Zoor was freeing Brusul. Then the little man used his sliver of steel to slice a rip through the back wall of the tent. They three slipped out into the starry darkness.

Khal Kan chuckled a little to himself as he remembered how his dream-self—the man Henry Stevens in that dream-world—had worried about his plight. As though there was anything worth worrying about in that.

They did not stop for a whispered consultation until they were well away from the tent in which they had been kept. The whole camp of the drylanders was still, except for an occasional drunken warrior staggering between the dark tents, and the stamping of tethered horses not far away.

“The horses are this way,” muttered Brusul. “We can be over the Dragals before these swart-skinned devils know we’re gone.”

“Wait!” commanded Khal Kan’s whisper. “I’m not going without that girl. Golden Wings.”

“Hell take your obstinacy!” snarled Brusul. “Do you think you can steal the drylanders’ princess right out of their camp? They’d chase us to the end of the world. Beside, what would you want with that little desert-cat who had you flogged raw?”

Khal Kan uttered a low laugh. “She’s the only wench I’ve ever seen who was more than a sweet armful for an idle hour. She’s flame and steel and beauty—and by the sun, I’m taking her. You two get horses and wait by the edge of the camp yonder. I’ll be along.”

He hastened away before they could voice the torrent of objections on their lips. He had taken Zoor’s hiltless knife.

Khal Kan made his way through the dark tents to the big pavilion of the dryland chief. He silently skirted its rear wall, stopping here and there to slash the wall and peer inside.

Thus he discovered the compartment of the pavilion in which the girl slept. It had a guttering copper night-lamp whose flickering radiance fell on silken hangings and on a low mass of cushions on which she lay.

Golden Wings’ dark head was pillowed on her arm, her long black lashes slumbering on her cheek. Coolly, Khal Kan made an entrance. He delayed to cut strips from the silken hangings, and then approached her.

His big hand whipped the silken gag around Golden Wings’ mouth and tied it before she was half-awake. Her eyes raging as she recognized him, and her slim silken figure struggled in his grasp with wildcat fury.

Khal Kan was rough and fast. He got the silken bonds around her hands and feet, and then drew a breath of relief.

“Now we ride for Jotan, my sweet,” he whispered mockingly to her as he picked up her helpless figure.

Golden Wings’ black eyes blazed into his own, and he laughed.

He kissed her eyelids. “This will have to serve as proof of my affections until we can take this damned gag off, my dear,” he mocked.

Her firm body writhed furiously in his grasp as he went out into the starry night. Silently, bearing the girl easily, he made his way through the sleeping camp.

Stamping shadows loomed up at the camp edge, awaiting him. Brusul and Zoor had horses, and the little spy handed Khal Kan a stolen sword.

“You have the girl!” Zoor sniggered. “Even I could not make a theft so daring—to steal the drylanders’ princess out of their own camp!”

“We haven’t got her out yet, and it’s far to Jotan,” snarled Brusul. “Let’s get out of here.”

Khal Kan vaulted into the saddle and drew Golden Wings’ struggling silken figure across the saddle-bow. They walked their horses softly eastward till they were out of earshot of the camp, and then they spurred into a gallop.

The cold dawn wind whistled past Khal Kan’s face. Far ahead, the black bulk of the Dragals loomed against the paling sky.

He took the gag from Golden Wings’ mouth. In the growing light, the cold anger of the girl’s face flared at him.

“Dog of Jotan!” she panted. “You’ll be staked out in the desert to die the sun-death, for this crime.”

“I didn’t free your mouth for words, my dear,” replied Khal Kan. “But for this—”

Her lips writhed under his kiss. His laughter pealed bade on the wind as he straightened again in the saddle.

Golden Wings sobbed with rage. “You’ll not be killed at once,” she promised breathlessly. “It will take time to think up a death appropriate for you. Even the sun-death would be too easy.”

“That’s the way I like to hear a girl talk,” applauded Khal Kan. “Hell take these wenches who are all softness and whimpers. We’ll get along, my pet.”

They were still far from the first ridges of the Dragals when the crimson sun came up to light their way. Brusul turned his battered face back to stare across the ocher sands, and then swore and pointed to a remote, low wisp of dust back on the western horizon.

“There they come! They’re following our tracks, curse them!”

“We can lose them when we reach the mountains,” Khal Kan called easily. “Faster!”

“You’ll never reach the Dragals,” taunted Golden Wings, eyes sparkling now. “My father’s horses are swift, Jotan dogs!”

They spurred on. The first low red ridges of the Dragals seemed tantalizingly far away. The sun was rising higher, and its blistering heat had already dispelled the coolness of dawn.

The crimson orb hung almost directly overhead, and they were still hours from the ridges, when Zoor’s pony tripped and went down. It rolled with a broken neck as the little man darted nimbly from the saddle.

Khal Kan reined up and came riding back. The dust-cloud of their pursuers was ominously big and close.

“Ride on!” Zoor cried, his wizened face unperturbed. “You can make the ridges without me.”

“We can’t make them,” Khal Kan denied coolly. “And it’s not our way to separate in face of danger.”

He dismounted. Golden Wings was looking westward with exultation in her black eyes. “Did I not tell you I’d see you caught!” she cried.

Khal Kan cut free her hands and feet. He reached up and set his lips against hers, bruisingly. Then he stepped back, releasing her.

“You can ride back and meet your father’s warriors with the glad news that we’re here for the taking, my sweet,” he told her.

“You’re letting her go?” yelled Brusul. “We could hold her hostage.”

“No,” declared Khal Kan. “I’ll not see her harmed in the fight.”

He laughed up at her, as she sat in the saddle looking down at him with wide, strangely bewildered eyes.

“Too bad I couldn’t get you to Jotan with me, my little desert-cat. “But you’ll have the pleasure of seeing us killed. Tell your father’s warriors to come with their swords out!”

For a long moment, Golden Wings looked down at him. Then she set spur to the pony and galloped away to the oncoming dust-cloud.

Khal Kan and his two comrades drew their swords and waited. And soon they saw the force of a hundred drylanders riding up to them. Bladomir was in the lead, his beard bristling. And Golden Wings rode beside him.

“The little hell-cat wants to help kill us,” growled Brusul. “You should have slit her throat.”

Khal Kan shrugged. “I’d liefer slit my own. Too bad we have to end in a skirmish like this, old friends. I dragged you into it.”

“Oh, it’s all right, except that we won’t be with the armies of Jotan when they go out to meet Egir and the Bunts,” muttered Brusul.

The drylanders were not charging. No sword was unsheathed as they came forward, though old Bladomir was frowning blackly. The desert chieftain halted his horse ten paces away, and spoke to Khal Kan in a roaring voice.

“I ought to kill you all, Jotanians, for taking my daughter away with you. But we’re a free people. Since she says she goes with you of her own free will, I’ll not interfere.”

“Of her own free will?” gasped Brusul. “What in the sun’s name—”

Golden Wings had dismounted and came toward Khal Kan. Her dark eyes met him levelly. She did not speak, nor did he, as she took his hand.

Bladomir laid a sword-blade across their clasped hands, and tossed a handful of the yellow desert sand upon it. Khal Kan felt his heart in his throat. It was the marriage rite of the drylanders.

Zoor and Brusul were staring unbelievingly, the drylanders sadly. But Golden Wings’ red lips were sweet fire under his mouth.

“You said that for each lash-stroke last night, I’d pay a hundred kisses,” she whispered. “That will take long—my lord.”

He looked earnestly into the brooding sweetness of her face. “No deceptions between us, my little sandcat!” he said. “When I freed you and let you go to your father, I was gambling that you’d come back—like this.”

For a moment her eyes flared surprise and anger. And then she laughed. “No deceptions, my lord! Last night, in my father’s pavilion, I knew you were the mate I’d long awaited. But—I thought the lashing would teach you to value me the more!”

Bladomir had mounted his horse. The stoical old desert chieftain and his men called their farewells, and then rode back westward.

They had left horse and sword for Golden Wings. She rode knee to knee with Khal Kan as they spurred up the sloping sands toward the first red ridges of the Dragals.

Dusk came upon them hours later as they climbed the steep pass toward the highest ridge of the range. One of the pink moons was up and the other was rising. The desert was a vague unreality far behind and below.

“Look back and you can see the campfires of your people,” he told the girl.

Her dark head did not turn. “My people are ahead now, in Jotan.”

They topped the ridge. A yell of horror burst from Brusul.

“The Bunts are in Galoon! Hell take the green devils—they’ve marched leagues north in the last two days!”

Khal Kan’s fierce rage choked him as he too saw. Far, far to the east beneath the rosy moons, the lowland plain below the Dragals stretched out to the silvery immensity of the Zambrian Sea.

Down there to the right, on the coast, should have shone the bright lights of the city Galoon, southern most port of Jotanland.

But instead the city was scarred by hideous red fires, that smoldered through the night like baleful, unwinking eyes.

“Egir’s led the green men farther north than I dreamed!’” Khal Kan muttered. “Oh, damn that traitor! If I had my sword at his throat—”

“We’d best ride hard for Jotan before we’re cut off,” Zoor cried.

They rode north along the ridges, until the red fires of burning Galoon receded from sight. Then they moved down the western slopes of the mountains, and galloped on north along the easier coast road.

Galloping under the rosy moons, Khal Kan pointed far along the shore to a yellow beacon-fire atop the lighthouse tower outside Jotan.

The square black towers of Jotan loomed sheer on the edge of the silver sea, surrounded by the high black wall which had only two openings—a big water-gate on the sea side, and a smaller gate on the other. The rosy moonlight glinted off the arms of sentries posted thick on the wall, and a sharp challenge was flung down as Khal Kan rode up to the closed gate.

Joyful cries greeted the disclosure of his identity. The gates ground slowly open, and he and Golden Wings galloped in with Brusul and Zoor. Khal Kan led the way through the black-paved stone streets of Jotan to the low, brooding mass of the palace.

When, with Golden Wings’ hand in his, he hurried into the great domed, torchlit marble Hall of the Kings, he found his father awaiting him.

Kan Abul’s iron-hard face seemed even grimmer than usual.

“The Bunts—” Khal Kan began, but the king finished for him.

“I know—the green men have captured and sacked Galoon, led by my traitorous brother. We’ve been gathering our forces. Tomorrow we march south to attack—it’s good you*re in time to join us. But who’s this?”

Khal Kan grinned. “I found no Bunts over the Dragais, but I did find a princess for Jotan. They call her Golden Wings—Bladomir’s daughter.”

Kan Abul grunted. “A dryland princess? Well, you’ve made a bad bargain, girl—this son of mine’s an empty-skulled rascal. And tomorrow he goes south with us to battle.”

“And I go with him!” declared Golden Wings. “Do you think I’m one of your Jotan girls that cannot ride or fight?”

Khal Kin laughed. “We’ll argue that the morrow.”

Later that night, in his great chamber of seaward windows, with Golden Wings sleeping in his arms, Khal Kan also slept—

Henry Stevens brooded as he sat waiting in the office of the psychoanalyst, the next afternoon. Things couldn’t go on this way! He’d been reprimanded twice this day by Carson for neglect of his work.

Since he’d awakened this morning, the danger to Jotan had been obsessing his thoughts.

It was queer, but he had had more time to reflect upon the peril than had Khal Kan himself in the dream.

“You can go in now, Mr. Stevens,” smiled the receptionist.

Doctor Thorn’s alert young eyes caught the haggardness of Henry’s face but he was casual as he pushed cigarettes across the desk.

“You had the same dream last night?” he asked Henry.

Henry Stevens nodded. “Yes, and things are getting worse—over there in Thar. The Bunts have taken Galoon in some way, and Egir must be planning to lead them on against Jotan.”

“Egir?” questioned the psychoanalyst.

Henry explained. “Egir was my—I mean Khal Kan’s—uncle, the younger brother of Kan Abul. He’s a renegade to Jotan. He fled from there about—let’s see, about four Thar years ago, after Kan Abul discovered his plot to usurp the throne. Since then, he’s been conspiring with the Bunts.”

Henry took a pencil and drew a little map on a sheet of paper. It showed a curving, crescent-like coast.

“This is the Zambrian Sea,” he explained. “On the north of this indented gulf is Jotan, my city—I mean, Khal Kan’s city. Away to the south here across the gulf is Buntland, where the barbarian green men live. On the coast between Buntland and Jotan are the independent city of Kaubos and the southernmost Jotanian city of Galoon.

“When my uncle Egir fled to the Bunts,” Henry went on earnestly, “he stirred them up to attack Kaubos, which they captured. We’ve been planning an expedition to drive them out of there. Five days ago I rode over the Dragal Mountains with two comrades to reconnoiter a possible route by which we could make a surprise march south. But now the Bunts are moving north and have sacked Galoon. There’s a big battle coming—”

Henry paused embarrassedly. He had suddenly awakened from his intense interest in exposition to become aware that Doctor Thorn was not looking at the map, but at his face.

“I know it all sounds crazy, to talk about a dream this way,” Henry mumbled. “But I can’t help worrying about Jotan. You see, if it turned out that Thar was real and that this was the dream—”

He broke off again, and then finished with an earnest plea. “That’s why I must know which is real—Thar or Earth, Khal Kan or myself!”

Doctor Thorn considered gravely. The young psychiatrist did not ridicule Henry’s bafflement, as he had half expected.

“Look at it from my point of view,” Thorn proposed. “You think it’s possible that I may be only a figment in a world dreamed by Khal Kan each night. But I know that I’m real, though I can’t very well prove it.”

“That’s it,” Henry murmured discouragedly. “People always take for granted that this world is real—they never even imagine that it may be just a dream. But none of them could prove that it isn’t a dream.”

“But suppose you could prove that Thar is a dream?” Thorn pursued. “Then you’d know that this must be the real existence.”

Henry considered. “That’s true. But how can I do that?”

“I want you to take this memory across into the dreamlife with you tonight,” Doctor Thorn said earnestly. “I want you, when you awake as Khal Kan, to say over and over to yourself—‘This isn’t real. I’m not real. Henry Stevens and Earth are the reality’.”

“You think that will have some effect?” Henry asked doubtfully.

“I think that in time your dream-world will begin to fade, if you keep saying that,” the psychoanalyst declared.

“Well, I’ll try it,” Henry promised thoughtfully. “If it has any effect, I’ll be sure then that Thar is the dream.”

Doctor Thorn remarked, “Probably the best thing to happen would be if Khal Kan got himself killed in that dreamlife. Then, the moment before he ‘died,’ the dream of Thar would vanish utterly as always in such dreams.”

Henry was a little appalled. “You mean—Thar and Jotan and Golden Wings and all the rest would be gone forever?”

“That’s right—you wouldn’t ever again be oppressed by the dream,” encouraged the psychoanalyst.

Henry Stevens felt a chill as he drove homeward. That was something he hadn’t forseen, that the death of Khal Kan in that other life would destroy Thar forever if Thar was the dream.

Henry didn’t want that. He had spent just as much of his life in Thar, as Khal Kan, as he had done here on Earth. No matter if that life should turn out to be merely a dream, it was real and vivid, and he didn’t want to see it utterly destroyed.

He felt a little panic as he pictured himself cut off from Thar forever, never again riding with Brusul and Zoor on crazy adventure, never seeing again that brooding smile in Golden Wings’ eyes, nor the towers of Jotan brooding under the rosy moons.

Life as Henry Stevens of Earth, without his nightly existence in Thar, would be tame and profitless. Yet he knew that he must once and for all settle the question of which of his lives was real, even though it risked destroying one of those lives.

“I’ll do what Doctor Thorn said, when I’m Khal Kan tonight,” Henry muttered. “I’ll tell myself Thar isn’t real, and see if it has any effect.”

He was so strung up by anticipation of the test he was about to make, that he paid even less attention than usual to Emma’s placid account of neighborhood gossip and small household happenings.

That night as he lay, waiting for sleep, Henry repeated over and over to himself the formula that he must repeat as Khal Kan. His last waking thought, as he drifted into sleep, was of that.

Khal Kan awoke with a vague sense of some duty oppressing his mind. There was something he must do, or say—

He opened his eyes, to look with contentment upon the dawnlit interior of his own black stone chamber in the great palace at Jotan. On the wall were his favorite weapons—the sword with which he’d killed a sea-dragon when he was fourteen years old, the battered shield with the great scar which he had borne in his first real battle.

Golden Wings stirred sleepily against him, her perfumed black hair brushing his cheek. He patted her head with rough tenderness. Then he became aware of the tramp of many feet outside, of distant clank of arms and hard voices barking orders, and rattle of hurrying hoofs.

His pulse leaped. “Today we go south to meet Egir and the Bunts!”

Then he remembered what it was that dimly oppressed his mind. It was something from his dream—the queer nightly dream in which he was the timid little man Henry Stevens on that strange world called Earth.

He remembered now that Henry Stevens had promised a doctor that he would say aloud, “Thar isn’t real—I, Khal Kan, am not real.”

Khal Kan laughed. The idea of saying such a thing, of asserting that Thar and Jotan and everything else was not real, seemed idiotic.

“That timid little man I am in the dream each night—he thinks I would mouth such folly as that!” Khal Kan chuckled.

Golden Wings had awakened. Her slumbrous black eyes regarded him questioningly.

“It’s my own private joke, sweet,” he told her. And he went on to tell her of the nightly dream he had had since childhood, of a queer world, called Earth in which he was another man. “It’s the maddest world you can imagine, my pet—that dream-world. Men don’t even wear swords, they don’t know how to ride or fight like men, and they spend their lives plotting in stuffy rooms for a thing they call ‘money’—bits of paper and metal.

“And the cream of the joke,” Khal Kan laughed, “is that in my dream, I even doubt whether Thar is real. The dream-me believes that maybe this is the dream, that Jotan and Brusul and Zoor and even you are but phantom visions of my sleeping brain.”

He rose to his feet. “Enough of dreams and visions. Today we ride to meet Egir and the Bunts. That is no dream!”

Ten thousand strong massed the fighting-men of Jotan later that morning, outside the walls of the city. Under the red sun their bronzed faces were sternly confident and eager for battle.

Kan Abul rode out through their ranks, with his captains behind him in full armor. Khal Kan was among them, and beside him rode Golden Wings. The desert princess had fiercely refused to be left behind.

Their helmets flashed in die red sunlight, and the cheers of the troops were deafening as Kan Abul spoke to his captains.

“Egir’s main force is already ten leagues north of Galoon,” he told them. “There’s talk of some new weapon which the Bunts have, with which they claim to be invincible. So we’re going to take them by surprise.

“I’ll lead our main force of eight thousand archers and spearmen south along the coast road,” the king continued. “My son, you will take our two thousand horsemen and ride over the first ridge of the Dragals, then ride south ten leagues. We’ll join battle with the Bunts down on the coastal plain, and you can come down from the Dragals and strike their flank. And the gods will be against us if we don’t roll them up and destroy them as our forefathers did, generations ago.”

Kan Abul led the troops down the coast road, and as they marched along they roared out the old fighting-song of Jotan.

“The Bunts came up to Jotan,

Long ago!”

Hours later, Khal Kan sat his horse amid a thin screen of brush high in the red easternmost ridge of the Dragals, leagues south of Jotan. Golden Wings sat her pony beside him, and their two thousand horsemen waited below the concealment of the ridge.

Down there below them, the red slopes dropped into a narrow plain between the mountains and the blue Zambrian. Far southward, a pall of black smoke marked the site of sacked Galoon. And from there, something like a glittering snake was crawling north along the coast.

“My Uncle Egir and his green devils,” muttered Khal Kan. “Now where are father and our footmen?”

“See—they come!” Golden Wings cried, pointing northward eagerly.

In the north, a glittering serpent of almost equal size seemed crawling southward to meet the advancing Bunt columns.

“Your desert eyes see well,” declared Khal Kan. “Now we wait.”

The two armies drew closer to each other. Horns were blaring now down in the Bunt columns, and the green bowmen were hastily forming up in double columns, a solid, blocky formation. More slowly, they advanced.

Trumpets roared in the north, where the footmen of Jotan marched steadily on. Faintly to the two on the ridge came the distant chorus.

“The Bunts fled back on the homeward track

When blood did flow!”

“There is my uncle, damn him!” exclaimed Khal Kan, pointing.

He felt the old, bitter rage as he saw the stalwart, bright-helmed figure that rode with a group of Bunts at the head of the green men’s army.

“He leads them to the battle,” he muttered. “He never was a coward, whatever else he is. But today I will wipe out his menace to Jotan.”

“They are fighting!” Golden Wings cried, with flaring eagerness.

Clouds of arrows were whizzing between the two nearing armies, as Jotan archers and Bunt bowmen came within range.

Men began to drop in both armies—but in the Jotan army four fell for every stricken Bunt.

“Something’s wrong!” Khal Kan cried. “Every man of ours who is even touched by an arrow is falling. I can’t—”

“Poison!” hissed Golden Wings. “Theyare using poisoned arrows. It’s a trick I’ve heard of the Nameless Men of the far north.”

Khal Kan stared unbelievingly. “Even the Bunts wouldn’t use such hideous means! Yet my uncle is ruthless—”

Red rage misted his brain, and his voice was an unhuman roar as he turned and shouted to his tensely waiting horsemen.

“Our men are being slain by foul magic!” he yelled. “Down upon them—we strike for Jotan!”

It was as though he and Golden Wings were riding the forefront of a human avalanche as they charged down the steep slope to the battle.

They smashed home into the flank of the Bunts. The green men gave way in surprise and momentary terror. Kahl Kan’s sword whipped like a lash of light among ugly green heads and thrusting spears. As always, in a fight, he moved by pure instinct rather than by conscious design.

Yet he kept Golden Wings a little behind him. The girl was fiercely wielding her light sword against those on the ground who sought to hamstring Khal Kan’s horse with spear or sword. His riders were yelling shrilly.

The crazy confusion of the battle took on definite pattern. The Bunts had recoiled from the unexpected attack, but Egir was reforming them.

Khal Kan shouted and spurred to get at Egir. He could see his uncle’s giant form, his cynical, powerful face under his helmet, and could hear his bull voice directing the reforming of the Bunt columns.

But he could not smash through the mad melee toward Egir. And now poisoned Bunt arrows were falling, dropping men from their saddles.

Brusul had reached him, was shouting to him. “Prince, your father is slain—one of those hellish arrows.”

Khal Kan’s heart went cold for a moment. He hardly heard Brusul’ s hoarse voice, shouting on.

“We can’t face those poisoned shafts here in the open! Unless we fall back, they’ll cut us down from a distance like grain in harvest-time!”

Khal Kan groaned. He saw the dilemma. They could not hope to smash the Bunt lines that Egir had reformed—and in a long battle the new poisoned arrows of the green men would take heavier and heavier toll of them.

The safety of Jotan was now a crushing weight on his shoulders. He was king now, and the dire responsibility of the position in this mad moment left him no time even for sorrow for his father. A battle lost here now meant that Jotan was defenseless before Egir’s horde.

With a groan, he ordered a trumpeter to sound retreat.

“Fall back toward Jotan!” he ordered. “March the footmen back on the double, Brusul—we’ll cover your withdrawal with the horsemen.”

Through the long, hot hours of that afternoon, the bitter righting retreat surged back northward to Jotan. The Bunt columns followed closely, the green men howling with triumph.

Ever and again, Khal Kan and his riders charged back against the pursuing Bunts and smashed their front lines, making them recoil. Each time, empty saddles showed the toll of the poisoned shafts.

Sunset was flaring bloodily over the Dragals when they came back by that bitter way to the black towers of Jotan. Footsore, reeling with fatigue, Brusul’s spearmen marched through the gate into the city.

One last charge back at the Bunts made Khal Kan with the horsemen. He rode back then with Golden Wings, who was swaying in her saddle. They two were the last of the riders to enter the city.

The great gates hastily ground shut, as sweating men labored in the dusk at the winches. Through the loopholes of the guard-towers, Khal Kan looked out and saw the Bunt hordes outside spreading to encircle the whole land side of Jotan.

“They have now four fighting-men to every one of ours,” he muttered through his teeth. “We are in a trap called a city.”

He was staggering, his face grimed and smeared with sweat and dust and blood. Golden Wings pressed his arm in complete faith.

“It was only the foul trick of the poisoned arrows that defeated tis!” she exclaimed. “But for that, we’d have rolled them into the sea.”

“We have Egir to thank for that,” rasped Khal Kan. “While that man lives, doom hangs like a thundercloud over Jotan.”

He stepped to the window and sent his voice rolling out into the gathering darkness.”

“Egir, will you settle this man to man, sword to sword? Speak!”

Back came a sardonic voice from the camp of the Bunts.

“I am not so simple, my dear nephew! Your city’s a nut whose shell we’ll soon crack and pick, so rest you.”

Khal Kan set guards at every rod of the wall. Jotan’s streets were dark under the two moons, for no torches had been lit this night. The sound of women’s voices wailing a requiem for his dead father brought his numbed mind a sick sense of loss.

No one else in Jotan spoke or broke the stillness. Awful and imminent peril crushed the city’s folk. But from the darkness outside the walls came the sound of distant hammering as the Bunt hordes began making scaling-ladders for the morrow.

From a window of the palace, before he collapsed in drugged sleep of exhaustion, Khal Kan saw the Bunt fires hemming in the whole landward side of the city in their crescent of flame.…

Henry Steven’s wife had been worried about him all day. He had been acting queerly, she thought anxiously, ever since he had awakened that morning.

He had been pale and stricken and haggard since he had awakened. He had not gone to the office at all, a tiling unprecedented. And he had spent most of the day pacing to and fro in the little house, his haunted eyes not seeming to see her, his whole bearing one of intense excitement.

Henry was afraid—afraid of the dread climax to which things were rushing in the other world of Thar. He knew the awful peril in which Jotan now stood. Once those hordes of Bunts got over the wall, the city was doomed.

“I’ve got to quit driving myself crazy about it,” he told himself desperately that afternoon. “It’s just a dream—Thar and Khal Kan must be only a dream.”

But his feverish apprehension was not lessened by that thought. No matter if Thar was only a dream, it was real to him!

He knew Jotan and its people, from the nightly dreams of his earliest childhood. Every street of the black city he had known and loved, as Khal Kan. Even if it were only a dream, he couldn’t let the old, lovely city and its people be overwhelmed by Egir and his green barbarians.

If Thar was the dream, and the city Jotan was taken and Khal Kan was slain—there would be an end to his precious dreamlife, forever. Only the monotonous existence of Henry Stevens would stretch before him.

And if Thar happened to be the reality, then it was doubly vital that Khal Kan’s people be saved from that menace.

“Yet what can I do?” Henry groaned inwardly. “What can Khal Kan do? The Bunts will surely break into the city—”

The poisoned arrows, new to the Jotanians, gave Egir’s green warriors a terrific advantage. That, and their outnumbering hordes, would enable them to scale the walls of Jotan and then the end would be at hand.

“Damn Egir for his deviltry in using those arrows!” Henry muttered. “I wish I could take a dozen machine-guns across. I’d show the cursed traitor.”

It was a vain and idle wish, he knew. Nothing material could traverse the gulf between dream-world and real world, whichever was which. His own body, even—Henry Stevens’ body—never crossed that gulf. AH he took into Thar each night were his memories of Henry Stevens’ life on Earth during the day, and that seemed only a dream.

He could take memory across, though. And that thought gave pause to Henry. A faint gleam of hope appeared on his horizon. As Khal Kan, he would remember everything that he did or learned now, as Henry Stevens. Suppose that he—

“By Heaven!” Henry exclaimed excitedly. “There’s a chance I could do it! A trick to overmatch Egir’s poisoned arrows!”

His wife watched him puzzledly as he pored excitedly over certain volumes of their encyclopedia. She saw him hastily jot down notes, and then for a long time that evening he sat, moving his lips, apparently memorizing.

Henry was vibrant with excitement and hope. He, Henry Stevens of Earth, might be able to save Khal Kan’s city for him!

“If Khal Kan will only do it!” he thought prayerfully. “If he won’t just ignore it as dream—”

Waiting tensely for sleep that night, Henry repeated over and over to himself the simple formula he had gleaned from the encyclopedia.

“Khal Kan must try it!” he told himself desperately.

Sleep came slowly to him. And as he fell asleep, he knew that in his dream he would wake to what might be the last day of Jotan’s existence.…

Khal Kan awoke with that thought from his dream vibrating in his mind like an ominous tolling.

“The last day of Jotan!” he whispered. “By all the gods—no!”

Fiercely, the tall young prince rose and buckled on his sword. It was just dawn, and sea-mists shrouded all the city outside in gray fog.

Golden Wings still lay sleeping, Khal Kan heard a persistent hammering from out in the fog, as he went down to the lower level of the palace. Brusul, in full armor, came stalking up to him.

“All’s quiet,” reported the brawny captain. “The Bunts are still working away at their cursed scaling-ladders. When they are ready, they’ll dear the walls of our men with their damned poisoned arrows, and then come over.”

Khal Kan went out with him and inspected their defenses. As he supervised the placing of their fighting-men around the wall, and gave the white-faced people rough encouragement, something oppressed Khal Kan’s mind. Something he should be doing for the defense of the city—

When he got back to the palace with Brusul, Golden Wings’ slim, leather-clad figure came flying into his arms.

“I dreamed the Bunts were already in the city!” she cried. “And then I awoke and found you gone—”

Khal Kan, soothing her, suddenly stiffened. Her words had recalled that vague, forgotten something that had oppressed him.

“My dream!” he exclaimed. “I remember now—in the dream, on that other world, I learned how to make a weapon against the Bunts.”

It had all come back to him now—the dream in which Henry Stevens had feverishly memorized a formula out of the science of that dream-world of Earth, to help him in his struggle against the Bunts.

For a moment, Khal Kan clutched at new hope. Then his eagerness faded. After all, that was only a dream. Henry Stevens and Earth and its science were only an insubstantial vision of his sleeping mind, and nothing that he learned in that could be of any value.

“I could wish you’d dreamed away the Bunts entirely,” Brusul was saying dryly. “Unfortunately, they’re still outside and it won’t be many hours before they attack.”

Khal Kan was not listening. His mind was revolving the simple formula that Henry Stevens had desperately memorized, in the dream.

“It wouldn’t work,” he thought. “It couldn’t work, when there’s no reality to all that—”

Yet he kept remembering Henry Stevens’ desperate effort to help him. That timid, thin little man he was in his dream each night—that little man had prayed that Khal Kan would not ignore his help, would try the formula.

Khal Kan reached decision. “I’m going to try it—the thing I learned in the dream!” he told the others.

Brusul stared. “Are you wit-struck? Dreams won’t help us now! How could a dream-weapon be of any use?”

“I’m not so sure now it was a dream,” Khal Kan muttered. “Maybe this is the dream, after all. Oh, hell take all speculations—dream or reality, I’m going to try this thing.”

He shot orders. “Bring all the charcoal you can find, all the sulphur from the street of the apothecaries, and all of the white crystals we use for drying fruits. Those crystals were called ‘saltpeter’ in the dream.”

Scared, wondering men brought the materials to the palace. There, Brusul and Zoor and Golden Wings watched mystifiedly as Khal Kan supervised their preparation.

He remembered clearly the formula that Henry Stevens had memorized in the dream. He had the men pound and pulverize and mix, until a big mass of granular black powder was the result.

“Now bring small metal vases—enough to hold all this—and lampwicks and day,” he ordered.

A captain came running, breathless. “The Bunts have finished their ladders and I think they’re soon going to make their attack, sire!” he cried.

“And our leader lingers here, muddling in minerals!” cried Brusul gustily. “Khal Kan, forget this crazy dream and make ready for battle!”

Khal Kan paid no attention. He was having the men stuff the small metal vases with the black powder, stopping their mouths with clay through which a fuse-like wick protruded.

“Distribute these vases to all our men along the walls,” he ordered. “Tell them, that when the Bunts place their ladders, they are to light the fuses and fling the vases down among the green warriors, at my command.”

“Hell destroy all dreams!” raged Brusul. “What good will such a crazy plan do? Do you think dropping vases on the Bunts will stop them?”

“I don’t know,” Khal Kan muttered. “In the dream, I thought it would. The dream-me called the powder ‘gunpowder’ and the vases ‘grenades.’ And in the dream they seemed a more terrible weapon even than the poisoned arrows.”

Yells from the walls and the warning blare of trumpets ripped across the sunlit city. A great cry swept through Jotan’s streets.

“The Bunts are coming!”

“To the wall!” Khal Kan cried.

From the parapet atop the great wall, the rising sun revealed an ominous spectacle. From all around the landward side of Jotan, the hordes of the Bunts were surging toward the city.

First came a line of green bowmen whose hissing, poisoned shafts were already rattling along the top of the wall. Jotanian warriors sank groaning as the swift poison sped into their blood. Khal Kan held his shield up, and swept Golden Wings behind him as they waited.

Behind the first line of bowmen came Bunts carrying long, rough wooden scaling-ladders. Behind these came the main masses of the stocky green men, armed with bows and short-swords, led by Egir himself.

The ladders came up against the wall, and the blood-chilling Bunt yell broke around the city as the green warriors swarmed catlike up them. Joranians who sought to push over the ladders were smitten by arrows.

“Over the wall and open the gates!” Egir’s bull voice was yelling to his green men. “Let us into Jotan!”

The main horde of the Bunts was already surging toward the gates of the city, while their attackers on the ladders sought to win the wall.

“Now—light the fuses and drop the vases!” Khal Kan yelled along the parapet, through the melee.

Torches at readiness set the wicks alight. The seemingly harmless little metal vases were tossed over into the surging mass of the Bunts.

A series of ear-splitting crashes shook the air, like thunder. White smoke drifted away to show masses of the Bunts felled by the explosions.

“Gods!” cried Brusul appaliedly. “Your dream-weapon is thunder of heaven itself!”

“Magic!” yelled the Bunts, shrinking back aghast from their own dead, tumbling in panic off the ladders. “Flee, brothers!”

The fear-maddened green warriors surged back from the walls of Jotan, breaking in panic-stricken, disorganized masses. Egir’s bull voice could be heard raging, trying to rally them, but in vain.

The men of Jotan who had lighted and flung the new weapons were as horrified as their victims. Khal Kan’s yell aroused them.

“Horses, and after them!” he cried. “Now is our chance to avenge yesterday!”

The gates ground open—and every horsemen left in jotan galloped out after Khal Kan and Golden Wings in pursuit of the routed, green men.

The Bunts made hardly any effort to turn and fight They were madly intent on putting as great a distance as possible between them and Jotan.

“It’s Egir I’m after!” Khal Kan cried to Brusul. “While he lives, no safety for Jotan!”

“See—there he rides!” cried Golden Wings’ silvery voice.

Khal Kan yelled and put spur to his horse as he saw Egir and his Bunt captains riding full tilt toward the Dragals, in an effort to escape.

They rode right through the Seeing Bunts in pursuit of the traitor. They were overtaking him, when Egir turned and saw them coming. The Jotanian renegade uttered a yell, and he and his green captains turned.

“’Ware arrows!” shouted Brusul, behind Khal Kan.

Khal Kan saw the Bunts loosing the vicious shafts, but he saw it only vaguely, for only Egir’s sardonic face was clear to him as he charged.

Sword out, he galloped toward his uncle. Something stung his arm, and he heard a scream from Golden Wings and knew an arrow had hit him.

“My dear nephew, you’ve two minutes to live!” panted Egir, his eyes blazing hate and triumph as they met and their swords clashed. “You’re a dead man now—”

Khal Kan felt a cold, deadly numbness creeping through his arm with incredible rapidity. He summoned all his fast-flowing strength to swing his sword up.

It left his guard open and Egir stabbed viciously as their horses wheeled. Then Khal Kan’s nerveless arm brought his blade down.

“This for my father, Egir!”

The sword shore the traitor’s shoulder and neck half through. And a moment after Egir dropped from the saddle, Khal Kan felt his own numb body falling. He could not feel the impact with the ground.

His mind was darkening and everything was spinning around. It was as though he whirled in a black funnel, and was being sucked down into its depths, yet he could still hear voices of those bending over him.

“Khal Kan!” That was Golden Wings, he knew.

He tried to speak up to them out of the roaring darkness that was engulfing him.

“Jotan—safe now, with Egir gone. The kingship to Brusul. Golden Wings—”

He could not form more words. Khal Kan knew that he was dying. But he knew, at last, that Thar was not a dream, for even though his own life was passing, nothing around him was vanishing. But, his darkening brain wondered, if That had been real all the time—

But then, in a flash of light on the very verge of darkness, Khal Kan saw the truth that neither he nor the other had ever imagined.…

Henry Stevens lay dead upon his bed in the neat bedroom of his little suburban cottage. And in the room, his sobbing wife was trying to tell her story to the physician and the psychiatrist.

“It was all so sudden,” she sobbed. “I awoke, and found that Herry was clenching his fists as though in a convulsion and was shouting—something about Jotan being safe now. And then—he was dead—”

The physician was soothing her as he led her to another room. When he came back, his face was keen as he looked at Doctor Thorn.

“You heard her story?” he said to the psychiatrist. “I telephoned you because I understood he’d been consulting you. I can’t understand this thing at all.”

He pointed to Henry’s motionless figure. “The man had nothing organically wrong with him, as I happen to know. Yet he died in his sleep—as though from terrible mental shock.”

“You’ve hit it, Doctor,” nodded Doctor Thorn thoughtfully. “If my guess is right, he was dreaming, and when his dream-self was killed, Henry Stevens died, also.”

He went on to tell the physician of the case.

The practitioner’s face became incredulous as he heard.

“The poor devil!” he ejaculated. “He had that dream and dreamlife all his life long, and when his dream-self died, he died too by mental suggestion.”

“I am not sure that that other life of his, that world of Thar, was a dream,” Doctor Thorn replied soberly.

“Oh, come, Doctor,” protested the other. “If Henry Stevens and Earth were real, and we know they were, Thar and Khal Kan must have been only his dream.”

“I wonder,” replied the psychiatrist. “Did you ever hear of mental rapport? Cases where two people’s minds are so tuned that one experiences the other’s feelings and thoughts, when his own mind is relaxed and quiescent? There have been a good many such provable cases.

“Suppose,” Thorn went on, “that Henry Stevens was a unique case of that. Suppose that his mind happened to be in rapport, from the time of his birth, with the mind of another man—another man, who was not of Earth but of some world far across the universe from ours? Suppose that each man’s subconscious was able to experience the other man’s thoughts and feelings, when his own consciousness was relaxed and sleeping? So that each man, all his life, seemed each night to dream the other man’s life?”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed the practitioner. “If that were true, both Henry Stevens and Khal Kan were real, on far-separated worlds?”

Doctor Thorn nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, and the two men would be so much in rapport that the death of one would kill the other. It’s only a theory, and we can never know if it’s true. Probably he knows, now—”

Henry Stevens, lying there, seemed to be smiling at their speculations. But it was not his own smile that lay upon his face. It was the reckless, gay, triumphant smile of Khal Kan.

THE CITY AT WORLD’S END

CHAPTER I

Cataclysm

Kenniston realized afterward that it was like death. You knew you were going to die someday, but you didn’t believe it. He had known that there was danger of the long-dreaded atomic war beginning with a sneak punch, but he hadn’t really believed it.

Not until that June morning when the missile came down on Middletown. And then there was no time for realization. You don’t hear or see a thing that comes faster than sound. One moment, he was striding down Mill Street toward the plant, getting ready to speak to the policeman coming toward him. The next moment, the sky split open.

It split wide open, and above the whole town there was a burn and blaze of light so swift, so violent, that it seemed the air itself had burst into instantaneous flame. In that fraction of a second, as the sky flared and the ground heaved wildly under his feet, Kenniston knew that the surprise attack had come, and that the first of the long-feared super-atomic bombs had exploded overhead.…

Shock, thought Kenniston, as his mouth crushed against the grimy sidewalk. The shock that keeps a dying man from feeling pain. He lay there, waiting for the ultimate destruction, and the first eye-blinding flare across the heavens faded and the shuddering world grew still. It was over, as quickly as that.

He ought to be dead. He thought it very probable that he was dying right now, which would explain the fading light and the ominous quiet. But in spite of that he raised his head, and then scrambled shakily to his feet, gasping over his own wild heartbeats, fighting an animal urge to run for the mere sake of running. He looked down Mill Street. He expected to see pulverized buildings, smoking craters, fire and steam and devastation. But what he saw was more stunning than that, and in a strange way, more awful.

He saw Middletown lying unchanged and peaceful in the sunlight.

The policeman he had been going to speak to was still there ahead of him. He was getting up slowly from his hands and knees, where the quake had thrown him. His mouth hung open and his cap had fallen off. His eyes were very wide and dazed and frightened. Beyond him was an old woman with a shawl over her head. She, too, had been there before. She was clinging now to a wall, the sack of groceries she had carried split open around her feet, spilling onions and cans of soup across the walk. Cars and street-cars were still moving along the street in the distance, beginning erratically to jerk to a halt. Apart from these small things, nothing was different, nothing at all.

The policeman came up to Kenniston. He looked like a young, efficient officer. Or he would have, if his face had not gone so slack and his eyes so stunned. He asked hoarsely:

“What happened?”

Kenniston answered, and the words sounded queer and improbable as he said them. “We’ve been hit by a bomb—a super-atomic.”

The policeman stared at him. “Are you crazy?”

“Yes,” said Kenniston, “I think maybe I am. I think that’s the only explanation.”

His brain had begun to pound. The air felt suddenly cold and strange. The sunshine was duskier and redder and did not warm him now. The woman in the shawl was crying. Presently, still weeping, she got painfully down upon her thick old knees and Kenniston thought she was going to pray, but instead she began to gather up her onions, fumbling with them as a child does, trying to fit them into the broken paper bag.

“Look,” said the policeman, “I’ve read stuff about those super-atomic bombs, in the papers. It said they were thousands of times more powerful than the atom-bombs they used to have. If one of them hit any place there wouldn’t be anything left of it.” His voice was getting stronger. He was convincing himself. “So no super-atomic bomb could have hit us. It couldn’t have been that.”

“You saw that terrific flash in the sky, didn’t you?” said Kenniston.

“Sure I did, but—” And then the policeman’s face cleared. “Say, it was a fizzle. That’s what it was. This super-atomic bomb they’ve been scaring the world with—it turned out to be just a fizzle.” He laughed noisily, in vast relief. “Isn’t that rich? They tell for years what terrible things it’s going to do, and then it just makes a big fizz and flash like a bad Fourth of July firecracker!”

It could be true, Kenniston thought with a wild surge of hope. It could be true.

And then he looked up and saw the Sun.

“It was maybe a bluff, all the time,” the policeman’s voice rattled on. “They maybe didn’t really have any super-atomic bomb at all.”

Kenniston, without lowering his gaze, spoke in a dry whisper. “They had them, all right. And they used one on us. And I think we’re dead and don’t know it yet We don’t know yet that we’re only ghosts and not living on Earth any more.”

“Not on Earth?” said the policeman angrily. “Now, listen—”

And then his voice trailed away to silence as he followed Kenniston’s staring gaze and looked up at the Sun.

It wasn’t the Sun. Not the Sun they and all the generations of men had known as a golden, dazzling orb. They could look right at this Sun, without blinking. They could stare at it steadily, for it was no more than a very big, dull-glowing red ball with tiny flames writhing around its edges. It was higher in the sky now than it had been before. And the air was cold. “It’s in the wrong place,” said the policeman. “And it looks different.” He groped in half-forgotten high-school science for an explanation. “Refraction. Dust that that fizzle-bomb stirred up—”

Kenniston didn’t tell him. What was the use? What was the good of telling him what he, as a scientist, knew—that no conceivable refraction could make the Sun look like that. But he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

“Sure I’m right,” said the policeman, loudly. He didn’t look up at the sky and Sun, any more. He seemed to avoid looking at them.

Kenniston started on down Mill Street. He had been on his way to the Lab, when this happened. He kept on going now. He wanted to hear what Hubble and the others would say about this.

He laughed a little. “I am a ghost, going to talk with other ghosts about our sudden deaths.” Then he told himself fiercely, “Stop that! You’re a scientist. What good is your science if it cracks up in the face of an unexplained phenomenon?”

That, certainly, was an understatement. A super-atomic bomb went off over a quiet little Midwestern town of fifty thousand people, and it didn’t change a thing except to put a new Sun into the sky. And you called that an unexplained phenomenon.

Kenniston walked on down the street. He walked fast, for the air was unseasonably cold. He didn’t stop to talk to the bewildered-looking people he met. They were mostly men who had been on their way to work in Middletown’s mills when it had happened. They stood now, discussing the sudden flash and shock. The word Kenniston heard most often was “earthquake.” They didn’t look too upset, these men. They looked excited and a little bit glad that something had happened to interrupt their drab daily routine. Some of them were staring up at that strange, dull-red Sun, but they seemed more perplexed than disturbed.

The air was cold and musty. And the red, dusky sunlight was queer. But that hadn’t disturbed these men too much. It was, after all, not much stranger than the chill and the lurid light that often foreshadow a Midwestern thunderstorm.

Kenniston turned in at the gate of the smoke-grimed brick structure that bore the sign, “Industrial Research Laboratories.” The watchman at the gate nodded to him unperturbedly as he let him through.

Neither the watchman nor any of Middletown’s fifty thousand people, except a few city officials, knew that this supposed industrial laboratory actually housed one of the key nerve centers of America’s atomic defense setup.

Clever, thought Kenniston. It had been clever of those in charge of dispersal to tuck this key atomic laboratory into a prosaic little Midwestern mill town.

“But not clever enough,” he thought.

No, not quite clever enough. The unknown enemy had learned the secret, and had struck the first stunning blow of his surprise attack at the hidden nerve center of Middletown.

A super-atomic, to smash that nerve center before war even started. Only, the super-atomic had fizzled. Or had it? The Sun was a different Sun. And the air was strange and cold.

Crisci met Kenniston by the entrance of the big brick building. Crisci was the youngest of the staff, a tall, black-haired youngster—and because he was the youngest, he tried hard not to show emotion now.

“It looks like it’s beginning,” said Crisci, trying to smile. “Atomic Armageddon—the final fireworks.” Then he quit trying to smile. “Why didn’t it wipe us out, Kenniston? Why didn’t it?”

Kenniston asked him, “Don’t the Geigers show anything?”

“Nothing. Not a thing.”

That, Kenniston thought numbly, fitted the crazy improbability of it all. He asked, “Where’s Hubble?”

Crisci gestured vaguely. “Over there. He’s had us trying to call Washington, but the wires are all dead and even the radio hasn’t been able to get through yet.”

Kenniston walked across the cluttered plant yard. Hubble, his chief, stood looking up at the dusky sky and at the red dull Sun you could stare at without blinking. He was only fifty but he looked older at the moment, his graying hair disordered and his thin face tightly drawn.

“There isn’t any way yet to figure out where that missile came from,” Kenniston said.

Then he realized that Hubble’s thoughts weren’t on that, for the other only nodded abstractedly.

“Look at those stars, Kenniston.”

“Stars? Stars, in the daytime—?”

And then, looking up, Kenniston realized that you could see the stars now. You could see them as faint, glimmering points all across the strangely dusky sky, even near the dull Sun.

“They’re wrong,” said Hubble. “They’re very wrong.”

Kenniston asked, “What happened? Did their super-atomic really fizzle?”

Hubble lowered his gaze and blinked at him. “No,” he said softly. “It didn’t fizzle. It went off.”

“But Hubble, if that super-atomic went off, why—”

Hubble ignored the question. He went on into his own office in the Lab, and began to pull down reference volumes. To Kenniston’s surprise, he opened them to pages of astronomical diagrams. Then Hubble took a pencil and began to scrawl quick calculations on a pad.

Kenniston grabbed him by the shoulder. “For Christ’s sake, Hubble, this is no time for scientific theorizing! The town hasn’t been hit, but something big has happened, and—”

“Get the hell away from me,” said Hubble, without turning.

The sheer shock of hearing Hubble swear silenced Kenniston. Hubble went on with his figures, referring often to the books. The office was as silent as though nothing had happened at all. Finally, Hubble turned. His hand shook a little as he pointed to the figures on the pad.

“See those, Ken? They’re proof—proof of something that cannot be. What does a scientist do when he faces that kind of a situation?”

He could see the sick shock and fear in Hubble’s gray face, and it fed his own fear. But before he could speak, Crisci came in.

He said, “We haven’t been able to contact Washington yet. And we can’t understand—our calls go completely unanswered, and not one station outside Middletown seems to be broadcasting.”

Hubble stared at his pad. “It all fits in. Yes, it all fits in.”

“What do you make of it, Doctor?” asked Crisci anxiously. “That bomb went off over Middletown, even though it didn’t hurt us. Yet it’s as though all the world outside Middletown has been silenced!”

Kenniston, cold from what he had seen in Hubble’s face, waited for the senior scientist to tell them what he knew or thought. But the phone rang suddenly with strident loudness.

It was the intercom from the watchman at the gate. Hubble picked it up. After a minute he said, “Yes, let him come in.” He hung up. “It’s Johnson. You know, the electrician who did some installations for us. He lives out on the edge of town. He told the watchman that was why he had to see me—because he lives on the edge of town.”

Johnson, when he came, was a man in the grip of a fear greater than Kenniston had even begun to imagine, and he was almost beyond talking. “I thought you might know,” he said to Hubble. “It seems like somebody’s got to tell me what’s happened, or I’ll lose my mind. I’ve got a cornfield, Mr. Hubble. It’s a long field, and then there’s a fence row, and my neighbor’s barn beyond it.”

He began to tremble, and Hubble said, “What about your cornfield?”

“Part of it’s gone,” said Johnson, “and the fence row, and the barn… Mr. Hubble, they’re all gone, everything…”

“Blast effect,” said Hubble gently. “A bomb hit here a little while ago, you see.”

“No,” said Johnson. “I was in London last war, I know what blast can do. This isn’t destruction. It’s…” He sought for a word, and could not find it. “I thought you might know what it is.”

Kenniston’s chill premonition, the shapeless growing terror in him, became too evil to be borne. He said, “I’m going out and take a look.”

Hubble glanced at him and then nodded, and rose to his feet, slowly, as though he did not want to go but was forcing himself. He said, “We can see everything from the water tower, I think—that’s the highest point in town. You keep trying to get through, Crisci.”

Kenniston walked with him out of the Lab grounds, and across Mill Street and the cluttered railroad tracks to the huge, stilt-legged water tower of Middletown. The air had grown colder. The red sunshine had no warmth in it, and when Kenniston took hold of the iron rungs of the ladder to begin the climb, they were like bars of ice. He followed Hubble upward, keeping his eyes fixed on the retreating soles of Hubble’s shoes. It was a long climb. They had to stop to rest once. The wind blew harder the higher they got, and it had a dry musty taint in it that made Kenniston think of the air that blows from deep rock tombs with dust of ages in them.

They came out at last on the railed platform around the big, high tank. Kenniston looked down on the town. He saw knots of people gathered on the corners, and the tops of cars, a few of them moving slowly but most of them stopped and jamming the streets. There was a curious sort of silence.

Hubble did not bother to look at the town, except for a first brief glance that took it all in, the circumference of Middletown with all its buildings standing just as they always had, with the iron Civil War soldier still stiffly mounting guard on the Square, and the smoke still rising steadily from the stacks of the mills. Then he looked outward. He did not speak, and presently Kenniston’s eyes were drawn also to look beyond the town.

He looked for a long time before it began to penetrate. His retinas relayed the image again and again, but the brain recoiled from its task of making sense out of that image, that unbelievable, impossible… No. It must be dust, or refraction, or an illusion created by the dusky red sunlight, anything but truth. There could not, by any laws known to Creation, be a truth like this one!

The whole countryside around Middletown was gone. The fields, the green, flat fields of the Middle West, and the river, and the streams, and the old scattered farms—they were all gone, and it was a completely different and utterly alien landscape that now stretched outside the town.

Rolling, ocher-yellow plains, sad and empty, lifted toward a ridge of broken hills that had never been there before. The wind blew over that barren, lifeless world, stirring the ocher weeds, lifting heavy little clouds of dust and dropping them back again to earth. The Sun peered down like a great dull eye with lashes of writhing fire, and the glimmering stars swung solemn in the sky, and all of them, the Earth, the stars, the Sun, had a look of death about them, a stillness and a waiting, a remoteness that had nothing to do with men or with anything that lived.

Kenniston gripped the rail tightly, feeling all reality crumbling away beneath him, searching frantically for an explanation, for any rational explanation, of that impossible scene.

“The bomb—did it somehow blast the countryside out there, instead of Middletown?”

“Would it take away a river, and bring instead those hills and that yellow scrub?” said Hubble. “Would any bomb-blast do that?”

“But for God’s sake, then what—”

“It hit us, Kenniston. It went off right over Middletown, and it did something…” He faltered, and then said, “Nobody really knew what a super-atomic bomb would do. There were logical theories and assumptions about it, but nobody really knew anything except that the most violent concentrated force in history would be suddenly released. Well, it was released, over Middletown. And it was violent. So violent that…”

He stopped, again, as though he could not quite muster up the courage to voice the certainty that was in him. He gestured at the dusky sky.

“That’s our Sun, our own Sun—but it’s old now, very old. And that Earth we see out there is old too, barren and eroded and dying. And the stars.… You looked at the stars, Ken, but you didn’t see them. They’re different, the constellations distorted by the motions of the stars, as only millions of years could distort them.”

Kenniston whispered, “Millions of years? Then you think that the bomb…” He stopped, and he knew now how Hubble had felt. How did you say a thing that had never been said before?

“Yes, the bomb,” said Hubble. “A force, a violence, greater than any ever known before, too great to be confined by the ordinary boundaries of matter, too great to waste its strength on petty physical destruction. Instead of shattering buildings, it shattered space and time.”

Kenniston’s denial was a hoarse cry. “Hubble, no! That’s madness! Time is absolute—”

Hubble said, “You know it isn’t. You know from Einstein’s work that there’s no such thing as time by itself, that instead there is a space-time continuum. And that continuum is curved, and a great enough force could hurl matter from one part of the curve to another.”

He raised a shaking hand toward the deathly, alien landscape outside the town.

“And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into this dying, future Earth!”

CHAPTER 2

The Incredible

The rest of the staff was waiting for them when they came back into the Lab grounds. A dozen men, ranging in age from Crisci to old Beitz, standing shivering in the chill red sunlight in front of the building. Johnson was with them, waiting for his answer. Hubble looked at him, and at the others. He said, “I think we’d better go inside.”

They did not ask the questions that were clamoring inside them. Silently, with the jerky awkward movements of men strung so taut that their reflex centers no longer function smoothly, they followed Hubble through the doorway. Kenniston went with them, but not all the way. He turned aside, toward his own office, and said, “I’ve got to find out if Carol is all right.”

Hubble said sharply. “Don’t tell her, Ken. Not yet.”

“No,” said Kenniston. “No, I won’t.”

He went into the small room and closed the door. The telephone was on his desk, and he reached for it, and then he drew his hand away. The fear had altered now into a kind of numbness, as though it were too large to be contained within a human body and had ebbed away, carrying with it all the substances of strength and will as water carries sand. He looked at the black, familiar instrument and thought how improbable it was that there should still be telephones, and fat books beside them with quantities of names and numbers belonging to people who had lived once in villages and nearby towns, but who were not there any more, not since—how long? An hour or so, if you figured it one way. If you figured it another…

He sat down in the chair behind the desk. He had done a lot of hard work sitting in that chair, and now all that work had ceased to matter. Quite a lot of things had ceased to matter. Plans, and ideas, and where you were going to go on your honeymoon, and exactly where you wanted to live, and in what kind of a house. Florida and California and New York were words as meaningless as “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” They were gone, the times and the places, and there wasn’t anything left out of them but Carol herself, and maybe even Carol wasn’t left, maybe she’d been out with her aunt for a little drive in the country, and if she wasn’t in Middletown when it happened she’s gone, gone, gone…

He took the phone in both hands and said a number over and over into it. The operator was quite patient with him. Everybody in Middletown seemed to be calling someone else, and over the roar and click of the exchange and the ghostly confusion of voices he heard the pounding of his own blood in his ears and he thought that he did not have any right to want Carol to be there, and he ought to be praying that she had gone somewhere, because why would he want anybody he loved to have to face what was ahead of them. And what was ahead of them? How could you guess which one, out of all the shadowy formless horrors that might be…

“Ken?” said a voice in his ear. “Ken, is that you? Hello!”

“Carol,” he said. The room turned misty around him and there was nothing anywhere but that voice on the line.

“I’ve been trying and trying to get you, Ken! What on earth happened? The whole town is excited—I saw a terrible flash of lightning, but there wasn’t any storm, and then that quake… Are you all right?”

“Sure, I’m fine…” She wasn’t really frightened yet. Anxious, upset, but not frightened. A flash of lightning, and a quake. Alarming yes, but not terrifying, not the end of the world… He caught himself up, hard. He said, “I don’t know yet what it was.”

“Can you find out? Somebody must know.” She did not guess, of course, that Kenniston was an atomic physicist. He had not been allowed to tell that to anyone, not even his fiancŽe. To her, he was merely a research technician in an industrial laboratory, vaguely involved with test tubes and things. She had never questioned him very closely about his work, apparently content to leave all that up to him, and he had been grateful because it had spared him the necessity of lying to her. Now he was even more grateful, because she would not dream that he might have special information. That way, he could spare her a little longer, get himself in hand before he told her. “I’ll do my best,” he told her. “But until we’re sure, I wish you and your aunt would stay in the house, off the street. No, I don’t think your bridge-luncheon will come off anyway. And you can’t tell what people will do when they’re frightened. Promise? Yes—yes, I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

He hung up, and as soon as that contact with Carol was broken, reality slipped away from him again. He looked around the office, and it became suddenly rather horrible, because it had no longer any meaning. He had an urgent wish to get out of it, yet when he rose he stood for some while with his hands on the edge of the desk, going over Hubble’s words in his mind, remembering how the Sun had looked, and the stars, and the sad, alien Earth, knowing that it was all impossible but unable to deny it. The long hall of time, and a shattering force… He wanted desperately to run away, but there was no place to run to. Presently he went down the corridor to Hubble’s office.

They were all there, the twelve men of the staff, and Johnson. Johnson had gone by himself into a corner. He had seen what lay out there beyond the town, and the others had not. He was trying to understand it, to understand the fact and the explanation of it he had just heard. It was not a pleasant thing, to watch him try. Kenniston glanced at the others. He had worked closely with these men. He had thought he knew them all so well, having seen them under stress, in the moments when their work succeeded and the others when it did not. Now he realized that they were all strangers, to him and to each other, alone and wary with their personal fears.

Old Beitz was saying, almost truculently, “Even if it were true, you can’t say exactly how long a time has passed. Not just from the stars.”

Hubble said, “I’m not an astronomer, but anyone can figure it from the tables of known star-motions, and the change in the constellations. Not exactly, no. But as close as will ever matter.”

“But if the continuum were actually shattered, if this town has actually jumped millions of years…” Beitz’ voice trailed off. His mouth began to twitch and he seemed suddenly bewildered by what he was saying, and he, and all of them, stood looking at Hubble in a haunted silence.

Hubble shook his head. “You won’t really believe, until you see for yourselves. I don’t blame you. But in the meantime, you’ll have to accept my statement as a working hypothesis.”

Morrow cleared his throat and asked, “What about the people out there—the town? Are you going to tell them?”

“They’ll have to know at least part of it,” Hubble said. “It’ll get colder, very much colder, by night, and they’ll have to be prepared for it. But there must not be any panic. The Mayor and the Chief of Police are on their way here now, and we’ll work it out with them.”

“Do they know yet, themselves?” asked Kenniston, and Hubble said, “No.”

Johnson moved abruptly. He came up to Hubble and said, “I don’t get all this scientific talk about space and time. What I want to know is—is my boy safe?”

Hubble stared at him. “Your boy?”

“He went out to Martinsen’s farm early, to borrow a cultivator. It’s two miles out the north road. What about him, Mr. Hubble—is he safe?”

That was the secret agony that had been riding him, the one he had not voiced. Hubble said gently. “I would say that you don’t have to worry about him at all, Johnson.”

Johnson nodded, but still looked worried. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Hubble. I’d better go back now. I left my wife in hysterics.”

A minute or two after he left, Kenniston heard a siren scream outside. It swung into the Lab yard and stopped. “That,” said Hubble, “would be the Mayor.”

A small and infirm reed to lean upon, thought Kenniston, at a time like this. There was nothing particularly wrong about Mayor Garris. He was no more bumbling, inefficient, or venal than the average mayor of any average small city. He liked banquets and oratory, he worried about the right necktie, and he was said to be a good husband and father. But Kenniston could not, somehow, picture Bertram Garris shepherding his people safely across the end of the world. He thought so even less when Garris came in, his bones well padded with the plump pink flesh of good living, his face the perfect pattern of the successful little man who is pleased with the world and his place in it. Just now he was considerably puzzled and upset, but also rather elated at the prospect of something important going on. Kimer, the Chief of Police, was another matter. He was a large angular man with a face that had seen many grimy things and had learned from them a hard kind of wisdom. Not a brilliant man, Kenniston thought, but one who could get things done. And he was worried, far more worried than the Mayor. Garris turned immediately to Hubble. It was obvious that he had a great respect for him and was proud to be on an equal footing with such an important person as one of the nation’s top atomic scientists. “Is there any news yet, Doctor Hubble? We haven’t been able to get a word from outside, and the wildest rumors are going around. I was afraid at first that you might have had an explosion here in the laboratory, but…”

Kimer interrupted him. “Talk is going around that an atomic bomb hit here, Doctor Hubble. Some of the people are getting scared. If enough of them get to believe it, we’ll have a panic on our hands. I’ve got our officers on the streets soothing ’em down, but I’d like to have a straight story they’ll believe.”

“Atomic bomb!” said Mayor Garris. “Preposterous. We’re all alive, and there’s been no damage. Doctor Hubble will tell you that atomic bombs…”

For the second time he was cut short. Hubble broke in sharply. “We’re not dealing with an ordinary bomb. And the rumors are true, as far as they go.” He paused, and went on more slowly, making every word distinct, “A super-atomic was exploded an hour ago, for the first time in history, right here.”

He let that sink in. It was a lingering and painful process, and while it was going on Kenniston looked away, up through the window at the dusky sky and the sullen red Sun, and felt the knot in his stomach tighten. We were warned, he thought. We were all warned for years that we were playing with forces too big for us.

“It didn’t destroy us,” Hubble was saying. “We’re lucky that way. But it did have certain—effects.”

“I don’t understand,” said the Mayor piteously. “I simply don’t—Certain effects? What?”

Hubble told him, with quiet bluntness.

The Mayor and the Chief of Police of Middletown, normal men of a normal city, adjusted to life in a normal world, listening to the incredible. Listening, trying to comprehend—trying, and failing, and rejecting it utterly.

“That’s insane,” said Garris angrily. “Middletown thrown into the future? Why, the very sound of it… What are you trying to do, Doctor Hubble?”

He said a great deal more than that. So did Kimer. But Hubble wore them down. Quietly, implacably, he pointed to the alien landscape around the town, the deepening cold, the red, aged Sun, the ceasing of all wire and radio communication from outside. He explained, sketchily, the nature of time and space, and how they might be shattered. His scientific points they could not understand. But those they took on faith, the faith which the people of the Twentieth Century had come to have in the interpreters of the complex sciences they themselves were unable to comprehend. The physical facts they understood well enough. Too well, once they were forced to it.

It got home at last. Mayor Garris sank down into a chair, and his face was no longer pink, and the flesh sagged on it. His voice was no more than a whimper when finally he asked, “What are we going to do?”

Hubble had an answer ready, to a part of that question, at least. “We can’t afford a panic. The people of Middletown will have to learn the truth slowly. That means that none of them must go outside the town yet—or they’d learn at once. I’d suggest you announce the area outside town is possibly radioactive contaminated, and forbid anyone to leave.”

Police Chief Kimer grasped with pathetic eagerness at the necessity of coping with a problem he could comprehend. “I can put men and barricades at all the street-ends, to see to that.”

“And our local National Guard company is assembling now at the Armory,” put in Mayor Garris. His voice was shaky, his eyes still stunned.

Hubble asked, “What about the city’s utilities?”

“Everything seems to be working—power, gas and water,” the Mayor answered.

They would, Kenniston thought. Middletown’s coal-steam electric generation plant, and its big watertower, and its artificial gas plant, had all come through time with them.

“They, and all food and fuel, must be rationed,” Hubble was saying. “Proclaim it as an emergency measure.”

Mayor Garris seemed to feel a little better at being told what to do. “Yes. We’ll do that at once.” Then he asked, timidly, “Isn’t there any way of getting in touch with the rest of the country?”

“The rest of the country,” Hubble reminded him, “is some millions of years in the dead past. You’ll have to keep remembering that.”

“Yes—of course. I keep forgetting,” said the Mayor. He shivered, and then took refuge in the task set him. “We’ll get busy at once.”

When the car had borne the two away, Hubble looked haggardly at his silent colleagues.

“They’ll talk, of course. But if the news spreads slowly, it won’t be so bad. It’ll give us a chance to find out a few things first.”

Crisci began to laugh, a little shrilly. “If it’s true, this is a side-splitting joke! This whole town flung into the end of the world and not even knowing it yet! All these fifty thousand people, not guessing yet that their Cousin Agnes in Indianapolis has been dead and dust for millions of years!”

“And they mustn’t guess,” Hubble said. “Not yet. Not until we know what we face in this future Earth.”

He went on, thinking aloud. “We need to see what’s out there, outside the town, before we can plan anything. Kenniston, will you get a jeep and bring it back here? Bring spare gasoline, and some warm clothing, too. We’ll need it out there. And Ken—bring two guns.”

CHAPTER 3

Dying Planet

Kenniston walked back down Mill Street, toward the garage where he had left his car a billion years ago when such things were still important. He knew they kept a jeep there for road service, and he knew also that they would not have any need for it now because there were no longer any roads. He wished he had a topcoat. At the rate the air was chilling off it would be below zero by nightfall.

Quite literally, he began to feel as though he were walking in a nightmare. Above him was an alien sky, and the red light of it lay strangely on the familiar walls of brick. But the walls themselves were not altered. That, he decided, was the really shocking thing—the drab everyday appearance of the town. When time and space gape open for the first time in history, and you go through into the end of the world, you expect everything to be different. Middletown did not look different, except for that eerie light.

There were a lot of people on Mill Street, but then, there always were a good many. It was the street of dingy factories and small plants that connected Middletown with the shabby South Side, and there were always buses, cars, pedestrians on it Perhaps the bumbling traffic was a bit more disorganized than usual, and the groups of pedestrians tended to clot together and chatter more excitedly, but that was all.

Kenniston knew a number of these people, by now, but he did not stop to talk to them. He was somehow unwilling to meet their eyes. He felt guilty, to know the truth where they did not. What if he should tell them, what would they do? It was a terrible temptation, to rid himself of his secret. His tongue ached to cry it out.

There were people like old Mike Witter, the fat red-faced watchman who sat all day in his little shack at the railroad crossing, with his small rat-terrier curled up by his feet. The terrier was crouching now, shivering, her eyes bright and moist with fear, as though she guessed what the humans did not, but old Mike was as placid as ever.

“Cold, for June!” he hailed Kenniston. “Coldest I ever saw. I’m going to build a fire. Never saw such a freak storm!”

There was the knot of tube-mill workers at the next corner, in front of Joe’s Lunch. They were arguing, and two or three of them that Kenniston knew turned toward him.

“Hey, there’s Mr. Kenniston, one of the guys at the Industrial Lab. Maybe he’d know!” Their puzzled faces, as they asked, “Has a war started? Have you guys heard anything?”

Before he could answer, one asserted loudly, “Sure it’s a war. Didn’t someone say an atomic bomb went off overhead and missed fire? Didn’t you see the flash?”

“Hell, that was only a big lightning flash.”

“Are you nuts? It nearly blinded me.”

Kenniston evaded them. “Sorry, boys—I don’t know much more than you. There’ll be some announcement soon.”

As he went on, a bewildered voice enquired, “But if a war’s started, who’s the enemy?”

The enemy, Kenniston thought bitterly, is a country that perished and was dust—how many millions of years ago?

There were loafers on the Mill Street bridge, staring down at the muddy bed of the river and trying to explain the sudden vanishing of its water. In the beer-parlors that cheered the grimy street, there were more men than was normal for this hour. Kenniston could hear them as he passed, their voices high, excited, a little quarrelsome, but with no edge of terror.

A woman called across the street from an upstairs flat window, to the other housewife who was sweeping the opposite front porch. “I’m missing every one of my radio stories! The radio won’t get anything but the Middletown station today!”

Kenniston was glad when he got to Bud’s Garage. Bud Martin, a tall thin young man with a smudge of grease on his lip, was reassembling a carburetor with energetic efficiency and criticizing his harried young helper at the same time.

“Haven’t got to your car yet, Mr. Kenniston,” he protested. “I said around five, remember?”

Kenniston shook his head and told Martin what he wanted. Martin shrugged. “Sure, you can hire the jeep. I’m too busy to answer road calls today, anyway.” He did not seem particularly interested in what Kenniston intended to do with the jeep. The carburetor resisted and he swore at it.

A man in a floury baker’s apron stuck his head into the garage. “Hey, Bud, hear the news? The mills just shut down—all of them.”

“Ah, nuts,” said Martin. “I been hearing news all morning. Guys running in and out with the damnedest stories. I’m too busy to listen to ’em.”

Kenniston thought that probably that was the answer to the relative calm in Middletown. The men, particularly, had been too busy. The strong habit patterns of work, a job at hand to be done, had held them steady so far.

He sighed. “Bud,” he said, “I’m afraid this story is true.”

Martin looked at him sharply and then groaned. “Oh, Lord, another recession! This’ll ruin business—and me with the garage only half paid for!”

What was the use of telling him, Kenniston thought, that the mills had been hastily shut down to conserve precious fuel, and that they would never open again.

He filled spare gasoline cans, stacked them in the back of the jeep, and drove northward.

Topcoats were appearing on Main Street now. There were knots of people on street corners, and people waiting for buses were looking up curiously at the red Sun and dusky sky. But the stores were open, housewives carried bulging shopping-bags, kids went by on bicycles. It wasn’t too changed, yet. Not yet.

Nor was quiet Walters Avenue, where he had his rooms, though the rows of maples were an odd color in the reddish light. Kenniston was glad his landlady was out, for he didn’t think he could face many more puzzled questions right now.

He loaded his hunting kit—a .30-30 rifle and a 16-gauge repeating shotgun with boxes of shells—into the jeep. He put on a mackinaw, brought a leather coat for Hubble, and remembered gloves. Then, before re-entering the jeep, he ran down the street half a block to Carol Lane’s house.

Her aunt met him at the door. Mrs. Adams was stout, pink and worried.

“John, I’m so glad you came! Maybe you can tell me what to do. Should I cover my flowers?” She babbled on anxiously. “It seems so silly, on a June day. But it’s so much colder. And the petunias and bleeding-heart are so easily frost-bitten. And the roses—”

“I’d cover them, Mrs. Adams,” he told her. “The prediction is that it will be even colder.”

She threw up her hands. “The weather, these days! It never used to be like this.” And she hurried away to secure covering for the flowers, the flowers that had but hours to live. It hit Kenniston with another of those sickening little shocks of realization. No more roses on Earth, after today. No more roses, ever again.

“Ken—did you find out what happened?” It was Carol’s voice behind him, and he knew, even before he turned to face her, that he could not evade with her as he had with the others. She didn’t know about science, and such things as time warps and shattered continuums had never entered her head. But she knew him, and she gave him no chance to temporize.

“Are they true, the stories about an atom bomb going off over Middletown?”

She had had time, since he called her, to become really alarmed. She had dark hair and dark eyes. She was slim in a sturdy fashion, and her ankles were nice, and her mouth was firm and sweet. She liked Tennyson and children and small dogs, and her ways were the ways of pleasant houses and fragrant kitchens, of quiet talk and laughter. It seemed a dreadful thing to Kenniston that she should be standing in a dying garden asking questions about atomic bombs.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re true.” He watched the color drain out of her face, and he went on hastily, “Nobody was killed. There are no radiation effects in the city, nothing at all to be afraid of.”

“There is something. I can see it in your face.”

“Well, there are things we’re not sure of yet. Hubble and I are going to investigate them now.” He caught her hands. “I haven’t time to talk, but…”

“Ken,” she said. “Why you? What would you know about such terrible things?”

He saw it coming, now, the necessity he had always a little dreaded and had hoped might be forever postponed, the time when Carol had to learn about his work. With what eyes would she look on him when she knew? He was not sure, not sure at all. He was glad he could evade a little longer.

He smiled. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Stay in the house, Carol, promise me. Then I won’t worry.”

“All right,” she said slowly. And then, sharply, “Ken…”

“What?”

“Nothing. Be careful.”

He kissed her, and ran back toward the jeep. Thank God she wasn’t the hysterical type. That would have been the last straw, right now.

He climbed in and drove to the Lab, wondering all the way what this was going to do to Carol and himself, whether they would both be alive tomorrow or the next day, and if so, what kind of a life it would be. Grim, cold thoughts, and bitter with regret. He had had it all so nicely planned, before this nightmare happened. The loneliness would all be over, and the rootless drifting from place to place. He would have a home again, which he had not had since his parents died, and as much peace as a man was allowed in the modern world. He would have the normal things a man needed to keep him steady and give meaning to his years. And now…

Hubble was waiting for him outside the Lab, holding a Geiger counter and a clutter of other instruments. He placed them carefully in the jeep, then put on the leather coat and climbed into the seat beside Kenniston.

“All right, Ken—let’s go out the south end of town. From the hills we glimpsed that way, we can see more of the lay of the land.”

They found a barricade, and police on guard, at the southern edge of town. There they were delayed until the Mayor phoned through a hasty authorization for Hubble and Kenniston to go out “for inspection of the contaminated region.”

The jeep rolled down a concrete road between green little suburban farms, for less than a mile. Then the road and the green farmland suddenly ended.

From this sharp demarcation, rolling ocher plains ran away endlessly to east and west. Not a tree, not a speck of green broke the monotony. Only the ocher-yellow scrub, and the dust, and the wind.

Hubble, studying his instruments, said, “Nothing. Not a thing. Keep going.”

Ahead of them the low hills rose, gaunt and naked, and above was the vast bowl of the sky, a cold darkness clamped down upon the horizons. Dim Sun, dim stars, and under them no sound but the cheerless whimper of the wind.

Its motor rattling and roaring, its body lurching over the unevenness of the ocher plain, the jeep bore them out into the silence of the dead Earth.

CHAPTER 4

Dead City

Kenniston concentrated on the wheel, gripping it until his hands ached. He stared fixedly at the ground ahead, noting every rock, guiding the jeep carefully across shallow gullies, driving as though there were nothing in the universe but the mechanical act. He envied the jeep its ability to chug unemotionally over the end of the world. It struck him as so amusing that he laughed a little.

Hubble’s fingers clamped his shoulder, hard enough to hurt even through the heavy coat. “Don’t, Ken.”

Kenniston turned his head. He saw that Hubble’s face was drawn and gray, and that his eyes were almost pleading.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Hubble nodded. “I know. I’m having a hard enough time hanging on myself.”

They went on across the empty plain, toward the low skeletal hills that were like bony knees thrust up from the ocher dust. Soon the jeep was climbing an easy slope, its motor clattering and roaring. Somehow, the familiar motor sound only served to emphasize the fact that around them lay the silence and red dusk of world’s end. Kenniston wished that Hubble would say something, anything. But the older man did not, and Kenniston’s own tongue was frozen. He was lost in a nightmare, and there was nothing to do but drive.

A sudden whistling scream came piping down the slope at them. Both men started violently. With hands slippery with cold sweat, Kenniston swung the jeep a little and saw a brown, furry shape about the size of a small horse bolting over the ridge, going with long, awkward bounds.

Kenniston slowed down until he had stopped shaking. Hubble said in a low whisper, “Then there is still animal life on Earth—of a sort. And look there—” He pointed to a deep little pit in the dusty ground with a ridge of freshly dark new soil around it. “The thing was digging there. Probably for water. The surface is arid, so it must dig to drink.”

They stopped the jeep, and examined the pit and the scrub around it. There were marks of teeth on the bark of the low shrubs.

“Rodential teeth,” said Hubble. “Enormously larger than anything like them occurring in our time, but still recognizable.” They looked at each other, standing in the chill red light. Then Hubble turned back to the jeep. “We’ll go on.”

They went on, up the ridge. They saw two more of the pits made by the diggers, but these were old and crumbling. The blind red eye of the Sun watched them coldly. Kenniston thought of a frightened, furry thing loping on and on over the ocher desolation that once long ago had been the home of men.

They came up onto the low ridge, and he stopped the jeep so they could look out across the red-lit plain beyond.

Hubble stared southwest, and then his hands began to tremble a little.

“Ken, do you see it?” Kenniston looked that way, and saw.

The stunning shock of relief and joy! The wild gladness at finding that you and your people are not alone on a lifeless Earth!

Out there on the barren plain stood a city. A city of white buildings, completely enclosed and roofed and bounded by the great shimmering bubble of a transparent dome.

They looked and looked, savoring the exquisite delight of relief. They could see no movement in that domed city at this distance, but just to see it was enough.

Then, slowly, Hubble said, “There are no roads. No roads across the plain.”

“Perhaps they don’t need roads. Perhaps they fly.” Instinctively both men craned their necks to examine the bleak heavens, but there was nothing there but the wind and the stars and the dim Sun with its Medusa crown of flames.

“There aren’t any lights, either,” said Hubble.

“It’s daytime,” said Kenniston. “They wouldn’t need lights. They’d be used to this dusk. They’ve had it a long time.”

A sudden nervousness possessed him. He could barely perform the accustomed motions of starting the jeep again, grating the gears horribly, letting in the clutch with a lurching jerk.

“Take it easy,” said Hubble. “If they’re there, there’s no hurry. If they’re not…” His voice was not quite steady. After a moment he finished, “There’s no hurry then, either.”

Words. Nothing but words. It seemed to Kenniston that he could not bear the waiting. The plain stretched endlessly before him. The jeep seemed to crawl. Rocks and pits and gullies moved themselves maliciously into its path. The city mocked, and came no nearer.

Then, all at once, the domed city was full before them. It loomed in the sky like a glassy mountain out of fairy tale, for from this angle its curved surface reflected the sunlight.

Here, at last, they struck a smooth, broad road. It went straight toward a high, arched portal in the glassy wall of the city. The portal was open.

“If they domed this city to keep it warm, why should the door be open?” Hubble said.

Kenniston had no answer for that. No answer, except the one that his mind refused to accept.

They drove through the portal, were beneath the city dome. And after the emptiness of the plain, the weight of this city and its mighty shield was a crushing thing.

And it was warmer here beneath the dome. Not really warm, but the air here lacked the freezing chill of the outside.

They went down a broad avenue, going slowly now, timidly, shaken by the beating of their own hearts. And the noise of the motor was very loud in the stillness, echoed and re-echoed from many facets of stone—blasphemously loud, against the silence. Dust blew heavily along the pavement, hung dun-colored veils across the open places where boulevards met. It lay in ruffled drifts in the sheltered spots, in doorways and arches and the corners of window ledges.

The buildings were tall and massive, infinitely more beautiful and simple in line than anything Kenniston had ever imagined. A city of grace and symmetry and dignity, made lovely with the soft tints and textures of plastics, the clean strength of metal and stone.

A million windows looked down upon the jeep and the two men from another time. A million eyes dimmed with cataracts of dust, empty, blind. Some were open, some shut, but none saw.

The chill wind from the portal whispered in and out of sagging doorways, prowling up and down the streets, wandering restlessly across the wide parks that were no longer green and bright with flowers, but only wastes of scrub and drifting dust. Nowhere was there anything but the little wind that stirred. Yet Kenniston drove on. It seemed too terrible a thing to accept, that this great domed city was only a shell, an abandoned corpse, and that Middletown was alone on the face of the dying Earth.

He drove on shouting, crying out, sounding the horn in a sort of frenzy, both of them straining their eyes into the shadowy streets. Surely, somewhere in this place that men had built, there must be a human face, a human voice! Surely, in all these countless empty rooms and halls, there was space enough for life! But there was no life.

Kenniston drove more and more slowly. He ceased to sound the horn and call out. Presently he ceased even to look. He allowed the jeep to roll to a halt in a great central plaza. He cut the motor, and the silence descended upon him and Hubble like an avalanche.

He bowed his head in his hands and sat that way for a long time. He heard Hubble’s voice saying, “They’re all dead and gone.”

Kenniston raised his head. “Yes. Dead and gone, all of them, long ago.” He looked around the beautiful buildings. “You know what that means, Hubble. It means that Earth won’t support human life any more. For even in this domed city they couldn’t live.”

“But why couldn’t they?” Hubble said. He pointed to a wide space of low, flat, open tanks that covered acres of the city nearby. “Those were hydroponic tanks, I think. They could raise food in them.”

“If they had water. Perhaps that’s what ran out on them.” Hubble shook his head. “Those ratlike digging animals we saw could find water. Men could find it, too. I’m going to see.” He got out of the jeep and walked toward the dusty tanks nearby. Kenniston dully watched him.

But presently he too climbed out, and began looking into the buildings around the plaza. He could see little but lofty, shadowy rooms illuminated only by the sad light that filtered through dusty windows. In some of the rooms was heavy furniture of metal, massive yet graceful. In others, nothing but the quiet dust.

A great sadness and futility came upon Kenniston as he went slowly around the silent streets. What did it matter, after all, that a town lost out of its time was facing death? Here a race had died, and the face of the Earth was barren wilderness. Kenniston was roused from his numbness by Hubble’s voice. “There’s still water there, Ken—big reservoirs of it under those tanks. So that isn’t what ended them. It was something else.”

“What difference does it make now what it was?” Kenniston said heavily.

“It makes a difference,” Hubble said. “I’ve been thinking—But there isn’t time to talk now. The night and cold are coming.”

With a start, Kenniston realized that the Sun was sinking in the west, and that the shadow of the mighty buildings lay black upon the streets of the city. He shivered a little, and led the way back to the jeep. Again, its clattering roar profaned the deathly silence as they drove back to and through the portal.

“We have to get back,” Hubble was saying. “They don’t know yet in Middletown what they’re facing.”

“If we tell them of this place,” Kenniston said, “if they learn that there are no more people, that they’re maybe all alone on Earth, they’ll go mad with panic.”

The Sun was very low, a splotch of crimson that bulked huge in the western sky as the jeep whined and lurched toward the ridge. The stars were brighter, the unfamiliar stars that had done with man. The cold became more piercing by the minute, as the dusk deepened.

A horror of the dying planet’s gathering night gripped both men. They uttered exclamations of shaken relief when the jeep finally topped the ridge.

For there ahead, incongruous on this nighted elder Earth, gleamed the familiar street lights of Middletown. The bright axes of Main Street and Mill Street, the fainter gridiron of the residential sections, the red neon beer signs of South Street—all shining out on the icy night of a dead world.

“I forgot about anti-freeze in the jeep’s radiator,” Kenniston said, inconsequentially.

It was that cold, now. The wind had the edge of a razor of ice, and even in their heavy coats they couldn’t stop shivering.

Hubble nodded. “People have to be warned about things like that. They don’t know yet how cold it will be tonight.”

Kenniston said hopelessly, “But after tonight—when the fuel and food are gone, what then? Is there any use struggling?”

“Why, no, if you look at it that way, there’s no use,” Hubble said. “Stop the jeep, and we’ll lie down beside it and freeze to death quickly and comfortably.”

Kenniston drove in silence for a moment. Then he said, “You’re right.”

“It isn’t completely hopeless,” Hubble said. “There may be other domed cities on Earth that aren’t dead. People, help, companionship. But we have to hang on, until we find them. That’s what I’ve been thinking about—how to hang on.” He added, as they neared the town, “Drive to City Hall first.”

The barricade at the end of Jefferson Street had a leaping bonfire beside it now. The police guards, and a little knot of uniformed National Guardsmen, had been staring out into the gathering darkness. They greeted the jeep excitedly, asking eager questions, their breath steaming on the frosty air. Hubble steadily refused answers. There would be announcements soon.

But the terrier-like little police captain who cleared the way through the group for them had his own questions before they left him. “They’re talking stuff around City Hall about the whole Earth being dead. What’s there to this story about falling through time?”

Hubble evaded. “We’re not sure of anything yet. It’ll take time to find out.”

The police captain asked shrewdly, “What did you find out there? Any sign of life?”

“Why, yes, there’s life out there,” Hubble said. “We didn’t meet any people yet, but there’s life.”

Furred and furtive life timidly searching for its scant food, Kenniston thought. The last life, the poor last creatures who were the inheritors of Earth.

Swept by an icy wind, South Street was as empty-looking as on a February night. But the red beer signs beckoned clamorously, and the bars seemed crowded.

Bundled-up children were hanging about the pond in Mill Street Park. Kenniston realized the reason for their whooping excitement when he saw the thin ice that already sheeted the pond. The cold was already driving the crowd off Main Street. Yet puzzled-looking people still clotted at corners, gesturing, arguing.

Hubble said suddenly, “They have to be told, Ken. Now. Unless they know the truth, we’ll never get them to do the things that must be done.”

“They won’t believe,” Kenniston said. “Or if they do, it’ll likely start a panic.”

“Perhaps. We’ll have to risk that. I’ll get the Mayor to make the announcement over the radio station.”

When Kenniston started to follow Hubble out of the jeep at City Hall, the other stopped him.

“I won’t need you right now, Ken. And I know you’re worried about Carol. Go on and see she’s all right.”

Kenniston drove north through streets already almost deserted. The cold was deepening, and the green leaves of trees and shrubs hung strangely limp and lifeless. He stopped at his lodgings. His landlady’s torrent of questions he answered with a reference to a forthcoming announcement that sent her hurrying to her radio. He went up to his rooms and dug out a bottle of Scotch and drank off half a tumbler straight. Then he went to Carol’s house.

From its chimney, as from all the chimneys along the street, smoke was curling up. He found Carol and her aunt beside a fireplace blaze.

“It won’t be enough,” Kenniston told them. “We’ll need the furnace going. And the storm windows up.”

“In June?” wailed Mrs. Adams, shocked again by the crazy vagaries of weather.

Carol came and stood before him. “You know a lot you’re not telling us, Ken. Maybe you think you’re being kind, to spare us, but—I want to know.”

“As soon as I get the house fixed up,” said Kenniston heavily, “I’ll tell you what I can. Turn the radio on, Mrs. Adams, and keep it going.”

It seemed strange to him that the end of the world meant fussing with furnace-shakers and ashes in a cold basement, hauling out storm windows and swearing at catches that wouldn’t catch. He worked outside in almost total darkness, his hands stiff with the frigid chill.

As though she could no longer endure the waiting, Carol came out as Kenniston finished with the windows. He heard her low, startled cry and turned, alert for any danger. But she was standing still, looking at the eastern sky. An enormous dull-copper shield was rising there. The Moon—but a Moon many times magnified, swollen to monstrous size, its glaring craters and plains and mountain chains frighteningly clear to the unaided eye. Kenniston had a moment of vertigo, a feeling that that unnatural bulk was about to topple forward and crush them, and then Carol had him by the arms in such a painful grip that he forgot about the Moon.

“What is it, what’s happening?” she cried, and for the first time her voice had a shrill edge of hysteria.

Mrs. Adams called from the doorway to come quickly. “It’s the Mayor. He’s going to make an important announcement.”

Kenniston followed them inside. Yes, an important announcement, he thought. The most important ever.

World’s end should be announced by a voice of thunder speaking from the sky. By the trumpets of the archangels. Not by the scared, hesitating voice of Mayor Bertram Garris.

Even now, politician-like, Mayor Garris tried to shift responsibility a little. He told what he had to tell, but he prefixed it by, “Doctor Hubble and his associates are of the opinion that—” and, “It would appear from scientific evidence that—” But he told it. And the silence that followed in the living room of Mrs. Adams’ comfortable house was, Kenniston knew, only a part of the stunned silence that whelmed all Middletown.

Later, he knew, would come the outburst. But now they could not speak, they could only look at him with terrified faces pleading for a reassurance that he could not give.

CHAPTER 5

In the Red Dawn

Kenniston was aroused next morning by the sharp summons of the telephone. He awoke with chill, stiff limbs on the sofa where he had dozed fitfully during the night. He had fired the coal furnace half a dozen times, but the house was cold and white frost was thick on the storm windows. He stood up, heavy with sleep, oppressed with a sense of evil things but still mercifully vague, and stumbled mechanically toward the phone. It was not until he heard Hubble’s voice on the wire that his mind cleared and he remembered yesterday.

Hubble’s message was brief. “Will you get over here, Ken? The Keystone coal yard. I’m afraid there’s going to be trouble.” Kenniston said, “Right away.” He hung up and stood where he was for a moment, painfully adjusting himself to the realization of how different today was from all the other days of his life. His hands and feet were numb, and his breath steamed faintly in the room. Presently he stirred himself, going hastily to the cellar, where he dug into the dwindling dregs of last winter’s coal.

Carol was there when he went back up. She wore her fur coat over her night things, and her eyes were heavy and shadowed, as though she had not slept much. “The phone woke me,” she said. “Is it…?”

She did not finish. It was ridiculous to inquire whether the call had brought bad news. They were all existing in a horror dream in which everything was bad.

He only told her that Hubble wanted him for a while. Then, a little hesitantly, he put his arms around her. “You’re all right now?” he asked.

“Yes. Ken. I’m all right.” But her voice was remote and tired, and had no life in it.

Kenniston did not refer to the night before, to the time after the Mayor’s apocalpytic announcement. Of all the bad moments he had had that day, that one had been the worst. Mrs. Adams did the expected things, which he could cope with by means of brandy and ammonia capsules, but Carol did not. She sat quite still, looking at him in a way that he had never seen before. The Mayor had told the full truth about the Industrial Research Laboratory. It had been necessary, to explain why Hubbies’ statements were authoritative. Kenniston wished that he had told Carol about it himself. It seemed an unimportant thing in the face of the world’s end, and yet he felt that to her it was not unimportant at all. He could not talk it out with her then, with Mrs. Adams’ hysterics dominating everything, and she had not come out to him later, and now, facing her again this morning, Kenniston felt unsure of himself and of her for the first time since he had met her.

“Stay inside and keep the furnace going,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He kissed her, and she stood there in the circle of his arms, neither yielding nor resisting. He said, almost desperately, “Don’t give up, Carol. We’ll find an answer to it all, somehow.”

She nodded and said, “Yes. Be careful,” and turned away. Kenniston went out alone, into the bitter morning.

It was still half dark, for the sullen Sun had not quite risen, sprawling in the east like some bloated monster heavy with blood. He refilled the jeep’s radiator, which he had drained the night before. It was very still, he noticed. The mill whistles, the delivery trucks, the peremptory voices of locomotives quarrelling at the Junction—all were gone. Even the children were silent now, afraid of the red, cold dawn. The roses all were dead, and the frost had blackened the summer shrubs and trees. The streets seemed empty as Kenniston drove the jeep down Main Street. Middletown had taken on, overnight, the aspect of a tomb. Smoke arose from every chimney, in the houses where the people crouched indoors, peering sometimes with pale faces framed in frost-rimed glass as the jeep went clattering by in the silence. From every church he passed came sounds of hymns and praying. The bars, too, were noisy, having apparently defied law to remain open all night.

Kenniston realized that this town was dying as it stood. Fuel would run out fast, and without it life could not survive these bitter nights. A feeling of utter hopelessness swept over him. It seemed ironic that Middletown should have come safely through the most staggering cataclysm in history, only to perish miserably of cold.

Dimly, in the back of his mind, a thought began to form. It tempered his hopelessness a little, but before he could get it clear, he had made the turn into Vine Street, and the Keystone coal yard lay before him. And at that place in this still and deathly city, there was life and noise enough.

Policemen and National Guardsmen formed a cordon around the yard and its great black heaps of coal. They faced a crowd—an ugly crowd, still only muttering, but bound for trouble. Kenniston saw people he knew in that crowd, people who sat on their front porches in the warm summer nights and talked with neighbors and laughed. Mill hands, merchants, housewives—solid, decent folk, but turned wolfish now with the cold and the fear of dying.

Hubble met him inside the yard. A worried police sergeant was with him, and Borchard, who owned the yard.

“They were starting to loot the coal piles,” Hubble said. “Poor devils, it was summer and they didn’t have much fuel. Some of them burned their furniture last night to keep alive.”

Borchard said anxiously, “We don’t want to have to kill anyone. And right now, they’ll believe you scientists before anyone else.”

Hubble nodded. “You talk to them, Ken. You’ve gotten to know them better than I have, and they’ll trust you more.”

Kenniston said, “The hell they will. And anyway, what’ll I say to them? ‘Go home and freeze to death quietly, like gentlefolk, and let’s not have any nasty scenes.’ They’ll love that.”

“Maybe they don’t have to freeze,” said Hubble. “Maybe there’s an answer to that.”

The half-formed thought in the back of Kenniston’s mind leaped forward. He looked at Hubble, and he knew that the older man had had that same thought, but sooner and clearer. A small flicker of hope began to stir again in Kenniston.

“The domed city,” he said.

Hubble nodded. “Yes. It retains heat to a considerable degree, at night. We saw that. That’s why the dome was built—how long ago? No matter. It’s our only half-warm refuge. We have to go there, Ken, all of us. And soon! We can’t go through many more nights here!”

“But will they go? And if they do, what’ll happen when they see that city and realize Earth is a dead world?”

Hubble made an impatient gesture. “We’ll have to take care of that when it comes. The thing now is to give these people some hope. Tell them to wait in their homes, that soon they’ll be safe. Tell them anything you like, but make them go!”

Kenniston scrambled up a black ridge of coal, to stand above the crowd. From outside the cordon they snarled at him when he began. But he shouted them down, calling out the names of the ones he knew, ordering them to listen—being masterful, while his heart pounded with the same dread that drove the men and women in the street.

“Don’t talk to us about law when it’s the end of the world!” yelled a hard-faced woman.

“It’s the end of nothing unless you lose your heads,” Kenniston hammered. “The Mayor is arranging now to give you what you want—an answer to how you’re going to live and be safe. Your lives and the lives of your families depend on how you cooperate. Go home to your radios and wait for the orders.”

“Will they give us coal?” shouted a burly millhand.

“Coal, food, everything you need. Nobody’s going to cheat anyone. We’re all in the same boat. We’ll stay in, or get out, together. Now go home and keep your families together and wait.”

He called suddenly to the men on guard, “You, too! Get out of here and report back to your headquarters! The orders coming up are more important than this coal!”

He climbed back down from the black heap, wondering whether his feeble attempt at psychology would work. Borchard started angry remonstrance about dismissal of the guards, but Hubble shut him up.

“It worked,” he said. “Look, they’re going.” As the crowd dispersed, Chief of Police Kimer arrived. His unshaven face was gray from lack of sleep, his eyes red-rimmed. He did not seem to be much excited by the trouble at the coal yard.

“We’ve had a lot more than this on our hands, during the night,” he said.

Kenniston learned then what had gone on in Middletown since the Mayor had finished speaking—the deaths from shock, the scattering of suicides, the outbreaks of looting in the downtown streets, quickly checked. A dozen people, mostly drunks, had died of cold.

“But the barricades at the edge of town were the worst,” Kimer said tiredly. “You know, a good number of people from outside Middletown were trapped here by this thing. They, and some of our own people gone panicky, tried to stampede out of town.” He added, as he turned back to his car, “They tell me more than two thousand people were baptized last night.”

“We’ll go with you to City Hall,” Hubble told him. “Yes, you too, Ken. I’ll need your help with the Mayor.”

It seemed impossible that the pudgy little Mayor could be a problem. He had been so docile, so pathetically eager to take advice and follow orders. But when, in City Hall, Hubble confronted him with the plan to evacuate Middletown, Mayor Garris’ face took on a mulish look.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “Take up a whole city of fifty thousand people and transport them to another place we don’t know anything about? It’s insane!”

“There are enough cars, buses and trucks to transport the population and supplies. There’s enough gasoline to run them.”

“But this other city—what do we know about it? Nothing. There might be any kind of danger there. No. I was born in Middletown. I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. I just spent five thousand dollars to redecorate my house, and I’m not going to leave it.”

He glared at them, and his plump body trembled. Hubble said gently, “We’re all afraid, Mr. Garris. It’s a hard thing to do. People have their roots, and they can’t break them easily all at once. But we must go. We must seek shelter, or die.”

The Mayor shook his head. “My wife and daughter—they’ve been hysterical all night, pleading with me to do something, to make things go as they always have. This has been an awful shock to them. I don’t think they could stand any more.”

“Slap their faces, Mr. Garris,” Hubble said brutally. “This has been a shock to all of us. Now what are you going to do? Will you call in the City Council or won’t you?”

“I can’t, not on that proposal.” Garris’ face crinkled like that of a child about to cry. “Honestly, gentlemen, I can’t.”

Kenniston thought of Carol shivering in her fur coat, struggling with the last shovels of coal, and the thought made him grasp Garris savagely by the shirtfront.

“All right, don’t,” he snapped. “The people are waiting for an announcement from you, but I’ll make one myself. I’ll tell them that there’s a way to save them, but that Mayor Garris won’t hear of it. I’ll tell them they must die of cold because their Mayor won’t give up his big fine house with its cellarful of coal. Would you like me to tell them that, Mr. Garris?”

Kenniston thought he had never seen a man turn so white. “They’d tear me to pieces,” whispered Garris. “No. No, don’t.” He looked piteously from one to the other, and then he said, “I’ll call in the Council.”

The men of the Council reacted, at first, very much as the Mayor had done. Kenniston did not entirely blame them. The difficulties of uprooting a population of fifty thousand and moving it bodily in a short space of time to a place it had never seen nor heard of were enough to daunt anybody. But Hubble’s arguments were unanswerable. It was move or die, and they knew it, and in the end the decision was made. A crushed, frightened little man, Mayor Garris went to make his announcement.

On the way to the broadcasting station, Kenniston looked at Middletown. The big houses, standing lordly on the North Side. The little houses, in close-set rows, with their tiny gardens. It was going to be hard, very hard. The people who lived in those houses would not want to leave them.

In a low, tired voice, bereft now of pomposity and guile, the Mayor spoke to the people of Middletown.

“So we must leave Middletown, temporarily,” he concluded. And he repeated the word. “Temporarily. The domed city out there will be a little cold too, but not so cold as unprotected Middletown. We can live there, until—until things clear up. Stay by your radios. You will be given instructions. Please cooperate, to save all our lives. Please—”

CHAPTER 6

Caravan into Tomorrow

Kenniston lost track of his own emotions very quickly in the rush of urgent tasks. City Hall became the nerve center of the evacuation. The police and National Guard officers were already there, and other men were called in—the wholesale grocers, the warehouse men, the heads of trucking and bus and van lines. McLain, the big rawboned manager of the largest trucking company, proved a tower of strength. He had been a transport officer in the last war, and knew something about moving men and supplies.

“You’ll have a traffic madhouse, and won’t get these people out for weeks,” he said crisply. “It’s got to be organized by wards. There have to be quarters in your domed city assigned for each ward, so they can go into their own streets when they get there.”

Hubble nodded. “I can get a crew of twenty men ready to handle that.”

“Good. I figure the move will take three days. A third of the population is about all we can handle safely at one time. Civilian populations are the devil and all! Now, there’ll have to be a squad assigned to distribute fuel to the ones who have to wait here in Middletown, and to quarter them so as to conserve that fuel. Also…”

Hubble sighed. “You take a big load off my mind, McLain. Will you organize the march? Kenniston can lead the first contingent, when you’re ready.”

McLain nodded brusquely, sat down at someone else’s desk, and began to fire orders. Hubble departed with his twenty picked men, well armed, to set up a base in the domed city.

The radio chattered incessantly now, urging, soothing, cajoling, issuing instructions. Police and Guardsmen were dispatched to each ward, with a responsible man heading each squad. They were ordered to take the streets house by house, to assure complete evacuation, and also to ascertain how many private cars could be counted on for transportation. The city buses could carry only a fraction of the evacuees.

McLain was the one who thought of the patients in the Middletown hospitals, and set men to collecting ambulances, hearses, whatever would carry the sick comfortably. The police patrol wagons and a few big army trucks from the Armory he assigned to move the prisoners in the jail who could not safely be released. Both they and the sick would be left until the last day, to ensure proper quarters for their reception.

Fleets of trucks were started to the warehouses, with hasty lists of the food and other emergency supplies that must go with them. “We can run a truck line back to Middletown for more supplies later,” McLain told Kenniston. “But this stuff we’ll need right away.”

The First and Second Wards were to go first, and that meant that Carol and her aunt would be in the first day’s evacuation. Kenniston managed to get away long enough to see them.

He was sorry he went. Mrs. Adams sat weeping in the living room, and Carol struggled alone with blankets and mattresses and suitcases, in a bitter, stonyfaced mood that Kenniston could not quite understand. He stayed longer than he should have done to help them pack, trying earnestly to penetrate Carol’s tight-lipped silence.

“I know it’s hard to leave your home,” he said, “but it’s hard for everybody. And after all, we’ll have shelter and warmth, and can stay alive.”

“Shelter and warmth?” said Carol. She looked around at the starched white curtains, the polished furniture, the pictures on the walls and the bits of fine china that were so lovingly placed, and she said bitterly, “We had those. We had them for generations, until we had to have scientific progress too.”

“I’ll admit you have a point there,” said Kenniston heavily, “but it’s too late to argue now.”

“Yes,” she said. “Too late.” Suddenly she began to cry, in a slow, painful way that was not in the least like Mrs. Adams’ whimpering. “Oh, Ken, my house and all the things I loved…” He had wit enough to know that it was not for glass and china that she wept, but for a way of life that was gone and could never possibly return. He felt a terrible pity for her, which almost smothered his irritation at the inability of the female mind to grapple with the essentials of a situation.

“It won’t be so bad,” he said reassuringly. “And I’ll be leading tomorrow’s first evacuation, and won’t be far from you at any time.”

It was before nine o’clock the next morning when Kenniston left City Hall with McLain, to check the progress of preparations. Under the cold red eye of the Sun, Middletown seethed with an excited activity that centered in the First and Second Wards.

Cars were being hastily loaded, piled high on roofs and fenders. Children were being called together, barking dogs being caught and leashed, families gathering in excited haste. Roar of motors filled the wintry air. Motors of great trucks rumbling to and from the warehouse, motors of police cars dashing with sirens screaming, sputtering motors of old cars being agonizedly coaxed to life.

The people on the streets, the people hurrying with bundles and children and dogs, looked more dazed than frightened. Some of them were laughing, a false merriment edged with excitement. Only a few women were sobbing.

McLain and Kenniston rode down in the jeep to the center of town, the Square. This was the down town First Ward of Middletown.

“The First and Second Ward will move out in that order,” McLain told Kenniston. “You take charge of the First, since you’re to lead the way.”

Police and National Guardsmen were already forming up cars on South Jefferson Street. Cadillacs, Buicks, Fords, ancient Hupmobiles. City and school buses were crowded with those who had no cars, and piled high with their belongings. Policemen on motorcycles roared past.

McLain boomed rapid orders. “Get sidecars on those motorcycles—they won’t make it without them, over rough ground.

“Divide up the garage tow-trucks as they come in—divide them evenly between the wards, so they can haul any car that conks out!”

And, to a worried National Guard officer, “No! What the devil use would we have for your fieldguns? Leave ’em in the Armory and bring cots, blankets, camp equipment, instead!”

Then McLain commandeered a car, jumped in, and shouted back to Kenniston, “Have ’em ready to move out by noon! I’ll have the Tube Mill whistle sounded, for a starting signal!”

And he was gone, racing off to the other ward gathering point. Kenniston found himself faced by police, Guardsmen, deputies, officials, all clamoring for orders.

“What are we going to do with these cars? Half of them are so overloaded they’ll never get anywhere!”

Kenniston saw that. The arriving cars were piled not only with bedding and other essentials, but with radios, musical instruments, big framed family portraits, hobby-horses, every sort of possession.

“Go along and tear some of that junk off,” he ordered. “Form up all the way down South Jefferson—but only two abreast, for some of those South Side streets are narrow.”

As he sweated to marshal the gathering cars, he watched for Carol’s blue coupe. When she came, driving with pale self-possession while her aunt looked scaredly at the jam, he got her as near the front of the form-up as he could, and then raced back to the Square.

The squad leaders rapidly reported in on their assigned streets. “Everybody’s out of Adams Street! Everybody’s out of Perry Street! Lincoln Avenue—”

But—“We haven’t got ’em all out of North Street, Mr. Kenniston! Some of those old people just won’t go!”

Kenniston swore, and then jumped back into the jeep and drove around to North Street. It was the street of shabby ancient brick houses only two blocks off Main Street. And the first person he saw there was a grim-looking, shawled old woman standing with folded arms on her front porch.

“I’m not leaving my home,” she snapped to Kenniston before he could speak. “I’ve lived in this house all my life, and my mother before me. I’ll not leave it now.” She sniffed scornfully. “The idea of the whole town taking up and running away just because it’s got a little cold!”

Kenniston, baffled, saw a little girl of six peering at him from inside the window of the house.

“That your granddaughter?” he asked. “Listen. She’ll be dead in a few days. Stone, frozen dead. Unless you bring her and your warm clothes and blankets along now.”

The shawled old woman stared at him. Then, her voice suddenly dull, she asked, “Where do I go?”

He hastened on along the street. A peppery old man was being carried out in a wheelchair by two squad men, and was viciously striking at them with his cane.

“God-damned foolishness!” he was swearing. They got them into the waiting buses, and hastily loaded on their belongings. Then Kenniston raced back to the Square. His watch said eleven-ten, and he knew how far they were from ready.

On the Square, under the big sycamore tree, a gaunt, tall man with burning eyes was brandishing a Bible and shouting, to no one, “End of the world—punishment for sin—”

Lauber, the truck dispatcher whom McLain had left in charge of the First Ward caravan under Kenniston, came running up to him when he reached South Jefferson.

“These people are crazy!” he panted. “The ones already here want to start right now—and they don’t even know the way!”

Kenniston saw that the police had drawn a barricade of big trucks across the street some blocks southward. Cars were surging against it, motors roaring, drivers shouting, horns sounding in a deafening chorus.

Panic! He knew it was in the air. He, all of them, had known there was danger of it when the Mayor had made his broadcast. They had had to risk it, for only real fear could make people leave their lifelong homes. But if it got out of hand—

He rode along the line, shouting, “Form up! Form in line! If you jam the street, you’ll be left behind!”

He couldn’t even be heard. Limousines, trucks, jalopies—they crowded each other, banged fenders, bumped and recoiled and pressed forward again. And the horns never stopped their shrieking cacophony.

Kenniston, sweating now despite the frozen chill of the air, prayed that the gathering panic would not burst into violence. At the front of the surging, roaring mass, he found Mayor Garris. And the Mayor’s pallid face showed that panic had infected him too.

“Shouldn’t we go?” he shouted to Kenniston over the uproar of horns and motors. “Everyone seems ready here!”

“McLain’s running the traffic movement, and we’ve got to stick to his orders!” he shouted back.

“But if these people break loose—” the Mayor began. He stopped. Over the shrieking horns and thundering motors, a new sound was rising. A distant, banshee wail, a faraway scream that swelled into a hoarse, giant howl. The auto horns, the shouting voices from the cars, fell silent. Only the sound of motors was background to that unending scream that wailed across Middletown like a requiem.

“That’s the Tube Mill whistle!” cried Lauber. “That’s the signal!”

Kenniston sent the jeep jumping ahead. “Okay, let those trucks roll! But keep people in line, back of them! No stampeding!”

The big Diesels that barricaded the way began to snort and rumble, and then started to move out, as ponderously as elephants. Kenniston’s jeep swung in front. But almost at once, cars behind pressed to get around them.

“Run the trucks three abreast, in front!” he shouted to Lauber. “It’ll keep them from getting around!”

Down Jefferson Street, down over the muddy bed of the vanished river, past the old houses with their doors carefully shut and locked, past the playground that looked as forlorn as though it knew the children were going, never to return.

Past Home Street, past the silent mills, past the beer signs of South Street, where from an upstairs window a drunken man shouted and waved a bottle at them. Past the last rows of drab frame houses, the last brave little yards whose flowers were blackened now by frost.

Kenniston saw ahead of them the line of demarcation, the boundary between the past and what was now Earth. They reached it, passed it—

And then the rolling, ocher-yellow plains were all about them, barren and drab beneath the great, firelashed red eye of the Sun. The cold wind whooped around them, as they started to climb the easy slope toward the ridge. Behind his jeep, Diesels, jalopies, buses, shiny station wagons rolled with roaring, sputtering, purring motors.

Kenniston looked back down the slope at them. Already the other Ward was moving out, and he rode at the head of a huge caravan of vehicles crawling endlessly out of Middletown—a caravan out of the Earth that was gone forever, into this unguessable tomorrow.

CHAPTER 7

Under the Dome

When they came up over the ridge, and for the first time had view of the distant domed city that shimmered in the wan light far out on the desolate plain, Kenniston could sense the shock of doubt and fear that ran through all of this host who were seeing it for the first time. He could see it in all their peering faces, pale and strained in the red light of the dying Sun.

Even he, seeing it for only the second time, felt an inner recoiling. With his mind still filled with every sight and sound and smell of the old town they had left, the alien, solemn, deathly city of the dome seemed to him impossible as a refuge. He choked down that feeling, he had to choke it down; it was go on or die.

“Keep moving!” he shouted, sounding the jeep’s horn to command attention, gesturing authoritatively forward. “Keep going!”

He conquered that brief pause of recoil, got them moving over the ridge, skidding and sliding down the other slope, in clouds of heavy dust.

He glimpsed Mayor Garris staring ahead, his plump face shocked and pallid. He wondered what Carol was thinking, as she looked out at the lonely shining bubble in the sad wastes.

The endless caravan, shrouded in dust, was halfway down the long slope when Kenniston heard a raging of horns and looked back. An old sedan had stopped squarely in the middle of the narrow track the trucks had beaten down across a shallow gully. Cars were pulling out around it, wallowing in soft earth, jamming their low-hung frames against the banks, getting inextricably tangled. Behind them, the line was damming up.

Kenniston yelled to Lauber to keep the head of the caravan moving on toward the distant dome, and then sent his jeep snorting back along the line. A knot of people had collected now around the offending sedan. Kenniston hastily shouldered his way through them.

“What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded. “Whose car is this?”

A weatherbeaten, middle-aged man turned to him, half-scared, half-apologetic. “Mine—my car. I’m John Borzak.” He gestured to the back seat of the old sedan. “My wife, she’s having a baby in there.” He added, as an afterthought, “My fifth.”

“Oh, Christ, that’s all we needed!” Kenniston cried. Borzak looked instantly guilty. He looked so sad that Kenniston began to laugh. Suddenly all of them were laughing, in sheer relief from nervous tension.

He set men scurrying to get a doctor and ambulance out of the procession, and meanwhile willing hands carefully rolled the old sedan a little aside.

The dammed-up lines of cars began to roll again. But the pause, the waiting, the minutes spent in staring at the drear landscape, had been too much for some of those in line. Kenniston saw cars, only a few of them as yet, curving out of line and scrambling on the slope to swing back toward Middletown.

He’d feared that, above all things. People—people of a 20th Century Middlewestern town—could take only so much of the unknown. But he had to stop them, or panic would spread like fire that nobody could stop. He bucketed the jeep after them, got ahead of them by the advantage of his four-wheel drive, and then blocked their way back and stood up in the jeep and shouted at them and pointed ahead.

A man who looked like an aging carpenter, with a knobby face sheet-pale now, cursed Kenniston out of the depths of his fear.

“We’re not going out to die in this damned desert! We’re going back home!”

“You’ll never even get near it!” Kenniston warned. “There are special guards who won’t let anyone back into Middletown! Get it into your heads that the place is a death trap, will you!”

“Oh, Hugh, maybe we’d better go on!” whimpered the shapeless woman beside the man.

“Like hell we will! I’m a free American and this isn’t any dictatorship!”

Kenniston found the only argument that could sway these people who were recoiling from the deathliness of the desert.

“If you go back, if you do get into Middletown and stay there, you’ll soon be all alone there! You and the few like you—all alone, here at the end of the world, with the night and the cold!”

That got to them, replacing their fear with a greater dread, the dread of aloneness in this lonely world. The knobby-faced man looked sick and trapped, but he finally turned his car around, and the other cars followed him back into line.

Kenniston’s squad cars had come up but they weren’t needed. He told them, “Watch the line close! Don’t let one start to turn again—not one.”

He fought the jeep back up along the line, choking on dust and exhaust fumes, hanging precariously to the wheel, deafened by the continuous roar of motors.

At the head of the caravan he was at least out of the dust, and could look ahead at the distant city. It was still only a shimmering, tiny bubble on the horizon, only a glittering point lost and drowned in the vast indifference of the ocher-colored wastes that stretched—how far? Clear around the world, over the beds of dried-up oceans and the sites of vanished cities? Was the bottom of the Atlantic like this, was New York, was Paris, were the Poles?

He had to forget that and keep his mind on the city ahead, on the job of getting these thousands of people to it, for if he didn’t the weight of the whole dying world would come down upon him like an avalanche and he would cease to struggle. The world couldn’t all be like this, there must be green valleys and people somewhere yet. But there wasn’t time to think of it now, they had hit the road that led to the portal and the dome of man’s last refuge was towering, colossal, in front of them.

He saw that Hubble’s men had closed the portal. That would be the first step, of course, to conserve what warmth there was and keep out the frigid wind. It opened now to receive them, and an armed man waved and smiled, and then clung on to the side of the jeep.

“Straight up this boulevard, and then turn. I’ll show you. Yeah, we got the section ready. No, no sign of anything. I don’t think even a mouse lives here anymore.” A pause. “I’m sure glad you people have got here. This place is so damned quiet it would scare you.”

The tall, white silent towers watched them, the long, long line of dusty cars and trucks and buses that crept along the empty boulevards. The noise of motors greatly magnified echoed and rebounded from the walls and was repeated faintly from the dome, and the very shocking loudness of the sound made Kenniston shiver.

Apart from that mechanical racket, a curious hush had come over the Middletowners. All down the lines heads were thrust forth out of car windows, looking, peering, savoring the height of buildings whose tops they could not see, staring at the lines and colors that were alien to all they knew, listening to the emptiness. Kenniston knew how they felt. It was too big, and too strange. Even a native New Yorker would have found awe among these mighty towers, and to the folk of Middletown, used to the little slate-roofed houses and the squat buildings of dingy brick, they were overpowering, crushing, with something in them of dread because they were all deserted.

The head of the caravan reached a section that was barred off with ropes. The ropes were laid aside, and the cars went in.

Hubble’s advance squad was ready. Without them the assignment of nearly seventeen thousand people to improvised quarters would have been impossible. With them, it was a scrambling chaos, carried out strangely without much noise. Men and women moved with a sort of stunned docility, glancing sidelong into the dust and the shadows, peering at the blank windows and the tall strange rooms, afraid to raise their voices. Gradually the sound of motors died, and the streets were ghastly in their silence, and it was a silence so great that the scuffling of many feet and the murmur of many voices and the labor of unpacking trucks and cars did not disturb it, but were merely lost. Even the dogs were cowed.

Kenniston made his report to Hubble and then went in search of Carol. Here and there people still sat in their cars, refusing to move from their one last familiar reality, and he passed a woman who crouched in the dust of the street and wept, with her arms full of blankets. Something of the same feeling of despair infected Kenniston. It was not going to work, it was not going to work at all, and he dreaded to talk to Carol. But he plodded on until he found her.

There was a great vaulted room on the street level, smelling dismally of the dust and desertion of ages. Very tall windows let in what light they could, but still it was dusky. There were twenty women in the room, of all sorts and ages, milling about with suitcases and loads of bedding, uttering vague wails and words of complaint, struggling with rolled-up-mattresses. Carol and her aunt were two of the twenty.

Characteristically, they had managed to get off in a corner as much by themselves as possible. Mrs. Adams had collapsed onto her improvised bed, and Carol was making what order she could of their scanty belongings.

“Are you all right?” he asked her anxiously, and she nodded. From the nested blankets on the floor Mrs. Adams whimpered, “Why did they bring us here, to this dreadful place? Why couldn’t they have let us stay at home?” Carol hushed her as she would a fretful child.

Two sniffling, mouse-faced girls had crept up to ask Kenniston questions. Behind them a short, thick, middle-aged woman was stamping up and down along the walls, banging open the doors that pierced them. “Where’s the bathrooms?” she was demanding belligerently.

Kenniston took Carol to the doorway and a little beyond it, where if there was no more privacy they were at least not beseiged. He said, “I know it’s rough as hell now, but it’s only for a little while—this bunking together, I mean. There’s room enough for everybody here, and you can pick out a place you like, all to yourselves. I can fetch anything you want from your house, your books and things, even furniture…”

She cut him short. “No! I don’t want anything touched there. I want to know it’s all just as I left it, so I can at least think about it, and maybe…” She shook her head, and then went on, “Ken, old Mr. Peters from our street had another stroke when we got here. They took him away on a stretcher. He was dying, and I saw his face. He was looking up at these awful buildings, so puzzled and afraid. He was trying to understand, and he couldn’t.” She shivered.

“Dying isn’t good anywhere you do it,” he said. “But we’re young and strong and we aren’t going to die.” He added, before he left her, “There was a baby born on the march. Think of the baby, Carol, instead of the old man.”

He went away, depressed and worried. Carol seemed different, and he didn’t think it was just her tiredness. Perhaps she had roots too deep, not just in Middletown but in the pattern, the state of mind. Well, the pattern was smashed forever now, and she, and all of them, had to adjust.

Kenniston had gone two of the long squares, sunk in his disturbed thoughts, before he realized that a change had come into the streets. He tried to think what it was. People were more in the buildings now, and less in the cars, but that was not all of it. There was something…

The streets had suddenly come alive.

The children had done it. Overawed at first by the strangeness and the silence and the behavior of their elders, it had slowly dawned upon them that here was a whole great city lying ready to their hands—fabulous empty buildings full of mysteries and treasures, new streets, new narrow ways behind them, all virgin territory to be explored. By twos and threes the venturesome spirits had started out and taken others with them. And now the lofty hallways rang with shouts and running feet, small figures scudded to and fro across the pavement, the shadows teemed with motion, with screams and squeals and the voices of parental anger. One bull-lunged urchin had discovered that he could make echoes. Another, intoxicated by blank expanses of white, unsullied wall, stood with a stub of pencil in his hand writing in ever-enlarging letters. Kenniston thought, The irreverent little bastards! But his step quickened, and quite suddenly, he felt that it was going to work out after all. The human race was tough.

He had further evidence of that in the next two days. The great waves of the migration poured down across the dusty ridge and in through the portal, the clamorous thousands of wheels and motors, the countless faces and peering eyes. And for those who came on the second day and on the third, it was not so bad as it had been for those who came first. The seventeen thousand pioneers had lifted the curse of the empty stillness. Community kitchens, working on oil and gasoline ranges, filled the air with the homely, cheering smell of coffee. There was hot food, and the excitement of searching out friends and comparing notes. Indefatigable housewives busied themselves with brooms and drove their husbands to cleaning windows and whacked their unruly children. And the cars piled up in lines along the streets and boulevards, the Plymouths and Nashes and Chevrolets and Fords, incongruous in this dreamlike city of an elder Earth.

On the third day they brought the sick and put them in the hospital. They brought the prisoners from the jail and locked them away in another building. A great structure on the central plaza became the City Hall. And by that third night, not a soul was left in Middletown. All were here under the great dome of the alien city.

“We’ll call this place New Middletown,” Mayor Garris had proclaimed. “Makes it seem more like home.”

Kenniston walked with Carol that night down one of the dark main avenues of the domed city. There was candlelight and lamplight from doorways and tall windows. A baby wailed from inside a dark doorway and was hastily soothed. Dogs barked defiance to alien ghosts. A tinny phonograph sang somewhere:

“I can’t give you anything but love, baby!”

Kenniston thought that the streets of tall white buildings looked down with their windows as with eyes—amazed, bewildered. This city beneath the shimmering starlit dome had had silence for a long, long time. Silence, and the slow swing of the cold red Sun and the farther stars.

Could a city remember, Kenniston wondered? Did this one remember the old days of its builders, the lovers who had walked its ways and the children who had known its nooks and corners? Was it glad that men had come again, or did it regret the agelong silence and peace?

Carol shivered a little and buttoned her topcoat. “It’s getting colder.”

Kenniston nodded. “But not bitterly so—only like an October night, back in our own time. We can stand that.”

She looked up at him, her eyes dark in the white blur of her face. “But how will we live here, Ken? I mean, when the food from Middletown’s warehouses runs out?”

He and Hubble had known the question would come up, and had the answer for it. Not a perfect answer, but the only one.

“There are big hydroponic tanks farther over in the city, Carol. The people here raised their food in them. We can do the same. There are plenty of seeds in Middletown.”

“But water?”

“Lots of it,” he answered promptly. “Big underground reservoirs, that must tap deep water-bearing strata. Hubble had it tested, and it’s perfectly safe.”

They walked on to the edge of the plaza. Now the Moon was rising, that copper-colored, unreally big Moon that was so much nearer Earth than in the old times. Its coppery light poured through the dome upon the city. The white towers dreamed. The chill deepened.

The whole mighty past of dead Earth seemed to crush down upon Kenniston. Millions of years, trillions of lives full of pain and hope and struggle, and all for what? For this?

Carol felt it too, for she pressed closer to him. “Are they all dead, Ken? All the human race, but ourselves?”

He and Hubble had the answer for that, too, the answer they would have to give to everyone.

“There’s no reason to assume that. There may be other cities that are still inhabited. If so, we’ll soon contact them.”

She shook her head. “Words, Ken. You don’t even believe them yourself.” She drew away from him. “We’re alone,” she said. “Everything we had is gone, our world, our whole life, and we’re quite alone.”

He put his arms around her. He would have said something to comfort her, but she stood stiff and quivering, and suddenly she said,

“Ken, there are times when I can’t help hating you.”

Utterly shocked, and too bewildered to be angry yet, he let her go. He said, “Carol, you’re wrought up—hysterical—”

Her voice was low and harsh, the words came fast as though they could no longer be held back. “Am I? Maybe. But I can’t help remembering that if you and men like you hadn’t come to Middletown with that secret laboratory, fifty thousand people wouldn’t have had to suffer for it. You brought this on us…”

He began to understand now all that had been behind Carol’s taut manner and unfriendly silences, all the blind resentment that had focused upon himself.

He was for the moment furiously indignant, the more so because what she had said stung him on a sensitive nerve. He stood, almost glaring at her, and then his anger washed away, and he took her by the shoulders and said,

“Carol, you’re not making sense, and you know it! You’re bitter because you’ve lost your home, your way of life, your world, and you’re making me a scapegoat for that. You can’t! We need each other more than ever, and we’re not going to lose each other.”

She stared at him rigidly, then started to sob, and clung to him crying.

“Oh, Ken, don’t let me be a fool! I’m so mixed up, I don’t know my own mind any more.”

“All of us feel like that,” he said. “But it’ll all come right. Forget about it, Carol.”

But as he held her and soothed her and looked up past her at the alien towers and the face of the alien Moon, he knew that she could not completely forget, that that deep resentment would not die easily, and that he would have to fight it. And it would be hard to fight, for there had been the sting of truth in her words, only a partial truth but one he had not wanted ever to face.

CHAPTER 8

Middletown Calling!

When Kenniston awoke, he lay for some time in his blankets looking around the great room, with the same feeling of unreality that he felt now each morning.

It was quite a large room, with graceful curving walls and ceiling of soft-textured, ivory plastic. But it was not as large as it looked, for the builders of the city had known how to use daringly jutting mezzanines to give two floor levels the spaciousness and loftiness of one.

He looked up at the tall, dusty windows, and wondered what this room had once been. It was part of a big structure on the plaza, for Mayor Garris had insisted that the whole Lab staff be quartered near City Hall. It had obviously been a public building, but except for a few massive tables it had been quite empty, and there was no clue to its function.

He looked around at the others on the row of mattresses. Hubble was still sleeping calmly. So was Beitz, with the slight, groaning stirrings of slumbering age. But Crisci lay wide awake and unmoving, looking up at the ceiling.

Kenniston remembered something, with a sudden pang, something that he had completely forgotten in the rush of events. He went over to Crisci, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Louis. I never thought until now about your girl.”

“Why would you think about that?” Crisci’s low voice was toneless. “Why would you, when all this has happened?” He went on, as tonelessly, “Besides, it was all over a long time ago. For millions of years now, she’s been dead.”

Kenniston lingered a moment, seeking something to say, remembering now Crisci’s eager talk of the girl he was soon to marry—the girl who lived fifty miles away from Middletown. He could find nothing to say. Crisci’s tragedy had been repeated many times among these people—the mother whose son had gone to California, the wife whose husband had been upstate on a business trip, the lovers, the families, the friends, divided forever by the great gulf of time. He felt again a great thankfulness that Carol had come through with him, and a renewed determination to hold her against anything.

Kenniston was lighting his morning cigarette, when the others rose. He paused suddenly, and said, “I just thought—”

Hubble grinned at him. “Yes, I know. You just thought about tobacco. You, and a lot of people, will soon have to do without.”

As they went out to get their breakfast at the nearest community kitchen, Hubble told him what was going forward.

“McLain’s going back to Middletown to bring gasoline engines and pumps. We have to get water flowing in the city’s system at once, and it may be a long time before we can figure out its pumping power. They seem to be atomic engines of some sort, but I’m not sure.”

“What about food rationing?”

“Food and medicine will all go into guarded warerooms. Ration tickets will be printed at once. Use of cars is forbidden, of course. Everybody is restricted to their own Ward district temporarily, to prevent accidents in exploration. We’ve already organized crews to explore the city.”

Kenniston nodded. He drew the last drags of a cigarette suddenly precious, before he spoke.

“That’s all good. But the main problem will be morale, Hubble.” He thought of Carol, as he added, “I don’t believe these people can take it, if they find out they’re the last humans left.” Hubble looked worried. “I know. But there must be people left somewhere. This city wasn’t abandoned because of sudden disaster. They may just have gone to other, better cities.”

“There wasn’t a whisper on the radio from outside Middletown,” Kenniston reminded.

“No. But I believe they used something different from our radio system. That’s what I want you for this morning, Ken. Beitz last night found a communication system in a building near here. It has big apparatus that he thinks was for televisor communication. That’s more in your field than ours.”

Kenniston felt a sharp interest, the interest of the technician that not even world’s end could completely kill. “I’d like to see that.”

As they walked through the cold red morning, Kenniston was surprised by the unexpectedly everyday appearance of this alien city beneath the dome.

Families were trooping toward the community kitchens, with the air of going on picnic. A little band of children whooped down the nearest street, a small, woolly dog racing beside them with frantic barking. A bald, red-faced man in undershirt and trousers smoked his pipe and looked down the mighty street with mild curiosity. Two plump women, one of whom was buttoning a reluctant small boy into his jacket, called to each other from neighboring doorways.

“—and they say that Mrs. Biler’s feeling better now, but her husband’s still poorly—”

“Human beings,” said Hubble, “are adaptable. Thank God for that.”

“But if they’re the last? They won’t be able to adapt to that.”

Hubble shook his head. “No. I’m afraid not.”

After breakfast, Beitz led them to a big square building two blocks off the plaza. Inside was a large, shadowy hall, in which bulked a row of tall, square blocks of apparatus. They were, obviously, televisor instruments. Each had a square screen, a microphone grating, and beneath that a panel of control switches, pointer dials, and other less identifiable instruments.

Kenniston found and opened a service panel in the back of one. Brief examination of the tangled apparatus inside discouraged him badly.

“They were televisor communication instruments, yes. But the principles on which they worked are baffling. They didn’t even use vacuum tubes—they’d apparently got beyond the vacuum tube.”

“Could you start one of them transmitting again?”

Kenniston shook his head. “The video system is absolutely beyond me. No resemblance at all to our primitive television apparatus.”

Hubble asked, “Would it be possible then to use just the audio system—use one of them as a straight sound-radio transmitter?”

Kenniston hesitated. “That might be done. It’d be mostly groping in the dark. But there are some familiar bits of design—” He pondered, then said, “The power leads come from outside. See anything around here that looks like a power station?”

Old Beitz nodded. “Only a block away. Big, shielded atomic turbines of some kind, coupled to generators.”

“We might spend years trying to learn how to operate their atomic machinery,” Kenniston said.

“We could couple gasoline engines to those generators,” Hubble suggested. “It’d furnish power enough to try one of these transmitters.”

Kenniston looked at him. “To call to the other people still left on Earth?”

“Yes. If there are any of them, they’d not hear our kind of radio calls. But this is their own communication setup. They’d hear it.”

Kenniston said finally, “All right Give me power, and I’ll try.”

In the next few days, Kenniston was so immersed in the overmastering fascination of the technical problem set him, that he saw little of how Middletown’s people were adapting to New Middletown. He could hear the trucks rumbling constantly under the dome, as McLain indefatigably pushed the work of bringing supplies from the deserted town beyond the ridge.

They brought the gasoline engines needed, not only to pump water from the great reservoirs but also to turn one of the generators in the power station. Once he had power, Kenniston began to experiment. Realizing the futility of trying to fathom the principles of the strange super-radio transmitters, he tried merely to deduce the ordinary method of operating them.

The trucks brought other things—more food, clothing, furniture, hospital equipment, books. McLain began to talk of organizing a motor expedition to explore the surrounding country. And meanwhile, the crews already organized to explore New Middletown itself were searching every block and building. Already, they had made two surprising discoveries.

Hubble took Kenniston away from his work to see one of these. He led down through a chain of corridors and catacombs underneath the city.

“You know that it’s a few degrees warmer here in New Middletown than the Sun’s retained heat can account for,” Hubble said. “We found big conduits that seem to bring that slightly wanner air up into the city, so I had the men trace the conduits down to their source.”

Kenniston felt sudden excitement. “The source? A big artificial heating plant?”

“No, not that,” Hubble said. “But here we are now. Have a look for yourself.”

They had suddenly emerged onto a railed gallery in a vast underground chamber. The narrow gallery was the brink of an abysmal pit—a great, circular shaft that dropped into unplumbed blackness. Kenniston stared puzzledly. He saw that big conduits led upward out of the pit, and then diverged in all directions. “The slightly warmer air comes up from this shaft,” Hubble said, nodding toward the pit. He added, “I know it sounds impossible, to our engineering experience. But I believe this shaft goes downward many, many miles. I believe it goes down into Earth’s core.”

“But Earth’s core is incredibly hot!” Kenniston objected. “It was hot, millions of years ago,” Hubble corrected. “And as it grew cooler, as the surface grew cold, they built this domed city and maybe others like it—and sank a great shaft downward to bring up heat from the core. But Earth’s core is even cooler now, almost cold. And now there is only a trifle of heat from it to warm the city a little.”

“So that’s why they couldn’t live here any more—it was the Earth heat they depended on, and that ran out,” said Kenniston, a little hopelessly.

The second discovery was made by Jennings, a young auto salesman who headed one of the exploration crews. He brought news of it to the scientists, and Kenniston went with Beitz and Crisci to see it.

It was simply a big, semicircular meeting hall in one of the larger buildings, with tiers of several hundred seats.

“A council room, or lecture hall, maybe,” said Beitz. “But what’s unusual about it?”

“Look at those seats in the second tier,” said Jennings. They saw then what he meant. The seats in that tier were not ordinary metal chairs like the others. They were different—different from the chairs, and different from each other. Some of them hardly looked like seats at all. One row of them were very wide and flat and low, with broad backs that flared in a little inward. Another row were very narrow seats, that had no backs at all. Still others looked a little like curved lounging chairs, but the curve was an impossibly deep one.

“If they’re seats,” said Jennings, “they weren’t intended for ordinary human people to sit in.”

Kenniston and the others looked at each other, startled. He had a sudden grotesque vision of this hall crowded with an audience, an audience partly human, and partly—what? Had humanity, in the last ages, shared the Earth with other races that were not human?

“We are all jumping to conclusions.” Beitz’ voice broke the spell. “They may not be seats at all.” But he added to Jennings as they left, “Better not tell the people about this. It might upset them.”

What the other exploration crews had found was summarized in a short speech by Hubble at the big town meeting of Middletown’s people held in the plaza on Sunday afternoon.

There had been church services that morning—services without bells or organs or stained glass, but held in lofty, shadowy rooms of cathedral solemnity. The first town meeting of New Middletown followed. Loudspeakers had been set up so that all in the big plaza might hear, and Mayor Garris, an older-looking, humbled Mayor Garris, spoke to them. He was stumblingly encouraging.

The ration system was working well, he told them. There was no danger of starvation, for hydroponic farming would soon be started. They could live in New Middletown indefinitely, if necessary.

“Doctor Hubble,” he added, “will tell you of what has been found in New Middletown by the exploring crews.”

Hubble was concise. He emphasized first that the original inhabitants of New Middletown had apparently left it deliberately.

“They took their personal belongings, their books, their clothing, their smaller apparatus, instruments, and furnishings. What they left were things too massive for easy transportation. That includes certain machinery which we think was atomically powered, but which must be studied with great care before attempts at operation can be made. We feel sure that in time, study will make it possible to use all such equipment.”

Mayor Garris rose to add eagerly, “And at least one piece of equipment is now ready to use! Mr. Kenniston has got one of the radio transmitters here going, and will now start calling to contact the other people of the Earth.”

A great cheering rose instantly from the gathered Middletowners. Kenniston, after the gathering broke up, found himself besieged by excited questioners. Yes, they would start calling, right away.

He was worried when he got a moment alone with Hubble. “Garris shouldn’t have announced that! These people are dead sure now that we’ll soon be talking to other, peopled cities!”

Hubble looked worried too. “They’re so sure there are other people—that it’s only a matter of contacting them.”

Kenniston looked at him. “Do you believe there are any others? I’m beginning to doubt it, Hubble. If they couldn’t live in this city, they couldn’t anywhere.”

“Perhaps,” Hubble admitted uneasily. “But we can’t be sure of anything. We have to try, and keep trying.”

Kenniston started the transmitter that night, using it for only ten minutes each hour, to conserve gasoline as much as possible. “Middletown calling!” he spoke into the microphone, “Middletown calling!”

No use of adding more—they could not yet operate a receiver to hear an answer. They could only call to make known their presence, and wait and hope that any others left on dying Earth would hear and come.

Crowds watched from outside the door, as he called. They were there through the night, when Beitz took over, and there again the next day, and the next. They were quite silent, but the hope in their faces made Kenniston sick. He felt, as another day and another passed, the mockery of the words he kept repeating.

“Middletown calling!”

Calling to what? To an Earth dying, devoid of human life, to a cold and arid sphere that had done with humanity long ago? Yet he had to keep sending it out, the cry of man lost in the ages and seeking his kind, the cry that he felt there were no ears on Earth to hear.

“Middletown calling—calling—”

CHAPTER 9

Out of the Silence

No answer. Weeks had gone by, while Kenniston and Beitz called and called, and out of the silence of the dying Earth had come no reply. Every hour they had spoken the words that had become meaningless. And between calls, they had fumbled with the strange receivers that they did not know how to tune. And nothing at all had happened.

Kenniston came to dread the times when he must leave the building and walk through the little crowd of hopeful Middletowners who were always gathered outside.

“No, not yet,” he had to say, always trying to look confident. “But maybe soon—”

“And maybe never,” Carol said to him hopelessly, when they were alone. “If anybody had heard, they could have got here from any part of Earth, in these weeks you’ve been calling.”

“Perhaps they don’t have airplanes,” he reminded her.

“If they had complicated radio receivers to hear our call, they’d have planes too, wouldn’t they?”

Her logic was unanswerable. For a moment Kenniston was silent. Then, “Please don’t say that to anyone else, Carol. All these people—it’s what keeps them going, I think, their hope of finding other people. They wouldn’t feel so lost, then.” He sighed. “We’ll keep calling. It’s all we can do. And maybe McLain and Crisci will find someone out there. They should be back soon.”

McLain had succeeded in organizing his motor expedition to explore the surrounding country. It had taken weeks of preparation, of marshalling tank-trucks from Middletown to use as gasoline caches at carefully selected points, of laying out tentative routes to follow. Two weeks before, the little caravan of jeeps and half-tracs had started out, and its return was due.

And as it searched the dusty wastes out there, as Kenniston and Beitz again and again voiced the unanswered call, work and life and death had marched forward in New Middletown.

Hubble had helped lay out the schedule of necessary work. The hydroponic tanks had to be got ready. The whole city had to be cleaned of drifted dust. The supplies brought from old Middletown had to be inventoried.

A board of elected officials had assigned men to their work. Every man had his job, his schedule of hours, his pay in ration tickets. The schools had been set up again. Courts and law functioned once more, thought all except serious offenders were liberated on probation.

Babies were born in New Middletown each day. And the death toll was heavy at first, most of its victims among the old who could not stand the shock of uprooting. A space of land outside the dome had been carefully fenced in as a cemetery.

But underneath all the bustle of new activities, it was a waiting city. A city, waiting with terrible eagerness for an answer to that call that went hourly out into the silence.

Kenniston felt his helplessness. He could not even understand completely the transmitters he used. He had, in these weeks, completely disassembled one of them without being able to puzzle out its circuits. He was sure that it employed radio frequencies far outside the electromagnetic spectrum of twentieth-century science. But parts of the design were baffling. The words stamped on the apparatus meant nothing—they were in the same completely unknown language as all the city’s inscriptions. He could only keep sending out the same questioning, hopeful message into the unknown. “Middletown calling!”

Finally, McLain’s exploring expedition returned. Carol came running to Kenniston with the news. He went with her to the portal, where thousands of Middletowners were already anxiously gathering.

“They’ve had a hard time,” said Kenniston, as the jeeps and half-tracs rolled through the portal and came to a halt. McLain, Crisci and the others were unshaven, dust-smeared, exhausted-looking. Some of them sagged in their seats.

McLain’s voice boomed to the eager questioners. “Tell you all about it later! Right now, we’re pretty beat up.”

Crisci’s tired voice cut in. “Why not tell them now? They’ll have to know.” He faced the wondering crowd and said, “We found something, yes. We found a city, two hundred miles west of here. A domed city, just like New Middletown.”

Bertram Garris asked the question that was in everyone’s mind. “Well? Were there people in that other city?”

Crisci answered softly, “No. There was nobody there. Not a soul. It was dead, and it had been dead a long time.”

McLain added, “It’s true. We saw no sign of life anywhere, except a few little animals on the plains.”

Carol turned a pale face toward Kenniston. “Then there’s no one else? Then we are the last?”

A sick silence had fallen on the crowd. They looked at each other numbly. And then Bertram Garris displayed unsuspected capacities of leadership. He got up on one of the half-tracs and spoke cheerfully.

“Now, folks, no use to let this news get you down! McLain’s party only covered a few hundred miles, and Earth is a mighty big place. Remember that Mr. Kenniston’s radio calls are going out, every hour.” He rattled on with loud heartiness. “We’ve all been working hard, and we need some recreation. So tonight we’re going to have a big get-together in the plaza—a town party. Tell everybody to come!”

The crowd of Middletowners brightened a little. But as they went away, Kenniston saw that most of them still looked back soberly. He told Garris, “That was a good idea, to take their minds off things.”

The Mayor looked pleased. “Sure. They’re just too impatient. They don’t realize it may take the other people a good while to answer those calls of yours.”

Kenniston realized that Garris’ confidence had not been assumed. Despite the shattering new revelation, the Mayor still had faith that there were other people.

But Hubble was somber when he heard the news. “Another dead city? Then there’s no further doubt in my mind. Earth must be lifeless.”

“Shall I keep sending out the radio call?” Hubble hesitated. “Yes, Ken—for a while. We don’t want to spoil their party tonight.”

The town party in the plaza that night had the unusual luxury of electric lights, powered by a portable generator. There was a swing band on a platform, and a big space had been roped off for dancing. Kenniston threaded through the crowd with Carol, for Beitz had offered to stand his trick. Everyone knew him now and greeted him, but he noticed a significant difference in the greetings. They did not ask him now whether his calls had had an answer.

“They’re giving up hope,” he said to Carol. “They’re afraid there are no other people, and they don’t want to think about it.”

Yet the party went well, until Mayor Garris blundered. He had been cheerily backslapping his way through the crowd all evening, admiring babies, exchanging familiar greetings, obviously enjoying this relapse into the arts of politicianship. Flushed and happy, he got up on the band platform and called through the loudspeaker to the crowd.

“Come on, folks, how about a little community singing? I’ll lead you with my famous tenor. How about ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’?”

They laughed, and sang, as the band struck up the tune and the pudgy Mayor cheerfully waved his hand like a conductor. The old songs not heard on Earth for millions of years echoed off the tall white buildings and the great shimmering dome overhead.

But as they sang, as they sang “Banks of the Wabash” and “Old Kentucky Home,” voices and faces lost their brightness. Kenniston saw the haunting yearning that came into the gathered thousands of faces, and the mistiness in Carol’s eyes.

The swell of voices dropped a little. The singers seemed to hesitate. And then with an hysterical cry, a woman in the crowd sank sobbing to the ground.

The singing and the music stopped, and there was nothing but the racking sobs of the woman, whom a man vainly tried to comfort. Kenniston heard her crying out, “It’s all gone forever—our whole world and all its people! There’s only us, alone on a dead world!”

“Let’s not get downhearted, folks!” pleaded the Mayor, but it was too late for that. The spell was broken. The people of Middletown were at last confronted with their awful aloneness.

The party was over. The crowd silently dispersed, not speaking to each other, each man going back to his own home, his own thoughts. Kenniston tried to find words of comfort for Carol when he left her, but he could not. There was no comfort for anyone, not now. They all had to face it, the certainty that they were the last on Earth.

He walked slowly back through the silent, empty streets, to relieve Beitz. The Moon had risen now, and through the great dome it poured coppery light upon the deserted plaza. Then, suddenly, he stopped and turned as he heard a voice and running feet pursuing him.

“Hey! Hey, Mr. Kenniston!”

He recognized Bud Martin, who had owned the garage in old Middletown. Bud’s lean young face was excited, and the words came tumbling out of him so fast as to be almost incoherent.

“Mr. Kenniston, I thought I just saw a plane going over the dome, high up! Only it looked more like a big submarine than a plane. But I saw it, I know I did!”

Kenniston thought that he might have expected this. In their reaction of bitter disappointment, many of the Middletowners might be expected now to “see” the other people they so longed to see.

He said, “I didn’t hear anything, Bud.”

“Neither did I. It went quiet and fast, high up there. I got just a glimpse of it.”

Kenniston looked up with him. They stared for moments, but the moonlit sky was cold and empty. He lowered his gaze. “It must have been a cloud shadow, Bud. There’s nothing there.”

Bud Martin swore, and then said earnestly, “Listen, Mr. Kenniston, I’m not an hysterical woman. I saw something.”

It gave Kenniston pause. For a moment, his heart quickened. Was it possible? He stared again, for long minutes. The sky remained empty, and yet his throb of excitement persisted.

He said abruptly, “We’ll get Hubble. But don’t say anything to anyone else. Stirring up false hopes now would be disastrous.”

Hubble was with McLain and Crisci in a candlelit room, listening to their account of that other dead city they had found. He heard Bud Martin’s eager tale, and then looked at Kenniston.

“I saw nothing,” Kenniston admitted. “But through the dome, anything would be hard to see except when it was dead overhead.”

Hubble rose. “Perhaps we’d better have a look from outside. Get your coats on.”

Heavily wrapped, the five of them went along the silent streets to the portal, and through it into the outer night. They walked a hundred yards out from the portal, along the sand-drifted highway, and then stopped and scanned the sky. The cold was intense. The big Moon shone with a hard, coppery brilliance that washed the looming dome of New Middletown with light.

Kenniston’s gaze swept the blazing chains of stars. The old groups were much changed by the ages but a few he could still vaguely recognize—the time-distorted Great Bear warding the north, the warped and altered star-pattern of the Lyre. And individual stars still burned in unmistakable splendor—the blue-white, flaring beacon of Vega, the somber, smoky red magnificence of Antares, the throbbing gold of Altair.

“People are going to be seeing plenty of things,” said McLain skeptically. “We might as well…”

“Listen!” said Hubble sharply, holding up his hand. Kenniston heard only the whisper of the bitter wind. Then, faintly, he caught a thrumming sound that rose and fell and rose again.

“It’s from the north,” Crisci said suddenly. “And it’s coming back around toward us.”

All five of them were suddenly rigid, held in the grip of an emotion too big for utterance, as they peered at the starry sky. The thrumming deepened.

“That’s no plane motor!” McLain exclaimed.

It wasn’t, Kenniston knew. It was neither the staccato roar of combustion engines nor the scream of jets, but a deep bass humming that seemed to fill the sky. He was aware that his heart was pounding.

Crisci shouted and flung up his hand. They saw it almost at once, an elongated black mass cutting rapidly down across the stars.

Bud Martin yelled. “It’s coming right down on us!”

The thing, in a heartbeat, had become an enormous dark bulk rushing down upon them, looming like a thundercloud. They ran back toward the portal, their feet slipping on the loose sand.

“Look!” cried Crisci. “Look at it!”

They turned, there at the portal. And Kenniston saw now that the downward rush of the black visitant upon them had been only an illusion born of its bigness. For the thing, whatever it was, humming like a million tops, was settling upon the plain a half-mile from New Middletown. Sand spumed up wildly to veil the giant bulk, then fell away and disclosed it resting on the plain.

It was, Kenniston saw instantly, a ship. Bud Martin’s description had been accurate. The thing looked for all the world like a gigantic submarine without a conning tower, that had come down out of the sky to land upon the plain.

The deep bass thrumming had stopped. The thing lay there in the moonlight, big, dark, silent. They stared rigidly.

“A ship from another world?” Kenniston whispered. “A spaceship?”

“It must be. But there were no rocketjets. It uses some other kind of power.”

“Why don’t they come out of it, now they’ve landed?”

“What did they come here for? Who are they?”

The bulky enigma out there brooded, silent, unchanged. Then Kenniston heard a calling of voices, a rising uproar in the city behind him. Others had seen, and called the news. The uproar of voices and running feet increased. All the thousands in New Middletown were beginning to stream in wild excitement toward the portal.

Mayor Garris’ pudgy figure ran toward them. “Have they really come? Have the other people come?”

Hubble’s voice crackled. “Keep the people back! They mustn’t go outside yet. Something has come, we don’t know what. Until we do know, we’ve got to be careful.”

Into Kenniston’s mind suddenly flashed the remembrance of that big meeting hall that Jennings had found, with its special section of queer seats that no ordinary human man or woman could have used. He felt a chill along his nerves. What manner of beings were in the looming, monstrous mass out there?

Garris sounded a little scared. “Why—why, I never thought that if people came, they might be enemies.”

He started to shout to the police and National Guardsmen already on hand. “Get those people back! And get your guns!”

Presently the crowd had been forced back into the adjacent streets. And a score of armed police and Guardsmen waited with Hubble and Kenniston and the others, just inside the portal. The Mayor, his teeth chattering in the cold, said, “Shall we go out to them?”

Hubble shook his head. “No, we’re not sure of anything. We’ll wait.”

They waited, shivering in the cold wind, and as they waited, Kenniston’s mind rioted with speculation. This great vessel from outer space—whence had it come to dying Earth? From the farther stars? Why had it come? And what was going on inside it now? What eyes were watching them?

They waited. All New Middletown waited, and watched, as the Moon swung lordly across the zenith and the stars shifted and the cold deepened. And nothing happened. The monster metal bulk out there lay lightless and without sound.

The stars dimmed. Bleak gray light crept up the eastern sky. To Kenniston, chafing half-frozen hands, the mighty vessel out on the plain seemed unreal and dreamlike.

McLain swore. “If they’re not coming to see us, we might as well go out to see them.”

“Wait,” said Hubble.

“But we’ve waited for hours, and—”

“Wait,” said Hubble again. “They’re coming now.”

Kenniston saw. A dark opening had appeared, low in the side of the distant, looming hull. Figures that were vaguely unreal in the dawn light were emerging from that opening, and moving slowly toward New Middletown.

CHAPTER 10

From the Stars

Kenniston watched them come, the four vague figures walking slowly through the dawn, toward New Middletown. His heart pounded and his mouth was dry, and he was strangely afraid.

Perhaps it was the manner of their coming that made him so—the brooding, enigmatic bulk of that unknown ship, that long and cautious silence. It came to him that they, too, were doubtful.

The three leading figures resolved themselves gradually into men, clad in slacks and jackets against the biting cold. The fourth member of the party trudged along some distance behind them, a stocky form veiled in the blowing dust.

Mayor Garris said, wonderingly, “They look just like us. I guess people haven’t changed much after all, in a billion years.”

Kenniston nodded. For some reason, the cold knot in the pit of his stomach would not relax. There was something overpowering in this incredible meeting of two epochs.

He glanced at the others. Their faces were white and tense. There was a fooling of excitement verging almost on hysteria.

The strangers were close enough now to distinguish features. The stocky laggard remained indistinct, but of the three who came before, Kenniston saw now that only two were men. The third was a blue-eyed woman, tall and lithe, with hair the color of pale gold smooth-coiled about her head. Kenniston was struck by her. He had seen more beautiful women, but he had seldom seen one who carried herself with such grace and authority, and who looked at the world with such a direct, intelligent gaze. Almost instantly he resented her, for no more reason than that she made him instantly conscious of vast horizons of knowledge and experience which were far beyond his present ken. And yet her mouth was friendly, quite a strong mouth, but ready to smile.

The younger of the two men was broad and hard and healthy, with sorrel hair and one of those frank, jovial faces that is built over flint. Like the woman’s, his attitude was of alert, half-cautious reserve.

The other man was thin and untidy and very human. He had none of the cool reserve of his companions. He was excited, and showed it, blinking eagerly at the Middletowners. Kenniston warmed to him at once.

There was a strange silence, and the woman and two men stopped. They looked at the Middletowners, and the Middletowners stared at them. Then the woman said something to her companions in a rapid, unfamiliar tongue. The younger man nodded silently, and the thin eager man poured out a tumbling flood of words.

Mayor Garris stepped forward hesitantly, a paradox of pompous humility.

“I…” he said, and stopped. The small word vanished away on the wind, and he could seem to find nothing to replace it. The blond woman regarded him with her bright gaze, intent and faintly amused.

The thin man stepped forward toward them. Forming the words very carefully, he said, “Middletown calling.” And again, “Middletown—calling!”

Kenniston was shaken by a great amazement. Relief and understanding made him almost giddy for the moment, and he heard again his own tired voice speaking those two hopeless, pleading words into a silence that neither heard nor answered. But it had heard. It had answered, from somewhere. From where? Another world, another star? Not from anywhere on Earth, surely. That great ship had never stooped to make such a paltry journey.

He heard Mayor Garris utter a squeaking, strangled cry. A wave of shock, audible in the indrawn breath of every man there, swept the tight-packed group. Kenniston’s wandering thoughts came back with a start.

The fourth member of the party had come up and joined the other three. And Kenniston himself was appalled at what he saw.

The fourth of the newcomers was not human. Manlike, yes—but not a man.

He was tall, his body enormously strong and massive, his thick arms ending in hands like heavy paws. He was clothed in his own shaggy fur, supplemented by a harness-like garment. His head was flattened, its muzzle protruding in the fashion of a beast, his round and tufted ears alert. And his eyes… It was the eyes that were most shocking. They met Kenniston’s, large, and dark and full of a quick, penetrating intelligence. Good-natured eyes, curious, smiling…

The Mayor had backed away. His face was quite white. He cried out shrilly, “Why, it isn’t human!”

The furry one looked puzzled by this outburst. He glanced at the woman and the two men, and they all looked at Garris, frowning, as though at a loss to understand his fright.

The creature moved toward Garris a step or two, his pawlike hands outstretched. He spoke in a slow, rumbling voice and smiled, showing a row of great teeth that glistened sharp as sabres in the light.

Garris shrieked. And Kenniston saw panic on the faces of the other men, and saw the guns come up.

“Wait!” he yelled, and darted forward, thrusting the Mayor aside. “For God’s sake, wait, you fools!” He faced them, standing so that his body shielded the alien one. He had, himself, a revulsion from that creature that was both beastlike and manlike. But the furry one had looked at him, and had smiled…

“Don’t shoot!” he cried. “It’s intelligent, it’s one of them!”

“Stand aside, Kenniston,” shouted the Mayor, his voice high with panic. “The brute looks dangerous!”

The guns he faced swung sharply away from Kenniston. He turned and saw that the four newcomers had suddenly stepped a little to one side. And abruptly, the scene ended. The woman raised her hand in a swift gesture. From the ship out on the plain came a flash of white light. It struck like a snake, at all the crowd of Middletowners in the portal. It struck, and was gone in an instant.

Kenniston had been in its path, too. He felt a stunning shock in every nerve of his body. There was only a split second of pain, and then a numbed paralysis as from an electric shock. He saw Garris and Hubble and the others stagger, their faces white and shaken. The guns dropped from nerveless hands.

Then the furry one trudged toward Kenniston. Again, his dark eyes smiled. He made reassuring rumbling sounds, and his big pawlike hands kneaded into Kenniston’s neck with expert deftness. The paralysis of Kenniston’s nerves began to fade.

The sorrel-haired younger man had stepped forward and picked up one of the fallen guns. Incredulity came into his eyes as he examined it. He said something in a sharp voice to the others. They looked the gun over and over. Then, puzzled and startled, they stared at Kenniston and at the other Middletowners who now seemed returning to normal.

“They’ve got a death ray or something!” choked Bertram Garris. “They can kill us!”

Hubble said savagely, “Shut up. You’re making an ass of yourself. That weapon was only a nonlethal means of defense that you forced them to use.”

The woman called excitedly to the furry one. “Gorr Holl!” It was, obviously, his name. And Gorr Holl rejoined the other three. He too uttered sounds of bewilderment as he looked at the gun.

Kenniston spoke to Hubble, ignoring Garris and the dazed police. “I think they’ve just begun to suspect where we came from.”

The excitement of the four newcomers was obvious. It was the woman, Kenniston noticed, who first recovered from that bewilderment. She spoke quickly to the thin, blinking man, the one who had so happily repeated, “Middletown calling!” From her repeated use of the name, Kenniston guessed the man was called Piers Eglin. And Piers Eglin looked the most staggered of all the four—and the most joyful.

He came back to Kenniston. He almost devoured him with those blinking eyes. “Middletown,” he said. And then, after a moment, “Friends.”

Kenniston seized on that. “Friends? Then you speak English?” The word “English” set Piers Eglin off into a new paroxysm of excitement. He began to babble to the others, but the woman cut him short. He swung back to Kenniston. “English—language,” he almost panted. “You—speak—English—language.” Kenniston simply nodded.

A look of awe crept into Piers Eglin’s blinking eyes as he asked, “Who—No!” He began again. “Where—do you—come from?”

“From the past,” Kenniston answered, and felt the full unreality of it as he said it. “From far in the past.”

“How far?”

Kenniston realized that twentieth-century dates would mean little, after all these epochs. He thought a moment. Then he said, “Very far in the past. In our lifetime, atomic power was first released.”

“So far?” whispered Piers Eglin numbly. “But how? How?” Kenniston shrugged helplessly. “There was an atomic explosion over our city. We found our whole city in this age. That’s all.”

The thin man feverishly translated for the others. The woman showed deep interest. But it was Gorr Holl, the furry one, who made the longest comment in his rumbling voice.

Piers Eglin swung back to Kenniston, but Kenniston stemmed the other’s eager questions by a question of his own. “Where do you come from?”

The thin one pointed up at the dawnlit sky. “From—” he seemed trying to remember the ancient name. Then, “—from Vega.”

It was Kenniston’s turn to be staggered. “But you’re Earthmen!” He pointed to Gorr Holl’s furry figure. “And what about him?”

Again, Piers Eglin seemed to search his memory for a name. Then he said it. “Capella. Gorr Holl is from Capella.”

There was a silence, in which the four looked at the men of Middletown. Kenniston’s mind was a chaotic whirl, out of which one thing stood clear. The televisor-radio of this domed city had indeed been far outside his comprehension. That radio had been designed for interstellar distances. That was where the call had gone, and whence it had been answered—from Vega, from Capella, from the stars!

“But you speak our old language!” he cried incredulously.

Piers Eglin stumblingly explained. “I am an—historian, specializing in the pre-atomic Earth civilization. I learned its language from the old records. That is why I asked leave to accompany this party to Earth.”

The woman interrupted. She was shivering a little, and she spoke now in a low, rapid voice. Piers Eglin told them, “She is Varn Allan, the Administrator of this—this sector. Here—” nodding to the sorrel-haired younger man—“is Norden Lund, the Sub-Administrator.” The words were hard for him to remember, harder still to shape. He added, “Varn Allan asks that we—we talk inside the city, where it is not so cold.”

Kenniston had guessed that the woman held authority in the group. He was not surprised. Her vibrant forcefulness was striking.

Mayor Garris, who was half frozen himself, was only too happy to accede to that request. He turned toward the portal, behind which all the thousands of New Middletown were being held with difficulty. Their massed faces showed as a pale blur through the glass of the dome.

“Make way, there!” Garris ordered, in his most important tone. He gestured at the sweating guardsmen and police who held the line. “Clear a way there, now, we’re coming in.” He raised his voice, speaking to the people beyond. “Stand back, will you? Everything’s fine, the other people have come at last, and they want to see our city. So let them through, let them through!”

The crowd, with painful reluctance, made a narrow lane through itself, which was widened by the efforts of the guardsmen. Leading the way for the star-folk, the Mayor’s dignity was somewhat injured by the uneasiness that caused him to skip hastily ahead with nervous backward glances at Gorr Holl’s towering figure. But he kept up his jovial front as leader of his people, shouting to them that all was well, that there was nothing to fear, and begging them to keep back and refrain from pushing.

Varn Allan was the first one to follow Garris through the portal. She hesitated, just an instant, as she and the jostling eager crowd caught sight of one another, and the crowd sent up a wild-throated roar of cheering that shook the dome. Behind her, Norden Lund grinned and shook his head, as a man might at the bad manners of children. Then Varn Allan smiled at the people and went on, and the edges of the crowd swayed and buckled inward and the guardsmen swore, and some irreverent soul whistled appreciatively at the tall, lithe woman with the golden hair. They shouted questions at her, a thousand all at once, and the half-hysterical greetings of people who have waited so long that they have lost hope and then find it suddenly fulfilled, and Kenniston hoped that they would not do anything violent, like carrying her and Norden Lund on their shoulders.

He went in right beside Gorr Holl. The people had not seen him yet, except as a vague, dark figure beyond the wall of curving glass. When they did, their voice dropped dead still for a moment and then took up again on a rising note of incredulity and alarm. Women who had shoved and clawed to get in the first row now tried to scramble back out of harm’s way, and the edges of the crowd drew sharply apart. Kenniston walked close to the big furry Capellan, his hand resting on one mighty shoulder, to show the crowd that they had nothing to fear. And the people stared and stared.

“What the devil is it? A pet?”

“Look, it’s got clothes on! Don’t tell me it’s one of them!”

“Keep it away from me! It’s showing its teeth…” Kenniston shouted explanations, and under his palm the dark thick fur was hot and alien, and he was almost as much afraid of Gorr Holl as they were. And then, from out of the crowd, a tiny girl came toddling directly into their path. Her eyes shining with childish glee, she ran toward Gorr Holl’s mighty, furry form. “Teddy-bear!” she shrieked joyfully. “Teddy-bear!” And she flung her arms around his leg.

Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling laugh. He reached down his great paw to pat her head, and other children came running, breaking away from fearful mothers, clustering eagerly around the big Capellan as he trudged along. The little girl he hoisted to his shoulder and she rode there clinging to his ears, and after that it was impossible for anyone to fear him. The tension of the crowd relaxed and they grinned at each other and laughed.

“Sure, it’s a pet! Hey, how do you like that? Walking on his hind legs, just like a man! Smart, ain’t he? Why, you’d almost think he was trying to talk!”

Piers Eglin, who must have caught at least a part of this, peered sidelong at Gorr Holl, but he did not offer to translate.

The crowd became a fluid mass flowing along the boulevards, following the strangers. Help and hope and companionship had come at last to New Middletown, and the relief and joy in the faces of the people were wonderful to see. But Kenniston watched the faces of the blue-eyed woman and the man Norden Lund, seeing their expressions change from incredulity to a startled acceptance.

Pier Eglin was beside himself. A woman’s fur coat entranced him—quite ordinary cheap fur, but from a species of animal that Kenniston realized must have been extinct for millions of years. Cloth and leather became treasures unimaginable in his eyes. He talked incessantly, feverishly, pointing out this wonder and that to his companions, lapsing occasionally into his painful English to ask Kenniston some question. And when he saw an automobile he became perfectly hysterical with excitement.

The automobile was of interest to them all. Varn Allan and Norden Lund stopped to examine it, and Gorr Holl, gently disengaging himself from his burden of children, joined them, The furry one’s quick eye apparently divined where the motive power was hidden away, and he made signs to Kenniston that he wanted to see inside. Kenniston lifted the hood. Immediately all four bent over to inspect the motor, and the crowd of Middletowners laughed to see the big tame pet animal imitating its masters. The star-folk talked, in their swift unfamiliar tongue, and Norden Lund pointed to the engine assembly with the same half mocking wonder that a man of Kenniston’s day might have felt toward an oxcart. Gorr Holl spoke to Piers Eglin, and the little man turned to Kenniston.

“So beautiful, so primitive,” he whispered, and clasped his hands. “They ask you make it—make it.…” He was stumped for a word, but Kenniston got his meaning. The keys were in the lock. He started the motor. Gorr Holl was fascinated. There was a good bit of talking and then the last cupful of gas in the tank ran out, and the motor died. The star-folk looked at each other, and nodded, and went on.

Mayor Garris was now in his finest form. He had lost his terror of Gorr Holl in his pride and his excitement. He showed the strangers from the stars the means by which New Middletown had been made livable, he babbled about it government, its schools and courts, the distribution of food. How much of it the strangers got through Pier Eglin’s stumbling translations, Kenniston could not know. But an unreasoning resentment was growing in him.

For he and all the folk of Middletown shared Garris’ pride. They had had a hard time, but they had taken this alien city and with their own hands and ingenuity they had made a functioning decent habitation out of it, and they were proud of that. And all the while they were being proud, the strangers peered at the gasoline pumps and the improvised water system and the precious electric lights that had cost such labor, and were appalled at the crudity and ignorance of these things. They did not need to say so. It was plain in their faces.

Presently they stopped and conferred at some length among themselves. Evidently they reached a decision, for Piers Eglin turned and spoke.

“We have seen enough for this time,” he said. “Later—” and here he trembled with eagerness and his eyes shone moistly, like a hound’s—“later we will wish to see the old city, which you say still stands. But now Varn Allan says we will return to the ship, to report what we have found to Government Center.”

“Listen!” said Kenniston urgently. “We need help. We need power, and our fuel is running low.”

Hubble, who had been nearby through all the visit of the strangers, nodded and said, “If you could start up some of the atomic generators here…”

Piers Eglin turned at once to consult Varn Allan, who glanced at Kenniston and Hubble and nodded. Piers Eglin said, “Of course. She says you should be made as comfortable as possible while you are still here. The crew of the Thanis will help. They will work under Gorr Holl, who is our chief atomic technician.”

The Mayor gasped. “That furry brute a technician?”

Piers Eglin cleared his throat. “There will be—others, among the crew. They will be strange to you. But they are also friends. You had better assure your people.”

Garris gulped, and said, “I’ll attend to it.”

“I will act as—yes, interpreter. And now there is much to be done. I will return shortly, with the crew and the necessary—uh—objects.”

The star-folk left then, going back as they had come, though the portal and out across the dusty plain. And as they went Mayor Garris gave the news to the crowd—power, more water, more lights, perhaps even heat. The wild, jubilant cheering startled the still heights of the towers and the dome rang with it and underneath that cry of joy, Hubble said to Kenniston, “What did he mean—while we are still here?” Kenniston shook his head. A cold doubt was in him, almost a foreboding, and it was based on nothing that had been said or done, but simply on the realization of the abyss that separated the civilization of old Middletown from civilization that had gone out among the stars so far and so long ago that Earth was almost forgotten.

He wondered how well those two incredibly disparate cultures were going to understand each other. He stood for a long while, wondering, watching the crowd disperse, and even the thought that soon the big generators would be humming again could not dispel his worry.

CHAPTER 11

Revelation

The Crew of the Thanis came into New Middletown that afternoon, and Kenniston and Carol, and all the rest of the city’s thousands, watched them come.

There were two score of them—a hard-handed, alert, capable breed no different from all the sailors Kenniston had ever seen, though their seas were the incalculable deeps of outer space and their faces were darkened by the rays of alien Suns. Across the blowing dust of this world that had bred and lost them they came, and with them were the others Piers Eglin had spoken of—the strange children of other stars.

Kenniston had explained about these aliens to Carol, who had seen no more than the tips of Gorr Holl’s furry ears and had supposed, like the others, that he was only a peculiar kind of pet. He didn’t think that she had really understood him, any more than the people of New Middletown had really understood the Mayor’s similar explanation.

“From Vega,” Carol had said, and shivered, looking toward the dim sky where the stars showed even in daylight. “They can’t be like us, Ken. No human being could ever go out there, and still be like us.”

Kenniston was startled to hear his own thoughts repeated in her voice, but he said reassuringly. “They can’t have changed too much. And the others, the humanoids—they may look queer, but they’re our friends.”

It was what Mayor Garris had told his people. “Whatever these newcomers are like, they’ve got to be treated right, and there’s a jail cell waiting for anyone who makes trouble with them. Do you all get that? No matter what they look like, act as though they’re people!”

Hearing is one thing, seeing another. And now Carol’s fingers closed tight on Kenniston’s hand and her body shrank against his, and the crowd who had gathered to watch this second entrance of the incredible into their midst, stared and whispered and moved uneasily.

One of these aliens was big and bulky, walking stodgily on massive legs. His wrinkled gray skin hung in heavy folds. His face was broad and flat and featureless, with little, wise old eyes that glanced with shrewd understanding at the staring, silent crowd.

Two were lean and dark, moving like conspirators wrapped in black cloaks. Their narrow heads were hairless, and their glance was bright and full of madcap humor. Kenniston realized with a shock that the cloaks they wore were wings, folded close around their bodies.

There was another, who had peculiar gliding grace that hinted of unguessed strength and speed, and whose bearing was very cool and proud. He was handsome, with a mane of snow-white fur sweeping back from his brow, and there was only a faint touch of cruelty in his broad cheekbones and straight, smiling mouth.

These four, and Gorr Holl were manlike but not men, children of far worlds walking with easy confidence on old Earth.

“They’re horrible,” whispered Carol, drawing away. “Unholy! How can you stand to be near them?”

Kenniston was fighting down much the same reaction. The Middletowners gaped and muttered and drew back, partly from a creeping fear of the unnatural, partly from sheer racial resentment. It was hard enough to accept the fact that such nonhuman people existed at all. It was harder still to accept them as equals. Beast was beast and man was man, and there was no middle ground…

But not to Middletown’s children. They ignored the bronzed spacemen and clustered in droves around the humanoids. They had none of their elders’ preconceptions. These were creatures out of fairy tales come alive, and the children loved them.

Piers Eglin came up to Kenniston. Kenniston said. “Hubble has the main generator rooms opened up. He’s waiting for us there. I’ll take you.”

Eglin sighed. “Thank you,” he said. He seemed desperately unhappy. Kenniston said a hasty goodbye to Carol, and fell in beside the little historian.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“My orders,” said Piers Eglin. “I am to interpret, and to teach some of you our language.” He shook his head dismally. “It will take days, and that old city of yours—I should be in it every moment.”

Kenniston smiled. “I’ll try to learn fast,” he said.

He led the way to where Hubble was waiting by the generators, and behind him he heard the eerie footfalls of the creatures who were not human, and it was incredible to him that he was going to have to work beside these weird beings who gave him a cold shiver every time he came near them. Surely they could not behave like men!

They went into the building, into an enormous room filled with the towering, dusty shapes of armored mechanisms that he and Hubble had not been able to make head nor tail of. The senior scientist joined them, looking askance at the humanoids.

Kenniston said, “We supposed that these were the main generators.” He spoke to Pier Eglin, since Eglin must do the translating, but he was facing Gorr Holl and the four others who stood beside him. “If they can really repair and start them, we…”

His voice trailed off. The five pairs of alien eyes regarded him, the five alien bodies breathed and stirred, and the crest of white fur on the proud one’s skull lifted in a way so beastlike that it was impossible for Kenniston to pretend any longer to accept them as human. Doubt, distrust, and just a hint of fear crept into his face. Piers Eglin frowned a little, and started to speak.

With the suddenness of a bat darting out in the evening, one of the lean dark brothers whipped wide his wings and made a little spring at Kenniston, uttering a cry that sounded very much like “Boo!”

Kenniston leaped backward, startled almost out of his skin. And the lean one promptly doubled up with laughter, which was echoed by the others. Even the large grey creature smiled. They all looked at Kenniston and laughed, and presently Hubble got it and began to laugh too, and after that there was nothing for Kenniston to do but join in. The joke was on him, at that. They had known perfectly well how he felt about them, and the lean one had paid him back in his own coin, but with humor and not malice.

And somehow, after they had laughed together, the tension was gone. Laughter is a human sort of thing. Kenniston mumbled something, and Gorr Holl slapped his shoulder, nearly putting him on his face.

But when he approached the dusty generators, Gorr Holl changed abruptly from a shambling, good-natured creature into a highly efficient technician. He operated hidden catches, and had a shield panel off one of the big mechanisms before Kenniston saw how he did it. He drew a flat pocket flash from a pouch on his harness, and used it for light as he poked his hairy bullet-shaped head inside the machine. His low, rumbling comments came out of the bowels of the generator. Finally Gorr Holl withdrew his head from the machine, and spoke disgustedly.

Eglin translated, “He says this old installation is badly designed and in poor condition. He says he would like to get his hands on the technician who would do a job like this.”

Kenniston laughed again. The big, furry Capellan sounded like a blood brother to every repair technician on old Earth. While Gorr Holl examined the other generators, Piers Eglin fastened onto Hubble and Kenniston, deluging them with questions about their own remote time. They managed at last to ask a question of their own, one that was big in their minds but that they’d had no chance to ask before.

“Why is Earth lifeless now? What happened to all its people?”

Piers Eglin said, “Long ago, Earth’s people went out to other worlds. Not so much to the other planets of this System—the outer ones were cold, and watery Venus had too small a land surface—but to the worlds of other stars, across the galaxy.”

“But surely some of them would have stayed on Earth?” said Kenniston.

Eglin shrugged. “They did, until it grew so cold that even in these domed cities life was difficult. Then the last of them went, to the worlds of warmer Suns.”

Kenniston said, “In our day, we hadn’t even reached the Moon.” He felt a little dazed by it all. “…to the worlds of other stars, across the galaxy…”

Gorr Holl finally came back to them and rumbled lengthily. Eglin translated, “He thinks they can get the generators going. But it’ll take time, and he’ll need materials—copper, magnesium, some platinum—”

They listened carefully, and Hubble nodded and said, “We can get all those for you in old Middletown.”

“The old city?” cried Piers Eglin eagerly. “I will go with you! Let us start at once!”

The little historian was afire for a look at the old town. He fidgeted until he and Hubble and Kenniston, in a jeep; were driving across the cold ocher wasteland.

“I shall see, with my own eyes, a town of the pre-atomic age!” he exulted.

It was strange to come upon old Middletown, standing so silent in the midst of desolation. The houses were as he had last seen them, the doors locked, the empty porch swings rocking in the cold wind. The streets were drifted thick with dust. The trees were bare, and the last small blade of grass had died.

Kenniston saw that Hubble’s eyes were misted, and his own heart contracted with a terrible pang of longing. He wished that he had not come. Back in that other city, absorbed in the effort to survive, one could almost forget that there had been a life before.

He drove the jeep through those deathly streets, and memory spoke to him strongly of lost summers—girls in bright frocks, catalpa trees heavy with blossom, the quarreling of wrens, and the lights and sounds of human voices in the drowsy evening. Piers Eglin was speechless with joy, lost in a historian’s dream as he walked the streets and looked into shops and houses.

“It must be preserved,” Eglin whispered. “It is too precious. I will have them build a dome and seal it all—the signs, the artifacts, the beautiful scraps of paper!”

Hubble said abruptly, “There’s someone here ahead of us.” Kenniston saw the small bullet-shaped car that stood outside the old Lab. Out of the building came Norden Lund and Varn Allan.

She spoke to Eglin, and he translated, “They have been gathering data for her report to Government Center.”

Kenniston saw the distaste in the woman’s clearcut face as her blue eyes rested on the panorama of grimy mills, the towering stacks black with forgotten smokes, the rustling rails of the sidings, the drab little houses huddled along the narrow streets. He resented it, and said defiantly. “Ask her what she thinks of our little city?”

Eglin did, and Varn Allan answered incisively. The little historian looked uneasy when Kenniston asked him to interpret.

“Varn Allan says that it is unbelievable people could live in a place so pitiful and sordid.”

Lund laughed. Kenniston flushed hot, and for a moment he detested this woman for her cool, imperious superiority. She looked at old Middletown as one might look at an unclean apes’ den.

Hubble saw his face, and laid a hand on his arm. “Come on, Ken. We have work to do.”

He followed the older man into the Lab, Piers Eglin trailing along. He said, “Why the hell would they put a haughty blonde in authority?”

Hubble said, “Presumably because she is competent to fill the job. Don’t tell me old-fashioned masculine vanity is bothering you?”

Piers Eglin had understood what they were saying, for he chuckled. “That’s not such an old-fashioned feeling. Norden Lund doesn’t much like being Sub for a girl.”

When they came out of the building with the materials Gorr Holl had requested, Varn Allan and Lund were gone.

They found, upon their return to New Middletown, that Gorr Holl and his crew were already at work disassembling the generators. Bellowing orders, thundering deep-chested Capellan profanity, attacking each generator as though it were a personal enemy, Gorr Holl drove his hard-handed spacemen into performing miracles of effort.

Kenniston, in the days that followed, forgot all sense of strangeness in the intense technical interest of the work. Laboring as he could, eating and sleeping with these star-worlders though the long days and nights, he began to pick up the language with amazing speed. Piers Eglin was eager to help him, and after Kenniston discovered that the basic structure of the tongue was that of his own English, things went more easily.

He discovered one day that he was working beside the humanoids as naturally as though he had always done it. It no longer seemed strange that Magro, the handsome white-furred Spican, was an electronics expert whose easy unerring work left Kenniston staring.

The brothers, Ban and Bal, were masters at refitting. Kenniston envied their deftness with outworn parts, the swift ease with which their wiry bodies flitted batlike among the upper levels of the towering machines, where it was hard for men to go.

And Lal’lor, the old grey stodgy one of the massive body, who spoke little but saw much from wise little eyes, had an amazing mathematical genius. Kenniston discovered it when Lal’lor went with him and Hubble and Piers Eglin to look at the big heat shaft that seemed to go down to the bowels of Earth.

The historian nodded comprehendingly as he looked at the great shaft and its conduits. It descended, he said, to Earth’s inmost core.

“It was a great work. It and others like it, in these domed cities, kept Earth habitable ages longer than would otherwise have been the case. But there is no more heat in Earth’s core to tap, now.” He sighed. “The doom of all planets, sooner or later. Even after their Sun has waned they can live while their interior heat keeps them warm. But when that interior planetary heat dies the planet must be abandoned.”

Lal’lor spoke in his throaty, husky voice. “But Jon Arnol, as you know, claims that a dead, cold planet can be revived. And his equations seem unassailable.”

And the bulk gray Miran—for that star had bred him, Kenniston had learned—repeated a staggering series of equations that Kenniston could not even begin to follow.

Piers Eglin, for some reason, looked oddly uncomfortable. He seemed to avoid Lal’lor’s gaze as he said hastily, “Jon Arnol is an enthusiast, a fanatic theorist. You know what happened when he tried a test.”

As soon as Kenniston could make himself understood in the new tongue, Piers Eglin considered that his duty was done and he departed for Old Middletown, to shiver and freeze and root joyfully among the archaic treasures that abounded in every block. Left alone with the star-worlders, Kenniston found himself more and more forgetting differences of time and culture and race as he worked with them to force life back into the veins of the city.

They had New Middletown’s water system in full operation again, and the luxury of opening one of the curious taps and seeing water gush forth in endless quantities was a wonderful thing. Many of the great atomic generators were functioning now, including a tremendous auxiliary heating system which made the air inside the dome several degrees warmer. And Gorr Holl and Margo had been working hard on the last miracle of all.

There came a night when the big Capellan called Kenniston into one of the main generator rooms. Magro and a number of the crewmen were there, smeared with dust and grease but grinning the happy grins of men who have just seen the last of a hard job. Gorr Holl pointed to a window.

“Stand over there,” he said to Kenniston, “and watch.” Kenniston looked out, over the dark city. There was no moon, and the towers were cloaked in shadow, the black canyons of the streets below them pricked here and there with the feeble glints of candles and the few electric bulbs that shone around the City Hall. Gorr Holl strode across the room behind him, to a huge control panel half the height of the wall. He grunted. There was a click and a snap as the master switch went home, and suddenly, over that nighted city under the dome, there burst a brilliant flood of light.

The shadowy towers lit to a soaring glow. The streets became rivers of white radiance, soft and clear, and above it all there was an new night sky—the wondrous luminescence of the dome, like a vast bowl fashioned out of moonbeams and many-colored clouds, crowning the gleaming towers with a glory of its own. It was so strange and beautiful, after the long darkness and the shadows, that Kenniston stood without moving, looking at the miracle of light, and was aware only later that there were tears in his eyes.

The sleeping city woke. The people poured out into the shining streets, and the sound of their voices rose and became one long shout of joy. Kenniston turned to Gorr Holl and Magro and the others. He wanted to say something, but he could not find any words. Finally he laughed, and they laughed with him, and they went out together into the streets.

Mayor Garris met them almost at once, having run all the way from City Hall. Hubble was with him, and most of the men from the old Lab, and a crowd of Middletowners. There was no making any sense out of anything that was said, but the people hoisted Gorr Holl and Magro and the crewmen to their shoulders and rode them in a triumphal procession around the plaza, and the shouts and cheers were deafening. More than water, more than heat, the people treasured this gift of light. And on that night they accepted the humanoids as brothers.

A little later, a breathless and jubilant group gathered in City Hall—Gorr Holl and Magro, Kenniston, Hubble, and the Mayor. Bertram Garris wrung the big Capellan’s mighty paw and beamed at Magro, trying to express his thanks for all that they and the others had done, and Gorr Holl listened, grinning.

“What’s he saying?” he asked Kenniston, who now occupied the position of interpreter.

Kenniston laughed. “He wants to know what he can do to show his appreciation—like giving you the city or his daughter in marriage, or a few pints of his blood. Seriously, Gorr, we are all mighty grateful. You people have made the city live again, and—well, is there anything we can do to show you we mean it?”

Gorr Holl considered. He looked at Magro, and Magro nodded solemnly. Gorr Holl said, “Well, being primitives—we could use a drink!”

Hubble, who had picked up a smattering of the language, began to laugh. Kenniston translated for the Mayor, who immediately proclaimed a medical emergency and hastened to produce bottles from the hoard. It was a cheerful celebration, and Kenniston found himself actively missing Bal and Ban and the grey Lal’lor, who had returned to the ship with part of the crew a day or so before.

An unhappy thought occurred to him, and he said, “I suppose you people will be going away pretty soon, now that the work’s done.”

Margo shrugged his supple shoulders. “That will depend on a number of things.” He glanced lazily at Gorr Holl.

Gorr Holl was a little drunk by now—not much, but loud and cheerful. The Mayor was feeling good too, and was affectionately patting the Capellan’s great furry shoulder.

“I want you to understand,” Garris was saying earnestly, “that I’m sorry about that stupid bull of mine when I first saw you. We’re all sorry, seeing how much you’ve done for us.”

“Listen, we haven’t done much,” said Gorr Holl, when Kenniston had translated. “But the lights and all will make you more comfortable here, while you’re waiting.”

Kenniston stared at him. “What do you mean—while we’re waiting?”

“Why, while you’re waiting to be evacuated, of course,” said Gorr.

There was a little silence. Kenniston felt a queer tension seize him, and he knew suddenly that this was something he’d been unconsciously expecting, something that he’d felt wasn’t quite right, all along.

He said carefully, “Gorr, we don’t understand this. What is this talk of evacuation?”

The big Capellan stared at him, with surprise in his large dark eyes and bearlike face. But, of a sudden, Kenniston felt that that surprise was completely assumed, that in this offhand, casual way Gorr Holl was springing something on them and watching for their reaction.

“Didn’t Piers tell you?” said Gorr Holl. “No, I suppose he’d have instructions not to. They’d figure you people were emotional primitives like Magro and me, and that the less time you have to think about it, the better.”

Kenniston said tightly again, “What do you mean by evacuation?”

The Capellan looked at him levelly now. “I simply mean that, by order of the Governors, all you people are to be evacuated from Earth to some other starworld.”

CHAPTER 12

Crisis

Three men of Earth stared at the big Capellan, and for a long, long moment no one spoke. Gorr Holl became absorbed in the glass he held between his hands. Magro watched them with his bright cat eyes. The beautiful streaming light poured over them, and the men were like three images of stone.

Bertram Garris found his tongue at last. But it was only to repeat Gorr Holl’s words, as Kenniston had translated them.

“Evacuation?” he said. And again, “Evacuation?”

“To the world of another star,” said Kenniston slowly. His mouth twitched, and he leaned close to Gorr Holl, and cried, “What do you think we’re made of?”

Gorr Holl looked around their faces, and then said ruefully, “I guess I’ve talked too much.” His ruefulness was no more convincing than his earlier surprise.

Mayor Garris had begun to tremble. A fury was building up in him, a genuine fury that had nothing to do with display. He glared at Magro and at Gorr Holl.

“They knew this all along, that woman and the others,” he said. “They came in here, pretending to be our friends, and all the time behind our backs…” He stopped. His wrath and fear were all but choking him, coming so swiftly after joy. His voice went up and octave. “You tell them, Kenniston, tell them from me—if they think we’re going to move clear off the Earth to some—some—” he stammered over the sheer impossibility of what he was saying, “—some damn fool place out in the sky—well, they’re crazy!”

Hubble said to Kenniston, “Ask him if this is a thing they do, these Governors? I mean, this moving of whole populations from one world to another?”

Gorr Holl nodded to that. “Oh, yes. Whenever life on some planet becomes economically unsound, or the margin of survival is too small, the Governors evacuate the people to a better world. There are lots of them, good warm fertile planets that are uninhabited or nearly so. They did it to some of my own people, moved them from Capella Five to Aldebaran.”

Kenniston cried out of his anger, “And people let that be done to them? They didn’t even resist it?”

Gorr Holl said, “People—human people, I mean—have got millions of years of civilization behind them. They’re used to peaceful government, used to obedience, and they’ve been moving from world to world ever since they left Earth ages ago, so that one planet doesn’t mean much more than another to them. But the primitive humanoid folk, lately civilized, like my own and Magro’s, aren’t so reasonable. There’s been a good bit of resentment among them about this evacuation business. In fact, they hate it—just as much as you do.”

“Here!” said Hubble sharply. “Where are you going?” He was talking to the Mayor, who was striding suddenly toward the door. He caught Garris by the coat and pulled him back. The Mayor struggled sullenly to free himself.

“I’m going to tell them,” he said, jerking his head toward the sounds of revelry that came from the crowd of Middletowners in the plaza. “Move off the Earth? They’ll have something to say about that!”

“What do you want to do?” snapped Hubble. “Start a riot? Don’t be a fool, that’s no way to handle this. No, it’s that ice-water blonde we’ve got to talk to, and that fellow Lund.” He shook Garris. “Stop it, I say! Going off half-cocked will only make it harder for everyone.”

Garris stopped struggling. He looked from Hubble to Kenniston and back again. “All right,” he said, “we’ll talk to them. But they’d better get it through their heads that they’re not dealing with any flock of tame sheep.” He stamped back into the room. “Ordering us off our own world…! Get those two freaks out of here, Kenniston. I was right the first time. They’re not to be trusted, they’re…”

“Oh, shut up,” said Kenniston impatiently. “Gorr and Margo don’t make the laws. They’re simply being decent enough to give us fair warning of something we wouldn’t have known about until it was too late.” He knew there was more in it than that, but he was too hurried and upset to search for deeper motives now. He turned to Gorr and the Spican.

“Listen,” he said. “You’ve seen how the Mayor reacted. Well, I can assure you that all our people will react just that way, only more so. Tell that to Varn Allan, and tell her that she’d better come here and talk about this evacuation before she gets in too deep. Tell her we don’t like having things done behind our backs. Tell her—” He caught himself, surprised by his own fury. “No, I guess you couldn’t tell her that,” he said, and Gorr Holl grinned.

“As one primitive to another, I get your meaning.”

“Well, all right. And Gorr—you and Magro and the others better stay out of the city. When this thing breaks, I wouldn’t guarantee anybody’s safety.”

“Oh,” said Gorr Holl, and grinned very widely so that even his grinders glistened, “we’ll be quite safe, confined to quarters in the ship. We, or rather I, have done an evil thing. We have spoken out of turn, and upset the Policy.”

The three of them, humanoids and human, looked at each other, and there was understanding between them. Kenniston put his hand on Gorr Holl’s furry shoulder, and gripped the iron muscles of it, and Magro said, “One more thing, Kenniston. If there’s trouble—and I seem to smell trouble very strongly in the air—watch out for Lund. Varn Allan may be much too sure of herself, but she’s honest. Lund—well, he wants Varn’s job, and he will cheerfully cut anyone’s throat to get it.”

“That is so,” said Gorr Holl. “Remember, Kenniston.”

“I’ll remember. And—thanks.”

They went away, to take the message of defiance to the ship. Kenniston watched them go, and the Mayor watched them, and they listened to the cheering that followed them all the way to the portal.

“I’m sorry I called them freaks,” the Mayor said suddenly. “By God, they’re more like us than the people in that ship!”

Hubble nodded. “Their culture level is closer to ours. They haven’t lost their old aboriginal roots. Our own people have gone too far beyond us. The whole pattern of their thinking is different. We—well, we’re strangers now, to our own kind.”

To Kenniston, the cheering and the happiness of the Middletowners out there was an ironically bitter thing, now. If they knew what was being planned for them…

He said to Hubble, nodding his head toward the Mayor, “Will you stick with him and keep him from telling everyone? He’ll listen to you more than to anyone.”

Hubble said, “I will. You get some sleep, Ken. You’ve been working a tough grind—and the Allan woman and Lund won’t likely come before morning.”

And Kenniston slept, but neither much nor well. In spite of his exhaustion, Gorr Holl’s words rang like passing bells in his mind all the rest of that night—evacuate, evacuate—to the world of another star. And he thought of all the people of Middletown who happily believed their troubles were over, and of Carol—particularly of Carol—and most of all he thought of Varn Allan, whom he had begun to hate. And he was afraid.

It did not take much imagination to divine what the Mayor’s narrowness had missed—a vast and powerful machinery of government directing this future universe, a machinery of which the big starship and its occupants were but a symbol. It did not seem likely that a handful of people on a dying planet could successfully defy that government for very long.

Hubble woke him at last out of an uneasy slumber, to tell him that Varn Allan and Lund had come, and that the Mayor had called the City Council.

“We need you to interpret, Ken,” he said. “You speak the language better than any of us, and this is too important to take any chances of misunderstanding.”

Neither of them talked much on the way to the soaring tower that was now City Hall. And Kenniston could see that Hubble was as worried and oppressed as he.

A crowd had gathered in the plaza, a happy crowd, come to cheer their good friends who had helped them so much. Inside City Hall, the Council of Middletown sat around a massive metal table. The Mayor, Borchard the coal dealer, Moretti the wholesale produce merchant, half a dozen more, facing at one end of the table the woman and the man who came from Vega and who were Administrators over a vast sector of space with all its worlds and peoples.

Mayor Garris fastened on Kenniston the moment he came in. He looked as though he had slept even less than Kenniston, and his mood had not changed since the night before.

“You ask her, Kenniston,” he said. “You ask her if this evacuation story is true.” He asked her.

Varn Allan nodded. “Quite true. I’m sorry that Gorr Holl spoke so prematurely—is seems to have upset your people.” She glanced at the ominous faces of the City Council and the tense countenance of the Mayor. It struck Kenniston that she had been all through this situation before with other populations, and was attacking the problem with a kind of weary patience.

“I am sure,” she said, “that when they understand, they will realize that we are only serving their best interests.”

“Best interests?” cried Garris, when he had heard that. “Then why didn’t you tell us at first? Why plan this behind our backs?”

Norden Lund, a smug look on his face, said to the woman, “I told you it would have been better—”

“We’ll discuss that later,” she flashed. Kenniston could see the effort she made to keep her imperious temper in check as she went on, speaking directly to him, “We wanted to wait until we could present a complete plan of evacuation, so as not to upset your people too much.”

“In other words,” said Kenniston angrily, “you were dealing with a bunch of primitive aborigines who had to be coaxed along?”

“Aren’t you acting in just such fashion?” Varn Allan demanded. Again, she visibly got a grip on her irritation. She said, carefully as though explaining to a child, “A shipful of evacuation experts is on its way here, should arrive soon. They can assess the needs of your people, and find a world that will fit their physical and psychological needs. We will see that it is a world as much like your past Earth as possible.”

“That,” said Kenniston ironically, “is very decent of you.” The woman’s blue eyes flashed open hostility at him. He turned away from her, for Garris was demanding a translation. He gave it, and in his own resentment he did not soften it.

Garris forgot oratory, in his indignation. He sputtered, “If they think we are going to move away from Earth to some crazy world out in the sky, they’re badly mistaken! You make that clear to them!”

Varn Allan looked honestly bewildered, when Kenniston did. “But surely you people don’t want to stay in the cold and hardship of this dying world?”

Kenniston, watching the anger and the instinctive, basic fear grow still stronger in the Mayor’s white face, could understand his feelings. His own reaction was the same.

“Not want to stay here?” said Garris, forcing words out painfully from a throat constricted with emotion. “Not want to? Listen, you people! We have left our own time. We have had to leave our own city, our homes. That’s enough. It’s all we can stand in one lifetime. Leave Earth, leave our own world? No!” There was no oratory about him now, at all. He was like a man who has been asked to die.

Kenniston spoke to Varn Allan. His own voice was not quite steady. “Try to understand. We are Earth-born. Our whole life, all the generations before us, since the beginning…”

He could not put it into words, this sudden passionate oneness with Earth.

The Earth hath He given to the children of men… The Earth, the soil, the winds and the rains, the growth and the dying over the ages, beast and tree and man. You could not forget that. You could not let drop the heritage of a world as though it had never been.

The sorrel-haired Norden Lund was speaking to Varn Allan, looking contemptuously at the Middletowners as he spoke. “I warned you, Varn, that these primitives are too emotional for ordinary methods.”

The woman, her blue eyes troubled, ignored Lund and addressed Kenniston. “You must make them recognize the facts. Life here is impossible, and therefore they must go.”

“Let her tell that to the people,” said the Mayor, in an oddly tight voice. “No. I’ll tell them myself.”

He rose and left the council room. There was a curious dignity about his plump figure now. Borchard and Moretti and the others followed. They, too, showed a shrinking, instinctive dread of the thing that had been proposed. They went out on the steps, and Kenniston and Hubble and the two from the stars went with them.

Outside in the plaza were still gathered thousands of the Middletowners, millhand, housewife, banker and bookkeeper, the old men and the little children. They were still happy, and they cheered, sending up a great joyous shout to echo from the towers.

Mayor Garris took the microphone of the loudspeaker system.

“Folks, listen carefully! These new people are telling us now that we ought to leave Earth. They say they’ll give us a better world, somewhere out there among the stars. What about it? Do you want to go—away from Earth?”

There was a long moment of utter silence, in which Kenniston saw the Middletowners’ faces grow bewildered, incredulous. He looked at Van Allan’s clearcut face and saw that the shadow of weariness on it was deeper. He realized again that two epochs, two utterly different ways of life were looking at each other here, and finding it difficult to understand each other.

When, finally, the crowd of Middletowners had grasped the suggestion, their answer came as a rising chorus of exclamations.

“Go off and live someplace in the sky? Are these people nuts?”

“It was bad enough to leave Middletown for this place! But to leave Earth?”

A large-handed, stocky man whom Kenniston recognized as Lauber, McLain’s truckdriver, came to the steps and spoke up to the Mayor.

“What’s all this about, anyway? We’re getting along here all right now. Why would we want to go off to the Moon or somewhere?”

The Mayor turned to the two star-folk. “You see? My people wouldn’t listen to an idea like that for a minute!”

Kenniston told the woman, “The people completely reject the whole proposal.”

Varn Allan stared at him, in honest surprise. “But it is not a ‘proposal’—it is a formal order of the Board of Governors! I recommended this evacuation, and they have approved it.”

Kenniston said dryly, “Unfortunately, our people don’t recoganize any authority but their own government, so the order means nothing to them.”

The woman looked appalled. “But nobody defies the Governors! They are the executive body of the whole Federation of Stars.”

The Federation of Stars? It had a sound of distant thunder in it, and again Kenniston realized the incomprehensible, staggering vastness of the civilization out there which this woman and this man represented.

He said, exasperated, “Can’t you understand that to these people the stars are just points of light in the sky? That your Suns and worlds and Governors mean nothing to them?”

Norden Lund chose that moment to intervene. He said smoothly to Varn Allan, “Perhaps, in an impasse of this nature, we should consult Government Center?”

She gave him a hot look. “You would like me to admit my incapacity by doing that. No. I’ll carry this matter through, and when it’s done I’ll have words to say to Gorr Holl for precipitating things prematurely.”

She turned to Kenniston, and said, “Your people must comprehend that this is not a cruel thing we’re doing. Explain to them what life would be like on this dead planet—isolated, precarious, increasingly difficult, with nothing to look forward to but an ultimate dying out of attrition and sheer hopelessness. Perhaps they’ll realize then that what they’re asking me to do is to abandon them to a very ugly fate.”

“Perhaps,” said Kenniston, “but I wouldn’t count on it. You don’t know us yet. As a people, we’re neither soft nor easily frightened.”

He spoke with hostility, because of the truth that he had recognized in Varn Allan’s words, and did not want to recognize.

She gave him a level glance, as though she were taking his measure and through him the measure of all Middletown. Then she said quietly, “Bear in mind that a formal decree passed by the Board of Governors is a law which must be respected and complied with. The evacuation has been ordered, and will be carried out.”

She nodded to Lund, who shrugged and fell in beside her. They went down the steps and across the plaza, and the muttering crowd, alarmed and confused but not yet hostile, moved apart to let them through.

Kenniston turned to Hubble. “What are we going to do?” he said, and the older man shook his head.

“I don’t know. But I know one thing we must not do, and that is to let any violence occur. That would be fatal. We’ve got to calm people down before that evacuation staff arrives and brings things to a head.”

Kenniston did his best, during the rest of that day. He repeated Varn Allan’s plea for understanding, but it fell on unreceptive ears. The city was functioning, they had light and water, they were not alone in the universe, and life today seemed pretty good. With the irrepressible optimism of the human race, they were convinced that they could make tomorrow even better. And they were not going to leave Earth. That was like asking them to leave their bodies.

The shock of losing their own time and the pattern of life that went with it had been terrible enough. It might have overwhelmed them completely, Kenniston knew, except that in a measure the shock had been softened. For a while they had kept their own old city, and it was still there beyond the ridge, an anchor in their memories. To a certain extent, they had brought their own time with them, for life in the alien city had been adapted as much as possible to the pattern of life in old Middletown. They had oriented themselves again, they had built a facsimile of their familiar existence. It had been hard, but they had done it. They could not now, quite suddenly, throw it all away and start again on something utterly divorced from everything they had ever known.

Kenniston realized perfectly that it was not only an atavistic clinging to the Earth that had bred them which made them reject the idea of leaving it so fiercely. It was the physical and immediate horror of entering a perfectly unknown kind of ship and plunging in it out beyond the sky, into—into what? Night and nothingness and sickening abysses that ran on for ever, with only the cold stars for beacons and the Earth, the solid, understandable, protecting Earth lost forever! His own mind recoiled from the very imagining. Why couldn’t the woman understand? Why couldn’t she realize that a people to whom the automobile was still quite recent were not psychologically capable of rushing into space!

The great ship brooded on the plain, and all that afternoon and evening the people drifted restlessly toward the wall of the dome to look at it, and stand in little groups talking angrily, and move away again. The streets seethed with a half-heard murmur of voices and movement. Crowds gathered in the plaza, and a detachment of National Guardsmen in full kit went marching down to mount guard at the portal. Dejected, oppressed, and more than a little sick with worry, Kenniston faced the unavoidable and went to Carol.

She knew, of course. Everybody in New Middletown knew. She met him with the drawn, half-bitter look that had come more and more often on her face since the June day their world had ended, and she said, “They can’t do it, can they? They can’t make us go?”

“They think they’re doing the right thing,” he said. “It’s a question of making them understand they’re wrong.”

She began to laugh, quite softly—laughter with no mirth in it. “There isn’t any end to it,” she said. “First we had to leave Middletown. Now we have to leave Earth, Why didn’t we stay in our homes and die there, if we had to, like decent human beings? It’s all been madness ever since—this city, and now…” She stopped laughing. She looked at him and said calmly, “I won’t go, Ken.”

“You’re not the only one that feels that way,” Kenniston told her. “We’ve got to convince them of that.” Restlessness rode him, and he got up and said, “Let’s take a walk. We’d both feel better.”

She went out with him into the dusk. The lights were on, the lovely radiance that they had greeted with such joy. They walked, saying very little, burdened with their own thoughts, and Kenniston was conscious again of the barrier that seemed always between them now, even when they agreed. Their silence was not the silence of understanding, but the silence which is between two minds that can communicate only with words.

They drifted toward the section of the dome through which the distant starship was visible. The unease in the city had grown, until the air quivered with it. There was a mob around the portal. They did not go close to it. Through the curved, transparent wall the lighted bulk of the Thanis was no more than a distorted gleaming. Carol shivered and turned away.

“I don’t want to look at it,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

“Wait,” said Kenniston. “There’s Hubble.”

The older man caught sight of him and swore. “I’ve been hunting the hell and gone over town for you,” he said. “Ken, that bloody fool Garris has blown his top completely, and is getting the people all stirred up to fight. You’ve got to come with me and help soothe him down!”

Kenniston said bitterly, “No wonder Varn Allan thinks we’re a bunch of primitives! Oh, all right, I’ll come. We’ll walk you back home on the way, Carol.”

They started back through the streets, whose towers now shone timelessly beautiful in the calm white radiance. But the people in those streets, the little tense, talking groups, the worried faces and questions, the angry expletives, jarred against that supernal calm.

The pulse of unease in the city seemed to quicken. A low cry ran along the streets. People were calling something, a shout was running along the ways, hands pointed upward, white faces turned and looked at the shimmer of the great dome above.

“What—” Hubble began impatiently, but Kenniston silenced him.

“Listen!”

They listened. Above the swell of distant voices, growing louder every moment, they heard a sound that they had heard only once before. A vibration, more than a sound, a deep, bass humming from the sky, too deep to be smothered even by the dome.

It came downward, and it was louder, and louder, and then quite suddenly it stopped. People were running now toward the portal and the words they shouted came drifting confusedly back.

“Another starship,” said Kenniston. “Another starship has come.”

Hubble’s face was gray and haggard. “The evacuation staff. She said they’d arrive soon. And the whole town ready to blow off—Ken, this is it!”

CHAPTER 13

Embattled City

With a sinking heart, Kenniston stared at Hubble and listened to the sharpening voice of the city. Carol spoke, and the words reached him from a long way off.

“Never mind me, Ken. I’ll get home all right.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve got to get hold of the Mayor right away…Stay in off the streets, Carol.”

He kissed her swiftly on the cheek, and she turned away, walking fast. Kenniston hesitated, feeling that he ought to go with her, but Hubble had already started on and there was no time for punctilio. After all, there was no danger—not yet.

He caught up with Hubble. People streamed past them, going the other way, toward the portal. Frightened, belligerent people, their eyes a little too bright, their voices too loud. Kenniston and Hubble were almost running, but even so, it took them some minutes to reach the plaza in front of City Hall. As they crossed it, jeeps loaded with National Guardsmen pulled away from the government building and went tearing off down the boulevard. The men were wrapped to the eyes in heavy clothing, and Hubble groaned.

“They’re going outside. Now what the devil has that idiot done?”

They raced up the steps and into the building. In the Council chamber they found the Mayor with Borchard and Moretti and most of the Councilmen. Garris strode up and down, his face mottled, his eyes glittering with the courage born of fear. He turned to Kenniston and Hubble as they came in, and there was a curious blankness in his look, an absence of reason that made Kenniston lose what little hope he had.

“So they’re going to try to rush us away from Earth,” said Garris. “Well, we’ll see! We’ll see how far they’re going to get with that!” His voice shook, his pudgy hands were clenched. “I’ve called up all units of the National Guard, and did you see those jeeps? They’re on their way to Old Middletown, to bring the field guns from the Armory. Guns, Hubble, guns! That’s the only way to show ’em they can’t order us around!”

“You fool,” said Hubble. “Oh, you fool.”

It was too late in the day to call the Mayor a fool, and Hubble found it out. Borchard snarled at him, “He’s acting with our complete approval. Listen, Mr. Hubble, you stick to your science and we’ll handle the government.”

“That’s right,” said Moretti. He said it two or three times, and the remaining council members backed him up.

Hubble faced them. “Listen to me!” he said. “You’re all scared so blind you can’t see what’s in front of you. Guns! All the guns we’ve got won’t make a pop like a toy pistol compared to what they can bring against us if they want to. These people have conquered the stars, can’t you understand that? They can conquer us with no more than that ray they’ve got on the ship, and violence will only anger them into doing it!”

Garris thrust his face close to Hubble’s. “You’re afraid of them,” he said. “Well we’re not. We’ll fight!” The Council cheered.

“All right,” said Hubble, “go ahead. There’s no use arguing with idiots. The only chance we had of beating this thing was to behave like civilized men. They might have listened to us, then, and respected our feelings. But now…” He made a gesture of negation, and the Mayor snorted.

“Talk! A lot of good your talking did. No, sir! We’ll handle this our way, and you can be thankful that your Mayor and Council haven’t forgotten how to defend the rights of the people!”

His voice rose almost to a shout to carry the last words to Hubble, who had walked out with Kenniston close on his heels.

Outside in the plaza, Kenniston said abruptly, “There’s only one thing to do—talk to Varn Allan. If she’d agree to call off her dogs for a while, things might simmer down.” He shook his head, making a wry face. “I hate to admit to that blonde bureaucrat that we’re governed by a bunch of half-witted children, but…”

“You can’t really blame them,” said Hubble. “We are like children, faced with the unknown, and since we can’t run and hide we have to fight. It’s just that they’re taking the wrong way.” He sighed. “You go out to the ship, Ken. Do what you can. I’m going back in and struggle with His Honor. If I’m patient enough—Oh, well, good luck.”

He went back inside, and Kenniston retraced his weary steps toward the portal.

The crowd had doubled since he had last seen it. It pushed and swirled around the portal, spreading out on both sides along the wall of the dome. Out on the plain the lights of two ships gleamed, and the people watched them, a low murmur running through them like the first mutter of wind before a storm. The company of Guardsmen in full kit had taken up their station in the portal, a barrier of olive-drab picked out with the dull gleam of gunbarrels.

Kenniston went up to them. He nodded to some of the men he knew and said, “I’m going out to the ships—important conference,” and started through the line. And they stopped him,

“Mayor’s orders,” the lieutenant said. “Nobody goes outside. Yeah, I know who you are, Mr. Kenniston! But I have my orders. Nobody goes outside.”

“Listen,” said Kenniston desperately, manufacturing a lie. “The Mayor sent me, I’m on his business.”

“Bring me a written order,” said the lieutenant, “and we’ll talk about it some more.”

The line of guns and stolid men remained unmoved. Kenniston considered trying to crash it, and gave that up at once. The lieutenant was watching him suspiciously, so suspiciously that an uncomfortable thought occurred to Kenniston. He spoke the language and he had worked closely with the star-folk, and the good people of Middletown might just possibly take him for a traitor or a spy…

“If the Mayor sent you,” the lieutenant said, “he’ll give you an order.”

Kenniston went away, back to the City Hall. And he spent the rest of the night cooling his heels with Hubble, outside the guarded door behind which the Mayor, the Council and the ranking officers of the National Guard were drawing up a plan of campaign.

Shortly after daybreak an orderly came in hastily, and was admitted to the guarded room. Immediately the Mayor, the Council, and the officers came out. Garris, haggard, heavy-eyed, but triumphant, caught sight of Kenniston and said, “Come along. We’ll need you to interpret.”

Feeling old and hopeless, Kenniston rose and joined the little procession. Falling in beside him, Hubble leaned over and murmured, “Talk fast, Ken. Your knowledge of the language is our one last ace in the hole.”

They reached the portal at almost the same time as the party from the starships. Varn Allan and Lund were the only ones in the group that Kenniston recognized. Of the others, one was a woman of mature years, and the remainder were men of varying ages. They stared, more in wonder than in apprehension, at the line of soldiers, Varn Allan frowned.

The Mayor marched up to her, as the line reformed to let him and his party through. A soiled, haggard little man, devoutly convinced of his own wisdom and secure in the knowledge that his people were with him, his courage screwed up to the last trembling notch, he faced the strangers from the stars and said to Kenniston, “Tell them this is our world, and we give the orders here. Tell them to get into their ships and go. Inform them that this is an ultimatum which we are prepared to enforce.”

The crowd behind him roared approval.

A faint uneasiness had appeared in the faces of the star-folk. That mob yell, the armed soldiers, and the attitude of the Mayor must have roused a doubt in them. And yet Varn Allan spoke quite calmly to Kenniston, hardly waiting for the Mayor to finish.

“Will you please have way made for us?” She indicated the newcomers who were with her. “These officials head a large staff of experts on mass migration. They will begin preliminary planning of the evacuation, and it is important that you cooperate…”

Kenniston interrupted her. “Listen,” he said, “you take your officials and get back to your ships.” The crowd was beginning to move forward a little, pressing up against the line of soldiers. Individual shouts came out of it, ugly, threatening counterpoint to the growling undertone. The Mayor shifted nervously from one foot to the other, “Did you tell her?” he demanded. “What’s she saying? Did you tell her?”

Kenniston cried out, “Go back to your ships, and quickly! Can’t you see that mob’s about to break loose?”

But still Varn Allan did not seem to understand. “There’s no room for further argument,” she said, as though her patience was at an end. “We are here on direct orders from the Board of Governors, and I must ask you to…”

Speaking very distinctly, Kenniston said, “I am trying to prevent violence. Go back to your ships now, and I’ll come out and talk to you later.”

She stared at him in utter astonishment. “Violence?” she said. And again, “Violence? Against officials of the Federation?”

It crossed his mind that that was something she had never seen nor heard of. In the momentary silence between them, the surge and rumble of the crowd grew louder, and abruptly, Norden Lund laughed.

“I told you that you were taking the wrong way to deal with savages,” he said. “We’d better go.”

“No!” Secure in her pride, in the authority vested in her by the Federation of Stars, in her proven ability as an administrator, Varn Allan was not going to run before the shouts of a mob. She turned on Kenniston, her voice perfectly steady and sharp as a steel knife.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “When an order is issued in the name of the Board of Governors, that order is obeyed. You will so inform your Mayor, and require him to disperse his people—and at once!”

Kenniston, clenched his fists and groaned. “For Christ’s sake…” he began, and then the Mayor, the overanxious, bellicose, and frightened Mayor, set the spark to the ready tinder.

“You tell ’em they’d better get out in a hurry!” he cried, loud enough to be heard clearly by the front ranks of the crowd. “Tell ’em to get out, or we’ll run ’em out!”

Run ’em out!” yelled a man, and another, and a hundred others. “Run ’em out!” The crowd roar rose to a howl. The press of men and women surged forward through the portal, and even if they had wanted to the soldiers could not have held them back.

Kenniston caught a kaleidoscopic glimpse of faces—the middle-aged woman official with her mouth open in a scream, the incredulous eyes of the men that did not credit what they saw, Varn Allan’s cheeks flaming a sudden angry red, Lund already backing away, a study in mingled fear and triumph.

Varn Allan said, “If you dare to touch Federation officials—”

“Get back to your ships!” yelled Kenniston. “Get back!” The first wave of the mob was upon them, all shouts and fists and trampling feet. They were howling for Varn Allan because she was the leader. Kenniston saw the danger. He grabbed her wrist and began to run toward the Thanis, hauling her along. The other officials, including Lund, had taken to their heels. It was amazing how they could run.

He dragged Varn Allan along, and for some seconds she did not resist. He realized later that it must have been the first physical violence she had ever encountered, and that she was too astonished by it to think of resisting at first. Then, all at once, she cried out passionately, “Let me go!” and set her heels hard into the dust.

The crowd was boiling after them, and it was no time for niceties. Kenniston gave her wrist a jerk that snatched her off balance and began to run again, yanking her bodily along. And then, as the Thanis loomed fairly close ahead, he missed his footing in the loose sand and stumbled, and she wrenched herself free from him.

During the moment that he floundered in the treacherous sand, Kenniston saw the first pallid beam flick out from the ship. It swung in a wide arc, bringing a sudden uproar from the crowd. And then it hit him, and this time the shock was strong. He dropped forward into the sand and lay there like a dead man, utterly still and knowing nothing.

He came back to consciousness, lying flat on his face in a bunk with Gorr Holl’s powerful fingers kneading the nerve centers along his spine. He groaned, and the Capellan exclaimed in relief.

“Thank the gods you’ve come round! I’ve been working on you the last couple of hours!”

Kenniston sat up painfully. He saw in a small windowless cabin, furnished with a desk and a chair designed to accommodate Gorr Holl’s huge proportions, and it dawned on him that he must be inside the Thanis. “How did I get here?” he asked. It was difficult to speak. His tongue, like the rest of him, was numb and leaden.

“Varn Allan had you brought in. She realized afterward that you were trying to haul her out of trouble, and knocking you out was a mistake. She wanted you fixed up as quickly as possible.”

Kenniston was too groggy to be sarcastic. He groaned again, and mumbled, “What’s happened, Gorr?”

“Plenty—and all of it bad. Look here.” He touched a stud, and a square section of the metal wall became perfectly transparent, a window.

Kenniston struggled to his feet and looked out through it, at the distant, gleaming dome of New Middletown. And he saw the men of Middletown laboring in the ocher dust before the portal, digging trenches, filling sandbags, drawing up the lines of war.

Gorr Holl pointed out across the dreary waste toward the far-off ridges. Kenniston looked, and saw the brave small cavalcade that toiled down from them, out of the old town. He saw the shrouded field guns, the whole mobile force of the Middletown battery of the National Guard—the little guns that came to bark defiance to the Federation of Stars.

Gorr Holl said, “They gave us three hours to pack up our traps and go—long enough to get their battery in position. After that, they’ll start shooting.”

“The fools,” Kenniston whispered. “The poor bloody fools!” He could have wept with pride, in spite of his full realization of the extent of that folly.

The time was almost up. Those hurrying limbers would reach the portal and swing around, and soon then the men of Middletown would cast the die of their own destruction.

“I’ve got to stop this, Gorr,” he said. “Somehow, I’ve got to stop it!”

Gorr Holl studied him with a curiously intent, measuring look. He said, “How much are you willing to risk on a try? No, wait before you answer. It won’t be easy. Especially for you, with your background, it won’t be easy.”

“Get to the point,” said Kenniston. He grasped almost fiercely at the hint of hope. “Come on! What is it?”

Gorr Holl said, “There are other dying planets beside your Earth. And as I told you, we primitives cling to the worlds of our birth just as your people do. There has been a—well, call it a conspiracy, between the primitive races to stop mass migration, and our whole plans center on the process Lal’lor told you about, Jon Arnol’s process of reviving dead worlds, which has been forbidden by the Federation. Kenniston, we could make Earth a test case!”

“In other words,” said Kenniston slowly, “you want to involve me and my people in a movement to help your peoples buck the Federation law?”

“Quite frankly, yes. But it’s to your benefit, too. If you win, you’ll have Earth and we’ll have our own worlds, to stay on. If you lose well, you’ll be no worse off than you are now.” He put his great paw on Kenniston’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Varn Allan is on the televisor now, getting authorization from Vega Center to use force in carrying out her orders. Think fast, Kenniston!”

Kenniston thought. It was like moving blindfold through an unfamiliar maze, but he could sense some of the outlines, the undercurrents of disaffection that flowed between the stars. He had no right to involve himself and Middletown in a struggle that he knew almost nothing about…But there beyond the window were the trenches filled with angry men, and the dusty limbers wheeling down, and how could they be worse off than they were now? If there was even an outside chance…

“What do I have to do?” he asked.

Gorr Holl grinned. “Good,” he said. “And remember, you’ll have allies in this thing! Now come on with me, and I’ll tell you on the way.”

CHAPTER 14

Last Appeal

The big Cappellan led him out then swiftly through a maze of narrow passageways that ran through the bowels of the Thanis. They met no one, and Kenniston guessed that Gorr Holl was avoiding the main corridors.

He hardly looked at what he could see of the ship as he passed through it. He didn’t care now. All he could think of was the terrible need for haste, the need to avert the disaster that was coming. His ears, his nerves cringed, waiting for the first shell to burst against the Thanis. He knew it was too soon, but the minutes were passing fast.

Gorr Holl did some rapid explaining as they went. “The evacuation order came from the Board of Governors by an executive committee. According to Federation law, you can make an appeal from that order to the Board of Governors in full session. Now, remember, Kenniston, no one can deny you the right of appeal, so don’t let them bull you out of it.”

They came out on a shadowy catwalk. Gorr Holl stopped and pointed to a corridor some nine feet below. At its end was a closed door.

“That’s the Visor room. Varn Allan is in contact with the committee now. Go in and make your appeal. And remember, Lund is in there too.”

He melted back into the shadows. Kenniston went down a companionway to the corridor and along it to the door at the end. He tried it and it swung open under his hand, and he went through into a high and narrow room, where Varn and Norden Lund turned to face him, startled and surprised by his sudden entrance.

He hardly saw them. Something else caught his gaze and held him transfixed, frozen with a kind of awe.

Two walls of the room were occupied by complicated and unfamiliar mechanisms, all apparently automatic. Facing him was the third wall—a giant-sized screen, reproducing so clear a picture that it was weirdly like a window.

A window into another world…

At a black plastic table sat four figures. Three of these were men in ordinary jackets and slacks—one of them quite old, another elderly, the third dark, brusque-looking, not far into middle age. The fourth at the table was not a man. He was a Spican like Magro, white-furred and oddly catlike with his narrow mane and handsome, faintly cruel face. But he was older and graver than Magro.

The four of them were like a quartet of businessmen, rudely interrupted in the midst of an earnest conference. They stared out of the screen at Kenniston, and the youngest man demanded of Varn Allan, “Who is this person?”

Kenniston still stood motionless, looking beyond them now. He saw that the room behind them was like the one in which he stood but much larger, a communications room massive with control banks and screens.

Through the window of that room billions of miles across space, Kenniston could see the looming wall of a titanic building. And above it blazed the fiery limb of a diamond Sun, supernal, magnificent, shedding a blue-white blaze across the heavens.

Again the sharp voice from across the galaxy, flashing through the parsecs far faster than light by the magic of latter-day science.

“Varn Allan! Who is this man?”

“He’s one of the Earth primitives, sir,” she answered angrily, and turned again to Kenniston. “You have no right here! Leave at once.”

“No,” said Kenniston. “Not until I’ve had my say.”

“Lund,” said Varn Allan, “will you please call orderlies and have him removed?”

Kenniston moved a little. “I wouldn’t,” he said.

Lund considered. His eyes moved from Kenniston’s knotted fist to Varn Allan’s angry face, and there was a smile in them.

“After all,” he said, “I suppose this man is a citizen of the Federation now. Can we deny him his right of speech?”

Varn Allan’s blue eyes flashed hotly at him. Then she spoke to the images in the screen. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. But perhaps this will demonstrate the situation here more clearly. I have had no cooperation from the primitives, and my own subordinate is apparently trying to undermine my authority.”

The dark younger man of the four said impatiently, “This is not the occasion to hear complaints of administrative wrangling!”

Kenniston was glaring upward at the quartet on Vega’s faraway world who seemed to hold the fate of Middletown in their hands. He demanded, “Are you the executive committee responsible for the evacuation order?”

The oldest man said to him quietly, “There is no need for truculence. Yes, we are that committee.” He glanced at Varn Allan. “I think, Allan, that since the interruption has been made, we may as well clear this thing up now.”

Varn Allan shrugged, and Lund’s smile broadened a little.

Kenniston said, “I’m sorry, but there isn’t time for politeness. In a few minutes my people are going to fire on your ships. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want my people killed, nor yours.”

The old man answered, “There will be no killing. The paralysis ray, used at full potency, can immobilize your whole population without harm.”

Kenniston shook his head. “That’s only a postponement. When they come to again they will fight. That is what I must make you understand. As long as my people live they will fight to stay on Earth!”

The ring of utter truth in his passionate cry seemed to disturb them deeply. And the white-furred Spican said slowly, “It may be so. Some of my own people still have such an illogical attachment to one planet.”

Lund spoke up, his tone smooth and deferential. “That is the point of basic psychology which I have been trying to make with Administrator Allan.”

Varn Allan said icily, “If you have a suggestion to make, I shall be glad to hear it.”

“Of course,” said Lund, “it’s quite impossible to allow these people to remain on Earth. To do so would establish a fatal precedent for other waning planets whose populations must be transferred. But my idea—”

Whatever Lund had been going to say was lost, for Kenniston drowned him out. “The hell with your ideas!” He moved closer to the screen. “I ask you to revoke the order for evacuation.”

The old man spread his hands in a weary gesture of negation. “That is out of the question.”

“Then,” said Kenniston harshly, “I appeal your decision to the Board of Governors in full session!”

That startled them all. They stared at him, and Lund said, “So the savage has learned a little law!” Then he laughed. “But of course—Gorr Holl and his friends have been coaching him.”

Varn Allan came up to Kenniston, “This is a waste of time,” she said. “The Board of Governors will issue the same ruling.”

“Quite so,” said the dark brusque man in the screen. “It’s merely a stratagem to gain time,”

“Nevertheless,” said the Spican, regarding Kenniston with faint amusement in his slit-pupiled eyes, “his demand is perfectly legal.”

The old man sighed. “Yes.” He looked at Kenniston. “I am forced by Federation law to grant your right of appeal. But I warn you that Administrator Allan is right. The Board will ratify our decision.”

“Until they do,” Kenniston pressed, “I demand that you withdraw from Earth the ships that have created this critical situation.”

The old man nodded reluctantly. “That too is a legitimate demand. The ships will be recalled temporarily to Vega. And you will come with them, since all appeals to the Board of Governors must be made in person.”

In person? The significance of the two casual words hit Kenniston staggeringly, replacing his dawning hope with a breathless and more personal emotion.

Those two words meant—they meant leaving Earth. He, John Kenniston, going out into the dark abyss, out across half the starry universe on a forlorn hope. Out to an incredibly distant and alien world, to plead the cause of Middletown to alien ears, with all the odds against him! He knew now what Gorr Holl had meant, “—with your background, it won’t be easy.”

Varn Allan’s crisp voice was challenging him. “Do you agree to go? Say quickly—there’s little time left to notify your people before they attack.”

Mention of that imminent attack that meant irrevocable disaster to his people, steadied Kenniston. He had to avert that, at any cost or risk.

He drew a long breath. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I’ll go.”

“In that case, Administrator Allan,” said the old man, “you will take your ships off in not more than two hours.” He rose, signing that the interview was closed. “I shall notify the Board of Governors.”

The screen went blank. Varn Allan looked at Kenniston and said, “You had better go and tell your people, at once.”

He knew, as he went out, that she was very angry. But Lund seemed strangely pleased.

With what speed he could muster, Kenniston went back across the desert toward the portal, and with every step he took the incredible reality of his commitment beat into his mind.

“You’re going away from Earth. You’re going to get into a ship, that ship, and step clear off the Earth, out to the stars—”

Just the realization of it gave him a feeling of vertigo, a shuddering recoil, and he knew that he had to keep his mind away from what it would be like in that ship, in space—he had to avoid anticipation or the impact of it would be too much for him.

Soldiers met him well outside the portal, raising their rifles but lowering them again when they recognized him. Beyond them, the red dust was flying from laboring shovels and the gun limbers were being wrestled into place.

“What’s going on out there?” cried a sergeant. “Are those ships going to attack? Are—”

“Where’s the Mayor?” Kenniston interrupted. “Back inside the portal. They’re all there, waiting.” Kenniston pushed past them, between the half-dug trenches, and saw Hubble and most of the Council grouped around Mayor Garris just inside the dome.

Most of Middletown’s people seemed crowded in the background, held back by rope barriers. They weren’t shouting now, their faces looked anxious, and he knew that that demonstration of the paralysis ray’s power had cooled down their rage and given them something to worry about.

Garris’ plump face was haggard with strain too, and he greeted Kenniston with a suspicious scowl. “What brought you back? I thought you’d stay out there with your friends.”

Kenniston’s temper, tightened by the weight of the thing he was going to do, let go. “For Christ’s sake,” he snarled, “I’ve been fighting to save your necks. I’ve even agreed to go out to Vega to do it, and this is the kind of reception I get!” Then he was ashamed of his outburst, and got a grip on his nerves. “Listen to me. Those ships are leaving. They’re leaving inside of two hours, and I’m going with them. I’m appealing this whole evacuation question to their Board of Governors.”

A wondering silence fell upon them all. They stared at him, all their faces except Hubble’s uncomprehending.

Hubble exclaimed, “Good God, Ken—you, to Vega? But will it do any good?”

“I’m hoping so,” Kenniston said. He ignored the others, speaking to Hubble as he rapidly explained. “So there’s a chance that I can make them understand our case, and let us alone.”

Mayor Garris had only now begun to understand, apparently. His face had changed—there was an eager hopefulness in it now, a hopefulness dawning also on the faces of Borchard and Moretti and the others.

Kenniston realized then just how hopeless they had all been before his coming. They, and the soldiers, and the people of Middletown, were still ready to fight evacuation, but the futility of such a fight had been made clear to them by the power of the ray, they had known they must fight a battle foredoomed to failure, and now he had brought them a hope at least of another way out.

“Well, now,” said Garris, a little unsteadily, “that’s the way I’ve wanted it all along. Due course of law, peaceful debate… It was just that I couldn’t let them force our people…” He broke off, seizing Kenniston’s hand. “You’ll do your best for us out there, Kenniston, I know that! They can’t all be as stubborn as that blasted woman!”

And, almost unmanned by his relief, Garris turned and cried out to the anxious crowd, “It’s all right, folks, there’s not going to be any fighting right now. Mr. Kenniston’s going to go clear out to where those people come from and put this thing to their government! He’s going to ask a square deal for us!”

There was cheering, during which the Mayor’s high color began to fade back to its original pallor as a new thought struck him.

He said to Kenniston, “But if anyone’s going out there to represent us, maybe as Mayor—” Kenniston really admired him as he struggled to get out those last awful words—“as Mayor, I ought to go?”

Kenniston shook his head. “You’re needed right here, Mr. Garris. And besides, you don’t speak the language, so there wouldn’t be any use in your going.”

“That’s so,” said the Mayor, beginning to breathe again. “Of course, that’s so. Yes, indeed. Now, Kenniston, what can we do to help you? Anything—”

“No, there’s nothing,” said Kenniston. “I haven’t much time. I only need to get a few things, and to say goodbye to someone. Hubble, will you come with me?”

Hubble came. And behind them, as they hurried back into town, they heard the Mayor shouting, and heard the rising voice of relief and jubilation from the people.

They had seen themselves about to be beaten in a hopeless fight against weapons they couldn’t combat, those people. And now, suddenly, there wasn’t going to be any fight, the ships were going away, one of their own was going out and convince the star-folk that they couldn’t shove Earth people around, everything was going to be all right!

Kenniston groaned. “I wish they weren’t so God-damned sure! This is only a reprieve.”

“What are our chances, Ken?” Hubble asked him. “Between us.”

“Honest to God, Hubble, I don’t know! I’ve got us into a big undercover struggle that I don’t half understand yet.” He told Hubble what Gorr Holl had said, and added, “Gorr and the humanoids are on our side, but maybe they’re only using me as a catspaw. Anyway, I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will,” said Hubble. “I wish I were going with you—but I’m too old, and I’m needed here.” He added, “I’ll get Carol while you pack.”

The nightmare unreality of it hit Kenniston again as he hastily got his few necessaries together. It was just like packing for an overnight run to Pittsburgh or Chicago, instead of for a trip across the galaxy. It couldn’t be really going to happen… Carol’s face, when she came, didn’t help him. There was no color in it at all, and when he took her in his arms and tried to explain, she only whispered, “No, Ken—no! You can’t go! You’re not like them—you’ll die out there!”

“I won’t die, and I can maybe help us all,” he told her. “Carol, listen—if I can do this, if I can find a way out for us, it’ll make up a little for our work that brought this whole thing on Middletown, won’t it? Won’t it?”

She wasn’t even listening to him. She was searching his face, her hands clinging to him painfully, and she said suddenly, “You want to go.”

“Want to?” said Kenniston. “I’m scared stiff! My skin is crawling right now! But I’ve got to.”

“You want to go,” she said again, and looked at him, he thought, as though she finally saw clearly a barrier between them. “That’s the difference between us, it’s always been the difference. I only want the old things, the old, loved ways. You want the new.”

Time was running out, and a sort of despair was in him, and it made him grasp her with a rough male masterfulness, and hold her fiercely against the intangible tide that was sweeping them apart.

“I’m going, to do what I can for us all, and I’m coming back the same, and you’re going to be waiting for me, Carol! You hear?”

He kissed her, and she returned his kiss with a curious tenderness as if she were never going to see him again and was remembering all the good days that they had had together. And when he let her go, her eyes were bright with tears.

He went with Hubble toward the portal, and now the whole city was vibrant with a new hopefulness and excitement, that centered upon himself. But he was quaking with the realization of what he was going toward, he hardly saw the crowded faces that watched him with a mixture of anxious hope and of awe, he hardly heard the voices that shouted, “Good luck, Mr. Kenniston!” and “You tell ’em out there, Mr. Kenniston! You tell ’em!”

Kenniston went on, out of the domed city and across the plain, and the black, strange belly of the Thanis took him in.

CHAPTER 15

Mission for Earth

He would not show fear. They expected him to do so, they were watching him with sidelong glances of interest and amused expectation. But Kenniston clenched his fists inside his jacket pockets, and resolved fiercely to disappoint them.

He was afraid, yes. It was one thing to read and talk and speculate on flying space. It was another and much more frightening thing to do it, to step off the solid Earth, to rush and plunge and fall through the worldless emptiness.

He stood there with Gorr Holl and Piers Eglin in the bridge of the Thanis, looking ahead through the curving view windows, and a cold sickness clutched at his vitals.

“It isn’t the way I expected it to be,” he said unsteadily. “Only those stars ahead—”

He fought against the impulse to clutch for support. He wouldn’t do that, while the bronzed star-men behind him were curiously watching him.

The deep humming and slight quivering of the great fabric around him were the only evidence that the Thanis was moving.

Directly ahead, Kenniston looked at a depthless black in which fierce stars flared like lamps. The blue-hot beacon of Vega centered that vista, and up from it blazed the stars of the time-distorted Lyre and Aquila, crossed on the upper left by the glittering sun-drift of the Milky Way.

Only that section of sky ahead was clear. The rest of the firmament, extending back from it, was an increasingly blurred vista of warped starlight whose rays seemed to twitch, jerk and dance.

Gorr Holl nodded toward the bank of controls behind which four men sat. “You know the principle of propulsion? Reaction rays many times faster than light, pushing back against the cosmic dust of space.”

Kenniston sighed. “I feel ignorant as a child. The possibility of such rays was wholly unsuspected, in my day. And Einstein’s equations proved that if matter moved faster than light, it would expand indefinitely.”

Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling chuckle. “Your Einstein was a great scientist, but we’ve opened up new fields of knowledge since then. The mass control that prevents that expansion, and other things.”

Kenniston was only half listening. He was looking at the blue-white eye of Vega, glaring arrogantly at him from the great drift of spangled stars. And looking at it somehow made him sense their awful speed, their nightmare fall through the infinite.

It was worse than the takeoff, and he had not thought that anything could be worse than that. If he lived forever, he would never forget those last still minutes, strapped into a recoil chair, trying to relax and not succeeding, listening to ringing alarm bells, watching the blinking of lights, feeling the deep quivering of the ship as it gathered itself for the outward leap, his heartbeats choking him and the icy sweat running, trying to tell himself that it was no different from taking off in a plane… And then the lift, the pressure, the instinctive gasp for breath, the terrible claustrophobia of being shut into a moving thing over which he had no control.

He could not know yet by what mastery of science the occupants of the ship were shielded from the enormous pressures of that acceleration. Yet shielded they were, for the pressure was not so much worse than that in a fast ascending elevator. It was the knowledge that Earth was falling irretrievably away that made the lift horrible. He could hear the whisper and the hiss and then the scream of air against the cleaving hull, and then almost at once it was gone. He was in space. And he was sick with the age-old fear of abysses and of falling. He thought of the emptiness that lay beneath his feet, beyond that thin floor of metal, and he shut his teeth hard on his tongue to keep from screaming.

“Don’t think about it,” Gorr Holl had said. “And remember, there’s a first time for all of us! I thought I wouldn’t live through my own first takeoff.” He had helped Kenniston get to his feet. “Let’s go up on the bridge. You might as well get it all over with at once.”

And so they had come to the bridge, and Kenniston had looked into outer space where the great Suns burned unveiled and there was neither air nor cloud to hide them. And he had got hold of himself, because he was too proud to do what he wanted to do, which was to get down on his belly and whimper like a dog.

He tried now to visualize the ordeal that awaited him there at Vega where he must plead the cause of little Middletown to the Governors of the stars. How could he make people who traveled casually in ships like this one, understand the passionate devotion of his own people to their little, ancient planet?

Yet if he failed to do so, he would fail the people of Middletown, who had such hope in his mission. That was what he had to think about—not space, nor his sensations about it, but the task he had ahead of him.

He glanced at Gorr Holl and said, “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

They left Piers Eglin there and went below again, and when they were in the main corridor, alone, Kenniston said, “All right, Gorr. I want to know what I’ve got myself in on.”

The big Capellan nodded. “Let’s join Magro and Lal’lor. They’re waiting for us.”

He led Kenniston along companionways and narrow corridors, to a cabin only two doors from his own. And it was a relief for Kenniston to be in a closed place without windows, so that he need not look at the staggering, crushing emptiness of space, where only the proud Suns had any right to be. There was a wild thrill to it, underneath the fear—but a twentieth century man couldn’t take much of it at first.

Lal’lor’s massive gray form was bent over a table littered with sheets of complicated symbols. Margo, who was sprawled in the bunk, explained to Kenniston, “He works theorems for amusement. He even claims he knows what all those figures mean.”

Lal’lor’s small eyes twinkled in his flat, featureless face. He thrust the sheets aside and said, “Sit down, Kenniston. So we are to be allies now, as well as friends.”

“I wish,” said Kenniston, “that someone would tell me just what this alliance means. Remember, I’m gambling the fate of my people on faith, without knowing a damned thing.”

“There’s nothing sinister about it,” said Gorr Holl. He eased his furry bulk onto the corner of Lal’lor’s table, which was quite strong enough to hold him. “As I told you, we all have the same problem, and the solution to that problem revolves around a man and a process.”

He paused. “By a peculiar freak, Kenniston, you have been thrown with us rather than with your own kind. The human races spread out from Earth so long ago, and have continued to move and spread, constantly expanding, that they have lost all sense of identification with their old birthworld, or any other. The universe is their home, not a planet.”

Kenniston was beginning to understand that better with every passing minute. The impersonal magnitudes of space, many times recrossed, would tend to sever a man from the old narrow ways of thought. Carol had been right about that.

Gorr Holl went on. “But we of the humanoid races don’t have that background. When the humans came to our worlds, we were nearly all barbarians, and quite happy in our barbarism. Well, they civilized us, and now we are accepted as equals. But we’re still more primitive in thought than they, we still cling to our native worlds, and whenever it becomes necessary to move us, we balk—just as your people are balking now, though we have learned to be less violent. In the end, of course, we’ve always given in. But in the last few years we’ve hung on more desperately because we’ve had something to hope for—this process of Jon Arnol’s.”

“Hold on,” said Kenniston. “All I know of Jon Arnol is his name. What exactly is this process? You said it was a process for the rejuvenation of cold and dying planets?”

Lal’lor answered that. “Arnol’s plan is this—to start a cycle of matter-energy transformation similar to the hydrogen-helium transformation which gives a Sun its energy—to start such a nuclear cycle operating deep inside a cold planet.”

Kenniston stared at him, completely stunned. “But,” he said at last, “that would be equivalent to creating a giant solar furnace deep inside a planet!”

“Yes. A bold, brilliant idea. It would solve the problem of the many cold and dying worlds within the Federation—since, as you know, a planet may live on its interior heat long after the parent Sun’s heat has decreased.”

He paused. “Unfortunately, when Arnol tested his process on a small asteroid, the results were disastrous.”

“Disastrous?”

“Quite disastrous. Arnold’s energy bomb, designed to start the cycle inside that asteroid, went wrong and caused terrible quakes. In fact, the asteroid was wrecked. Arnol claims that it was because he was not allowed a large enough planet for his test. His equations bear him out.”

Kenniston said, “Why didn’t he make another test on a bigger planet, then?”

“The Governors would not allow it,” said Lal’lor, “They said it was too dangerous.”

“But couldn’t he have tested it on an uninhabited planet without danger?”

Lal’lor sighed. “You don’t understand, Kenniston. The Governors don’t want Arnol’s process to succeed. They don’t want to make it possible for primitive peoples to cling to their native worlds. That’s the kind of provincial patriotism they oppose, in their efforts to establish a truly cosmopolitan star-community.”

Kenniston thought about that. It fitted what he had seen and heard of this vast Federation of Stars. And yet…

He said, slowly, “It comes down to the fact that you want to use my world, our Earth, to test a scheme which your Governors, whatever their motives, have already ruled as dangerous.”

Lal’lor nodded calmly. “Yes. It comes down to that. But whether the test is made first on Earth or some abandoned planet is beside the point. The point is to force the Board of Governors to allow another test.”

Gorr Holl exclaimed, “Don’t you see how it links up? Alone, your plea to remain on Earth will be turned down because you can’t present any alternative to evacuation. But by advancing Jon Arnol’s planet-reviving process as an alternative, you might be able to help both Earth and us!”

Kenniston struggled to comprehend the galactic complexity of the problem. “In other words, if we could persuade the Governors to give Arnol another chance, they would delay the evacuation of Earth?”

“They would,” said Lal’lor. “And if Arnol succeeded, Earth and our similar worlds throughout the Federation could be made warm and livable again. Is it not worth trying for?”

“When you put it like that,” said Kenniston, “yes. Yes, it is.” He was beginning to be hopeful again. “And you think this—this solar-furnace thing might succeed? Safely, I mean?”

“According to all mathematical evidence, yes.” Still Kenniston hesitated, and Gorr Holl said, “The decision would be up to your people, Kenniston, and not you—whether they’d take the risk, I mean. And remember, it’s a small population and could be taken off quite easily until any danger was over.”

That was true. He need not be afraid of committing his people too deeply, because he had not the power to do that. And it might be a way.

“Is it agreed, then?” asked Lal’lor. “Arnol has been my friend for many years, and I can message ahead to him to be there when we land. He can help you prepare your plea.”

Kenniston looked at them, the three familiar, unhuman faces. He had to trust them, to take what they said on trust. Suddenly, he knew he did trust them.

“All right,” said Kenniston. “I guess any hope is better than none.”

“Then we are agreed,” said Lal’lor quietly.

Kenniston felt a little breathless, as though he had taken an irrevocable plunge into deeps far beyond his own fathoming. Gorr Holl shot a keen glance at him, and said, “You need something. And I think I know what it is.”

He went out, and returned in a moment with a large flat flask of gray metal. He showed his great teeth in that frightening grin. “Fortunately, not being ship’s personnel, we of the technical staff are not forbidden stimulants. Get some cups, Magro.”

The white-furred Spican brought only three of the plastic cups. “Our wise Lal’lor prefers to stimulate himself with equations,” he explained, and the grey one nodded.

Gorr Holl carefully poured a clear liquid from the flask. “Try this, Kenniston.”

The liquid had a musty, mushroomy taste. Then it seemed to explode inside Kenniston, sending waves of heat to his fingertips. When he could breathe again, he gasped, “What is the stuff?”

Gorr Holl said, “It’s distilled from fungus growths found on the worlds of Capella. Smooth, eh?”

Kenniston, as he drank again, felt his worries recede a little. He sat relaxed and listening as these children of alien worlds talked. He knew they were talking now just to let down his tension.

“First voyages can be tough.” Magro was saying. He was curled up on the bunk like a sleepy cat, with a distant, lazy gleam in his eyes. “I remember my own. We shot the Pleiades with half our power burned out, and the little worlds swarming around us like angry bees.”

Gorr Holl nodded. “Do you remember that wreck in the Algol stardrift? I lost good friends then. A cold grave, those empty deeps.”

Kenniston listened as they talked on, of old voyages beyond the Federation’s starry frontiers, of dangers from nebula and comet and cosmic cloud, of shipwreck on wild worlds.

He quoted slowly, “Then shall we list to no shallow gossip of Magellans and Drakes. Then shall we give ear to voyagers who have circumnavigated the Ecliptic; who have rounded the Polar Star as Cape Horn—”

Lal’lor asked interestedly, “Who wrote that? Some man of your own time who foresaw space travel?”

“No,” said Kenniston. “A man of a century before even my time. His name was Melville, and he was a sailor too, but on Earth’s seas.”

Gorr Holl shook his head. “Queer days they must have been, with only the water oceans of one little planet to venture on.”

“Yet there was adventure enough in that,” Kenniston said. “The Atlantic in a fall storm, the Gulf on a moonlight night…” An aching nostalgia took him again, that haunting homesickness for an Earth lost forever, for the smell of leaves burning on crisp fall nights, for a clover field under the summer Sun, for the blue skies and green hills, the snowy mountains and the sleepy villages and the old cities and the roads that went between them, for all that was gone and could never be again. It made him long even for the Earth that still was, the tired, dying old planet that at least held memory of the world he had known, the people there who had known that world too. Carol was right, the old ways and the old things were best! What was he doing out here in these alien immensities?

Then he saw that the others were looking at him with a queerly sympathetic understanding in their faces, those strange and yet familiar and friendly humanoid faces.

“Give me another drink,” he said.

It did not help any. It only seemed to heighten his futile yearning. Presently Kenniston left them, and went to his own cabin.

He switched off the cabin lights and pressed the stud that made a window of the solid hull. The black, star-shot gulf opened to infinity beyond. He sat on the edge of the bunk and stared, hating that uncaring, unhuman vastness, brooding upon his desperate mission.

Presently he realized that someone was knocking at his door. He rose and opened it, and the light in the corridor showed him that it was Varn Allan.

CHAPTER 16

At Vega

She glanced quickly from his face to the darkened room, and then back at him, with a look of understanding. She asked, “May I come in?”

He stepped aside, reaching for the switch, and she said, “No, don’t. I like to look out, too.”

She took the chair by the window and sat for a few moments in silence, looking out, the dim starglow touching her face.

Kenniston, his immediate feeling of hostility tempered a little by puzzlement, waited for her to speak. She sat almost stiffly, a queerly prim little figure in the drab jacket and slacks, but he thought that there were lines of tiredness and strain in her clear face now.

She turned and looked at him with thoughtful blue eyes, and it came to him that Varn Allan felt ill at ease with him, that she wanted to say something that she did not quite know how to say. So she, too, was worried about this business at Vega? He thought savagely that that was fine, that it cut her down from a high-and-mighty official of the great Federation into an anxious woman, almost a girl.

She said, “I came to tell you—owing to the pressing nature of this case, the Board of Governors has granted us two hours on the day after we arrive at Vega Four.”

“Two hours!” exclaimed Kenniston. It did not seem much time in which to decide the fate of a world.

“The Governors have the problems of half a galaxy to decide. They cannot give more time than that to anyone. So perpare your case carefully. There is never a second hearing.”

He thought that she had not come only to say that, and he waited, forcing her to speak. He realized now that her tension and weariness equaled his own.

Finally, reluctantly, Varn Allan said, “As Sub-Administrator of the sector, Norden Lund will have the right to speak on this problem to the Governors.”

Kenniston hadn’t known that, but it made no difference to him and he said so.

“It may make a very great difference indeed to you and your people,” she warned him.

“In what way?”

She told him, “Lund is ambitious. He wants to be an Administrator, and later, a Governor—perhaps even Chairman. His aspirations are unbounded.”

Now, Kenniston began to understand a little. “In other words, as Gorr Holl said, Lund is after your job.”

“Yes. It would be a step up for him. And to make that step, he would quite cheerfully commit an injustice. Of that I am sure.” Varn Allan leaned forward. “He sees in the problem of Earth an unparalleled opportunity to advance himself. Your unheard-of irruption into this time from the past has created tremendous interest in you. And many worlds will be watching this coming hearing.”

In her earnestness, she had risen and was standing in front of him, speaking carefully, choosing her words to make him understand.

“If Lund can dominate this hearing, if he can offer some sensational proof that I have blundered in handling the Earth problem and that he has been right, he will have distinguished himself before the eyes of everyone.”

Kenniston was sure now that he completely understood, but he did not let his feelings show in his face or voice as he asked, “Then you’re afraid that Lund is going to spring some surprise at this hearing?”

Varn Allan nodded earnestly. “Yes—I know that he has something in mind. He has been smugly triumphant with me, ever since we took off. But what it is, I do not know.” She looked at Kenniston worriedly, and asked, “Do you know? Is there something about your people, about this Earth problem, that Lund could use at the hearing?”

Kenniston got to his feet. He looked down into her face, and then he began to laugh. Softly, at first, and then more loudly—a bitter, angry laughter that vented all the resentment he had felt from the first. She looked up at him, startled and uncomprehending.

“This,” he said, “is very rich indeed. This is really comic. You come to Earth as the law of the Federation, as Miss High-and-Mighty, and look at us as though we were a bunch of sheep, and order us this and order us that, and can hardly bear even to talk to the poor fuzzy-witted primitives. And then, all of a sudden, when your own precious job is in danger, you come running to me to help you save it!”

Varn Allan’s face was white and incredulous, her blue eyes starting to flare, her whole slim figure rigid.

Kenniston told her savagely, “You know what? I don’t give a damn who’s administrator, you or Lund! You’re neither of you my kind. If he can take your job, more power to him—it’ll make no difference to me or mine!”

He knew by the white wrath in her face that he had thrust beneath that serious, composed exterior at last, that the competent, brilliant official had emotions like any other woman and that he had got to them.

“So you think that,” Varn Allan breathed. “So you think that I would plead for your help, to save my position?”

Her voice rose then, driven by an anger that seemed almost more than her small figure could contain. It was as though he had touched a spring that released a hot, long-pent passion.

“My position—my official rank! Do you think I am like Lund, that the power to give orders is pleasure to me? What would you, a primitive, know of a tradition of service to the Federation? Do you suppose I wanted to follow that family tradition, that I enjoyed the years of study when other girls were dancing, that my idea of a happy life is to spend it in starship cabins and on unfriendly worlds? Do you think all that is so dear to me that I would worry and plot and come pleading to a primitive, to keep it?”

She choked on her own indignation, and turned toward the door. Kenniston, startled by that violent outburst, obeyed a sudden impulse and caught her arm.

“Wait! Don’t go. I—”

She looked up at him with blazing eyes and said, “Let me go or I’ll call an orderly.”

Kenniston did not release her. He said awkwardly, “No, wait. I was out of line. I’m sorry—”

He was. He was ashamed of himself, and he did not know exactly why he should be, but something in her passion had made him so. He hated unfairness, and he felt that he had been unfair.

He said so, and Varn Allan looked up at him with eyes that were still angry, but after a moment she turned away from the door.

“Let us forget it,” she said stiffly. “I was at fault, for talking emotionally like—”

“Like a primitive,” Kenniston finished for her, and she set her small jaw and said, “Exactly. Like a primitive.”

Kenniston laughed. His hostility to her and her kind might remain, but he had lost that resentful consciousness of inferiority that had nagged him since he met her. He had lost it, when the cool, competent Federation official had revealed herself as a worried and lonely girl.

“No, no, I wasn’t laughing at you,” he said hastily. “Now tell me, why did you feel it necessary to bring up this Lund business with me?”

“It was to save my rank and position,” she said bitterly. “It was because I was afraid of losing them, of—”

“Oh, all right, I’ve apologized for that,” he said impatiently. “Christ, but you people are touchy!”

For a moment Varn Allan was silent. Then she said, “You think it will make no difference to you whether Lund or I speak at the hearing, that we’re both against your people. You are wrong, Kenniston.”

“You and he are both for evacuating us off Earth,” he reminded her, “So what difference is there?”

“There’s a very great difference,” she said earnestly. “I may have made mistakes in dealing with your people, but my desire has been to accomplish a smooth, peaceful evacuation. Lund would like to deal with this Earth problem dramatically—that is to say, forcefully.”

“Forcefully?” Kenniston stiffened. “I told you both what it would mean if you tried force!”

“I know, and I believe you enough to want to solve this evacuation problem peacefully, even though it should involve delay. That is my idea of an Administrator’s duty. But Lund knows that due to your strange background, and due to the fact that this Earth case focuses the whole long controversy about world evacuation, all eyes will be on this hearing, and he would use it to advance himself, no matter what disastrous events he might unchain on Earth.”

Her logic was clear enough, and it squared with Kenniston’s estimate of Lund. He felt a suddenly deepened worry.

“But what could Lund bring up about the Earth problem that would be a surprise?” he wanted to know.

Varn Allan shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you might know. He has something, I’m sure.”

Kenniston said thoughtfully, “I don’t. But maybe Gorr and the others might have some idea. I’ll try to find out.”

He looked at her, and whatever his feelings about her might be he had to admit that he was convinced of her sincere attachment to her duty, and that though her ideas of justice might not jibe with his, she would not be deliberately unjust.

He said, “Thanks for telling me this. And again—I’m sorry I shot off.”

She said soberly, “I know you’re under strain, from this voyage and from anxiety. But—don’t let Gorr and the rest encourage you to hope for too much. The evacuation itself cannot be avoided; it is the way in which it is to be done that worries me.” And she added with sudden weariness, “I wish I were a girl of your Middletown, who had never left her world and to whom the stars were just lights in the sky.”

He shook his head. “You’d still have your worries, believe me. Hurled out of your own life into this one—Carol, right now, is more upset than you’ll ever be.”

“Carol? That would be the girl I saw with you?”

He nodded. “Yes. My girl. She was raised in that old town of ours, school and picnics and parties and what hat to wear, and then suddenly—bang! She’s here in this crazy future, and may not even be allowed to stay on Earth!”

Varn Allan said, musingly, “How strange it must be, to have grown up on one little, little planet, to have lived that tiny, circumscribed routine. In a way, I envy her. And I’m sorry for her.”

She turned to go, and Kenniston held out his hand. “No hard feelings, then?”

She was for a moment completely puzzled by his gesture, then understood and smiled and laid her hand awkwardly in his. But she took it away hastily and went out.

Kenniston stared after her. “Well, I’ll be damned if she isn’t afraid of men!”

His resentful hostility to her was gone, and while he knew she would be in there pitching against him on this evacuation that she thought so necessary, it did not worry him like the matter of Norden Lund.

The more he thought about Lund, the more he worried. Finally, he went to Gorr Holl’s cabin and told the big Capellan.

Gorr Holl instantly looked upset. “That’s bad. Lund could make nasty trouble, if he’s got hold of something. But what could it be?”

“I thought maybe you’d know.”

“Not a thing,” the Capellan denied. “Wait a minute—Piers Eglin has been a little thick with Lund lately. Maybe he’d know.”

Kenniston got up. “Piers always wants to talk to me about the old town. If he knows anything, maybe he’ll spill it.”

But it was not until the next day—the strange dawnless artifical day of starship routine—that he got a chance to talk to the little historian.

He asked Eglin bluntly, “Do you know what Lund’s got up his sleeve for this hearing?”

The question fluttered Piers Eglin badly. He fidgeted, and looked away with a hunted expression, and mumbled, “Why do you ask me? What could I know?”

Kenniston stared at him. “You’re a pretty poor liar, Piers. What do you know?”

Eglin began to babble almost incoherently. “Kenniston, listen—you mustn’t draw me into your troubles! I like you, I wish I could help you—but I’m a historian, it’s my life, that old town of yours on Earth is like a dream come true to me, and to save it, I would do anything. Anything!”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Kenniston demanded. “What does Middletown have to do with it?”

The little historian said feverishly, “You don’t understand its importance. You people from the past will die away, but that city from the far past can be preserved forever, the greatest of historical treasures. I can preserve it, keep it for future study, if I have official backing—”

A light dawned on Kenniston. “And Norden Lund is going to give you that backing? In exchange for what? What have you done to help him?”

Eglin shook his head wretchedly. “I can’t say anything. Honestly, I can’t.”

He was nearly in tears, as he went away. Kenniston looked after him, mystified and deeply troubled.

He told Gorr Holl and the others. Magro looked baffled. “But what could Piers do to help Lund? I don’t get it at all.”

“Maybe he overheard some of our people making threats and wild talk, and reported it?” Kenniston said.

Gorr Holl shook his head. “Just hearsay wouldn’t be worth much. And anyway, Piers wasn’t around your people much after the first—he spent all his time in the old town.”

Lal’lor said slowly, “I do not like it. Try to find out what it is that Piers has done, Kenniston.”

Kenniston, thought, found in the following “days” that Piers Eglin very definitely was avoiding him. He did not even see the little historian again until they made their landing on Vega Four.

He had sat for hours that day in the bridge room of the Thanis, looking with unbelieving wonderment at the alien solar system shaping itself out of the void, the spinning planets sweeping in majestic curves through the brilliant circle of Vega’s light.

The ship was sweeping in toward the fourth planet. Kenniston saw the cloudy globe leap up to meet them, and again he felt the magically tempered pressure. As they hummed downward, he was stricken with a vertiginous fear that they were going to crash.

He glimpsed a vast landscape whose dominant colors were quite unearthly. Cruel, lofty mountains of purple-black rock rose grandly beyond broad blue plains. Then the rushing ship swept over a great expanse of vivid yellow—a golden ocean that flashed back Vega’s brilliance blindingly. And then a city. A white, towering continent of a city that, even viewed from the stratosphere, was enough to take Kenniston’s breath away. There was a huge starship port near it, and the Thanis was dropping smoothly through tangled shipping traffic toward it, making worldfall in its waiting dock with the softest of jars.

Vega Four. He was here. And he could not believe it, not even now.

Gorr Holl unfastened his straps. The Capellan was almost as tense as Kenniston himself.

“Jon Arnol should be here waiting for us,” he said rapidly. “His workshop is on the other side of this planet. Gome along, Kenniston!”

Jon Arnol? Kenniston had almost forgotten about him, in the grip of this strange arrival. In the shivering fascination of being here, he found it hard to keep his mind on why he was here.

He went down with Gorr Holl to the big vestibule inside the entrance port. The lock was open, and strange blue sunlight struck the metal floor, strange air, laden with faintly alien scents, drifted to his nostrils.

Lund and Varn Allan were there, and the woman said to him, “Your quarters will be in Government Center. I can take you there.”

Gorr Holl, looking out at a dark, lean man who was hurrying across the concrete apron toward the Thanis, said hastily, “No, you needn’t bother. We’ll take Kenniston along to his quarters.”

The lean, dark man was coming up the stairs to the lock. He was perhaps ten years older than Kenniston, with a worn face and the eyes of a dreamer, and the unsteady hands of a man who is laboring under great excitement.

Varn Allan’s eyes rested on him, and she said, “I see. Jon Arnol. I thought that’s what you had in mind. But it won’t succeed, Gorr.”

“Maybe it will, this time,” rumbled the Capellan.

Norden Lund, looking at Arnol as he entered, laughed, and then without saying anything went out. Varn Allan looked as though she were going to speak to Kenniston, but didn’t.

She said, “Then you are responsible for his appearance tomorrow, Gorr,” and she left.

Kenniston, looking after her, wished she had not spoken. And he wished that Lund had not laughed quite so smugly. He was worried enough as it was.

Arnol had reached them, was greeting Lal’lor as an old friend, smiling at Magro and Gorr Holl. His smile, his movements, were quick and sharp and only half finished, as though the tense nerves of the body were acting independently of the brain.

“I think we’ve got a chance this time, Lal’lor!” he said eagerly. “By God, I think we do! This Earth business may be just what we’ve waited for, the chance to ram the Arnol process down their throats whether they like it or not! It’s a lucky break!” Gorr Holl told him, “This is Kenniston, of Earth.” Jon Arnol looked a little ashamed as he turned to Kenniston. “I’m sorry if I sounded selfish. I know you’ve got your own terrible problem. But if you knew how long I’ve sweated and waited and hoped! I’m a scientist, nothing else is important to me, and I’ve seen my whole life’s work and achievement held back by politics—”

Gorr Holl interrupted. “Now listen, this is no place to talk! Let’s get on to Government Center. We can talk in Kenniston’s quarters, and we’ve got plenty of planning to do before tomorrow!”

Kenniston went down the steps with them, onto the concrete apron, and for a moment the whole problem of Earth seemed impossibly far away.

He stood on an alien world, under an alien Sun, and all around him was the rush and clangor of the starport, where the great ships came and went across the galaxy. Somehow here, more than in space, he caught the reality of that incredible commerce that plied between the farthest Suns, that knew the shining trails among the nebulae and the deadly currents of the stardrifts, and the infinite numbers of ports on infinite nameless worlds. Something in him rose up in mingled awe and pride, remembering that men of Earth had first voyaged across the unknown seas to these star-fringed shores of the universe.

The deep bass thrumming of the great ships shook the ground beneath him and the atomic forges beat, hammering the plates for bow and keel, and the black hulls lifted majestically against the sky, scarred and pitted with the dusts and atmospheres of a galaxy, and Kenniston would have stood forever watching if Gorr Holl had not led him away with them.

Jon Arnol had a car waiting, a car that bore small relation to the ones that Kenniston had known except that it went along the ground. It was sleek and low, and he knew that it must be very swift, but speed seemed to be controlled along the incredible network of ramps and roads and flying bridges that spanned the city. They went fast, but not so fast that he could not see.

He looked at this city, splendid in the light of setting Vega, and he felt like an ignorant barbarian come down from the hills to Babylon. It was more a nation than a city, too huge and awesome to comprehend. Already the dusk was gathering in its deep ways, soft lights were glowing forth and the traffic and the crowd flowed there in murmuring rivers. And along such a river sped their car, the others so little impressed that they were talking eagerly still of the morrow, of the hearing, of the great chance.

Kenniston looked at the thronged and glowing streets, the strange thousands who went its ways, and it was borne in upon him with crushing impact that this was the center of the galaxy, the capital of a thousand thousand worlds. Man and woman and humanoid, silken clothing and furry hides and backs humped with wings, voices human and nonhuman, alien music that jarred his nerves, throb of hidden machines, and over all the deep humming from the sky that told of more and more starships dropping down through the deepening dusk.

As though from a remote distance he heard Gorr Holl speaking to him, pointing ahead toward a range of titan buildings that rose like white Cordilleras, their tops raking the sky. It came to his numbed mind presently that that was Government Center, the place to which they were bound, the place where he must presently stand up alone and speak for faraway Earth to these strangers of the stars.

CHAPTER 17

Judgment of the Stars

Kenniston clenched his hands under the table of gleaming plastic and clung hard to his sanity.

This is true, he told himself fiercely. It is happening, and I am not mad. I am John Kenniston. Only a few weeks ago I was in Middletown. Now I am in a place called Vega Center. I am still John Kenniston. Only the world has changed.

But he knew that it was not so. He knew that Vega Center and the marble amphitheatre in which he sat were only shadows in a shifting nightmare from which he could not wake.

Unsteadily he looked upward. They sat silently, row upon row of them, tier upon tier, full circle around the vast echoing space, reaching up into the shadowy vault, watching him with the crushing thousands of their eyes, human and unhuman, curious, intent.

The hosts of the Federation of Stars. The Board of Governors, in full session.

These countless hundreds who came from the far-flung worlds of a galaxy—to them, he must seem equally unreal. It would seem impossible to them that they looked down upon a man of the forgotten past.

Varn Allan’s quiet, earnest voice broke in upon his reeling thoughts. She was finishing her report on Middletown.

“This is a complex situation. In finding a solution for it, I would ask you to remember that these people are a special case, for which there is no precedent. In my belief, they are entitled to special consideration.

“Therefore, my recommendation is as follows: that the proposed evacuation be delayed until these people can be psychologically conditioned to the idea of world-change. Such conditioning, in my belief, would enable this evacuation to be carried out without difficulty.”

She glanced at Norden Lund, who sat next her at the table. “Perhaps Sub-Administrator Lund has something to add to that report.”

Lund smiled. “No. I will reserve my right to speak until later.” His eyes held a gleam of anticipation.

There was a moment of silence. And Kenniston could hear the soft gigantic rustling, the breathing and small stirring of the ranked thousands of the Governors.

The Spokesman, a small alert man who was the voice of the Board, the questioner, and who sat with them at the table, said, “The Board of Governors recognizes Kenniston, of Sol Three.”

The rulers of the galaxy were waiting for him to speak.

Others were waiting, too. They were waiting in the dusk and cold of Sol Three, the little world whose ancient name of Earth had been all but forgotten in these halls of government. The millhands, the housewives, the rich men and the poor, the folk of Middletown.

Varn Allan looked at him and smiled.

He took a deep breath. He forced himself to speak. He forced the words to come out of the tight dark corridors of fear.

“We did not ask to come into your time. Having come, we are under Federation law, and we do not defy your authority as such. We do not wish to make trouble. Our problem is a psychological one…”

He tried to explain to these men of the Federation something of what life had been like before that fateful morning in June. He tried to make them understand how his people were bound to their world and why they must cling to it so desperately.

“I understand the technological problems of supporting life on a world such as ours. But we have known privation and suffering before. We are not afraid of them. And we believe that, given time, we can solve those problems.

“We don’t even ask you for help, though we would be grateful if you cared to give it. All we ask of you is to be let alone, to work out our own salvation!”

He stopped. The silence, the thousands of watching eyes, bore down upon him with a crushing weight.

Kenniston struggled for a final word. There was so much he had not said—so much that could never be put into words.

How do you phrase the history of the race of men, the pride and sorrow of their beginning?

He said, “Earth is the mother that bore you. You should not let her die!”

It was done. For good or ill, it was done and over.

Jon Arnol leaned from where he sat beside him at the table. “Magnificent,” he whispered. And again, “Magnificent!”

The Spokesman asked, “Is it through the application of Jon Arnol’s theories that you hope to bring back life to Sol Three?”

Before Kenniston could answer, Arnol himself cried out, “On that point, I ask leave to speak!”

The Spokesman nodded.

Arnol rose. The fierce energy that drove him could not be contained for long in any chair. He seemed to face the entire Board of Governors at once, turning his dark, challenging gaze upon them.

“You have denied me another chance to test my process—in spite of the fact that no reputable scientist can challenge my equations. You have denied me that chance, because of political considerations which are known to everyone here. The same considerations which deliberately made my first test fail, by choosing for it a world too small for the energy-blast released in its core!

“But Earth is not such a world. The experiment will succeed, there. I demand that you let it be done! Remember, this process will solve not only the immediate problem before you but also the whole future problem of dying worlds. You think that evacuation, transfer of populations, is a better solution. But you can’t go on moving populations forever!”

He paused. Then his voice rang out sternly. “Neither can you, for a preconceived political philosophy, forever hold back scientific progress. I say that you have no right to deny to the peoples of the Federation the incalculable good that this process can do them. And therefore, I ask permission to prove my process, using the planet Sol Three as the subject!”

He sat down. There was much whispering in the ranks of the Governors, a nodding together of heads. Kenniston stared hungrily at their faces. Impossible to tell…

“I think,” Jon Arnol whispered, “we may have done it!” The Spokesman lifted his gavel, about to signal the beginning of the vote.

Norden Lund said, “I now claim my right to speak.” It was granted. And Kenniston felt his heart stop beating. Lund’s voice rang through the amphitheatre. “There is one fact concerning these so-called Middletowners that has not been mentioned—one that my superior did not even discover! A fact which was learned from records in their own old town, deciphered by the linguistic and historical expert of our party.”

Kenniston grew tense. So it was coming now, whatever it was that Lund had found out through Piers Eglin.

“You have been told that these Middletowners are a kindly, harmless folk. You are asked to be sorry for them, to give them special indulgences, to overlook their little violences. And why? Because they are pathetic creatures, innocent victims of a freak of chance that threw them forward along their world-line.”

Lund’s face hardened. His voice thundered wrathfully.

“It was no freak of chance that brought them into our time. It was an act of war!”

He paused, to let them understand that. Kenniston saw Varn Allan’s face. She was looking at Lund in amazement.

Lund went on. “Let Kenniston deny this if he can! It was the explosion of a hostile atomic bomb that ruptured the continuum and hurled his city through. These people are the children of war, born and bred in an age of wars.

“Consider the mob violence, the threats made against Federation officials, the refusal to accept peaceful authority! Consider that at this moment those kindly folk of Middletown are prepared for war, their trenches dug, their guns in place, ready to fire on the first Federation ship that lands!”

Lund’s voice dropped to a lower, tenser pitch.

“I warn you that these people are rotten with the plague of war. For centuries, we of the Federation struggled to find release from war, and we found it. The galaxy has been clean of that hideous disease. Now it has appeared again among us.

“And we—the upholders of Federation law—are wavering before a show of force!”

Kenniston was on his feet. Jon Arnol clung to him, holding him back. Varn Allan leaned over the table, telling him in a desperate undertone, “Don’t Kenniston! Keep your temper!”

The Spokesman asked of Lund, “What is your recommendation to the Board of Governors?”

Lund cried, “Show these people that they cannot flout peaceful authority with a threat of war! Remove them, as quickly as possible, to some isolated world on the frontiers of the galaxy—a world so remote that they cannot infect the main thought currents of the Federation with their brute psychology!”

Kenniston broke away from Arnol’s grasp. He strode up to Lund and took him by the front of his jacket and bent over him a face so white with anger that Lund quailed before it.

“Who are you,” snarled Kenniston, “to sit in judgment upon us?”

The words choked in his throat. He thrust Lund from him, flung him away so that he went sprawling to his knees, and turned to face the Governors.

“Yes, we fought our wars! We fought because we had to, so that thought and progress and freedom could live in our world. You owe us for that! You owe us for the men that died so that there could one day be a Federation of Stars. You owe us for atomic power, too. We may have misused it—but it’s the force that built your civilization, and we gave it to you!

“Think of those things, you men of the future! From Earth you came, and your whole civilization is rooted in our blood. You live in peace, because we died in war. Remember that, when you sit in judgment upon the past!”

He stood silent then, trembling, and Varn Allan came to bring him back to his chair.

Lund had got to his feet. He said, “I will let Kenniston’s own actions stand as my final argument.” He sat down. The Spokesman brought his gavel down. Kenniston was hardly aware of the taking of the vote. He wrestled with a dark turmoil of doubt and anger and fear, dreading to hear the words of judgment that he knew were coming. “It is the final decision of the Board of Governors that the population of Sol Three shall be evacuated in accordance with the official order already outstanding.

“No experiments with the Arnol process on a planetary scale can be considered safe at this time.

“It is the wish of the Governors that the people of Sol Three be peaceably assimilated into the Federation. It is hoped that their attitude in the future will be such as to make this possible. If it is not, then they must be shown the futility of armed resistance.

“The hearing is concluded.”

Kenniston realized that Arnol was telling him to get up. He rose and went out of the amphitheatre with the others. He heard Varn Allan’s voice speaking in bitter anger to Norden Lund.

Nothing was very clear to him after that until he was back in his own quarters and Gorr Holl was putting a glass in his hand. Magro and Lal’lor had waited there for the verdict. Varn Allan was still with him, and Arnol.

“I’m sorry, Kenniston,” said Varn, and he knew she meant it. He shook his head.

“It was my fault. If I hadn’t lost my temper…”

“Don’t blame yourself, Kenniston. Forgive me, but Lund had just enough truth on his side to carry the day. Why didn’t you or your people tell us that you had been engaged in war, back in your own time?”

He shook his head. “Because we weren’t in any war. Don’t you see, the bomb that hurled us out of our own time came in peacetime! Whatever followed we never knew about, because we weren’t there!”

She paced the room, frowning, and then said, “I’m going to try to get this evacuation order lengthened out as long as possible. It may soften the blow a little for your people. I used to have some influence with the Coordinators—Now I don’t know. Lund has undermined me pretty badly.”

It dawned on Kenniston then that this day had been a defeat for her, too, and an unjust one. He had been too wrapped up in his own despair to think about it.

It was his turn to say, “I’m sorry.”

She smiled a little and turned to go, pausing to lay her hand briefly on Kenniston’s shoulder. “Don’t take this too hard,” she said. “Nobody could have done a better job than you did.”

She went out. They looked at each other with faces sick, angry, sullen—the two men and the three humanoids.

“Well,” said Gorr Holl, “It was a damned good try. I vote we have a drink.”

Magro said, “It’ll be bitter news for our people, Gorr. They were beginning to hope.”

The Capellan rumbled, “I know that. Shut up.”

He took a glass to Jon Arnol, who was sitting staring at the wall. “Cheer up,” he said. “Your process is bound to win out some day.”

Arnol said, “Maybe. But that’s not doing your people any good—all the humanoid peoples who backed and financed my work and put their hopes in it. I’ve let you down.”

“The hell you have,” said Gorr.

Kenniston was thinking sickly of the people back there on Earth, waiting anxiously for his return. He was thinking of Carol, and he said slowly, “I can’t go back. I can’t face them, and tell them I’ve failed.”

“They’ll get over it,” said Gorr Holl, in a heavy attempt to be reassuring. “After all, going to a strange world isn’t half as much of a shock as being hurled forward in time. They stood that.”

“It happened before they knew it,” said Kenniston, “That makes a difference. And they were still in a place they knew. No. They won’t get used to it. They’ll fight it to the bitter end.”

He spread his hands in a gesture of futile anger. “That’s what I can’t make anybody, even you, understand! They belong on Earth. It’s like an extension of themselves. They will risk any danger, dare and threat, to hold onto it!”

His gaze fell then on Jon Arnol’s bitter face, abstracted and brooding on his own disappointment. Kenniston’s pulse gave a sudden leap.

He said softly, “Any danger, any threat… Yes, by heaven!” He was suddenly shaken by a terrible, desperate hope. He got up and went across the room to Jon Arnol.

“You said that you had a small starcruiser and technical crew of your own?” Kenniston said.

Arnol nodded. “Yes. Over at my workshop in the mountains.” He added bitterly, “I sent them word last night to get the cruiser ready to go to Earth. I was so sure that our chance had come.”

Kenniston asked him softly, “Tell me, Arnol. Do you really believe in your own process?”

Arnol got to his feet. His eyes were suddenly hot, and he looked as if he would hit the Earthman.

Kenniston demanded, “Do you believe in it enough, to defy an order of the Board?”

Arnol stiffened. After a moment he said, “Explain that, Kenniston.”

Kenniston explained. Fairly shaking with the intensity of his idea, he talked. And gradually Arnol’s eyes took on a febrile glitter.

He muttered. “It could be done quickly, there on Earth. The ancient heat shafts would eliminate the necessity of deep boring—”

But then he shook his head, in a kind of dread, “No! It would mean dismissal from the College of Scientists, exile for the rest of my life. I can’t do it, Kenniston.”

“You’ve worked and hoped for many years,” Kenniston reminded him cruelly. “Some day you’ll give up hoping, and your process will be forgotten and lost.”

He stood back. “I won’t say any more—except that here is your chance, if you wish to take it. Your chance to try your planet rejuvenation process, on Earth!”

He waited, then, silent. Gorr Holl and the others watched. The Capellan’s eyes were very bright.

Arnol put his head in his hands and groaned. “I can’t, I can’t! And yet—they’ll never grant permission, that I know. A whole life’s work wasted…”

Kenniston watched him suffer, caught between desire and fear. And at last Arnol struggled to a decision. He said, hesitantly, “We would have to leave it to your people to decide, Kenniston. They must agree to accept the risk.”

“I know them, and I know they’ll agree!” Kenniston exclaimed. “And if they do?”

Beads of sweat stood on Arnol’s forehead. “If they’re willing, I’ll do it,” he said huskily.

A great excitement coursed through Kenniston. One chance—one last chance, after all!

He looked at Gorr Holl and Magro and Lal’lor. He asked, “Are you with us in this?”

Gorr Holl uttered a great, booming laugh. “Are we with you?” He strode to Kenniston, and he said, “We humanoids have been fighting this battle for a long time. Do you think we’d drop out now?”

Magro’s cat eyes were glittering, but he merely nodded.

Jon Arnol said excitedly, “My flier is docked at South Port, near here. It won’t take long to get to my mountain workshop.”

Lal’lor began, “I, too—”

Gorr Holl told him, “You, grey one, shall stay here and cover for us. Tell anyone who asks that we have all gone out to show Kenniston the sights.”

The Miran sighed. “All right, Gorr. But—try to be careful. All of you.”

They left the apartment Half an hour later, their flier was splitting the night on the way to the other side of Vega Four.

CHAPTER 18

Fateful Return

Another night had come. Under the brilliant, unfamiliar stars, black mountain peaks looked broodingly at the scene of feverish activity on the little plateau.

Lights flared there, illumining the little group of long, low buildings, the supply yard with its crane, and the dim metal mass of a small starcruiser battered and tarnished by long use.

A wide hatch gaped in the side of the ship’s hull. And toward it Kenniston and his three companions were carefully rolling a massive, black ovoid thing that rested in a wheeled cradle.

“You needn’t worry—there’s no danger of detonating it, when it isn’t even electrofused,” Jon Arnol was saying reassuringly.

“Listen, if this energy bomb is able to change a whole plant, I’m treating it with respect!” rumbled Gorr Holl.

Kenniston felt the unreality of it. The whole scheme now seemed to him mad, harebrained. This big black mass his hand touched—how could it change the future of a world?

He tried to fight down these doubts. The scientists of this latter-day universe, masters of a knowledge far beyond his own, had affirmed the soundness of Arnold theory. That was what had nerved him to start this project, and he must cling to it. It was too late now for questions.

He was tired, dead tired. They had worked without respite all through the day, he and Gorr Holl and Magro, helping Arnol and his technical crew to load the masses of supplies and incomprehensible equipment necessary for the experiment.

The little starcruiser was Arnol’s workship. It had carried him on many research trips throughout the galaxy. And the eager young men of the crew who had worked and dreamed beside Arnol for so long had asked no questions. Whether or not they guessed what their mission was to be, Kenniston had no way of knowing.

The Chief pilot came up to Arnol as the four of them reached the hatchway with their cryptic burden.

“She’s all checked and ready for takeoff, whenever you are.”

Arnol nodded. The technical men were taking over the task of loading the energy bomb and making it fast in its shockproof well.

“As soon as they’re through,” said Arnol. He glanced at Kenniston and the others, with a weary, triumphant smile. “In about twenty minutes, we’ll be on our way.”

It was then that Kenniston saw the jet streams of a flier drawing a distant curve of flame across the sky, coming toward the plateau.

The others saw it, too. They waited, while the technical crew labored swiftly on, and Kenniston said, “It must be Lal’lor, with a message!”

“Yes,” said Arnol. “No one else could know we were here.”

Yet their uneasiness grew as they watched the flier sweep in to a landing. Kenniston thought desperately, “No one else could know! We wouldn’t have been followed!”

He found himself running with the others across the flat surface of the landing field.

He saw the figure that stepped out of the flier. It was not Lal’lor. It was a man he had never seen—a stocky man with clipped iron-grey hair and a look of authority on his square face.

Behind this stranger came Varn Allan, and with her, his face alight with triumph, was Norden Lund.

Kenniston stopped, his heart sinking in cold despair. The stocky newcomer stood, surveying with startled, unbelieving eyes, the bustle of activity around the cruiser.

“I wouldn’t have thought it possible!” he gasped. “Lund, you were right. They were going to do it without permission.”

Lund said happily, “Yes, sir. I suspected it That’s why I had them watched. You can see for yourself.” And to Kenniston and Arnol and the others he said, “Let me introduce you. This is Coordinator Mathis.”

Varn Allan was still standing and looking at them, her face shocked and incredulous in the white glare of the worklights. She looked as though she could not credit what she saw.

“I didn’t believe it,” she said, speaking to Kenniston slowly. “When the Coordinator informed me of what Lund had told him, what you were doing, I refused to believe it I came with him, to prove that he was wrong.”

She paused, her blue eyes growing hot, fixed on Kenniston. “But I was wrong. You are a complete barbarian, with no respect for law. I’m beginning to think your people should be quarantined!”

Mathis, the Coordinator, was looking grimly at Jon Arnol. “You’ve gone too far this time, Arnol. You know the penalty for breaking Federation law, even if this Kenniston hasn’t learned it yet.”

“Arrest,” said Lund softly. “Arrest and exile for all of them. I hope, sir, you will remember that it was I who exposed this criminal plot after my superior had shown open sympathy for the criminals.”

“I will remember it,” Mathis said crisply. “Now advise Vega Center of this situation at once.”

Lund turned to go back to the flier. Its radio-televisor, Kenniston knew, would put him into instant contact with the Government Center.

He sprang forward in running strides. He caught up to Lund, and with one hand on the man’s shoulder he spun him around. With the other, he smashed a driving blow at Lund’s jaw.

Mathis recoiled, horrified by the violence. Varn Allan ran toward Kenniston, as Lund struggled to get up.

“Get back, Kenniston!” she ordered him. “You’re not on your barbaric world now. You can’t…”

She had no chance to finish. Lund came up fast, drawing a small glass weapon from his pocket. He had foreseen Kenniston’s reactions sufficiently to come armed.

Gorr Holl’s great furry shape loomed up behind the Sub-Administrator. One huge paw caught the hand with the weapon, the other arm went around Lund’s body and lifted him in the air like a child. His powerful fingers tightened. Lund dropped the glass weapon.

“Let me go!” he gasped. “I order you…”

“You might have killed someone,” Gorr Holl rumbled, and shook Lund until his teeth rattled. “You have no orders for me, little man!”

He looked around, still holding Lund. “What now?” Mathis said, a little shakily, “I demand in the name of the Federation—” Nobody paid any attention to his demand, and he stopped.

Arnol had come up. There was an iron set to his jaw now. “We are already liable to penalties for what we have done. Arrest and exile. They can’t do much more to us if we go through with it. Are you still game?”

“Yes!” Kenniston looked at Varn Allan and Mathis. He said regretfully, “I’m sorry you two came. You’ll have to go with us now—you and Lund. We can’t leave you behind to spread an alarm.”

Her eyes met his coldly and steadily. “It will do you no good. Our disappearance, and yours, will be noticed very soon.”

She said nothing more. She glanced once at the flier, and then at the men around her, and at the fleet Magro. She did not try to escape. Arnol had turned to face his men. He told them, “You are not responsible for my plans, and you are not yet under any penalty. Therefore you are free to decide now whether or not you will go with me.”

The Chief Pilot stepped forward. He was a tall young man with a reckless grin and eyes that were not given to showing fear.

“I’ve sweated this tub across the galaxy too many times to quit now,” he said. “I don’t know about the other boys, but I’m going.”

The others, technicians and crewmen alike, shouted assent.

“We’ve worked too long and too hard to throw this chance away! We’re with you, Arnol!”

Arnol’s dark eyes suffused with a mist that was very like the tears of gratitude. But his voice rang out like a bugle, crying, “Then prepare for takeoff! The Government ships will be after us as soon as the Coordinator and Varn Allan and Lund are missed and traced!”

Men began to run toward the starcruiser. Kenniston went with them, holding tight to Varn Allan, with Gorr Holl coming after with the squirming, protesting Lund clutched in his great arms. Magro brought the pale-faced Mathis, who neither spoke nor resisted.

The hatches were shut. The airlock valves clanged into place. As he followed Arnol along a narrow passageway, Kenniston was aware of the swift, ordered confusion that seethed throughout the ship. Warning lights flashed on the bulkheads. Bells rang. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the cruiser, machinery jarred into life, settling to a steady humming.

Arnol thrust open two doors that faced each other across the passage. Indicating one, he said, “I think this is the most comfortable, Administrator Allan. You’ll understand if we keep the door locked.”

She went inside without a word. Lund and Mathis were thrust into the opposite cabin, the former still snarling threats. Arnol glanced at the warning lights.

“All set,” he said. “Come on.”

In the cruiser, Kenniston sat dazedly through the last taut seconds of preparations, feeling all his weariness collapsing upon him. Then a bell rang, and the little ship went smoothly skyward. There was little sensation of the tremendous acceleration, any more than in the Thanis. He had learned by now of the elastic force-stasis that gripped everything in a starship to temper acceleration pressure.

As in a dream, Kenniston listened to the banshee scream of atmosphere past the outer hull. Then through the port he saw the great cloudy bulk of Vega Four falling away with slow majesty. And then the sky was gone, replaced by the depthless black vault of space that was hung thick with loops and chains and pendants of blazing Suns.

He became aware later of Gorr Holl’s big paws shaking him gently. “Gome on, Kenniston. You’re nearly out. Time to sleep.”

The big Capellan bore him away bodily to a cabin, and rolled him into a bunk.

He woke hours later, feeling rusty and still tired from the strain of the past days. He looked out. The cruiser was in deep space now, droning steadily across the mighty gulf that separated it from Earth. Kenniston felt an involuntary thrill. This voyaging in the great interstellar deeps was getting into his blood.

He stuck his head in the bridge and found Magro there with the Chief Pilot.

“I’ve been listening with the Visor operator,” said the Spican. “There’s been no alarm yet, back there.”

“But there will be, when they find all of us gone.”

“Yes. And Control ships will be after us like hounds. We’re not going to have much time, on Earth.”

Kenniston was silent. Then he asked, “Where’s Arnol?”

“You’ll find him down in the bomb compartment.”

As Kenniston groped his way down a series of ladders, into the compartment where the great bomb brooded in its well, that troubling doubt rose again within him.

Until now, the swiftness of events had crowded it down. But now it seemed suddenly fantastic that he should pin the hopes of Earth’s last people to this black thing. It had only been tested once, and that test had ended disastrously…

But Jon Arnol sat there in the dim light and smiled, a happy, peaceful smile.

“I have been admiring my child, Kenniston. That seems silly, doesn’t it? But I’ve put most of my life into that thing. I’ve waited—how long I’ve waited! And now, in a little while…”

His gaze dwelt fondly again upon the black metallic ovoid in its cradled pit.

“It is a dream, and it is half a lifetime of toil, and it is a power that will revive a world.”

Kenniston cried, out of his haunting doubt, “Can this bomb really rekindle Earth’s interior heat? How?”

Arnol said, a little helplessly, “I know the uncertainty that must oppress you. I’d like to explain my equations. But how can I, without first teaching you all that the ages have brought in new science?”

He went on, “But even though a primitive scientist, you are a scientist. I will try to make you understand the principle, at least. You know that most suns derive their energy from a nuclear reaction that changes four hydrogen atoms into one helium atom, by a series of shifting transmutations involving carbon and nitrogen?”

Kenniston nodded quickly. “Yes, that carbon-nitrogen cycle was discovered in my time. Scientists called it the Solar Phoenix. The tiny fraction of atomic weight left over, after the cycle, was the source of solar radiation.”

“Exactly,” said Arnol. “What you wouldn’t know is that scientists in the ages since then have succeeded in triggering similar cyclical reactions in other, heavier elements. That is the key to my process.

“Most planets, like your Earth, have a central core of iron and nickel. Now, a transformation of iron to nickel in cyclic reaction had been achieved in the laboratory, liberating the energy. I asked myself—instead of in a laboratory, why not start that reaction inside a planet?”

“Then it would reproduce the basic solar reaction inside such a planet?” Kenniston said incredulously.

“Not really, for the iron-nickel cycle does not yield such terrific radiation as your Solar Phoenix,” Arnol corrected. “It would, however, create a giant solar furnace inside a planet, and raise the surface temperature of that world by many degrees.”

Kenniston voiced his worry. “There wouldn’t be danger of the nuclear reaction bursting through to the surface?”

“It can’t burst through,” Arnol declared. “The cycle can only feed on nickel and iron, and the massive outer sphere of silicon and aluminum around the core would contain the reaction forever.”

He added, “That is why the energy-bomb that triggers the reaction must be detonated in the core. And that is why we can quickly start the process on your Earth—because the ancient heat shafts there provide access to the deep core without elaborate preliminary boring.”

Kenniston nodded. The theory seemed sound enough. And yet—

He said slowly, “But when you tested it before, the planet was nearly destroyed by quakes that the convulsion in the core started.”

“Planetoid” said Arnol wearily. “Not planet. Haven’t I explained that enough times? The mass was insufficient to sustain the blast.” He was suddenly angry. “Why was I ever fool enough to accept that impossible test? But I repeat, Kenniston, I know what I am doing. The entire College of Science has not been able to find flaws in my equations. You’ll have to be content with that.”

“Yes,” said Kenniston. “Yes, I’ll have to be.” But as he left Arnol, he could not entirely crush his apprehension. This man-made creation of a solar furnace in the heart of a planet was as monstrous to his mind as the making of fire must have been to the first man. What if, by his faith in Jon Arnol, he had doomed Earth instead of helping it?

One decision came clear in his mind. If there was a possibility that Earth’s surface might be ravaged by destructive quakes, no one should remain for the detonation of the bomb who did not do so of his own free will.

With a queer pang of guilt, he thought of Varn Allan. She and Lund and Mathis, prisoners against their will, would have to be let go before the great risk was taken. He would give her that reassurance, at least.

The door of her cabin had a simple combination lock, and the dial numbers had been given to all hands in case of necessity. Kenniston opened it, and went in.

She was sitting rather as he had sat that time aboard the Thanis, her shoulders bent, her gaze brooding on the immensity of space beyond the port. He thought she had not slept, from the lines of strain and weariness in her face.

She straightened up at once, and turned toward him defiantly. “Have you come to your senses and abandoned this criminal project?” she demanded.

The hard anger in her clear eyes awakened answering anger in Kenniston.

“We have not,” he said. “I came only to tell you that you and Lund and Mathis will be allowed to leave Earth before the thing is done.”

“Do you think I’m worried about my own safety?” cried Varn Allan. “It’s the thousands of your people whom you’re endangering by this mad defiance of Federation law.”

“To the devil with Federation law,” he said roughly. Her eyes flashed hotly. “You’ll learn its power. Control ships will speed to Earth before you can even do this thing.”

Exasperated beyond measure, he grabbed her shoulders with a brutal impulse to shake her.

Then the totally unexpected happened. Varn Allan began to cry.

Kenniston’s anger melted into distress. She had always seemed so cool and self-contained that it was upsetting to see her in tears.

After a moment, he clumsily patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Varn. I know you were trying to help me there at Vega Center. And it must seem to you that I’m ungrateful. But I’m not! It’s just that I have to try this thing, or see Middletown’s people break their hearts trying to fight your Federation.”

She looked a him, wet-eyed, and murmured, “I’m behaving like an emotional fool.”

He looked down at her, his hands still on her shoulders. She pushed him back. She seemed to avoid his eyes as she said,

“I know you’re sincere, Kenniston. But I know too that this thing is wrong, that you can’t successfully defy the power of all the stars.”

He was strangely depressed when he left her. He tried not to think about it—tried not to remember the touch of her, tried not to recognize the choking emotion that had leaped in him for a moment.

“That’s just insane,” he muttered to himself. “And there’s Carol—”

He would not go to her again, in all the hours and days that the little starcruiser swept full speed across the galactic void. He was, somehow, afraid to see her once more.

A tension grew in Kenniston as the dim red spark of Sol largened to a sullen sphere. As the cruiser swept in at decelerating speed past the lifeless outer planets, he looked ahead.

“We must work fast, once we’re there,” Jon Arnol was saying tautly. He, too, was showing the strain. “Already Federation ships must be on their way here to stop us.”

Kenniston made no answer. That cold, haunting doubt was a deeper shadow on him as he watched the gray blob of old Earth grow big ahead.

His people were there, waiting. What was he bringing to them and their dying planet? New life, or final, ultimate death?

CHAPTER 19

Middletown Decides

With tightening nerves, Kenniston walked across the dust and desolation of the plain toward the bright dome of New Middletown. Arnol was with him, and big Gorr Holl. The cold wind was as he remembered it, and the red, lowering Sun with its crown of fire.

“Perfect!” whispered Arnol. “Perfect! Such a world as I have dreamed of for a test!”

“Here they come,” said Gorr Holl, and pointed to the portal.

The armed lookouts had recognized Kenniston and the big Capellan. Word had gone around, and the folk of Middletown were pouring out through the portal to meet them.

Within seconds the crowd was around them, shouting, all but trampling them in its excitement. He recognized well-known faces—Bud Martin, John Borzak, Lauber—

McLain’s towering figure shouldered toward him. “What happened out there, Kenniston?”

“Yeah, what’s the verdict?” came a cry from beside him. “Are they going to let us be?”

He raised his voice to shout back to the wildly excited crowd. “Everybody—go to the plaza! Pass the word around. I’ll tell you all about it, there.”

“The plaza! The plaza!”

Some of them began to run back toward the city, to cry the news through the streets. Others swarmed around Gorr Holl, glad to see him back. They stared curiously at Jon Arnol, demanding to know who he was, but Kenniston shook his head. The story would be hard enough to tell once. He was not going to do it twice.

He searched for Carol’s face in the crowd. He yearned to see her—and yet deep in his mind somewhere there was a strange reluctance to see her, to face her, and he did not know why this should be so. But she was not there, he should have known she would not have ventured into this excited crowd.

Mayor Garris bustled up to him at the portal, preceding Hubble and a few of the City Council.

“Did you fix things, Kenniston?” he cried. “Did you make them understand out there?”

Kenniston said, “I’d like to make my report in the plaza, where everyone can hear.”

The Mayor gave him a worried, half-frightened look, and fell back. Kenniston reached out to take Hubble’s hand.

“I’ve got to talk to you, Hubble,” he said. “I’ve done something, and I don’t know…”

He talked in a rapid undertone to the older scientist as they made their way through the streets.

Hubble’s reaction was the same as Kenniston’s had been when the thing had been first broached to him. He recoiled from it.

“Good God, Ken! It’s mad—dangerous…”

But as he heard more, his alarm changed to grave attention, and then keenest interest.

“Yet it does sound logical, by every principle of our own physical science.” He looked at Jon Arnol. “If I could only talk clearly to him!”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” said Kenniston grimly. “That’s the awful part of it. His science is a million years beyond us.”

Hubble turned to Gorr Holl. He had worked beside the big furry Capellan. He knew and trusted his ability as an atomic technician. Haltingly, he asked, “Will Arnol’s process work?”

Gorr Holl answered simply, “I believe in it enough to risk my life helping to try it.”

Kenniston translated that. And Hubble seemed reassured. “It still seems a great gamble, Ken. But—I think it’s worth it.”

Soon Kenniston had mounted the steps of the building that was City Hall, and stood by the microphone. Before him were the gathered thousands of Middletowners—a kaleidoscope of eager faces, excited, waiting.

This was the moment he had dreaded—the moment he had thought he could not endure. And it was harder even than he had dreamed, to say the words he must say.

There was no use being gentle about it. He told them almost brutally, “The decision is against us. They say we have to go.” He listened to the roar that broke out then, the angry cry of a people driven beyond their patience.

Mayor Garris voiced the passionate reaction of all Middletown.

“We won’t leave Earth! And if they want to push it to a fight, they can!”

Kenniston raised his hands, begging for quiet.

“Wait!” he shouted into the microphone. “Listen! You may not have to go, and you may not have to fight. There’s one chance…”

He told them, as simply and carefully as he could, of Jon Arnol’s great proposed experiment.

“Earth would be warm again—perhaps not quite as warm as before, but warm enough so that you could live here comfortably for all time to come.”

There was a long silence. He knew that the concept was too enormous for them to grasp at once. But they were trying to grasp it, trying to equate it with some familiar thing. The planetary scale of it, their minds could not hold onto. They struggled for a personal significance they could understand.

Finally John Borzak stepped forward, a rawboned, grizzled man who had spent a lifetime in the mills.

“Does it mean, Mr. Kenniston, that we could go back then to Middletown?”

He answered, “Yes.”

A cheer went up that shook the very walls of the buildings. “Back to Middletown! Did you hear that? We could go back to Middletown!”

Kenniston was touched beyond measure. To them, the shocking of a planet back to life meant primarily one thing—the ability to return to the drab little city beyond the hills, the city that was still home.

He motioned to them again for silence.

“I have to warn you. This experiment has never been tried on a world like Earth. It’s possible that it may fail. If it does, the surface of the Earth may be wrecked by quakes.”

That gave them pause. Kenniston saw the shadow of fear cross their faces, saw how they turned to one another and talked, and shook their heads, and looked anxiously back and forth.

Finally a voice cried, “What do you and Doctor Hubble think? You’re scientists. What’s your advice?”

Kenniston hesitated. Then he said slowly, “If I were alone on Earth, I would try it. But I cannot advise you. You must make your own decision.”

Hubble said into the microphone, “We can’t advise you, because we don’t know ourselves. We are dealing here with the science of this future age, which is far beyond us. We can only take what their scientists tell us on faith.

“They say that the theory is entirely workable. We have warned you of the possibility of failure. It’s up to you to decide how great the risk is, and how much you are willing to gamble.”

Kenniston turned and spoke to Mayor Garris. “Tell them to think it over carefully. Then call for a vote—those in favor of trying it to go to one side of the plaza, those against it to the other.” Aside, to Hubble, he said, “They should have months to decide a thing like this, instead of minutes!”

Hubble said, “It may be just as well. They won’t torture themselves with too much waiting and thinking.”

Mayor Garris talked to the crowd. There was a deepening, seething turmoil in the plaza then as people tried to reach others, to gather opinions from each other on what they ought to do. Scraps of heated conversations reached Kenniston’s ears:

“These guys from outside have done pretty well so far, getting this city going again. They know what they’re doing!”

“I don’t know. Suppose it does bring on terrible quakes?”

“Listen, these people know their stuff! They’d have to, to live out there in the stars the way they do!”

“Yeah. And I’d rather sit through an earthquake than go kiting off to the Milky Way!”

At last Mayor Garris asked, “Are you ready for the vote?”

They were, as ready as they would ever be.

Kenniston watched, his heart pounding. And beside him, Jon Arnol watched also. Kenniston had explained the procedure to him. He knew what Arnol must be going through as he waited while his life’s work was weighed in the balance.

For a time, the motion of the crowd was only a chaotic churning. Then, gradually, the separating motion came clear.

Those for the experiment, to the right side of the plaza…

Those against it, to the left…

The channel between the two factions widened. And Kenniston saw that on the left were a scant two hundred people.

The vote was carried. The experiment was approved.

Kenniston’s knees felt weak. He saw Arnol’s face, moved almost to tears with relief and joy. He himself was conscious of a wild excitement—and yet, even now, he could not stifle all his fear. They were committed, now, he and Arnol and the rest. For life or death, they were committed.

He spoke again into the microphone. “We must do this thing as soon as we can. We have very little time before ships of the Federation will arrive to stop us.

“You will please, all of you prepare to leave the city at a moment’s notice. As a precaution, no one is to remain under the dome when the energy bomb is detonated.

“Those of you who voted against the experiment will be given a chance to leave Earth before it takes place. The starcruiser can take only part of you, so it is suggested that you draw lots for space aboard her.” He swung around to the Mayor. “Will you take over now? Start the work of organizing the departure—we’ll need every minute we’ve got!”

Hubble said, “I think we’d better let Jon Arnol see the shaft.” Arnol’s technical crew came in from the ship. They studied the great heat shaft, with Gorr Holl and Magro and Arnol himself, while Kenniston and Hubble stood by and watched.

Arnol finally said, “It’ll do. It goes right down to the core. But the similar shafts in the other domed cities here—they’ll have to be exploded and sealed, first.”

Kenniston was startled. He hadn’t though of that “But that’ll take time—”

“No, not so long. A few of my men can whip around to them in the cruiser and do it quickly. Of course I brought Earth maps—and there are only half a dozen of the domed cities.”

Kenniston asked him. “How long will it take to get things ready here?”

Arnol said, “If we perform a miracle, we can be ready by noon tomorrow.”

Kenniston nodded. “I’ll do my damnedest to help you, and so will everybody here. Just let me have ten minutes, first.”

Ten minutes wasn’t much. Not much, for a man who has just been halfway across a universe to spend with his girl. But time was what they didn’t have, an inexorable limit was closing down on them every second, and even this little time he took to go to Carol was time cheated and stolen from the common need.

Yet in the face of this terrible decision that had been taken, this thing that they were going to do to Earth, he had to see her, to quiet her fears and reassure her as best he could. He thought she would want to take frightened refuge on the cruiser, when the moment came, and he could only hope that he could get her on it.

Carol was waiting, as though she had known he would come. And to Kenniston’s amazement, there was no fear in her face—it was bright with eagerness and hope, her eyes lighted in a way he had not seen since the old time.

“Ken, can it really be done?” she cried. “Will it really work, make Earth warmer?”

“We’re so sure that we’re gambling everything it will,” he said. “Of course, there’s always a chance of failure—”

She didn’t even listen to that. Her hands clutched his arms, her face had a breathless excitement, as she explained, “But that doesn’t matter! It’s worth running any chance, if it succeeds! If it lets us go back to Middletown—”

He saw the mist in her eyes, the hunger, the yearning, as she whispered, “Just to think of it—of going back to our own town, our own homes, our own people—”

Kenniston understood, now. Deep indeed was her homesickness for the old town, for the old way of life. So deep, that it had completely conquered the fear she might otherwise have felt.

He took her in his arms and kissed her, and touched her hair, and he was thinking, She does love me—but only as part of a life that’s gone, not me alone, not just John Kenniston by himself, but the Kenniston of Middletown. And she’ll be happy with me again, if we can change our life back a little to what it was.

Why did that thought bring no joy? Why must he think of Varn Allan, tired and lonely, and yet courageously facing the wide universe, carrying a burden of duty too heavy for her?

Carol was asking him, “What was it like, Ken? Out there?”

He shook his head. “Strange—and hostile—and beautiful, in a terrible way.”

She said, “I think it changed you, a little. I think it would change anybody.”

And she shivered a little, as though even in the touch of him now was a freezing breath of alien deeps, a taint of unearthly worlds.

“No, Carol,” he said. “I’m not changed! But I can’t stay now. I have to get back—every minute is precious—”

As he hurried back to the others, Kenniston saw that New Middletown had become a rushing, surging swirl of excitement. Voices called to him, hands grabbed to delay him, men and women tried to reach him with questions. He was glad to rejoin the others around the lip of the great heat shaft.

Gorr Holl grinned his frightening grin at him. “Now, get ready to work!”

For what seemed an eternity, Kenniston worked. Machinists and sheet metal workers of Middletown were called in, every available man and piece of equipment. Great loads were brought in from the ship. Hammers rang with a deafening clamor, shaping metal on improvised forges. Riveting machines gave out their staccato thunder.

And gradually, painfully, shaped out of the sweat and effort of their bodies, a scaffolding of steel girders rose above the mouth of the great shaft.

Magro labored with the technicians over the complicated and delicate electrofuses, and the timing devices, and the radio control that from a distance would drop and detonate the charge.

Kenniston had little time to think of anything but the work. Yet his mind reverted strangely often to Varn Allan, locked in her cabin aboard the cruiser, and he wondered what her thoughts were.

Morning came. The city was to be cleared by noon, and the men and women of Middletown were gathering their children in readiness. They would not take much out of the city with them. They would not need much, either way.

The cryptic black ovoid was wheeled into position by the shaft. And with it were brought four small round objects of a different look.

“Capper bombs, that we made in the ship’s laboratory on the way here,” explained Arnol. “They will drop an instant after the energy bomb and will explode in the shaft just before it detonates below, sealing the shaft to prevent backlash.”

Kenniston watched while the technicians set the capper bombs in their racks, one above the other, inside the frame of girders. The racks would be tripped by electronic relay, from the remote control box.

Kenniston felt an increasing dread, as the fateful moment loomed close. His dread was for the trusting thousands of Middletown, who accepted the powers of scientists with the same unquestioning faith with which men had once accepted the powers of wizards.

He hoped that, if the experiment were a disastrous failure, he would not survive to know it.

A crane had been rigged to handle the energy bomb. The electronics crew were working desperately to finish the intricate wiring of the rack mechanisms, the split second timing of the relays. One of the cantilever support girders had flawed, and steel workers were sweating away to replace it.

A few more hours now, and the thing would be done. By noon, or a little after, they would know whether Earth was to live or die.

Then one of Arnol’s men came running. He had run all the way from the starcruiser. He was breathless, and his eyes were wild.

He cried out to Arnol, “A message on the televisor from a Control Squadron! They say they are approaching Earth, and order us to cease operations at once!”

CHAPTER 20

Appointment with Destiny

Kenniston felt the impact of the news as a catastrophe crushing all their desperate hopes. He stood sagging, looking at the technicians who stared frozenly back.

Like an ominous echo, Varn Allan’s warning came back into his mind.

“You cannot fight Federation law!”

But Jon Arnol, raging at seeing the dream of a lifetime threatened at this last moment, rushed forward to the messenger.

He grabbed the man’s collar. “Did you think to use a distance gauge on the message from those ships?”

The man nodded hastily. “Yes. The readings were—”

“The devil with readings! How far from Earth are those ships?”

“I’d estimate that they’re three or four hours away, if they come at full speed.”

“They’ll come at full speed, don’t worry,” said Arnol grimly. His face was a sweating mask, the bones of it standing out gauntly, as he turned to the others. “Can we be ready in time?”

“The rack-trip controls are in,” answered a technician. “It’ll take an hour or more to prepare the timers.”

Kenniston had regained a little hope, when he heard of the time limit they faced.

“Surely we can be ready in time, Arnol! I’ll start them moving out the people, at once!”

Mayor Bertram Garris was not far to seek. Round-eyed and pale with worry, the pudgy Mayor had been watching their work around the great shaft.

Kenniston ran up to him. “Get the people started out at once, to the ridge of the hills. Only the sick and old to go in cars—the rest must walk. We can’t risk a traffic tangle now!”

“Yes,” gasped the Mayor. “Yes, right away.” He caught Kenniston’s arm, looking past him at the black ovoid bulk of the bomb. As though ashamed to show the terror he felt, Garris stammered, “How much danger is there, Kenniston?”

Kenniston gave him a reassuring shake. “Don’t worry. Go along and get those people out of the city!” He wished he could find reassurance himself.

The next hours were nightmarish. Working under pressure, grudging every second, it seemed that everything conspired against them. The metal, the mechanisms, the very tools seemed determined to betray them.

And yet, at last, the dark shape of the energy bomb swung it its rack over the mouth of the shaft. The last of the timers was set, and it was done.

“Get your equipment ready,” Kenniston told them tautly. “Let’s go. There’s still a lot to be done.”

He went out with Hubble and Arnol and the rest. The city was as he had first seen it—empty, still, lifeless. The people had gone. As he passed out the portal he could see the dark, trailing mass of them already far across the plain, the thousands streaming slowly up the slope of the distant ridge.

Anxiously he scanned the sky. There was no sign yet of the Control Squadron.

Arnold sent his technical crew ahead to the ridge, with the remote control mechanisms and recording instruments. Gorr Holl and Margo and Hubble went with them. Then Kenniston and Arnol ran toward the starcruiser.

There was a little knot of people standing beside it in the dust and cold—the Middletowners who were leaving Earth.

Kenniston stared at them in amazement. Out of the two hundred, only a score had actually come to the cruiser.

Arnol told them curtly, “You can come aboard now.”

A few of them picked up their bundles and stood irresolutely glancing from their companions to Kenniston and back, wanting to speak. Then they turned and went aboard.

Kenniston counted. Two men, three women, and a child.

“Well,” he snapped at those who were left, “what are you waiting for? Get aboard!”

“I guess,” said one man, and then stopped to clear his throat. “I guess I’d rather stay with all the rest.”

He grabbed his bundle and started away, hurrying after the distant crowd.

Another and another followed him until all were gone, a small hastening group in the immense desolation of the plain.

Arnol smiled. “Among your people, Kenniston, even the cowards are brave. It must be even harder, in some ways, for those who have decided to go.”

They entered the cruiser, and released Mathis and Norden Lund and Varn Allan from their locked cabins. Varn Allan did not speak, but the Coordinator said icily, “So you are really going to do it?”

“We are,” said Arnol. “My chief pilot is about to take this ship off. You’ll be safe.”

Norden Lund said bitterly, “I hope it blows you all to fragments! But even if it doesn’t, even if it succeeds, you won’t win. You’ll still have Federation law to face. We’ll see to that!”

“I don’t doubt it. And now we must go.”

He turned, but Kenniston paused, still looking at Varn Allan. Her face was a little pale but in it was no such anger as Lund’s. She was looking at him with a searching, level gaze.

He wanted to speak to her, he wanted to voice something that was in him, but he could find no words. He could only say, finally, “I’m sorry things had to be this way, Varn. Goodbye—”

“Wait, Kenniston.”

He stopped, and she came up to him, pale and calm, her blue eyes very steady on his face. She said, “I’m staying here, while you do this thing.”

He stared at her, dumb with astonishment. And he heard Mathis exclaim, “Are you mad? What are you thinking of?”

She told Mathis slowly, “I am Administrator of this world’s sector. If my mistakes have caused this crisis, I will not evade its consequences. I will stay.”

Lund cried to Mathis, “She’s not thinking of her responsibility! She’s thinking of this primitive, this Kenniston!”

She turned, as though to make furious reply. But she did not speak. She looked instead at Kenniston, her face white and strained.

Mathis was saying to her coldly, “I will not order you to come with us. But be sure that your conduct will be remembered when your fitness for office is re-examined.”

She bowed silently to that, and turned and went out of the ship. And Kenniston, following her, felt a wondering, incredulous emotion that he dared not let himself recognize.

They stepped out into the red sunlight, and with a soft humming the starcruiser mounted into the sky and was lost to view.

The last, dark, trailing mass of people was disappearing over the ridge, as Kenniston and Varn Allan and Arnol started that way.

“Hurry!” urged Arnol. “Even yet, we might be too late—”

When they reached the ridge, Gorr Holl and Margo and Hubble were waiting there with the young technicians and their apparatus. And Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling exclamation when he saw them.

“I thought you’d stay, Varn!”

Her head went up and she said half angrily, “But why should you—” She stopped abruptly, and was silent a moment, then asked, “How soon?”

“We’re all set now,” the big Capellan answered. Kenniston saw that the radio control box and the panels of strange instruments were ready. He glanced at Arnol.

The scientist’s face was filmed with sweat. All the color had gone from it, and his hands shook. In this moment, he was facing the climax of his whole life, all the years and the pain and the effort.

He said in a strangely toneless voice, “You’d better warn them, Kenniston. Now.”

Below them, on the far slope of the ridge, waited the thousands of Middletown’s people.

Kenniston went down toward them. He cried out to them, and his voice carried thin and unreal on the chill wind, across the dead rocks and the dust.

“Keep down behind the ridge! Pass the word to keep down! We’re going to blow it!”

They looked toward him, all the massed white faces pale in the dim light of the Sun—the dying Sun that watched them with its red uncaring eye.

A great silence fell upon them. By ones and twos, and then by hundreds, they knelt to pray. And others, by the hundreds, stood unspeaking, looking solemnly upward to the crest of the ridge. Here and there, a child began to cry.

Slowly, gripped as in a strange and fateful dream, Kenniston mounted again to where Arnol and the others stood. Far beyond them he saw the dome of the city, still glowing with light as they had left it, lonely in the vast barrenness of the plain.

He thought of the black thing waiting alone in the city to make its nightmare plunge, and a deep tremor shook him. He reached out and took Varn Allan’s hand.

In that last minute before Arnol’s fingers pressed the final pattern on the control board, Varn Allan looked past Kenniston, down at the silent, waiting thousands who were the last of all the races of old Earth.

“I see now,” she whispered, “that in spite of all we have gained since your day, we have lost something, too. A courage, a blind, brave something—I’m glad I stayed!” Arnol drew a sharp and painful breath. “It is done,” he said.

For a long, eternal moment, the dead Earth lay unstirring. Then Kenniston felt the ridge leap under his feet—once, twice, four times. The sharp grinding shocks of the capper bombs, sealing the great shaft.

Arnol watched the quivering needles of the dials. He had ceased his trembling now. It was too late for anything, even emotion.

Deep, deep within the buried core of the Earth a trembling was born, a dilating shudder that came slowly upward to the barren rocks and touched them and was gone.

It was as though a dead heart had suddenly started to beat again. To beat strongly, exultantly, a planet reborn…

The pointers on the panel of dials had gone quite mad. Gradually they quivered back to normal. All but one row of them, at which Arnol and his crew stared with intensity.

Kenniston could bear the terrible silence no longer.

“Has it…” His voice trailed away into hoarseness.

Arnol turned very slowly toward him. He said, as though it was difficult for him to speak. “Yes. The reaction is begun. There is a great flame of warmth and life inside Earth now. It will take weeks for that warmth and life to creep up to the surface, but it will come.”

He turned his back then, on Kenniston, on all of them. What he had to say was for the tired, waiting young men who had labored with him so long.

He said to them, “Here on this little Earth, long ago, one of our savage ancestors kindled a world. And there are all the others, all the cold, dying worlds out there…”

Kenniston heard no more. A babel had broken loose. Varn Allan was clinging to him, and Gorr Holl was shouting deafeningly, and he heard the stammering questions of Mayor Garris and Hubble’s shaking voice.

Over all came the surge of thousands of feet The thousands of Middletown were coming up the slope, scrambling, running, a life-or-death question on their white faces.

“Tell them, Ken,” said Hubble, his voice thick.

Kenniston stood upon the ridge, and the crowd below froze tensely silent as he shouted down to them. “It has succeeded! All danger is over, and in weeks the heat of the core will begin to reach the surface…”

He stopped. These were not the words that could reach their hearts. Then he found those words, and called them to the thousands.

“It has been chill winter on Earth, for a million years. But now, soon, spring is coming back to Earth. Spring!”

They could understand that. They began to laugh, and to weep, and then to shout and shout.

They were still shouting when the great Control cruisers came humming swiftly down from the sky.

CHAPTER 21

Waking World

Slowly, slowly, during all these weeks, the spring had come. It was not the spring of old Earth, but every day the wind blew a little more softly and now at last the first blades of grass were pushing upward, touching the ocher plains with green.

But only by hearsay did Kenniston know of that. Confined with the others in a building of New Middletown, it had seemed to him that the time would never end. The weeks of waiting for the special Committee of Governors to come from Vega, the weeks of the hearing itself, the slow gathering of testimony and careful sifting of motives. And now, the days they had waited for the final verdict.

Arnol was not worried. He was a happy man. He said very little, but he had had a triumph in his eyes all through the hearing. His lifework was justified, and he was content.

Nor were Gorr Holl and Magro worried. The big Capellan, even now when they awaited the decision, was still jubilant.

“Hell, what can they do?” he said to Kenniston, for the twentieth time. “The thing’s done. The Arnol process is proved practicable, and by now the whole galaxy knows of it. They can’t refuse now to let the humanoids’ dying worlds make use of it. They wouldn’t dare!”

Magro added, “Nor can they force your people to evacuate Earth now that it is getting warmer. It wouldn’t make sense.”

Kenniston said, “They can keep us locked up for the rest of our lives, and I wouldn’t enjoy that.”

Gorr Holl grinned widely at him. “Remember, man, we’re only emotional primitives, and they’ll have to make allowances for that.”

When they were led back into the big room for the verdict, Kenniston’s eyes swung, not to the group of three men and a humanoid that sat behind the table, but to Varn Allan. He knew that her own career was at stake in this hearing. She did not look upset, and she met his gaze with a grave little smile.

Lund, beside her, looked alert and faintly worried now. He shot a hard glance at Kenniston, but Kenniston had to turn his gaze as the reading of the verdict began.

The aging man who read it, the oldest of the four Governors, had no friendliness in his face. He spoke as one who reluctantly performs an unpleasant duty.

“You, the ringleaders in this thing, have rendered yourselves liable to the extremest penalties of Federation law by your direct defiance of the Governors,” he said. “It would be quite in order to direct a sentence of life imprisonment.”

He looked down at them coldly. Gorr Holl whispered, “Just trying to scare us—” but he did not sound very confident now.

The old Governor continued. “But in this case it is quite impossible to reach a verdict on purely legalistic grounds. We must admit that your fait accompli has created a new situation. The Board of Governors has now given approval to the use of the Arnol process on certain other planets—”

Kenniston found it hard, hard, to realize that a long, great battle for the survival of worlds was ending in these phrases.

“—on certain other planets, and that presents us with a legal impasse. To punish you now for your use of it here would be, morally if not legally, punishing you for infraction of a no-longer-existing law.”

Gorr Holl uttered such a long and noisy exhalation of relief that he was promptly glared into silence.

“We are unable, therefore, to do other than dismiss you with the official reprimand of the Board of Governors for your behavior.”

Now that the moment had come, now that it was over, Kenniston found that he felt very little emotion, after all. The issues had been so vast that they had dwarfed his personal fate. He knew that that feeling would pass, that later he would be glad and thankful, but now—

The Governor, though, had not finished. He was speaking directly now to Varn Allan.

“Over and above the main issue, there remains the conduct of the responsible officials in dealing with it We are forced to express official censure of what appears to be inexcusable bungling of a psychological problem by the Administrator in charge, and—” here he looked toward Norden Lund—“and on the part of the Sub-Administrator, obvious attempts to hamper his superior for selfish reasons.”

The cold voice ended with the brief, hard phrases,

“We recommend, for Administrator Allan: Demotion one grade. For Sub-Administrator Lund: Demotion one grade. This hearing is concluded.”

Kenniston looked across the big room at Varn Allan. Her face had not changed, and silently she turned to go.

Gorr Holl was slapping him mightily on the back, Magro was saying something excitedly, but he wrenched away from them and went after her. She saw him coming, and waited. But Norden Lund was between them.

Lund’s face was white with controlled rage, and his voice was thick as he told Kenniston, “So you primitives have ruined my career?”

Varn Allan cut in contemptuously. “You ruined it yourself, Norden, with your ambitious plotting.”

He turned and strode away from them. Varn Allan, looking after him, sighed and said, “You have made a deadly enemy.”

He was not thinking of that. He waited until she turned back toward him, and he asked, “Are you my enemy too, for what I’ve done to you?”

She shook her head gravely. “No. That was not your doing. In a new and confused situation, I failed. That is all.”

“The hell it is!” he burst out. “They were unfair to you! You did your best, and—”

“And it wasn’t quite good enough,” she finished. And then she smiled a little at him. “It’s not a tragedy. An Administrator’s burden is not easy. I shall not be entirely sorry.”

He had never admired her courage so much as now. He wanted to say so, he wanted so say many things, but she turned away from him a little, and said, “This is a great day for you, Kenniston. For this is the day when they are allowing those of your people who wish to, to return to your old town.”

“Yes, I heard that it was today.”

“And you will be going back there, with your Carol. She will be very happy.”

He said, “Varn—”

But she would not face him. She said, “This is not goodbye. You’ll come back before we leave Earth.”

He stood, oppressed by emotions he could not define, and finally he said, “Yes. Yes, I’ll come back before then.”

She left, and he looked after her until she was gone. Then, slowly, he went back through the big, empty hall and out through the building into the street.

A tremendous, brassy clamor and uproar hit him in the face. The plaza was crowded, but a wide lane was open through the crowd to the boulevard that led to the portal. And the Middletown High School Band, brave for the occasion in its retrieved scarlet uniforms, with its drum majorettes prancing and horns blatting, and cymbals banging and big drums booming, was marching through the lane toward the portal.

Behind it came a glistening, open green convertible, with Mayor Garris standing up on the back seat, hatless, his plump face beaming sunlike, waving his hat joyfully to the cheering throngs. And behind his car rolled a long line of other cars—the ancient jalopies, the shining station wagons, the family sedans, crowded with excited men and sobbing women, the first of the long caravan forming up to go back to old Middletown.

Kenniston saw the cheering people who surrounded Jon Arnol, and Hubble, and Gorr Holl and Magro, nearby. He knew that he would be drawn into that group, and he went back and circled around the plaza, going by temporarily abandoned streets to the quarters of Carol and her aunt.

Carol leaped up with a glad cry when he entered. “Oh, Ken, then you’re free! They said it would be today, and I was waiting and hoping—”

“Yes, it’s all done with,” he said. He stood, not knowing quite what to say to her, until Mrs. Adams came up.

“Then we can leave here now, like the others?” Mrs. Adams said anxiously. “We can go back to Middletown now?”

“Just as soon as you can pack up and I can get the jeep,” he said.

“I’ve been packed for days,” she told him. “I wouldn’t stay in this unearthly place for one minute longer than I have to! Just imagine, they tell me a lot of the young people are going to stay here from choice! They say they like it better than Middletown, now!”

Kenniston felt a curious sense of unreality as he got the jeep, and packed their things into it, and then joined the slow, bottlenecked traffic that was now steadily rolling out of the domed city.

Could it all be ending like this? Could it be true that he was going back to the old town, the old life, after all that he had done and seen?

Down the wide boulevard, between the lofty white towers, through the portal, out from underneath the dome—The red Sun still shone dully, but a softer wind than Earth had felt for a million years was blowing across the plain, stirring the timid little shoots of new grass, bringing a breath of warm new life.

Cars ahead of them and cars behind them, rolling toward the ridge, eager for sight of the old city. And now they were passing Jon Arnol’s small cruiser, and then the titan black bulks of the great starships, brooding upon the plain, wrapped in the majesty of giants who knew the secrets of infinity. He looked back at the great ships, and he thought of the vast, star-shot spaces whither they would go, and then he looked on ahead.

And at last the eager cars topped the ridge and went hurrying joyously down into old Middletown.

All along the familiar streets, houses were already beginning to come to life. Shutters flung open, storm windows raised, doors standing wide to the soft wind, women busy with brooms on dust-drifted porches. The shrill voices of children and barking of dogs mingled with the noisy impatience of the auto horns.

Down Mill Street to Main Street, and on. And finally, the old grey house, just as they had left it.

Kenniston stopped the jeep at the curb. Mrs. Adams got out. She went slowly up the steps and unlocked the door. She stood for a moment, looking in.

“Nothing is changed,” she whispered. But all this dust. I’ll have to clean—”

Suddenly she sat down in her chair by the window and began to cry.

Carol did not go in at once. Feeling an odd sense of strain, Kenniston asked, “Are you happy too, Carol?”

She nodded, half smiling, looking out along the awakening street. “Yes, Ken.”

He said, “Well—I want to return to New Middletown to see Gorr and the others before they leave. But I’ll be back soon.”

She looked at him now, and she said, “No, Ken. Don’t come back to me.”

He stared at her, astonished. “Carol, what do you mean?”

Her soft face was quite steady. “I mean that you don’t altogether belong here now, Ken. You changed when you went out there. You’ll change more in the days ahead—will turn more and more toward the strange new life.” She added, “And I can’t change. Not like that. You’d be miserable with me, clinging to the old things.”

He knew she spoke truth, and yet he must protest. “But the plans we made together, Carol—”

She shook her head. “I made those plans with another man, a man who isn’t quite here any more, and won’t ever be here again.”

She reached up and kissed him, and then she went inside and closed the door.

Kenniston stood a moment, hesitating. Then, slowly, he climbed back into the jeep and drove out of Middletown.

From the ridge he could see again the starships that rested on the plain by the domed city. And the city itself still lived. It was the younger folk of Middletown who had chosen to stay in it—the young in mind who could still look forward to the new.

The starships would continue to come, now the Earth was habitable again. The people of far stars would mingle with the people of Middletown, and the young men here would go out to other Suns, and gradually the whole strange story of Middletown would be absorbed into the stream of history.

Kenniston sent the jeep speeding toward the domed city. He felt now a sense of new freedom, and a deep gratitude toward Carol, who had not tried to hold him back. But he felt, too, an uncertainty, a shrinking. Vast new horizons stretched before him now, the boundless horizons of space, the endless avenues of new thought. He was still a child of older Earth, and it would be strange and lonely.

He found the others still in the plaza, talking together—Gorr Holl and Magro and Arnol. And with them, Varn Allan. They saw him, Gorr waved and bawled to him. As he drove toward them, he saw Varn Allan’s eager eyes awaiting him, and he knew suddenly that he was wrong and that in all the strangeness of the years to come, he would not be alone.

THE WORLD WITH A THOUSAND MOONS

CHAPTER 1

Thrill Cruise

Lance Kenniston felt the cold realization of failure as he came out of the building into the sharp chill of the Martian night. He stood for a moment, his lean, drawn face haggard in the light of the two hurtling moons.

He looked hopelessly across the dark spaceport. It was a large one, for this ancient town of Syrtis was the main port of Mars. The forked light of the flying moons showed many ships docked on the tarmac—a big liner, several freighters, a small, shining cruiser and other small craft. And for lack of one of those ships, his hopes were ruined!

A squat, brawny figure in shapeless space-jacket came to Kenniston’s side. It was Holk Or, the Jovian who had been waiting for him.

“What luck?” asked the Jovian in a rumbling whisper.

“It’s hopeless,” Kenniston answered heavily. “There isn’t a small cruiser to be had at any price. The meteor-miners buy up all small ships here.”

“The devil!” muttered Holk Or, dismayed. “What are we going to do? Go on to Earth and get a cruiser there?”

“We can’t do that,” Kenniston answered. “You know we’ve got to get back to that asteroid within two weeks. We’ve got to get a ship here.”

Desperation made Kenniston’s voice taut. His lean, hard face was bleak with knowledge of disastrous failure.

The big Jovian scratched his head. In the shifting moonslight his battered green face expressed ignorant perplexity as he stared across the busy spaceport.

“That shiny little cruiser there would be just the thing,” Holk Or muttered, looking at the gleaming, torpedo-shaped craft nearby. “It would hold all the stuff we’ve got to take; and with robot controls we two could run it.”

“We haven’t a chance to get that craft,” Kenniston told him. “I found out that it’s under charter to a bunch of rich Earth youngsters who came out here in it for a pleasure cruise. A girl named Loring, heiress to Loring Radium, is the head of the party.”

The Jovian swore. “Just the ship we need, and a lot of spoiled kids are using it for thrill-hunting!”

Kenniston had an idea. “It might be,” he said slowly, “that they’re tired of the cruise by this time and would sell us the craft. I think I’ll go up to the Terra Hotel and see this Loring girl.”

“Sure, let’s try it anyway,” Holk Or agreed.

The Earthman looked at him anxiously. “Oughtn’t you to keep under cover, Holk? The Planet Patrol has had your record on file for a long time. If you happened to be recognized—”

“Bah, they think I’m dead, don’t they?” scoffed the Jovian. “There’s no danger of us getting picked up.”

Kenniston was not so sure, but he was too driven by urgent need to waste time in argument. With the Jovian clumping along beside him, he made his way from the spaceport across the ancient Martian city.

The dark streets of old Syrtis were not crowded. Martians are not a nocturnal people and only a few were abroad in the chill darkness, even they being wrapped in heavy synthewool cloaks from which only their bald red heads and solemn, cadaverous faces protruded.

Earthmen were fairly numerous in this main port of the planet. Swaggering space-sailors, prosperous-looking traders and rough meteor-miners made up the most of them. There were a few tourists gaping at the grotesque old black stone buildings, and under a krypton-bulb at a corner, two men in the drab uniform of the Patrol stood eyeing passersby sharply. Kenniston breathed more easily when he and the Jovian had passed the two officers without challenge.

The Terra Hotel stood in a garden at the edge of town, fronting the moonlit immensity of the desert. This glittering glass block, especially built to cater to the tourist trade from Earth, was Earth-conditioned inside. Its gravitation, air pressure and humidity were ingeniously maintained at Earth standards for the greater comfort of its patrons.

Kenniston felt oddly oppressed by the warm, soft air inside the resplendent lobby. He had spent so much of his time away from Earth that he had become more or less adapted to thinner, colder atmospheres.

“Miss Gloria Loring?” repeated the immaculate young Earthman behind the information desk. His eyes appraised Kenniston’s shabby space-jacket and the hulking green Jovian. “I am afraid—”

“I’m here to see her on important business, by appointment,” Kenniston snapped.

The clerk melted at once. “Oh, I see! I believe that Miss Loring’s party is now in The Bridge. That’s our cocktail room—top floor.”

Kenniston felt badly out of place, riding up in the magnetic lift with Holk Or. The other people in the car, Earthmen and women in the shimmering synthesilks of the latest formal dress, stared at him and the Jovian as though wondering how they had ever gained admittance.

The lights, silks and perfumes made Kenniston feel even shabbier than he was. All this luxury was a far cry from the hard, dangerous life he had led for so long amid the wild asteroids and moons of the outer planets.

It was worse up in the glittering cocktail room atop the hotel. The place had glassite walls and ceiling, and was designed to give an impression of the navigating bridge of a spaceship. The orchestra played behind a phony control-board of instruments and rocket-controls. Meaningless space-charts hung on the walls for decoration. It was just the sort of pretentious sham, Kenniston thought contemptuously, to appeal to tourists.

“Some crowd!” muttered Holk Or, looking over the tables of richly dressed and jewelled people. His small eyes gleamed. “What a place to loot!”

“Shut up!” Kenniston muttered hastily. He asked a waiter for the Loring party, and was conducted to a table in a corner.

There were a half dozen people at the table, most of them young Earthmen and girls. They were drinking pink Martian desert-wine, except for one sulky-looking youngster who had stuck to Earth whisky.

One of the girls turned and looked at Kenniston with cool, insolently uninterested gaze when the waiter whispered to her politely.

“I’m Gloria Loring,” she drawled. “What did you want to see me about?”

She was dark and slim, and surprisingly young. There were almost childish lines to the bare shoulders revealed by her low golden gown. Her thoroughbred grace and beauty were spoiled for Kenniston by the bored look in her clear dark eyes and the faintly disdainful droop of her mouth.

The chubby, rosy youth beside her goggled in simulated amazement and terror at the battered green Jovian behind Kenniston. He set down his glass with a theatrical gesture of horror.

“This Martian liquor has got me!” he exclaimed. “I can see a little green man!”

Holk Or started wrathfully forward. “Why, that young pup—”

Kenniston hastily restrained him with a gesture. He turned back to the table. Some of the girls were giggling.

“Be quiet, Robbie,” Gloria Loring was telling the chubby young comedian. She turned her cool gaze back to Kenniston. “Well?”

“Miss Loring, I heard down at the spaceport that you are the charterer of that small cruiser, the Sunsprite,” Kenniston explained. “I need a craft like that very badly. If you would part with her, I’d be glad to pay almost any price for your charter.”

The girl looked at him in astonishment. “Why in the world should I let you have our cruiser?”

Kenniston said earnestly, “Your party could travel just as well and a lot more comfortably by liner. And getting a cruiser like that is a life-or-death business for me right now.”

“I’m not interested in your business, Mr. Kenniston,” drawled Gloria Loring. “And I certainly don’t propose to alter our plans just to help a stranger out of his difficulties.”

Kenniston flushed from the cool rebuke. He stood there, suddenly feeling a savage dislike for the whole pampered group of them.

“Beside that,” the girl continued, “we chose the cruiser for this trip because we wanted to get off the beaten track of liner routes, and see something new. We’re going from here out to Jupiter’s moons.”

Kenniston perceived that these bored, spoiled youngsters were out here hunting for new thrills on the interplanetary frontier. His dislike of them increased.

A clean-cut, sober-faced young man who seemed older and more serious than the rest of the party, was speaking to the heiress.

“Unhardened space-travellers like us are likely to get hit by gravitation paralysis out in the outer planets, Gloria,” he was saying to the heiress. “I don’t think we ought to go farther out than Mars.”

Gloria looked at him mockingly. “If you’re scared, Hugh, why did you leave your nice safe office on Earth and come along with us?”

The chubby youth called Robbie laughed loudly. “We all know why Hugh Murdock came along. It’s not thrills he wants—it’s you, Gloria.”

They were all ignoring Kenniston now. He felt that he had been dismissed but he was desperately reluctant to lose his last hope of getting a ship. Somehow he must get that cruiser!

A stratagem occurred to him. If these spoiled scions wouldn’t give up their ship, at least he might induce them to go where he wanted.

Kenniston hesitated. It would mean leading them all into the deadliest kind of peril. But a man’s life depended on it. A man who was worth all these rich young wastrels put together. He decided to try it.

“Miss Loring, if it’s thrills you’re after, maybe I can furnish them,” Kenniston said. “Maybe we can team up on this. How would you like to go on a voyage after the biggest treasure in the System?”

“Treasure?” exclaimed the heiress surprisedly. “Where is it?”

They were all leaning forward, with quick interest. Kenniston saw that his bait had caught them.

“You’ve heard of John Dark, the notorious space-pirate?” he asked.

Gloria nodded. “Of course. The telenews was full of his exploits until the Patrol caught and destroyed his ship a few weeks ago.”

Kenniston corrected her. “The Patrol caught up to John Dark’s ship in the asteroid, but didn’t completely destroy it. They gunned the pirate craft to a wreck in a running fight. But Dark’s wrecked ship drifted into a dangerous zone of meteor swarms where they couldn’t follow.”

“I remember now—that’s what the telenews said,” conceded the heiress. “But Dark and his crew were undoubtedly killed, they said.”

“John Dark,” Kenniston went on, “looted scores of ships during his career. He amassed a hoard of jewels and precious metals. And he kept it right with him in his ship. That treasure’s still in that lost wreck.”

“How do you know?” asked Hugh Murdock bluntly.

“Because I found the lost wreck of Dark’s ship myself,” Kenniston answered. He hated to lie like this, but knew that he had no choice.

He plunged on. “I’m a meteor-miner by profession. Two weeks ago my Jovian partner and I were prospecting in the outer asteroid zone in our little rocket. Our air-tanks got low and to replenish them, we landed on the asteroid Vesta. That’s the big asteroid they call the World with a Thousand Moons, because it’s circled by a swarm of hundreds of meteors.

“It’s a weird, jungled little world, inhabited by some very queer forms of life. In landing, my partner and I noticed where some great object had crashed down into the jungle. We discovered it was the wreck of John Dark’s ship. The wreck had drifted until it crashed on Vesta, almost completely burying itself in the ground. No one was alive on it, of course.”

Kenniston concluded. “We knew Dark’s treasure must still be in the buried wreck. But it would take machinery and equipment to dig out the wreck. So we came here to Mars, intending to get a small cruiser, load it with the necessary equipment, and go back to Vesta and lift the treasure. Only we haven’t been able to get a ship of any kind.”

He leaned toward the girl. “Here’s my proposition, Miss Loring. You take us and our equipment to Vesta in your cruiser, and we’ll share the treasure with you fifty-fifty. What do you say?”

The blonde girl beside Gloria uttered a squeal of excitement. “Pirate treasure! Gloria, let’s do it—what a thrill it would be!”

The others showed equal excitement. The romance of a treasure hunt in the wild asteroids lured them, rather than the possible rewards.

“We’d certainly be able to take back a wonderful story to Earth if we found John Dark’s treasure,” admitted Gloria, with quick, eager interest.

Hugh Murdock was an exception to the general enthusiasm. He asked Kenniston, “How do you know the treasure’s still in the buried wreck?”

“Because the wreck was still undisturbed,” Kenniston answered. “And because we found these jewels on the body of one of John Dark’s crew, who had been flung clear somehow when the wreck crashed.”

He held out a half-dozen gems he took from his pocket. They were Saturnian moon-stones, softly shining white jewels whose brilliance waxed and waned in perfect periodic rhythm.

“These jewels,” Kenniston said, “must have been that pirate’s share of the loot. You can imagine how rich John Dark’s own hoard must be.”

The jewels, worth many thousands, swept away the lingering incredulity of the others as Kenniston had known they would.

“You’re sure no one else knows the wreck is there?” Gloria asked breathlessly.

“We kept our find absolutely secret,” Kenniston told her. “But since I can’t get a ship any other way, I’m willing to share the hoard with you. If I wait too long, someone else may find the wreck.”

“I accept your proposition, Mr. Kenniston!” Gloria declared. “We’ll start for Vesta just as soon as you can get the equipment you’ll need loaded on the Sunsprite.”

“Gloria, you’re being too hasty,” protested Hugh Murdock. “I’ve heard of this world with a Thousand Moons. There’re stories of queer, unhuman creatures they call Vestans, who infest that asteroid. The danger—”

Gloria impatiently dismissed his objections. “Hugh, if you are going to start worrying about dangers again, you’d better go back to Earth and safety.”

Murdock flushed and was silent. Kenniston felt a certain sympathy for the young businessman. He knew, if these others did not, just how real was the alien menace of those strange creatures, the Vestans.

“I’ll go right down to the spaceport and see about loading the equipment aboard your cruiser,” Kenniston told the heiress. “You’d better give me a note to your captain. We ought to be able to start tomorrow.”

“Pirate treasure on an unexplored asteroid!” exulted the enthusiastic Robbie. “Ho for the World with a Thousand Moons!”

Kenniston felt guilty when he and Holk Or left the big hotel. These youngsters, he thought, hadn’t the faintest idea of the peril into which he was leading them. They were as ignorant as babies of the dark evil and unearthly danger of the interplanetary frontier.

He hardened himself against the qualms of conscience. There was that at stake, he told himself fiercely, against which the safety of a lot of spoiled, rich young people was absolutely nothing.

Holk Or was chuckling as they emerged into the chill Martian night. He told Kenniston admiringly, “That was one of the smoothest jobs of lying I ever heard, that story about finding John Dark’s treasure. Take it from me, it was slick!”

The Jovian guffawed loudly as he added, “What would their faces be like if they knew that John Dark and his crew are still living? That it was John Dark himself who sent us here?”

“Be quiet, you idiot!” ordered Kenniston hastily. “Do you want the whole Patrol to hear you?”

CHAPTER II

Discovered

The Sunsprite throbbed steadily through the vast, dangerous wilderness of the asteroidal zone. To the eye, the cruiser moved in a black void starred by creeping crumbs of light. In reality those bright, crawling specks were booming asteroids or whirling meteor-swarms rushing in complicated, unchartable orbits and constantly threatening destruction.

For three days now, the cruiser had cautiously groped deeper into this most perilous region of the System. Now a bright, tiny disk of white light was shining far ahead like a beckoning beacon. It was the asteroid Vesta—their goal.

Kenniston, leaning against the glassite deck-wall, somberly eyed the distant asteroid.

“We’ll reach it by tomorrow,” he thought. “Then what? I suppose John Dark will hold these rich youngsters for ransom.”

Kenniston knew that the pirate leader would instantly see the chance of extorting vast sums by holding this group of wealthy young people as captives.

“I wish to God I hadn’t had to bring them into this,” Kenniston sweated. “But what else could I do? It was the only way I could get back to Vesta with the materials.”

His mind was going back over the disastrous events since the day three weeks before, when the Patrol had caught up to John Dark at last.

Dark’s pirate ship, the Falcon, had been gunned to a helpless wreck. It had, fortunately for the pirates, drifted off into a region of perilous meteor-swarms where the Patrol cruisers dared not follow. The Patrol thought everybody on the pirate ship dead anyway, Kenniston knew.

But John Dark and most of his crew were still alive in the drifting wreck. They had fought the battle wearing space-suits, and that had saved them. They had clung grimly to the wreck as it drifted on and on until it finally fell into the feeble gravitational pull of Vesta.

Kenniston could still remember those tense hours when the wreck had fallen through the satellite swarm of meteors onto the World with a Thousand Moons. They had managed to cushion their crash. John Dark, always the most resourceful of men, had managed to jury-rig makeshift rocket-tubes that had softened the impact of their fall.

But the wrecked Falcon had been marooned there in the weird asteroidal jungle, with the alien, menacing Vestans already gathering around it. The ship would never fly space again until major repairs were made. And they could not be made until quantities of material and equipment were brought. Someone must go for those materials to Mars, the nearest planet.

John Dark had superintended construction of a little two-man rocket from parts of the ship. Kenniston and Holk Or were to go in it.

“You must be back with that list of equipment and materials within two weeks, Kenniston,” Dark had emphasized. “If we stay castaway here longer than that, either the Vestans will get us or the Patrol discover us.”

The pirate leader had added, “The moon-jewels I’ve given you will more than pay for a small cruiser, if you can buy one at Mars. If you can’t buy one, get one any way you can—but get back here quickly!”

Well, Kenniston thought grimly, he had got a cruiser in the only way he could. Down in its hold were the berylloy plates and spare rocket-tubes and new cyclotrons he had had loaded aboard at Syrtis.

But he was also bringing back to Vesta with him a bunch of thrill-seeking, rich, young people who believed they were going on a romantic treasure-hunt. What would they think of him when they discovered how he had betrayed them?

“That’s Vesta, isn’t it?” spoke a girl’s eager voice behind him, interrupting his dark thoughts.

Kenniston turned quickly. It was Gloria Loring, boyish in silken space-slacks, her hands thrust into the pockets.

There was a naive eagerness in her clear, lovely face as she looked toward the distant asteroid, that made her look more like an excited small girl than like the bored, jewelled heiress of that night at Syrtis.

“Yes, that’s the World with a Thousand Moons,” Kenniston nodded. “We’ll reach it by tomorrow. I’ve just been up on the bridge, telling your Captain Walls the safest route through the meteor swarms.”

Her dark eyes studied him curiously. “You’ve been out here on the frontier a long time, haven’t you?”

“Twelve years,” he told her. “That’s a long time in the outer planets. Most spacemen don’t last that long out here—wrecks, accidents or gravitation-paralysis gets them.”

“Gravitation-paralysis?” she repeated. “I’ve heard of that as a terrible danger to space-travelers. But I don’t really know what it is.”

“It’s the most dreaded danger of all out here,” Kenniston answered. “A paralysis that hits you when you change from very weak to very strong gravities or vice versa, too often. It locks all your muscles rigid by numbing the motor-nerves.”

Gloria shivered. “That sounds ghastly.”

“It is,” Kenniston said somberly. “I’ve seen scores of my friends stricken down by it, in the years I’ve sailed the outer System.”

“I didn’t know you’d been a space-sailor all that time,” the heiress said wonderingly. “I thought you said you were a meteor-miner.”

Kenniston woke up to the fact that he had made a bad slip. He hastily covered up. “You have to be a good bit of a space-sailor to be a meteor-miner, Miss Loring. You have to cover a lot of territory.”

He was thankful that they were interrupted at that moment by some of the others who came along the deck in a lively, chattering group.

Robbie Boone was the center of the group. That chubby, clownish young man, heir to the Atomic Power Corporation millions, had garbed himself in what he fondly believed to be a typical spaceman’s outfit. His jacket and slacks were of black synthesilk, and he wore a big atom-pistol.

“Hiya, pal!” he grinned cherubically at Kenniston. “When does this here crate of ours jet down at Vesta?”

“If you knew how silly you looked, Robbie,” said Gloria devastatingly, “trying to dress and talk like an old spaceman.”

“You’re just jealous,” Robbie defied. “I look all right, don’t I, Kenniston?”

Kenniston’s lips twitched. “You’d certainly create a sensation if you walked into the Spaceman’s Rendezvous in Jovopolis.”

Alice Krim, a featherheaded little blonde, eyed Kenniston admiringly. “You’ve been to an awful lot of planets, haven’t you?” she sighed.

“Turn it off, Alice,” said Gloria dryly. “Mr. Kenniston doesn’t flirt.”

Arthur Lanning, the sulky, handsome youngster who always had a drink in his hand, drawled. “Then you’ve tried him out, Gloria?”

The heiress’ dark eyes snapped, but she was spared a reply by the appearance of Mrs. Milsom. That dumpy, fluttery woman, the nominal chaperone of the group, immediately seized upon Kenniston as usual.

“Mr. Kenniston, are you sure this asteroid we’re going to is safe?” she asked him for the hundredth time. “Is there a good hotel there?”

“A good hotel there?” Kenniston was too astounded to answer, for a moment.

Into his mind had risen memory of the savage, choking green jungles of the World with a Thousand Moons; of the slithering creatures slipping through the fronds, of the rustling presence of the dreaded Vestans who could never quite be seen; of the pirate wreck around which John Dark and half a hundred of the System’s most hardened outlaws waited.

“Of course there’s no hotel there, Aunty,” Gloria said disgustedly. “Can’t you understand that this asteroid’s almost unexplored?”

Holk Or had come up, and the big Jovian had heard. He broke into a booming laugh. “A hotel on Vesta! That’s a good one!”

Kenniston flashed the big green pirate a warning glance. Robbie Boone was asking him, “Will there be any good hunting there?”

“Sure there will,” Holk Or declared. His small eyes gleamed with secret humor. “You’re going to find lots of adventure there, my lad.”

When Mrs. Milsom had dragged the others away for the usual afternoon game of “dimension bridge,” the Jovian looked after them, chuckling.

“This crowd of idiots hadn’t ought to have ever left Earth. What a surprise they’re going to get on Vesta!”

“They’re not such a bad bunch, at bottom,” Kenniston said halfheartedly. “Just a lot of ignorant kids looking for adventure.”

“Bah, you’re falling for the Loring girl,” scoffed Holk Or. “You’d better keep your mind on John Dark’s orders.”

Kenniston made a warning gesture. “Cut it! Here comes Murdock.”

Hugh Murdock came straight along the deck toward them, and his sober, clean-cut young face wore a puzzled look as he halted before them.

“Kenniston, there’s something about this I can’t understand,” he declared.

“Yes? What’s that?” returned Kenniston guardedly.

He was very much on the alert. Murdock was not a heedless, gullible youngster like the others. He was, Kenniston had learned, an already important official in the Loring Radium company.

From the chaffing the others gave Murdock, it was evident that the young business man had joined the party only because he was in love with Gloria. There was something likeable about the dogged devotion of the sober young man. His very obvious determination to protect Gloria’s safety, and his intelligence, made him dangerous in Kenniston’s eyes.

“I was down in the hold looking over the equipment you loaded,” Hugh Murdock was saying. “You know, the stuff we’re to use to dig out the wreck of Dark’s ship. And I can’t understand it—there’s no digging machinery, but simply a lot of cyclotrons, rocket-tubes and spare plates.”

Kenniston smiled to cover the alarm he felt. “Don’t worry, Murdock, I loaded just the equipment we’ll need. You’ll see when we reach Vesta.”

Murdock persisted. “But I still don’t see how that stuff is going to help. It’s more like ship-repair stores than anything else.”

Kenniston lied hastily. “The cycs are for power-supply, and the rocket-tubes and plates are to build a heavy duty power-hoist to jack the wreck out of the mud. Holk Or and I have got that all figured out.”

Murdock frowned as though still unconvinced, but dropped the subject. When he had gone off to join the others, Holk Or glared after him.

“That fellow’s too smart for his own good,” muttered the Jovian. “He’s suspicious. Maybe I’d better see that he meets with an accident.”

“No, let him alone,” warned Kenniston. “If anything happened to him now, the others would want to turn back. And we’re almost to Vesta now.”

But worry remained as a shadow in the back of Kenniston’s own mind. It still oppressed him hours later when the arbitrary ship’s-time had brought the ‘night.’ Sitting down in the luxurious passenger-cabin over highballs with the others, he wondered where Hugh Murdock was.

The rest of Gloria’s party were all here, listening with fascinated interest to Holk Or’s colorful yarns of adventures on the wild asteroids. But Murdock was missing. Kenniston wondered worriedly if the fellow was looking over that equipment in the hold again.

A young Earth spaceman—one of the Sunsprite’s small crew—came into the cabin and approached Kenniston.

“Captain Walls’ compliments, sir, and would you come up to the bridge? He’d like your advice about the course again.”

“I’ll go with you,” Gloria said as Kenniston rose. “I like it up in the bridge best of any place on the ship.”

As they climbed past the little telaudio transmitter-room, they saw Hugh Murdock standing in there by the operator. He smiled at Gloria.

“I’ve been trying to get some messages through to Earth, but it seems we’re almost out of range,” he said ruefully.

“Can’t you ever forget business, Hugh?” the girl said exasperatedly. “You’re about as adventurous as a fat radium-broker of fifty.”

Kenniston, however, felt relieved that Murdock had apparently forgotten about the oddness of the equipment below. His spirits were lighter when they entered the glassite-enclosed bridge.

Captain Walls turned from where he stood beside Bray, the chief pilot. The plump, cheerful master touched his cap to Gloria Loring.

“Sorry to bother you again, Mr. Kenniston,” he apologized. “But we’re getting pretty near Vesta, and you know this devilish region of space better than I do. The charts are so vague they’re useless.”

Kenniston glanced at the instrument-panel with a practiced eye and then squinted at the void ahead. The Sunsprite was now throbbing steadily through a starry immensity whose hosts of glittering points of light would have made a bewildering panorama to laymen’s eyes.

They seemed near none of those blazing sparks. Yet every few minutes, red lights blinked and buzzers sounded on the instrument panel. At each such warning of the meteorometers, the pilot glanced quickly at their direction-dials and then touched the rocket-throttles to change course slightly. The cruiser was threading a way through unseen but highly perilous swarms of rushing meteors and scores of thundering asteroids.

Vesta was now a bright, pale-green disk like a little moon. It was not directly ahead, but lay well to the left. The cruiser was following an indirect course that had been laid to detour it well around one of the bigger meteor-swarms that was spinning rapidly toward Mars.

“What about it, Mr. Kenniston—is it safe to turn toward Vesta now?” Captain Walls asked anxiously. “The chart doesn’t show any more swarms that should be in this region now, by my calculations.”

Kenniston snorted. “Charts are all made by planet-lubbers. There’s a small swarm that tags after that big No. 480 mess we just detoured around. Let me have the ’scopes and I’ll try to locate it.”

Using the meteorscopes whose sensitive electromagnetic beams could probe far out through space, to be reflected by any matter, Kenniston searched carefully. He finally straightened from the task.

“It’s all right—the tag-swarm is on the far side of No. 480,” he reported. “It should be safe to blast straight toward Vesta now.”

The captain’s anxiety was only partly assuaged. “But when we reach the asteroid, what then? How do we get through the satellite-swarm around it?”

“I can pilot you through that,” Kenniston assured him. “There’s a periodic break in that swarm, due to gravitational perturbations of the spinning meteor-moons. I know how to find it.”

“Then I’ll wake you up early tomorrow ‘morning’ before we reach Vesta,” vowed Captain Walls. “I’ve no hankering to run that swarm myself.”

“We’ll be there in the morning?” exclaimed Gloria with eager delight. “How long then will it take us to find the pirate wreck?”

Kenniston uncomfortably evaded the question. “I don’t know—it shouldn’t take long. We can land in the jungle near the wreck.”

His feeling of guilt was increased by her enthusiastic excitement. If she and the others only knew what the morrow was to bring them!

He did not feel like facing the rest of them now, and lingered on the dark deck when they went back down from the bridge. Gloria remained beside him instead of going on to the cabin.

She stood, with the starlight from the transparent deck-wall falling upon her youthful face as she looked up at him.

“You are a moody creature, you know,” she told Kenniston lightly. “Sometimes you’re almost human—then you get all dark and grim again.”

Kenniston grinned despite himself. Her voice came in mock surprise. “Why, it can actually smile! I can’t believe my eyes.”

Her clear young face was provocatively close, the faint perfume of her dark hair in his nostrils. He knew that she was deliberately flirting with him, perhaps mostly out of curiosity.

She expected him to kiss her, he knew. Damn it, he would kiss her! He did so, half ironically. But the ironic amusement faded out of his mind somehow at the oddly shy contact of her soft lips.

“Why, you’re just a kid,” he muttered. “A little kid masquerading as a bored, sophisticated young lady.”

Gloria stiffened with anger. “Don’t be silly! I’ve kissed men before. I just wanted to find out what you were really like.”

“Well, what did you find out?”

Her voice softened. “I found out that you’re not as grim as you look. I think you’re just lonely.”

The truth of that made Kenniston wince. Yes, he was lonely enough, he thought somberly. All his old space-mates, passing one by one—

“Don’t you have anyone?” Gloria was asking him wonderingly.

“No family, except my kid brother Ricky,” he answered heavily. “And most of my old space-partners are either dead or else worse—lying in the grip of gravitation-paralysis.”

Memory of those old partners re-established Kenniston’s wavering resolution. He mustn’t let them down! He must go through with delivering this cruiser’s cargo to John Dark, no matter what the consequences.

He thrust the girl almost roughly from him. “It’s getting late. You’d better turn in like the others.”

But later, in his bunk in the little cabin he shared with Holk Or, Kenniston found memory of Gloria a barrier to sleep. The shy touch of her lips refused to be forgotten. What would she think of him by tomorrow?

He slept, finally. When he awakened, it was to realization that someone had just sharply spoken his name. He knew drowsily it was ‘morning’ and thought at first that Captain Walls had sent someone to awaken him.

Then he stiffened as he saw who had awakened him. It was Hugh Murdock. The young businessman’s sober face was grim now, and he stood in the doorway of the cabin with a heavy atom-pistol in his hand.

“Get up and dress, Kenniston,” Murdock said sternly. “And wake up your fellow-pirate, too. If you make a wrong move I’ll kill you both.”

CHAPTER III

Through the Meteor-Moons

Kenniston went cold with dismay. He told himself numbly that it was impossible Hugh Murdock could have discovered the truth. But the grim expression on Murdock’s face and the naked hate in his eyes were explainable on no other grounds.

The young businessman’s finger was tense on the trigger of the atom-pistol. Resistance would be senseless. Mechanically, Kenniston slipped from his bunk and threw on his slacks and space-jacket. Holk Or was doing the same, the big Jovian’s battered green face almost ludicrous in astonishment.

“Now perhaps you’ll tell us what this means,” Kenniston said harshly, his mind racing. “Have you lost your senses?”

“I’ve just come to them, Kenniston,” rapped Murdock. “What fools we all were, not to guess that you two belong to Dark’s pirates!”

Kenniston’s lips tightened. It was clear now that Murdock had actually discovered something. From Holk Or came an angry roar.

“Devils of Pluto, I’m no pirate!” the big Jovian lied magnificently. “Whatever gave you this crazy idea?”

Murdock’s hard face did not relax. He waved the atom-pistol. “Go into the main cabin,” he ordered. “Walk ahead of me.”

Helplessly, Kenniston and Holk Or obeyed. His mind was desperate as he shouldered down the corridor. The throbbing of the rockets told him the Sunsprite was still forging through the void. They must be very near Vesta by now—and now this had to happen!

The others had been awakened by the uproar and streamed into the main cabin after Murdock and his two prisoners. Kenniston glimpsed Gloria, slim in a silken negligee, her dark eyes round with amazement.

“Hugh, have you gone crazy?” she exclaimed stupefiedly.

Murdock answered without looking toward her. “I’ve found out the truth, Gloria. These men belong to John Dark’s crew. They were taking us into a trap.”

“Holy smoke!” gasped Robbie Boone, his jaw sagging as the chubby youth stared at Kenniston and Holk Or. “They’re pirates?”

“I think you must be losing your mind!” Gloria stormed at Hugh Murdock. “This is ridiculous.”

Holk Or yawned elaborately. “Space-sickness hits people in queer ways, Miss Loring,” the Jovian told Gloria confidentially. “Some it just makes sick, but others it makes delirious.”

“I’m not delirious, and you two know it,” Murdock retorted grimly. He spoke to Gloria and the others, without taking his eyes or the muzzle of his pistol off his two captives.

“I thought from the first that this Kenniston’s story of finding the wreck of Dark’s ship on Vesta was a thin one,” Murdock declared. “And yesterday my suspicions were increased when I went down and looked over the cargo of equipment they brought. It’s not equipment to dig out a buried wreck. It’s equipment to repair a damaged ship—John Dark’s ship!

“Suspecting that, last ‘night’ I sent a telaudiogram to Patrol headquarters at Earth. I gave full descriptions of Kenniston and this Jovian and inquired if they had criminal records. An answer came through an hour ago. This fellow Holk Or has a record of criminal piracy as long as your arm, and was definitely known to be one of John Dark’s crew!”

There was an incredulous gasp from the others. Murdock still grimly watched Kenniston and the Jovian as he concluded.

“The Patrol hasn’t yet sent through Kenniston’s record, but it’s obvious enough that he’s one of Dark’s men too, and that his story that he and the Jovian are meteor-miners is a flat lie.”

“I can’t understand this,” muttered young Arthur Lanning, staring. “If they’re Dark’s men, why should they induce us to go to Vesta?”

“Can’t you see?” said Hugh Murdock. “John Dark’s ship did crash on Vesta after being wrecked—that must be true enough. But Dark and his pirates weren’t dead as the Patrol thought. They had to have machines and material to repair their ship. So Dark sent these two men to Mars for the materials. The two couldn’t get a ship there any other way, so they made use of our cruiser by selling us that treasure yarn!”

Kenniston winced. He knew now that he had underestimated Murdock, who had put together the evidence quickly when his suspicions were roused.

Gloria Loring, looking at Kenniston with wide dark eyes, saw the change in his expression. Into her white face came an incredulous loathing.

“Then it’s true,” she whispered. “You did that—you deliberately planned to lead us all into capture?”

“Aw, you’re all space-struck,” growled Holk Or, bluffing to the last.

Murdock spoke over his shoulder. “Call Captain Walls, Robbie.”

“No need to—here he comes now!” yelped the excited youth.

Captain Walls, entering the cabin in urgent haste, had eyes only for Kenniston in the first moment.

“Ah, there you are, Mr. Kenniston!” the captain exclaimed relievedly. “I was just coming for you. We’ve reached Vesta! I’ve ordered the pilot to slow down, for I want you to pilot us through the swarm—”

The captain’s voice trailed off. His eyes bulged as for the first time he perceived that Murdock was covering the two men with a gun.

“We’re not going in to Vesta, captain,” rapped Murdock. “John Dark and his pirates are on the asteroid—alive!”

Captain Walls’ plump face went waxy as he heard the name of the most dreaded corsair of the System.

“Dark—living?” he stuttered. “Good God, you must be joking!”

Mrs. Milsom, her dumpy figure shivering and her teeth chattering with terror, pointed a finger at Kenniston and the Jovian.

“They’re two of the pirates!” she shrilled. “They might have murdered us all in our beds! I knew this would happen when we left Earth—”

Kenniston’s mind was seething with despair as he stood there with hands upraised. His whole desperate plan was ruined at this last moment.

He wouldn’t let it be ruined! He would get this cargo of machines and materials to John Dark if it meant his life!

“Turn back at once toward Mars, captain,” Gloria was saying quietly to the stunned officer. Her face was still very pale.

Kenniston, standing tense, had had an idea. A desperate chance to make a break, in the face of Murdock’s atom-gun.

The captain had said that he had just ordered the pilot to slow down the Sunsprite. In a moment would come the shock of the braking rocket-tubes firing from the bows—

That shock came an instant after the wild expedient flashed across Kenniston’s mind. It was only a jarring vibration through the fabric of the ship, for the pilot knew his business.

It staggered them all on their feet, for just a moment. But Kenniston had been waiting for that moment. As Hugh Murdock moved his gun-arm involuntarily to balance himself, Kenniston lunged forward.

“The bridge, Holk!” he yelled as he hurled himself.

Kenniston’s shoulder hit the captain and sent him caroming into Murdock. The two men sprawled on the floor.

Holk Or, with instant understanding, already had the door of the cabin open. They plunged out into the corridor together.

“Our only chance is to make the bridge and grab the controls!” Kenniston cried as they raced down the corridor. “We can keep them long enough to land on Vesta—”

Hiss—flash! The crackling blast of the atom-gun tore into the lower steps of the ladder up which he and the Jovian frantically climbed. Murdock was running after them as he fired, and there were shouts of alarm.

Kenniston and Holk Or burst into the glassite-walled bridge. Bray, the pilot, turned for a startled moment from his rocket-throttles.

Beyond the pilot, the transparent front wall framed a square of black space in which bulked the monstrous sphere of the nearby asteroid.

The World with a Thousand Moons! It loomed up only a few hundred miles away, a big, pale-green sphere encircled by the vast globular swarm of hundreds on hundreds of gleaming little meteor-satellites.

“Why—what—” stammered the pilot, bewildered.

Kenniston’s fist caught his chin, and the man sagged to the floor.

“Bar the door, Holk!” yelled Kenniston as he leaped toward the rocket-throttles.

“Hell, there’s only a catch!” swore the Jovian. He braced his brawny shoulders against the metal door. “I can hold it a little while.”

Kenniston’s hands were flashing over the throttles. The Sunsprite was moving at reduced speed toward the meteor-enclosed asteroid.

The cruiser shook to the bursting roar of power, as he opened up all the tail rockets. It plunged visibly faster toward the deadly swarm around Vesta, picking up speed by the minute.

Rocking, creaking, quivering to the dangerous rate of acceleration Kenniston was maintaining, the little ship rushed ahead. But now there was loud hammering at the bridge-room door.

“Open up or we’ll burn that door down!” came Captain Walls’ yell.

Kenniston didn’t turn. Hunched over the throttles, peering tensely ahead, he was tautly estimating speed and direction. His eyes searched frantically for the periodic break in the outer meteors.

There was a muffled crackling and the smell of scorched metal flooded the bridge-room. A hoarse exclamation of pain came from Holk Or.

“They got my arm through the door, damn them!” cursed the Jovian. “Hurry, Kenniston!”

Kenniston was driving the Sunsprite full speed toward the whirling cloud of meteors around the asteroid. He had spotted the break in the cloud, the periodic opening caused by the gravitational influence of another nearby asteroid.

It was not a real opening. It was merely a small area in the swarm where the rushing meteors were not so thick, and where a ship had a chance to worm through by careful piloting.

Kenniston only remotely heard the struggle that Holk Or was putting up to hold the door against the hammering crowd outside. His mind was wholly intent on the desperately ticklish piloting at hand.

He cut speed and eased the Sunsprite down into that thinner area of the meteor-swarm. Space around them now seemed buzzing with rushing, brilliant little moons.

The meteorometers had gone crazy, blinking and buzzing unceasing warning, their needles bobbing all over the direction-dials. Instruments were useless here—he had to work by sight alone. He eased the cruiser lower through the swarm, his fingers flashing over the throttles, using quick bursts of the rockets to veer aside from the bright, rushing meteors.

“Hurry!” yelled Holk Or hoarsely again, over the tumult. “I can’t—hold them out much longer—”

Down and down went the Sunsprite through the maze of meteor-moons, twisting, turning, dropping ever lower toward the green asteroid.

A last gasping shout from Holk Or, and the door crashed off its burned-through hinges. Kenniston, unable to turn from the life-or-death business of threading the swarm, heard the Jovian fighting furiously.

Next moment a hand gripped Kenniston’s shoulder and tore him away from the controls. It was Murdock, his eyes blazing, his gun raised.

“Raise your hands or I’ll kill you, Kenniston!” he cried.

“Let me go!” yelled Kenniston, struggling to get back to the throttles. “You fool!”

He had just glimpsed the jagged moonlet rushing obliquely toward them from the left, bulking suddenly big and monstrous.

Crash! The shock flung them from their feet, and the Sunsprite gyrated crazily in space. There was a blood-chilling shriek of outrushing air from the fore part of the ship, and the slam-slam-slam of the automatic air-doors closing, down there.

The cruiser’s whole bows had been crushed in by the glancing blow of the meteor. Now, ironically, the ship was falling clear of the meteor-swarm for Kenniston’s piloting had almost won through it before the impact. But the Sunsprite was falling helplessly, turning over and over as it plunged down toward the green surface of the jungled asteroid.

“By God, we’re struck!” came Captain Walls’ thin yell.

“This is your fault!” Murdock blazed at Kenniston. “You damned pirates will die for this!”

“Let me at those controls or we’ll all die together in five minutes!” Kenniston cried. “We’ll crash to smithereens unless I can make a tail-tube landing—”

Heedless of Murdock’s gun, he jumped to the controls. His hands flew over the throttles, firing desperate quick bursts of the tail rocket-tubes to bring them out of the spin in which they were falling.

The brake-rockets in the bow were gone. The ship was crippled, almost impossible to handle. And the dark green jungles of Vesta’s surface were rushing upward with appalling speed.

Kenniston’s frantic efforts brought the Sunsprite out of the spin. By firing the lateral rockets, he kept it falling tail-downward.

“We’re goners!” yelled someone in the stricken ship. “We’re going to crash!”

Air was screaming outside the plummeting ship. Kenniston, his hands superhumanly tense on the throttles, mechanically estimated their distance from the uprushing green jungles.

He glimpsed a little black lake in the jungle, and near it the big circle of an electrified stockade. He recognized it—John Dark’s camp!

Then, a thousand feet above the jungle, Kenniston’s hands jerked open the throttles. The tail rockets spouted fire downward.

Sickening shock of the sudden check almost hurled him away from the controls. His hands jabbed the throttles in and out with lightning rapidity, checking their further fall with one quick burst after another.

A sound of rending branches—a staggering sidewise shock that flung him from his feet. A jarring thump, then silence. They had landed.

CHAPTER IV

The Vestans

Kenniston picked himself up groggily. The others in the bridge had been thrown against walls or floor by the shock, but seemed no more than bruised. Holk Or was nursing his burned arm. But Hugh Murdock, staggering in a corner, still held his atom-pistol trained on Kenniston and the Jovian.

“My God, what a landing!” exclaimed Captain Walls, his plump face still white. “I thought we were done for.”

“Maybe we still are,” Murdock said grimly. He said savagely to Kenniston, “You think you’ve won, don’t you? Because you’ve managed to crash us on this asteroid where your pirate boss is waiting?”

“Listen, Murdock—,” Kenniston began desperately.

“Keep your hands up or I’ll kill you both!” blazed Murdock. “March down to the main cabin.”

Kenniston and the Jovian obeyed. The Sunsprite was lying sharply canted on its side, and it was difficult to scramble down through the tilted passageways and decks to the big main cabin.

The cabin was a scene of confusion, for it was impossible to stand upright on its tilted floor. Young Arthur Lanning had been stunned, and Gloria Loring and the scared blonde girl, Alice Krim, were bathing his bruised forehead. Robbie Boone was peering wildly through a porthole at the sunlit tangle of green jungle outside. From Mrs. Milsom came a shrill, steady wail of terror.

“Stop that screeching,” Murdock told the dumpy dowager brutally. “You’re not hurt. Gloria, are you others all right?”

Gloria raised her white face from her task. “Only bruised, Hugh.”

She did not look at Kenniston or the big Jovian as she spoke.

Robbie Boone’s teeth were chattering. “Murdock, what are we going to do? We’re wrecked, on this hellish jungle asteroid—”

Murdock paid the frightened, chubby youth no attention. Captain Walls, Bray, and four of the crew were entering the cabin. The captain and pilot had belted on atom-pistols.

Captain Walls’ plump face was paler. “Two of the crew were killed and our telaudio wrecked by that meteor,” he reported. He glared at Kenniston. “You damned pirate! You’re responsible for this!”

“If you hadn’t dragged me away from the controls, the cruiser wouldn’t have been struck,” Kenniston denied. “And I’m not a pirate—”

Murdock interrupted. “We’ll settle with those two later,” he told the enraged captain. “Right now, we’ll have to get out of the ship. We can’t stay in here until we get it righted on an even keel.”

Holk Or rumbled a warning. “Better be careful about going outside. Those cursed Vestans are thick in these jungles.”

“I’ll have no advice from you two pirates!” flamed the captain. “Bray, you and Thorpe keep your guns on them every minute.”

The heavy main space-door was opened. Pale sunlight and warm, steamy air laden with rank scents of strange vegetation drifted in. Outside lay a raw clearing the falling ship had crushed out of the jungle.

Captain Walls supervised as they all donned lead-soled weight-shoes to compensate for the weaker gravity. Then they emerged, young Lanning being supported by Murdock and Robbie. Kenniston and the Jovian were last to emerge, under the watchful guns of their guards.

The crew and passengers were looking around with wonder and revulsion. The silvery bulk of the Sunsprite lay awkwardly heeled on its side. The symmetrical torpedo shape of the cruiser was now badly marred by the crumpled condition of its bow.

All around them in the thin sunlight rose slender trees whose enormous green leaves grew directly from the trunks. This grotesque forest was made more dense by festoons of writhing “snake-vines,” weird rootless creepers which crawled like plant-serpents from one tree to another. Each stir of wind brought white spore-dust down in a shower from the trees.

The few living creatures of this forbidding landscape were equally alien. Big white meteor-rats scurried on their eight legs through the brush. Phosphorescent flame-birds shot through the upper fronds like streaks of fire. In the pale sky overhead, there were ceaseless gleams and flashes of light as the spinning meteor-swarm reflected the sunlight.

“What a horrible place!” shrilled Mrs. Milsom. “We’ll all die here—we’ll never get back to Earth. I knew this would happen!”

“This is certainly a mean spot to be cast away,” muttered Captain Walls. “God knows what queer creatures inhabit it, not to speak of the mysterious Vestans everybody talks about. And John Dark and his crew are somewhere here. And the telaudio wrecked, so we can’t call for help.”

Kenniston realized that none of the others had glimpsed Dark’s camp as they fell. They didn’t know the pirate encampment was only a few miles away in the jungle.

“What are we going to do, captain?” Gloria was asking, her face still pale but her voice quite steady. “Can we get away?”

Captain Walls looked hopeless. “We can’t take off with the whole bow of the Sunsprite crushed in.”

“We can repair it, can’t we?” Hugh Murdock suggested. “Remember, in the hold is the cargo of machinery and repair-materials that Kenniston was bringing to repair Dark’s ship. Can’t we use that equipment?”

The captain looked more hopeful. “Maybe we can. Bray and the crew and I ought to be able to do an emergency job of patching the bow and installing new rocket-tubes there. But we’ll have to work fast to get away before Dark’s outfit learns we’re here.”

He pointed vindicatively at Kenniston. “Better lock up that fellow and his partner to make sure he doesn’t signal somehow to his fellow-pirates.”

Kenniston tried again to explain. “Will you all listen to me? I tell you, I’m no pirate!”

Murdock eyed him sternly. “Do you deny that John Dark sent you to Mars for repair-equipment, and that you told us that lying treasure-story to get the equipment here in our ship?”

“No, I don’t deny that,” Kenniston admitted. “But I’m not one of John Dark’s crew—I never was! I was a prisoner on his ship, captured by the pirates before they themselves were attacked by the Patrol.”

“Do you expect us to believe that?” Murdock said incredulously.

“It’s true!” Kenniston insisted. “My kid brother Ricky and I were captured by John Dark’s outfit several weeks ago. We were prisoners on his ship when it was wrecked by the Patrol. After the wreck drifted onto Vesta here, Dark wanted to send someone to Mars for repair-equipment. He wouldn’t send one of his own men in charge, for fear the man would double-cross him and never come back.

“So he sent me, his prisoner, on that errand. Holk Or came along to help me navigate a ship back. And I had to obey Dark and get the equipment back here at any cost. For Dark kept my brother Ricky prisoner here with him, and told me that if I didn’t bring back that equipment, Ricky would be shot!”

Holk Or spoke up. “It’s true, what Kenniston’s telling you,” rumbled the Jovian. “Me, I’m one of Dark’s pirates and I don’t care a curse who knows it. But Kenniston did this only to save his brother.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Captain Walls flatly. “It’s another of the smooth lies this fellow Kenniston makes up so easily.”

Gloria spoke to Kenniston, her dark eyes still accusing. “If what you say is true and you’re not a pirate, then you brought all of us into this danger simply to save your own brother?”

Kenniston looked at her miserably. “Yes, I did. I was willing to lead you all into capture to save Ricky. But I had a reason—”

“Sure, you had a reason,” Murdock said bitterly. “What did the safety of strangers like us mean to you, compared to your precious brother?”

Captain Walls motioned Kenniston and Holk Or angrily toward the ship. “Bray, take them in and lock them under guard in a cabin,” he said.

Holk Or suddenly yelled. “Look out! There’s a Vestan!”

Kenniston, his blood chilling with alarm, glanced where the Jovian pointed. At the west edge of the clearing, a small animal had suddenly emerged from the dense green jungle.

It was a six-legged, striped, catlike beast, not unordinary as interplanetary animals go. But its head looked queer, seeming to have a bulbous gray mass attached behind its ears.

Captain Walls uttered a scoffing exclamation. “That’s only an ordinary asteroid-cat.”

“That is a Vestan!” Kenniston cried. “Shoot at its head—”

His warning was too late. The catlike beast had launched itself in a spring toward their group.

As its striped body shot through the air, Walls triggered his atom-pistol. The crackling blast of force tore into the body of the charging asteroid-cat, and the beast fell heavily a few yards away.

But as it fell, the small gray mass upon its neck suddenly detached itself from the dead animal and scuttled swiftly forward. It moved with blurring speed toward Bray, the nearest to it of the group.

The little gray creature was no bigger than a man’s clenched fists together. It was a gray, wrinkled featureless thing, except for pinpoint eyes and the tiny clawlike legs upon which it scurried. It reached Bray and ran swiftly up his legs and back as he swore startledly.

Kenniston, made reckless of danger by his horror, yelled and lunged toward the pilot. Bray was swearing and trying to slap at the gray thing running up his back. But the little creature had now reached his neck. Clinging there, it swiftly dug two tiny, needle-like antennae into the base of his neck.

“Hold him!” Kenniston shouted hoarsely. “The Vestan has got him!”

Bray had undergone a sudden metamorphosis as the gray creature dug its antennae into his neck. His face stiffened, became masklike.

The pilot turned and began to run stiffly toward the jungle. Kenniston’s leap almost caught him, but Bray lashed out a fist that sent Kenniston sprawling.

“Don’t let him get away!” Kenniston yelled, scrambling up.

But the others were too stricken by amazement and horror to interfere in time. Bray had already plunged into the jungle and was gone.

“My God, what happened?” Captain Walls exclaimed dazedly. “Bray went clean crazy!”

His gun was pointing at Kenniston and Holk Or as though he held them responsible for what had occurred.

“He didn’t go crazy, but he’s lost now,” Kenniston said heavily. “That little gray creature was one of the Vestans.”

“But what did it do to him? That thing wasn’t big enough to harm anybody.”

“That’s all you know about it,” said Holk Or ominously. “Those little Vestans are the most dangerous creatures in the System.”

“The Vestans,” Kenniston added dully, “are semi-intelligent parasites. The live by attaching themselves to and taking control of some other creature’s body. They do it by jabbing in those tiny, needle-like antennae to contact the victim’s nervous system. Thereafter, the Vestan controls the victim’s body absolutely. When the victim dies or is hurt, the Vestan simply detaches himself and fastens upon a new victim.”

Horror was on the white faces of the others. Murdock gulped and asked, “Then Bray—”

“Bray is beyond saving now,” Kenniston said. “The Vestan parasite will control his body till he dies. The Vestans always like to attach themselves to human beings—they know that a man’s body is more versatile in its capabilities than an animal’s.”

Twilight was beginning to descend upon the little clearing in the jungle, for the sun had gone down during the last few minutes. In the gathering dusk, the jungle loomed dark and brooding about them.

Overhead, the sky of this World with a Thousand Moons was burgeoning into its full glory. The hundreds of meteor-moons that spun across the heavens were shining brighter and brighter in the deepening dusk.

Captain Walls broke the spell of horror and dread. “We’d better get back inside the ship for tonight,” he said nervously. “We can’t do anything about repairs until tomorrow, anyway. By then we’ll have figured out some way to deal with those devilish creatures.”

Murdock said bitterly to Kenniston, “Bray’s end is your fault, Kenniston. You brought him and us and these women into this place, all for the sake of that brother of yours.”

“He’ll stand trial for that when we get back to Mars,” the captain vowed. “Even if he wasn’t one of Dark’s crew originally, by helping them he’s made himself a space-pirate, liable to execution.”

Kenniston made no attempt to defend himself. He knew they wouldn’t understand why he had sacrificed them for Ricky’s sake, even if he told them.

He and Holk Or were locked in one of the little cabins, after it had been carefully searched. The crewman Thorpe was stationed as a guard outside their bolted door.

Holk Or, who had bandaged his burned arm, looked around the dark little cabin disgustedly. “This is a devil of a fix to get into!” swore the Jovian. “Here we’ve reached Vesta with the stuff, but can’t let the chief know.”

Kenniston asked him earnestly, “Holk, would John Dark really shoot Ricky if I didn’t deliver the equipment? He said he would, but you know he needs Ricky.”

Kenniston was clinging to this last shred of hope for his brother. John Dark and his pirates did need Ricky. For Ricky was a physician—Doctor Richard Kenniston of the Institute of Planetary Medicine.

That was why John Dark had spared the lives of the two brothers when he had captured them in the freighter in which they were returning to Earth from Saturn. Ordinarily, the pirate leader would have ruthlessly killed them as he killed all prisoners who were not rich enough to pay ransom.

But the fact that Ricky was a physician had saved them. The pirates needed a doctor. They had kept the two brothers prisoner on their ship for that reason. Kenniston and Ricky had still been on the Falcon as prisoners, when the Patrol had finally caught up to it and wrecked it.

“Dark knows that Ricky is a fine doctor and he needs a doctor,” Kenniston repeated hopefully, to the Jovian. “Surely he wouldn’t be foolish enough to shoot Ricky, even if I don’t deliver the equipment.”

“Kenniston, don’t fool yourself,” warned Holk Or. “The chief said he’d shoot him if you weren’t back with the stuff in two weeks, and shoot him he will. John Dark never breaks his word.”

That assurance sank the iron deeper into Kenniston’s tormented soul. If that was true, and he knew in his heart it was, Ricky would die two days from now unless he’d delivered the repair-equipment to Dark.

He mustn’t let Ricky die! Too much depended on his young brother’s life. He must save Ricky even if it did mean the capture of Gloria and the others by the pirates. Better that they be held for ransom, than for Ricky to be killed!

Kenniston got to his feet, rigid with decision. “Then we’ve got to get out of here,” he muttered. “We’ve got to escape and take word to Dark that the equipment is here.”

He continued quickly, “Holk, Dark’s camp is only a few miles north of here. I spotted it as the Sunsprite fell.”

Holk Or uttered an exclamation. “Why the devil didn’t you tell me so! I figured it was on the other side of the asteroid, maybe, and that we’d never find it in the jungle even if we did get away.”

“It still won’t be easy for us,” Kenniston warned. “The Vestans may get us in the jungle between here and Dark’s camp. And anyway, how can we get out of this cabin?”

The big Jovian grinned. “That’ll be easy. I’d have been out of here before now, only I was waiting for the ship to quiet down.”

Kenniston stared. “That door is bolted. And there’s no tool or weapon in the cabin. They didn’t forget a thing when they searched it!”

Holk Or’s grin deepened. “They forgot one thing. They forgot how strong a Jovian is on a little, weak-gravity asteroid like this!”

CHAPTER V

Night Attack

Kenniston caught desperately at the hope implied by the Jovian’s words.

“What do you mean, Holk?”

“I mean that I’m a hundred times stronger on this little asteroid than I am on my own world, Jupiter. I can break the bolt of that door any time I want to.”

“But there’s an armed guard stationed outside it.”

“I know, and that’s where you come in, Kenniston. When I rip the door open, you be ready to jump the guard.”

Kenniston considered swiftly. The chance of their getting out of the ship and safely through the jungles to the pirate camp, even if they escaped this cabin, seemed a slim one. Yet it presented the only possibility of delivering the equipment in the hold to John Dark.

The bitter irony of it struck Kenniston, for the hundredth time. He, Lance Kenniston, honorable spaceman for a dozen years, working desperately to aid the most notorious pirate in the void! Even drawing into danger the girl for whom he felt—

He shut Gloria out of his mind. He mustn’t think of her now. He must think only of Ricky, and of what would be lost if Ricky died. He must risk everything, sacrifice everything, to prevent that loss.

“We might as well try it now,” he told the Jovian in low tones. “The ship seems quiet.”

“I’ll do my best to make as little noise as possible,” Holk Or muttered. “Are you ready?”

The Jovian’s big hands grasped the knob of the door. Kenniston crouched a little behind him, every muscle tense.

Holk Or suddenly put all his gigantically magnified strength into a tremendous tug at the door. Its bolt snapped with a crack like that of a pistolshot, and it swung wide open.

The man on guard outside turned startledly, his hand darting to the atom-gun at his belt and his mouth open to yell. But Kenniston had launched himself like a human projectile as the door was torn open.

Kenniston’s fist smashed the space-sailor’s chin and the man sagged limp and unconscious with no chance to utter the cry on his lips. Hastily, Kenniston took his atom-pistol and eased him to the floor.

He and Holk Or listened tensely. The single sharp crack of the snapping bolt had apparently aroused no one. The ship was silent. All aboard were sleeping exhaustedly.

“Come on,” Kenniston murmured tensely to the Jovian. “We’ve got to hurry to get to Dark’s camp before night is over.”

Holk Or chuckled. “The chief will welcome us with open arms when he learns we’ve got the equipment here for him.”

Kenniston gripped the atom-pistol as they stole through the dark ship and out of the space-door. Outside, they paused in the darkness.

The scene was one of magic, unearthly beauty. The metal bulk of the cruiser and the towering jungle around the clearing were washed by brilliant silver light that fell from the wonderful night sky of this World with a Thousand Moons.

A thousand moons indeed seemed blazing in the canopied heavens overhead! The whole dark sky was crowded by the shining moonlets that rushed ceaselessly across the firmament with the spinning of the meteor-swarm of which they were part. It was like the glorious vista of a world seen in dreams.

But Kenniston was familiar with the unearthly spectacle. He led the way rapidly toward the northern edge of the jungle.

“We’ll just have to plunge in and head north,” he told the Jovian. “If we reach that little lake, we can soon find Dark’s camp.”

They started into the dense jungle, a fairyland of silver beams sifting through the choking fronds. Something scurried close by.

“Kenniston, shoot!” cried Holk Or instantly.

Kenniston had already glimpsed the white beast scurrying toward them across a little patch of moonslight. It was one of the big meteor-rats. On its neck bunched one of the little gray masses—a Vestan.

The horror inspired by the hideous parasites tightened Kenniston’s finger convulsively on the trigger of the atom-pistol. The crackling bolt of fire from the weapon ripped into the Vestan on the meteor-rat, and both parasite and animal victim were instantly a scorched, smoking heap.

“Hell, that’s torn it!” cried the big Jovian. “We’ve roused the whole ship!”

Men awakened by the blast of the atom-gun were pouring out of the Sunsprite, rushing after the two escaped men. Kenniston heard Captain Walls shouting.

“They’re in the jungle here! Spread out and surround them!” the officer was ordering.

Kenniston and the Jovian plunged forward, seeking to escape northward. But they had come up against an impenetrable abatis of brush.

Before they could find a way around it, they heard men crashing all around them. They were completely encircled.

“Kenniston, you and that Jovian walk back into the clearing with your hands raised or we’ll blast every inch of the brush till we get you!” came the stentorian shout of the captain.

“The devil—they’ve got us boxed!” exclaimed Holk Or furiously. “We’ll try to fight our way through.”

“No!” Kenniston declared. “We couldn’t make it anyway. And I’m not going to shoot innocent men.”

Holk Or angrily grabbed for the atom-pistol, but Kenniston promptly threw it away. Not even in this last extremity could he bring himself to kill.

“You’re a fool!” gritted the Jovian. “Now there’s nothing for it but surrender.”

With their hands raised, they walked out of the jungle into the brilliant silvery light of the clearing. Instantly they were surrounded by Captain Walls, Murdock and the other armed crewmen.

The girls and their scared chaperon, and young Lanning and Robbie Boone, were emerging in alarm from the Sunsprite. Kenniston did not look toward them.

Captain Walls’ face was grim in the moonslight, as he and his men covered the two captured fugitives. “Kenniston, you and this Jovian were going to make your way to John Dark and tell him of our presence here, weren’t you? You needn’t deny it—it’s plain enough.”

“Sure we were!” exclaimed the angry Jovian. “We’d have made it, too, if a Vestan hadn’t jumped us in the jungle.”

“That would have meant capture of us all by Dark’s pirates,” said the captain grimly. “You two are a danger to us all, while you live. I’m going to remove that danger. As master of a spaceship, I have legal right to order summary execution of any space-pirates I capture. I’m going to order that now.”

“You’re going to kill them?” exclaimed Gloria. “Oh, no—you can’t!”

“It’s absolutely necessary, before they betray us to the pirates, Miss Loring,” defended the captain. “They’d be sentenced to death by the courts if we took them back to Mars, anyway. But we daren’t take a chance on keeping them prisoned that long.”

“But just to shoot them down!” said Gloria horrifiedly. “I won’t stand for that!”

Murdock took her by the arm. “It’s space law, Gloria,” he told her earnestly. “You’d better go back into the ship.”

Kenniston stood silent in the moonslight, for he realized from the finality of Walls’ voice that appeals would be utterly useless. There was no use trying again to explain why he’d been willing to betray them all to save Ricky. Even if they listened, they wouldn’t understand.

He felt tired, crushed, old. He’d gone a long way in the last dozen years, but every mile of it had only led toward this ending. He was going to die here under the hurtling meteor-moons of Vesta, and that meant that Ricky and Ricky’s dream were going to die soon too.

“I told you you were a fool to throw away that gun,” Holk Or was muttering.

“You two march over there to the edge of the clearing,” Captain Walls ordered grimly, gesturing with his gun. “Anything you want to say first, Kenniston?”

“Nothing that you would listen to or understand, you people,” Kenniston answered dully. “No, I’ve got nothing to say.”

A crackling voice came out of the dark jungle at that moment.

“I have something to say! Drop those guns, every man of you, and get your hands up!”

Walls spun around with an oath, levelling his atom-pistol. But out of the jungle crashed a streak of fire that hit the captain’s arm and sent him reeling.

One of the girls screamed. Another of the Sunsprite’s crew had tried to aim his weapon and had been cut down by a second bolt of atomic fire that had hit his leg.

“I don’t want to kill you unless you force me to,” came that crisp voice from the darkness. “You have ten seconds to drop the guns.”

“That’s the chief, Kenniston!” yelled Holk Or excitedly. “It’s John Dark himself!”

The dreaded name of the pirate, a synonym for cold ruthlessness, reinforced the threat from the darkness.

Murdock let his weapon fall and shouted, “Drop the atom-guns, men! If we try to fight, the women will be hurt!”

The Sunsprite’s men dropped their atom-pistols. Instantly out into the brilliant light from the jungle rushed a score of armed pirates. Martians, Earthmen, Venusians and others—this horde represented the criminal under-world of every planet in the System.

In a moment they had those in the clearing completely disarmed and lined up against the ship. All except Holk Or, who was loudly greeting his pirate comrades.

Kenniston saw John Dark coming across the moonslit clearing toward them. The notorious pirate was a tall, bulky Earthman, but he walked with the lightfootedness of a cat in his moonshoes. His black hair was bare, and in the silver light his black-browed, intelligent face was coldly calm as his eyes searched the row of prisoners.

“So you finally got here, Kenniston. What about the repair-equipment?” he asked sharply.

Kenniston nodded toward the Sunsprite. “It’s in the hold. We got everything you listed.”

“Good!” Dark approved. “We saw your ship crash-landing today, and started this way at once. We’ve been beating through the jungle, fighting off the damned Vestans, until we heard the uproar going on here. What happened? Who are these people?”

Kenniston explained briefly how he had induced Gloria Loring’s party to come on a pretended treasure-hunt. He was careful to stress the wealth of the party, and John Dark reacted as he had expected.

“If they’re that wealthy, their families can pay big ransoms. You’ve done very well, Kenniston.”

“What about Ricky?” asked Kenniston tensely. “He’s all right?”

“Sure he’s all right—he’s up at the camp,” Dark answered.

Gloria said bitterly to Kenniston, “You can congratulate yourself. You’ve managed to save your brother.”

John Dark addressed her. “Miss Loring, I presume you and your companions are willing to pay ransom for your crew also? I never take prisoners, unless they promise a good profit.”

“Yes, of course we’ll pay the ransom of the crew!” Gloria agreed hastily.

“Good!” said the pirate calmly. “You’ll not find your captivity any more irksome than necessary.”

Mrs. Milsom, the dumpy chaperon, was goggling at the notorious pirate in an extreme of terror. A sardonic gleam came into Dark’s eyes as he glanced at her.

“You’re a handsome wench,” he told the plump dowager with mock admiration. “I’ve half a mind to keep you and let the ransom go.”

“No, no!” shrieked the terrified woman.

Dark burst into a roar of laughter. “All right, my shrinking beauty, we’ll accept ransom for you.”

He turned and shot efficient orders to his subordinates, who by now had gathered behind him.

“Get that stuff out of the hold, rig up power-sledges, and start freighting it up to the camp. You’ll have to cut a path through the jungle—use atom-blasters to burn one out.”

One of the pirates, a hard-faced Martian, said uneasily, “That will make a racket that’ll bring every Vestan on the asteroid down on us.”

“You can keep the Vestans off if you keep your eyes open,” Dark retorted. “Get to work, now! We’ve got to get the stuff up there and repair the Falcon at once. I’ll take these prisoners up to camp.”

Kenniston was grouped with the other prisoners. With a strong escort of armed pirates guarding them, and Dark and Holk Or ahead, they started through the jungle toward the pirate camp.

CHAPTER VI

Asteroid Horror

The pirate encampment was a big clearing hacked from the jungle a mile west of the little lake. In this space lay the long, looming black mass of the most dreaded corsair ship ever to sail the void. The Falcon had been righted to even keel, but its crippled condition was evident in the fused, wrecked condition of its tail rocket-tubes.

The whole camp was enclosed and protected by a shimmering blue dome of electric force. This emanated from a heavy copper cable that completely encircled the clearing, and which drew its power from insulated cables that led into the ship to generators driven by the few cyclotrons still functioning. This protective electric wall had been set up at John Dark’s orders to keep out the dreaded Vestans.

John Dark raised his voice as he and his men with their prisoners approached the shimmering wall of the camp.

“Kin Ibo! Drop the wall for us!”

They saw the hard-looking Martian who was Dark’s second-in-command dive into the ship to turn off the power of the electric barrier. It died, and Dark’s party entered the clearing. Then the electric wall sprang into being again behind them.

Kenniston looked swiftly around. There were a score more of the motley pirates here in the camp. Also, near the side of the looming black Falcon, were the small, rough log huts that Dark’s men had constructed.

Dark’s black eyes were triumphant as he told his Martian lieutenant, “Kenniston and Holk Or brought back the equipment all right, and also brought some people who’ll bring big ransom. Their wrecked ship is a few miles south. You go down there with half the men here and help the others bring up the equipment.”

Kin Ibo, looking a little apprehensively out at the jungle, obeyed. Dark motioned Kenniston and the other captives toward one of the huts by the big ship.

“That hut will be your quarters until we get the Falcon repaired,” declared the pirate leader. “Any of you who try to leave it will be shot at sight. I hope you’ll not be foolish enough to attempt escape.”

“That’s right, folks, you wouldn’t have a chance,” Holk Or told them earnestly. “Even if you could get out through the electric wall, the Vestans would get you. They’re thick in the jungle around here.”

They silently entered the hut. Its broad open windows admitted enough of the dazzling moonslight to brighten its interior.

A dark, eager-looking young Earthman sprang up as they entered, and rushed to pump Kenniston’s hand.

“Lance, you got back safely!” he exclaimed. “Thank the Lord—I’ve been worrying myself almost crazy about you.”

“How about you, Ricky?” Kenniston asked his young brother anxiously. “You’re all right?”

Ricky Kenniston nodded quickly. “Sure, I’m okay. But things haven’t been so good here, Lance. The Vestans have got a half-dozen pirates who ventured outside the wall in the last few days. These creatures literally haunt the jungles around here now—I think they’ve been drawn here from all over the asteroid.”

Ricky looked wonderingly at Gloria and the others who were entering the hut. “Lance, who are all these people? Are they prisoners of Dark too?”

“Yes, we’re prisoners,” Hugh Murdock told him bitterly, with a savage glance at Kenniston. “We’re prisoners because your brother sacrificed us all to get back here and save your neck.”

“Lance, you didn’t do that?” Ricky exclaimed in distress.

“I had to, Ricky,” Kenniston protested. “It meant your life if I didn’t.”

“Of course,” Murdock agreed ironically. “What importance are we, compared to saving your young brother’s life?”

Kenniston spoke slowly, to Murdock and Gloria and the others. “It wasn’t merely Ricky’s life at stake that made me sacrifice you all. It was more than that. I tried to tell you before, but you wouldn’t listen.”

Kenniston went across the hut and brought back the square black medicine-case of his young physician-brother. He opened it, and out of the vials and instruments inside he took a square bottle of milky fluid.

“This is what I sacrificed everything to save,” Kenniston said simply.

They all stared. “What is it?” Gloria asked, puzzled.

“It’s Ricky’s discovery,” Kenniston said. “It’s a preventative and cure for gravitation-paralysis.”

Captain Walls, himself an oldtime spaceman, was first of the group to appreciate the significance of the statement. The captain gasped.

“A preventative for gravitation-paralysis? Kenniston, are you sure?”

Kenniston nodded gravely. “Yes. Ricky had been working on the problem a long time, back in the Institute of Planetary Medicine. He thought he’d found a way to prevent gravitation-paralysis, the most awful scourge of all the outer System, the thing that’s doomed so many spacemen. But his formula required rare elements found only in the outer planets.

“Ricky and I,” he continued, “went out there and secured those elements. He made up this formula, and tried it on a gravitation-paralysis case—a spaceman who’s lain paralyzed for years. The formula was designed to strengthen the human nervous system against the shock of varying gravitations, to re-establish an already damaged nerve-web. And it worked.”

Kenniston’s voice was husky as he concluded. “It worked, and that living log became a man again. The formula was a success. Ricky and I started back for Earth, where he intended to announce the discovery and arrange for its manufacture on a big scale. But, on the way back, Dark’s pirates captured us.”

Kenniston flung out his hand in a tortured gesture. “That’s why I went to any lengths to save Ricky’s life! It’s because Ricky is the only person who knows the intricate formula of this serum. If he were to die, the secret of the cure would die with him. And that would mean that thousands on thousands more of spacemen would be stricken into living death by gravitation-paralysis in the future, just as so many thousands of old friends and shipmates of mine have been stricken in the past!”

Captain Walls was the first to speak. Quietly, the plump master of the Sunsprite extended his hand.

“Kenniston, will you shake hands with me? And will you forgive me for everything? You did absolutely right. I’m an old spaceman and I know what gravitation-paralysis is.”

Gloria’s dark eyes were glimmering with tears. “If we’d only known,” she murmured to Kenniston. “No one could blame you for sacrificing a lot of worthless idlers like us, for a thing like this.”

“But you’re going to be all right—all of you,” Kenniston assured her. “John Dark will make you pay a big ransom, but you can afford that and you’ll get back safely to Earth.”

“Thank Heaven for that!” exclaimed Mrs. Milsom. “I can’t understand all this scientific talk of yours, but I do know that that pirate chief means no good to me. Didn’t you see the lustful looks he gave me?”

The laugh that greeted this lessened the tension. Kenniston turned as Ricky plucked at his arm.

“What about ourselves, Lance?” Ricky asked quietly. “Dark still won’t let us go, you know. He still needs me as a doctor.”

Hugh Murdock stepped forward. “Dark would let you both go, for a big enough ransom. I’d like to pay it for you.”

The handsomeness of Murdock’s gesture moved Kenniston. He was only able to mutter his thanks.

While Ricky was treating Captain Walls’ burned arm, the officer kept looking fascinatedly at that square bottle of milky fluid.

He said hesitantly, “I’ve a son—back on Earth. For five years he’s lain in a cot from the gravitation-paralysis that hit him out on Jupiter. Do you suppose—”

Ricky nodded. “Yes, Captain. I’m sure that we can cure him, now.”

There was an uproar out in the clearing. Kenniston went to the door and looked out.

The electric wall had temporarily been dropped, and Kin Ibo and the main body of the pirates were hastily entering the camp with their improvised power-sledges that bore heavy loads of machinery and materials.

Kenniston heard Kin Ibo reporting shrilly to John Dark, “We lost two men to the Vestans on the way here—and nearly lost two more! All this activity has drawn them from all over the asteroid! Look at that!”

Outside the electric wall, which had been hastily re-raised, could be glimpsed the shapes of lurking asteroidal animals. Meteor-rats, big striped cats, flame-birds—and every one of those lurking animals bore attached to its neck one of the little gray Vestan parasites.

John Dark was saying harshly, “We’ve got to have the rest of those materials to repair the Falcon.”

“I tell you, it’d be suicide to try another trip through those jungles!” expostulated the Martian. “Those Vestans are devils!”

“Bah, you Martians are all alike—no good when your superstitions get aroused,” snorted Dark contemptuously. “I’ll take the men down myself. Come on, men—unload those sledges and we’ll go back to the wreck.”

His indomitable personality drove the scared, unwilling pirates into the task. Again the electric wall was faded out for a moment to let them out.

When they returned some time toward morning, Kenniston heard the crash of atom-guns heralding their approach. And when the wall was momentarily dropped, John Dark and his men stumbled into the camp with their loaded sledges in sweating haste.

“Turn on the wall again—quick!” bellowed Dark’s bull voice. “The jungle’s swarming with the gray devils now—they got five of us on the way back!”

Ricky, looking over Kenniston’s shoulder, spoke appalledly. “Good God, Lance—look at them! I didn’t know there were so many Vestans!”

Outside the barrier of shimmering electricity, scores of animals and birds dominated by the dreaded little gray parasitical creatures were now swarming. And their number seemed growing every minute.

“All this activity of the night has drawn the Vestans from far and wide,” Kenniston muttered. “I don’t like it. If that electric wall should fail, the creatures would be in on us in a moment.”

Dark himself seemed to feel something of the same apprehension, for he was shouting urgent orders. “Hook up those atomic welders, and start putting the new plates into the Falcon’s tail. Kin Ibo, have your gang fit in the new rocket-tubes. I’ll see to installing the new cycs. If we work, we can get the job done by tomorrow night and get out of here.”

Through the day, the pirates toiled with an energy that showed their earnest desire to leave the asteroid. That desire was reinforced by the ever-larger number of Vestans that now swarmed outside the wall.

There were literally hundreds of the gray parasites now outside the barrier. To have tried going outside the wall now would have been sheer suicide. The creatures were apparently driven by unholy eagerness to possess themselves of human bodies.

Gloria, looking out with Kenniston, shuddered deeply. “This horrible world! It’s like a nightmare.”

“We’ll soon be away from it,” Kenniston reassured. “See, they’ve almost finished repairing the Falcon.”

The urgent toil of the pirates was showing results. By the time night came again, and the meteor-moonlets blazed forth with magic beauty in the dark heavens, the task of repair was almost done.

Kenniston and his companions had not ventured forth from the hut. Pirates were everywhere in the clearing, and all had heard John Dark’s strict order to blast down the captives if they left their prison.

But from the hut, Kenniston and the others could see that the horde of Vestan-dominated animals around the camp had further increased. With ghastly avidity, they kept circling the shimmering, electric wall.

Kenniston turned in alarm at a ripping sound from the back of the log hut. Two of the logs were being torn out bodily. The battered green face and giant shoulders of Holk Or came through the opening.

“Kenniston, I came in this way because I didn’t dare let Dark see me talking to you!” the Jovian exclaimed. His face was urgent in expression. “I’ve found out that Dark doesn’t mean to let your friends here get away from Vesta alive.”

“What?” exclaimed Kenniston. “That’s impossible! Dark said he was going to hold Gloria and the others for ransom.”

Holk Or nodded hastily. “I know, and he meant it, then. But since then, he’s found out something that’s changed his plans. He found it out from me—like a big fool, I told him everything when he questioned me.”

The Jovian continued rapidly. “I told him that Murdock had sent that telaudio message back to Patrol headquarters, asking about my record. Now Dark figures that the Patrol will come out here to find out if that message meant that some of John Dark’s outfit had actually escaped.

“Dark wants the Patrol to keep thinking that he and his outfit were destroyed—so he can slip out to Pluto and prepare a new base. So Dark, when he leaves here, is going to drop Miss Loring and her friends by the wrecked Sunsprite, so the Patrol will find ’em dead by the wreck and will believe their cruiser crashed accidentally. That way, they won’t go on searching as they would if Miss Loring’s party was all missing. And Dark will have a chance to get out to Pluto without an alarm going out.”

Kenniston was suspicious. “Why do you tell us this, Holk? You’re one of the pirates yourself.”

“I know, but I’m afraid Dark means to drop me with the others by the Sunsprite!” Holk Or exclaimed. “He didn’t say so, but I believe he figures on doing it so that the telaudio inquiry about me would be explained when I was found dead with the others by the wreck.”

Murdock said swiftly, “The Jovian’s right, Kenniston. All this is just what Dark would do, to hide his trail, now that he knows my telaudio message may have aroused the Patrol’s suspicion.”

Holk Or said emphatically, “I’m with you if you can figure out any way to take the Falcon, Kenniston!”

Kenniston paced to and fro. His whole mind was suddenly in a wild turmoil of stark fears. This meant death for Gloria and the others, and the ultimate responsibility for that death would be his.

“There is one possible chance for us to take the Falcon,” he muttered finally. “But my God, it seems like an insane idea—”

“Wait a minute!” Captain Walls interrupted. “Dark won’t drop you and your brother to die, Kenniston. He still needs your brother as a physician. You two will be safe even if we are killed.”

“What of that? I can’t let Gloria and the rest of you be murdered! I was willing to sacrifice you when I thought it was only a question of your being held for ransom, but this changes everything,” Kenniston said wildly.

“It doesn’t change anything,” the captain said firmly. “Your duty is to keep your brother alive at all costs, to save that formula that means life and hope for thousands of gravitation-paralysis victims like my son.”

“You mean—I should let you all be killed so Ricky and I can be saved?” Kenniston cried. “I’m damned if I will!”

“We’ll never do that!” Ricky Kenniston agreed warmly. “No formula in the world is worth that.”

“This formula is,” Gloria said earnestly to Kenniston. “The captain is right.”

“I won’t do it,” Kenniston repeated. “I have an idea by which we might be able to take the Falcon. We’re going to try it.”

“Be reasonable, Kenniston,” pleaded Hugh Murdock. “None of us except Holk Or has a weapon. What chance would we have against half a hundred armed pirates?”

Kenniston looked at his brother. “Ricky, your formula strengthens the nervous system against any form of shock or damage, doesn’t it? You said it did it by sheathing the nerves themselves with an impenetrable coating.”

Ricky nodded puzzledly. “Yes, that’s the principle. But how is that going to help us?”

“The Vestans,” Kenniston reminded, “seize control of their victims by inserting those tiny needle antennae of theirs into the victim’s nerve-system to establish contact. Wouldn’t your formula insulate the nerves against such contact? Wouldn’t it make a man immune to Vestan attack?”

“Why, it would!” Ricky declared wonderingly. “I never thought of it, yet it’s entirely logical.”

“Then,” Kenniston said swiftly, “I want you to give every one of us, including yourself, an injection of the formula right now.”

The driving purpose in his voice brushed aside all their bewildered questions and objections. Hastily, Ricky prepared his hypodermics and rapidly made an injection of the milky fluid into the big nerve-centers in the neck of each of them. Kenniston did the same for Ricky himself.

“We should be immune now to Vestan attack,” Kenniston said prayerfully.

“But what good’s that going to do us?” Holk Or demanded. “Are you figuring to try an escape into the jungle?”

“No, I’m figuring on taking the Falcon—by using the Vestans,” Kenniston replied. “Holk, can you get into the ship and turn off the power that keeps the electric wall going? Can you drop the wall?”

The Jovian’s jaw dropped. “Why, sure, I could do that, but if I did, all those hordes of Vestans outside the wall will burst in here—”

He stopped, his eyes bulging. “Good God, then that’s your plan? To let the Vestans in?”

“That’s it,” Kenniston said tightly, his face grim. “To let the Vestans in on the pirates. That’ll give us a chance to take the ship—if the formula really makes us immune to the Vestans.”

The terrible nature of the proposal stunned them all. But in a moment a flame of purpose lit in the Jovian’s eyes.

“I’ll do it!” he swore. “It’s better than waiting for Dark to kill me like he’s planning. You be ready!”

The Jovian slipped out of the opening in the back of the hut. They saw him presently, casually approaching the door of the Falcon.

John Dark stood, a tall, dominant figure in the moonslight, barking orders to the scores of pirates who were bolting in the last of the new rocket-tubes. Kenniston’s eyes swung toward the shimmering electric wall, and the horde of Vestan-dominated animals outside it.

The wall suddenly died! And as the electric barrier vanished, into the clearing came rushing the swarm of asteroidal animals.

“The wall’s down!” John Dark yelled, his atom-gun leaping into his hand. “Get back into the ship—get back—”

The crash of his atom-gun drowned his own shout. Other pirates were firing wildly at the hideous creatures assailing them.

For the little gray Vestans had detached themselves from their animal victims and were swarming upon the pirates, clambering with blurring speed up their legs and backs, sinking into their necks the tiny antennae.

Kenniston glimpsed John Dark, with a hideous little gray bunch now fastened to the back of his neck, drop his gun and stalk stiffly away toward the jungle. His face was an unhuman, lifeless mask—he was a human automaton, dominated utterly by the alien creature.

“Come on!” Kenniston yelled to his friends. “Now’s our chance to get into the ship!”

They plunged out of the hut into the gruesome melee. Screaming pirates were now running into the jungle in vain effort to escape the hordes of Vestans. More than half the corsairs were now overcome.

Kenniston heard a scream from Gloria as they ran, felt a swift scurrying up his back, then the needle-like stab of antennae sinking into his neck.

But the parasitic creature did not overpower his will! He reached around, grasped and tore loose the hideous little thing, and with strong revulsion flung it to the ground.

“Your formula works, Ricky—we’re immune to them!” he gasped. “But hurry!”

Other Vestans were clambering up on them like ghastly gray spiders as they ran, but were powerless to overcome them. They tore away the creatures and plunged on.

Holk Or appeared in the door of the Falcon, his green face blazing as his atom-pistol pumped crashing fire into pirates inside the ship.

“I’ve got the ship cleared of them!” the Jovian shouted to Kenniston. “Let’s get out of here!”

It was time they did so. Almost the last of John Dark’s pirates had been possessed by Vestans and had become parasite-dominated robots stumbling off into the jungle. The remaining swarms of gray creatures were scurrying toward Kenniston’s group.

They tumbled into the Falcon and slammed shut the space-door. The ship, completely if roughly repaired, was ready for takeoff. Captain Walls and the men of the Sunsprite crew hastily started the newly-installed cyclotrons while Kenniston and the others raced up to the bridge.

Kenniston took the controls. He sent the big black pirate ship leaping up into the darkness upon flaming keel and tail-jets, and then it climbed steeply toward the wonderful sky of countless rushing moonlets.

By the time an hour had passed, the Falcon had groped out through the periodic break in the meteor-swarm around the asteroid. And it was throbbing at steadily increasing speed out into the vault of space, away from the World with a Thousand Moons.

“We’ll head for Mars,” Kenniston told the others. “We can report there to the Patrol.”

“If you don’t mind,” Holk Or put in hastily, “I’d just as soon you dropped me at some asteroid before then. I’ve no desire to meet the Patrol.”

Captain Walls told the Jovian, “Nonsense! After what you’ve done, you’ll get a full pardon from the Patrol.”

“You can count on it,” Hugh Murdock told the doubtful Jovian. “We have some influence, back at Earth.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go honest, then,” sighed Holk Or. “All the real pirate outfits are gone now, anyway.” He shook his head heavily as he walked away. “The System sure isn’t what it used to be.”

Captain Walls was asking Ricky earnestly, “You’re quite sure your formula will cure my son? All these years, I’ve hoped and prayed—”

“I’m certain,” Ricky smiled. “Within a few weeks after we get back to Earth, gravitation-paralysis will be a thing of the past.”

They moved off with the others. But Gloria lingered in the bridge with Kenniston.

“Where will you be going, after we get back?” she asked him quietly.

“Oh, back to space,” he answered, a little uncomfortably. “There’s nothing to hold me on Earth now that Ricky’s work has succeeded.”

“Nothing to hold you on Earth?” Gloria repeated. “That, I would say, is about the most ungallant speech on record.”

He flushed. “You don’t mean—that night on the Sunsprite—you weren’t in earnest, surely—”

“Your passionate proposal is accepted,” Gloria said calmly.

Kenniston was aghast. “But I didn’t propose! I mean—I do love you, and you know it, but you’re an heiress, and I—”

“We’ll have all the way back to Mars to argue that out,” she told him. “And I have an idea you’ll lose.”

Kenniston had the same idea.

THE STARS, MY BROTHERS

CHAPTER 1

Something tiny went wrong, but no one ever knew whether it was in an electric relay or in the brain of the pilot.

The pilot was Lieutenant Charles Wandek, UNRC, home address: 1677 Anstey Avenue, Detroit. He did not survive the crash of his ferry into Wheel Five. Neither did his three passengers, a young French astrophysicist, an East Indian expert on magnetic fields, and a forty-year-old man from Philadelphia who was coming out to replace a pump technician.

Someone else who did not survive was Reed Kieran, the only man in Wheel Five itself to lose his life. Kieran, who was thirty-six years old, was an accredited scientist-employee of UNRC. Home address: 815 Elm Street, Midland Springs, Ohio.

Kieran, despite the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor, was in Wheel Five because of a woman. But the woman who had sent him there was no beautiful lost love. Her name was Gertrude Lemmiken; she was nineteen years old and overweight, with a fat, stupid face. She suffered from head-colds, and sniffed constantly in the Ohio college classroom where Kieran taught Physics Two.

One March morning, Kieran could bear it no longer. He told himself, “If she sniffs this morning, I’m through. I’ll resign and join the UNRC.”

Gertrude sniffed. Six months later, having finished his training for the United Nations Reconnaissance Corps, Kieran shipped out for a term of duty in UNRC Space Laboratory Number 5, known more familiarly as Wheel Five.

Wheel Five circled the Moon. There was an elaborate base on the surface of the Moon in this year 1981. There were laboratories and observatories there, too. But it had been found that the alternating fortnights of boiling heat and near-absolute-zero cold on the lunar surface could play havoc with the delicate instruments used in certain researches. Hence Wheel Five had been built and was staffed by research men who were rotated at regular eight-month intervals.

Kieran loved it, from the first. He thought that that was because of the sheer beauty of it, the gaunt, silver deaths-head of the Moon forever turning beneath, the still and solemn glory of the undimmed stars, the filamentaries stretched across the distant star-clusters like shining veils, the quietness, the peace.

But Kieran had a certain intellectual honesty, and after a while he admitted to himself that neither the beauty nor the romance of it was what made this life so attractive to him. It was the fact that he was far away from Earth. He did not even have to look at Earth, for nearly all geophysical research was taken care of by Wheels Two and Three that circled the mother planet. He was almost completely divorced from all Earth’s problems and people.

Kieran liked people, but had never felt that he understood them. What seemed important to them, all the drives of ordinary day-to-day existence, had never seemed very important to him. He had felt that there must be something wrong with him, something lacking, for it seemed to him that people everywhere committed the most outlandish follies, believed in the most incredible things, were swayed by pure herd-instinct into the most harmful courses of behavior. They could not all be wrong, he thought, so he must be wrong—and it had worried him. He had taken partial refuge in pure science, but the study and then the teaching of astrophysics had not been the refuge that Wheel Five was. He would be sorry to leave the Wheel when his time was up.

And he was sorry, when the day came. The others of the staff were already out in the docking lock in the rim, waiting to greet the replacements from the ferry. Kieran, hating to leave, lagged behind. Then, realizing it would be churlish not to meet this young Frenchman who was replacing him, he hurried along the corridor in the big spoke when he saw the ferry coming in.

He was two-thirds of the way along the spoke to the rim when it happened. There was a tremendous crash that flung him violently from his feet. He felt a coldness, instant and terrible.

He was dying.

He was dead.

The ferry had been coming in on a perfectly normal approach when the tiny something went wrong, in the ship or in the judgment of the pilot. Its drive-rockets suddenly blasted on full, it heeled over sharply, it smashed through the big starboard spoke like a knife through butter.

Wheel Five staggered, rocked, and floundered. The automatic safety bulkheads had all closed, and the big spoke—Section T2—was the only section to blow its air, and Kieran was the only man caught in it. The alarms went off, and while the wreckage of the ferry, with three dead men in it, was still drifting close by, everyone in the Wheel was in his pressure-suit and emergency measures were in full force.

Within thirty minutes it became evident that the Wheel was going to survive this accident. It was edging slowly out of orbit from the impetus of the blow, and in the present weakened state of the construction its small corrective rockets could not be used to stop the drift. But Meloni, the UNRC captain commanding, had got first reports from his damage-control teams, and it did not look too bad. He fired off peremptory demands for the repair materials he would need, and was assured by UNRC headquarters at Mexico City that the ferries would be loaded and on their way as soon as possible.

Meloni was just beginning to relax a little when a young officer brought up a minor but vexing problem. Lieutenant Vinson had headed the small party sent out to recover the bodies of the four dead men. In their pressure-suits they had been pawing through the tangled wreckage for some time, and young Vinson was tired when he made his report.

“We have all four alongside, sir. The three men in the ferry were pretty badly mangled in the crash. Kieran wasn’t physically wounded, but died from space-asphyxiation.”

The captain stared at him. “Alongside? Why didn’t you bring them in? They’ll go back in one of the ferries to Earth for burial.”

“But—” Vinson started to protest.

Meloni interrupted sharply. “You need to learn a few things about morale, Lieutenant. You think it’s going to do morale here any good to have four dead men floating alongside where everyone can see them? Fetch them in and store them in one of the holds.”

Vinson, sweating and unhappy now, had visions of a black mark on his record, and determined to make his point.

“But about Kieran, sir—he was only frozen. Suppose there was a chance to bring him back?”

“Bring him back? What the devil are you talking about?”

Vinson said, “I read they’re trying to find some way of restoring a man that gets space-frozen. Some scientists down at Delhi University. If they succeeded, and if we had Kieran still intact in space—”

“Oh, hell, that’s just a scientific pipe-dream, they’ll never find a way to do that,” Meloni said. “It’s all just theory.”

“Yes, sir,” said Vinson, hanging his head.

“We’ve got trouble enough here without you bringing up ideas like this,” the captain continued angrily. “Get out of here.”

Vinson was now completely crushed. “Yes, sir. I’ll bring the bodies in.”

He went out. Meloni stared at the door, and began to think. A commanding officer had to be careful, or he could get skinned alive. If, by some remote chance, this Delhi idea ever succeeded, he, Meloni, would be in for it for having Kieran buried. He strode to the door and flung it open, mentally cursing the young snotty who had had to bring this up.

“Vinson!” he shouted.

The lieutenant turned back, startled. “Yes, sir?”

“Hold Kieran’s body outside. I’ll check on this with Mexico City.”

“Yes, sir.”

Still angry, Meloni shot a message to Personnel at Mexico City. That done, he forgot about it. The buck had been passed, let the boys sitting on their backsides down on Earth handle it.

Colonel Hausman, second in command of Personnel Division of UNRC, was the man to whom Meloni’s message went. He snorted loudly when he read it. And later, when he went in to report to Garces, the brigadier commanding the Division, he took the message with him.

“Meloni must be pretty badly rattled by the crash,” he said. “Look at this.”

Garces read the message, then looked up. “Anything to this? The Delhi experiments, I mean?”

Hausman had taken care to brief himself on that point and was able to answer emphatically.

“Damned little. Those chaps in Delhi have been playing around freezing insects and thawing them out, and they think the process might be developed someday to where it could revive frozen spacemen. It’s an iffy idea. I’ll burn Meloni’s backside off for bringing it up at a time like this.”

Garces, after a moment, shook his head. “No, wait. Let me think about this.”

He looked speculatively out of the window for a few moments. Then he said,

“Message Meloni that this one chap’s body—what’s his name, Kieran?—is to be preserved in space against a chance of future revival.”

Hausman nearly blotted his copybook by exclaiming, “For God’s sake—” He choked that down in time and said, “But it could be centuries before a revival process is perfected, if it ever is.”

Garces nodded. “I know. But you’re missing a psychological point that could be valuable to UNRC. This Kieran has relatives, doesn’t he?”

Hausman nodded. “A widowed mother and a sister. His father’s been dead a long time. No wife or children.”

Garces said, “If we tell them he’s dead, frozen in space and then buried, it’s all over with. Won’t those people feel a lot better if we tell them that he’s apparently dead, but might be brought back when a revival-technique is perfected in the future?”

“I suppose they’d feel better about it,” Hausman conceded. “But I don’t see—”

Garces shrugged. “Simple. We’re only really beginning in space, you know. As we go on, UNRC is going to lose a number of men, space-struck just like Kieran. A howl will go up about our casualty lists, it always does. But if we can say that they’re only frozen until such time as revival technique is achieved, everyone will feel better about it.”

“I suppose public relations are important—” Hausman began to say, and Garces nodded quickly.

“They are. See that this is done, when you go up to confer with Meloni. Make sure that it gets onto the video networks, I want everyone to see it.”

Later, with many cameras and millions of people watching, Kieran’s body, in a pressure-suit, was ceremoniously taken to a selected position where it would orbit the Moon. All suggestions of the funerary were carefully avoided. The space-struck man—nobody at all referred to him as “dead”—would remain in this position until a revival process was perfected.

“Until forever,” thought Hausman, watching sourly. “I suppose Garces is right. But they’ll have a whole graveyard here, as time goes on.”

As time went on, they did.

CHAPTER 2

In his dreams, a soft voice whispered.

He did not know what it was telling him, except that it was important. He was hardly aware of its coming, the times it came. There would be the quiet murmuring, and something in him seemed to hear and understand, and then the murmur faded away and there was nothing but the dreams again.

But were they dreams? Nothing had form or meaning. Light, darkness, sound, pain and not-pain, flowed over him. Flowed over—who? Who was he? He did not even know that. He did not care.

But he came to care, the question vaguely nagged him. He should try to remember. There was more than dreams and the whispering voice. There was—what? If he had one real thing to cling to, to put his feet on and climb back from— One thing like his name.

He had no name. He was no one. Sleep and forget it. Sleep and dream and listen—

“Kieran.”

It went across his brain like a shattering bolt of lightning, that word. He did not know what the word was or what it meant but it found an echo somewhere and his brain screamed it.

“Kieran!”

Not his brain alone, his voice was gasping it, harshly and croakingly, his lungs seeming on fire as they expelled the word.

He was shaking. He had a body that could shake, that could feel pain, that was feeling pain now. He tried to move, to break the nightmare, to get back again to the vague dreams, and the soothing whisper.

He moved. His limbs thrashed leadenly, his chest heaved and panted, his eyes opened.

He lay in a narrow bunk in a very small metal room.

He looked slowly around. He did not know this place. The gleaming white metal of walls and ceiling was unfamiliar. There was a slight, persistent tingling vibration in everything that was unfamiliar, too.

He was not in Wheel Five. He had seen every cell in it and none of them were like this. Also, there lacked the persistent susurrant sound of the ventilation pumps. Where—

You’re in a ship, Kieran. A starship.

Something back in his mind told him that. But of course it was ridiculous, a quirk of the imagination. There weren’t any starships.

You’re all right, Kieran. You’re in a starship, and you’re all right.

The emphatic assurance came from somewhere back in his brain and it was comforting. He didn’t feel very good, he felt dopey and sore, but there was no use worrying about it when he knew for sure he was all right—

The hell he was all right! He was in someplace new, someplace strange, and he felt half sick and he was not all right at all. Instead of lying here on his back listening to comforting lies from his imagination, he should get up, find out what was going on, what had happened.

Of a sudden, memory began to clear. What had happened? Something, a crash, a terrible coldness—

Kieran began to shiver. He had been in Section T2, on his way to the lock, and suddenly the floor had risen under him and Wheel Five had seemed to crash into pieces around him. The cold, the pain—

You’re in a starship. You’re all right.

For God’s sake why did his mind keep telling him things like that, things he believed? For if he did not believe them he would be in a panic, not knowing where he was, how he had come here. There was panic in his mind but there was a barrier against it, the barrier of the soothing reassurances that came from he knew not where.

He tried to sit up. It was useless, he was too weak. He lay, breathing heavily. He felt that he should be hysterical with fear but somehow he was not, that barrier in his mind prevented it.

He had decided to try shouting when a door in the side of the little room slid open and a man came in.

He came over and looked down at Kieran. He was a young man, sandy-haired, with a compact, chunky figure and a flat, hard face. His eyes were blue and intense, and they gave Kieran the feeling that this man was a wound-up spring. He looked down and said,

“How do you feel, Kieran?”

Kieran looked up at him. He asked, “Am I in a starship?”

“Yes.”

“But there aren’t any starships.”

“There are. You’re in one.” The sandy-haired man added, “My name is Vaillant.”

It’s true, what he says, murmured the something in Kieran’s mind.

“Where—how—” Kieran began.

Vaillant interrupted his stammering question. “As to where, we’re quite a way from Earth, heading right now in the general direction of Altair. As to how—” He paused, looking keenly down at Kieran. “Don’t you know how?”

Of course I know. I was frozen, and now I have been awakened and time has gone by—

Vaillant, looking searchingly down at his face, showed a trace of relief. “You do know, don’t you? For a moment I was afraid it hadn’t worked.”

He sat down on the edge of the bunk.

“How long?” asked Kieran.

Vaillant answered as casually as though it was the most ordinary question in the world. “A bit over a century.”

It was wonderful, thought Kieran, how he could take a statement like that without getting excited. It was almost as though he’d known it all the time.

“How—” he began, when there was an interruption.

Something buzzed thinly in the pocket of Vaillant’s shirt. He took out a thin three-inch disk of metal and said sharply into it,

“Yes?”

A tiny voice squawked from the disk. It was too far from Kieran for him to understand what it was saying but it had a note of excitement, almost of panic, in it.

Something changed, hardened, in Vaillant’s flat face. He said, “I expected it. I’ll be right there. You know what to do.”

He did something to the disk and spoke into it again. “Paula, take over here.”

He stood up. Kieran looked up at him, feeling numb and stupid. “I’d like to know some things.”

“Later,” said Vaillant. “We’ve got troubles. Stay where you are.”

He went rapidly out of the room. Kieran looked after him, wondering. Troubles—troubles in a starship? And a century had passed—

He suddenly felt an emotion that shook his nerves and tightened his guts. It was beginning to hit him now. He sat up in the bunk and swung his legs out of it and tried to stand but could not, he was too weak. All he could do was to sit there, shaking.

His mind could not take it in. It seemed only minutes ago that he had been walking along the corridor in Wheel Five. It seemed that Wheel Five must exist, that the Earth, the people, the time he knew, must still be somewhere out there. This could be some kind of a joke, or some kind of psychological experiment. That was it—the space-medicine boys were always making way-out experiments to find out how men would bear up in unusual conditions, and this must be one of them—

A woman came into the room. She was a dark woman who might have been thirty years old, and who wore a white shirt and slacks. She would, he thought, have been good-looking if she had not looked so tired and so edgy.

She came over and looked down at him and said to him,

“Don’t try to get up yet. You’ll feel better very soon.”

Her voice was a slightly husky one. It was utterly familiar to Kieran, and yet he had never seen this woman before. Then it came to him.

“You were the one who talked to me,” he said, looking up at her. “In the dreams, I mean.”

She nodded. “I’m Paula Ray and I’m a psychologist. You had to be psychologically prepared for your awakening.”

“Prepared?”

The woman explained patiently. “Hypnopedic technique—establishing facts in the subconscious of a sleeping patient. Otherwise, it would be too terrific a shock for you when you awakened. That was proved when they first tried reviving space-struck men, forty or fifty years ago.”

The comfortable conviction that this was all a fake, an experiment of some kind, began to drain out of Kieran. But if it was true—

He asked, with some difficulty, “You say that they found out how to revive space-frozen men, that long ago?”

“Yes.”

“Yet it took forty or fifty years to get around to reviving me?”

The woman sighed. “You have a misconception. The process of revival was perfected that long ago. But it has been used only immediately after a wreck or disaster. Men or women in the old space-cemeteries have not been revived.”

“Why not?” he asked carefully.

“Unsatisfactory results,” she said. “They could not adjust psychologically to changed conditions. They usually became unbalanced. Some suicides and a number of cases of extreme schizophrenia resulted. It was decided that it was no kindness to the older space-struck cases to bring them back.”

“But you brought me back?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“There were good reasons.” She was, clearly, evading that question. She went on quickly. “The psychological shock of awakening would have been devastating, if you were not prepared. So, while you were still under sedation, I used the hypnopedic method on you. Your unconscious was aware of the main facts of the situation before you awoke, and that cushioned the shock.”

Kieran thought of himself, lying frozen and dead in a graveyard that was space, bodies drifting in orbit, circling slowly around each other as the years passed, in a macabre sarabande— A deep shiver shook him.

“Because all space-struck victims were in pressure-suits, dehydration was not the problem it could have been,” Paula was saying. “But it’s still a highly delicate process—”

He looked at her and interrupted roughly. “What reasons?” And when she stared blankly, he added, “You said there were good reasons why you picked me for revival. What reasons?”

Her face became tight and alert. “You were the oldest victim, in point of date. That was one of the determining factors—”

“Look,” said Kieran. “I’m not a child, nor yet a savage. You can drop the patronizing professional jargon and answer my question.”

Her voice became hard and brittle. “You’re new to this environment. You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“All right,” she answered. “We need you, as a symbol, in a political struggle we’re waging against the Sakae.”

“The Sakae?”

“I told you that you couldn’t understand yet,” she answered impatiently, turning away. “You can’t expect me to fill you in on a whole world that’s new to you, in five minutes.”

She started toward the door. “Oh, no,” said Kieran. “You’re not going yet.”

He slid out of the bunk. He felt weak and shaky but resentment energized his flaccid muscles. He took a step toward her.

The lights suddenly went dim, and a bull-throated roar sounded from somewhere, an appalling sound of raw power. The slight tingling that Kieran had felt in the metal fabric around him abruptly became a vibration so deep and powerful that it dizzied him and he had to grab the stanchion of the bunk to keep from falling.

Alarm had flashed into the woman’s face. Next moment, from some hidden speaker in the wall, a male voice yelled sharply,

“Overtaken—prepare for extreme evasion—”

“Get back into the bunk,” she told Kieran.

“What is it?”

“It may be,” she said with a certain faint viciousness, “that you’re about to die a second time.”

CHAPTER 3

The lights dimmed to semidarkness, and the deep vibration grew worse. Kieran clutched the woman’s arm.

“What’s happening?”

“Damn it, let me go!” she said.

The exclamation was so wholly familiar in its human angriness that Kieran almost liked her, for the first time. But he continued to hold onto her, although he did not feel that with his present weakness he could hold her long.

“I’ve a right to know,” he said.

“All right, perhaps you have,” said Paula. “We—our group—are operating against authority. We’ve broken laws, in going to Earth and reviving you. And now authority is catching up to us.”

“Another ship? Is there going to be a fight?”

“A fight?” She stared at him, and shock and then faint repulsion showed in her face. “But of course, you come from the old time of wars, you would think that—”

Kieran got the impression that what he had said had made her look at him with the same feelings he would have had when he looked at a decent, worthy savage who happened to be a cannibal.

“I always felt that bringing you back was a mistake,” she said, with a sharpness in her voice. “Let me go.”

She wrenched away from him and before he could stop her she had got to the door and slid it open. He woke up in time to lurch after her and he got his shoulder into the door-opening before she could slide it shut.

“Oh, very well, since you insist I’m not going to worry about you,” she said rapidly, and turned and hurried away.

Kieran wanted to follow her but his knees were buckling under him. He hung to the side of the door-opening. He felt angry, and anger was all that kept him from falling over. He would not faint, he told himself. He was not a child, and would not be treated like one—

He got his head outside the door. There was a long and very narrow corridor out there, blank metal with a few closed doors along it. One door, away down toward the end of the corridor, was just sliding shut.

He started down the corridor, steadying himself with his hand against the smooth wall. Before he had gone more than a few steps, the anger that pushed him began to ebb away. Of a sudden, the mountainous and incredible fact of his being here, in this place, this time, this ship, came down on him like an avalanche from which the hypnopedic pre-conditioning would no longer protect him.

I am touching a starship, I am in a starship, I, Reed Kieran of Midland Springs, Ohio. I ought to be back there, teaching my classes, stopping at Hartnett’s Drug Store for a soft drink on the way home, but I am here in a ship fleeing through the stars …

His head was spinning and he was afraid that he was going to go out again. He found himself at the door and slid it open and fell rather than walked inside. He heard a startled voice.

This was a bigger room. There was a table whose top was translucent and which showed a bewildering mass of fleeting symbols in bright light, ever changing. There was a screen on one wall of the room and that showed nothing, a blank, dark surface.

Vaillant and Paula Ray and a tall, tough-looking man of middle age were around the table and had looked up, surprised.

Vaillant’s face flashed irritation. “Paula, you were supposed to keep him in his cabin!”

“I didn’t think he was strong enough to follow,” she said.

“I’m not,” said Kieran, and pitched over.

The tall middle-aged man reached and caught him before he hit the floor, and eased him into a chair.

He heard, as though from a great distance, Vaillant’s voice saying irritatedly, “Let Paula take care of him, Webber. Look at this—we’re going to cross another rift—”

There were a few minutes then when everything was very jumbled up in Kieran’s mind. The woman was talking to him. She was telling him that they had prepared him physically, as well as psychologically, for the shock of revival, and that he would be quite all right but had to take things more slowly.

He heard her voice but paid little attention. He sat in the chair and blankly watched the two men who hung over the table and its flow of brilliant symbols. Vaillant seemed to tighten up more and more as the moments passed, and there was still about him the look of a coiled spring but now the spring seemed to be wound to the breaking-point. Webber, the tall man with the tough face, watched the fleeting symbols and his face was stony.

“Here we go,” he muttered, and both he and Vaillant looked up at the blank black screen on the wall.

Kieran looked too. There was nothing. Then, in an instant, the blackness vanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunning splendor that Kieran could not grasp it.

Stars blazed like high fires across the screen, loops and chains and shining clots of them. This was not too different from the way they had looked from Wheel Five. But what was different was that the starry firmament was partly blotted out by vast rifted ramparts of blackness, ebon cliffs that went up to infinity. Kieran had seen astronomical photographs like this and knew what the blackness was.

Dust. A dust so fine that its percentage of particles in space would be a vacuum, on Earth. But, here where it extended over parsecs of space, it formed a barrier to light. There was a narrow rift here between the titan cliffs of darkness and he—the ship he was in—was fleeing across that rift.

The screen abruptly went black again. Kieran remained sitting and staring at it. That incredible fleeting vision had finally impressed the utter reality of all this upon his mind. They, this ship, were far from Earth—very far, in one of the dust-clouds in which they were trying to lose pursuers. This was real.

“—will have got another fix on us as we crossed, for sure,” Vaillant was saying, in a bitter voice. “They’ll have the net out for us—the pattern will be shaping now and we can’t slip through it.”

“We can’t,” said Webber. “The ship can’t. But the flitter can, with luck.”

They both looked at Kieran. “He’s the important one,” Webber said. “If a couple of us could get him through—”

“No,” said Paula. “We couldn’t. As soon as they caught the ship and found the flitter gone, they’d be after him.”

“Not to Sako,” said Webber. “They’d never figure that we’d take him to Sako.”

“Do I have a word in this?” asked Kieran, between his teeth.

“What?” asked Vaillant.

“This. The hell with you all. I’ll go no place with you or for you.”

He got a savage satisfaction from saying it; he was tired of sitting there like a booby while they discussed him, but he did not get the reaction from them he had expected. The two men merely continued to look thoughtfully at him. The woman sighed.

“You see?” she said. “There wasn’t time enough to explain it to him. It’s natural for him to react with hostility.”

“Put him out, and take him along,” said Webber.

“No,” said Paula sharply. “If he goes out right now, he’s liable to stay out. I won’t answer for it.”

“Meanwhile,” said Vaillant with an edge to his voice, “the pattern is forming up. Have you any suggestions, Paula?”

She nodded. “This.”

She suddenly squeezed something under Kieran’s nose, a small thing that she had produced from her pocket without his noticing it, in his angry preoccupation with the two men. He smelled a sweet, refreshing odor, and he struck her arm away.

“Oh, no, you’re not giving me any more dopes—” Then he stopped, for suddenly it all seemed wryly humorous to him. “A bunch of bloody incompetents,” he said, and laughed. “This is the one thing I would never have dreamed—that a man could sleep, and wake up in a starship, and find the starship manned by blunderers.”

“Euphoric,” said Paula, to the two men.

“At that,” said Webber sourly, “there may be something in what he says about us.”

Vaillant turned on him and said fiercely, “If that’s what you think—” Then he controlled himself and said tightly, “Quarrelling’s no good. We’re in a box but we can maybe still put it over if we get this man to Sako. Webber, you and Paula take him in the flitter.”

Kieran rose to his feet. “Fine,” he said gaily. “Let us go in the flitter, whatever that is. I am already bored with starships.”

He felt good, very good. He felt a little drunk, not enough to impede his mental processes but enough to give him a fine devil-may-care indifference to what happened next. So it was only the spray Paula had given him—it still made his body feel better and removed his shock and worry and made everything seem suddenly rather amusing.

“Let us to Sako in the flitter,” he said. “After all, I’m living on velvet, I might as well see the whole show. I’m sure that Sako, wherever it is, will be just as full of human folly as Earth was.”

“He’s euphoric,” Paula said again, but her face was stricken.

“Of all the people in that space-cemetery, we had to pick one who thinks like that,” said Vaillant, with a sort of restrained fury.

“You said yourself that the oldest one would be the best,” said Webber. “Sako will change him.”

Kieran walked down the corridor with Webber and Paula and he laughed as he walked. They had brought him back from nothingness without his consent, violating the privacy of death or near-death, and now something that he had just said had bitterly disappointed them.

“Come along,” he said buoyantly to the two. “Let us not lag. Once aboard the flitter and the girl is mine.”

“Oh for God’s sake shut up,” said Webber.

CHAPTER 4

It was ridiculous to be flying the stars with a bad hangover, but Kieran had one. His head ached dully, he had an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth, and his former ebullience had given way to a dull depression. He looked sourly around.

He sat in a confined little metal coop of a cabin, hardly enough in which to stand erect. Paula Ray, in a chair a few feet away was sleeping, her head on her breast. Webber sat forward, in what appeared to be a pilot-chair with a number of crowded control banks in front of it. He was not doing anything to the controls. He looked as though he might be sleeping, too.

That was all—a tiny metal room, blank metal walls, silence. They were, presumably, flying between the stars at incredible speeds but there was nothing to show it. There were no screens such as the one he had seen in the ship, to show by artful scanning devices what vista of suns and darknesses lay outside.

“A flitter,” Webber had informed him, “just doesn’t have room for the complicated apparatus that such scanners require. Seeing is a luxury you dispense with in a flitter. We’ll see when we get to Sako.”

After a moment he had added, “If we get to Sako.”

Kieran had merely laughed then, and had promptly gone to sleep. When he had awakened, it had been with the euphoria all gone and with his present hangover.

“At least,” he told himself, “I can truthfully say that this one wasn’t my fault. That blasted spray—”

He looked resentfully at the sleeping woman in the chair. Then he reached and roughly shook her shoulder.

She opened her eyes and looked at him, first sleepily and then with resentment.

“You had no right to wake me up,” she said.

Then, before Kieran could retort, she seemed to realize the monumental irony of what she had just said, and she burst into laughter.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Go ahead and say it. I had no right to wake you up.”

“Let’s come back to that,” said Kieran after a moment. “Why did you?”

Paula looked at him ruefully. “What I need now is a ten-volume history of the last century, and time enough for you to read it. But since we don’t have either—” She broke off, then after a pause asked, “Your date was 1981, wasn’t it? It and your name were on the tag of your pressure-suit.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, then. Back in 1981, it was expected that men would spread out to the stars, wasn’t it?”

Kieran nodded. “As soon as they had a workable high-speed drive. Several drives were being experimented with even then.”

“One of them—the Flournoy principle—was finally made workable,” she said. She frowned. “I’m trying to give you this briefly and I keep straying into details.”

“Just tell me why you woke me up.”

“I’m trying to tell you.” She asked candidly, “Were you always so damned hateful or did the revivification process do this to you?”

Kieran grinned. “All right. Go ahead.”

“Things happened pretty much as people foresaw back in 1981,” she said. “The drive was perfected. The ships went out to the nearer stars. They found worlds. They established colonies from the overflowing population of Earth. They found human indigenous races on a few worlds, all of them at a rather low technical level, and they taught them.

“There was a determination from the beginning to make it one universe. No separate nationalistic groups, no chance of wars. The governing council was set up at Altair Two. Every world was represented. There are twenty-nine of them, now. It’s expected to go on like that, till there are twenty-nine hundred starworlds represented there, twenty-nine thousand—any number. But—”

Kieran had been listening closely. “But what? What upset this particular utopia?”

“Sako.”

“This world we’re going to?”

“Yes,” she said soberly. “Men found something different about this world when they reached it. It had people—human people—on it, very low in the scale of civilization.”

“Well, what was the problem? Couldn’t you start teaching them as you had others?”

She shook her head. “It would take a long while. But that wasn’t the real problem. It was— You see, there’s another race on Sako beside the human ones, and it’s a fairly civilized race. The Sakae. The trouble is—the Sakae aren’t human.”

Kieran stared at her. “So what? If they’re intelligent—”

“You talk as though it was the simplest thing in the world,” she flashed.

“Isn’t it? If your Sakae are intelligent and the humans of Sako aren’t, then the Sakae have the rights on that world, don’t they?”

She looked at him, not saying anything, and again she had that stricken look of one who has tried and failed. Then from up forward, without turning, Webber spoke.

“What do you think now of Vaillant’s fine idea, Paula?”

“It can still work,” she said, but there was no conviction in her voice.

“If you don’t mind,” said Kieran, with an edge to his voice, “I’d still like to know what this Sako business has to do with reviving me.”

“The Sakae rule the humans on that world,” Paula answered. “There are some of us who don’t believe they should. In the Council, we’re known as the Humanity Party, because we believe that humans should not be ruled by nonhumans.”

Again, Kieran was distracted from his immediate question—this time by the phrase “Nonhuman”.

“These Sakae—what are they like?”

“They’re not monsters, if that’s what you’re thinking of,” Paula said. “They’re bipeds—lizardoid rather than humanoid—and are a fairly intelligent and law-abiding lot.”

“If they’re all that, and higher in development than the humans, why shouldn’t they rule their own world?” demanded Kieran.

Webber uttered a sardonic laugh. Without turning he asked, “Shall I change course and go to Altair?”

“No!” she said. Her eyes flashed at Kieran and she spoke almost breathlessly. “You’re very sure about things you just heard about, aren’t you? You know what’s right and you know what’s wrong, even though you’ve only been in this time, this universe, for a few hours!”

Kieran looked at her closely. He thought he was beginning to get a glimmer of the shape of things now.

“You—all you who woke me up illegally—you belong to this Humanity Party, don’t you? You did it for some reason connected with that?”

“Yes,” she answered defiantly. “We need a symbol in this political struggle. We thought that one of the oldtime space pioneers, one of the humans who began the conquest of the stars, would be it. We—”

Kieran interrupted. “I think I get it. It was really considerate of you. You drag a man back from what amounts to death, for a party rally. ‘Oldtime space hero condemns nonhumans’—it would go something like that, wouldn’t it?”

“Listen—,” she began.

“Listen, hell,” he said. He was hot with rage, shaking with it. “I am glad to say that you could not possibly have picked a worse symbol than me. I have no more use for the idea of the innate sacred superiority of one species over another than I had for that of one kind of man over another.”

Her face changed. From an angry woman, she suddenly became a professional psychologist, coolly observing reactions.

“It’s not the political question you really resent,” she said. “You’ve wakened to a strange world and you’re afraid of it, in spite of all the pre-awakening preparation we gave your subconscious. You’re afraid, and so you’re angry.”

Kieran got a grip on himself. He shrugged. “What you say may be true. But it doesn’t change the way I feel. I will not help you one damned bit.”

Webber got up from his seat and came back toward them, his tall form stooping. He looked at Kieran and then at the woman.

“We have to settle this right now,” he said. “We’re getting near enough to Sako to go out of drive. Are we going to land or aren’t we?”

“Yes,” said Paula steadily. “We’re landing.”

Webber glanced again at Kieran’s face. “But if that’s the way he feels—”

“Go ahead and land,” she said.

CHAPTER 5

It was nothing like landing in a rocket. First there was the business referred to as “going out of drive”. Paula made Kieran strap in and she said, “You may find this unpleasant, but just sit tight. It doesn’t last long.” Kieran sat stiff and glowering, prepared for anything and determined not to show it no matter how he felt. Then Webber did something to the control board and the universe fell apart. Kieran’s stomach came up and stuck in his throat. He was falling—up? Down? Sideways? He didn’t know, but whichever it was not all the parts of him were falling at the same rate, or perhaps it was not all in the same direction, he didn’t know that either, but it was an exceptionally hideous feeling. He opened his mouth to protest, and all of a sudden he was sitting normally in the chair in the normal cabin and screaming at the top of his lungs.

He shut up.

Paula said, “I told you it would be unpleasant.”

“So you did,” said Kieran. He sat, sweating. His hands and feet were cold.

Now for the first time he became aware of motion. The flitter seemed to hurtle forward at comet-like speed. Kieran knew that this was merely an ironic little joke, because now they were proceeding at something in the range of normal velocity, whereas before their speed had been quite beyond his comprehension. But he could comprehend this. He could feel it. They were going like a bat out of hell, and somewhere ahead of them was a planet, and he was closed in, blind, a mouse in a nose-cone. His insides writhed with helplessness and the imminence of a crash. He wanted very much to start screaming again, but Paula was watching him.

In a few moments that desire became academic. A whistling shriek began faintly outside the hull and built swiftly to a point where nothing could have been heard above it. Atmosphere. And somewhere under the blind wall of the flitter a rock-hard world-face reeling and rushing, leaping to meet them—

The flitter slowed. It seemed to hang motionless, quivering faintly. Then it dropped. Express elevator in the world’s tallest building, top to bottom—only the elevator is a bubble and the wind is tossing it from side to side as it drops and there is no bottom.

They hung again, bounding lightly on the unseen wind.

Then down.

And hang again.

And down.

Paula said suddenly, “Webber. Webber, I think he’s dying.” She began to unstrap.

Kieran said faintly, “Am I turning green?”

She looked at him, frowning. “Yes.”

“A simple old malady. I’m seasick. Tell Webber to quit playing humming-bird and put this thing down.”

Paula made an impatient gesture and tightened her belt again.

Hang and drop. Once more, twice more. A little rocking bounce, a light thump, motion ceased. Webber turned a series of switches. Silence.

Kieran said, “Air?”

Webber opened a hatch in the side of the cabin. Light poured in. It had to be sunlight, Kieran knew, but it was a queer color, a sort of tawny orange that carried a pleasantly burning heat. He got loose with Paula helping him and tottered to the hatch. The air smelled of clean sun-warmed dust and some kind of vegetation. Kieran climbed out of the flitter, practically throwing himself out in his haste. He wanted solid ground under him, he didn’t care whose or where.

And as his boots thumped onto the red-ochre sand, it occurred to him that it had been a very long time since he had had solid ground underfoot. A very long time indeed—

His insides knotted up again, and this time it was not seasickness but fear, and he was cold all through again in spite of the hot new sun.

He was afraid, not of the present, nor of the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, the stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds and dead space, brother to the cold and the dark.

He began to tremble.

Paula shook him. She was talking but he couldn’t hear her. He could only hear the rush of eternal darkness past his ears, the thin squeak of his shadow brushing across the stars. Webber’s face was somewhere above him, looking angry and disgusted. He was talking to Paula, shaking his head. They were far away. Kieran was losing them, drifting away from them on the black tide. Then suddenly there was something like an explosion, a crimson flare across the black, a burst of heat against the cold. Shocked and wild, the physical part of him clawed back to reality.

Something hurt him, something threatened him. He put his hand to his cheek and it came away red.

Paula and Webber were yanking at him, trying to get him to move.

A stone whizzed past his head. It struck the side of the flitter with a sharp clack, and fell. Kieran’s nervous relays finally connected. He jumped for the open hatch. Automatically he pushed Paula ahead of him, trying to shield her, and she gave him an odd startled look. Webber was already inside. More stones rattled around and one grazed Kieran’s thigh. It hurt. His cheek was bleeding freely. He rolled inside the flitter and turned to look back out the hatch. He was mad.

“Who’s doing it?” he demanded.

Paula pointed. At first Kieran was distracted by the strangeness of the landscape. The flitter crouched in a vastness of red-ochre sand laced with some low-growing plant that shone like metallic gold in the sunlight. The sand receded in tilted planes lifting gradually to a range of mountains on the right, and dropping gradually to infinity on the left. Directly in front of the flitter and quite literally a stone’s throw away was the beginning of a thick belt of trees that grew beside a river, apparently quite a wide one though he could not see much but a tawny sparkling of water. The course of the river could be traced clear back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before. There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that looked like spearheads.

Exotic or not, they made perfectly adequate cover. Stones came whistling out of the woods, but Kieran could not see anything where Paula was pointing but an occasional shaking of foliage.

“Sakae?” he asked.

Webber snorted. “You’ll know it when the Sakae find us. They don’t throw stones.”

“These are the humans,” Paula said. There was an indulgent softness in her voice that irritated Kieran.

“I thought they were our dear little friends,” he said.

“You frightened them.”

“I frightened them?”

“They’ve seen the flitter before. But they’re extremely alert to modes of behavior, and they knew you weren’t acting right. They thought you were sick.”

“So they tried to kill me. Nice fellows.”

“Self-preservation,” Webber said. “They can’t afford the luxury of too much kindness.”

“They’re very kind among themselves,” Paula said defensively. To Kieran she added, “I doubt if they were trying to kill you. They just wanted to drive you away.”

“Oh, well,” said Kieran, “in that case I wouldn’t dream of disappointing them. Let’s go.”

Paula glared at him and turned to Webber. “Talk to them.”

“I hope there’s time,” Webber grunted, glancing at the sky. “We’re sitting ducks here. Keep your patient quiet—any more of that moaning and flopping and we’re sunk.”

He picked up a large plastic container and moved closer to the door.

Paula looked at Kieran’s cheek. “Let me fix that.”

“Don’t bother,” he said. At this moment he hoped the Sakae, whoever and whatever they were, would come along and clap these two into some suitable place for the rest of their lives.

Webber began to “talk”.

Kieran stared at him, fascinated. He had expected words—primitive words, perhaps resembling the click-speech of Earth’s stone-age survivals, but words of some sort. Webber hooted. It was a soft reassuring sound, repeated over and over, but it was not a word. The rattle of stones diminished, then stopped. Webber continued to make his hooting call. Presently it was answered. Webber turned and nodded at Paula, smiling. He reached into the plastic container and drew forth a handful of brownish objects that smelled to Kieran like dried fruit. Webber tossed these out onto the sand. Now he made a different sound, a grunting and whuffling. There was a silence. Webber made the sound again.

On the third try the people came out of the woods.

In all there were perhaps twenty-five of them. They came slowly and furtively, moving a step or two at a time, then halting and peering, prepared to run. The able-bodied men came first, with one in the lead, a fine-looking chap in early middle age who was apparently the chief. The women, the old men, and the children followed, trickling gradually out of the shadow of the trees but remaining where they could disappear in a flash if alarmed. They were all perfectly naked, tall and slender and large-eyed, their muscles strung for speed and agility rather than massive strength. Their bodies gleamed a light bronze color in the sun, and Kieran noticed that the men were beardless and smooth-skinned. Both men and women had long hair, ranging in color from black to tawny, and very clean and glistening. They were a beautiful people, as deer are a beautiful people, graceful, innocent, and wild. The men came to the dried fruits which had been scattered for them. They picked them up and sniffed them, bit them, then began to eat, repeating the grunt-and-whuffle call. The women and children and old men decided everything was safe and joined them. Webber tossed out more fruit, and then got out himself, carrying the plastic box.

“What does he do next?” whispered Kieran to Paula. “Scratch their ears? I used to tame squirrels this way when I was a kid.”

“Shut up,” she warned him. Webber beckoned and she nudged him to move out of the flitter. “Slow and careful.”

Kieran slid out of the flitter. Big glistening eyes swung to watch him. The eating stopped. Some of the little ones scuttled for the trees. Kieran froze. Webber hooted and whuffled some more and the tension relaxed. Kieran approached the group with Paula. There was suddenly no truth in what he was doing. He was an actor in a bad scene, mingling with impossible characters in an improbable setting. Webber making ridiculous noises and tossing his dried fruit around like a caricature of somebody sowing, Paula with her brisk professionalism all dissolved in misty-eyed fondness, himself an alien in this time and place, and these perfectly normal-appearing people behaving like orang-utans with their fur shaved off. He started to laugh and then thought better of it. Once started, he might not be able to stop.

“Let them get used to you,” said Webber softly.

Paula obviously had been here before. She had begun to make noises too, a modified hooting more like a pigeon’s call. Kieran just stood still. The people moved in around them, sniffing, touching. There was no conversation, no laughing or giggling even among the little girls. A particularly beautiful young woman stood just behind the chief, watching the strangers with big yellow cat-eyes. Kieran took her to be the man’s daughter. He smiled at her. She continued to stare, deadpan and blank-eyed, with no answering flicker of a smile. It was as though she had never seen one before. Kieran shivered. All this silence and unresponsiveness became eerie.

“I’m happy to tell you,” he murmured to Paula, “that I don’t think much of your little pets?”

She could not allow herself to be sharply angry. She only said, in a whisper, “They are not pets, they are not animals. They—”

She broke off. Something had come over the naked people. Every head had lifted, every eye had turned away from the strangers. They were listening. Even the littlest ones were still.

Kieran could not hear anything except the wind in the trees.

“What—?” he started to ask.

Webber made an imperative gesture for silence. The tableau held for a brief second longer. Then the brown-haired man who seemed to be the leader made a short harsh noise. The people turned and vanished into the trees.

“The Sakae,” Webber said. “Get out of sight.” He ran toward the flitter. Paula grabbed Kieran’s sleeve and pushed him toward the trees.

“What’s going on?” he demanded as he ran.

“Their ears are better than ours. There’s a patrol ship coming, I think.”

The shadows took them in, orange-and-gold-splashed shadows under strange trees. Kieran looked back. Webber had been inside the flitter. Now he tumbled out of the hatch and ran toward them. Behind him the hatch closed and the flitter stirred and then took off all by itself, humming.

“They’ll follow it for a while,” Webber panted. “It may give us a chance to get away.” He and Paula started after the running people.

Kieran balked. “I don’t know why I’m running away from anybody.”

Webber pulled out a snub-nosed instrument that looked enough like a gun to be very convincing. He pointed it at Kieran’s middle.

“Reason one,” he said. “If the Sakae catch Paula and me here we’re in very big trouble. Reason two—this is a closed area, and you’re with us, so you will be in very big trouble.” He looked coldly at Kieran. “The first reason is the one that interests me most.”

Kieran shrugged. “Well, now I know.” He ran.

Only then did he hear the low heavy thrumming in the sky.

CHAPTER 6

The sound came rumbling very swiftly toward them. It was a completely different sound from the humming of the flitter, and it seemed to Kieran to hold a note of menace. He stopped in a small clearing where he might see up through the trees. He wanted a look at this ship or flier or whatever it was that had been built and was flown by nonhumans.

But Webber shoved him roughly on into a clump of squat trees that were the color of sherry wine, with flat thick leaves.

“Don’t move,” he said.

Paula was hugging a tree beside him. She nodded to him to do as Webber said.

“They have very powerful scanners.” She pointed with her chin. “Look. They’ve learned.”

The harsh warning barks of the men sounded faintly, then were hushed. Nothing moved, except by the natural motion of the wind. The people crouched among the trees, so still that Kieran would not have seen them if he had not known they were there.

The patrol craft roared past, cranking up speed as it went. Webber grinned. “They’ll be a couple of hours at least, overhauling and examining the flitter. By that time it’ll be dark, and by morning we’ll be in the mountains.”

The people were already moving. They headed upstream, going at a steady, shuffling trot. Three of the women, Kieran noticed, had babies in their arms. The older children ran beside their mothers. Two of the men and several of the women were white-haired. They ran also.

“Do you like to see them run?” asked Paula, with a sharp note of passion in her voice. “Does it look good to you?”

“No,” said Kieran, frowning. He looked in the direction in which the sound of the patrol craft was vanishing.

“Move along,” Webber said. “They’ll leave us far enough behind as it is.”

Kieran followed the naked people through the woods, beside the tawny river. Paula and Webber jogged beside him. The shadows were long now, reaching out across the water.

Paula kept glancing at him anxiously, as though to detect any sign of weakness on his part. “You’re doing fine,” she said. “You should. Your body was brought back to normal strength and tone, before you ever were awakened.”

“They’ll slow down when it’s dark, anyway,” said Webber.

The old people and the little children ran strongly.

“Is their village there?” Kieran asked, indicating the distant mountains.

“They don’t live in villages,” Paula said. “But the mountains are safer. More places to hide.”

“You said this was a closed area. What is it, a hunting preserve?”

“The Sakae don’t hunt them any more.”

“But they used to?”

“Well,” Webber said, “a long time ago. Not for food, the Sakae are vegetarians, but—”

“But,” said Paula, “they were the dominant race, and the people were simply beasts of the field. When they competed for land and food the people were hunted down or driven out.” She swung an expressive hand toward the landscape beyond the trees. “Why do you think they live in this desert, scraping a miserable existence along the watercourses? It’s land the Sakae didn’t want. Now, of course, they have no objection to setting it aside as a sort of game preserve. The humans are protected, the Sakae tell us. They’re living their natural life in their natural environment, and when we demand that a program be—”

She was out of breath and had to stop, panting. Webber finished for her.

“We want them taught, lifted out of this naked savagery. The Sakae say it’s impossible.”

“Is it true?” asked Kieran.

“No,” said Paula fiercely. “It’s a matter of pride. They want to keep their dominance, so they simply won’t admit that the people are anything more than animals, and they won’t give them a chance to be anything more.”

There was no more talking after that, but even so the three outlanders grew more and more winded and the people gained on them. The sun went down in a blaze of blood-orange light that tinted the trees in even more impossible colors and set the river briefly on fire. Then night came, and just after the darkness shut down the patrol craft returned, beating up along the winding river bed. Kieran froze under the black trees and the hair lifted on his skin. For the first time he felt like a hunted thing. For the first time he felt a personal anger.

The patrol craft drummed away and vanished. “They won’t come back until daylight,” Webber said.

He handed out little flat packets of concentrated food from his pockets. They munched as they walked. Nobody said anything. The wind, which had dropped at sundown, picked up from a different quarter and began to blow again. It got cold. After a while they caught up with the people, who had stopped to rest and eat. The babies and old people for whom Kieran had felt a worried pity were in much better shape than he. He drank from the river and then sat down. Paula and Webber sat beside him, on the ground. The wind blew hard from the desert, dry and chill. The trees thrashed overhead. Against the pale glimmer of the water Kieran could see naked bodies moving along the river’s edge, wading, bending, grubbing in the mud. Apparently they found things, for he could see that they were eating. Somewhere close by other people were stripping fruit or nuts from the trees. A man picked up a stone and pounded something with a cracking noise, then dropped the stone again. They moved easily in the dark, as though they were used to it. Kieran recognized the leader’s yellow-eyed daughter, her beautiful slender height outlined against the pale-gleaming water. She stood up to her ankles in the soft mud, holding something tight in her two hands, eating.

The sweat dried on Kieran. He began to shiver.

“You’re sure that patrol ship won’t come back?” he asked.

“Not until they can see what they’re looking for.”

“Then I guess it’s safe.” He began to scramble around, feeling for dried sticks.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting some firewood.”

“No.” Paula was beside him in an instant, her hand on his arm, “No, you mustn’t do that.”

“But Webber said—”

“It isn’t the patrol ship, Kieran. It’s the people. They—”

“They what?”

“I told you they were low on the social scale. This is one of the basic things they have to be taught. Right now they still regard fire as a danger, something to run from.”

“I see,” Kieran said, and let the kindling fall. “Very well, if I can’t have a fire, I’ll have you. Your body will warm me.” He pulled her into his arms.

She gasped, more in astonishment, he thought, than alarm. “What are you talking about?”

“That’s a line from an old movie. From a number of old movies, in fact. Not bad, eh?”

He held her tight. She was definitely female. After a moment he pushed her away.

“That was a mistake. I want to be able to go on disliking you without any qualifying considerations.”

She laughed, a curiously flat little sound. “Was everybody crazy in your day?” she asked. And then, “Reed—”

It was the first time she had used his given name. “What?”

“When they threw the stones, and we got back into the flitter, you pushed me ahead of you. You were guarding me. Why?”

He stared at her, or rather at the pale blur of her standing close to him. “Well, it’s always been sort of the custom for the men to— But now that I think of it, Webber didn’t bother.”

“No,” said Paula. “Back in your day women were still taking advantage of the dual standard—demanding complete equality with men but clinging to their special status. We’ve got beyond that.”

“Do you like it? Beyond, I mean.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was good of you to do that, but—”

Webber said, “They’re moving again. Come on.”

The people walked this time, strung out in a long line between the trees and the water, where the light was a little better and the way more open. The three outlanders tagged behind, clumsy in their boots and clothing. The long hair of the people blew in the wind and their bare feet padded softly, light and swift.

Kieran looked up at the sky. The trees obscured much of it so that all he could see was some scattered stars overhead. But he thought that somewhere a moon was rising.

He asked Paula and she said, “Wait. You’ll see.”

Night and the river rolled behind them. The moonlight became brighter, but it was not at all like the moonlight Kieran remembered from long ago and far away. That had had a cold tranquility to it, but this light was neither cold nor tranquil. It seemed somehow to shift color, too, which made it even less adequate for seeing than the white moonlight he was used to. Sometimes as it filtered through the trees it seemed, ice-green, and again it was reddish or amber, or blue.

They came to a place where the river made a wide bend and they cut across it, clear of the trees. Paula touched Kieran’s arm and pointed. “Look.”

Kieran looked, and then he stopped still. The light was not moonlight, and its source was not a moon. It was a globular cluster of stars, hung in the sky like a swarm of fiery bees, a burning and pulsing of many colors, diamond-white and gold, green and crimson, peacock blue and smoky umber. Kieran stared, and beside him Paula murmured, “I’ve been on a lot of planets, but none of them have anything like this.”

The people moved swiftly on, paying no attention at all to the sky.

Reluctantly Kieran followed them into the obscuring woods. He kept looking at the open sky above the river, waiting for the cluster to rise high so he could see it.

It was some time after this, but before the cluster rose clear of the trees, that Kieran got the feeling that something, or someone, was following them.

CHAPTER 7

He had stopped to catch his breath and shake an accumulation of sand out of his boots. He was leaning against a tree with his back to the wind, which meant that he was facing their back-trail, and he thought he saw a shadow move where there was nothing to cast a shadow. He straightened up with the little trip-hammers of alarm beating all over him, but he could see nothing more. He thought he might have been mistaken. Just the same, he ran to catch up with the others.

The people were moving steadily. Kieran knew that their senses were far keener than his, and they were obviously not aware of any danger other than the basic one of the Sakae. He decided that he must have been seeing things.

But an uneasiness persisted. He dropped behind again, this time on purpose, after they had passed a clearing. He stayed hidden behind a tree-trunk and watched. The cluster-light was bright now but very confusing to the eye. He heard a rustling that he did not think was wind, and he thought that something started to cross the clearing and then stopped, as though it had caught his scent.

Then he thought that he heard rustlings at both sides of the clearing, stealthy sounds of stalking that closed in toward him. Only the wind, he told himself, but again he turned to run. This time he met Paula, coming back to look for him.

“Reed, are you all right?” she asked. He caught her arm and pulled her around and made her run. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.” He hurried with her until he could see Webber ahead, and beyond him the bare backs and blowing hair of the people. “Listen,” he said, “are there any predators here?”

“Yes,” Paula said, and Webber turned sharply around.

“Have you seen something?”

“I don’t know. I thought I did. I’m not sure.”

“Where?”

“Behind us.”

Webber made the harsh barking danger call, and the people stopped. Webber stood looking back the way they had come. The women caught the children and the men fell back to where Webber stood. They looked and listened, sniffing the air. Kieran listened too, but now he did not hear any rustlings except the high thrashing of the branches. Nothing stirred visibly and the wind would carry away any warning scent.

The men turned away. The people moved on again. Webber shrugged.

“You must have been mistaken, Kieran.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they just can’t think beyond the elementary. If they don’t smell it, it isn’t there. If something is after us it’s coming up-wind, the way any hunting animal works. A couple of the men ought to circle around and—”

“Come on,” said Webber wearily.

They followed the people beside the river. The cluster was high now, a hive of suns reflected in the flowing water, a kaleidoscopic rippling of colors.

Now the women were carrying the smaller children. The ones too large to be carried were lagging behind a little. So were the aged. Not much, yet. Kieran, conscious that he was weaker than the weakest of these, looked ahead at the dim bulk of the mountains and thought that they ought to be able to make it. He was not at all sure that he would.

The river made another bend. The trail lay across the bend, clear of the trees. It was a wide bend, perhaps two miles across the neck. Ahead, where the trail joined the river again, there was a rocky hill. Something about the outlines of the hill seemed wrong to Kieran, but it was too far away to be sure of anything. Overhead the cluster burned gloriously. The people set out across the sand.

Webber looked back. “You see?” he said. “Nothing.”

They went on. Kieran was beginning to feel very tired now, all the artificial strength that had been pumped into him before his awakening was running out. Webber and Paula walked with their heads down, striding determinedly but without joy.

“What do you think now?” she asked Kieran. “Is this any way for humans to live?”

The ragged line of women and children moved ahead of them, with the men in the lead. It was not natural, Kieran thought, for children to be able to travel so far, and then he remembered that the young of non-predacious species have to be strong and fleet at an early age.

Suddenly one of the women made a harsh, shrill cry.

Kieran looked where she was looking, off to the left, to the river and the curving line of trees. A large black shadow slipped across the sand. He looked behind him. There were other shadows, coming with long easy bounds out of the trees, fanning out in a shallow crescent. They reminded Kieran of some animal he had once seen in a zoo, a partly catlike, partly doglike beast, a cheetah he thought it had been called, only the cheetah was spotted like a leopard and these creatures were black, with stiff, upstanding ears. They bayed, and the coursing began.

“Nothing,” said Kieran bitterly. “I count seven.”

Webber said, “My God, I—”

The people ran. They tried to break back to the river and the trees that could be climbed to safety, but the hunters turned them. Then they fled blindly forward, toward the hill. They ran with all their strength, making no sound. Kieran and Webber ran with them, with Paula between them. Webber seemed absolutely appalled.

“Where’s that gun you had?” Kieran panted.

“It’s not a gun, only a short-range shocker,” he said. “It wouldn’t stop these things. Look at them!”

They bounded, sporting around them, howling with a sound like laughter. They were as large as leopards and their eyes glowed in the cluster-light. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, as though hunting was the most delightful game in the world. One of them ran up to within two feet of Kieran and snapped at him with its great jaws, dodging agilely when he raised his arm. They drove the people, faster and faster. At first the men had formed around the women and children. But the formation began to disintegrate as the weaker ones dropped behind, and no attempt was made to keep it. Panic was stronger than instinct now. Kieran looked ahead. “If we can make it to that hill—”

Paula screamed and he stumbled over a child, a girl about five, crawling on her hands and knees. He picked her up. She bit and thrashed and tore at him, her bare little body hard as whalebone and slippery with sweat. He could not hold onto her. She kicked herself free of his hands and rushed wildly out of reach, and one of the black hunters pounced in and bore her away, shrieking thinly like a fledgling bird in the jaws of a cat.

“Oh my God,” said Paula, and covered her head with her arms, trying to shut out sight and sound. He caught her and said harshly, “Don’t faint, because I can’t carry you.” The child’s mother, whichever of the women it might have been, did not look back.

An old woman who strayed aside was pulled down and dragged off, and then one of the white-haired men. The hill was closer. Kieran saw now what was wrong with it. Part of it was a building. He was too tired and too sick to be interested, except as it offered a refuge. He spoke to Webber, with great difficulty because he was winded. And then he realized that Webber wasn’t there.

Webber had stumbled and fallen. He had started to get up, but the hunters were on him. He was on his hands and knees facing them, screaming at them to get away from him. He had, obviously, had little or no experience with raw violence. Kieran ran back to him, with Paula close behind.

“Use your gun!” he yelled. He was afraid of the black hunters, but he was full of rage and the rage outweighed the fear. He yelled at them, cursing them. He hurled sand into their eyes, and one that was creeping up on Webber from the side he kicked. The creature drew off a little, not frightened but surprised. They were not used to this sort of thing from humans. “Your gun!” Kieran roared again, and Webber pulled the snub-nosed thing out of his pocket. He stood up and said unsteadily, “I told you, it’s not a gun. It won’t kill anything. I don’t think—”

“Use it,” said Kieran. “And get moving again. Slowly.”

They started to move, and then across the sky a great iron voice spoke like thunder. “Lie down,” it said, “please. Lie down flat.”

Kieran turned his head, startled. From the direction of the building on the hill a vehicle was speeding toward them.

“The Sakae,” said Webber with what was almost a sob of relief. “Lie down.”

As he did so, Kieran saw a pale flash shoot out from the vehicle and knock over a hunter still hanging on the flanks of the fleeing people. He hugged the sand. Something went whining and whistling over him, there was a thunk and a screech. It was repeated, and then the iron voice spoke again.

“You may get up now. Please remain where you are.” The vehicle was much closer. They were bathed in sudden light. The voice said, “Mr. Webber, you are holding a weapon. Please drop it.”

“It’s only a little shocker,” Webber said, plaintively. He dropped it.

The vehicle had wide tracks that threw up clouds of sand. It came clanking to a halt. Kieran, shading his eyes, thought he distinguished two creatures inside, a driver and a passenger.

The passenger emerged, climbing with some difficulty over the steep step of the track, his tail rattling down behind him like a length of thick cable. Once on the ground he became quite agile, moving with a sort of oddly graceful prance on his powerful legs. He approached, his attention centered on Kieran. But he observed the amenities, placing one delicate hand on his breast and making a slight bow.

“Doctor Ray.” His muzzle, shaped something like a duck’s bill, nevertheless formed Paula’s name tolerably well. “And you, I think, are Mr. Kieran.”

Kieran said, “Yes.” The star-cluster blazed overhead. The dead beasts lay behind him, the people with their flying hair had run on beyond his sight. He had been dead for a hundred years and now he was alive again. Now he was standing on alien soil, facing an alien form of life, communicating with it, and he was so dog-tired and every sensory nerve was so thoroughly flayed that he had nothing left to react with. He simply looked at the Saka as he might have looked at a fence-post, and said, “Yes.”

The Saka made his formal little bow again. “I am Bregg.” He shook his head. “I’m glad I was able to reach you in time. You people don’t seem to have any notion of the amount of trouble you make for us—”

Paula, who had not spoken since the child was carried off, suddenly screamed at Bregg, “Murderer!”

She sprang at him, striking him in blind hysteria.

CHAPTER 8

Bregg sighed. He caught Paula in those fine small hands that seemed to have amazing strength and held her, at arm’s length. “Doctor Ray,” he said. He shook her. “Doctor Ray.” She stopped screaming. “I don’t wish to administer a sedative because then you will say that I drugged you. But I will if I must.”

Kieran said, “I’ll keep her quiet.”

He took her from Bregg. She collapsed against him and began to cry. “Murderers,” she whispered. “That little girl, those old people—”

Webber said, “You could exterminate those beasts. You don’t have to let them hunt the people like that. It’s—it’s—”

“Unhuman is the word you want,” said Bregg. His voice was exceedingly weary. “Please get into the car.”

They climbed in. The car churned around and sped back toward the building. Paula shivered, and Kieran held her in his arms. Webber said after a moment or two, “How did you happen to be here, Bregg?”

“When we caught the flitter and found it empty, it was obvious that you were with the people, and it became imperative to find you before you came to harm. I remembered that the trail ran close by this old outpost building, so I had the patrol ship drop us here with an emergency vehicle.”

Kieran said, “You knew the people were coming this way?”

“Of course.” Bregg sounded surprised. “They migrate every year at the beginning of the dry season. How do you suppose Webber found them so easily?”

Kieran looked at Webber. He asked, “Then they weren’t running from the Sakae?”

“Of course they were,” Paula said. “You saw them yourself, cowering under the trees when the ship went over.”

“The patrol ships frighten them,” Bregg said. “Sometimes to the point of stampeding them, which is why we use them only in emergencies. The people do not connect the ships with us.”

“That,” said Paula flatly, “is a lie.”

Bregg sighed. “Enthusiasts always believe what they want to believe. Come and see for yourself.”

She straightened up. “What have you done to them?”

“We’ve caught them in a trap,” said Bregg, “and we are presently going to stick needles into them—a procedure necessitated by your presence, Doctor Ray. They’re highly susceptible to imported viruses, as you should remember—one of your little parties of do-gooders succeeded in wiping out a whole band of them not too many years ago. So—inoculations and quarantine.”

Lights had blazed up in the area near the building. The car sped toward them.

Kieran said slowly, “Why don’t you just exterminate the hunters and have done with them?”

“In your day, Mr. Kieran—yes, I’ve heard all about you—in your day, did you on Earth exterminate the predators so that their natural prey might live more happily?”

Bregg’s long muzzle and sloping skull were profiled against the lights.

“No,” said Kieran, “we didn’t. But in that case, they were all animals.”

“Exactly,” said Bregg. “No, wait, Doctor Ray. Spare me the lecture. I can give you a much better reason than that, one even you can’t quarrel with. It’s a matter of ecology. The number of humans destroyed by these predators annually is negligible but they do themselves destroy an enormous number of small creatures with which the humans compete for their food. If we exterminated the hunters the small animals would multiply so rapidly that the humans would starve to death.”

The car stopped beside the hill, at the edge of the lighted area. A sort of makeshift corral of wire fencing had been set up, with wide wings to funnel the people into the enclosure, where a gate was shut on them. Two Sakae were mounting guard as the party from the car approached the corral. Inside the fence Kieran could see the people, flopped around in positions of exhaustion. They did not seem to be afraid now. A few of them were drinking from a supply of water provided for them. There was food scattered for them on the ground.

Bregg said something in his own language to one of the guards, who looked surprised and questioned him, then departed, springing strongly on his powerful legs. “Wait,” said Bregg.

They waited, and in a moment or two the guard came back leading one of the black hunting beasts on a chain. It was a female, somewhat smaller than the ones Kieran had fought with, and having a slash of white on the throat and chest. She howled and sprang up on Bregg, butting her great head into his shoulder, wriggling with delight. He petted her, talking to her, and she laughed doglike and licked his cheek.

“They domesticate well,” he said. “We’ve had a tame breed for centuries.”

He moved a little closer to the corral, holding tight to the animal’s chain. Suddenly she became aware of the people. Instantly the good-natured pet turned into a snarling fury. She reared on her hind legs and screamed, and inside the corral the people roused up. They were not frightened now. They spat and chattered, clawing up sand and pebbles and bits of food to throw through the fence. Bregg handed the chain to the guard, who hauled the animal away by main force.

Paula said coldly, “If your point was that the people are not kind to animals, my answer is that you can hardly blame them.”

“A year ago,” Bregg said, “some of the people got hold of her two young ones. They were torn to pieces before they could be saved, and she saw it. I can’t blame her, either.”

He went on to the gate and opened it and went inside. The people drew back from him. They spat at him, too, and pelted him with food and pebbles. He spoke to them, sternly, in the tone of one speaking to unruly dogs, and he spoke words, in his own tongue. The people began to shuffle about uneasily. They stopped throwing things. He stood waiting.

The yellow-eyed girl came sidling forward and rubbed herself against his thigh, head, shoulder and flank. He reached down and stroked her, and she whimpered with pleasure and arched her back.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Kieran, “let’s get out of here.”

Later, they sat wearily on fallen blocks of cement inside a dusty, shadowy room of the old building. Only a hand-lamp dispelled the gloom, and the wind whispered coldly, and Bregg walked to and fro in his curious prance as he talked.

“It will be a little while before the necessary medical team can be picked up and brought here,” he said. “We shall have to wait.”

“And then?” asked Kieran.

“First to—” Bregg used a word that undoubtedly named a city of the Sakae but that meant nothing to Kieran, “—and then to Altair Two. This, of course, is a council matter.”

He stopped and looked with bright, shrewd eyes at Kieran. “You are quite the sensation already, Mr. Kieran. The whole community of starworlds is already aware of the illegal resuscitation of one of the pioneer spacemen, and of course there is great interest.” He paused. “You, yourself, have done nothing unlawful. You cannot very well be sent back to sleep, and undoubtedly the council will want to hear you. I am curious as to what you will say.”

“About Sako?” said Kieran. “About—them?” He made a gesture toward a window through which the wind brought the sound of stirring, of the gruntings and whufflings of the corralled people.

“Yes. About them.”

“I’ll tell you how I feel,” Kieran said flatly. He saw Paula and Webber lean forward in the shadows. “I’m a human man. The people out there may be savage, low as the beasts, good for nothing the way they are—but they’re human. You Sakae may be intelligent, civilized, reasonable, but you’re not human. When I see you ordering them around like beasts, I want to kill you. That’s how I feel.”

Bregg did not change his bearing, but he made a small sound that was almost a sigh.

“Yes,” he said. “I feared it would be so. A man of your times—a man from a world where humans were all-dominant—would feel that way.” He turned and looked at Paula and Webber. “It appears that your scheme, to this extent, was successful.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” said Kieran.

Paula stood up. “But you just told us how you feel—”

“And it’s the truth,” said Kieran. “But there’s something else.” He looked thoughtfully at her. “It was a good idea. It was bound to work—a man of my time was bound to feel just this way you wanted him to feel, and would go away from here crying your party slogans and believing them. But you overlooked something—”

He paused, looking out the window into the sky, at the faint vari-colored radiance of the cluster.

“You overlooked the fact that when you awoke me, I would no longer be a man of my own time—or of any time. I was in darkness for a hundred years—with the stars my brothers, and no man touching me. Maybe that chills a man’s feelings, maybe something deep in his mind lives and has time to think. I’ve told you how I feel, yes. But I haven’t told you what I think—”

He stopped again, then said, “The people out there in the corral have my form, and my instinctive loyalty is to them. But instinct isn’t enough. It would have kept us in the mud of Earth forever, if it could. Reason took us out to the wider universe. Instinct tells me that those out there are my people. Reason tells me that you—” he looked at Bregg, “—who are abhorrent to me, who would make my skin creep if I touched you, you who go by reason—that you are my real people. Instinct made a hell of Earth for millennia—I say we ought to leave it behind us there in the mud and not let it make a hell of the stars. For you’ll run into this same problem over and over again as you go out into the wider universe, and the old parochial human loyalties must be altered, to solve it.”

He looked at Paula and said, “I’m sorry, but if anyone asks me, that is what I’ll say.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said, rage and dejection ringing in her voice. “Sorry we woke you. I hope I never see you again.”

Kieran shrugged. “After all, you did wake me. You’re responsible for me. Here I am, facing a whole new universe, and I’ll need you.” He went over and patted her shoulder.

“Damn you,” she said. But she did not move away from him.

THE SARGASSO OF SPACE

C aptain Crain faced his crew calmly. “We may as well face the facts, men,” he said. “The ship’s fuel-tanks are empty and we are drifting through space toward the dead-area.”

The twenty-odd officers and men gathered on the middle-deck of the freighter Pallas made no answer, and Crain continued:

“We left Jupiter with full tanks, more than enough fuel to take us to Neptune. But the leaks in the starboard tanks lost us half our supply, and we had used the other half before discovering that. Since the ship’s rocket-tubes cannot operate without fuel, we are simply drifting. We would drift on to Neptune if the attraction of Uranus were not pulling us to the right. That attraction alters our course so that in three ship-days we shall drift into the dead-area.”

Rance Kent, first-officer of the Pallas, asked a question: “Couldn’t we, raise Neptune with the radio, sir, and have them send out a fuel-ship in time to reach us?”

“It’s impossible, Mr. Kent,” Crain answered. “Our main radio is dead without fuel to run its dynamotors, and our auxiliary set hasn’t the power to reach Neptune.”

“Why not abandon ship in the space-suits,” asked Liggett, the second-officer, “and trust to the chance of some ship picking us up?”

The captain shook his head. “It would be quite useless, for we’d simply drift on through space with the ship into the dead-area.”

The score of members of the crew, bronzed space-sailors out of every port in the solar system, had listened mutely. Now, one of them, a tall tube-man, stepped forward a little.

“Just what is this dead-area, sir?” he asked. “I’ve heard of it, but as this is my first outer-planet voyage, I know nothing about it.”

“I’ll admit I know little more,” said Liggett, “save that a good many disabled ships have drifted into it and have never come out.”

“The dead area,” Crain told them, “is a region of space ninety thousand miles across within Neptune’s orbit, in which the ordinary gravitational attractions of the solar system are dead. This is because in that region the pulls of the sun and the outer planets exactly balance each other. Because of that, anything in the dead-area, will stay in there until time ends, unless it has power of its own. Many wrecked spaceships have drifted into it at one time or another, none ever emerging; and it’s believed that there is a great mass of wrecks somewhere in the area, drawn and held together by mutual attraction.”

“And we’re drifting in to join them,” Kent said. “Some prospect!”

“Then there’s really no chance for us?” asked Liggett keenly.

Captain Crain thought. “As I see it, very little,” he admitted. “If our auxiliary radio can reach some nearby ship before the Pallas enters the dead-area, we’ll have a chance. But it seems a remote one.”

He addressed himself to the men: “I have laid the situation frankly before you because I consider you entitled to the truth. You must remember, however, that while there is life there is hope.

“There will be no change in ship routine, and the customary watches will be kept. Half-rations of food and water will be the rule from now on, though. That is all.”

As the men moved silently off, the captain looked after them with something of pride.

“They’re taking it like men,” he told Kent and Liggett. “It’s a pity there’s no way out for them and us.”

“If the Pallas does enter the dead-area and join the wreck-pack,” Liggett said, “how long will we be able to live?”

“Probably for some months on our present condensed air and food supplies,” Crain answered. “I would prefer, myself, a quicker end.”

“So would I,” said Kent. “Well, there’s nothing left but to pray for some kind of ship to cross our path in the next day or two.”

Kent’s prayers were not answered in the next ship-day, nor in the next. For, though one of the Pallas’ radio-operators was constantly at the instruments under Captain Crain’s orders, the weak calls of the auxiliary set raised no response.

Had they been on the Venus or Mars run, Kent told himself, there would be some chance, but out here in the vast spaces, between the outer planets, ships were fewer and farther between. The big, cigar-shaped freighter drifted helplessly on in a broad curve toward the dreaded area, the green light-speck of Neptune swinging to their left.

On the third ship-day Kent and Captain Crain stood in the pilot-house behind Liggett, who sat at the now useless rocket-tube controls. Their eyes were on the big glass screen of the gravograph. The black dot on it that represented their ship was crawling steadily toward the bright red circle that stood for the dead-area.…

They watched silently until the dot had crawled over the circle’s red line, heading toward its center.

“Well, we’re in at last,” Kent commented. “There seems to be no change in anything, either.”

Crain pointed to the instrument-panel. “Look at the gravitometers.”

Kent did. “All dead! No gravitational pull from any direction—no, that one shows a slight attraction from ahead!”

“Then gravitational attraction of some sort does exist in the dead-area after all!” Liggett exclaimed.

“You don’t understand,” said Crain. “That attraction from ahead is the pull of the wreck-pack at the dead-area’s center.”

“And it’s pulling the Pallas toward it?” Kent exclaimed.

Crain nodded. “We’ll probably reach the wreck-pack in two more ship-days.”

The next two ship-days seemed to Kent drawn out endlessly. A moody silence had grown upon the officers and men of the ship. All seemed oppressed by the strange forces of fate that had seized the ship and were carrying it, smoothly and soundlessly, into this region of irrevocable doom.

The radio-operators’ vain calls had ceased. The Pallas drifted on into the dreaded area like some dumb ship laden with damned souls. It drifted on, Kent told himself, as many a wrecked and disabled ship had done before it, with the ordinary activities and life of the solar system forever behind it, and mystery and death ahead.

It was toward the end of the second of those two ship-days that Liggett’s voice came down from the pilot-house:

“Wreck-pack in sight ahead!”

“We’ve arrived, anyway!” Kent cried, as he and Crain hastened up into the pilot house. The crew was running to the deck-windows.

“Right ahead there, about fifteen degrees left,” Liggett told Kent and Crain, pointing. “Do you see it?”

Kent stared; nodded. The wreck-pack was a distant, disk-like mass against the star-flecked heavens, a mass that glinted here and there in the feeble sunlight of space. It did not seem large, but, as they drifted steadily closer in the next hours, they saw that in reality the wreck-pack was tremendous, measuring at least fifty miles across.

Its huge mass was a heterogeneous heap, composed mostly of countless cigar-like spaceships in all stages of wreckage. Some appeared smashed almost out of all recognizable shape, while others were, to all appearances unharmed. They floated together in this dense mass in space, crowded against one another by their mutual attraction.

There seemed to be among them every type of ship known in the solar system, from small, swift mail-boats to big freighters. And, as they drifted nearer, the three in the pilot-house could see that around and between the ships of the wreck-pack floated much other matter—fragments of wreckage, meteors, small and large, and space-debris of every sort.

The Pallas was drifting, not straight toward the wreck-pack, but in a course that promised to take the ship past it.

“We’re not heading into the wreck-pack!” Liggett exclaimed. “Maybe we’ll drift past it, and on out the dead-area’s other side!”

Captain Crain smiled mirthlessly. “You’re forgetting your space-mechanics, Liggett. We will drift along the wreck-pack’s edge, and then will curve in and go round it in a closing spiral until we reach its edge.”

“Lord, who’d have thought there were so many wrecks here!” Kent marvelled. “There must be thousands of them!”

“They’ve been collecting here ever since the first interplanetary rocket-ships went forth,” Crain reminded him. “Not only meteor-wrecked ships, but ships whose mechanisms went wrong—or that ran out of fuel like ours—or that were captured and sacked, and then set adrift by space-pirates.”

The Pallas by then was drifting along the wreck-pack’s rim at a half-mile distance, and Kent’s eyes were running over the mass.

“Some of those ships look entirely undamaged. Why couldn’t we find one that has fuel in its tanks, transfer it to our own tanks, and get away?” he asked.

Crain’s eyes lit. “Kent, that’s a real chance! There must be some ships in that pack with fuel in them, and we can use the space-suits to explore for them!”

“Look, we’re beginning to curve in around the pack now!” Liggett exclaimed.

The Pallas, as though loath to pass the wreck-pack, was curving inward to follow its rim. In the next hours it continued to sail slowly around the great pack, approaching closer and closer to its edge.

In those hours Kent and Crain and all in the ship watched with a fascinated interest that even knowledge of their own peril could not kill. They could see swift-lined passenger-ships of the Pluto and Neptune runs shouldering against small space-yachts with the insignia of Mars or Venus on their bows. Wrecked freighters from Saturn or Earth floated beside rotund grain-boats from Jupiter.

The debris among the pack’s wrecks was just as varied, holding fragments of metal, dark meteors of differing size—and many human bodies. Among these were some clad in the insulated space-suits, with their transparent glassite helmets. Kent wondered what wreck they had abandoned hastily in those suits, only to be swept with it into the dead-area, to die in their suits.

By the end of that ship-day, the Pallas, having floated almost completely around the wreck-pack, finally struck the wrecks at its edge with a jarring shock; then bobbed for a while and lay still. From pilot-house and deck windows the men looked eagerly forth.

Their ship floated at the wreck-pack’s edge. Directly to its right floated a sleek, shining Uranus-Jupiter passenger-ship whose bows had been smashed in by a meteor. On their left bobbed an unmarked freighter of the old type with projecting rocket-tubes, apparently intact. Beyond them in the wreck-pack lay another Uranus craft, a freighter, and, beyond it, stretched the countless other wrecks.

Captain Crain summoned the crew together again on the middle-deck.

“Men, we’ve reached the wreck-pack at the dead-area’s center, and here we’ll stay until the end of time unless we get out under our own power. Mr. Kent has suggested a possible way of doing so, which I consider highly feasible.

“He has suggested that in some of the ships in the wreck-pack may be found enough fuel to enable us to escape from the dead-area, once it is transferred to this ship. I am going to permit him to explore the wreck-pack with a party in space suits, and I am asking for volunteers for this service.”

The entire crew stepped quickly forward. Crain smiled. “Twelve of you will be enough,” he told them. “The eight tube-men and four of the cargo-men will go, therefore, with Mr. Kent and Mr. Liggett as leaders. Mr. Kent, you may address the men if you wish.”

“Get down to the lower airlock and into your space-suits at once, then,” Kent told them. “Mr. Liggett, will you supervise that?”

As Liggett and the men trooped down to the airlock, Kent turned back toward his superior.

“There’s a very real chance of your becoming lost in this huge wreck-pack, Kent,” Crain told him: “so be very careful to keep your bearings at all times. I know I can depend on you.”

“I’ll do my best,” Kent was saying, when Liggett’s excited face reappeared suddenly at the stair.

“There are men coming toward the Pallas along the wreck-pack’s edge!” he reported—“a half-dozen men in space-suits!”

“You must be mistaken, Liggett!” exclaimed Crain. “They must be some of the bodies in space-suits we saw in the pack.”

“No, they’re living men!” Liggett cried. “They’re coming straight toward us—come down and see!”

Crain and Kent followed Liggett quickly down to the airlock room, where the men who had started donning their space-suits were now peering excitedly from the windows. Crain and Kent looked where Liggett pointed, along the wreck-pack’s edge to the ship’s right.

Six floating shapes, men in space-suits, were approaching along the pack’s border. They floated smoothly through space, reaching the wrecked passenger-ship beside the Pallas. They braced their feet against its side and propelled themselves on through the void like swimmers under water, toward the Pallas.

“They must be survivors from some wreck that drifted in here as we did!” Kent exclaimed. “Maybe they’ve lived here for months!”

“It’s evident that they saw the Pallas drift into the pack, and have come to investigate,” Crain estimated. “Open the airlock for them, men, for they’ll want to come inside.”

Two of the men spun the wheels that slid aside the airlock’s outer door. In a moment the half-dozen men outside had reached the ship’s side, and had pulled themselves down inside the airlock.

When all were in, the outer door was closed, and air hissed in to fill the lock. The airlock’s inner door then slid open and the newcomers stepped into the ship’s interior, unscrewing their transparent helmets as they did so. For a few moments the visitors silently surveyed their new surroundings.

Their leader was a swarthy individual with sardonic black eyes who, on noticing Crain’s captain-insignia, came toward him with outstretched hand. His followers seemed to be cargo-men or deck-men, looking hardly intelligent enough to Kent’s eyes to be tube-men.

“Welcome to our city!” their leader exclaimed as he shook Crain’s hand. “We saw your ship drift in, but hardly expected to find anyone living in it.”

“I’ll confess that we’re surprised ourselves to find any life here,” Crain told him. “You’re living on one of the wrecks?”

The other nodded. “Yes, on the Martian Queen, a quarter-mile along the pack’s edge. It was a Saturn-Neptune passenger ship, and about a month ago we were at this cursed dead-area’s edge, when half our rocket-tubes exploded. Eighteen of us escaped the explosion, the ship’s walls still being tight; and we drifted into the pack here, and have been living here ever since.”

“My name’s Krell,” he added, “and I was a tube-man on the ship. I and another of the tube-men, named Jandron, were the highest in rank left, all the officers and other tube-men having been killed, so we took charge and have been keeping order.”

“What about your passengers?” Liggett asked.

“All killed but one,” Krell answered. “When the tubes let go they smashed up the whole lower two decks.”

Crain briefly explained to him the Pallas’ predicament. “Mr. Kent and Mr. Liggett were on the point of starting a search of the wreck-pack for fuel when you arrived,” he said, “With enough fuel we can get clear of the dead-area.”

Krell’s eyes lit up. “That would mean a getaway for all of us! It surely ought to be possible!”

“Do you know whether there are any ships in the pack with fuel in their tanks?” Kent asked. Krell shook his head.

“We’ve searched through the wreck-pack a good bit, but never bothered about fuel, it being no good to us. But there ought to be some, at least: there’s enough wrecks in this cursed place to make it possible to find almost anything.

“You’d better not start exploring, though,” he added, “without some of us along as guides, for I’m here to tell you that you can lose yourself in this wreck-pack without knowing it. If you wait until tomorrow, I’ll come over myself and go with you.”

“I think that would be wise,” Crain said to Kent. “There is plenty of time.”

“Time is the one thing there’s plenty of in this damned place,” Krell agreed. “We’ll be getting back to the Martian Queen now and give the good news to Jandron and the rest.”

“Wouldn’t mind if Liggett and I came along, would you?” Kent asked. “I’d like to see how your ship’s fixed—that is, if it’s all right with you, sir,” he added to his superior.

Crain nodded. “All right if you don’t stay long,” he said. But, to Kent’s surprise Krell seemed reluctant to endorse his proposal.

“I guess it’ll be all right,” he said slowly, “though there’s nothing much on the Martian Queen to see.”

Krell and his followers replaced their helmets and returned into the airlock. Liggett followed them, and, as Kent struggled hastily into a space-suit, he found Captain Crain at his side.

“Kent, look sharp when you get over on that ship,” Crain told him. “I don’t like the look of this Krell, and his story about all the officers being killed in the explosion sounds fishy to me.”

“To me, too,” Kent agreed. “But Liggett and I will have the suit-phones in our space-suits and can call you from there in case of need.”

Crain nodded, and Kent with space-suit on and transparent helmet screwed tight, stepped into the airlock with the rest. The airlock’s inner door closed, the outer one opened, and as the air puffed out into space, Kent and Krell and Liggett leapt out into the void, the others following.

It was no novelty to Kent to float in a space-suit in the empty void. He and the others now floated as smoothly as though under water toward a wrecked liner at the Pallas’ right. They reached it, pulled themselves around it, and, with feet braced against its side, propelled themselves on through space along the border of the wreck-pack.

They passed a half-dozen wrecks thus, before coming to the Martian Queen. It was a silvery, glistening ship whose stern and lower walls were bulging and strained, but not cracked. Kent told himself that Krell had spoken truth about the exploding rocket-tubes, at least.

They struck the Martian Queen’s side and entered the upper-airlock open for them. Once through the airlock they found themselves on the ship’s upper-deck. And when Kent and Liggett removed their helmets with the others they found a full dozen men confronting them, a brutal-faced group who exhibited some surprise at sight of them.

Foremost among them stood a tall, heavy individual who regarded Kent and Liggett with the cold, suspicious eyes of an animal.

“My comrade and fellow-ruler here, Wald Jandron,” said Krell. To Jandron he explained rapidly. “The whole crew of the Pallas is alive, and they say if they can find fuel in the wreck-pack their ship can get out of here.”

“Good,” grunted Jandron. “The sooner they can do it, the better it will be for us.”

Kent saw Liggett flush angrily, but he ignored Jandron and spoke to Krell. “You said one of your passengers had escaped the explosion?”

To Kent’s amazement a girl stepped from behind the group of men, a slim girl with pale face and steady, dark eyes. “I’m the passenger,” she told him. “My name’s Marta Mallen.”

Kent and Liggett stared, astounded. “Good Lord!” Kent exclaimed. “A girl like you on this ship!”

“Miss Mallen happened to be on the upper-deck at the time of the explosion and, so, escaped when the other passengers were killed,” Krell explained smoothly. “Isn’t that so, Miss Mallen?”

The girl’s eyes had not left Kent’s, but at Krell’s words she nodded. “Yes, that is so,” she said mechanically.

Kent collected his whirling thoughts. “But wouldn’t you rather go back to the Pallas with us?” he asked. “I’m sure you’d be more comfortable there.”

“She doesn’t go,” grunted Jandron. Kent turned in quick wrath toward him, but Krell intervened.

“Jandron only means that Miss Mallen is much more comfortable on this passenger-ship than she’d be in your freighter.” He shot a glance at the girl as he spoke, and Kent saw her wince.

“I’m afraid that’s so,” she said; “but I thank you for the offer, Mr. Kent.”

Kent could have sworn that there was an appeal in her eyes, and he stood for a moment, indecisive, Jandron’s stare upon him. After a moment’s thought he turned to Krell.

“You were going to show me the damage the exploding tubes did,” he said, and Krell nodded quickly.

“Of course; you can see from the head of the stair back in the after-deck.”

He led the way along a corridor, Jandron and the girl and two of the men coming with them. Kent’s thoughts were still chaotic as he walked between Krell and Liggett. What was this girl doing amid the men of the Martian Queen? What had her eyes tried to tell him?

Liggett nudged his side in the dim corridor, and Kent, looking down, saw dark splotches on its metal floor. Blood-stains! His suspicions strengthened. They might be from the bleeding of those wounded in the tube-explosions. But were they?

They reached the after-deck whose stair’s head gave a view of the wrecked tube-rooms beneath. The lower decks had been smashed by terrific forces. Kent’s practiced eyes ran rapidly over the shattered rocket-tubes.

“They’ve back-blasted from being fired too fast,” he said. “Who was controlling the ship when this happened?”

“Galling, our second-officer,” answered Krell. “He had found us routed too close to the dead-area’s edge and was trying to get away from it in a hurry, when he used the tubes too fast, and half of them back-blasted.”

“If Galling was at the controls in the pilot-house, how did the explosion kill him?” asked Liggett skeptically. Krell turned quickly.

“The shock threw him against the pilot-house wall and fractured his skull—he died in an hour,” he said. Liggett was silent.

“Well, this ship will never move again,” Kent said. “It’s too bad that the explosion blew out your tanks, but we ought to find fuel somewhere in the wreck-pack for the Pallas. And now we’d best get back.”

As they returned up the dim corridor Kent managed to walk beside Marta Mallen, and, without being seen, he contrived to detach his suit-phone—the compact little radiophone case inside his space-suit’s neck—and slip it into the girl’s grasp. He dared utter no word of explanation, but apparently she understood, for she had concealed the suit-phone by the time they reached the upper-deck.

Kent and Liggett prepared to don their space-helmets, and before entering the airlock, Kent turned to Krell.

“We’ll expect you at the Pallas first hour tomorrow, and we’ll start searching the wreck-pack with a dozen of our men,” he said.

He then extended his hand to the girl. “Good-by, Miss Mallen. I hope we can have a talk soon.”

He had said the words with double meaning, and saw understanding in her eyes. “I hope we can, too,” she said.

Kent’s nod to Jandron went unanswered, and he and Liggett adjusted their helmets and entered the airlock.

Once out of it, they kicked rapidly away from the Martian Queen, floating along with the wreck-pack’s huge mass to their right, and only the star-flecked emptiness of infinity to their left. In a few minutes they reached the airlock of the Pallas.

They found Captain Crain awaiting them anxiously. Briefly Kent reported everything.

“I’m certain there has been foul play aboard the Martian Queen,” he said. “Krell you saw for yourself, Jandron is pure brute, and their men seem capable of anything.

“I gave the suit-phone to the girl, however, and if she can call us with it, we can get the truth from her. She dared not tell me anything there in the presence of Krell and Jandron.”

Crain nodded, his face grave. “We’ll see whether or not she calls,” he said.

Kent took a suit-phone from one of their space-suits and rapidly, tuned it to match the one he had left with Marta Mallen. Almost at once they heard her voice from it, and Kent answered rapidly.

“I’m so glad I got you!” she exclaimed. “Mr. Kent, I dared not tell you the truth about this ship when you were here, or Krell and the rest would have killed you at once.”

“I thought that was it, and that’s why I left the suit-phone for you,” Kent said. “Just what is the truth?”

“Krell and Jandron and these men of theirs are the ones who killed the officers and passengers of the Martian Queen! What they told you about the explosion was true enough, for the explosion did happen that way, and because of it, the ship drifted into the dead-area. But the only ones killed by it were some of the tube-men and three passengers.

“Then, while the ship was drifting into the dead-area, Krell told the men that the fewer aboard, the longer they could live on the ship’s food and air. Krell and Jandron led the men in a surprise attack and killed all the officers and passengers, and threw their bodies out into space. I was the only passenger they spared, because both Krell and Jandron—want me!”

There was a silence, and Kent felt a red anger rising in him. “Have they dared harm you?” he asked after a moment.

“No, for Krell and Jandron are too jealous of each other to permit the other to touch me. But it’s been terrible living with them in this awful place.”

“Ask her if she knows what their plans are in regard to us,” Crain told Kent.

Marta had apparently overheard the question. “I don’t know that, for they shut me in my cabin as soon as you left,” she said. “I’ve heard them talking and arguing excitedly, though. I know that if you do find fuel, they’ll try to kill you all and escape from here in your ship.”

“Pleasant prospect,” Kent commented. “Do you think they plan an attack on us now?”

“No; I think that they’ll wait until you’ve refueled your ship, if you are able to do that, and then try treachery.”

“Well, they’ll find us ready. Miss Mallen, you have the suit-phone: keep it hidden in your cabin and I’ll call you first thing tomorrow. We’re going to get you out of there, but we don’t want to break with Krell until we’re ready. Will you be all right until then?”

“Of course I will,” she answered. “There’s another thing, though. My name isn’t Miss Mallen—it’s Marta.”

“Mine’s Rance,” said Kent, smiling. “Good-by until tomorrow, then, Marta.”

“Good-by, Rance.”

Kent rose from the instrument with the smile still in his eyes, but with his lips compressed. “Damn it, there’s the bravest and finest girl in the solar system!” he exclaimed. “Over there with those brutes!”

“We’ll have her out, never fear,” Crain reassured him. “The main thing is to determine our course toward Krell and Jandron.”

Kent thought. “As I see it, Krell can help us immeasurably in our search through the wreck-pack for fuel,” he said. “I think it would be best to keep on good terms with him until we’ve found fuel and have it in our tanks. Then we can turn the tables on them before they can do anything.”

Crain nodded thoughtfully. “I think you’re right. Then you and Liggett and Krell can head our search-party tomorrow.”

Crain established watches on a new schedule, and Kent and Liggett and the dozen men chosen for the exploring party of the next day ate a scanty meal and turned in for some sleep.

When Kent woke and glimpsed the massed wrecks through the window he was for the moment amazed, but rapidly remembered. He and Liggett were finishing their morning ration when Crain pointed to a window.

“There comes Krell now,” he said, indicating the single space-suited figure approaching along the wreck-pack’s edge.

“I’ll call Marta before he gets here,” said Kent hastily.

The girl answered on the suit-phone immediately, and it occurred to Kent that she must have spent the night without sleeping. “Krell left a few minutes ago,” she said.

“Yes, he’s coming now. You heard nothing of their plans?”

“No; they’ve kept me shut in my cabin. However, I did hear Krell giving Jandron and the rest directions. I’m sure they’re plotting something.”

“We’re prepared for them,” Kent assured her. “If all goes well, before you realize it, you’ll be sailing out of here with us in the Pallas.”

“I hope so,” she said. “Rance, be careful with Krell in the wreck-pack. He’s dangerous.”

“I’ll be watching him,” he promised. “Good-by, Marta.”

Kent reached the lower-deck just as Krell entered from the airlock, his swarthy face smiling as he removed his helmet. He carried a pointed steel bar. Liggett and the others were donning their suits.

“All ready to go, Kent?” Krell asked.

Kent nodded. “All ready,” he said shortly. Since hearing Marta’s story he found it hard to dissimulate with Krell.

“You’ll want bars like mine,” Krell continued, “for they’re damned handy when you get jammed between wreckage masses. Exploring this wreck-pack is no soft job: I can tell you from experience.”

Liggett and the rest had their suits adjusted, and with bars in their grasp, followed Krell into the airlock. Kent hung back for a last word with Crain, who, with his half-dozen remaining men, was watching.

“Marta just told me that Krell and Jandron have been plotting something,” he told the captain; “so I’d keep a close watch outside.”

“Don’t worry, Kent. We’ll let no one inside the Pallas until you and Liggett and the men get back.”

In a few minutes they were out of the ship, with Krell and Kent and Liggett leading, and the twelve members of the Pallas’ crew following closely.

The three leaders climbed up on the Uranus-Jupiter passenger-ship that lay beside the Pallas, the others moving on and exploring the neighboring wrecks in parties of two and three. From the top of the passenger-ship, when they gained it, Kent and his two companions could look far out over the wreck-pack. It was an extraordinary spectacle, this stupendous mass of dead ships floating motionless in the depths of space, with the burning stars above and below them.

His companions and the other men clambering over the neighboring wrecks seemed weird figures in their bulky suits and transparent helmets. Kent looked back at the Pallas, and then along the wreck-pack’s edge to where he could glimpse the silvery side of the Martian Queen. But now Krell and Liggett were descending into the ship’s interior through the great opening smashed in its bows, and Kent followed.

They found themselves in the liner’s upper navigation-rooms. Officers and men lay about, frozen to death at the instant the meteor-struck vessel’s air had rushed out, and the cold of space had entered. Krell led the way on, down into the ship’s lower decks, where they found the bodies of the crew and passengers lying in the same silent death.

The salons held beautifully-dressed women, distinguished-looking men, lying about as the meteor’s shock had hurled them. One group lay around a card-table, their game interrupted. A woman still held a small child, both seemingly asleep. Kent tried to shake off the oppression he felt as he and Krell and Liggett continued down to the tank-rooms.

They found their quest there useless, for the tanks had been strained by the meteor’s shock, and were empty. Kent felt Liggett grasp his hand and heard him speak, the sound-vibrations coming through their contacting suits.

“Nothing here; and we’ll find it much the same through all these wrecks, if I’m not wrong. Tanks always give at a shock.”

“There must be some ships with fuel still in them among all these,” Kent answered.

They climbed back, up to the ship’s top, and leapt off it toward a Jupiter freighter lying a little farther inside the pack. As they floated toward it, Kent saw their men moving on with them from ship to ship, progressing inward into the pack. Both Kent and Liggett kept Krell always ahead of them, knowing that a blow from his bar, shattering their glassite helmets, meant instant death. But Krell seemed quite intent on the search for fuel.

The big Jupiter freighter seemed intact from above, but, when they penetrated into it, they found its whole under-side blown away, apparently by an explosion of its tanks. They moved on to the next ship, a private space-yacht, small in size, but luxurious in fittings. It had been abandoned in space, its rocket-tubes burst and tanks strained.

They went on, working deeper into the wreck-pack. Kent almost forgot the paramount importance of their search in the fascination of it. They explored almost every known type of ship—freighters, liners, cold-storage boats, and grain-boats. Once Kent’s hopes ran high at sight of a fuel-ship, but it proved to be in ballast, its cargo-tanks empty and its own tanks and tubes apparently blown simultaneously.

Kent’s muscles ached from the arduous work of climbing over and exploring the wrecks. He and Liggett had become accustomed to the sight of frozen, motionless bodies.

As they worked deeper into the pack, they noticed that the ships were of increasingly older types, and at last Krell signalled a halt. “We’re almost a mile in,” he told them, gripping their hands. “We’d better work back out, taking a different section of the pack as we do.”

Kent nodded. “It may change our luck,” he said.

It did; for when they had gone not more than a half-mile back, they glimpsed one of their men waving excitedly from the top of a Pluto liner.

They hastened at once toward him, the other men gathering also; and when Kent grasped the man’s hand he heard his excited voice.

“Fuel-tanks here are more than half-full, sir!”

They descended quickly into the liner, finding that though its whole stern had been sheared away by a meteor, its tanks had remained miraculously unstrained.

“Enough fuel here to take the Pallas to Neptune!” Kent exclaimed.

“How will you get it over to your ship?” Krell asked. Kent pointed to great reels of flexible metal tubing hanging near the tanks.

“We’ll pump it over. The Pallas has tubing like this ship’s, for taking on fuel in space, and, by joining its tubing to this, we’ll have a tube-line between the two ships. It’s hardly more than a quarter-mile.”

“Let’s get back and let them know about it,” Liggett urged, and they climbed back out of the liner.

They worked their way out of the wreck-pack with much greater speed than that with which they had entered, needing only an occasional brace against a ship’s side to send them floating over the wrecks. They came to the wreck-pack’s edge at a little distance from the Pallas, and hastened toward it.

They found the outer door of the Pallas’ airlock open, and entered, Krell remaining with them. As the outer door closed and air hissed into the lock, Kent and the rest removed their helmets. The inner door slid open as they were doing this, and from inside almost a score of men leapt upon them!

Kent, stunned for a moment, saw Jandron among their attackers, bellowing orders to them, and even as he struck out furiously he comprehended. Jandron and the men of the Martian Queen had somehow captured the Pallas from Crain and had been awaiting their return!

The struggle was almost instantly over, for, outnumbered and hampered as they were by their heavy space-suits, Kent and Liggett and their followers had no chance. Their hands, still in the suits, were bound quickly behind them at Jandron’s orders.

Kent heard an exclamation, and saw Marta starting toward him from behind Jandron’s men. But a sweep of Jandron’s arm brushed her rudely back. Kent strained madly at his bonds. Krell’s face had a triumphant look.

“Did it all work as I told you it would, Jandron?” he asked.

“It worked,” Jandron answered impassively. “When they saw fifteen of us coming from the wreck-pack in space-suits, they opened right up to us.”

Kent understood, and cursed Krell’s cunning. Crain, seeing the fifteen figures approaching from the wreck-pack, had naturally thought they were Kent’s party, and had let them enter to overwhelm his half-dozen men.

“We put Crain and his men over in the Martian Queen,” Jandron continued, “and took all their helmets so they can’t escape. The girl we brought over here. Did you find a wreck with fuel?”

Krell nodded. “A Pluto liner a quarter-mile back, and we can pump the fuel over here by connecting tube-lines. What the devil—”

Jandron had made a signal at which three of his men had leapt forward on Krell, securing his hands like those of the others.

“Have you gone crazy, Jandron?” cried Krell, his face red with anger and surprise.

“No,” Jandron replied impassively; “but the men are as tired as I am of your bossing ways, and have chosen me as their sole leader.”

“You dirty double-crosser!” Krell raged. “Are you men going to let him get away with this?”

The men paid no attention, and Jandron motioned to the airlock. “Take them over to the Martian Queen too,” he ordered, “and make sure there’s no space-helmet left there. Then get back at once, for we’ve got to get the fuel into this ship and make a getaway.”

The helmets of Kent and Krell and the other helpless prisoners were put upon them, and, with hands still bound, they were herded into the airlock by eight of Jandron’s men attired in space-suits also. The prisoners were then joined one to another by a strand of metal cable.

Kent, glancing back into the ship as the airlock’s inner door closed, saw Jandron giving rapid orders to his followers, and noticed Marta held back from the airlock by one of them. Krell’s eyes glittered venomously through his helmet. The outer door opened, and their guards jerked them forth into space by the connecting cable.

They were towed helplessly along the wreck-pack’s rim toward the Martian Queen. Once inside its airlock, Jandron’s men removed the prisoners’ space-helmets and then used the duplicate-control inside the airlock itself to open the inner door. Through this opening they thrust the captives, those inside the ship not daring to enter the airlock. Jandron’s men then closed the inner door, re-opened the outer one, and started back toward the Pallas with the helmets of Kent and his companions.

Kent and the others soon found Crain and his half-dozen men who rapidly undid their bonds. Crain’s men still wore their space-suits, but, like Kent’s companions, were without space-helmets.

“Kent, I was afraid they’d get you and your men too!” Crain exclaimed. “It’s all my fault, for when I saw Jandron and his men coming from the wreck-pack I never doubted but that it was you.”

“It’s no one’s fault,” Kent told him. “It’s just something that we couldn’t foresee.”

Crain’s eyes fell on Krell. “But what’s he doing here?” he exclaimed. Kent briefly explained Jandron’s treachery toward Krell, and Crain’s brows drew ominously together.

“So Jandron put you here with us! Krell, I am a commissioned captain of a spaceship, and as such can legally try you and sentence you to death here without further formalities.”

Krell did not answer, but Kent intervened. “There’s hardly time for that now, sir,” he said. “I’m as anxious to settle with Krell as anyone, but right now our main enemy is Jandron, and Krell hates Jandron worse than we do, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not,” said Krell grimly. “All I want right now is to get within reach of Jandron.”

“There’s small chance of any of us doing that,” Crain told them. “There’s not a single space-helmet on the Martian Queen.”

“You’ve searched?” Liggett asked.

“Every cubic inch of the ship,” Crain told him. “No, Jandron’s men made sure there were no helmets left here, and without helmets this ship is an inescapable prison.”

“Damn it, there must be some way out!” Kent exclaimed. “Why, Jandron and his men must be starting to pump that fuel into the Pallas by now! They’ll be sailing off as soon as they do it!”

Crain’s face was sad. “I’m afraid this is the end, Kent. Without helmets, the space between the Martian Queen and the Pallas is a greater barrier to us than a mile-thick wall of steel. In this ship we’ll stay, until the air and food give out, and death releases us.”

“Damn it, I’m not thinking of myself!” Kent cried. “I’m thinking of Marta! The Pallas will sail out of here with her in Jandron’s power!”

“The girl!” Liggett exclaimed. “If she could bring us over space-helmets from the Pallas we could get out of here!”

Kent was thoughtful. “If we could talk to her—she must still have that suit-phone I gave her. Where’s another?”

Crain quickly detached the compact suit-phone from inside the neck of his own space-suit, and Kent rapidly tuned it to the one he had given Marta Mallen. His heart leapt as her voice came instantly from it:

“Rance! Rance Kent—”

“Marta—this is Rance!” he cried.

He heard a sob of relief. “I’ve been calling you for minutes! I was hoping that you’d remember to listen!

“Jandron and ten of the others have gone to that wreck in which you found the fuel,” she added swiftly. “They unreeled a tube-line behind them as they went, and I can hear them pumping in the fuel now.”

“Are the others guarding you?” Kent asked quickly.

“They’re down in the lower deck at the tanks and airlocks. They won’t allow me down on that deck. I’m up here in the middle-deck, absolutely alone.

“Jandron told me that we’d start out of here as soon as the fuel was in,” she added, “and he and the men were laughing about Krell.”

“Marta, could you in any way get space-helmets and get out to bring them over here to us?” Kent asked eagerly.

“There’s a lot of space-suits and helmets here,” she answered, “but I couldn’t get out with them, Rance! I couldn’t get to the airlocks with Jandron’s seven or eight men down there guarding them!”

Kent felt despair; then as an idea suddenly flamed in him, he almost shouted into the instrument:

“Marta, unless you can get over here with helmets for us, we’re all lost. I want you to put on a space-suit and helmet at once!”

There was a short silence, and then her voice came, a little muffled. “I’ve got the suit and helmet on, Rance. I’m wearing the suit-phone inside it.”

“Good! Now, can you get up to the pilot-house? There’s no one guarding it or the upper-deck? Hurry up there, then, at once.”

Crain and the rest were staring at Kent. “Kent, what are you going to have her do?” Crain exclaimed. “It’ll do no good for her to start the Pallas: those guards will be up there in a minute!”

“I’m not going to have her start the Pallas,” said Kent grimly. “Marta, you’re in the pilot-house? Do you see the heavy little steel door in the wall beside the instrument-panel?”

“I’m at it, but it’s locked with a combination-lock,” she said.

“The combination is 6–34–77–81,” Kent told her swiftly. “Open it as quickly as you can.”

“Good God, Kent!” cried Crain. “You’re going to have her—?”

“Get out of there the only way she can!” Kent finished fiercely. “You have the door open, Marta?”

“Yes; there are six or seven control-wheels inside.”

“Those wheels control the Pallas’ exhaust-valves,” Kent told her. “Each wheel opens the valves of one of the ship’s decks or compartments and allows its air to escape into space. They’re used for testing leaks in the different deck and compartment divisions. Marta, you must turn all those wheels as far as you can to the right.”

“But all the ship’s air will rush out; the guards below have no suits on, and they’ll be—” she was exclaiming. Kent interrupted.

“It’s the only chance for you, for all of us. Turn them!”

There was a moment of silence, and Kent was going to repeat the order when her voice came, lower in tone, a little strange:

“I understand, Rance. I’m going to turn them.”

There was silence again, and Kent and the men grouped round him were tense. All were envisioning the same thing—the air rushing out of the Pallas’ valves, and the unsuspecting guards in its lower deck smitten suddenly by an instantaneous death.

Then Marta’s voice, almost a sob: “I turned them, Rance. The air puffed out all around me.”

“Your space-suit is working all right?”

“Perfectly,” she said.

“Then go down and tie together as many space-helmets as you can manage, get out of the airlock, and try to get over here to the Martian Queen with them. Do you think you can do that, Marta?”

“I’m going to try,” she said steadily. “But I’ll have to pass those men in the lower-deck I just—killed. Don’t be anxious if I don’t talk for a little.”

Yet her voice came again almost immediately. “Rance, the pumping has stopped! They must have pumped all the fuel into the Pallas!”

“Then Jandron and the rest will be coming back to the Pallas at once!” Kent cried. “Hurry, Marta!”

The suit-phone was silent; and Kent and the rest, their faces closely pressed against the deck-windows, peered intently along the wreck-pack’s edge. The Pallas was hidden from their view by the wrecks between, and there was no sign as yet of the girl.

Kent felt his heart beating rapidly. Crain and Liggett pressed beside him, the men around them; Krell’s face was a mask as he too gazed. Kent was rapidly becoming convinced that some mischance had overtaken the girl when an exclamation came from Liggett. He pointed excitedly.

She was in sight, unrecognizable in space-suit and helmet, floating along the wreck-pack’s edge toward them. A mass of the glassite space-helmets tied together was in her grasp. She climbed bravely over the stern of a projecting wreck and shot on toward the Martian Queen.

The airlock’s door was open for her, and, when she was inside it, the outer door closed and air hissed into the lock. In a moment she was in among them, still clinging to the helmets. Kent grasped her swaying figure and removed her helmet.

“Marta, you’re all right?” he cried. She nodded a little weakly.

“I’m all right. It was just that I had to go over those guards that were all frozen.… Terrible!”

“Get these helmets on!” Crain was crying. “There’s a dozen of them, and twelve of us can stop Jandron’s men if we get back in time!”

Kent and Liggett and the nearer of their men were swiftly donning the helmets. Krell grasped one and Crain sought to snatch it.

“Let that go! We’ll not have you with us when we haven’t enough helmets for our own men!”

“You’ll have me or kill me here!” Krell cried, his eyes hate-mad. “I’ve got my own account to settle with Jandron!”

“Let him have it!” Liggett cried. “We’ve no time now to argue!”

Kent reached toward the girl. “Marta, give one of the men your helmet,” he ordered; but she shook her head.

“I’m going with you!” Before Kent could dispute she had the helmet on again, and Crain was pushing them into the airlock. The nine or ten left inside without helmets hastily thrust steel bars into the men’s hands before the inner door closed. The outer one opened and they leapt forth into space, floating smoothly along the wreck-pack’s border with bars in their grasp, thirteen strong.

Kent found the slowness with which they floated forward torturing. He glimpsed Crain and Liggett ahead, Marta beside him, Krell floating behind him to the left. They reached the projecting freighters, climbed over and around them, braced against them and shot on. They sighted the Pallas ahead now. Suddenly they discerned another group of eleven figures in space-suits approaching it from the wreck-pack’s interior, rolling up the tube-line that led from the Pallas as they did so. Jandron’s party!

Jandron and his men had seen them and were suddenly making greater efforts to reach the Pallas. Kent and his companions, propelling themselves frenziedly on from another wreck, reached the ship’s side at the same time as Jandron’s men. The two groups mixed and mingled, twisted and turned in a mad space-combat.

Kent had been grasped by one of Jandron’s men and raised his bar to crack the other’s glassite helmet. His opponent caught the bar, and they struggled, twisting and turning over and over far up in space amid a half-score similar struggles. Kent wrenched his bar free at last from the other’s grasp and brought it down on his helmet. The glassite cracked, and he caught a glimpse of the man’s hate-distorted face frozen instantly in death.

Kent released him and propelled himself toward a struggling trio nearby. As he floated toward them, he saw Jandron beyond them making wild gestures of command and saw Krell approaching Jandron with upraised bar. Kent, on reaching the three combatants, found them to be two of Jandron’s men overcoming Crain. He shattered one’s helmet as he reached them, but saw the other’s bar go up for a blow.

Kent twisted frantically, uselessly, to escape it, but before the blow could descend a bar shattered his opponent’s helmet from behind. As the man froze in instant death Kent saw that it was Marta who had struck him from behind. He jerked her to his side. The struggles in space around them seemed to be ending.

Six of Jandron’s party had been slain, and three of Kent’s companions. Jandron’s four other followers were giving up the combat, floating off into the wreck-pack in clumsy, hasty flight. Someone grasped Kent’s arm, and he turned to find it was Liggett.

“They’re beaten!” Liggett’s voice came to him! “They’re all killed but those four!”

“What about Jandron himself?” Kent cried. Liggett pointed to two space-suited bodies twisting together in space, with bars still in their lifeless grasp.

Kent saw through their shattered helmets the stiffened faces of Jandron and Krell, their helmets having apparently been broken by each other’s simultaneous blows.

Crain had gripped Kent’s arm also. “Kent, it’s over!” he was exclaiming. “Liggett and I will close the Pallas’ exhaust-valves and release new air in it. You take over helmets for the rest of our men in the Martian Queen.”

In several minutes Kent was back with the men from the Martian Queen. The Pallas was ready, with Liggett in its pilot-house, the men taking their stations, and Crain and Marta awaiting Kent.

“We’ve enough fuel to take us out of the dead-area and to Neptune without trouble!” Crain declared. “But what about those four of Jandron’s men that got away?”

“The best we can do is leave them here,” Kent told him. “Best for them, too, for at Neptune they’d be executed, while they can live indefinitely in the wreck-pack.”

“I’ve seen so many men killed on the Martian Queen and here,” pleaded Marta. “Please don’t take them to Neptune.”

“All right, we’ll leave them,” Crain agreed, “though the scoundrels ought to meet justice.” He hastened up to the pilot-house after Liggett.

In a moment came the familiar blast of the rocket-tubes, and the Pallas shot out cleanly from the wreck-pack’s edge. A scattered cheer came from the crew. With gathering speed the ship arrowed out, its rocket-tubes blasting now in steady succession.

Kent, with his arm across Marta’s shoulders, watched the wreck-pack grow smaller behind. It lay as when he first had seen it, a strange great mass, floating forever motionless among the brilliant stars. He felt the girl beside him shiver, and swung her quickly around.

“Let’s not look back or remember now, Marta!” he said. “Let’s look ahead.”

She nestled closer inside his arm. “Yes, Rance. Let’s look ahead.”

THE MAN WHO SAW THE FUTURE

Jean de Marselait, Inquisitor Extraordinary of the King of France, raised his head from the parchments that littered the crude desk at which he sat. His glance shifted along the long stone-walled, torchlit room to the file of mail-clad soldiers who stood like steel statues by its door. A word from him and two of them sprang forward.

“You may bring in the prisoner,” he said.

The two disappeared through the door, and in moments there came a clang of opening bolts and grating of heavy hinges from somewhere in the building. Then the clang of the returning soldiers, and they entered the room with another man between them whose hands were fettered.

He was a straight figure, and was dressed in drab tunic and hose. His dark hair was long and straight, and his face held a dreaming strength, altogether different from the battered visages of the soldiers or the changeless mask of the Inquisitor. The latter regarded the prisoner for a moment, and then lifted one of the parchments from before him and read from it in a smooth, clear voice.

“Henri Lothiere, apothecary’s assistant of Paris,” he read, “is charged in this year of our lord one thousand four hundred and forty-four with offending against God and the king by committing the crime of sorcery.”

The prisoner spoke for the first time, his voice low but steady. “I am no sorcerer, sire.”

Jean de Marselait read calmly on from the parchment. “It is stated by many witnesses that for long that part of Paris, called Nanley by some, has been troubled by works of the devil. Ever and anon great claps of thunder have been heard issuing from an open field there without visible cause. They were evidently caused by a sorcerer of power since even exorcists could not halt them.

“It is attested by many that the accused, Henri Lothiere, did in spite of the known diabolical nature of the thing, spend much time at the field in question. It is also attested that the said Henri Lothiere did state that in his opinion the thunderclaps were not of diabolical origin, and that if they were studied, their cause might be discovered.

“It being suspected from this that Henri Lothiere was himself the sorcerer causing the thunderclaps, he was watched and on the third day of June was seen to go in the early morning to the unholy spot with certain instruments. There he was observed going through strange and diabolical conjurations, when there came suddenly another thunderclap and the said Henri Lothiere did vanish entirely from view in that moment. This fact is attested beyond all doubt.

“The news spreading, many hundreds watched around the field during that day. Upon that night before midnight, another thunderclap was heard and the said Henri Lothiere was seen by these hundreds to appear at the field’s center as swiftly and as strangely as he had vanished. The fear-stricken hundreds around the field heard him tell them how, by diabolical power, he had gone for hundreds of years into the future, a thing surely possible only to the devil and his minions, and heard him tell other blasphemies before they seized him and brought him to the Inquisitor of the King, praying that he be burned and his work of sorcery thus halted.

“Therefore, Henri Lothiere, since you were seen to vanish and to reappear as only the servants of the evil one might do, and were heard by many to utter the blasphemies mentioned, I must adjudge you a sorcerer with the penalty of death by fire. If anything there be that you can advance in palliation of your black offense, however, you may now do so before final sentence is passed upon you.”

Jean de Marselait laid down the parchment, and raised his eyes to the prisoner. The latter looked round him quickly for a moment, a half-glimpsed panic for an instant in his eyes, then seemed to steady.

“Sire, I cannot change the sentence you will pass upon me,” he said quietly, “yet do I wish well to relate once, what happened to me and what I saw. Is it permitted me to tell that from first to last?”

The Inquisitor’s head bent, and Henri Lothiere spoke, his voice gaining in strength and fervor as he continued.

“Sire, I, Henri Lothiere, am no sorcerer but a simple apothecary’s assistant. It was always my nature, from earliest youth, to desire to delve into matters unknown to men; the secrets of the earth and sea and sky, the knowledge hidden from us. I knew well that this was wicked, that the Church teaches all we need to know and that heaven frowns when we pry into its mysteries, but so strong was my desire to know, that many times I concerned myself with matters forbidden.

“I had sought to know the nature of the lightning, and the manner of flight of the birds, and the way in which fishes are able to live beneath the waters, and the mystery of the stars. So when these thunderclaps began to be heard in the part of Paris in which I lived, I did not fear them so much as my neighbors. I was eager to learn only what was causing them, for it seemed to me that their cause might be learned.

“So I began to go to that field from which they issued, to study them. I waited in it and twice I heard the great thunderclaps myself. I thought they came from near the field’s center, and I studied that place. But I could see nothing there that was causing them. I dug in the ground, I looked up for hours into the sky, but there was nothing. And still, at intervals, the thunderclaps sounded.

“I still kept going to the field, though I knew that many of my neighbors whispered that I was engaged in sorcery. Upon that morning of the third day of June, it had occurred to me to take certain instruments, such as loadstones, to the field, to see whether anything might be learned with them. I went, a few superstitious ones following me at a distance. I reached the field’s center, and started the examinations I had planned. Then came suddenly another thunderclap and with it I passed from the sight of those who had followed and were watching, vanished from view.

“Sire, I cannot well describe what happened in that moment. I heard the thunderclap come as though from all the air around me, stunning my ears with its terrible burst of sound. And at the same moment that I heard it, I was buffeted as though by awful winds and seemed falling downward through terrific depths. Then through the hellish uproar, I felt myself bumping upon a hard surface, and the sounds quickly ceased from about me.

“I had involuntarily closed my eyes at the great thunderclap, but now, slowly, I opened them. I looked around me, first in stupefaction, and then in growing amazement. For I was not in that familiar field at all, sire, that I had been in a moment before. I was in a room, lying upon its floor, and it was such a room as I had never seen before.

“Its walls were smooth and white and gleaming. There were windows in the walls, and they were closed with sheets of glass so smooth and clear that one seemed looking through a clear opening rather than through glass. The floor was of stone, smooth and seamless as though carven from one great rock, yet seeming not, in some way, to be stone at all. There was a great circle of smooth metal inset in it, and it was on it that I was lying.

“All around the room were many great things the like of which I had never seen. Some seemed of black metal, seemed contrivances or machines of some sort. Black cords of wire connected them to each other and from part of them came a humming sound that did not stop. Others had glass tubes fixed on the front of them, and there were square black plates on which were many shining little handles and buttons.

“There was a sound of voices, and I turned to find that two men were bending over me. They were men like myself, yet they were at the same time like no men I had ever met! One was whitebearded and the other plump and bare of face. Neither of them wore cloak or tunic or hose. Instead they wore loose and straight-hanging garments of cloth.

“They were both greatly excited, it seemed, and were talking to each other as they bent over me. I caught a word or two of their speech in a moment, and found it was French they were talking. But it was not the French I knew, being so strange and with so many new words as to be almost a different language. I could understand the drift, though, of what they were saying.

“‘We have succeeded!’ the plump one was shouting excitedly. ‘We’ve brought someone through at last!’

“‘They will never believe it,’ the other replied. ‘They’ll say it was faked.’

“‘Nonsense!’ cried the first. ‘We can do it again, Rastin; we can show them before their own eyes!’

“They bent toward me, seeing me staring at them.

“‘Where are you from?’ shouted the plump-faced one. ‘What time—what year—what century?’

“‘He doesn’t understand, Thicourt,’ muttered the whitebearded one. ‘What year is this now, my friend?’ he asked me.

“I found voice to answer. ‘Surely, sirs, whoever you be, you know that this is the year fourteen hundred and forty-four,’ I said.

“That set them off again into a babble of excited talk, of which I could make out only a word here and there. They lifted me up, seeing how sick and weak I felt, and seated me in a strange, but very comfortable chair. I felt dazed. The two were still talking excitedly, but finally the whitebearded one, Rastin, turned to me. He spoke to me, very slowly, so that I understood him clearly, and he asked me my name. I told him.

“‘Henri Lothiere,’ he repeated. ‘Well, Henri, you must try to understand. You are not now in the year 1444. You are five hundred years in the future, or what would seem to you the future. This is the year 1944.’

“‘And Rastin and I have jerked you out of your own time across five solid centuries,’ said the other, grinning.

“I looked from one to the other. ‘Messieurs,’ I pleaded, and Rastin shook his head.

“‘He does not believe,’ he said to the other. Then to me, ‘Where were you just before you found yourself here, Henri?’ he asked.

“‘In a field at the outskirts of Paris,’ I said.

“‘Well, look from that window and see if you still believe yourself in your 15th-century Paris.’

“I went to the window. I looked out. Mother of God, what a sight before my eyes! The familiar gray little houses, the open fields behind them, the saunterers in the dirt streets—all these were gone and it was a new and terrible city that lay about me! Its broad streets were of stone and great buildings of many levels rose on either side of them. Great numbers of people, dressed like the two beside me, moved in the streets and also strange vehicles or carriages, undrawn by horse or ox, that rushed to and fro at undreamed-of speed! I staggered back to the chair.

“‘You believe now, Henri?’ asked the whitebeard, Rastin, kindly enough, and I nodded weakly. My brain was whirling.

“He pointed to the circle of metal on the floor and the machines around the room. ‘Those are what we used to jerk you from your own time to this one,’ he said.

“‘But how, sirs?’ I asked. ‘For the love of God, how is it that you can take me from one time to another? Have ye become gods or devils?’

“‘Neither the one nor the other, Henri,’ he answered. ‘We are simply scientists, physicists—men who want to know as much as man can know and who spend our lives in seeking knowledge.’

“I felt my confidence returning. These were men such as I had dreamed might some day be. ‘But what can you do with time?’ I asked. ‘Is not time a thing unalterable, unchanging?’

“Both shook their heads. ‘No, Henri, it is not. But lately have our men of science found that out.’

“They went on to tell me of things that I could not understand. It seemed they were telling that their men of knowledge had found time to be a mere measurement, or dimension, just as length or breadth or thickness. They mentioned names with reverence that I had never heard—Einstein and De Sitter and Lorentz. I was in a maze at their words.

“They said that just as men use force to move or rotate matter from one point along the three known measurements to another, so might matter be rotated from one point in time, the fourth measurement, to another, if the right force were used. They said that their machines produced that force and applied it to the metal circle from five hundred years before to this time of theirs.

“They had tried it many times, they said, but nothing had been on the spot at that time and they had rotated nothing but the air above it from the one time to the other, and the reverse. I told them of the thunderclaps that had been heard at the spot in the field and that had made me curious. They said that they had been caused by the changing of the air above the spot from the one time to the other in their trials. I could not understand these things.

“They said then that I had happened to be on the spot when they had again turned on their force and so had been rotated out of my own time into theirs. They said that they had always hoped to get someone living from a distant time in that way, since such a man would be a proof to all the other men of knowledge of what they had been able to do.

“I could not comprehend, and they saw and told me not to fear. I was not fearful, but excited at the things that I saw around me. I asked of those things and Rastin and Thicourt laughed and explained some of them to me as best they could. Much they said that I did not understand but my eyes saw marvels in that room of which I had never dreamed.

“They showed me a thing like a small glass bottle with wires inside, and then told me to touch a button beneath it. I did so and the bottle shone with a brilliant light exceeding that of scores of candles. I shrank back, but they laughed, and when Rastin touched the button again, the light in the glass thing vanished. I saw that there were many of these things in the ceiling.

“They showed me also a rounded black object of metal with a wheel at the end. A belt ran around the wheel and around smaller wheels connected to many machines. They touched a lever on this object and a sound of humming came from it and the wheel turned very fast, turning all the machines with the belt. It turned faster than any man could ever have turned it, yet when they touched the lever again, its turning ceased. They said that it was the power of the lightning in the skies that they used to make the light and to turn that wheel!

“My brain reeled at the wonders that they showed. One took an instrument from the table that he held to his face, saying that he would summon the other scientists or men of knowledge to see their experiment that night. He spoke into the instrument as though to different men, and let me hear voices from it answering him! They said that the men who answered were leagues separated from him!

“I could not believe—and yet somehow I did believe! I was half-dazed with wonder and yet excited too. The whitebearded man, Rastin, saw that, and encouraged me. Then they brought a small box with an opening and placed a black disk on the box, and set it turning in some way. A woman’s voice came from the opening of the box, singing. I shuddered when they told me that the woman was one who had died years before. Could the dead speak thus?

“How can I describe what I saw there? Another box or cabinet there was, with an opening also. I thought it was like that from which I had heard the dead woman singing, but they said it was different. They touched buttons on it and a voice came from it speaking in a tongue I knew not. They said that the man was speaking thousands of leagues from us, in a strange land across the uncrossed western ocean, yet he seemed speaking by my side!

“They saw how dazed I was by these things, and gave me wine. At that I took heart, for wine, at least, was as it had always been.

“‘You will want to see Paris—the Paris of our time, Henri?’ asked Rastin.

“‘But it is different—terrible—’ I said.

“‘We’ll take you,’ Thicourt said, ‘but first your clothes—’

“He got a long light coat that they had me put on, that covered my tunic and hose, and a hat of grotesque round shape that they put on my head. They led me then out of the building and into the street.

“I gazed astoundedly along that street. It had a raised walk at either side, on which many hundreds of people moved to and fro, all dressed in as strange a fashion. Many, like Rastin and Thicourt, seemed of gentle blood, yet, in spite of this, they did not wear a sword or even a dagger. There were no knights or squires, or priests or peasants. All seemed dressed much the same.

“Small lads ran to and fro selling what seemed sheets of very thin white parchment, many times folded and covered with lettering. Rastin said that these had written in them all things that had happened through all the world, even but hours before. I said that to write even one of these sheets would take a clerk many days, but they said that the writing was done in some way very quickly by machines.

“In the broad stone street between the two raised walks were rushing back and forth the strange vehicles I had seen from the window. There was no animal pulling or pushing any one of them, yet they never halted their swift rush, and carried many people at unthinkable speed. Sometimes those who walked stepped before the rushing vehicles, and then from them came terrible warning snarls or moans that made the walkers draw back.

“One of the vehicles stood at the walk’s edge before us, and we entered it and sat side by side on a soft leather seat. Thicourt sat behind a wheel on a post, with levers beside him. He touched these and a humming sound came from somewhere in the vehicle and then it too began to rush forward. Faster and faster along the street it went, yet neither of them seemed afraid.

“Many thousands of these vehicles were moving swiftly through the streets about us. We passed on, between great buildings and along wider streets, my eyes and ears numbed by what I saw about me. Then the buildings grew smaller, after we had gone for miles through them, and we were passing through the city’s outskirts. I could not believe, hardly, that it was Paris in which I was.

“We came to a great flat and open field outside the city and there Thicourt stopped and we got out of the vehicle. There were big buildings at the field’s end, and I saw other vehicles rolling out of them across the field, ones different from any I had yet seen, with flat winglike projections on either side. They rolled out over the field very fast and then I cried out as I saw them rising from the ground into the air. Mother of God, they were flying! The men in them were flying!

“Rastin and Thicourt took me forward to the great buildings. They spoke to men there and one brought forward one of the winged cars. Rastin told me to get in, and though I was terribly afraid, there was too terrible a fascination that drew me in. Thicourt and Rastin entered after me, and we sat in seats with the other man. He had before him levers and buttons, while at the car’s front was a great thing like a double-oar or paddle. A loud roaring came and that double-blade began to whirl so swiftly that I could not see it. Then the car rolled swiftly forward, bumping on the ground, and then ceased to bump. I looked down, then shuddered. The ground was already far beneath! I too, was flying in the air!

“We swept upward at terrible speed that increased steadily. The thunder of the car was terrific, and, as the man at the levers changed their position, we curved around and over downward and upward as though birds. Rastin tried to explain to me how the car flew, but it was all too wonderful, and I could not understand. I only knew that a wild thrilling excitement held me, and that it were worth life and death to fly thus, if but for once, as I had always dreamed that men might some day do.

“Higher and higher we went. The earth lay far beneath and I saw now that Paris was indeed a mighty city, its vast mass of buildings stretching away almost to the horizons below us. A mighty city of the future that it had been given my eyes to look on!

“There were other winged cars darting to and fro in the air about us, and they said that many of these were starting or finishing journeys of hundreds of leagues in the air. Then I cried out as I saw a great shape coming nearer us in the air. It was many rods in length, tapering to a point at both ends, a vast ship sailing in the air! There were great cabins on its lower part and in them we glimpsed people gazing out, coming and going inside, dancing even! They told me that vast ships of the air like this sailed to and fro for thousands of leagues with hundreds inside them.

“The huge vessel of the air passed us and then our winged car began to descend. It circled smoothly down to the field like a swooping bird, and, when we landed there, Rastin and Thicourt led me back to the ground-vehicle. It was late afternoon by then, the sun sinking westward, and darkness had descended by the time we rolled back into the great city.

“But in that city was not darkness! Lights were everywhere in it, flashing brilliant lights that shone from its mighty buildings and that blinked and burned and ran like water in great symbols upon the buildings above the streets. Their glare was like that of day! We stopped before a great building into which Rastin and Thicourt led me.

“It was vast inside and in it were many people in rows on rows of seats. I thought it a cathedral at first but saw soon that it was not. The wall at one end of it, toward which all in it were gazing, had on it pictures of people, great in size, and those pictures were moving as though themselves alive! And they were talking one to another, too, as though with living voices! I trembled. What magic!

“With Rastin and Thicourt in seats beside me, I watched the pictures enthralled. It was like looking through a great window into strange worlds. I saw the sea, seemingly tossing and roaring there before me, and then saw on it a ship, a vast ship of size incredible, without sails or oars, holding thousands of people. I seemed on that ship as I watched, seemed moving forward with it. They told me it was sailing over the western ocean that never men had crossed. I feared!

“Then another scene, land appearing from the ship. A great statue, upholding a torch, and we on the ship seemed passing beneath it. They said that the ship was approaching a city, the city of New York, but mists hid all before us. Then suddenly the mists before the ship cleared and there before me seemed the city.

“Mother of God, what a city! Climbing range on range of great mountain-like buildings that aspired up as though to scale heaven itself! Far beneath narrow streets pierced through them and in the picture we seemed to land from the ship, to go through those streets of the city. It was an incredible city of madness! The streets and ways were mere chasms between the sky-toppling buildings! People—people—people—millions on millions of them rushed through the endless streets. Countless ground-vehicles rushed to and fro also, and other different ones that roared above the streets and still others below them!

“Winged flying-cars and great airships were sailing to and fro over the titanic city, and in the waters around it great ships of the sea and smaller ships were coming as man never dreamed of surely, that reached out from the mighty city on all sides. And with the coming of darkness, the city blazed with living light!

“The pictures changed, showed other mighty cities, though none so terrible as that one. It showed great mechanisms that appalled me. Giant metal things that scooped in an instant from the earth as much as a man might dig in days. Vast things that poured molten metal from them like water. Others that lifted loads that hundreds of men and oxen could not have stirred.

“They showed men of knowledge like Rastin and Thicourt beside me. Some were healers, working miraculous cures in a way that I could not understand. Others were gazing through giant tubes at the stars, and the pictures showed what they saw, showed that all of the stars were great suns like our sun, and that our sun was greater than earth, that earth moved around it instead of the reverse! How could such things be, I wondered. Yet they said that it was so, that earth was round like an apple, and that with other earths like it, the planets, moved round the sun. I heard, but could scarce understand.

“At last Rastin and Thicourt led me out of that place of living pictures and to their ground-vehicle. We went again through the streets to their building, where first I had found myself. As we went I saw that none challenged my right to go, nor asked who was my lord. And Rastin said that none now had lords, but that all were lord, king and priest and noble, having no more power than any in the land. Each man was his own master! It was what I had hardly dared to hope for, in my own time, and this, I thought, was greatest of all the marvels they had shown me!

“We entered again their building but Rastin and Thicourt took me first to another room than the one in which I had found myself. They said that their men of knowledge were gathered there to hear of their feat, and to have it proved to them.

“‘You would not be afraid to return to your own time, Henri?’ asked Rastin, and I shook my head.

“‘I want to return to it,’ I told them. ‘I want to tell my people there what I have seen—what the future is that they must strive for.’

“‘But if they should not believe you?’ Thicourt asked.

“‘Still I must go—must tell them,’ I said.

“Rastin grasped my hand. ‘You are a man, Henri,’ he said. Then, throwing aside the cloak and hat I had worn outside, they went with me down to the big white-walled room where first I had found myself.

“It was lit brightly now by many of the shining glass things on ceiling and walls, and in it were many men. They all stared strangely at me and at my clothes, and talked excitedly so fast that I could not understand. Rastin began to address them.

“He seemed explaining how he had brought me from my own time to his. He used many terms and words that I could not understand, incomprehensible references and phrases, and I could understand but little. I heard again the names of Einstein and De Sitter that I had heard before, repeated frequently by these men as they disputed with Rastin and Thicourt. They seemed disputing about me.

“One big man was saying, ‘Impossible! I tell you, Rastin, you have faked this fellow!’

“Rastin smiled. ‘You don’t believe that Thicourt and I brought him here from his own time across five centuries?’

“A chorus of excited negatives answered him. He had me stand up and speak to them. They asked me many questions, part of which I could not understand. I told them of my life, and of the city of my own time, and of king and priest and noble, and of many simple things that they seemed quite ignorant of. Some appeared to believe me but others did not, and again their dispute broke out.

“‘There is a way to settle the argument, gentlemen,’ said Rastin finally.

“‘How?’ all cried.

“‘Thicourt and I brought Henri across five centuries by rotating the time-dimensions at this spot,’ he said. ‘Suppose we reverse that rotation and send him back before your eyes—would that be proof?’

“They all said that it would. Rastin turned to me. ‘Stand on the metal circle, Henri,’ he said. I did so.

“All were watching very closely. Thicourt did something quickly with the levers and buttons of the mechanisms in the room. They began to hum, and blue light came from the glass tubes on some. All were quiet, watching me as I stood there on the circle of metal. I met Rastin’s eyes and something in me made me call goodbye to him. He waved his hand and smiled. Thicourt pressed more buttons and the hum of the mechanisms grew louder. Then he reached toward another lever. All in the room were tense and I was tense.

“Then I saw Thicourt’s arm move as he turned one of the many levers.

“A terrific clap of thunder seemed to break around me, and as I closed my eyes before its shock, I felt myself whirling around and falling at the same time as though into a maelstrom, just as I had done before. The awful falling sensation ceased in a moment and the sound subsided. I opened my eyes. I was on the ground at the center of the familiar field from which I had vanished hours before, upon the morning of that day. It was night now, though, for that day I had spent five hundred years in the future.

“There were many people gathered around the field, fearful, and they screamed and some fled when I appeared in the thunderclap. I went toward those who remained. My mind was full of things I had seen and I wanted to tell them of these things. I wanted to tell them how they must work ever toward that future time of wonder.

“But they did not listen. Before I had spoken minutes to them they cried out on me as a sorcerer and a blasphemer, and seized me and brought me here to the Inquisitor, to you, sire. And to you, sire, I have told the truth in all things. I know that in doing so I have set the seal of my own fate, and that only a sorcerer would ever tell such a tale, yet despite that I am glad. Glad that I have told one at least of this time of what I saw five centuries in the future. Glad that I saw! Glad that I saw the things that someday, sometime, must come to be—”

It was a week later that they burned Henri Lothiere. Jean de Marselait, lifting his gaze from his endless parchment accusation and examens on that afternoon, looked out through the window at a thick curl of black smoke going up from the distant square.

“Strange, that one,” he mused. “A sorcerer, of course, but such a one as I had never heard before. I wonder,” he half-whispered, “was there any truth in that wild tale of his? The future—who can say—what men might do—?”

There was silence in the room as he brooded for a moment, and then he shook himself as one ridding himself of absurd speculations. “But tush—enough of these crazy fancies. They will have me for a sorcerer if I yield to these wild fancies and visions of the future.”

And bending again with his pen to the parchment before him, he went gravely on with his work.

THE MONSTER-GOD OF MAMURTH

Out of the desert night he came to us, stumbling into our little circle of firelight and collapsing at once. Mitchell and I sprang to our feet with startled exclamations, for men who travel alone and on foot are a strange sight in the deserts of North Africa.

For the first few minutes that we worked over him I thought he would die at once, but gradually we brought him back to consciousness. While Mitchell held a cup of water to his cracked lips I looked him over and saw that he was too far gone to live much longer. His clothes were in rags, and his hands and knees literally flayed, from crawling over the sands, I judged. So when he motioned feebly for more water, I gave it to him, knowing that in any case his time was short. Soon he could talk, in a dead, croaking voice.

“I’m alone,” he told us, in answer to our first question; “no more out there to look for. What are you two—traders? I thought so. No I’m an archeologist. A digger-up of the past.” His voice broke for a moment. “It’s not always good to dig up dead secrets. There are ionic things the past should be allowed to hide.”

He caught the look that passed between Mitchell and me.

“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “You will hear, I’ll tell you the whole tiling. But listen to me, you two,” and in his earnestness he raised himself to a sitting position, “keep out of Igidi Desert. Remember that I told you that. I had a warning, too, but I disregarded it. And I went into hell—into hell! But there, I will tell you from the beginning.

“My name—that doesn’t matter now. I left Mogador more than a year ago, and came through the foot-hills of the Atlas ranges striking out into the desert in hopes of finding some of the Carthaginian mills the North African deserts are known to hold.

“I spent months in the search, traveling among the squalid Arab villages, now near an oasis and now far into the black, untracked desert. And as I went farther into that savage country, I found more and more of the ruins I sought, crumbled remnants of temples and fortresses, relics, almost destroyed, of the age when Carthage meant empire and ruled all of North Africa from her walled city. And then, on the side of a massive block of stone, I found that which tumed me toward Igidi.

“It was an inscription in the garbled Phenician of the traders of Carthage, short enough so that I remembered it and can repeat it word for word. It read, literally, as follows: Merchants, go not into the city of Mamurth, which lies beyond the mountain pass. For I, San-Drabat of Carthage, entering the city with four companions in the month of Eschmoun, to trade, on the third night of our stay came priests and seized my fellows, I escaping by hiding. My companions they sacrificed to the evil god of the city, who has dwelt there from the beginning of time, and for whom the wise men of Mamurth have built a great temple the like of which is not on earth elsewhere, where the people of Mamurth worship their god. I escaped from the city and set this warning here that others may not turn their steps to Mamurth and to death.

“Perhaps you can imagine the effect that inscription had on me. I was the last trace of a city unknown to the memory of men, a last floating spar of a civilization sunken in the sea of time. That then could have been such a city at all seemed to me quite probable What do we know of Carthage even, but a few names? No city, no civilization was ever so completely blotted off the earth as Carthage when Roman Scipio ground its temples and palaces into the very dust, and plowed up the ground with salt, and the eagles of conquer ing Rome flew across a desert where a metropolis had been.

“It was on the outskirts of one of those wretched little Arab villages that I had found the block and its inscription, and I tried to find someone in the village to accompany me, but none would do so I could plainly see the mountain pass, a mere crack between towering blue cliffs. In reality it was miles and miles away, but the deceptive optical qualities of the desert light made it seem very near. My maps placed that mountain range all right, as a lower branch of the Atlas, and the expanse behind the mountains was marked as ‘Igidi Desert’, but that was all I got from them. All that I could reckon on as certain was that it was desert that lay on the other side of the pass, and I must carry enough supplies to meet it.

“But the Arabs knew more! Though I offered what must have been fabulous riches to those poor devils, not one would come with me when I let them know what place I was heading for. None had ever been there, they would not even ride far into the desert in that direction; but all had very definite ideas of the place beyond the mountains as a nest of devils, a haunt of evil Jinns.

“Knowing how firmly superstition is implanted in their kind, I tried no longer to persuade them, and started alone, with two scrawny camels carrying my water and supplies. So for three days I forged across the desert under a broiling sun, and on the morning of the fourth I reached the pass.

“It was only a narrow crevice to begin with, and great boulders were strewn so thickly on its floor that it was a long, hard job getting through. And the cliffs on each side towered to such a height that the space between was a place of shadows and whispers and semidarkness. It was late in the afternoon when I finally came through, and for a moment I stood motionless; for from that side of the pass the desert sloped down into a vast basin, and at the basin’s center, perhaps two miles from where I stood, gleamed the white ruins of Mamurth.

“I remember that I was very calm as I covered the two miles between myself and the ruins. I had taken the existence of the city as a fact, so much so that if the ruins had not been there I should have been vastly more surprised than at finding them.

“From the pass I had seen only a tangled mass of white fragments, but as I drew nearer, some of these began to take outline as crumbling blocks, and walls, and columns. The sand had drifted, too, and the ruins were completely buried in some sections, while nearly all were half covered.

“And then it was that I made a curious discovery. I had stopped to examine the material of the ruins, a smooth, veinless stone, much like an artificial marble or a superfine concrete. And while I looked about me, intent on this, I noticed that on almost every shaft and block, on broken cornice and column, was carved the same symbol-if it was a symbol. It was a rough picture of a queer, outlandish creature, much like an octopus, with a round, almost shapeless body, and several long tentacles or arms branching out from the body, not supple and boneless, like those of an octopus, but seemingly stiff and jointed, like a spider’s legs. In fact, the thing might have been intended to represent a spider, I thought, though some of the details were wrong. I speculated for a moment on the profusion of these creatures carved on the ruins all around me, then gave it up as an enigma that was unsolvable.

“And the riddle of the city about me seemed unsolvable also. What could I find in this half-buried mass of stone fragments to throw light on the past? I could not even superficially explore the place, for the scantiness of my supplies and water would not permit; a long stay. It was with a discouraged heart that I went back to the; camels and, leading them to an open spot in the ruins, made my camp for the night. And when night had fallen, and I sat beside my little fire, the vast, brooding silence of this place of death was awful. There were no laughing human voices, or cries of animals, or even cries of birds or insects. There was nothing but the darkness and silence that crowded around me, flowed down upon me, beat sullenly against the glowing spears of light my little fire threw out.

“As I sat there musing, I was startled by a slight sound behind me. I turned to see its cause, and then stiffened. As I have mentioned, the space directly around my camp was clear sand, smoothed level by the winds. Well, as I stared at that flat expanse of sand, a hole several inches across suddenly appeared in its surface, yards from where I stood, but clearly visible in the firelight.

“There was nothing whatever to be seen there, not even a shadow, but there it was, one moment the level surface of the sand, the next moment a hole appearing in it, accompanied by a soft, crunching sound. As I stood gazing at it in wonder, that sound was repeated and simultaneously another hole appeared in the sand’s surface, five or six feet nearer to me than the other.

“When I saw that, ice-tipped arrows of fear seemed to shoot through me, and then, yielding to a mad impulse, I snatched a blazing piece of fuel from the fire and buried it, a comet of red flame, at the place where the holes had appeared. There was a slight sound of scurrying and shuffling, and I felt that whatever thing had made those marks had retreated, if a living thing had made them at all. What it had been, I could not imagine, for there had been absolutely nothing in sight, one track and then another appearing magically in the clear sand, if indeed they were really tracks at all.

“The mystery of the thing haunted me. Even in sleep I found no rest, for evil dreams seemed to flow into my brain from the dead city around me. All the dusty sins of ages past, in the forgotten place, seemed to be focused on me in the dreams I had. Strange shapes walked through them, unearthly as the spawn of a distant star, half icon and vanishing again.

“It was little enough sleep I got that night, but when the sun finally came, with its first golden rays, my fears and oppressions dropped from me like a cloak. No wonder the early peoples were sun-worshippers!

“And with my renewed strength and courage, a new thought struck me. In the inscription I have quoted to you, that long-dead merchant-adventurer had mentioned the great temple of the city and dwelt on its grandeur. Where, then, were its ruins? I wondered. I decided that what time I had would be better spent in investigating the ruins of this temple, which should be prominent, if that ancient Carthaginian had been correct as to its size.

“I ascended a near-by hillock and looked about me in all directions, and though I could not perceive any vast pile of ruins that might have been the temple’s, I did see for the first time, far away, two great figures of stone that stood out black against the rosy flame of the sunrise. It was a discovery that filled me with excitement, and I broke camp at once, starting in the direction of those two shapes.

“They were on the very edge of the farther side of the city, and it was noon before I finally stood before them. And now I saw clearly their nature: two great, sitting figures, carved of black stone, all of fifty feet in height, and almost that far apart, facing both toward the city and toward me. They were of human shape and dressed in a queer, scaled armor, but the faces I can not describe, for they were unhuman. The features were human, well-proportioned, even, but tile face, the expression, suggested no kinship whatever with humanity as we know it. Were they carved from life? I wondered. If so, it must have been a strange sort of people who had lived in this city and set up these two statues.

“And now I tore my gaze away from them, and looked around. On each side of those shapes, the remains of what must once have been a mighty wall branched out, a long pile of crumbling ruins. But there had been no wall between the statues, that being evidently the gateway through the barrier. I wondered why the two guardians of tile gate had survived, apparently entirely unharmed, while the wall and the city behind me had fallen into ruins. They were of a different material, I could see; but what was that material?

“And now I noticed for the first time the long avenue that began on the other side of the statues and stretched away into the desert for a half-mile or more. The sides of this avenue were two rows of smaller stone figures that ran in parallel lines away from the two colossi. So I started down that avenue, passing between the two great shapes that stood at its head. And as I went between them, I noticed for the first time the inscription graven on the inner side of each.

On the pedestal of each figure, four or five feet from the ground was a raised tablet of the same material, perhaps a yard square, an covered with strange symbols—characters, no doubt, of a lost language, undecipherable, at least to me. One symbol, though, that was especially prominent in the inscription, was not new to me. It was the carven picture of the spider, or octopus, which I have mentiond that I had found everywhere on the ruins of the city. And here it was scattered thickly among the symbols that made up the inscription. The tablet on the other statue was a replica of the first, and I could learn no more from it. So I started down the avenue, turning over in my mind the riddle of that omnipresent symbol, and then forgetting it, as I observed the things about me.

“That long street was like the avenue of sphinxes at Kamak, down which Pharaoh swung in his litter, borne to his temple on the necks of men. But the statues that made up its sides were not sphinx shaped. They were carved in strange forms, shapes of animals unknown to us, as far removed from anything we can imagine as the beasts of another world. I can not describe them, any more than you could describe a dragon to a man who had been blind all his life. Yet they were of evil, reptilian shapes; they tore at my nerves as I looked at them.

“Down between the two rows of them I went, until I came to the end of the avenue. Standing there between the last two figures, I could see nothing before me but the yellow sands of the desert, as far as the eye could reach. I was puzzled. What had been the object of all the pains that had been taken, the wall, the two great statues, and this long avenue, if it but led into the desert?

“Gradually I began to see that there was something queer about the part of the desert that lay directly before me. It was flat. For an area, seemingly round in shape, that must have covered several acres the surface of the desert seemed absolutely level. It was as though the sands within that great circle had been packed down with tremendous force, leaving not even the littlest ridge of dune on its surface. Beyond this flat area, and all around it, the desert was broken up by small hills and valleys, and traversed by whirling sand-cloud but nothing stirred on the flat surface of the circle.

“Interested at once, I strode forward to the edge of the circle, only a few yards away. I had just reached that edge when an invisible hand seemed to strike me a great blow on the face and chest, knocking me backward in the sand.

“It was minutes before I advanced again, but I did advance, for all my curiosity was now aroused. I crawled toward the circle’s edge, holding my pistol before me, pushing slowly forward.

“When the automatic in my outstretched hand reached the line of the circle, it struck against something hard, and I could push it no farther. It was exactly as if it had struck against the side of a wall, hut no wall or anything else was to be seen. Reaching out my hand, I touched the same hard barrier, and in a moment I was on my feet.

“For I knew now that it was solid matter I had run into, not force. When I thrust out my hands, the edge of the circle was as far as they would go, for there they met a smooth wall, totally invisible, yet at the same time quite material. And the phenomenon was one which even I could partly understand. Somehow, in the dead past, the scientists of the city behind me, the ‘wise men’ mentioned in the inscription, had discovered the secret of making solid matter invisible, and had applied it to the work that I was now examining. Such a thing was far from impossible. Even our own scientists can make matter partly invisible, with the X-ray. Evidently these people had known the whole process, a secret that had been lost in the succeeding ages, like the secret of hard gold, and malleable glass, and others that we find mentioned in ancient writings. Yet I wondered how they had done this, so that, ages after those who had built the thing were wind-driven dust, it remained as invisible as ever.

“I stood back and threw pebbles into the air, toward the circle. No matter how high I threw them, when they reached the line of the circle’s edge they rebounded with a clicking sound; so I knew that the wall must tower to a great height above me. I was on fire to get inside the wall, and examine the place from the inside, but how to do it? There must be an entrance, but where? And I suddenly remembered the two guardian statues at the head of the great avenue, with their carven tablets, and wondered what connection they had with this place.

“Suddenly the strangeness of the whole thing struck me like a blow. The great, unseen wall before me, the circle of sand, flat and unchanging, and myself, standing there and wondering, wondering. A voice from out the dead city behind me seemed to sound in my heart, bidding me to turn and flee, to get away. I remembered the warning of the inscription, ‘Go not to Mamurth.’ And as I thought of the inscription, I had no doubt that this was the great temple described by San-Drabat. Surely he was right: the like of it was not on earth elsewhere.

“But I would not go, I could not go, until I had examined the wall from the inside. Calmly reasoning the matter, I decided that the logical place for the gateway through the wall would be at the end of the avenue, so that those who came down the street could pass directly through the wall. And my reasoning was good, for it was at that spot that I found the entrance: an opening in the barrier, several yards wide, and running higher than I could reach, how high I had no means of telling.

“I felt my way through the gate, and stepped at once upon a floor of hard material, not as smooth as the wall’s surface, but equally invisible. Inside the entrance lay a corridor of equal width, leading into the center of the circle, and I felt my way forward.

“I must have made a strange picture, had there been any there to observe it. For while I knew that all around me were the towering, invisible walls, and I knew not what else, yet all my eyes could see was the great flat circle of sand beneath me, carpeted with the afternoon sunshine. Only, I seemed to be walking a foot above the ground, in thin air. That was the thickness of the floor beneath me, and it was the weight of this great floor, I knew, that held the circle of sand under it for ever flat and unchanging.

“Iwalked slowly down the passageway, with hands outstretched before me, and had gone but a short distance when I brought up against another smooth wall that lay directly across the corridor, seemingly making it a blind alley. But I was not discouraged now, for I knew that there must be a door somewhere, and began to feel around me in search of it.

“I found the door. In groping about the sides of the corridor my hands encountered a smoothly rounded knob set in the wall, and as I laid my hand on this, the door opened. There was a sighing, as of a little wind, and when I again felt my way forward, the wall that had I lain across the passageway was gone, and I was free to go forward. But I dared not go through at once. I went back to the knob on the wall, and found that no amount of pressing or twisting of it would close the door that had opened. Some subtle mechanism within the knob had operated, that needed only a touch of the hand to work it, and the whole end of the corridor had moved out of the way, sliding up in grooves, I think, like a portcullis, though of this I am not sure.

“But the door was safely opened, and I passed through it. Moving about, like a blind man in a strange place, I found that I was in a vast inner court, the walls of which sloped away in a great curve. When I discovered this, I came back to the spot where the corridor opened into the court, and then walked straight out into the court itself.

“It was steps that I encountered: the first broad steps of what was evidently a staircase of titanic proportions. And I went up, slowly, carefully, feeling before me every foot of the way. It was only the feel of the staircase under me that gave reality to it, for as far as I could see, I was simply climbing up into empty space. It was weird beyond telling.

“Up and up I went, until I was all of a hundred feet above the ground, and then the staircase narrowed, the sides drew together. A few more steps, and I came out on a flat floor again, which, after some groping about, I found to be a broad landing, with high, railed edges. I crawled across this landing on hands and knees, and then struck against another wall, and in it, another door. I went through this too, still crawling, and though everything about me was still invisible, I sensed that I was no longer in the open air, but in a great room.

“I stopped short, and then, as I crouched on the floor, I felt a sudden prescience of evil, of some malignant, menacing entity that was native here. Nothing I could see, or hear, but strong upon my brain beat the thought of something infinitely ancient, infinitely evil, that was a part of this place. Was it a consciousness, I wonder, of the horror that had filled the place in ages long dead? Whatever caused it, I could go no farther in the face of the terror that possessed me; so I drew back and walked to the edge of the landing, leaning over its high, invisible railing and surveying the scene below.

“The setting sun hung like a great ball of red-hot iron in the western sky, and in its lurid rays the two great statues cast long shadows on the yellow sands. Not far away, my two camels, hobbled, moved restlessly about. To all appearances I was standing on thin air, a hundred feet or more above the ground, but in my mind’s eye I had a picture of the great courts and corridors below me, through which I had felt my way.

“As I mused there in the red light, it was clear to me that this was the great temple of the city. What a sight it must have been, in the time of the city’s life! I could imagine the long procession of priests and people, in somber and gorgeous robes, coming out from the city, between the great statues and down the long avenue, dragging with them, perhaps, an unhappy prisoner to sacrifice to their god in this, his temple.

“The sun was now dipping beneath the horizon, and I turned to go, but before ever I moved, I became rigid and my heart seemed to stand still. For on the farther edge of the clear stretch of sand that lay beneath the temple and the city, a hole suddenly appeared in the sand, springing into being on the desert’s face exactly like the one I had seen at my campfire the night before. I watched, as fascinated as by the eyes of a snake. And before my eyes, another and another appeared, not in a straight line, but in a zigzag fashion. Two such holes would be punched down on one side, then two more on the other side, then one in the middle, making a series of tracks, perhaps two yards in width from side to side, and advancing straight toward the temple and myself. And I could see nothing!

“It was like—the comparison suddenly struck me—like the tracks a many-legged insect might make in the sand, only magnified to unheard-of proportions. And with that thought, the truth rushed on me, for I remembered the spider carved on the ruins and on the statues, and I knew now what it had signified to the dwellers in the city. What was it the inscription had said? ‘The evil god of the city, who has dwelt there from the beginning of time. And as I saw those tracks advancing toward me, I knew that the city’s ancient evil god still dwelt here, and that I was in his temple, alone and unarmed.

“What strange creatures might there not have been in the dawn of time? And this one, this gigantic monster in a spider’s form—had not those who built the city found it here when they came, and, in awe, taken it as the city’s god, and built for it the mighty temple in which I now stood? And they, who had the wisdom and art to make this vast fane invisible, not to be seen by human eyes, had they done the same to their god, and made of him almost a true god, invisible, powerful, undying? Undying! Almost it must have been, to survive the ages as it had done. Yet I knew that even some kinds of parrots live for centuries, and what could I know of this monstrous relic of’ dead ages? And when the city died and crumbled, and the victims were no longer brought to its lair in the temple, did it not live, as I thought, by ranging the desert? No wonder the Arabs had feared the country in this direction! It would be death for anything that came even within view of such a horror, that could clutch and spring and chase, and yet remain always unseen. And was it death for me?

“Such were some of the thoughts that pounded through my brain, as I watched death approach, with those steadily advancing tracks in the sand. And now the paralysis of terror that had gripped me was broken, and I ran down the great staircase, and into the court. I could think of no place in that great hall where I might hide. Imagine hiding in a place where all is invisible! But I must go some place, and finally I dashed past the foot of the great staircase until I reached a wall directly under the landing on which I had stood, and against this I crouched, praying that the deepening shadows of dusk might hide me from the gaze of the creature whose lair this was.

“I knew instantly when the thing entered the gate through which I too had come. Pad, pad, pad—that was the soft, cushioned sound of its passage. I heard the feet stop for a moment by the opened door at the end of the corridor. Perhaps it was in surprise that the door was open, I thought, for how could I know how great or little intelligence lay in that unseen creature’s brain? Then, pad, pad—across the court it came, and I heard the soft sound of its passing as it ascended the staircase. Had I not been afraid to breathe, I would have almost screamed with relief.

“Yet still fear held me, and I remained crouched against the wall while the thing went up the great stairs. Imagine that scene! All around me was absolutely nothing visible, nothing but the great flat circle of sand that lay a foot below me; yet I saw the place with my mind’s eye, and knew of the walls and courts that lay about me, and the thing above me, in fear of which I was crouching there in the gathering darkness.

“The sound of feet above me had ceased, and I judged that the thing had gone into the great room above, which I had feared to enter. Now, if ever, was the time to make my escape in the darkness; so I rose, with infinite carefulness, and softly walked across the court to the door that led into the corridor. But when I had walked only half of the distance, as I thought, I crashed squarely into another invisible wall across my path, and fell backward, the metal handle of the sheath-knife at my belt striking the flooring with a loud clang. God help me, I had misjudged the position of the door, and had walked straight into the wall, instead! “I lay there, motionless, with cold fear flooding every part of my being. Then, pad, pad—the soft steps of the thing across the landing and then silence for a moment. Could it see me from the landing? I wondered. Could it? For a moment, hope warmed me, as no sound came, but the next instant I knew that death had me by the throat, for pad, pad—down the stairs it came.

“With that sound my last vestige of self-control fled and I scrambled to my feet and made another mad dash in the direction of the door. Crash!—into another wall I went, and rose to my feet trembling. There was no sound of footsteps now, and as quietly as I could, I walked into the great court still farther, as I thought, for all my ideas of direction were hopelessly confused. God, what a weird, game it was we played there on that darkened circle of sand!

“No sound whatever came from the thing that hunted me, and my hope flickered up again. And with a dreadful irony, it was at that exact moment that I walked straight into the thing. My outstretched hand touched and grasped what must have been one of its limbs, thick and cold and hairy, which was instantly torn from my grasp I and then seized me again, while another and another clutched me also. The thing had stood quite still, leaving me to walk directly into its grasp—the drama of the spider and the fly!

“A moment only it held me, for that cold grasp filled me with such deep, shuddering abhorrence that I wrenched myself loose and I fled madly across the court, stumbling again on the first step of the great staircase. I raced up the stairs, and even as I ran I heard the thing in pursuit.

“Up I went, and across the landing, and grasped the edge of the railing, for I meant to throw myself down from there, to a clean death on the floor below. But under my hands, the top of the railing moved, one of the great blocks that evidently made up its top was loosened and rocked toward me. In a flash I grasped the great block and staggered across the landing with it in my arms, to the head of the staircase. Two men could hardly have lifted it, I think, yet I did more, in a sudden access of mad strength; for as I heard that monster coming swiftly up the great stairs, I raised the block, invisible as ever, above my head, and sent it crashing down the staircase upon the place where I thought the thing was at that moment.

“For an instant after the crash there was silence, and then a low humming sound began, that waxed into a loud droning. And at the same time, at a spot halfway down the staircase where the block had crashed, a thin, purple liquid seemed to well out of the empty air, giving form to a few of the invisible steps as it flowed over them, and outlining, too, the block I had thrown, and a great hairy limb that lay crushed beneath it, and from which the fluid that was the monster’s blood was oozing. I had not killed the thing, but had chained it down with the block that held it prisoner.

“There was a thrashing sound on the staircase, and the purple stream ran more freely, and by the outline of its splashes, I saw, dimly, the monstrous god that had been known in Mamurth in ages past. It was like a giant spider, with angled limbs that were yards long, and a hairy, repellent body. Even as I stood there, I wondered that the thing, invisible as it was, was yet visible by the life-blood in it, when that blood was spilled. Yet so it was, nor can I even suggest a reason. But one glimpse I got of its half-visible, purple-splashed outline, and then, hugging the farther side of the stairs, I descended. When I passed the thing, the intolerable odor of a crushed insect almost smothered me, and the monster itself made frantic efforts to loosen itself and spring at me. But it could not, and I got safely down, shuddering and hardly able to walk.

“Straight across the great court I went, and ran shakily through the corridor, and down the long avenue, and out between the two great statues. The moonlight shone on them, and the tablets of inscriptions stood out clearly on the sides of the statues, with their strange symbols and carved spider forms. But I knew now what their message was!

“It was well that my camels had wandered into the ruins, for such was the fear that struck through me that I would never have returned for them had they lingered by the invisible wall. All that night I rode to the north, and when morning came I did not stop, hut still pushed north. And as I went through the mountain pass, one camel stumbled and fell, and in falling burst open all my water supplies that were lashed on its back.

“No water at all was left, but I still held north, killing the other camel by my constant speed, and then staggered on, afoot. On hands and knees I crawled forward, when my legs gave out, always north, away from that temple of evil and its evil god. And tonight, I had been crawling, how many miles I do not know, and I saw your fire. And that is all.”

He lay back exhausted, and Mitchell and I looked at each other’s faces in the firelight. Then, rising, Mitchell strode to the edge of our camp and looked for a long time at the moonlit desert, which lay to ward the south. What his thoughts were, I do not know. I was nursing my own, as I watched the man who lay beside our fire.

It was early the next morning that he died, muttering about great walls around him. We wrapped his body securely, and bearing it with us held our way across the desert.

In Algiers we cabled to the friends whose address we found in his moneybelt, and arranged to ship the body to them, for such had been his only request. Later they wrote that he had been buried in the little churchyard of the New England village that had been his childhood home. I do not think that his sleep there will be troubled by dreams of that place of evil from which he fled. I pray that it will not.

Often and often have Mitchell and I discussed the thing, over lonely campfires and in the inns of the seaport towns. Did he kill the invisible monster he spoke of, and is it lying now, a withered remnant, under the block on the great staircase? Or did it gnaw its way loose; does it still roam the desert and make its lair in the vast, ancient temple, as unseen as itself?

Or, different still, was the man simply crazed by the heat and thirst of the desert, and his tale but the product of a maddened mind? I do not think that this is so. I think that he told truth, yet I do not know. Nor shall I ever know, for never, Mitchell and I have decided, shall we be the ones to venture into the place of hell on earth where that ancient god of evil may still be living, amid the invisible courts and towers, beyond the unseen wall.

THE MAN WHO RETURNED

John Woodford in his first moments of returning consciousness was not aware that he was lying in his coffin. He had only a dull knowledge that he lay in utter darkness and that there was a close, heavy quality in the air he breathed. He felt very weak and had only a dim curiosity as to where he was and how he had come there.

He knew that he was not lying in his bedroom at home, for the darkness there was never so complete as this. Home? That memory brought others to John Woodford’s dulled brain and he recalled his wife now, and his son. He remembered too that he had been ill at home, very ill. And that was all that he could remember.

What was this place to which he had been brought? Why was the darkness so complete and the silence so unbroken, and why was there no one near him? He was a sick man, and they should have given him better care than this. He lay with a dull irritation at this treatment growing in his mind.

Then he became aware that breathing was beginning to hurt his lungs, that the air seemed warm and foul. Why did not someone open a window? His irritation grew to such a point that it spurred his muscles into action. He put out his right hand to reach for a bell or a light-button.

His hand moved slowly only a few inches to the side and then was stopped by an unyielding barrier. His lingers feebly examined it. It seemed a solid wall of wood or metal faced with smooth satin. It extended all along his right side, and when he weakly moved his other arm he found a similar wall on that side too.

His irritation gave way to mystification. Why in the world had they put him, a sick man, into this narrow place? Why, his shoulders rubbed against the sides on either side. He would soon know the reason for it, he told himself. He raised up to give utterance to a call that would bring those in attendance on him.

To his utter amazement his head bumped against a similar silk-lined wall directly above his face. He raised his arms in the darkness and discovered with growing astonishment that this wall or ceiling extended above him from head to foot, like those on either side. He lay upon a similar silk-padded surface. Why in the name of all that was holy had they put him into a silk-lined box like this?

Woodford’s brain was puzzling this when a minor irritation made itself felt. His collar was hurting him. It was a high, stiff collar and it was pressing into the flesh of his neck. But this again was mystery—that he should be wearing a stiff collar. Why had they dressed a sick man in formal clothes and put him into this box?

Suddenly John Woodford shrieked, and the echoes of his scream reverberated around his ears like hideous, demoniac laughter. He suddenly knew the answer to it all. He was not a sick man any more at all. He was a dead man! Or at least they had thought him dead and had put him into this coffin and closed it down! He was buried alive!

The fears of his lifetime had come true; his secret, dark forebodings were hideously realized. From earliest childhood he had feared this very horror, for he had known himself subject to cataleptic sleeps hardly to be distinguished from death. He had had nightmares of premature burial. Even after the proneness to the cataleptic condition seemed to have left him, his fears had clung to him.

He had never told his wife or son of his fears, but they had persisted. They had inspired him to exact a promise that he would not be embalmed when buried, and would be interred in his private vault instead of in the earth. He had thought that in case he were not really dead these provisions might save his life, but now he realized that they only laid him open to the horrible fate he had dreaded. He knew with terrible certainty that he lay now in his coffin in the stone vault in the quiet cemetery. His screams could not be heard outside the vault, probably not even outside the coffin. As long as he had lain in cataleptic sleep he had not breathed, but now that he was awake and breathing, the air in the coffin was rapidly being exhausted and he was doomed to perish of suffocation.

John Woodford went temporarily mad. He screamed with fear-choked throat, and as he shrieked he clawed with hands and feet at the unyielding satin-covered surfaces around and above him. He beat upward as best he could upon the coffin’s lid with his clenched lists, but the heavy fastenings held firm.

He yelled until his throat was too swollen to give utterance to further sound. He clawed at the top until he broke his nails against the metal behind the silk padding. He raised his head and beat against the top with it until he fell back half-stunned.

He lay exhausted for moments, unable to make further efforts. In his brain marched a hideous pageant of horrors. The air seemed much closer and hotter now, seemed to burn his lungs with each breath he inhaled. With sudden return of his frenzy he shrieked and shrieked again.

This would not do. He was in a horrible situation but he must do the best he could not to give way to the horror. He had not many minutes left and he must use them in the most rational way possible to try to escape his terrible prison.

With this resolution a little calm came to him and he began to test his powers of movement. He clenched his fists again and hammered upward. But this did no good. His arms were jammed so close against his body by the coffin’s narrowness that he could not strike a strong blow, nor had he any leverage to push strongly upward.

What about his feet? Feverishly he tried them, but found his kicks upward even less powerful. He thought of hunching up his knees and thus bursting up the lid, but found that he could not raise his knees high enough, and that when he pressed upward with them against the lid his feet simply slid away on the smooth silk of the coffin’s bottom.

Now the breaths he drew seared his lungs and nostrils and his brain seemed on fire. He knew his strength was waning and that before long he would lose consciousness. He must do whatever he could swiftly. He felt the soft silk about him and the dreadful irony of it came home to him—he had been placed so lovingly in this death-trap!

He tried to turn on his side, for he thought now that he might use his shoulders to heave up against the lid. But turning was not easy in the cramped coffin and had to be accomplished by a myriad little hitching movements, an infinitely slow and painful process.

John Woodford hitched and squirmed desperately until he lay on his left side. He found then that his right shoulder touched the lid above. He braced his left shoulder on the coffin’s bottom and heaved upward with all his strength. There was no result: the lid seemed as immovable as ever.

He heaved again, despair fast filling his heart. He knew that very soon he would give way and shriek and claw. There was already a ringing in his ears. He had not many minutes left. With the utter frenzy of despair he heaved upward again with his shoulder.

This time there was a grating sound of something giving above. The sound was like the wild peal of thousands of bells of hope to John Woodford’s ears. He heaved quickly again and again at the lid. Paying no attention to the bruising of his shoulder, he pressed upward with every ounce of his strength.

There was another grating sound, then a snap of metal fastenings breaking, and as he shoved upward with convulsive effort the heavy metal lid swung up and over and struck the stone wall with a deep clang. A flood of cold air struck him. He struggled up over the coffin’s side, dropped a few feet to a stone floor, and lay in a huddled mass.

It was minutes before he had mastered himself and summoned enough strength to stand up. He stood inside a little vault that held no coffin but his own. Its interior was in darkness save for a dim shaft of starlight that came through a tiny window high up in one wall.

John Woodford stumbled to the vault’s heavy iron doors and fumbled at their lock. He had an uncontrollable horror of this place that had almost been the scene of his perishing. The coffin there on the shelf with its lid leaning against the stone wall seemed gaping for him with its dark, cavernous mouth.

He worked frantically at the lock. What if he were not able to escape from the vault? But the heavy lock was easily manipulated on the inside, he found. He managed to turn its tumbler and shoot its bar and then the heavy iron doors swung open. John Woodford stepped eagerly out into the night.

He stopped on the vault’s threshold, closing the doors behind him and then looking forth with inexpressible emotions. The cemetery lay in the starlight before him as a dim, ghostly city of looming monuments and vaults. Little sheets of ice glinted here and there in the dim light, and the air was biting in its cold. Outside the cemetery’s low wall blinked the lights of the surrounding city.

Woodford started eagerly across the cemetery, unheeding of the cold. Somewhere across the lights of the city was his home, his wife, and somewhere his son—thinking him dead, mourning him. How glad they would be when he came back to them, alive! His heart expanded as he pictured their amazement and their joy at his return.

He came to the low stone wall of the cemetery and clambered quickly over it. It was apparently well after midnight, for the cars and pedestrians in sight in this suburban section were few.

Woodford hurried along the street. He passed people who looked at him in surprise, and only after some time did he realize the oddness of his appearance. A middle-aged man clad in a formal suit and lacking hat and overcoat was an odd person to meet on a suburban street on a winter midnight.

But he paid small attention to their stares. He did turn up the collar of his frock coat to keep out the cold. But he hardly felt the frigid air in the emotions that filled him. He wanted to get home, to get back to Helen, to witness her stupefaction and dawning joy when she saw him returned from the dead, living.

A street car came clanging along and John Woodford stepped quickly out to board it, but almost as quickly stepped back. He had mechanically thrust his hand into his pocket and found it quite empty. That was to be expected, of course. They didn’t put money in a dead man’s clothes. No matter, he would soon be there on foot.

As he reached the section in which his home was located, he glanced in a store-window in passing and saw on a tear-sheet calendar a big black date that made him gasp. It was a date ten days later than the one he last remembered. He had been buried in the vault for more than a week!

More than a week in that coffin! It seemed incredible, terrible. But that did not matter now, he told himself. It would only make the joy of his wife and son the greater when they found he was alive. To Woodford himself it seemed as though he were returning from a journey rather than from the dead.

Returned from the dead! As he hastened along the tree-bordered street on which his home was located, he almost laughed aloud as he thought of how amazed some of his friends would be when they met him. They would think him a ghost or a walking corpse, would perhaps shrink in terror from him at first.

But that thought brought another: he must not walk in on Helen too abruptly. The husband she had buried ten days ago must not appear too suddenly or the shock might easily kill her. He must contrive somehow to soften the shock of his appearance, must make sure that he did not startle her too much.

With this resolve in mind, when he reached his big house set well back from the street, Woodford turned aside through the grounds instead of approaching the front entrance. He saw windows lighted in the library of the house and he went toward them. He would see who was there, would try to break the news of his return gently to Helen.

He silently climbed onto the terrace outside the library windows and approached the tall easements. He peered in.

Through the silken curtains inside he could clearly see the room’s soft-lit interior, cozy with the shelves of his books and with the lamps and fireplace.

Helen, his wife, sat on a sofa with her back partly toward the window. Beside her sat a man that Woodford recognized as one of their closest friends, Curtis Dawes.

Sight of Dawes gave Woodford an idea. He would get Dawes outside in some way and have him break the news of his return to Helen. His heart was pounding at sight of his wife.

Then Curtis Dawes spoke, his words dimly audible to Woodford outside the window. “Happy, Helen?” he was asking.

“So happy, dear,” she answered, turning toward him.

Out in the darkness Woodford stared in perplexed wonder. How could she be happy when she thought her husband dead and buried?

He heard Curtis Dawes speaking again. “It was a long time,” the man was saying. “Those years that I waited, Helen.”

She laid her hand tenderly on his. “I know, and you never said a word. I respected so your loyalty to John.”

She looked into the fire musingly. “John was a good husband, Curt. He really loved me and I never let him guess that I didn’t love him, that it was you, his friend, I loved. But when he died I couldn’t feel grief. I felt regret for his sake, of course, but underneath it was the consciousness that at last you and I were free to love each other.”

Dawes’ arm went tenderly around her shoulder. “Darling, you don’t regret that I talked you into marrying me right away? You don’t care that people may be talking about us?”

“I don’t care for anything but you,” she told him. “John was dead, young Jack has his own home and wife, and there was no reason in the world why we should not marry. I’m glad that we did.”

In the darkness outside the window a stunned, dazed John Woodford saw her lift an illumined face toward the man’s.

“I’m proud to be your wife at last, dear, no matter what anyone may say about us,” he heard.

Woodford drew slowly back from the window. He paused in the darkness under the trees, his mind shaken, torn.

So this was his homecoming from the tomb? This was the joy he had anticipated in Helen when he returned?

It couldn’t be the truth! His ears had deceived him—Helen could not be the wife of Curtis Dawes! Yet part of his mind told him remorselessly that it was true.

He had always sensed that Helen’s feeling for him was not as strong as his for her. But that she had loved Dawes he had never dreamed. Yet now he remembered Dawes’ frequent visits, the odd silences between him and Helen. He remembered a thousand trifles that spoke of the love which these two had cherished for each other.

What was he, John Woodford, to do? Walk in upon them and tell them that they had been premature in counting him dead, that he had come back to claim his position in life and his wife again?

He couldn’t do it! If Helen during those years had wavered in the least in her loyalty to him, he would have had less compunction. But in the face of those years of silent, uncomplaining life with him, he couldn’t now reappear to her and blast her new-found happiness and blacken her name.

Woodford laughed a little, bitterly. He was then to be an Enoch Arden from the tomb. A strange role, surely, yet it was the only one open to him.

What was he to do? He couldn’t let Helen know now that he was alive, couldn’t return to the home that had been his. Yet he must go somewhere. Where?

With a sudden leap of the heart he thought of lack, his son. He could at least go to Jack, let his son know that he was living. Jack at least would be overjoyed to see him, and would keep the fact of his return secret from his mother.

John Woodford, with that thought rekindling a little his numbed feelings, started back through the trees toward the street. Where he had approached the house but minutes before with eager steps, he stole away now like a thief fearful of being observed.

He reached the street and started across the blocks toward the cottage of his son. Few were abroad, for the cold seemed increasing and it was well past midnight. Woodford mechanically rubbed his stiffened hands as he hurried along.

He came to his son’s neat little white cottage, and felt relief as he saw lights from its lower windows also. He had feared that no one would be up. He crossed the frozen lawn to the lighted windows, intent on seeing if Jack were there and if he were alone.

He peered in, as he had done at his own home. Jack was sitting at a little desk and his young wife was perched on the arm of his chair and was listening as he explained something to her from a sheet of writing on the desk.

John Woodford, pressing his face against the cold window-pane, could hear Jack’s words.

“You see, Dorothy, we can just make it by adding our savings to Dad’s insurance money,” lack was saying.

“Oh, Jack!” cried Dorothy happily. “And it’s what you’ve wanted so long, a little business of your own!”

Jack nodded. “It won’t be very big to start with, but I’ll make it grow, all right. This is the chance I’ve been hoping for and I’m sure going to make the most of it.

“Of course,” he said, his face sobering a little, “it’s too bad about Dad going like that. But seeing that he did die, the insurance money solves our problems of getting started. Now you take the overhead—” he said, and began unreeling a string of figures to the intent Dorothy.

John Woodford drew slowly back from the window. He felt more dazed and bewildered than ever. He had forgotten the insurance he had carried, which he had intended to give Jack his start. But of course, he saw now, it had been paid over when he was believed dead.

He was not dead, but living. Yet if he let Jack know that, it meant the end of his son’s long-desired opportunity. Jack would have to return the insurance money to the company, wrecking his dreamed-of chance. How could he let him know, then?

He, John Woodford, had already decided that he must remain dead to his wife and therefore to the world. He might as well remain so to his son, also. It was for the best. John Woodford melted away from the cottage into the darkness.

When he reached the street he stood in indecision. A freezing wind had begun to blow, and he felt very cold without an overcoat. Mechanically he turned his coat-collar closer around his neck.

He tried to think what he must do. Neither Helen nor Jack must know that he was living, and that meant that no one in the city must know. He must get out of the town to some other place, take up life under some other name.

But he would need help, money, to do that. Where was he to get them? Barred as he was from calling on his wife or son, to whom could he tum for help without letting his return become generally known?

Howard Norse! The name came at once to Woodford’s lips. Norse had been his employer, head of the firm where Woodford had held a position for many years. Woodford had been one of his oldest employees. Howard Norse would help him to get a position somewhere else, and would keep his reappearance secret.

He knew where Norse’s residence was, several miles out in the country. But he couldn’t walk that far, and he had no taxi or trolley fare. He would have to telephone Norse.

Woodford walked back toward the city’s central section, head bent against the piercing cold wind. He succeeded in finding an all-night lunchroom whose proprietor allowed him to use the telephone. With cold-stiffened lingers he dialed Norse’s number.

Howard Norse’s sleepy voice soon came over the wire. “Mr. Norse, this is Woodford—John Woodford,” he said quickly.

There was an incredulous exclamation from Howard Norse. “You’re crazy! John Woodford’s been dead and buried for a couple of weeks!”

“No, I tell you it’s John Woodford!” insisted Woodford. “I’m not dead at all, I’m as living as you are! If you’ll come into town for me you’ll see for yourself.”

“I’m not likely to drive to town at two in the morning to look at a maniac,” Norse replied acidly. “Whatever your game is, you’re wasting your time on me.”

“But you’ve got to help me!” Woodford cried. “I’ve got to have money, a chance to get out of the city without anyone knowing. I gave your firm my services for years and now you’ve got to give me help!”

“Listen to me, whoever you are,” snapped Norse over the wire. “I was bothered long enough with John Woodford when he was living—he was so inefficient we’d have kicked him out long ago if we hadn’t been sorry for him. But now that he’s dead, you needn’t think you can bother me in his name. Good-night!”

The receiver clicked in Woodford’s unbelieving ear.

He stared at the instrument. So that was what they had really thought of him at the firm—there where he had always thought himself one of the most highly valued of employees!

But there must be someone upon whom he could call for help; someone he could convince that John Woodford was still living; someone who would be glad to think that he might be living.

What about Willis Grann? Grann had been his closest friend next to Curtis Dawes. He had lent money more than once to Woodford in the past, and certainly should be willing to do so now.

Hastily Woodford called Grann’s number. This time he was more careful in his approach, when he heard the other’s voice.

“Willis, I’ve got something to tell you that may sound incredible, but you’ve got to believe, do you hear?” he said.

“Who is this and what in the world are you talking about?” demanded Grann’s startled voice.

“Willis, this is John Woodford. Do you hear, John Woodford! Everyone thinks I’m dead but I’m not, and I’ve got to see you.”

“What?” cried the other’s voice over the telephone. “Why, you must be drunk. I saw Woodford lying in his coffin myself, so I know he’s dead.”

“I tell you, it’s not so, I’m not dead!” Woodford almost screamed. “I’ve got to get some money, though, to get away from here and you must lend it to me! You always lent it to me before, and I need it now worse than ever I did. I’ve got to get away!”

“So that’s it!” said Willis Grann. “Because I used to help Woodford out you think you can get money from me by just calling me up and pretending that you’re he. Why, Woodford himself was the biggest pest in the world with his constant borrowings. I felt almost relieved when he died. And now you try to make me believe that he’s come back from the dead to pester me again!”

“But he never died—I’m John Woodford really—” Woodford protested vainly.

“Sorry, old top,” returned Grann’s mocking voice. “Next time pick a living person to impersonate, not a dead one.”

He hung up. John Woodford slowly replaced the receiver and made his way out to the street.

The wind was blowing harder and now was bringing with it clouds of fine snow that stung against his face like sand. He shivered as he stumbled along the streets of dark shops, his body freezing as his mind was frozen.

There was no one from whom he could get help, he saw. His paramount necessity was still to get out of the city, and to do that he must rely on himself.

The icy blasts of the snow-laden wind penetrated through his thin coat. His hands were shaking with the cold.

A sign caught Woodford’s eye, the illuminated beacon of a relief lodging-house. At once he made his way toward it. He could at least sleep there tonight, get started from the city in the morning.

The shabby men dozing inside in chairs looked queerly at him as he entered. So did the young clerk to whom he made his way.

“I’d—I’d like to stay here tonight,” he said to the clerk.

The clerk stared. “Are you trying to kid me?”

Woodford shook his head. “No, I’m penniless and it’s cold outside. I’ve got to stay somewhere.”

The clerk smiled disdainfully. “Listen, fellow, no one with duds like yours is that hard up. Scram before I call a cop.”

Woodford looked down at his clothes, his frock coat and stiff white shirt and gleaming patent-leather shoes, and understood.

He said desperately to the clerk, “But these clothes don’t mean anything. I tell you, I haven’t a penny!”

“Will you beat it before I have you thrown out of here?” the clerk demanded.

Woodford backed toward the door. He went outside again into the cold. The wind had increased and more snow was falling. The front of Woodford’s coat was soon covered with it as he pushed along.

It came to him as a queer joke that the splendor of his funeral clothes should keep him from getting help now. He couldn’t even beg a passer-by for a dime. Who would give to a panhandler in formal clothes?

Woodford felt his body quivering and his teeth chattering from sheer cold. If he could only get out of the blast of the icy wind! His eyes sought desperately along the street for a hallway where he might shelter himself.

He found a deep doorway and crouched down inside it, out of the wind and driving snow. But hardly had he done so when a heavy step paused in front of him and a nightstick rapped his feet smartly. An authoritative voice ordered him to get up and go home.

Woodford did not try to explain to the policeman that he was not a drunken citizen fallen by the way. He got wearily to his feet and moved on along the street, unable to see more than a few feet ahead for the whirl of snow.

The snow on which he was walking penetrated the thin shoes he wore, and his feet were soon even colder than the rest of his body. He walked with slow, dragging steps, head bent against the storm of white.

He was dully aware that the dark shops beside him had given way to a low stone wall. With a sudden start he recognized it as the wall of the cemetery which he had left but hours before, the cemetery containing the vault from which he had escaped.

The vault! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? he asked himself. The vault would be a shelter from the freezing wind and snow. He could stay there for the night without anyone objecting.

He paused, feeling for a moment a little renewal of his former terrors. Did he dare go back into that place from which he had struggled to escape? Then an extra—strong blast of icy air struck him and decided him—the vault would be shelter and that was what his frozen body craved more than anything else.

Stiffly he climbed over the low stone wall and made his way through the cemetery’s whitened monuments and vaults toward the one from which he had escaped. The driving snow covered his tracks almost as he made them, as he trudged toward the vault.

He reached it and tried its iron doors anxiously. Suppose he had locked them when he left! But to his relief they swung open, and he entered and shut them. It was dark inside, but he was out of the wind and snow now and his numbed body felt a little relief.

Woodford sat down in the corner of the vault. It was a shelter for the night, at least. It seemed rather ironic that he had had to come back here for shelter, but it was something to be thankful for that he had even this. In the morning, when the storm was over, he could leave without anyone seeing and get out of the city.

He sat listening to the wind and snow shriek outside. The stone floor of the vault was very cold, so cold that he felt his limbs stiffening and cramping, and finally he stood up unsteadily and paced to and fro in the vault, chaffing his arms and hands.

If he had only a blanket, or even a heavy coat, to lie upon! He’d freeze there upon the stone floor. Then as he turned in his pacing he bumped into the coffin on the shelf and a new idea was born in his mind.

The coffin! Why, the interior of it was lined deep with silk and satin padding. It would be warm in the coffin. He could sleep in it far better than on the cold stone floor. But did he dare to re-enter it?

Again Woodford felt faintly the former terrors he had experienced when he had awakened in it. But they meant nothing, he told himself. He would not be fastened in, this time, and his frozen flesh yearned for the warmth of the coffin’s lining.

Slowly, carefully, he climbed up and lowered himself into the coffin and stretched out. The silk and padding he sank into had a grateful warmth. He lowered his head upon the soft little pillow with a sigh of relief. This was better.

He experienced an almost luxurious comfort now; but after he had lain for a little while he felt that the top of his body was still cold, where the cold air came into the open coffin’s top. That cold air entering kept him from being completely warm. If the lid above him were just closed to keep out the cold air—

He reached up and got the edge of the heavy metal lid, then let it down upon himself. He was completely in the dark, now, inside the closed coffin. But he was warm, too, for the lid kept out the cold air. And he was getting warmer all the time, as his body warmed up the interior.

Yes, it was far more comfortable with the lid closed. An even, warmth now pervaded his whole being, and the air inside the coffin was still getting warmer and thicker. He felt a little drowsy now, as he breathed that warm air, felt luxuriously sleepy as he lay on the soft silk.

It was getting a little harder to breathe, somehow, as the air became thicker. He ought really to raise the coffin lid and let in some fresh air. But it was so warm now, and the air outside was so cold, and he was more and more sleepy.

Something dim and receding in his fading consciousness told him that he was on the way to suffocation. But what if he was? was his sleepy thought. He was better off in here than back in the world outside. He had been a fool ever to fight so hard before to get out of his warm, comfortable coffin, to get back to that outside world.

No, it was better like this, the darkness and the warmth and the sleep that advanced. Nobody would ever know that he had awakened at all, that he had been away from here at all. Everything would be just as before—just as before. And with that comforting assurance, John Woodford was swept farther and farther down the dark stream of unconsciousness from which this time there would be no returning.

THE SECOND SATELLITE

Norman and Hackett, bulky in their thick flying suits, seemed to fill the little office. Across the room Harding, the field superintendent, contemplated them. Two planes were curving up into the dawn together from the field outside, their motors thunderous as they roared over the building. When their clamor had receded, Harding spoke:

“I don’t know which of you two is crazier,” he said. “You, Norman, to propose a fool trip like this, or you, Hackett, to go with him.”

Hackett grinned, but the long, lean face of Norman was earnest. “No doubt it all sounds a little insane,” he said, “but I’m convinced I’m right.”

The field superintendent shook his head. “Norman, you ought to be writing fiction instead of flying. A second satellite—and Fellows and the others on it—what the devil!”

“What other theory can account for their disappearance?” asked Norman calmly. “You know that since the new X-type planes were introduced, hundreds of fliers all over Earth have been trying for altitude records in them. Twenty-five miles—thirty—thirty-five—the records have been broken every day. But out of the hundreds of fliers who have gone up to those immense heights, four have never come down nor been seen again!

“One vanished over northern Sweden, one over Australia, one over Lower California, and one, Fellows, himself, right here over Long Island. You saw the globe on which I marked those four spots, and you saw that when connected they formed a perfect circle around the Earth. The only explanation is that the four fliers when they reached a forty-mile height were caught up by some body moving round Earth in that circular orbit, some unknown moon circling Earth inside its atmosphere, a second satellite of Earth’s whose existence has until now never been suspected!”

Harding shook his head again. “Norman, your theory would be all right if it were not for the cold fact that no such satellite has ever been glimpsed.”

“Can you glimpse a bullet passing you?” Norman retorted. “The two fliers at Sweden and Lower California vanished within three hours of each other, on opposite sides of the Earth. That means that this second satellite, as I’ve computed, circles Earth once every six hours, and travelling at that terrific speed it is no more visible to us of Earth than a rifle bullet would be.”

“Moving through Earth’s atmosphere at such speed, indeed, one would expect it to burn up by its own friction with the air. But it does not, because its own gravitational power would draw to itself enough air to make a dense little atmosphere for itself that would cling to it and shield it as it speeds through Earth’s upper air. No, I’m certain that this second satellite exists, Harding, and I’m as certain that it’s responsible for the vanishing of those four fliers.”

“And now you and Hackett have figured when it will be passing over here and are going up in an X-type yourselves to look for it,” Harding said musingly.

“Look for it?” echoed Hackett. “We’re not going to climb forty miles just to get a look at the damn thing—we’re going to try landing on it!”

“You’re crazy sure!” the field superintendent exploded. “If Fellows and those others got caught by the thing and never came down again, why in the name of all that’s holy would you two want—” He stopped suddenly. “Oh, I think I see,” he said, awkwardly. “Fellows was rather a buddy of you two, wasn’t he?”

“The best that ever flew a crippled Nieuport against three Fokkers to pull us out of a hole,” said Norman softly. “Weeks he’s been gone, and if it had been Hackett and I he’d be all over the sky looking for us—the damned lunatic. Well, we’re not going to let him down.”

“I see,” Harding repeated. Then—“Well, here comes your mechanic, Norman, so your ship must be ready. I’ll go with you. It’s an event to see two Columbuses starting for another world.”

The gray dawn-light over the flying field was flushing to faint rose as the three strode out to where the long X-type stood, its strangely curved wings, enclosed cabin and flat, fan-like tail gleaming dully. Its motor was already roaring with power and the plane’s stubby wheels strained against the chocks. In their great suits Norman and Hackett were like two immense ape-figures in the uncertain light, to the eyes of those about them.

“Well, all the luck,” Harding told them. “You know I’m pulling for you, but—I suppose it’s useless to say anything about being careful.”

“I seem to have heard the words,” Hackett grinned, as he and Norman shook the field superintendent’s hand.

“It’s all the craziest chance,” Norman told the other. “And if we don’t come down in a reasonable time—well, you’ll know that our theory was right, and you can broadcast it or not as you please.”

“I hope for your sake that you’re dead wrong,” smiled the official. “I’ve told you two to get off the Earth a lot of times, but I never meant it seriously.”

Harding stepped back as the two clambered laboriously into the cramped cabin. Norman took the controls, the door slammed, and as the chocks were jerked back and the motor roared louder the long plane curved up at a dizzy angle from the field into the dawn. Hackett waved a thick arm down toward the diminishing figures on the field below; then turned from the window to peer ahead with his companion.

The plane flew in a narrow ascending spiral upward, at an angle that would have been impossible to any ship save an X-type. Norman’s eyes roved steadily over the instrument as they rose, his ears unconsciously alert for each explosion of the motor. Earth receded swiftly into a great gray concave surface as they climbed higher and higher.

By the time the five-mile height was reached Earth’s surface had changed definitely from concave to convex. The plane was ascending by then in a somewhat wider spiral, but its climb was as steady and sure as ever. Frost begin to form quickly on the cabin’s windows, creeping out from the edges. Norman spoke a word over the motor’s muffled thunder, and Hackett snicked on the electrical radiators. The frost crept back as their warm, clean heat flooded the cabin.

Ten miles—fifteen—they had reached already altitudes impossible but a few years before, though it was nothing to the X-types. As they passed the ten-mile mark, Hackett set the compact oxygen-generator going. A clean, tangy odor filled the cabin as it began functioning. Twenty miles—twenty-two—

After a time Norman pointed mutely to the clock on the instrument board, and Hackett nodded. They were well within their time schedule, having calculated to reach the forty-mile height at ten, the hour when, by its computed orbit, the second satellite should be passing overhead. “—26—27—28—” Hackett muttered the altimeter figures to himself as the needle crept over them.

Glancing obliquely down through the window he saw that Earth was now a huge gray ball beneath them, white cloud-oceans obscuring the drab details of its surface here and there. “—31—32—” The plane was climbing more slowly, and at a lesser angle. Even the X-type had to struggle to rise in the attenuated air now about them. Only the super-light, super-powered plane could ever have reached the terrific height.

It was at the thirty-four mile level that the real battle for altitude began. Norman kept the plane curving steadily upward, handling it with surpassing skill in the rarefied air. Frost was on its windows now despite the heating mechanism. Slowly the altimeter needle crept to the forty mark. Norman kept the ship circling, its wings tilted slightly, but not climbing, Earth a great gray misty ball beneath.

“Can’t keep this height long,” he jerked. “If our second satellite doesn’t show up in minutes we’ve had a trip for nothing.”

“All seems mighty different up here,” was Hackett’s shouted comment. “Easy enough to talk down there about hopping onto the thing, but up here—hell, there’s nothing but air and mighty little of that!”

Norman grinned. “There’ll be more. If I’m right about this thing we won’t need to hop it—its own atmosphere will pick us up.”

Both looked anxious as the motor sputtered briefly. But in a moment it was again roaring steadily. Norman shook his head.

“Maybe a fool’s errand after all. No—I’m still sure we’re right! But it seems that we don’t prove it this time.”

“Going down?” asked Hackett.

“We’ll have to, in minutes. Even with its own air-feed the motor can’t stand this height for—”

Norman never finished the words. There was a sound, a keen rising, rushing sound of immense power that reached their ears over the motor’s roar. Then in an instant the universe seemed to go mad about them: they saw the gray ball of Earth and the sun above skyrocketing around them as the plane whirled madly.

The rushing sound was in that moment thunderous, terrible, and as winds smashed and rocked the plane like giant hands, Hackett glimpsed another sphere that was not the sphere of Earth, a greenish globe that expanded with lightning speed in the firmament beside their spinning plane! The winds stilled; the green globe changed abruptly to a landscape of green land and sea toward which the plane was falling! Norman was fighting the controls—land and sea were gyrating up to them with dizzy speed—crash!

With that cracking crash the plane was motionless. Sunlight poured through its windows, and great green growths were all around it. Hackett, despite Norman’s warning cry, forced the door open and was bursting outside, Norman after him. They staggered and fell, with curious lightness and slowness, on the ground outside, then clutched the plane for support and gazed stupefiedly around them.

The plane had crashed down into a thicket of giant green reeds that rose a yard over their heads, its pancake landing having apparently not damaged it. The ground beneath their feet was soft and soggy, the air warm and balmy, and the giant reeds hid all the surrounding landscape from view.

In the sky the sun burned near one horizon with unusual brilliance. But it was dwarfed, in size, by the huge gray circle that filled half the heavens overhead. A giant gray sphere it was, screened here and there by floating white mists and clouds, that had yet plain on it the outlines of dark continents and gleaming seas. A quaking realization held the two as they stared up at it.

“Earth!” Norman was babbling. “It’s Earth, Hackett—above us; my God, I can’t believe even yet that we’ve done it!”

“Then we’re on—the satellite—the second satellite!—” Hackett fought for reality. “Those winds that caught us—”

“They were the atmosphere of this world, of the second satellite! They caught us and carried us on inside this smaller world’s atmosphere, Hackett. We’re moving with it around Earth at terrific speed now!”

“The second satellite, and we on it!” Hackett whispered, incredulously. “But these reeds—it can’t all be like this—”

They stepped together away from the plane. The effort sent each of them sailing upward in a great, slow leap, to float down more than a score of feet from the plane. But unheeding in their eagerness this strange effect of the satellite’s lesser gravitational power, they moved on, each step a giant, clumsy leap. Four such steps took them out of the towering reeds onto clear ground.

It was a gentle, grassy slope they were on, stretching away along a gray-green sea that extended out to the astoundingly near horizon on their right. To the left it rose into low hills covered with dense masses of green junglelike vegetation. Hackett and Norman, though, gazed neither at sea or hills for the moment, but at the half-score grotesque figures who had turned toward them as they emerged from the reeds. A sick sense of the unreal held them as they gazed, frozen with horror. For the great figures returning their gaze a few yards from them were—frog-men!

Frog-men! Great mottled green shapes seven to eight feet in height, with bowed, powerful legs and arms that ended in webbed paws. The heads were bulbous ones in which wide, unwinking frog-eyes were set at the sides, the mouths white-lipped and white-lined. Three of the creatures held each a black metal tube-and-handle oddly like a target-pistol.

“Norman!” Hackett’s voice was a crescendo of horror. “Norman!”

“Back to the plane!” Norman cried thickly. “The plane—”

The two staggered back, but the frog-men, recovering from their own first surprise, were running forward with great hopping steps! The two fliers flung themselves back in a floating leap toward the reeds, but the green monsters were quick after them. A croaking cry came from one and as another raised his tube-and-handle, something flicked from it that burst close beside Norman. There was no sound or light as it burst, but the reeds for a few feet around it vanished!

A hoarse cry from Hackett—the creatures had reached him, grasped him at the edge of the reeds! Norman swerved in his floating leap to strike the struggling flier and frog-men. The scene whirled around him as he fought them, great paws reaching for him. With a sick, frantic rage he felt his clenched fist drive against cold, green, billowy bodies. Croaking cries sounded in his ears; then, Hackett and he were jerked to their feet, held tightly by four of the creatures.

“My God, Norman,” panted Hackett, helpless. “What are they—frog-things?—”

“Steady, Hackett. They’re the people of the second satellite, it seems; wait!”

One of the armed frog-men approached and inspected them, and then croaked an order in a deep voice. Then, still holding the two tightly, the party of monsters began to move along the slope, skirting the sea’s edge. In a few minutes they reached two curious objects resting on the slope. They seemed long black metal boats, slender and with sharp prow and stern. A compact mechanism and control-board filled the prow, while at the stern and sides were long tubes mounted on swivels like machine-guns.

The frog-men motioned Norman and Hackett into one, fastening the two prisoners and themselves into their seats with metal straps provided for the purpose. Four had entered the one boat, the others that of the captives. One at the prow moved his paws over the control-board and with a purring of power the boat, followed by the other, rose smoothly into the air. It headed out over the gray-green sea, land dropping quickly from sight behind, the horizons water-bounded on all sides. From their nearness Norman guessed that this second satellite of Earth’s was small indeed beside its mother planet. He had to look up to earth’s great gray sphere overhead to attain a sense of reality.

Hackett was whispering beside him, the frog-men watchful. “Norman, it’s not real—it can’t be real! These things—these boats—intelligent like men—”

The other sought to steady him. “It’s a different world, Hackett. Gravitation different, light different, everything different, and evolution here has had a different course. On Earth men evolved to be the most intelligent life-forms, but here the frog-races, it seems.”

“But where are they taking us? Could we ever find the plane again?”

“God knows. If we ever get away from these things we might. And we’ve got to find Fellows, too; I wonder where he is on this world.”

For many minutes the two boats raced on at great speed over the endless waters before the watery skyline was broken far ahead by something dark and unmoving. Hackett and Norman peered with intense interest toward it. It seemed at first a giant squat mountain rising from the sea, but as they shot nearer they saw that its outline was too regular, and that colossal as it was in size it was the work of intelligence. They gasped as they came nearer and got a better view of it.

For it was a gigantic dome of black metal rising sheer from the lonely sea, ten miles if anything in diameter, a third that in greatest height. There was no gate or window or opening of any kind in it. Just the colossal, smooth black dome rearing from the watery plain. Yet the two boats were flashing lower toward it.

“They can’t be going inside!” Hackett conjectured. “There’s no way in and what could be in there? The whole thing’s mad—”

“There’s some way,” Norman said. “They’re slowing—”

The flying-boats were indeed slowing as they dipped lower. They were very near the dome now, its curving wall a looming, sky-high barrier before them. Suddenly the boats dipped sharply downward toward the green sea. Before the two fliers could comprehend their purpose, could do aught more than draw instinctive great breaths in preparation, the two craft had shot down into the waters and were arrowing down through the green depths.

Blinded, flung against his metal strap by the resistance of the waters they ripped through, Norman yet retained enough of consciousness to glimpse beams of light that stabbed ahead from the prows of their rushing boats, to see vaguely strange creatures of the deep blundering in and out of those beams as the boats hurtled forward. The water that forced its way between his lips was fresh, he was vaguely aware, and even as he fought to hold his breath was aware too that the frog-men seemed in no way incommoded by the sudden transition into the water, their amphibian nature allowing them to stay under it far longer than any human could do.

The boats ripped through the waters at terrific speed and in a few seconds there loomed before them the giant metal wall of the great dome, going down into the depths here. Norman glimpsed vaguely that the whole colossal dome rested on a vast pedestal-like mountain of rock that rose from the sea’s floor almost to the surface. Then a great round opening in the wall; the boats flashed into it and were hurtling along a water-filled tunnel. Norman felt his lungs near bursting—when the tunnel turned sharply upward and the boats whizzed up and abruptly out of the water-tunnel into air!

But it was not the open air again. They were beneath the gigantic dome! For as Norman and Hackett breathed deep, awe fell on their faces as they took in the scene. Far overhead stretched the dome’s colossally curving roof, and far out on all sides. It was lit beneath that roof by a clear light that the two would have sworn was sunlight. The dome was in effect the roof of a gigantic, illuminated building, and upon its floor there stretched a mighty city.

The city of the frog-men! Their boats were rising up over it and Norman and Hackett saw it clear. Square mile upon square mile of structures stretched beneath the dome, black buildings often of immense size, varying in shape, but all of square, rectangular proportions. Between them moved countless frog-hordes, swirling throngs in streets and squares, and over the roofs darted thick swarms of flying-boats. And at the city’s center, in a great, circular, clear space, lay a wide, round, green pool—the opening of the water-tunnel up through which they had come.

Norman pointed down toward it. “That’s your answer!” he cried. “The only entrance to this frog-city is from the sea, up through that water-tunnel!”

“Good God, an amphibian city!” Hackett was shaken, white-faced.

The two boats were driving quickly over the city, through the swarming craft. Norman glimpsed towering buildings that might have been palaces, temples, laboratories. They slowed and dipped toward one block-like building not far from the water-tunnel’s opening. Armed frog-guards were on its roof, and other boats rested there. The two came to rest and the two captives were jerked out, the guards seizing them.

Half-dragged and half-floating they were led toward an opening in the roof from which a stair led downward. They passed down thus into the building’s interior, lit by many windows. Norman glimpsed long halls ending in barred doors, guards here and there. Tube-lines ran along the walls and somewhere machines were throbbing dully. They came at last to a barred door whose guard opened it at the croaking order of the frog-men who held the two, and they were thrust inside, as the door clanged. They turned, and exclaimed in amazement. The room held fully a half-hundred men!

They were men such as the two fliers had never seen before, like humans except that their skins were a light green instead of the normal white and pink. They were dressed in dark short tunics, and kept talking to each other in a tongue quite unintelligible to Norman and Hackett. They came closer, flocking curiously around the two men, with a babel of voices quite meaningless to the two. Then one of the men uttered an exclamation, and all turned.

The barred door had swung open and a half-dozen frog-guards entered, followed by two frog-men carrying a square little mechanism from which tubing led back out through the door.

“Norman—these men—” Hackett was whispering rapidly. “If there are men in this world too, it may be that—”

“Quiet, Hackett—look at what they’re doing.”

The two frog-men had set their mechanism in place and then croaked out a brief word or order. Slowly, reluctantly, one of the green men moved toward them. Quickly they removed a metal disk fastened to his arm, exposing a small orifice like an unhealed wound. Onto this they fastened a suckerlike object from which a transparent tube led back through the mechanism. The machine hummed and at once a red stream pulsed through the tube and back through the mechanism. The man to whom it was attached was growing rapidly pale!

Norman, sick with horror, clutched his companion. “Hackett—these frog-men are sucking his blood from him!”

“Good God! And look—they’re doing it with another!”

“All of these men—kept prisoners to furnish them with blood. It must be the damned creatures’ food! And we here with the others—”

A common horror shook the two. It did not seem to affect the green men in the room, though, who advanced to the mechanism one by one with a reluctant air as of cows unwilling to be milked. Each was attached to the mechanism by the sucking disk on his arm, and out of each the blood poured through the tube. The metal disk was replaced on his arm then and he went back to the others. Norman saw that the frog-men took only from each an amount of blood that they could lose and yet live, since, though each came back pale and weak from the mechanism, they were able to walk.

“It must be their food—human blood!” Norman repeated. “They may have thousands on thousands of humans penned up like this, like so many herds of cows, and perhaps they live entirely on the life-blood they milk from them. Human cows—God!”

“Norman—look—they’re calling to us!”

The two stiffened. All the others in the room had taken their turn at the blood-sucking mechanism and now the frog-men croaked their order to the two fliers. They had forgotten their own predicament in the horror of the scene, but now it became real to them. They backed against the room’s wall, quivering, dangerous.

The frog-guards came forward to drag them to the machine. A webbed paw was outstretched but Hackett with a wild blow drove the frog-man back and downward. The frog-guards leaped, and Norman and Hackett struck them back with all the greater strength the lesser gravitation gave them. The room was in an uproar, the green men shouting hoarsely and seeming on the point of rushing to their aid.

But the menacing force-pistols of the other frog-guards held back the shouting men and in moments the two fliers were overpowered by sheer weight of frog-bodies. Norman felt himself dragged to the machine.

Pain needled his upper arm as an incision was made. He felt the sucking-disk attached; then the machine hummed, and a sickening nausea swept him as the blood drained from his body. Held tightly by the guards he went dizzy, weak, but at last felt the sucker removed and a metal disk fastened over the incision. He was jerked aside and Hackett, his face deathly white, was dragged into his place. In a moment some of the latter’s blood had been pumped from him also.

The machine was withdrawn, Norman and Hackett were released, and the frog-men, with their black force-pistols watchfully raised, withdrew, the door clanging. The room settled back to quietness, the green men stretching in lassitude on the metal bunks around it. The two fliers crouched down near the door, shuddering nausea and weakness still holding them.

Norman found that Hackett was laughing weakly. “To think that twenty-four hours ago I was in New York,” he half-laughed, half-sobbed. “On Earth—Earth—”

The other gripped his arm. “It’s horrible, Hackett, I know. But it isn’t instant death, and we’ve still a chance to escape. Hell, can damn frog-men keep us here? Where’s your nerve, man?”

A voice beside them made them turn in amazement. “You are men from Earth?” it asked, in queerly accented English. “From Earth?”

Astonishment held them as they saw who spoke. It was one of the green men in the room, who had settled down by their side. A tall figure with superb muscles and frank, clean countenance, his dark eyes afire with eagerness.

“English?” Norman exclaimed. “You know English—you understand me?”

The other showed his teeth in a smile. “I know, yes. I’m Sarja, and I learned to speak it from Fallas, in my city, before the Ralas caught me.”

“Fallas—” Norman repeated, puzzled; then suddenly he flamed. “By God, he means Fellows!”

“Fallas, yes,” said the other. “From the sky he fell into our city in a strange flying-boat that was smashed. He was hurt but we cared for him, and he taught me his speech, which I heard you talking now.”

“Then Fellows is in your city now?” asked Hackett eagerly. “Where is that?”

“Across this sea—back in the hills,” the other waved. “It is far from the sea but I was rash one day and came too near the water in my flying-boat. The Ralas were out raiding and they saw me, caught me, and brought me here. No escape now, until I die.”

“The Ralas—you mean these frog-men?” Norman asked.

Sarja nodded. “Of course. They are the tyrants and oppressors of this world. Our little world is but a tenth or less the size of your great Earth which it circles, but it has its lands and rivers, and this one great fresh-water sea into which the latter empty. In this sea long ago developed the Ralas, the great frog-men who acquired such intelligence and arts that they became lords of this world.

“Through the centuries, while on the land our races of green men have been struggling upward, the Ralas have oppressed them. Long ago the Ralas left all their other cities to build this one great amphibian city at the sea‘s center. Entrance to it is only by the water-tunnel from without, and being frog-people entrance thus is easy for them since they can move for many minutes under water, though they drown like any other breathing animal if kept under too long. Humans dare not try to enter it thus by the water-tunnel, since, before they could find it and make their way up through it, they would have drowned.

To the Ralas have ruled from this impregnable amphibian city. Its colossal metal dome is invulnerable to ordinary attack, and though solid and without openings it is always as light beneath the dome here as outside, since the Ralas’ scientists contrived light-condensers and conductors that catch light outside and bring it in to release inside. So when it is day outside the sunlight is as bright here, and when night comes the Earth-light shines here the same as without.

“From this city their raiding parties have gone out endlessly to swoop down on the cities of us green men. Since we learned to make flying-boats like theirs, with molecular-motors, and to make the guns like theirs that fire shells filled with annihilating force, we have resisted them stoutly but their raids have not ceased. And always they have brought their prisoners back in to this, their city.

“Tens of thousands of green men they have prisoned here like us, for the sole purpose of supplying them with blood. For the Ralas live on this blood alone, changing it chemically to fit their own bodies and then taking it into their bodies. It eliminates all necessity for food here for them. Every few days they drain blood from us, and since we are well fed and cared for to keep us good blood-producers, we will be here for a long time before we die.”

“But haven’t you made any attempt to get out of here—to escape?” Norman asked.

Sarja smiled. “Who could escape the city of the Ralas? In all recorded history it has never been done, for even if by some miracle you got a flying-boat, the opening of the water-tunnel that leads outward is guarded always.”

“Guards or no guards, we’re going to try it and not sit here to furnish blood for the Ralas,” Norman declared. “Are you willing to help, to try to get to Fellows and your city?”

The green man considered. “It is hopeless,” he said, “but as well to die beneath the force-shells of the Ralas as live out a lifetime here. Yes, I will help, though I cannot see how you expect to escape even from this room.”

“I think we can manage that,” Norman told him. “But first—not a word to these others. We can’t hope to escape with them all, and there is no knowing what one might not betray us to the frog-men.”

He went on then to outline to the other two the idea that had come to him. Both exclaimed at the simpleness of the idea, though Sarja remained somewhat doubtful. While Hackett slept, weak still from his loss of blood, Norman had the green man scratch on the metal floor as well as possible a crude map of the satellite’s surface, and found that the city, where Fellows was, seemed some hundreds of miles back from the sea.

While they talked, the sunlight, apparently sourceless, that came through the heavily barred windows of the room faded rapidly, and dusk settled over the great amphibian city beneath the giant dome, kept from total darkness by a silvery pervading light that Norman reflected must be the light from Earth’s great sphere. With the dusk’s coming the activities in the frog-city lessened greatly.

With dusk, too, frog-guards entered the room bearing long metal troughs filled with a red jellylike substance, that they placed on racks along the wall. As the guards withdrew the men in the room rushed toward the troughs, elbowing each other aside and striking each other to scoop up and eat as much of the red jelly as possible. It was for all the world like the feeding of farm-animals, and Hackett and Norman so sickened at the sight that they had no heart to try the food. Sarja, though, had no such scruples and seemed to make a hearty meal at one of the troughs.

After the meal the green men sought the bunks and soon were stretched in sonorous slumber. It was, Norman reflected, exactly the existence of domesticated animals—to eat and sleep and give food to their masters. A deeper horror of the frog-men shook him, and a deeper determination to escape them. He waited until all in the room were sleeping before beckoning to Sarja and Hackett.

“Quiet now,” he whispered to them. “If these others wake they’ll make such a clamor we won’t have a chance in the world. Ready, Sarja?”

The green man nodded. “Yes, though I still think such a thing’s impossible.”

“Probably is,” Norman admitted. “But it’s the one chance we’ve got, the immensely greater strength of our Earth-muscle that the frog-men must have forgotten when they put us in here.”

They moved silently to the room’s great barred door, outside which a frog-guard paced. They waited until he had passed the door and on down the hall, then Norman and Hackett and Sarja grasped together one of the door’s vertical bars. It was an inch and a half in thickness, of solid metal, and it seemed ridiculous that any men could bend it by the sheer strength of their muscles.

Norman, though, was relying on the fact that on the second satellite, with its far lesser gravitational influence, their Earth-muscles gave them enormous strength. He grasped the bar, Hackett and Sarja gripping it below him, and then at a whispered word they pulled with all their force. The bar resisted and again, with sweat starting on their foreheads, they pulled. It gave a little.

They shrank back from it as the guard returned, moving past. Then grasping the bar again they bent all their force once more upon it. Each effort saw it bending more, the opening in the door’s bars widening. They gave a final great wrench and the bent bar squealed a little. They shrank back, appalled, but the guard had not heard or noticed. He moved past it on his return along the hall, and no sooner was past it than Norman squeezed through the opening and leaped silently for the great frog-man’s back.

It went down with a wild flurry of waving webbed paws and croaking cries, stilled almost instantly by Norman’s terrific blows. There was silence then as Hackett and Sarja squeezed out after him, the momentary clamor of the battle having aroused no one.

The three leaped together toward the stairs. In two great floating leaps they were on the floor above, Hackett and Norman dragging Sarja between them. They were not seen, were sailing in giant steps up another stair, hopes rising high. The last stair—the roof-opening above; and then from beneath a great croaking cry swelled instantly into chorus of a alarmed shouts.

“They’ve found the door—the guard!” panted Hackett.

They were bursting out onto the roof. Frog-guards were on it who came in a hopping rush toward them, force-pistols raised. But a giant leap took Hackett among them, to amaze them for a moment with great flailing blows. Sarja had leaped for the nearest flying-boat resting on the roof, and was calling in a frantic voice to Norman and Hackett. Norman was turning toward Hackett, the center of a wild combat, but the latter emerged from it for a brief second to motion him frantically back.

“No use, Norman—get away—get away!” he cried hoarsely, frenziedly.

“Hackett—for God’s sake—!” Norman half-leaped to the other, but an arm caught him, pulled him desperately onto the boat’s surface. It was Sarja, the long craft flying over the roof beneath his control.

“They come!” he panted. “Too late now—” Frog-men were pouring up onto the roof from below. Sarja sent the craft rocketing upward, as Hackett gestured them away for a last frantic time before going down beneath the frog-men’s onslaught.

The roof and the combat on it dropped back and beneath them like a stone as their craft ripped across the silvery dusk over the mighty frog-city. They were shooting toward the city’s center, toward the green pool that was the entrance to the water-tunnel, while behind and beneath an increasing clamor of alarm spread swiftly. Norman raged futilely.

“Hackett—Hackett! We can’t leave him—”

“Too late!” Sarja cried. “We cannot help him but only be captured again. We escape now and come back—come back—”

The truth of it pierced Norman’s brain even in the wild moment. Hackett had fought and held back the frog-guards only that they might escape. He shouted suddenly.

“Sarja—the water-tunnel!” A half-dozen boats with frog-guards on them were rising round it in answer to the alarm!

“The force-gun!” cried the green man. “Beside you—!”

Norman whirled, glimpsed the long tube on its swivel beside him, trained it on the boats rising ahead as they rocketed nearer. He fumbled frantically at a catch at the gun’s rear, then felt a stream of shells flicking out of it. Two of the boats ahead vanished as the shells released their annihilating force, another sagged and fell. From the remaining three invisible force-shells flicked around them, but in an instant Sarja had whirled the boat through them and down into the water-tunnel!

Norman clung desperately to his seat as the boat flashed down through the waters, and then, as Sarja sent it flying out through the great tunnel’s waters, glimpsed, close behind, the beams of the three Rala boats as they pursued them through the tunnel, overtaking them. Could the force-shells be fired under water? Norman did not know, but desperately he swung the force-gun back as they rushed through the waters, and pressed the catch. An instant later beams and boats behind them in the tunnel vanished.

His lungs were afire; it seemed that he must open them to the strangling water. The boat was ripping the waters at such tremendous speed that he felt himself being torn from his hold on it. Pain seemed poured like molten metal through his chest—he could hold out no longer; and then the boat stabbed up from the waters into clear air!

Norman panted, sobbed. Behind them rose the colossal metal dome of the frog-city, gleaming dully in the silvery light that flooded the far-stretching seas. That light poured down from a stupendous silver crescent in the night skies. Norman saw dully the dark outlines on it before he remembered. Earth! He laughed a little hysterically. Sarja was driving the flying-boat out over the sea and away from the frog-city at enormous speed. At last he glanced back. Far behind them lay the great dome and up around it gleaming lights were pouring, lights of pursuing Rala boats.

“We escape,” Sarja cried, “the city of the Ralas, from which none ever before escaped!”

Remembrance smote Norman. “Hackett! Held off those frog-men so we could get away—we’ll come back for him, by God!”

“We come back!” said Sarja. “We come back with all the green men of this world to the Ralas’ city, yes! I know what Fallas has planned.”

“Can you find your way to him—to your city?” Norman asked.

Sarja nodded, looking upward. “Before the next sun has come and gone we can reach it.”

The boat flew onward, and the great dome and the searching lights around it dropped beneath the horizon. Norman felt the warm wind drying his drenched garments as they rushed onward. Crouched on the boat he gazed up toward the silver crescent of Earth sinking toward the horizon ahead. That meant, he told himself, that the satellite turned slowly on its axis as it whirled around Earth. It came to him that its night and day periods must be highly irregular.

When the sun climbed from the waters behind them they were flying still over a boundless waste of waters, but soon they sighted on the horizon ahead the thin green line of land. Sarja slowed as they reached it, took his bearings, and sent the craft flying onward.

They passed over a green coastal plain and then over low hills joined in long chains and mantled by dense and mighty jungles, towering green growths of unfamiliar appearance to Norman. He thought he glimpsed, more than once, huge beastlike forms moving in them. He did see twice in the jungles great clearings where were fair-sized cities of bright-green buildings, a metal tower rising from each. But when he pointed to them Sarja shook his head.

At last, as they passed over another range of hills and came into sight of a third green city with its looming tower, the other pointed, his face alight.

“My city,” he said. “Fallas there.”

Fellows! Norman’s heart beat faster.

They shot closer and lower and he saw that the buildings were obviously green to lend them a certain protective coloration similar to that of the green jungles around them. The tower with its surmounting cage puzzled him though, but before he could ask Sarja concerning it his answer came in a different way. A long metal tube poked slowly out of the cage on the tower’s top and sent a hail of force-shells flicking around them.

“They’re firing on us!” Norman cried. “This can’t be your city!”

“They see our black boat!” Sarja exclaimed. “They think we’re Rala raiders and unless we let them know they’ll shoot us out of the air! Stand up—wave to them—!”

Both Norman and Sarja sprang to their feet and waved wildly to those in the tower-cage, their flying-boat drifting slowly forward. Instantly the force-shells ceased to hail toward them, and as they moved nearer a sirenlike signal broke from the cage. At once scores of flying-boats like their own, but glittering metal instead of black, shot up from the city where they had lain until now, and surrounded them.

As Sarja called in his own tongue to them the green men on the surrounding boats broke into resounding cries. They shot down toward the city, Norman gazing tensely. Great crowds of green men in their dark tunics had swarmed out into its streets with the passing of the alarm, and their craft and the others came to rest in an open square that was the juncture of several streets.

The green men that crowded excitedly about Norman and Sarja gave way to a half-dozen hurrying into the square from the greatest of the buildings facing on it. All but one were green men like the others. But that one—the laughing-eyed tanned face—the worn brown clothing, the curious huge steps with which he came—Norman’s heart leapt.

“Fellows!”

“Great God—Norman!” The other’s face was thunderstruck. “Norman—how by all that’s holy did you get here?”

Norman, mind and body strained to the breaking point, was incoherent. “We guessed how you’d gone—the second satellite, Fellows—Hackett and I came after you—taken to that frog-city—”

As Norman choked the tale, Fellows’ face was a study. And when it was finished he swallowed, and gripped Norman’s hand viselike.

“And you and Hackett figured it out and came after me—took that risk? Crazy, both of you. Crazy—”

“Fellows, Hackett’s still there, if he’s alive! In the Rala city!”

Fellows’ voice was grim, quick. “We’ll have him out. Norman, if he still lives. And living or dead, the Ralas will pay soon for this and for all they’ve done upon this world in ages. Their time nears—yes.”

He led Norman, excited throngs of the green men about them, into the great building from which he had emerged. There were big rooms inside, workshops and laboratories that Norman but vaguely glimpsed in passing. The room to which the other led him was one with a long metal couch. Norman stretched protestingly upon it at the other’s bidding, drifted off almost at once into sleep.

He woke to find the sunlight that had filled the room gone and replaced by the silvery Earth-light. From the window he saw that the silver-lit city outside now held tremendous activity, immense hordes of green men surging through it with masses of weapons and equipment, flying-boats pouring down out of the night from all directions. He turned as the door of the room clicked open behind him. It was his old friend Fellows.

“I thought you’d be awake by now, Norman. Feeling fit?”

“As though I’d slept a week,” Norman said, and the other laughed his old care-free laugh.

“You almost have, at that. Two days and nights you’ve slept, but it all adds up to hardly more than a dozen hours.”

“This world!” Norman’s voice held all his incredulity. “To think that we should be on it—a second satellite of Earth’s—it seems almost beyond belief.”

“Sometimes it seems so to me, too,” Fellows said thoughtfully. “But it’s not a bad world—not the human part of it, at least. When this satellite’s atmosphere caught me and pitchforked me down among these green men, smashing the plane and almost myself, they took care of me. You say three others vanished as I did? I never heard of them here; they must have crashed into the sea or jungles. Of course, I’d have got back to Earth on one of these flying-boats if I’d been able, but their molecular power won’t take them far from this world’s surface, so I couldn’t.

“As it was, the green men cared for me, and when I found how those frog-men have dominated this world for ages, how that city of the Ralas has spread endless terror among the humans here, I resolved to smash those monsters whatever I did. I taught some of the green men like Sarja my own speech, later learning theirs, and in the weeks I’ve been here I’ve been working out a way to smash the Ralas.

“You know that amphibian city is almost impregnable because humans can hardly live long enough under the water to get into it, let alone fight under water as the frog-men can. To meet them on even terms the green men needed diving-helmets with an oxygen supply. They’d never heard of such an idea, too afraid of the sea ever to experiment in it, but I convinced them and they’ve made enough helmets for all their forces. In them they can meet the Ralas under water on equal terms.

“And there’s a chance we can destroy that whole Rala city with their help. It’s built on a giant pedestal of rock rising from the sea’s floor, as you saw, and I’ve had some of the green men make huge force-shells or force-bombs that ought to be powerful enough to split that pedestal beneath the city. If we can get a chance to place those bombs it may smash the frog-men forever on this world. But one thing is sure: we’re going to get Hackett out if he still lives!”

“Then you’re, going to attack the Rala city now?” Norman cried.

Fellows nodded grimly. “While you have slept all the forces of the green men on this world have been gathering. Your coming has only precipitated our plans, Norman—the whole soul of the green races has been set upon this attack for weeks!”

Norman, half bewildered at the swiftness with which events rushed upon him, found himself striding with Fellows in great steps out through the building into the great square. It was shadowed now by mass on mass of flying-boats, crowded with green men, that hung over it and over the streets. One boat, Sarja at its controls, waited on the ground and as they entered and buckled themselves into the seats the craft drove up to hang with the others.

A shattering cheer greeted them. Norman saw that in the silvery light of Earth’s great crescent there stretched over the city and surrounding jungle now a veritable plain of flying-boats. On each were green men and each bristled with force-guns, and had as many great goggled helmets fastened to it as it had occupants. He glimpsed larger boats loaded with huge metal cylinders—the force-bombs Fellows had mentioned.

Fellows rose and spoke briefly in a clear voice to the assembled green men on their craft, and another great shout roared from them, and from these who watched in the city below. Then as he spoke a word, Sarja sent their craft flying out over the city, and the great mass of boats, fully a thousand in number, were hurtling in a compact column after them.

Fellows leaned to Norman as the great column of purring craft shot on over the silver-lit jungles. “We’ll make straight for the Rala city and try setting into it before they understand what’s happening.”

“Won’t they have guards out?”

“Probably, but we can beat them back into the city before their whole forces can come out on us. That’s the only way in which we can get inside and reach Hackett. And while we’re attacking the force-bombs can be placed, though I don’t rely too much on them.”

“If the attack only succeeds in getting us inside,” Norman said, grim-lipped, “we’ll have a chance—”

“It’s on the knees of the gods. These green men are doing an unprecedented thing in attacking the Ralas, the masters of this world, remember. But they’ve got ages of oppression to avenge; they’ll fight.”

The fleet flew on, hills and rivers a silver-lit panorama unreeling beneath them. Earth’s crescent sank behind them, and by the time they flashed out over the great fresh-water sea, the sun was rising like a flaming eye from behind it. Land sank from sight behind and the green men were silent, tense, as they saw stretching beneath only the gray waters that for ages had been the base of the dread frog-men. But still the fleet’s column raced on.

At last the column slowed. Far ahead the merest bulge broke the level line where sky and waters met. The amphibian city of the Ralas! At Fellows’ order-the flying-boats sank downward until they moved just above the waters. Another order made the green hosts don the grotesque helmets. Norman found that while cumbersome their oxygen supply was unfailing. They shot on again at highest speed, but as the gigantic black dome of the frog-city grew in their vision there darted up from around it suddenly a far-flung swarm of black spots.

“Rala boats!”

The muffled exclamation was Fellows’. There needed now no order on his part, though. Like hawks, leaping for prey, the fleet of the green men sprang through the air. Norman, clutching the force-gun between his knees, had time only to see that the Rala craft were a few hundred in number and that, contemptuous of the greater odds that favored these humans they had so long oppressed, they were flying straight to meet them. Then the two fleets met—and were spinning side by side above the waters.

Norman saw the thing only as a wild whirl of Rala boats toward and beside them, great green frog-men crowding the craft, their force-guns hailing shells. Automatically, with the old air-fighting instinct, his fingers had pressed the catch of the gun between his knees and as its shells flicked toward the rushing boats he saw areas of nothingness opening suddenly in their mass, shells striking and exploding in annihilating invisibility there and in their own fleet.

The two fleets mingled and merged momentarily, the battle becoming a thing of madness, a huge whirl of black and glittering flying-boats together, striking shells exploding nothingness about them. The Ralas were fighting like demons.

The merged, terrific combat lasted but moments; could last but moments. Norman, his gun’s magazine empty, seemed to see the mass of struggling ships splittering, diverging; then saw that the black craft were dropping, plummeting downward toward the waves! The Ralas, stunned by that minute of terrific combat, were fleeing. Muffled cries and cheers came from about him as the glittering flying-boats of the green men shot after them. They crashed down into the waters and curved deeply into their green-depths, toward the gigantic dome.

Ahead the Rala boats were in flight toward their city, and now their pursuers were like sharks striking after them. There in the depths the force-guns of black and glittering boats alike were spitting, and giant waves and underwater convulsions rocked pursued and pursuers as the exploding shells annihilated boats and water about them. The tunnel! Its round opening yawned in the looming wall ahead, and Norman saw the Rala craft, reduced to scores in number, hurtling into it, to rouse all the forces of the great amphibian city. Their own boats were flashing into the opening after them. He glimpsed as he glanced back for a moment the larger craft with the great force-bombs veering aside behind them.

It was nightmare in the water-tunnel. Flashing beams of the craft ahead and waters that rocked and smashed around them as in flight the Ralas still rained back force-shells toward them in a chaos of action. Once the frog-men turned to hold them back in the tunnel, but by sheer weight the rushing ships of the green men crashed them onward. Boats were going into nothingness all around them. A part of Norman’s brain wondered calmly why they survived even while another part kept his gun again working, with refilled magazine. Fellows and Sarja were grotesque shapes beside him. Abruptly the tunnel curved upward and as they flashed up after the remaining Rala craft their boats ripped up into clear air! They were beneath the giant dome!

The frog-men chased inward spread out in all directions over their mighty, swarming city and across it a terrific clamor of alarm ran instantly as the green men emerged after them! Norman saw flying-boats beginning to rise across all the city and realized that moments would see all the immense force of the Ralas, the thousands of craft they could muster, pouring upon them. He pointed out over the city to a block-like building, and shouted madly through his helmet to Fellows and Sarja:

“Hackett!”

But already Sarja had sent their craft whirling across the city toward the structure, half their fleet behind it, with part still emerging from the water-tunnel. Rala boats rose before them, but nothing could stop them now, their force-shells raining ahead to clear a path for their meteor-flight. They shot down toward the block-structure, and Norman, half-crazed by now, saw that to descend and enter was suicide in the face of the frog-forces rising now over all the city. He cried to Fellows, and with two of the guns as they swooped lower they sprayed force-shells along the building’s side.

The shells struck and whiffed away the whole side, exposing the level on the building’s interior. Out from it rushed swarms of crazed green men, sweeping aside the frog-men guards, while far over the city the invading craft were loosing shells on the block-like buildings that held the prisoners, tens of thousands of them swarming forth. In the throng below as they raced madly forth Norman saw one, and shouted wildly. The one brown garbed figure looked up, saw their boat swooping lower, and leaped for it in a tremendous forty-foot spring that brought his fingers to its edge. Norman pulled him frenziedly up.

“Norman!” he babbled. “In God’s name—Fellows—!”

“That helmet, Hackett!” Fellows flung at him. “My God, look at those prisoners—Norman!”

The countless thousands of green men released from the buildings whose walls had vanished under the shells of the invaders had poured forth to make the amphibian city a chaos of madness. Oblivious to all else they were throwing themselves upon the city’s crowding frog-men in a battle whose ferocity was beyond belief, disregarding all else in this supreme chance to wreak vengeance on the monstrous beings who had fed upon their blood. In the incredible insanity of that raging fury the craft of the green men hanging over the city were all but forgotten.

Suddenly the city and the mighty dome over it quivered violently, and then again. There came from beneath a dull, vast, grinding roar.

“The great force-bombs!” Fellows screamed. “They’ve set them off—the city’s sinking—out of here, for the love of God!”

The boat whirled beneath Sarja’s hands toward the pool of the water-tunnel, all their fleet rushing with them. The grinding roar was louder, terrible; dome and city were shaking violently now; but in the insensate fury of their struggle the frog-men and their released prisoners were hardly aware of it. The whole great dome seemed sinking upon them and the city falling beneath it as Sarja’s craft ripped down into the tunnel’s waters, and then out, at awful speed, as the great tunnel’s walls swayed and sank around them! They shot out into the green depths from it to hear a dull, colossal crashing through the waters from behind as the great pedestal of rock on which the city had stood, shattered by the huge force-bombs, collapsed. And as their boats flashed up into the open air they saw that the huge dome of the city of the Ralas was gone.

Beneath them was only a titanic whirlpool of foaming waters in which only the curved top of the settling dome was visible for a moment as it sank slowly and ponderously downward, with a roar as of the roar of falling worlds. Buckling, collapsing, sinking, it vanished in the foam-wild sea with all the frog-men who for ages had ruled the second satellite, and with all those prisoners who had at the last dragged them down with them to death! Ripping off their helmets, with all the green men shouting crazily about them, Norman and Fellows and Hackett stared down at the colossal maelstrom in the waters that was the tomb of the masters of a world.

Then the depression’s sides collapsed, the waters rushing together…and beneath them was but troubled, tossing sea.…

Earth’s great gray ball was overhead again and the sun was sinking again to the horizon when the three soared upward in the long, gleaming plane, its motor roaring. Norman, with Hackett and Fellows crowding the narrow cabin beside him, waved with them through its windows. For all around them were rising the flying-boats of the green men.

They were waving wildly, shouting their farewells, Sarja’s tall figure erect at the prow of one. Insistent they had been that the three should stay, the three through whom the monstrous age-old tyranny of the frog-men had been lifted, but Earth-sickness was on them, and they had flown to where the plane lay still unharmed among the reeds, a hundred willing hands dragging it forth for the takeoff.

The plane soared higher, motor thundering, and they saw the flying-boats sinking back from around them. They caught the wave of Sarja’s hand still from the highest, and then that, too, was gone.

Upward they flew toward the great gray sphere, their eyes on the dark outlines of its continents and on one continent. Higher—higher—green land and gray tea receding beneath them; Hackett and Fellows intent and eager as Norman kept the plane rising. The satellite lay, a greenish globe, under them. And as they went higher still a rushing sound came louder to their ears.

“The edge of the satellite’s atmosphere?” Fellows asked, as Norman nodded.

“We’re almost to it—here we go!”

As he shot the plane higher, great forces smote it, gray Earth and green satellite and yellow sun gyrating round it as it reeled and plunged. Then suddenly it was falling steadily, gray Earth and its dark continent now beneath, while with a dwindling rushing roar its second satellite whirled away above them, passing and vanishing. Passing as though, to Norman it seemed, all their strange sojourn on it were passing; the frog-men and their mighty city, Sarja and their mad flight, the green men and the last terrific battle; all whirling away—whirling away.

MONSTERS OF MARS

Allan Randall stared at the man before him. “And that’s why you sent for me, Milton?” he finally asked.

There was a moment’s silence, in which Randall’s eyes moved as though uncomprehendingly from the face of Milton to those of the two men beside him. The four sat together at the end of a roughly furnished and electric-lit living-room, and in that momentary silence there came in to them from the outside night the distant pounding of the Atlantic upon the beach. It was Randall who first spoke again.

The other’s face was unsmiling. “That’s why I sent for you, Allan,” he said quietly. “To go to Mars with us tonight!”

“To Mars!” he repeated. “Have you gone crazy, Milton—or is this some joke you’ve put up with Lanier and Nelson here?”

Milton shook his head gravely. “It is not a joke, Allan. Lanier and I are actually going to flash out over the gulf to the planet Mars tonight. Nelson must stay here, and since we wanted three to go I wired you as the most likely of my friends to make the venture.”

“But good God!” Randall exploded, rising. “You, Milton, as a physicist ought to know better. Spaceships and projectiles and all that are but fictionists’ dreams.”

“We are not going in either spaceship or projectile,” said Milton calmly. And then as he saw his friend’s bewilderment he rose and led the way to a door at the room’s end, the other three following him into the room beyond.

It was a long laboratory of unusual size in which Randall found himself, one in which every variety of physical and electrical apparatus seemed represented. Three huge dynamo-motor arrangements took up the room’s far end, and from them a tangle of wiring led through square black condensers and transformers to a battery of great tubes. Most remarkable, though, was the object at the room’s center.

It was like a great double cube of dull metal, being in effect two metal cubes each twelve feet square, supported a few feet above the floor by insulated standards. One side of each cube was open, exposing the hollow interiors of the two cubical chambers. Other wiring led from the big electronic tubes and from the dynamos to the sides of the two cubes.

The four men gazed at the enigmatic thing for a time in silence. Milton’s strong, capable face showed only in its steady eyes what feelings were his, but Lanier’s younger countenance was alight with excitement; and so too to some degree was that of Nelson. Randall simply stared at the thing, until Milton nodded toward it.

“That,” he said, “is what will flash us out to Mars tonight.”

Randall could only turn his stare upon the other, and Lanier chuckled. “Can’t take it in yet, Randall? Well, neither could I when the idea was first sprung on us.”

Milton nodded to seats behind them, and as the half-dazed Randall sank into one the physicist faced him earnestly.

“Randall, there isn’t much time now, but I am going to tell you what I have been doing in the last two years on this God-forsaken Maine coast. I have been for those two years in unbroken communication by radio with beings on the planet Mars!

“It was when I still held my physics professorship back at the university that I got first onto the track of the thing. I was studying the variation of static vibrations, and in so doing caught steady signals—not static—at an unprecedentedly high wavelength. They were dots and dashes of varying length in an entirely unintelligible code, the same arrangement of them being sent out apparently every few hours.

“I began to study them and soon ascertained that they could be sent out by no station on earth. The signals seemed to be growing louder each day, and it suddenly occurred to me that Mars was approaching opposition with earth! I was startled, and kept careful watch. On the day that Mars was closest the earth the signals were loudest. Thereafter, as the red planet receded, they grew weaker. The signals were from some being or beings on Mars!

“At first I was going to give the news to the world, but saw in time that I could not. There was not sufficient proof, and a premature statement would only wreck my own scientific reputation. So I decided to study the signals farther until I had irrefutable proof, and to answer them if possible. I came up here and had this place built, and the aerial towers and other equipment I wanted set up. Lanier and Nelson came with me from the university, and we began our work.

Our chief object was to answer those signals, but it proved heartbreaking work at first. We could not produce a radio wave of great enough length to pierce out through earth’s insulating layer and across the gulf to Mars. We used all the power of our great windmill-dynamo hook-ups, but for long could not make it. Every few hours like clockwork the Martian signals came through. Then at last we heard them repeating one of our own signals. We had been heard!

“For a time we hardly left our instruments. We began the slow and almost impossible work of establishing intelligent communication with the Martians. It was with numbers we began. Earth is the third planet from the sun and Mars the fourth, so three represented earth and four stood for Mars. Slowly we felt our way to an exchange of ideas, and within months were in steady and intelligent communication with them.

“They asked us first concerning earth, its climates and seas and continents, and concerning ourselves, our races and mechanisms and weapons. Much information we flashed out to them, the language of our communication being English, the elements, of which they had learned, with a mixture of numbers and symbolical dot-dash signals.

“We were as eager to learn about them. They were somewhat reticent, we found, concerning their planet and themselves. They admitted that their world was a dying one and that their great canals were to make life possible on it, and also admitted that they were different in bodily form from ourselves.

“They told us finally that communication like this was too ineffective to give us a clear picture of their world, or vice versa. If we could visit Mars, and then they visit earth, both worlds would benefit by the knowledge of the other. It seemed impossible to me, though I was eager enough for it. But the Martians said that while spaceships and the like were impossible, there was a way by which living beings could flash from earth to Mars and back by radio waves, even as our signals flashed!”

Randall broke in in amazement. “By radio!” he exclaimed, and Milton nodded.

“Yes, so they said, nor did the idea of sending matter by radio seem too insane, after all. We send sound, music by radio waves across half the world from our broadcasting stations. We send light, pictures, across the world from our television stations. We do that by changing the wave length of the light-vibrations to make them radio vibrations, flashing them out thus over the world, to receivers which alter their wavelengths again and change them back into light-vibrations.

“Why then could not matter be sent in the same way? Matter, it has been long believed, is but another vibration of the ether, like light and radiant heat and radio vibrations and the like, having a lower wavelength than any of the others. Suppose we take matter and by applying electrical force to it change its wavelength, step it up to the wavelength of radio vibrations? Then those vibrations can be flashed forth from the sending station to a special receiver that will step them down again from radio vibrations to matter vibrations. Thus matter, living or non-living, could be flashed tremendous distances in a second!

This the Martians told us, and said they would set up a matter-transmitter and receiver on Mars and would aid and instruct us so that we could set up a similar transmitter and receiver here. Then part of us could be flashed out to Mars as radio vibrations by the transmitter, and in moments would have flashed across the gulf to the red planet and would be transformed back from radio vibrations to matter-vibrations by the receiver awaiting us there!

“Naturally we agreed enthusiastically to build such a matter-transmitter and receiver, and then, with their instructions signalled to us constantly, started the work. Weeks it took, but at last, only yesterday, we finished it. The thing’s two cubical chambers are one for the transmitting of matter and the other for its reception. At a time agreed on yesterday we tested the thing, placing a guinea pig in the transmitting chamber and turning on the actuating force. Instantly the animal vanished, and in moments came a signal from the Martians saying that they had received it unharmed in their receiving chamber.

“Then we tested it the other way, they sending the same guinea pig to us, and in moments it flashed into being in our receiving chamber. Of course the step-down force in the receiving chamber had to be in operation, since had it not been at that moment the radio-vibrations of the animal would have simply flashed on endlessly in endless space. And the same would happen to any of us were we flashed forth and no receiving chamber turned on to receive us.

“We signalled the Martians that all tests were satisfactory, and told them that on the next night at exactly midnight by our time we would flash out ourselves on our first visit to them. They have promised to have their receiving chamber operating to receive us at that moment, of course, and it is my plan to stay there twenty-four hours, gathering ample proofs of our visit, and then flash back to earth.

“Nelson must stay here, not only to flash us forth tonight, but above all to have the receiving chamber operating to receive us at the destined moment twenty-four hours later. The force required to operate it is too great to use for more than a few minutes at a time, so it is necessary above all that that force be turned on and the receiving chamber ready for us at the moment we flash back. And since Nelson must stay, and Lanier and I wanted another, we wired you, Randall, in the hope that you would want to go with us on this venture. And do you?”

As Milton’s question hung, Randall drew a long breath. His eyes were on the two great cubical chambers, and his brain seemed whirling at what he had heard. Then he was on his feet with the others.

“Go? Could you keep me from going? Why, man, it’s the greatest adventure in history!”

Milton grasped his hand, as did Lanier, and then the physicist shot a glance at the square clock on the wall. “Well, there’s little enough time left us,” he said, “for we’ve hardly an hour before midnight, and at midnight we must be in that transmitting chamber for Nelson to send us flashing out!”

Randall could never recall but dimly afterward how that tense hour passed. It was an hour in which Milton and Nelson went with anxious faces and low-voiced comments from one to another of the pieces of apparatus in the room, inspecting each carefully, from the great dynamos to the transmitting and receiving chambers, while Lanier quickly got out and made ready the rough khaki suits and equipment they were to take.

It lacked but a quarter-hour of midnight when they had finally donned those suits, each making sure that he was in possession of the small personal kit Milton had designated. This included for each a heavy automatic, a small supply of concentrated foods, and a small case of drugs chosen to counteract the rarer atmosphere and lesser gravity which Milton had been warned to expect on the red planet. Each had also a strong wrist-watch, the three synchronized exactly with the big laboratory clock.

When they had finished checking up on this equipment the clock’s longer hand pointed almost to the figure twelve, and the physicist gestured expressively toward the transmitting chamber. Lanier, though, strode for a moment to one of the laboratory’s doors and flung it open. As Randall gazed out with him they could see far out over the tossing sea, dimly lit by the great canopy of the summer stars overhead. Right at the zenith among those stars shone brightest a crimson spark.

“Mars,” said Lanier, his voice a half-whisper. “And they’re waiting out there for us now—out there where we’ll be in minutes!”

“And if they shouldn’t be waiting—their receiving chamber not ready—”

But Milton’s calm voice came across the room to them: “Zero hour,” he said, stepping up into the big transmitting chamber.

Lanier and Randall slowly followed, and despite himself a slight shudder shook the latter’s body as he stepped into the mechanism that in moments would send him flashing out through the great void as impalpable ether-vibrations. Milton and Lanier were standing silent beside him, their eyes on Nelson, who stood watchfully now at the big switchboard beside the chambers, his own gaze on the clock. They saw him touch a stud, and another, and the hum of the great dynamos at the room’s end grew loud as the swarming of angry bees.

The clock’s longer hand was crawling over the last space to cover the smaller hand. Nelson turned a knob and the battery of great glass tubes broke into brilliant white light, a crackling coming from them. Randall saw the clock’s pointer clicking over the last divisions, and as he saw Nelson grip a great switch there came over him a wild impulse to bolt from the transmitting chamber. But then as his thoughts whirled maelstromlike there came a clang from the clock and Nelson flung down the switch in his grasp. Blinding light seemed to break from all the chamber onto the three; Randall felt himself hurled into nothingness by forces titanic, inconceivable, and then knew no more.

Randall came back to consciousness with a humming sound in his ears and with a sharp pain piercing his lungs at every breath. He felt himself lying on a smooth hard surface, and heard the humming stop and be succeeded by a complete silence. He opened his eyes, drawing himself to his feet as Milton and Lanier were doing, and stared about him.

He was standing with his two friends inside a cubical metal chamber almost exactly the same as the one they had occupied in Milton’s laboratory a few moments before. But it was not the same, as their first astounded glance out through its open side told them.

For it was not the laboratory that lay around them, but a vast conelike hall that seemed to Randall’s dazed eyes of dimensions illimitable. Its dull-gleaming metal walls slanted up for a thousand feet over their heads, and through a round aperture at the tip far above and through great doors in the walls came a thin sunlight. At the center of the great hall’s circular floor stood the two cubical chambers in one of which the three were, while around the chambers were grouped masses of unfamiliar-looking apparatus.

To Randall’s untrained eyes it seemed electrical apparatus of very strange design, but neither he nor Milton nor Lanier paid it but small attention in that first breathless moment. They were gazing in fascinated horror at the scores of creatures who stood silent amid the apparatus and at its switches, gazing back at them. Those creatures were erect and roughly manlike in shape, but they were not human men. They were—the thought blasted to Randall’s brain in that horror-filled moment—crocodile-men.

Crocodile-men! It was only so that he could think of them in that moment. For they were terribly like great crocodile shapes that had learned in some way to carry themselves erect upon their hinder limbs. The bodies were not covered with skin, but with green bony plates. The limbs, thick and taloned at their paw-ends, seemed greater in size and stronger, the upper two great arms and the lower two the legs upon which each walked, while there was but the suggestion of a tail. But the flat head set on the neckless body was most crocodilian of all, with great fanged, hinged jaws projecting forward, and with dark unwinking eyes set back in bony sockets.

Each of the creatures wore on his torso a gleaming garment like a coat of metal scales, with metal belts in which some had shining tubes. They were standing in groups here and there about the mechanisms, the nearest group at a strange big switch-panel not a half-dozen feet from the three men. Milton and Lanier and Randall returned in a tense silence the unwinking stare of the monstrous beings around them.

“The Martians!” Lanier’s horror-filled exclamation was echoed in the next instant by Randall’s.

“The Martians! God, Milton! They’re not like anything we know—they’re reptilian!”

Milton’s hand clutched his shoulder. “Steady, Randall,” he muttered. “They’re terrible enough, God knows—but remember we must seem just as grotesque to them.”

The sound of their voices seemed to break the great hall’s spell of silence, and they saw the crocodilian Martians before them turning and speaking swiftly to each other in low hissing speech-sounds that were quite unintelligible to the three. Then from the small group nearest them one came forward, until he stood just outside the chamber in which they were.

Randall felt dimly the momentousness of the moment, in which beings of earth and Mars were confronting each other for the first time in the solar system’s history. The creature before them opened his great jaws and uttered slowly a succession of sounds that for the moment puzzled them, so different were they from the hissing speech of the others, though with the same sibilance of tone. Again the thing repeated the sounds, and this time Milton uttered an exclamation.

“He’s speaking to us!” he cried. “Trying to speak the English that I taught them in our communication! I caught a word—listen.…”

As the creature repeated the sounds, Randall and Lanier started to hear also vaguely expressed in that hissing voice familiar words: “You—are Milton and—others from—earth?”

Milton spoke very clearly and slowly to the creature: “We are those from earth,” he said. “And you are the Martians with whom we have communicated?”

“We are those Martians,” said the other’s hissing voice slowly. “These”—he waved a taloned paw toward those behind him—“have charge of the matter-transmitter and receiver. I am of our ruler’s council.”

“Ruler?” Milton repeated. “A ruler of all Mars?”

“Of all Mars,” the other said. “Our name for him would mean in your words the Martian Master. I am to take you to him.”

Milton turned to the other two with face alight with excitement. “These Martians have some supreme ruler they call the Martian Master,” he said quickly; “and we’re to go before him. As the first visitors from earth we’re of immense importance here.”

As he spoke, the Martian official before them had uttered a hissing call, and in answer to it a long shape of shining metal raced into the vast hall and halted beside them. It was like a fifty-foot centipede of metal, its scores of supporting short legs actuated by some mechanism inside the cylindrical body. There was a transparent-walled control room at the front end of that body, and in it a Martian at the controls who snapped open a door from which a metal ladder automatically descended.

The Martian official gestured with a reptilian arm toward the ladder, and Milton and Lanier and Randall moved carefully out of the cube-chamber and across the floor to it, each of their steps being made a short leap forward by the lesser gravity of the smaller planet. They climbed up into the centipede-machine’s control room, their guide following, and then as the door snapped shut, the operator of the thing pulled and turned the knob in his grasp and the long machine scuttled forward with amazing smoothness and speed.

In a moment it was out of the building and into the feeble sunlight of a broad metal-paved street. About them lay a Martian city, seen by their eager eyes for the first time. It was a city whose structures were giant metal cones like that from which they had just come, though none seemed as large as that titanic one. Throngs of the hideous crocodilian Martians were moving busily to and fro in the streets, while among them there scuttled and flashed numbers of the centipede-machines.

As their strange vehicle raced along, Randall saw that the conelike structures were for the most part divided into many levels, and that inside some could be glimpsed ranks of great mechanisms and hurrying Martians tending them. Away to their right across the vast forest of cones that was the city the sun’s little disk was shining, and he glimpsed in that direction higher ground covered with a vast tangle of bright crimson jungle that sloped upward from a great, half-glimpsed waterway.

The Martian beside them saw the direction of his gaze and leaned toward him. “No Martians live there,” he hissed slowly. “Martians live only in cities where canals meet.”

“Then there’s no life in those crimson jungles?” Randall asked, repeating the question a moment later more slowly.

“No Martians there, but life—living things,” the other told him, searching for words. “But not intelligent, like Martians and you.”

He turned to gaze ahead, then pointed. “The Martian Master’s cone,” he hissed.

The three saw that at the end of the broad metal street down which their vehicle was racing there loomed another titanic cone-structure, fully as large as the mighty one in which they first found themselves. As the centipede-machine swept up to its great door-opening and halted, they descended to the metal paving and then followed their reptilian guide through the opening.

They found themselves in a great hall in which scores of the Martians were coming and going. At the hall’s end stood a row of what seemed guards, Martians grasping shining tubes such as they had already glimpsed. These gave way to allow their passage when their conductor uttered a hissing order, and then they were moving down a shorter hall at whose end also were guards. As these sprang aside before them, a great door of massive metal they guarded moved softly upward, disclosing a mighty circular hall or room inside. Their crocodilian guide turned to them.

“The hall of the Martian Master,” he hissed.

They passed inside with him. The great hall seemed to extend upward to the giant cone’s tip, thin light coming down from an opening there. Upon the dull metal of its looming walls were running friezes of lighter metal, grotesque representations of reptilian shapes that they could but vaguely glimpse. Around the walls stood rank after rank of guards.

At the hall’s center was a low dias, and in a semicircle around and behind it stood a half-hundred great crocodilian shapes. Randall guessed even at the moment that they were the council of which their conductor had named himself a member. But like Milton and Lanier, he had eyes in that first moment only for the dais itself. For on it was—the Martian Master.

Randall heard Milton and Lanier choke with the horror that shook his own heart and brain as he gazed. It was not simply another great crocodilian shape that sat upon that dais. It was a monstrous thing formed by the joining of three of the great reptilian bodies! Three distinct crocodile-like bodies sitting close together upon a metal seat, that had but a single great head. A great, grotesque crocodilian head that bulged backward and to either side, and that rested on the three thick short necks that rose from the triple body! And that head, that triple-bodied thing, was living, its unwinking eyes gazing at the three men!

The Martian Master! Randall felt his brain reel as he gazed at that mind-shattering thing. The Martian Master—this great head with three bodies! Reason told Randall, even as he strove for sanity, that the thing was but logical, that even on earth biologists had formed multiple-headed creatures by surgery, and that the Martians had done so to combine in one great head, one great brain, the brains of three bodies. Reason told him that the great triple brain inside that bulging head needed the bloodstreams of all three bodies to nourish it, must be a giant intellect indeed, one fitted to be the supreme Martian Master. But reason could not overcome the horror that choked him as he gazed at the awful thing.

A hissing voice sounding before him made him aware that the Martian Master was speaking.

“You are the Earth-beings with whom we communicated, and whom we instructed to build a matter-transmitter and receiver on earth?” the slow voice asked. “You have come safely to Mars by means of that station?”

“We have come safely.” Milton’s voice was shaken and he could find no other words.

“That is well. Long had we desired to have such a station built on earth, since with it there to flash back and forth between the two worlds is easy. You have come, then, to learn of this world and to take back what you learn to your races?”

“That is why we came.” Milton said, more steadily. “We want to stay only hours on this first visit, and then flash back to earth as we came.”

The head’s awful eyes seemed to consider them. “But when do you intend to go back?” its strange voice asked. “Unless the one at your earth station has its receiver operating at the right moment you will simply flash on endlessly as radio waves—will be annihilated.”

Milton found the courage to smile. “We started from earth at our midnight exactly, and at midnight exactly twenty-four earth hours later, we are to flash back and the receiver will be awaiting us.”

There was silence when he had said that, a silence that seemed to Randall’s strained mind to have become suddenly tense, sinister. The great triple-bodied creature before them considered them again, its eyes moving over them, and when it again spoke the hissing words came very slowly.

“Twenty-four earth hours,” it said; “and then your receiver on earth will be awaiting you. That time we can measure to the moment, and that is well. For it is not you three Earth-beings who will flash back to earth when that moment comes! It will be Martians, the first of our Martian masses who have waited for ages for that moment and who will begin then our conquest of the earth!

“Yes, Earth-beings, our great plan comes to its end now at last! At last! Age on age, prisoned on this dying, arid world, we have desired the earth that by right of power shall be ours, have sought for ages to communicate with its beings. You finally heard us, you hearkened to us, you built the matter-transmitting and receiving station on earth that was the one thing needed for our plan. For when the matter-receiver of that station is turned on in twenty-four of your hours, and ready to receive matter flashes from here, it will be the first of our millions who will flash at last to earth!

“I, the Martian Master, say it. Those first to go shall seize that matter-receiver on earth when first they appear there, shall build other and larger receivers, and through them within days all our Martian hordes shall have been flashed to earth! Shall have poured out over it and conquered with our weapons your weak races of Earth-beings, who cannot stand before us, and whose world you have delivered at last into our hands!”

For a moment, when the great monster’s hissing voice had ceased, Milton and Randall and Lanier gazed toward it as though petrified, the whole unearthly scene spinning about them. And then, through the thick silence, the thin sound of Milton’s voice:

“Our world—our earth—delivered to the Martians, and by us! God—no!”

With that last cry of agonized comprehension and horror, Milton did what surely had never any in the great hall expected, leaped onto the dais with a single spring toward the Martian Master! Randall heard a hundred wild hissing cries break from about him, saw the crocodilian forms of guards and council rushing forward even as he and Lanier sprang after Milton, and then glimpsed shining tubes levelled from which brilliant shafts of dazzling crimson light or force were stabbing toward them!

To Randall the moment that followed was but a split-second flash and whirl of action. As his earthly muscles took him forward with Lanier after Milton in a great leap to the dais, he was aware of the brilliant red rays stabbing behind him closely, and knew that only the tremendous size of his leap had taken him past them. In the succeeding instant he was made aware of what he had escaped, for the hastily-loosed rays struck squarely a group of three or four Martian guards rushing to the dais from the opposite side, and they vanished from view with a sharp detonation as though clicked out of existence!

Randall was not to know then, that the red rays were ones that annihilated matter by neutralizing or damping the matter-vibrations in the ether. But he did know that no more rays were loosed, for by then he and Milton and Lanier were on the dais and were wrapped in a hurricane combat with the guards that had rushed between them and the Martian Master.

Gleaming fangs—great scaled forms—reaching talons—it was all a wild phantasmagoria of grotesque forms spinning around him as he struck with all the power of his earthly muscles and felt crocodilian forms staggering and going down beneath his frenzied blows. He heard the roar of an automatic close beside him in the melee as Milton remembered at last through the red haze of his fury the weapon he carried, but before either Randall or Lanier could reach their own weapons a new wave of crocodilian forms had poured onto them that by sheer pressing weight held them helpless, to be disarmed.

Hissing orders sounded, the arms and legs of the three were tightly grasped by great taloned paws, and the masses of Martians about them melted back from the dais. Held each by two great creatures, Milton and Randall and Lanier faced again the triple-bodied Martian Master, who in all that wild moment of struggle appeared not to have changed his position. The big monster’s black eyes stared unmovedly down at them.

“You Earth-beings seem of lower intelligence even than we thought,” his hissing voice informed them. “And those weapons—crude, very crude.”

Milton, his face set, spoke back: “It may be that you will find human weapons of some power if your hordes reach earth,” he said.

“But what compared with the power of ours?” the other asked coldly. “And since our scientists even now devise new weapons to annihilate the earth’s races, I think they would be glad of three of those races to experiment with now. The one use we can make of you, certainly.”

The creature turned its bulging head a little towards the guards who held the three men, and uttered a brief hissing order. Instantly the six Martians, grasping the three tightly, marched them across the great hall and through a different door than that by which they had entered.

They were taken down a narrow corridor that turned sharply twice as they went on. Randall saw that it was lit by squares inset in the walls that glowed with crimson light. It came to him as they marched on that night must be upon the Martian city without, since the sun had been sinking when they had crossed it in the centipede-machine.

Through what seemed an ante-room they were taken, and then into a long hall instantly recognizable as a laboratory. There were many glowing squares illuminating it, and narrow windows high in the wall gave them a glimpse of the city outside, a pattern of crimson lights. Long metal tables and racks filled the big room’s farther end, while along the walls were ranged shining mechanisms of unfamiliar and grotesque appearance. Fully a score of the crocodilian Martians were busy in the room, some intent on their work at the racks and tables, others operating some of the strange machines.

The guards conducted the three to an open space by the wall, below one of the high window-openings and between two great cylindrical mechanisms. Then, while five of their number held the three men prisoned in that space by the threat of their levelled ray-tubes, the other moved toward one of the busy Martian scientists and held with him a brief interchange of hissing speech.

Milton leaned to whisper to the other two: “We’ve got to get out of this while we’re still living,” he whispered. “You heard the Martian Master—in constructing that matter-receiver on earth, we’ve opened a door through which all the Martian millions will pour onto our world!”

“It’s useless, Milton,” said Randall dully. “Even if we got clear of this the Martians will be at their matter-transmitter in hordes when the moment comes to flash back to earth.”

“I know that, but we’ve got to try,” the other insisted. “If we or some of us could get clear of this, we might in some way hide near the matter-transmitter until the moment came and then fight to it.”

“But how to get out of the hands of these, even?” asked Lanier, nodding toward the alert guards before them.

“There’s but one way,” Milton whispered swiftly. “Our earthly muscles would enable us, I think, to get through this window-opening above us in a leap, if we had a moment’s chance. Well, whichever of us they take to experiment with or examine first, must make a struggle or disturbance that will turn the guards’ attention for a moment and give the other two a chance to make the attempt!”

“One to stay and the other two to get away.…” Randall said slowly; but Milton’s tense whisper interrupted:

“It’s the only way, and even then a thousand to one chance! But it’s we who have opened this gate for the Martian invasion of our world and it’s we who must—”

Before he could finish, the approach of hissing voices told them that the leader of the six guards and the Martian who seemed the chief of the experimenters in the hall were nearing them. The three men stood silent and tense as the two crocodilian monsters stopped before them. The scientist, who carried in his metal-belt, instead of a ray-tube a compact case of instruments, surveyed them as though in curiosity.

He came closer, his quick reptilian eyes taking in with evident interest every feature of their bodily appearance. Intuitively the three knew that one of them was to be chosen for a first investigation by the Martian scientists, and that that one would have not even the slender hope of escape open to the other two. A strange lottery of life and death!

Randall saw the creature’s gaze turn from one to another of them, and then heard the hiss of his voice as he pointed a taloned paw toward Milton. Instantly two of the guards had seized Milton and had jerked him out from the wall, the other guards holding back Randall and Lanier with threatening tubes. It was upon Milton that the fatal choice had fallen!

Randall and Lanier made together a half-movement forward, but Milton, a tense message in his eyes, forced them back. The guards who held the physicist led him, at the direction of the Martian scientist, toward a great upright frame at the room’s far end, upon which were clustered a score of dial-indicators. From these flexible cords led; and now the scientists began attaching these by clips to various spots on Milton’s body. Some mechanical examination of his bodily characteristics were apparently to be made. Milton shot suddenly a glance at the two by the wall, and his head nodded in an almost imperceptible signal. The muscles of Lanier and Randall tensed.

Then abruptly Milton seemed to go mad. He shouted aloud in a terrible voice, and at the same moment tore from him the cords just attached, his fists striking out then at the amazed Martians around him. As they leaped back from that sudden explosion of activity and sound on Milton’s part the guards before Randall and Lanier whirled instinctively for an instant toward it. And in that instant the two had leaped.

It was upward they leaped, with all the force of their earthly muscles, toward the big window-opening a half-dozen feet in the wall above them. Like released steel springs they sat up, and Randall heard the thump of their feet as they struck the opening’s sill, heard wild cries suddenly coming from beneath them, as the guards turned back toward them. Crimson rays clove up like light toward them, but the instant’s surprise had been enough, and in it they had leaped on and through the opening, into the outside night!

As they shot downward and struck the metal paving outside, Randall heard a wild babble of cries from inside. A moment he and Lanier gazed frenziedly around them, then were running with great leaps along the base of the building from which they had just escaped.

In the darkness of night the Martian city stretched away to their right, its massive dark cone-structures outlined by points of glowing ruddy light here and there upon them. Beside the city’s metal streets were illuminated by the brilliant field of stars overhead and by the soft light of the two moons, one much larger than the other, that moved among those stars.

Along the street crocodilian Martians were coming and going still, though in small numbers, there being but few in sight in the dim-lit street’s length. Lanier pointed ahead as they leaped onward.

“Straight onward, Randall!” he jerked. “There seem fewer of the Martians this way!”

“But the great cone of the matter-station is the other way!” Randall exclaimed.

“We can’t risk making for it now!” cried the other. “We’ve got to keep clear of them until the alarm is over. Hear them now?”

For even as they leaped forward a rising clamor of hissing cries and rush of feet was coming from behind as scores of Martians poured out into the darkness from the great cone-building. The two fugitives had passed by then from the shadow of the mighty structure, and as they ran along the broad metal street toward the shadow of the next cone, through the light of the moons above, they heard higher cries and then glimpsed narrow shafts of crimson force cleaving the night around them.

Randall, as the deadly rays drove past him, heard the low detonating sound made by their destruction of the air in their path, and the inrush of new air. But in the misty and uncertain moonlight the rays could not be loosed accurately, and before they could be swept sidewise to annihilate the two fleeing men they had gained, with a last great leap, the shadow of the next building.

On they ran, the clatter of the Martian pursuit growing more noisy behind them. Randall heard Lanier gasping with each great leap, and felt himself at every breath a knife of pain stabbing through his lungs, the rarified atmosphere of the red planet taking its toll. Again from the darkness behind them the crimson rays clove, but this time were wide of their mark.

With every moment the clamor of pursuit seemed growing louder, the alarm spreading out over the Martian city and arousing it. As they raced past cone after cone, Randall knew even the increased power of their muscles could not long aid them against the exhaustion which the thin air was imposing on them. His thoughts spun for a moment to Milton, in the laboratory behind, and then back to their own desperate plight.

Abruptly shapes loomed in the misty light before them! A group of three great Martians, reptilian shapes that had been coming toward them and had stopped for an instant in amazement at sight of the running pair. There was no time to halt themselves, to evade the three, and with a mutual instinct Lanier and Randall seized together the last expedient open to them. They ran straight forward toward the astounded three, and when a half-score feet from them, leaped with all their force upward and toward them, their tensed bodies flying through the air with feet outstretched before them.

Then they had struck the group of three with feet-foremost, and with the impetus of that great leap had knocked them sprawling to this side and that, while with a supreme effort the two kept their balance and leaped on. The cries of the three added to the din behind them as they threw themselves forward.

They flung themselves past a last cone building to halt for an instant in utter amazement despite the nearing pursuit. Before them were no more streets and structures, but a huge smooth-flowing waterway! It gleamed in the moonlight and lay at right angles across their path, seeming to flow along the Martian city’s edge.

“A canal!” cried Lanier. “It’s one of the canals that meet at this city and flow around it! We’re trapped—we’ve reached the city’s edge!”

“Not yet!” Randall gasped. “Look!”

As he pointed to the left Lanier shot a glance there; and then both of them were running in that direction, along the smooth metal paving that bordered the mighty canal. They came to what Randall had seen, a mighty metal arch that soared out over the waterway to its opposite side. A bridge!

They were on it, were racing up the smooth incline of it. Randall glanced back as they reached the arch’s summit. From that height the city stretched far away behind them, a lace of crimson lights in the night. He glimpsed the gleam of the giant waterway that encircled the city completely, one that was fed by other canals from far away that emptied into it, the great city’s vital water-supply brought thus from this world’s melting polar snows.

There were moving lights behind now, too, pouring out onto the metal paving by the waterway, moving to and fro as though in confusion, with a babel of hissing cries. It was not until Randall and Lanier were running down the descending incline of the great arched bridge, though, that the lights and shouts of their pursuers began to move up on that bridge after them.

Running off the bridge’s smooth way, the two found themselves stumbling on through the darkness over more metal paving, and then over soft ground. There were no lights or buildings or sounds of any sort on this farther side of the great waterway. A tall dark wall seemed suddenly to loom up out of the darkness some distance ahead of the two.

“The crimson jungle!” Randall cried. “The jungles we glimpsed from the city! It’s a chance to hide!”

They raced toward the protecting blackness of that wall of vegetation. They reached it, flung themselves inside, just as the pursuing Martians, a mass of running crocodilian shapes and of great racing centipede-machines, swept up over the bridge’s arch behind. A moment the two halted in the thick vegetation’s shelter, gasping for breath, then were moving forward through the jungle’s denser darkness.

Thick about them and far above them towered the masses of strange trees and plant life through which they made their way. Randall could see but dimly the nature of these plant-forms, but could make out that they were grotesque and unearthly in appearance, all leafless, and with masses of thin tendrils branching from them instead of leaves. He realized that it was only beside the arid planet’s great canals that this profusion of plant life had sufficient moisture for existence, and that it was the broad bands of jungle bordering the canals that had made the latter visible to earth’s astronomers.

Lanier and he halted for a moment to listen. The thick jungle about them seemed quite silent. But from behind there came through it a vague tumult of hissing calls; and then, as they glimpsed red flashes far behind, they heard the crashing of great masses of the leafless trees.

“The rays!” whispered Lanier. “They’re beating through the jungle with them and the centipede-machines after us!”

They paused no more, but pushed on through the thick growths with renewed urgency. Now and then, as they passed through small clearings, Randall glimpsed overhead the fast-moving nearer moon and slower sailing farther moon of Mars, moving across the steady stars. In some of these clearings they saw, too, strange great openings burrowed in the ground as though by some strange animal.

The crashing clamor of the Martians beating the jungle behind was coming close, ever closer, and as they came to still another misty-lit clearing, Lanier paused, with face white and tense.

“They’re closing in on us!” he said. “They’re hunting us down by beating the jungle with those centipede-machines, and even if we escape them we’re getting farther from the city and the matter-station each moment!”

Randall’s eyes roved desperately around the clearing; and then, as they fell on a group of the great burrowed openings that seemed present everywhere about them, he uttered an exclamation.

“These holes! We can hide in one until they’ve passed over us, and then steal back to the city!”

Lanier’s eyes lit. “It’s a chance!”

They sprang toward the openings. They were each of some four feet diameter, extending indefinitely downward as though the mouths of tunnels. In a moment Randall was lowering himself into one, Lanier after him. The tunnel in which they were, they found, curved to one side a few feet below the surface. They crawled down this curve until they were out of sight of the opening above. They crouched silent, then, listening.

There came down to them the dull, distant clamor of the centipede-machines crashing through the jungle, cutting a way with rays, their clamor growing ever louder. Then Randall, who was lowest in the tunnel, turned suddenly as there came to him a strange rustling sound from beneath him. It was as though some crawling or creeping thing was moving in the tunnel below them!

He grasped the arm of Lanier, beside and a little above him, to warn him, but the words he was about to whisper never were uttered. For at this moment a big shapeless living thing seemed to flash up toward them through the darkness from beneath, cold ropelike tentacles gripped both tightly; and then in an instant they were being dragged irresistibly down into the lightless tunnel’s depths!

As they were pulled swiftly downward into the tunnel by the tentacles that grasped them an involuntary cry of horror came from Randall and Lanier alike. They twisted frantically in the cold grip that held them, but found it of the quality of steel. And as Randall twisted in it to strike frantically down through the darkness at whatever thing of horror held them, his clenched fist met but the cold smooth skin of some big, soft-bodied creature!

Down—down—remorselessly they were being drawn farther into the black depths of the tunnel by the great thing crawling down below them. Again and again the two twisted and struck, but could not shake its hold. In sheer exhaustion they ceased to struggle, dragged helplessly farther down.

Was it minutes or hours, Randall wondered afterward, of that horrible progress downward, that passed before they glimpsed light beneath? A feeble glow, hardly discernible, it was, and as they went lower still he saw that it was caused by the tunnel passing through a strata of radioactive rock that gave off the faint light. In that light they glimpsed for the first time the horror dragging them downward.

It was a huge worm creature! A thing like a giant angleworm, three feet or more in thickness and thrice that in length, its great body soft and cold and worm-like. From the end nearest them projected two long tentacles with which it had gripped the two men and was dragging them down the tunnel after it! Randall glimpsed a mouth-aperture in the tentacled end of the worm body also, and two scarlike marks above it, placed like eyes, although eyes the monstrous thing had not.

But a moment they glimpsed it and then were in darkness again as the tunnel passed through the radioactive strata and lower. The horror of that moment’s glimpse, though, made them strike out in blind repulsion, but relentlessly the creature dragged them after it.

“God!” It was Lanier’s panting cry as they were dragged on. “This worm monster—we’re hundreds of feet below the surface!”

Randall sought to reply, but his voice choked. The air about them was close and damp, with an overpowering earthy smell. He felt consciousness leaving him.

A gleam of soft light—they were passing more radioactive patches. He felt the wild convulsive struggles of Lanier against the thing; and then suddenly the tunnel ended, debouched into a far-stretching, low-ceilinged cavity. It was feebly illuminated by radioactive patches here and there in walls and ceiling, and as the monster that held them halted on entering the cavity, Randall and Lanier lay in its grip and stared across the weird place with intensified horror.

For it was swarming with countless worm monsters! All were like the one who held them, thick long worm bodies with projecting tentacles and with black eyeless faces. They were crawling to and fro in this cavern far beneath the surface, swarming in hordes around and over each other, pouring in and out of the awful place from countless tunnels that led upward and downward from it!

A world of worm monsters, beneath the surface of the Martian jungles! As Randall stared across that swarming, dim-lit cave of horror, physically sick at sight of it, he remembered the countless tunnel openings they had glimpsed in their flight through the jungle, and remembered the remark of the Martian who had first guided them across the city, that in the jungles were living things, of a sort. These were the things, worm monsters whose unthinkable networks of tunnels and burrows formed beneath the surface a veritable worm world!

“Randall!” It was Lanier’s thick exclamation. “Randall—those scar-marks on their—faces—you see—?”

“See?”

“Those marks! These creatures had eyes once but must have been forced down here by the Martians. These may once have been—ages ago—human!”

At that thought Randall felt horror overcoming his senses. He was aware that the great worm monster holding them was dragging them forward through the cavern, that others of the swarms there were crowding around them, feeling them blindly with their tentacles, helping to drag them forward.

Half-carried and half-dragged they went, scores of tentacles now holding them, great worm shapes crawling forward on all sides of them and accompanying them along the cavern’s length. He glimpsed worm monsters here and there emerging from the upward tunnels with masses of strange plant stuff in their grasp that others blindly devoured. His senses reeled from the suffocating air, the great cavity being but a half-score feet in height, burrowed from the damp earth by these numberless things.

The faint, strange light of the radioactive patches showed him that they were approaching the cavern’s end. Tunnels opened from its end as from all its walls and floor, and into one Randall was dragged by the creatures, one before and one behind, grasping him, and Lanier being brought behind him in the same way. In the close tunnel the heavy air was deadly, and he was but partly conscious when again, after moments of crawling along it, he felt himself dragged out into another cavern.

This earth-walled cavity, though, seemed to extend farther than the first, though of the same height as the first and with a few radioactive illuminating patches. In it seethed and swarmed literally hundreds on hundreds of the worm monsters, a sea of great crawling bodies. Randall and Lanier saw that they were being carried and dragged now toward the farther end of this larger cavity.

As they approached it, pushing through the swarming creatures who felt them with inquisitive tentacles as their captors took them forward, the two men saw that a great shape was looming up in the faint light at the cave’s far end. In moments they were close enough to discern its nature, and a horror and awe filled them at sight of it more intense than they had yet felt.

For the looming shape was a huge earthen image or statue of a worm! It was shaped with a childish crudeness from the solid earth, a giant earthen worm shape whose body looped across the cave’s end, and whose tentacled head or front end was reared upward to the cavity’s roof. Before this awful earthen shape was a section of the cave’s floor higher than the rest, and on it a great crudely shaped rectangular earthen block.

“Lanier—that shape!” whispered Randall in his horror. “That earthen image, made by these creatures—it’s the worm god they’ve made for themselves!”

“A worm god!” Lanier repeated, staring toward it as they were dragged nearer. “Then that block.…”

“Its altar!” Randall exclaimed. “These things have some dim spark of intelligence or memory! They’re brought us here to—”

Before he could finish, the clutching tentacles of the worm monsters about them had dragged them up onto the raised floor beside the block, beneath the looming earthen worm shape. There they glimpsed for the first time in the faint light another who stood there held tightly by the tentacles of two worm monsters. It was a Martian!

The big crocodilian shape was apparently a prisoner like themselves, captured and brought down from above. His reptilian eyes surveyed Lanier and Randall quickly as they were dragged up and held beside him, but he took no other interest. To the two men, at the moment, it seemed that his great crocodilian shape was human, almost, so much more manlike was it than the grotesque worm monsters before them.

With a half-dozen of the creatures holding the two men and the Martian tightly, another great worm monster crawled to the edge of the raised earth floor in front of the giant worm god’s image, and then reared up the first third of his thick body into the air. By then the great, faint-lit cavity stretching before them was filled with countless numbers of the monsters, pouring into it from all the tunnels that opened into it from above and below, packing it thick with their grotesque bodies as far as the eye could reach in the dim light.

They were seething and crawling in that great mass; but as the worm monster on the elevation upreared, all in the cavity seemed suddenly to quiet. Then the upreared eyeless thing began to move his long tentacles. Very slowly at first he waved them back and forth, and slowly the masses of monsters in the cavity, all turned by some sense toward him, did likewise, the cavity becoming a forest of upraised tentacles waving rhythmically back and forth in unison with those of the leader.

Back and forth—back and forth—Randall felt caught in some torturing nightmare as he watched the countless tentacle-feelers waving thus from one side to the other. It was a ceremony, he knew—some strange rite springing perhaps from dim memory alone, that these worm monsters carried out thus before the looming shape of their worm god. Only the six that held the three captives never relaxed their grip.

Still on and on went the strange and senseless rite. By then the close, damp air of that cavity far beneath Mars’ surface was sinking Randall and Lanier deeper into a half-consciousness. The Martian beside them never moved or spoke. The upstretched tentacles of the leader and of the great worm horde before him never ceased swaying rhythmically from side to side.

Randall, half-hypnotized by those swaying tentacles and but semi-conscious by then, could only estimate afterward how long that grotesque rite went on. Hours it must have endured, he knew, hours in which each opening of his eyes revealed only the dimly-illuminated cavern, the worm monsters that filled it, the forest of tentacles waving in unison. It was only toward the end of those hours that he noticed vaguely that the tentacles were waving faster and faster.

And as the tentacles of leader and worm horde waved alike ever more swiftly an atmosphere of growing excitement and expectation seemed to hold the horde. At last the upstretched feelers were whipping back and forth almost too swiftly for the eye to follow. Then abruptly the worm leader ceased the motion himself, and while the horde before him continued it, turned and crawled to the three captives.

In an instant, as though in answer to a second command, the two worm monsters who held the Martian dragged him forward toward the great earthen block before the worm god’s image. Two others of the creatures came from the side, and the four swiftly stretched the Martian flat on the block’s top, each of the four grasping with their tentacles one of his four taloned limbs. They seemed to hesitate then, the worm leader beside them, the tentacles of the horde waving swiftly still.

Abruptly the tentacles of the leader flashed up as though in a signal. There was a dull ripping sound, and in that moment Randall and Lanier saw the Martian on the block torn literally limb from limb by the four great worm monsters who had held his four limbs!

The tentacles of the horde waved suddenly with increased, excited swiftness at that. Randall shrank in horror.

“They’ve brought us here for that!” he cried. “To sacrifice us on that altar that way to their worm god!”

But Lanier too had cried out, appalled, as he saw that awful sacrifice, and both strained madly against the grip of the worm creatures. Their struggles were in vain, and then in answer to another unspoken command the two monsters that held Randall were dragging him also to the earthen altar!

He felt himself gripped by the four great creatures around the block, felt as he struggled with his last strength that he was being stretched out on the block, each of the four at one of its corners grasping one of his limbs. He heard Lanier’s mad cries as though from a great distance, glimpsed as he was held thus on his back the great shape of the earthen worm god reared over him, and then glimpsed the leader of the monsters rearing beside him.

The dull sound of the swift-waving tentacles of the horde came to him, there was a tense moment of agony of waiting, and then the tentacles of the leader flashed up in the signal!

But at the same moment Randall felt his limbs released by the four monsters that had held them! There seemed sudden wild confusion in the great cave. The strange rite broke off; the horde of worm monsters crawled frantically this way and that in it. Randall slipped off the block; staggered to his feet.

The worm monsters in the cave were swarming toward the downward tunnel openings! The two captives forgotten, the creatures were pouring in crawling, fighting swarms toward those openings. And then, as Randall and Lanier stared stupefied, there came a red flash from one of the upward tunnels and a brilliant crimson ray stabbed down and mowed a path of annihilation in the cave’s earthen side!

The two heard great thumping sounds from above, saw the tunnels leading from above becoming suddenly many times greater in size as red rays flashed down along them to gouge the tunnel’s walls. Then down from those enlarged tunnels there were bursting long shining shapes, great centipede-machines crawling down the tunnels which their rays made larger before them! And as the centipede-machines burst down into the cavern their crimson rays stabbed right and left to cut paths of annihilation among the worms.

“The Martians!” Lanier cried. “They didn’t find us above—they knew we must have been taken by these things—and they’ve come down after us!”

“Back, Lanier!” Randall shouted. “Quick, before they see us, behind this—”

As he spoke he was jerking Lanier with him behind the looming earthen statue of the great worm god. Crouched there between the statue and the cave’s wall they were hidden precariously from the view of those in the cavern. And now that cavern had become a scene of horror unthinkable as the centipede-machines pouring down into it blasted the frantically crawling worm monsters with their rays.

The worm monsters attempted no resistance, but sought only to escape into their downward tunnels, and in moments those not caught by the rays had vanished in the openings. But the centipede-machines, after racing swiftly around the cavity, were following them, were going down into those downward tunnels also, their rays blasting down ahead of each to make the tunnel large enough for them to follow.

In a moment all but one had vanished down into the openings, the remaining one having its front or head jammed in one of the openings from the failure of its operator to blast a large enough opening before him. As Lanier and Randall watched tensely they saw the machine’s control room door open and a Martian descend. He inspected the tunnel opening in which his vehicle was jammed, then with a hand ray-tube began to disintegrate the earth around that opening to free his machine.

Randall clutched his companion’s arm. “That machine!” he whispered. “If we could capture it, it would give us a chance to get back to the city—to Milton and the matter-transmitter!”

Lanier started, then nodded swiftly. “We’ll chance it,” he whispered. “For our twenty-four hours here must be almost up.”

They hesitated a moment, then crept forward from behind the great earthen statue. The Martian had his back to them, his attention on the freeing of his mechanism. Across the dim-lit cavern they crept softly, and were within a dozen feet of the Martian when some sound made him wheel quickly to confront them with the deadly tube. But even as he whirled the two had leaped.

The force of their leap sent them flying through that dozen feet of space to strike the Martian at the moment his tube levelled. One hissing call he uttered as they struck him, and then with all his strength Lanier had grasped the crocodilian body and bent it backward. Something in it snapped, and the Martian collapsed limply. The two looked wildly around.

Nothing showed that the Martian’s call had been heard, and after a moment’s glance that showed the head of the centipede machine already freed, they were clambering up into its control room, closing the door. Randall seized the knob with which he had seen the machines operated. As he pulled it toward him the machine moved across the tunnel opening and raced smoothly over the cavern’s floor. As he turned the knob the machine turned swiftly in the same direction.

He headed the long mechanism toward one of the upward-curving tunnels which the Martians had blasted larger in descending. They were almost to it when there flashed up into the cavity from one of the downward tunnel openings a centipede-machine, and then another, and another. The Martians in their transparent-windowed control rooms took in at a glance the dead crocodilian on the floor, and then the three great machines were darting toward that of Randall and Lanier.

“The Martian we killed!” Randall cried. “They heard his call and are coming after us!”

“Turn to the wall!” Lanier shouted to him. “I have the rays—”

At that moment there was a clicking beside Randall and he glimpsed Lanier pulling forth two small grips he had found, then saw that two crimson rays were stabbing from tubes in their machine’s front toward the others even as their own rays darted back. The beams that had been loosed toward them grazed past them as Randall whirled their machine to the wall, and he saw one of the three attacking mechanisms vanish as Lanier’s beams struck it.

Around—back—with instinctive, lightninglike motions he whirled their centipede-machine in the great dim-lit cave as the two remaining ones leapt again to the attack. Their rays shot right and left to catch the two men’s vehicle in a trap of death, and as Randall swung their own mechanism straight ahead he glimpsed at the cavern’s far end the great earthen worm god still upreared.

On either side of them the red beams burned as they leapt forward, but as though running a gauntlet of death Randall kept the machine racing forward in the succeeding second until the two others loomed on either side of it. Then Lanier’s beams were driving in turn to right and left of them and the two vanished as though by magic as they were struck.

“Up to the surface!” Lanier cried, his eyes on the glowing dial of his wrist-watch. “We’ve been held hours here—we’ve but a half-hour or more before earth midnight!”

Randall sent their machine racing again toward one of the upward tunnels, and as the long mechanism began to climb smoothly up the darkness he heard Lanier agonizing beside him.

“God, if we have only enough time to get to that matter-transmitter before the Martians start flashing to earth through it!”

“But Milton?” Randall cried. “We don’t know whether he’s alive or dead! We can’t leave him!”

“We must!” said Lanier solemnly. “Our duty’s to the earth now, man, to the world that we alone can save from the Martian invasion and conquest! At the hour of twelve Nelson will have the matter-receiver turned on and at that hour the Martian will start flashing to earth—unless we prevent!”

Suddenly Randall grasped the knob in his hands more tightly as light showed above them. They had been climbing upward through the enlarged tunnel at their machine’s highest speed, and now as the tunnel curved the light grew stronger. Suddenly they were emerging into the thin sunlight of the Martian day.

In the crimson jungle about them were many Martians, milling excitedly to and fro, and other centipede-machines that were blasting their way down through tunnels to the worm world beneath.

Randall and Lanier, breathless, crouched low in the transparent-windowed control room as they sent their mechanism racing through this scene of swarming activity. Both gasped as one of the centipede-machines clashed against their own in passing, its Martian driver turning to stare after them. But there came no alarm, and in a moment they had passed out of the swarm of Martians and machines and were heading through the jungle in the direction of the city.

Through the weird red vegetation their mechanism raced with them, Randall holding it at its highest speed, and in minutes they came out of the jungle and were racing over the clear space between it and the great canal. Beyond that canal loomed into the thin sunlight the clustering cones of the mighty Martian city, two towering above all the others—the cone of the Martian Master and the other cone in which was the matter-transmitter and receiver.

It was toward the latter that Lanier pointed. “Head straight toward that cone, Randall—we’ve but minutes left!”

They were racing now up over the great arch of the canal’s metal bridge, and then scuttling smoothly off it and along the broad metal street through which they had fled in darkness hours before. In it Martians and centipede-machines were coming and going in great numbers, but none noticed the human forms of the two crouched low in their mechanism’s control room.

They were rushing then toward the looming cone of the Martian Master. As they flashed past it Randall saw Lanier’s face working, knew the desire that tore at him even as at himself to burst inside and ascertain whether or not Milton still lived in the laboratories from which they had fled. But they were past it, faces white and grim, were rushing on through the Martian city at reckless speed toward the other mighty cone.

It seemed that all in the great city were heading toward the same goal, streams of crocodilian Martians and masses of shining centipede-machines filling the streets as they moved toward it. As they came closer to the mighty structure, hearts pounding, they saw that around it surged a mighty mass of Martians and machines. The hordes waiting to be released through the matter-transmitter inside upon the unsuspecting earth!

“Try to get the machine inside!” Lanier whispered tensely. “If we can smash that transmitter yet.…”

Randall nodded grimly. “Keep ready at the ray-tubes,” he told the other.

As unobtrusively as possible he sent their long mechanism worming forward through the vast throng of machines and Martians, toward the great cone’s door. Crouching low, the hands of their watches closing fast toward the twelfth figure, they edged forward in the long machine. At last they were moving through the mighty door, into the cone’s interior.

They moved slowly on through the mass of machines and crocodile forms inside, then halted. For at the great crowd’s center was a clear circle hundreds of feet across, and as Randall gazed across it his heart seemed to leap once and then stop.

At the center of that clear circle rose the two cubical metal chambers of the matter-transmitter and receiver. The transmitting chamber, they saw, was flooded with humming force, with white light pouring from its inner walls. It was already in operation, and the masses of Martians in the great cone were only waiting for the moment to sound when the receiver on earth would be operating also. Then they would pour into the chamber to be flashed in masses across the gulf to earth! The eyes of all in the cone seemed turned toward an erect dial-mechanism beside the chambers which was clocklike in appearance, and that would mark the moment when the first Martian could enter the transmitting-chamber and flash out.

A little distance from the two metal chambers stood a low dais on which there sat the hideous triple-bodied form of the Martian Master. Around him were the massed members of his council, waiting like him for the start of their age-planned invasion of earth. And beside the dais was a figure between two crocodilian guards at sight of whom Randall forgot all else.

“Milton! My God, Lanier, it’s Milton!”

“Milton! They’ve brought him here to torture or kill him if they find he’s lied about the moment they could flash to earth!”

Milton! And at sight of him something snapped in Randall’s brain.

With a single motion of the knob he sent their centipede-machine crashing out into the clear circle at the mighty cone’s center. A wild uproar of hissing cries broke from all the thousands in it as he sent the mechanism whirling toward the dais of the Martian Master. He saw the crocodilian forms there scattering blindly before him, and then as his rays drove out and spun and stabbed in mad figures of crimson death through the astounded Martian masses he saw Milton looking up toward them, crying out crazily to them as his two guards loosed him for the moment.

A high call from the Martian Master ripped across the hall and was answered by a shattering roar of hissing voices as Martians and machines surged madly toward them. Randall and Lanier in a single leap were out of the centipede-machine, and in an instant had half-dragged Milton with them in a great leap up to the edge of the humming transmitting chamber.

Milton was shouting hoarsely to them over the wild uproar. To enter that transmitting chamber before the destined moment was annihilation, to be flashed out with no receiver on earth awaiting them. They turned, struck with all their strength at the first Martians rushing up to them. No rays flashed, for a ray loosed would destroy the chamber behind them that was the one gate for the Martians to the world they would invade. But as the Martian Master’s high call hissed again all the countless crocodilian forms in the great cone were rushing toward them.

Braced at the very edge of the humming, light-filled chamber, Randall and Lanier and Milton struck madly at the Martians surging up toward them. Randall seemed in a dream. A score of taloned paws clutched him from beneath; scaled forms collapsed under his insane blows.

The whole vast cone and surging reptilian hordes seemed spinning at increasing speed around him. As his clenched fists flashed with waning strength he glimpsed crocodilian forms swarming up on either side of them, glimpsed Lanier down, talons reaching toward him, Milton fighting over him like a madman. Another moment would see it ended—reptilian arms reaching in scores to drag him down—Milton jerking Lanier half to his feet. The Martian Master’s call sounded—and then came a great clanging sound at which the Martian hordes seemed to freeze for an instant motionless, at which Milton’s voice reached him in a supreme cry.

“Randall—the transmitter!”

For in that instant Milton was leaping back with Lanier, and as Randall with his last strength threw himself backward with them into the humming transmitting-chamber’s brilliant light, he heard a last frenzied roar of hissing cries from the Martian hordes about them. Then as the brilliant light and force from the chamber’s walls smote them, Randall felt himself hurled into blackness inconceivable, that smashed like a descending curtain across his brain.

The curtain of blackness lifted for a moment. He was lying with Milton and Lanier in another chamber whose force beat upon them. He saw a yellow-lit room instead of the great cone—saw the tense, anxious face of Nelson at the switch beside them. He strove to move, made to Nelson a gesture with his arm that seemed to drain all strength and life from him; and then, as in answer to it Nelson drove up the switch and turned off the force of the matter-receiver in which they lay, the black curtain descended on Randall’s brain once more.

Two hours later it was when Milton and Randall and Lanier and Nelson turned to the laboratory’s door. They paused to glance behind them. Of the great matter-transmitter and receiver, of the apparatus that had crowded the laboratory, there remained now but wreckage.

For that had been their first thought, their first task, when the astounded Nelson had brought the three back to consciousness and had heard their amazing tale. They had wrecked so completely the matter-station and its actuating apparatus that none could ever have guessed what a mechanism of wonder the laboratory a short time before had held.

The cubical chambers had been smashed beyond all recognition, the dynamos were masses of split metal and fused wiring, the batteries of tubes were shattered, the condensers and transformers and wiring demolished. And it had only been when the last written plans and blue-prints of the mechanism had been burned that Milton and Randall and Lanier had stopped to allow their exhausted bodies a moment of rest.

Now as they paused at the laboratory’s door, Lanier reached and swung it open. Together, silent, they gazed out.

It all seemed to Randall exactly as upon the night before. The shadowy masses in the darkness, the heaving, dim-lit sea stretching far away before them, the curtain of summer stars stretched across the heavens. And, sinking westward amid those stars, the red spark of Mars toward which as though toward a magnet all their eyes had turned.

Milton was speaking. “Up there it has shone for centuries—ages—a crimson spot of light. And up there the Martians have been watching, watching—until at last we opened to them the gate.”

Randall’s hand was on his shoulder. “But we closed that gate, too, in the end.”

Milton nodded slowly. “We—or the fate that rules our worlds. But the gate is closed, and God grant, shall never again be opened by any on this world.”

“God grant it,” the other echoed.

And they were all gazing still toward the thing. Gazing up toward the crimson spot of light that burned there among the stars, toward the planet that shone red, menacing, terrible, but whose menace and whose terror had been thrust back even as they had crouched to spring at last upon the earth.

THE MAN WHO EVOLVED

There were three of us in Pollard’s house on that night that I try vainly to forget. Dr. John Pollard himself, Hugh Dutton and I, Arthur Wright—we were the three. Pollard met that night a fate whose horror none could dream; Dutton has since that night inhabited a state institution reserved for the insane, and I alone am left to tell what happened.

It was on Pollard’s invitation that Dutton and I went up to his isolated cottage. We three had been friends and room-mates at the New York Technical University. Our friendship was perhaps a little unusual, for Pollard was a number of years older than Dutton and myself and was different in temperament, being rather quieter by nature. He had followed an intensive course of biological studies, too, instead of the ordinary engineering courses Dutton and I had taken.

As Dutton and I drove northward along the Hudson on that afternoon, we found ourselves reviewing what we knew of Pollard’s career. We had known of his taking his master’s and doctor’s degrees, and had heard of his work under Braun, the Vienna biologist whose theories had stirred up such turmoil. We had heard casually, too, that afterwards he had come back to plunge himself in private research at the country-house beside the Hudson he had inherited. But since then we had had no word from him and had been somewhat surprised to receive his telegrams inviting us to spend the weekend with him.

It was drawing into early-summer twilight when Dutton and I reached a small riverside village and were directed to Pollard’s place, a mile or so beyond. We found it easily enough, a splendid old pegged-frame house that for a hundred-odd years had squatted on a low hill above the river. Its outbuildings were clustered around the big house like the chicks about some protecting hen.

Pollard himself came out to greet us. “Why, you boys have grown up!” was his first exclamation. “Here I’ve remembered you as Hughie and Art, the campus trouble-raisers, and you look as though you belong to business clubs and talk everlastingly about sales-resistance!”

“That’s the sobering effect of commercial life,” Dutton explained, grinning. “It hasn’t touched you, you old oyster—you look the same as you did five years ago.”

He did, too, his lanky figure and slow smile and curiously thoughtful eyes having changed not a jot. Yet Pollard’s bearing seemed to show some rather more than usual excitement and I commented on it.

“If I seem a little excited it’s because this is a great day for me,” he answered.

“Well, you are in luck to get two fine fellows like Dutton and me to trail up to this hermitage of yours,” I began, but he shook his head smilingly.

“I don’t refer to that. Art, though I’m mighty glad you’ve come. As for my hermitage, as you call it, don’t say a word against it. I’ve been able to do work here I could never have done amid the distractions of a city laboratory.”

His eyes were alight. “If you two knew what—but there, you’ll hear it soon enough. Let’s get inside—I suppose you’re hungry?”

“Hungry—not I,” I assured him. “I might devour half a steer or some trifle like that, but I have really no appetite for anything else today.”

“Same here,” Dutton said. “I just pick at my food lately. Give me a few dozen sandwiches and a bucket of coffee and I consider it a full meal.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do to tempt your delicate appetites,” said Pollard, as we went inside.

We found his big house comfortable enough, with long, low-ceilinged rooms and broad windows looking riverward. After putting our bags in a bedroom, and while his housekeeper and cook prepared dinner. Pollard escorted us on a tour of inspection of the place. We were most interested in his laboratory.

It was a small wing he had added to the house, of frame construction outside to harmonize with the rest of the building, but inside offering a gleaming vista of white-tiled walls and polished instruments. A big cube-like structure of transparent metal surmounted by a huge metal cylinder resembling a monster vacuum tube, took up the room’s center, and he showed us in an adjoining stone-floored room the dynamos and motors of his private power-plant. Night had fallen by the time we finished dinner, the meal having been prolonged by our reminiscences. The housekeeper and cook had gone. Pollard explaining that the servants did not sleep in the place. We sat smoking for a while in his living-room, Dutton looking appreciatively around at our comfortable surroundings.

“Your hermitage doesn’t seem half-bad. Pollard,” he commented. “I wouldn’t mind this easy life for a while myself.”

“Easy life?” repeated Pollard. “That’s all you know about it, Hugh. The fact is that I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I’ve done up here in the last two years.”

“What in the world have you been working at?” I asked. “Something so unholy you’ve had to keep it hidden here?”

“A mad scheme,” Pollard chuckled. “That’s what they think down in the village. They know I’m a biologist and have a laboratory here, so it’s a foregone conclusion with them that I’m doing vivisection of a specially dreadful nature. That’s why the servants won’t stay here at night. As a matter of fact,” he added, “if they knew down in the village what I’ve really been working, on they’d be ten times as fearful as they are now.”

“Are you trying to play the mysterious great scientist for our benefit?” Dutton demanded. “If you are you’re wasting time—I know you, stranger, so take off that mask.”

“That’s right,” I told him. “If you’re trying to get our curiosity worked up you’ll find we can scram you as neatly as we could five years ago.”

“Which scramming generally ended in black eyes for both of you,” he retorted. “But I’ve no intention of working up your curiosity—as a matter of fact I asked you up here to see what I’ve been doing and help me finish it.”

“Help you?” echoed Dutton. “What can we help you do—dissect worms? Some weekend, I can see right now!”

“There’s more to this than dissecting worms,” Pollard said. He leaned back and smoked for a little time in silence before he spoke again.

“Do you two have any knowledge at all of evolution?” he asked.

“I know that it’s a fighting word in some states,” I answered, “and that when you say it you’ve got to smile, damn you.”

He smiled himself. “I suppose you’re aware of the fact, however, that all life on this earth began as simple unicellular protoplasm, and by successive evolutionary mutations or changes developed into its present forms and is still slowly developing?”

“We know that much—just because we’re not biologists you needn’t think we’re totally ignorant of biology,” Button said.

“Shut up. Dutton,” I warned. “What’s evolution got to do with your work up here, Pollard?”

“It is my work up here,” Pollard answered.

He bent forward. “I’ll try to make this clear to you from the start. You know, or say you know, the main steps of evolutionary development. Life began on this earth as simple protoplasm, a jellylike mass from which developed small protoplasmic organisms. From these developed in turn sea-creatures, land-lizards, mammals, by successive mutations. This infinitely slow evolutionary process has reached its highest point so far in the mammal man, and is still going on with the same slowness.

“This much is certain biological knowledge, but two great questions concerning this process of evolution have remained hitherto unanswered. First, what is the cause of evolutionary change, the cause of these slow, steady mutations into higher forms? Second, what is the future course of man’s evolution going to be, what will be the forms into which in the future man will evolve, and where will his evolution stop? Those two questions biology has so far been unable to answer.”

Pollard was silent a moment and then said quietly, “I have found the answer to one of those questions, and am going to find the answer to the other tonight.”

We stared at him. “Are you trying to spoof us?” I asked finally.

“I’m absolutely serious, Arthur. I have actually solved the first of those problems, have found the cause of evolution.”

“What is it, then?” burst out of Dutton.

“What it has been thought by some biologists for years to be,” Pollard answered. “The cosmic rays.”

“The cosmic rays?” I echoed. “The vibrations from space that Millikan discovered?”

“Yes, the cosmic rays, the shortest wavelength and most highly penetrating of all vibratory forces. It has been known that they beat unceasingly upon the earth from outer space, cast forth by the huge generators of the stars, and it has also been known that they must have some great effect in one way or another upon the life of the earth.”

“I have proved that they do have such an effect, and that that effect is what we call evolution! For it is the cosmic rays, beating upon every living organism on earth, that cause the profound changes in the structure of those organisms which we call mutations. Those changes are slow indeed, but it is due to them that through the ages life has been raised from the first protoplasm to man, and is still being raised higher.”

“good loRd, you can’t be serious on this. Pollard!” Dutton protested.

“I am so serious that I am going to stake my life on my discovery tonight,” Pollard answered, quietly.

We were startled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have found in the cosmic rays the cause of evolution, the answer to the first question, and that tonight by means of them I am going to answer the second question and find out what the future evolutionary development of man will be!”

“But how could you possibly—”

Pollard interrupted. “Easily enough. I have been able in the last months to do something no physicist has been able to do, to concentrate the cosmic rays and yet remove from them their harmful properties. You saw the cylinder over the metal cube in my laboratory? That cylinder literally gathers in from an immense distance the cosmic rays that strike this part of earth, and reflects them down inside the cube.

“Now suppose those concentrated cosmic rays, millions of times stronger than the ordinary cosmic rays that strike one spot on earth, fall upon a man standing inside the cube. What will be the result? It is the cosmic rays that cause evolutionary change, and you heard me say that they are still changing all life on earth, still changing man, but so slowly as to be unnoticeable. But what about the man under those terrifically intensified rays? He will be changed millions of times faster than ordinarily, will go forward in hours or minutes through the evolutionary mutations that all mankind will go forward through in eons to come!”

“And you propose to try that experiment?” I cried.

“I propose to try it on myself,” said Pollard gravely, “and to find out for myself the evolutionary changes that await humankind.”

“Why, it’s insane!” Dutton exclaimed.

Pollard smiled. “The old cry,” he commented. “Never an attempt has been made yet to tamper with nature’s laws, but that cry has been raised.”

“But Dutton’s right!” I cried. “Pollard, you’ve worked here alone too long—you’ve let your mind become warped—”

“You are trying to tell me that I have become a little mad,” he I said. “No, I am sane—perhaps wonderfully sane, in trying this.”

His expression changed, his eyes brooding. “Can’t you two sees what this may mean to humanity? As we are to the apes, so must the; men of the future be to us. If we could use this method of mine to take all mankind forward through millions of years of evolutionary development at one stride, wouldn’t it be sane to do so?”

My mind was whirling. “Good heavens, the whole thing is so crazy,” I protested. “To accelerate the evolution of the human race? It seems somehow a thing forbidden.”

“It’s a thing glorious if it can be done,” he returned, “and I know that it can be done. But first one must go ahead, must travel on through stage after stage of man’s future development to find out to which stage it would be most desirable for all mankind to be transferred. I know there is such an age.”

“And you asked us up here to take part in that?”

“Just that. I mean to enter the cube and let the concentrated rays whirl me forward along the paths of evolution, but I must have someone to turn the rays on and off at the right moments.”

“It’s all incredible!” Dutton exclaimed. “Pollard, if this is a joke it’s gone far enough for me.”

For answer Pollard rose. “We will go to the laboratory now,” he said simply. “I am eager to get started.”

I cannot remember following Pollard and Dutton to the laboratory, my thoughts were spinning so at the time. It was not until we stood before the great cube from which the huge metal cylinder towered that I was aware of the reality of it all.

Pollard had gone into the dynamo-room and as Dutton and I stared wordlessly at the great cube and cylinder, at the retorts and flasks of acids and strange equipment about us, we heard the hum of motor-generators. Pollard came back to the switchboard supported in a steel frame beside the cube, and as he closed a switch there there came a crackling and the cylinder glowed with white light.

Pollard pointed to it and the big quartz-like disk in the cubical chamber’s ceiling, from which the white force-shafts shot downward.

“The cylinder is now gathering cosmic rays from an immense area of space,” he said, “and those concentrated rays are falling through that disk into the cube’s interior. To cut off the rays it is necessary only to open this switch.” He reached to open the switch, the light died.

THE MAN WHO EVOLVED

Quickly, while we stared, he removed his clothing, donning in place of it a loose white running suit.

“I will want to observe the changes of my own body as much as possible,” he explained. “Now, I will stand inside the cube and you will turn on the rays and let them play upon me for fifteen minutes. Roughly, that should represent a period of some fifty million years of future evolutionary change. At the end of fifteen minutes you will turn the rays off and we will be able to observe what changes they have caused. We will then resume the process, going forward by fifteen-minute or rather fifty-million-year periods.”

“But where will it stop—where will we quit the process?” Dutton asked.

Pollard shrugged. “We’ll stop where evolution stops, that is, where the rays no longer affect me. You know, biologists have often wondered what the last change or final development of man will be, the last mutation. Well, we are going to see tonight what it will be.”

He stepped toward the cube and then paused, went to a desk and brought from it a sealed envelope he handed to me.

“This is just in case something happens to me of a fatal nature,” he said. “It contains an attestation signed by myself that you two are in no way responsible for what I am undertaking.”

“Pollard, give up this unholy business!” I cried, clutching his arm. “It’s not too late, and this whole thing seems ghastly to me!”

“I’m afraid it is too late,” he smiled. “If I backed out now I’d be ashamed to look in a mirror hereafter. And no explorer was ever more eager than I am to start down the path of man’s future evolution!”

He stepped up into the cube, standing directly beneath the disk in its ceiling. He motioned imperatively, and like an automaton I closed the door and then threw the switch.

The cylinder broke again into glowing white light, and as the shafts of glowing white force shot down from the disk in the cube’s ceiling upon Pollard, we glimpsed his whole body writhing as though beneath a terrifically concentrated electrical force. The shaft of glowing emanations almost hid him from our view. I knew that the cosmic rays in themselves were invisible but guessed that the light of the cylinder and shaft was in some way a transformation of part of the rays into visible light.

Dutton and I stared with beating hearts into the cubical chamber, having but fleeting glimpses of Pollard’s form. My watch was in one hand, the other hand on the switch. The fifteen minutes that followed seemed to me to pass with the slowness of fifteen eternities. Neither of us spoke and the only sounds were the hum of the generators and the crackling of the cylinder that from the far spaces was I gathering and concentrating the rays of evolution.

At last the watch’s hand marked the quarter-hour and I snapped I off the switch, the light of the cylinder and inside the cube dying. Exclamations burst from us both.

Pollard stood inside the cube, staggering as though still dazed by the impact of the experience, but he was not the Pollard who had entered the chamber! He was transfigured, godlike! His body had literally expanded into a great figure of such physical power and beauty as we had not imagined could exist! He was many inches taller and broader, his skin a clear pink, every limb and muscle molded as though by some master sculptor.

The greatest change, though, was in his face. Pollard’s homely, good-humored features were gone, replaced by a face whose perfectly-cut features held the stamp of immense intellectual power that shone almost overpoweringly from the dear dark eyes. It was not Pollard who stood before us, I told myself, but a being as far above us as the most advanced man of today is above the troglodyte!

He was stepping out of the cube and his voice reached our ears, clear and bell-like, triumphant.

“You see? It worked as I knew it would work! I’m fifty million years ahead of the rest of humanity in evolutionary development!”

“Pollard!” My lips moved with difficulty. “Pollard, this is terrible—this change—”

His radiant eyes flashed. “Terrible? It’s wonderful! Do you two realize what I now am, can you realize it? This body of mine is the kind of body all men will have in fifty million years, and the brain inside it is a brain fifty million years ahead of yours in development!” He swept his hand about. “Why, all this laboratory and former work of mine seems infinitely petty, childish, to me! The problems that I worked on for years I could solve now in minutes. I could do more for mankind now than all the men now living could do together!”

“Then you’re going to stop at this stage?” Dutton cried eagerly. “You’re not going further with this?”

“Of course I am! If fifty million years’ development makes this much change in man, what will a hundred million years, two hundred million make? I’m going to find that out.”

I grasped his hand. “Pollard, listen to me! Your experiment has succeeded, has fulfilled your wildest dreams. Stop it now! Think what you can accomplish, man! I know your ambition has always been to be one of humanity’s great benefactors—by stopping here you can be the greatest! You can be a living proof to mankind of what your process can make it, and with that proof before it all humanity will be eager to become the same as you!”

He freed himself from my grasp. “No, Arthur—I have gone part of the way into humanity’s future and I’m going on.”

He stepped back into the chamber, while Dutton and I stared helplessly. It seemed half a dream, the laboratory, the cubical chamber, the godlike figure inside that was and still was not Pollard.

“Turn on the rays, and let them play for fifteen minutes more,” he was directing. “It will project me ahead another fifty million years.”

His eyes and voice were imperative, and I glanced at my watch, and snicked over the switch. Again the cylinder broke into light, again the shaft of force shot down into the cube to hide Pollard’s splendid figure.

Dutton and I waited with feverish intensity in the next minutes. Pollard was standing still beneath the broad shaft of force, and so was hidden in it from our eyes. What would its lifting disclose? Would he have changed still more, into some giant form, or would he be the same, having already reached humanity’s highest possible development?

When I shut off the mechanism at the end of the appointed period, Dutton and I received a shock. For again Pollard had changed!

He was no longer the radiant, physically perfect figure of the first metamorphosis. His body instead seemed to have grown thin and shrivelled, the outlines of bones visible through its flesh. His body, indeed, seemed to have lost half its bulk and many inches of stature and breadth, but these were compensated for by the change in his head.

For the head supported by this weak body was an immense, bulging balloon that measured fully eighteen inches from brow to back! It was almost entirely hairless, its great mass balanced precariously upon his slender shoulders and neck. And his face too was changed greatly, the eyes larger and the mouth smaller, the ears seeming? smaller also. The great bulging forehead dominated the face.

Could this be Pollard? His voice sounded thin and weak to our ears.

“You are surprised to see me this time? Well, you see a man a hundred million years ahead of you in development. And I must confess that you appear to me as two brutish, hairy cave-men would appear to you.”

“But Pollard, this is awful!” Dutton cried. “This change is more terrible than the first…if you had only stopped at the first…”

The eyes of the shrivelled, huge-headed figure in the cube fired with anger. “Stop at that first stage? I’m glad now that I didn’t! The man I was fifteen minutes ago…fifty million years ago in development…seems now to me to have been half-animal! What was his big animal-like body beside my immense brain?”

“You say that because in this change you’re getting away from all human emotions and sentiments!” I burst. “Pollard, do you realize what you’re doing? You’re changing out of human semblance!”

“I realize it perfectly,” he snapped, “and I see nothing to be deplored in the fact. It means that in a hundred million years man will be developing in brain-capacity and will care nothing for the development of body. To you two crude beings, of what is to me the past,: this seems terrible; but to me it is desirable and natural. Turn on the rays again!”

“Don’t do it. Art!” cried Dutton. “This madness has gone far enough!”

Pollard’s great eyes surveyed us with cold menace. “You will turn on the rays,” his thin voice ordered deliberately. “If you do not, it will be but the work of a moment for me to annihilate both of you and go on with this alone.”

“You’d kill us?” I said dumfoundedly. “We two, two of your best friends?”

His narrow mouth seemed to sneer. “Friends? I am millions of years past such irrational emotions as friendship. The only emotion you awaken in me is a contempt for your crudity. Turn on the rays!”

THE BRAIN MONSTER

His eyes blazed as he snapped the last order, and as though propelled by a force outside myself, I closed the switch.

The shaft of glowing force again hid him from our view.

Of our thoughts during the following quarter-hour I can say nothing, for both Dutton and I were so rigid with awe and horror as to make our minds chaotic. I shall never forget, though, that first moment after the time had passed and I had again switched off the mechanism.

The change had continued, and Pollard—I could not call him that in my own mind—stood in the cube-chamber as a shape the sight of which stunned our minds.

He had become simply a great head! A huge hairless head fully a yard in diameter, supported on tiny legs, the arms having dwindled to mere hands that projected just below the head! The eyes were enormous, saucer-like, but the ears were mere pin-holes at either side of the head, the nose and mouth being similar holes below the eyes!

He was stepping out of the chamber on his ridiculously little limbs, and as Dutton and I reeled back in unreasoning horror, his voice came to us as an almost inaudible piping. And it held pride!

“You tried to keep me from going on, and you see what I have become? To such as you, no doubt, I seem terrible, yet you two and all like you seem as low to me as the worms that crawl!”

“Good God, Pollard, you’ve made yourself a monster!” The words burst from me without thought.

His enormous eyes turned on me. “You call me Pollard, yet I am no more the Pollard you knew, and who entered that chamber first, than you are the ape of millions of years ago from whom you sprang! And all mankind is like you two! Well, they will all learn the powers of one who is a hundred and fifty million years in advance of them!”

“What do you mean?” Dutton exclaimed.

“I mean that with the colossal brain I have I will master without a struggle this man-swarming planet, and make it a huge laboratory in which to pursue the experiments that please me.”

“But Pollard—remember why you started this!” I cried. “To go ahead and chart the path of future evolution for humanity—to benefit humanity and not to rule it!”

The great head’s enormous eyes did not change. “I remember that the creature Pollard that I was until tonight had such foolish ambitions, yes. It would stir mirth now, if I could feel such an emotion, To benefit humanity? Do you men dream of benefiting the animal you rule over? I would no sooner think of working for the benefit you humans!

“Do you two yet realize that I am so far ahead of you in brain power now as you are ahead of the beasts that perish? Look a this…”

He had climbed onto a chair beside one of the laboratory table was reaching among the retorts and apparatus there. Swiftly he poured several compounds into a lead mortar, added others, poured upon the mixed contents another mixture made as swiftly.

There was a puff of intense green smoke from the mortar instantly, and then the great head—I can only call him that—turned the mortar upside down. A lump of shining mottled metal fell out and we gasped as we recognized the yellow sheen of pure gold, made in a moment, apparently, by a mixture of common compounds!

“You see?” the grotesque figure was asking. “What is the tranformation of elements to a mind like mine? You two cannot even realize the scope of my intelligence!

“I can destroy all life on this earth from this room, if I desire. I can construct a telescope that will allow me to look on the planets the farthest galaxies! I can send my mind forth to make contact with other minds without the slightest material connection. And you think it terrible that I should rule your race! I will not rule them, I will own them and this planet as you might own a farm and animals!”

“You couldn’t!” I cried. “Pollard, if there is anything of Pollard left in you, give up that thought! We’ll kill you ourselves before we’ll let you start a monstrous rule of men!”

“We will—by God, we will!” Dutton cried, his face twitching.

We had started desperately forward toward the great head but stopped suddenly in our tracks as his great eyes met ours. I found myself walking backward to where I had stood, walking back and Dutton with me, like two automatons.

“So you two would try to kill me?” queried the head that had been Pollard. “Why, I could direct you without a word to kill yourselves and you’d do so in an instant! What chance has your puny will and brain against mine? And what chance will all the force of men have against me when a glance from me will make them puppets of my will?”

A desperate inspiration flashed through my brain. “Pollard, wait!” I exclaimed. “You were going on with the process, with the rays! If you stop here you’ll not know what changes lie beyond your present form!”

He seemed to consider. “That is true,” he admitted, “and though it seems impossible to me that by going on I can attain to greater intelligence than I now have, I want to find out for certain.”

“Then you’ll go under the rays for another fifteen minutes?” I asked quickly.

“I will,” he answered, “but lest you harbor any foolish ideas, you may know that even inside the chamber I will be able to read your thoughts and can kill both of you before you can make a move to harm me.”

He stepped up into the chamber again, and as I reached for the switch, Dutton trembling beside me, we glimpsed for a moment the huge head before the down-smiting white force hid it from our sight.

The minutes of this period seemed dragging even more slowly than before. It seemed hours before I reached at last to snap off the lays. We gazed into the chamber, shaking.

At first glance the great head inside seemed unchanged, but then we saw that it had changed, and greatly. Instead of being a skin-covered head with at least rudimentary arms and legs, it was now a great gray head-like shape of even greater size, supported by two gray muscular tentacles. The surface of this gray head-thing was wrinkled and folded, and its only features were two eyes as small as our own.

“Oh my God!” quaked Dutton. “He’s changing from a head into a brain—he’s losing all human appearance!”

Into our minds came a thought from the gray head-thing before us, a thought as clear as though spoken. “You have guessed it, for even my former head-body is disappearing, all atrophying except the brain. I am become a walking, seeing brain. As I am so all of your race will be in two hundred million years, gradually losing more and more of their atrophied bodies and developing more and more their great brains.”

His eyes seemed to read us. “You need not fear now the things I threatened in my last stage of development. My mind, grown infinitely greater, would no more now want to rule you men and your little planet than you would want to rule an anthill and its inhabitants!

My mind, gone fifty million years further ahead in development, can soar out now to vistas of power and knowledge unimagined by me in that last stage, and unimaginable to you.”

“Great God, Pollard!” I cried. “What have you become?”

“Pollard?” Dutton was laughing hysterically. “You call that thing Pollard? Why, we had dinner with Pollard three hours ago—he was a human being, and not a thing like this!”

“I have become what all men will become in time,” the thing’s thought answered me. “I have gone this far along the road of man’s future evolution, and am going on to the end of that road, am going to attain the development that the last mutation possible will give me!”

“Turn on the rays,” his thought continued. “I think that I must be approaching now the last possible mutation.”

I snapped over the switch again and the white shaft of the concentrated rays veiled from us the great gray shape. I felt my own mind giving beneath the strain of horror of the last hour, and Dutton was still half-hysterical.

The humming and crackling of the great apparatus seemed thunderous to my ears as the minutes passed. With every nerve keyed to highest tension, I threw open the switch at last. The rays ceased, and the figure in the chamber was again revealed.

Dutton began to laugh shrilly, and then abruptly was sobbing. I do not know whether I was doing the same, though I have a dim memory of mouthing incoherent things as my eyes took in the shape in the chamber.

It was a great brain! A gray limp mass four feet across, it lay in the chamber, its surface ridged and wrinkled by innumerable fine convolutions. It had no features or limbs of any kind in its gray mass. It was simply a huge brain whose only visible sign of life was its slow twitching movement.

From it thoughts beat strongly into our own horror-weighted brains.

“You see me now, a great brain only, just as all men will be far in the future. Yes, you might have known, I might have known, when I was like you, that this would be the course of human evolution, that the brain that alone gives man dominance would develop and the body that hampers that brain would atrophy until he would have developed into pure brain as I now am!

“I have no features, no senses that I could describe to you, yet can realize the universe infinitely better than you can with your elementary senses. I am aware of planes of existence you cannot imagine. I can feed myself with pure energy without the need of a cumbersome body, to transform it, and I can move and act, despite my lack of limbs, by means and with a speed and power utterly beyond your comprehension.

“If you still have fear of the threats I made two stages back against your world and race, banish them! I am pure intelligence now and as such, though I can no more feel the emotions of love or friendship, neither can I feel those of ambition or pride. The only emotion, if such it is, that remains to me still is intellectual curiosity, and this desire for truth that has burned in man since his apehood will thus be the last of all desires to leave him!”

THE LAST MUTATION

“A brain—a great brain!” Dutton was saying dazedly. “Here in Pollard’s laboratory—but where’s Pollard? He was here, too…”

“Then all men will some day be as you are now?” I cried.

“Yes,” came the answering thought, “in two hundred and fifty million years man as you know him and as you are will be no more, and after passing all the stages through which I have passed through tonight, the human race will have developed into great brains inhabiting not only your solar system, no doubt, but the systems of other stars!”

“And that’s the end of man’s evolutionary road? That is the highest point that he will reach?”

“No, I think he will change still from those great brains into still a higher form,” the brain answered—the brain that three hours before had been Pollard!—“and I am going to find out now what that higher form will be. For I think this will be the last mutation of all and that with it I will reach the end of man’s evolutionary path, the last and highest form into which he can develop!

“You will turn on the rays now,” the brain’s order continued, “and in fifteen minutes we will know what that last and highest form is.”

My hand was on the switch but Dutton had staggered to me, was clutching my arm. “Don’t, Arthur!” he was exclaiming thickly. “We’ve seen horrors enough—let’s not see the last—get out of here…”

“I can’t!” I cried. “Oh God, I want to stop but I can’t now—I want to see the end myself—I’ve got to see…”

“Turn on the rays!” came the brain’s thought-order again.

“The end of the road—the last mutation,” I panted. “We’ve got to see—to see—” I drove the switch home.

The rays flashed down again to hide the great gray brain in the cube. Dutton’s eyes were staring fixedly, he was clinging to me.

The minutes passed! Each tick of the watch in my hand was the mighty note of a great tolling bell in my ears.

An inability to move seemed gripping me. The hand of my watch was approaching the minute for which I waited, yet I could not raise my hand toward the switch!

Then as the hand reached the appointed minute I broke from my immobility and in a sheer frenzy of sudden strength pulled open the switch, rushed forward with Dutton to the cube’s very edge!

The great gray brain that had been inside it was gone. There lay on the cube’s floor instead of it a quite shapeless mass of clear, jellylike matter. It was quite motionless save for a slight quivering. My shaking hand went forth to touch it, and then it was that I screamed, such a scream as all the tortures of hell’s crudest fiends could not have wrung from a human throat.

The mass inside the cube was a mass of simple protoplasm! This then was the end of man’s evolution-road, the highest form to which time would bring him, the last mutation of all! The road of man’s evolution was a circular one, returning to its beginning!

From the earth’s bosom had risen the first crude organisms. Then sea-creature and land-creature and mammal and ape to man; and from man it would rise in the future through all the forms we had seen that night. There would be super-men, bodiless heads, pure brains; only to be changed by the last mutation of all into the protoplasm from which first it had sprung!

I do not know now exactly what followed. I know that I rushed upon that quivering, quiescent mass, calling Pollard’s name madly and shouting things I am glad I cannot remember. I know that Dutton was shouting too, with insane laughter, and that as he struck with lunatic howls and fury about the laboratory the crash of breaking glass and the hiss of escaping gases was in my ears. And then from those mingling acids bright flames were leaping and spreading sudden fires that alone, I think now, saved my own sanity.

For I can remember dragging the insanely laughing Dutton from the room, from the house, into the cool darkness of the night.

I remember the chill of dew-wet grass against my hands and face as the flames from Pollard’s house soared higher. And I remember that as I saw Dutton’s crazy laughter by that crimson light, I knew that he would laugh thus until he died.

So ends my narrative of the end that came to Pollard and Pollard’s house. It is, as I said in the beginning, a narrative that I only can tell now, for Dutton has never spoken a sane word since. In the institution where he now is, they think his condition the result of shock from the fire, just as Pollard was believed to have perished in that fire. I have never until now told the truth.

But I am telling it now, hoping that it will in some way lessen the horror it has left with me. For there could be no horror greater than that we saw in Pollard’s house that night. I have brooded upon it. With my mind’s eye I have followed that tremendous cycle of change, that purposeless, eon-long climb of life up from simple protoplasm through myriads of forms and lives of ceaseless pain and struggle, only to end in simple protoplasm again.

Will that cycle of evolutionary change be repeated over and over again upon this and other worlds, ceaselessly, purposelessly, until there is no more universe for it to go on in? Is this colossal cycle of life’s changes as inevitable and necessary as the cycle that in space makes of the nebulae myriad suns, and of the suns dark-stars, and of the dark-stars colliding with one another nebulae again?

Or is this evolutionary cycle we saw a cycle in appearance only, is there some change that we cannot understand, above and beyond it? I do not know which of these possibilities is truth, but I do know that the first of them haunts me. It would haunt the world if the world believed my story. Perhaps I should be thankful as I write to know that I will not be believed.

DEVOLUTION

Ross had ordinarily the most even of tempers, but four days of canoe travel in the wilds of North Quebec had begun to rasp it. On this, their fourth stop on the bank of the river to camp for the night, he lost control and for a few moments stood and spoke to his two companions in blistering terms.

His black eyes snapped and his darkly unshaven, handsome young face worked as he spoke. The biologists listened to him without reply at first. Gray’s blond young countenance was indignant, but Woodin, the older biologist, just listened impassively with his gray eyes level on Ross’s angry face.

When Ross stopped for breath, Woodin’s calm voice struck in. “Are you finished?”

Ross gulped as though about to resume his tirade, then abruptly got hold of himself. “Yes, I’m finished,” he said sullenly.

“Then listen to me,” said Woodin, like a middle-aged father admonishing a sulky child. “You’re working yourself up for nothing. Neither Gray nor I have made one complaint yet. Neither of us has once said that we disbelieve what you told us.”

“You haven’t said you disbelieve, no!” Ross exclaimed with anger suddenly re-flaring. “But I can tell what you’re thinking! You both think I told you a fairy story about the things I saw from my plane! You think I dragged you two up here on the wildest wild-goose chase, to look for incredible creatures that coulc never have existed. You believe that, don’t you?”

“Oh, damn these mosquitoes!” said Gray, slapping viciously at his neck and staring with unfriendly eyes at the aviator.

Woodin took command. “We’ll go over this after we’ve made camp. Jim, get out the dufflebags. Gray, will you rustle firewood?”

They both glared at him and at each other, but grudgingly they obeyed. The tension eased.

By the time darkness fell on the little riverside clearing, the canoe was drawn up on the bank, the trim little balloon-silk tent had been erected, and a fire crackled in front of it. Gray fed the fire with knots of pine while Woodin cooked over it coffee, hot cakes, and the inevitable bacon.

The firelight wavered feebly up toward the tall trunks of giant hemlocks that walled the little clearing on three sides. It lit up their three khaki-clad, stained figures and the irregular white block of the tent. It gleamed out there on the riffles of the McNorton, chuckling softly as it flowed on toward the Whale.

They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to the chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome cheeping of insects.

Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his boot-heel and sat up.

“All right,” he said, “now we’ll settle this argument we were having.”

Ross looked a little shamefaced. “I guess I got too hot about it,” he said subduedly. Then he added, “All the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me.”

Woodin shook his head. “When you told us that you’d seen creatures unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you. If we hadn’t, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?”

“I know, I know,” said the aviator. “You think I saw something queer, and you’re taking a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after it. But you don’t believe what I’ve told you about the look of the things. You think that sounds too queer to be true, don’t you?”

For the first time Woodin hesitated. “After all, Ross,” he said indirectly, “one’s eyes can play tricks when you’re only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up.”

“Glimpsing them?” echoed Ross. “I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, yes, but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.

“It was near here, too, just east of the fork of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking by in a hurry—I’d been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson’s Bay. I wanted to place myself by the river fork, so I brought my plane down a little and used my binoculars. Then, in a clearing by the river, I saw something glistening, dropped lower, and saw—the things. I tell you, they were incredible, but just the same I saw them clear! I forgot all about the river fork in the moment or two I stared down at them.

“They were big, glistening things like heaps of shining jelly, so translucent that I could see the ground through them. There were at least a dozen of them, and when I saw them, they were gliding all in that little clearing, a floating, flowing movement.

“Then they disappeared under the trees. If there’d been a clearing big enough to land in within a hundred miles, I’d have landed and looked for them, but there wasn’t and I had to go on. But I wanted like the devil to find out what they were, and when I took the story to you two, you agreed to come here by canoe to search for them. But I don’t think now you’ve ever fully believed me.”

Woodin looked thoughtfully into the fire. “I think you saw something queer, all right, some form of life. That’s why I was willing to come up on this search. But things such as you describe, jellylike, translucent, gliding over the ground like that—there’s nothing like that since the first protoplasmic creatures, the beginning of life on Earth, glided over our young world ages ago.”

“If there were such things then, why couldn’t they have left descendants like them?” Ross argued.

Woodin shook his head. “They changed into different and higher forms of life, starting the great upward climb of life that has reached its height in man. Those long-dead, single-celled protoplasmic creatures were the start, the crude, humble beginn of our life. They passed away and their descendants were unlike them. We men are their descendants, too.”

Ross looked at him, frowning. “But where did they come from in the first place, those first living things?”

Again Woodin shook his head. “That is one thing we biologists do not know and can hardly speculate upon, the origin of those first protoplasmic forms of life. It’s been suggested that they rose spontaneously from the chemicals of the Earth, yet this is disproved by the fact that no such things rise spontaneously now from inert matter. Their origin is still a complete mystery. But, however they came into existence, they were the first of life, our distant ancestors.”

Woodin’s eyes were dreaming, the other two forgotten, as he stared into the fire, seeing visions.

“What a glorious saga it is, that wonderful climb up from crude protoplasm creatures to a man! A marvelous series of changes that has brought us from that first low form to our present splendor. And it might not have occurred on any other world but Earth! For science is now almost sure that the cause of evolutionary mutations is the radiations of the radioactive deposits inside our planet, acting upon the genes of all living matter.”

He caught a glimpse of Ross’s uncomprehending face, and despite his raptness smiled a little.

“I can see that means nothing to you. I’ll try to explain. The germ-cell of every living thing on Earth contains in it a certain number of small, rod-like things which are called chromosomes. These chromosomes are made up of strings of tiny particles which we call genes. And each of these genes has a potent and different controlling effect upon the development of the creature that grows from that germ-cell.

“Some of these genes control the creature’s color, some control his size, some the shape of his limbs, and so on. Every characteristic of the creature that grows from that germ-cell will be greatly different the fellow-creatures of its species. He will be, in fact, of an entirely new species. That is the way in which new species come into existence on Earth, the method of evolutionary change.

“Biologists have known this for some time, and they have been searching for the cause of these sudden great changes, these mutations, as they are called. They have tried to find out what it is that affects the genes so radically. They have found experimentally that X-rays and chemical rays of various kinds, when turned upon the genes of a germ-cell, will change them greatly. And the creature that grows from that germ-cell will thus be a greatly changed creature, a mutant.

“Because of this, many biologists now believe that the radiation from the radioactive deposits inside Earth, acting upon all the genes of every living thing on Earth, is what causes the constant change of species, the procession of mutations, that has brought life up the evolutionary road to its present height.

“That is why I say that on any other world but Earth, evolutionary progress might never have happened. For it may be that no other world has similar radioactive deposits within to cause by gene-effect the mutations. On any other world, the first protoplasmic things that began life might have remained forever the same, down through endless generations.

“How thankful we ought to be that it was not so on Earth! That mutation after mutation has followed, life ever changing and progressing into new and higher species, until the crude protoplasm things have advanced through countless changing forms into the supreme achievement of man!”

Woodin’s enthusiasm had carried him away as he talked, but now he stopped, laughing a little as he relit his pipe.

“Sorry that I lectured you like a college freshman, Ross. But that’s my chief subject of thought, my idée fixe, that wonderful upward climb of life through the ages.”

Ross was staring thoughtfully into the fire. “It does seem wonderful the way you tell it. One species changing into another, going higher all the time—”

Gray stood up by the fire and stretched. “Well, you two can wonder over it, but this crass materialist is going to emulate his remote invertebrate ancestors and return to a prostrate position. In other words, I’m going to bed.”

He looked at Ross, a doubtful grin on his young blond face, and said, “No hard feelings now?”

“Forget it.” The aviator grinned back. “The paddling was hard today, and you fellows looked mighty skeptical. But you’ll see! Tomorrow we’ll be at the fork of the Little Whale, and then I’ll bet we won’t scout an hour before we run across those jelly-creatures.”

“I hope so,” said Woodin, yawning. “Then we’ll see just how good your eyesight is a mile up, and whether you’ve yanked two respectable scientists up here for nothing.”

Later as he lay in his blankets in the little tent, listening to Gray and Ross snore and looking sleepily out at the glowing fire embers, Woodin wondered again about that which had Ross actually seen in that fleeting glimpse from his speeding plane. Something queer, Woodin was sure of that, so sure that he’d come on this hard trip to find it. But what exactly?

Not protoplasmic things such as he described. That couldn’t be, of course. Or could it? If things like that had existed once, why couldn’t they—couldn’t they—?

Woodin didn’t know he’d been sleeping until he was awakened by Gray’s cry. It wasn’t a nice cry; it was the hoarse yell of someone suddenly assaulted by bone-freezing terror.

He opened his eyes at that cry to see the incredible looming against the stars in the open door of tent. A dark, amorphous mass humped there in the opening, glistening all over in the starlight, and gliding into the tent. Behind it were others like it.

Things happened very quickly then. They seemed to Woodin to happen not consecutively, but in succession of swift, clicking scenes like the successive pictures of a motion-picture film.

Gray’s pistol roared red flame at the first monster entering the tent, and the momentary flash showed the looming, glistening bulk of the thing, and Gray’s panic-frozen face, and Ross clawing in his blankets for his pistol.

Then that scene was over and instantly there was another one, Gray and Ross both stiffening suddenly as though petrified, both falling heavily over. Woodin knew they were both dead now, bu t he didn’t know how he knew it The glistening monsters were coming on into the tent.

He ripped up the rear wall of the tent and plunged out into the cold starlight of the clearing. He ran ten steps, he didn’t know in what direction, and then he stopped. He didn’t know why he stopped dead, he did.

He stood there, his brain desperately urging his limbs to fly, but his limbs would not obey. He couldn’t even turn, could not move a muscle of his body. He stood, his face toward the starlit gleam the river, stricken by a strange and utter paralysis.

Woodin heard rustling, gliding movements in the tent behind him. Now, from behind, there came into his line of vision several of the glistening things. They were gathering around him, a dozen of them it seemed, and he now could see them quite clearly.

They weren’t nightmares, no. They were real, poised here around him, humped, amorphous masses of viscous, translucent jelly. Each was about four feet tall and three in diameter, though their shapes kept constantly changing, making exact dimensions hard to guess.

At the center of each translucent mass was a dark, disk-like blob or nucleus. There was nothing else to the creatures, no limbs or sense-organs. He saw that they could protrude pseudopods, though, for two of them held the bodies of Gray and Ross in such tentacles and were now bringing them out and laying them down beside Woodin.

Woodin, still quite unable to move a muscle, could see the frozen, twisted faces of the two men and could see the pistols still gripped in their dead hands. And then, as he looked on Ross’s face, he remembered.

The things the aviator had seen from his plane, the jelly-creatures the three had come north to search for, they were the monsters around him! But how had they killed Ross and Gray, how were they holding him petrified like this, and what were they?

“We will permit you to move, but you must not try to escape.”

Woodin’s dazed brain numbed further with wonder. Who had said those words to him? He had heard nothing, yet he had thought he heard.

“We will let you move, but you must not attempt to escape or harm us.”

He did hear those words in his mind, even though his ears heard no sound. And now brain heard more.

“We are speaking to you by transference of thought impulses. Have you sufficient mentality to understand us?”

Minds? Minds in these things? Woodin was shaken by the thought as he stared at the glistening monsters.

His thought apparently had reached them. “Of course we have minds,” came the thought-answer into his brain. “We are going to let you move now, but do not try to flee.”

“I—I won’t try,” Woodin told himself mentally.

At once the paralysis that held him abruptly lifted. He stood there in the circle of the glistening monsters, his hands and body trembling violently.

There were ten of them, he saw now. Ten monstrous, humped masses of shining, translucent jelly gathered around him like cowled and faceless genii come from some dimension of the unknown. One stood closer to him than the others, apparently spokesman and leader.

Woodin looked slowly around their circle, then down at his two dead companions. In the midst of the unfamiliar terrors that froze his soul, he felt a sudden aching pity as he looked down at them.

Came another strong thought into Woodin’s mind from the creature closest him. “We did not wish to kill them; we came here simply to capture and communicate with the three of you. But when we sensed that they were trying to kill us, we slew quickly. You, who did not try to kill us but fled, we harmed not.”

“What—what do you want with us, with me?” Woodin asked. He whispered it through lips, as well as thinking it.

There was no mental answer this time. The things stood unmoving, a silent ring of brooding, unearthly figures. Woodin felt his mind snapping under the strain of silence as he asked the question again, almost screamed it.

This time the mental answer came. “I did not answer, because I was probing your mentality to ascertain whether you are of sufficient intelligence to comprehend our ideas. While your mind seems of an exceptionally low order, it seems possible that it can appreciate enough of what we wish to convey to understand us.

“Before beginning, however, I warn you again that it is quite impossible for you to escape or to harm any of us, and that attempts to do so will result disastrously for you. It is apparent you know nothing of mental energy, so I will inform you that your two fellow-creatures were killed by the sheer power of wills, and that your muscles were held unresponsive to your brain’s commands by the same power. With our mental energy we could completely annihilate your body, if we chose.”

There was a pause, and in that little space of silence, Woodin’s dazed brain clutched desperately for sanity, for steadiness.

Then came again that mental voice that seemed so like a real voice speaking in his brain.

“We are children of a galaxy whose name, as nearly as it can be approximated in your tongue, is Arctar. The galaxy of Arctar lies so many million light-years from this galaxy that it is far around the curve of the sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos.

“We came to dominance in that galaxy long ages ago. For we were creatures who could utilize our mental energy for transport, for physical power, for producing almost any effect we required. Because of this, we rapidly conquered and colonized that galaxy, traveling from sun to sun without need of any vehicle.

“Having brought all the matter of the galaxy Arctar under our control, we looked out upon the realms beyond. There are approximately a thousand million galaxies in the three-dimensional cosmos, and it seemed fitting to us that we should colonize them all so that all the matter in the cosmos should in time be brought under our control.

“Our first step was to proliferate—to multiply our number to that required for that great task of colonization of the cosmos. This was not difficult since, of course, reproduction with us matter of mere fission. When the requisite number of us were ready, they were divided into four forces.

“Then the whole sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos was quartered out among those four forces. Each was to colonize its division of the cosmos, and so in their tremendous hosts they set out from Arctar in four different directions.

“A part of one of these forces came to this galaxy of yours eons ago and spread out deliberately to colonize all its habitable worlds. All this took great lengths of time, of course, but our lives are of lengths vastly exceeding yours, and we comprehend that racial achievement is everything and individual achievement is nothing. In the colonization of this galaxy, a force of several million Arctarians came to this particular sun and, finding but this one planet of its worlds habitable, settled here.

“Now it has been the rule that the colonists of all these worlds throughout the cosmos have kept communication with the original home of our race, the galaxy Arctar. In that way, our people, who now hold the whole cosmos, are able to concentrate at one point all their knowledge and power, and from that point go forth commands that shape great projects for the cosmos.

“But from this world no communications have been received since shortly after the force of colonizing Arctarians came here. When this was first noted, the matter was deferred, it being thought within a few more million years reports would surely be made from this world, too. But still no word came, until after more than a thousand million years of this silence the directing council at Arctar ordered an expedition sent to this world to ascertain the reason for such silence on the part of its colonists.

“We ten form that expedition, and we started from one of the worlds of the sun you call Sirius, a short distance from your own sun, where we too are colonists. We were ordered to come with full speed to your world and ascertain why its colonists had made no report. So, wafting ourselves by mental energy through the void, we crossed the span from sun to sun and a few days ago arrived on your world.

“Imagine our perplexity when we floated down here! Instead of a world peopled every square mile by Arctarians like ourselves, descended from the original colonists, a world completely under their mental control, we find a planet that is largely a wilderness of weird forms of life.

“We remained at this spot where we had landed and for some time sent our vision forth and scanned this whole globe mentally. And our perplexity increased, for never have we seen such grotesque and degraded forms of life as presented themselves to us. And not one Arctarian is to be found on this whole planet.

“This has sorely perplexed us, for what could have done away with the Arctarians who colonized this world? Our mighty colonists and their descendants surely could never have been overcome and destroyed by the pitifully weak mentalities that now inhabit this globe. Yet where, then, are they?

“That is why we sought to seize you and your companions. Low as we know your mentalities to be, it seemed that surely even such as you would know what had become of our colonists who once inhabited this world.”

The thought-stream paused a moment, then raced into Woodin’s mind with a clear question.

“Have you not some knowledge of what became of our colonists? Some clue as to their strange disappearance?”

The numbed biologist found himself shaking his head slowly. “I never—I never heard before of such creatures as you, such minds. They never existed on Earth that we know of, and we now know almost all of the history of our planet.”

“Impossible!” exclaimed the thought of the Arctarian leader. “Surely you must have some knowledge of our mighty people, if you know all the history of this planet.”

From another Arctarian’s mind came a thought, directed at the leader but impinging indirectly onto Woodin’s brain.

“Why not examine the past of the planet through this creature’s brain and see what we can see fo ourselves!”

“An excellent idea!” exclaimed the leader. “His mentality will be easy enough to probe.”

“What are you going to do?” cried Woodin, panic edging his voice.

The answering thoughts were calming, reassuring. “Nothing that will harm you in the least. We are simply going to probe your racial past by unlocking the inherited memories of your brain.

“In the unused cells of your brain lie impressed inherited racial memories that go back to your remotest ancestors. By our mental power of command we shall make those buried memories tempor dominant and vivid in your mind.

“You will experience the same sensations, see the same scenes, that your remote ancestors of millions of years ago saw. And we, here around you, can read your mind as we now do, and so see what you are seeing, looking into the past of this planet.

“There is no danger. Physically you will remain standing here, but mentally you will leap back across the ages. We shall first push your mind back to a time approximating that when our colonists came to this world, to see what happened to them.”

No sooner had this thought impinged on Woodin’s mind than the starlit scene around him, the humped masses of the Arctarians, suddenly vanished and his consciousness seemed whirling through a gray mist.

He knew that physically he was not moving, yet mentally he had a sense of terrific velocity of motion. It was as though his mind was whirling across unthinkable gulfs, his brain expanding.

Then abruptly the gray mists cleared. A strange new scene took hazy form inside Woodin’s mind. It was a scene that he sensed, not saw. By other senses than sight did it present itself, yet it was none the less real and vivid.

He looked with those strange senses upon a strange Earth, a world of gray seas and harsh continents of rock without any speck of life upon them. The skies were heavily clouded and rain fell continually.

Down upon that world Woodin felt himself dropping, with a host of weird companions. They were each an amorphous, glistening, single-celled mass, with a dark nucleus at its center. They were Arctarians, and Woodin knew that he was an Arctarian, and that he had come with the others a long way through space toward this world.

They landed in hosts upon the harsh and lifeless planet. They exerted their mentalities and by such telekinetic force of mental energy they altered the material world to suit them. They reared great structures and cities, cities that were not of matter but of thought. He sensed a vast, ordered mass of inquiry, investigation, experiment, and communication, but all were beyond his present human mind in motives and achievement. Abruptly all dissolved in gray mists again.

The mists cleared almost at once and now Woodin looked on another scene. It was later in time—many millennia later. And now Woodin saw that time had worked strange changes upon the hosts of Arctarians, of which he still was one. They had changed from unicellular to multicellular beings. And they were no longer the same. Some were sessile, fixed in one spot, others mobile. Some betrayed a tendency toward the water, others toward the land. Something had changed the bodily form of the Arctarians as generations passed, branching them out in different lines.

This strange degeneration of their bodies had been accompanied by a kindred degeneration of their minds. Woodin sensed that. In the thought-cities, the ordered process of search for knowledge and power had become confused, chaotic. And the thought-cities themselves were vanishing, the Arctarians no longer having sufficient mental energy to maintain them.

The Arctarians were trying to ascertain what was causing this strange bodily and mental degeneration. They thought it was something that was affecting the genes of their bodies, but what it was they could not guess. On no other world had they ever degenerated so!

That scene passed rapidly into another much later. Woodin now saw the scene, for by then the ancestor whose mind he looked through had developed eyes. And he saw that the degeneration had now gone far, the Arctarians’ multicellular bodies more and more stricken by the diseases of complexity and diversification.

The last of the thought-cities now were gone. The once mighty Arctarians had become hideous, complex organisms degenerating ever further, some of them creeping and swimming in the waters, others fixed upon the land.

They still had left some of the great original mentality of their ancestors. These monstrously degenerated creatures of land and sea, living in what Woodin’s mind recognized as the late Paleozoic age, still made frantic and futile attempts to halt the terrible progress of their degradation.

Woodin’s mind flashed into a scene later still, in the Mesozoic. Now the spreading degeneration made of the descendants of the colonists a still more horrible group of races. Great webbed and scale and taloned creatures they were now, reptiles living in land and water.

Even these incredibly changed creatures possessed a faint remnant of their ancestors’ mental power. They made vain attempts to communicate with Arctarians on other worlds of distant suns, to apprise them of their plight. But their minds were now too weak.

There followed a scene in the Cenozoic. The reptiles had become mammals; the downward progress of the Arctarians had gone further. Now only the merest shreds of the original mentality remained in these degraded descendants. And now this pitiful posterity had produced a species even more foolish and lacking in mental power than any before, ground-apes that roamed the cold plains in chattering, quarreling packs. The last shreds of Arctarian inheritance, the ancient instincts toward dignity and cleanliness and forbearance, had faded out of these creatures.

And then a last picture filled Woodin’s brain. It was the world of the present day, the world he had seen through his own eyes. But now he saw and understood it as he never had before, a world in which degeneration had gone to the utmost limit.

The apes had become even weaker bipedal creatures, who had lost almost every atom of inheritance of the old Arctarian mind. These creatures had lost, too, many of the senses which had been retained by the apes before them. And these creatures, these humans, were now degenerating with increasing rapidity. Where at first they had killed like their animal forebears only for food, they had learned to kill wantonly. And had learned to kill each other in groups, in tribes, in nations, and in hemispheres. In the madness, their degeneracy, they slaughtered each other until Earth ran with their blood.

They were more cruel even than the apes who had preceded them, cruel with the utter cruelty of mad. And in their progressive insanity, they came to starve in the midst of plenty, to slay each other in their own cities, to cower beneath the lash of superstitious fears as no creatures had before them.

They were the last terrible descendants, the last degenerated product, of the ancient Arctarian colonists who once had been kings of intellect. Now the other animals were almost gone. These, the last hideous freaks, would soon wind up the terrible story entirely by annihilating each other in their madness.

Woodin came suddenly to consciousness. He was standing in the starlight in the center of the riverside clearing. And around him still were poised the ten amorphous Arctarians, a silent ring.

Dazed, reeling from that tremendous and awful vision that had passed through his mind with incredible vividness, he turned slowly from one to the other of the Arctarians. Their thoughts impinged on his brain, strong, somber, shaken by terrible horror and loathing.

The sick thought of the Arctarian leader beat into Woodin’s mind.

“So that is what became of our Arctarian colonists who came to this world! They degenerated, changed into lower and lower forms of life, until these pitiful insane things, who now swarm on this world, are their last descendants.

“This world is a world of deadly horror! A world that somehow damages the genes of our race’s bodies and changes them bodily and mentally, making them degenerate further each generation. Before us we see the awful result.”

The shaken thought of another Arctarian asked, “But what can we do now?”

“There is nothing we can do,” uttered their leader solemnly. “This degeneration, this awful change, has gone too far for us ever to reverse it now.

“Our intelligent brothers became on this poisoned world things of horror, and we cannot now turn back the clock and restore them from the degraded things their descendants are.”

Woodin found his voice and cried out thinly, shrilly:

“It isn’t true!” he cried. “It’s all a lie, what I saw! We humans aren’t the product of downward devolution, we’re the product of ages of upward evolution! We must be, I tell you! Why, we wouldn’t want to live, I wouldn’t want to live, if that other tale was true. It can’t be true!”

The thought of the Arctarian leader, directed at the other amorphous shapes, reached his raving mind. It was tinged with pity, yet strong with a superhuman loathing.

“Come, my brothers,” the Arctarian was saying to his fellows. “There is nothing we can do here on this soul-sickening world. Let us go, before we too are poisoned and changed. And we will send warning to Arctar that this world is poisoned, a world of degeneration, so that never again may any of our race come here and go down the awful road that those others went down. Come! We return to our own sun.”

The Arctarian leader’s humped shape flattened, assumed a disk-like form, then rose smoothly upward into the air. The others too changed and followed, in a group, and a stupefied Woodin stared up at glistening dots lifting rapidly into the starlight.

He staggered forward a few steps, shaking his fist insanely up at the shining, receding dots.

“Come back, damn you!” he screamed. “Come back and tell me it’s a lie! It must be a lie—it must—”

There was no sign of the vanished Arctarians now in the starlit sky. The darkness was brooding, intense around Woodin.

He screamed up again into the night, but only a whispering echo answered. Wild-eyed, staggering, soul-smitten, his gaze fell on the pistol in Ross’s hand. He seized it with a hoarse cry.

The stillness of the forest was broken suddenly by a sharp crack that reverberated a moment and died rapidly away. Then all was silent again save for the chuckling whisper of the river hurrying on.

THE BIRTHPLACE OF CREATION

CHAPTER I

Citadel of the Futuremen

Garrand watched the face of the Moon grow larger in the forward port of his small cruiser. A white and terrible face, he thought. A death’s-head with meteor-gnawed bones and gaping crater-wounds, bleak and cruel and very silent, watching him come and thinking secret boding thoughts about him. A feeling of sickness grew in him.

“I am a fool and soon I will probably be a dead fool,” he said to himself.

He was not a brave man. He was very fond of living and he did not think of death at all as a thing to be dared and laughed at. The knowledge that he was likely to die there on the Moon gave him qualms of physical anguish that made him look as white and hollow as the stony face that watched him through the port. And yet he did not turn back. There was something in Garrand that was stronger than his fear. His hands trembled, but they held the cruiser grimly on its course.

The stark plains and mountain ranges took size and shape, the lonely mountains of the Moon that looked on nothing and the plains where nothing stirred, not even the smallest wind or whirl of dust. Men had gone out to other worlds and other stars. They had ranged far across space, founding colonies on asteroids and cities on the shores of alien seas. But they left the deathly airless Moon alone. They had looked at it once and gone away. There were only four who made the Moon their home—and not all of those four where men.

Tycho Crater widened out below the little ship. Licking dry lips metallic with the taste of fear, Garrand consulted a map, drawn carefully to scale and showing in that desolation one intricate diagram of a man-made structure. There were ominous gaps in that diagram and Garrand was painfully aware of them. He made his calculations and set his ship down well beyond the outer periphery of defenses marked on the chart.

His landing was a clumsy nervous one. White pumice-dust burst upward around the hull and settled slowly back again. Garrand cut his jets and sat for a moment looking out across Tycho, all ringed around in the distance with cliffs and spires and pinnacles of blasted rock that glittered in the light. There was no sign of the structure indicated on the chart. It was all below ground. Even its observatory dome was set flush, reflecting the Sun’s unsoftened glare no more than the surrounding plain.

Presently Garrand rose, moving with the stiff reluctance of a man going to the gallows. He checked over the bulky shapes of a considerable mass of equipment. His examination was minute and he made one or two readjustments. Then he struggled into a pressure-suit and opened the airlock. The air went out with a whistling rush and after that there was no sound, only the utter silence of a world that has heard nothing since it was made.

Working in that vacuum Garrand carried out a light hand-sledge and set it in the dust. Then he brought out the bulky pieces of equipment and loaded them onto it. He was able to do this alone because of the weak gravitation and when he was through he was able for the same reason to tow the sledge behind him.

He set off across the crater. The glare was intense. Sweat gathered on him and ran in slow trickles down his face. He suffered in the heavy armor, setting one weighted boot before the other, with the little puffs of dust rising and falling back at every step, hauling the sledge behind him. And fear grew steadily in him as he went on.

He knew—all the System knew—that the four who lived here were not here now, that they were far away on a distant troubled world. But their formidable name and presence seemed to haunt this lifeless sphere and he was walking now into the teeth of the deadly defenses they had left behind them.

“They can be beaten,” he told himself, sweating. “I’ve got to beat them.”

He studied his map again. He knew exactly how far he had come from the ship. Leaving himself a wide margin of safety he activated the detector-mechanism on the sledge. The helmet of his pressure-suit was fitted with ultra-sensitive hearing devices that had nothing to do with sonic waves but translated sub-electronic impulses from the detector into audible sound-signals.

He stood still, listening intently. But the detector said nothing and he went on, very slowly now and cautiously, across the dead waste until his footsteps in the dust approached the line of that outer circle on the map. Then the detector spoke with a faint small clicking.

Garrand stopped. He bent over the panel of the mechanism, a jumble of dials, sorters, frequency-indicators and pattern-indicators. Above them a red pip burned in a ground-glass feld. His heart hammered hard and he reached hastily for a black oblong bulk beside the detector.

He thought, “I’m still far enough away so that the blast won’t be lethal if this doesn’t work.”

The thought was comforting but unconvincing. He forced his hand to steady, to pick up the four-pronged plugs and insert them, one by one in the proper order, into the side of the detector. Then he dropped behind the sledge and waited.

The black oblong hummed. He could feel it humming where his shoulder touched the metal of the sledge. It was designed to pick up its readings from the detector, to formulate them, adjust itself automatically to the indicated pattern and frequency, to broadcast an electronic barrier that would blank out the impulse-receptivity of the hidden trap’s sensor-unit. That was its purpose. It should work. But if it did not…

He waited, the muscles of his belly knotted tight. There was no flash or tremor of a blast. After he had counted slowly to a hundred he got up again and looked. The red pip had faded from the ground-glass screen. There was a white one in place of it.

Garrand watched that white pip as though it were the face of his patron saint, hauling the sledge on slowly through that outer circle and through the ones beyond it that were only guessed at. Three times more the urgent clicking sounded in his ears and the dials and pointers changed—and three times the pip faded from red to white and Garrand was still alive when he reached the metal valve door set into the floor of the crater.

The controls of that door were plainly in sight but he did not touch them. Instead he hauled a portable scanner off the sledge and used it to examine the intimate molecular structure of the metal and all its control connections. By this means he found the particular bolt-head that was a switch and turned it, immobilizing a certain device set to catch an unknowing intruder as soon as he opened the valve.

Within minutes after that Garrand had the door open and was standing at the head of a steep flight of steps, going down. His heart was still thudding away and he felt weak in the knees—but he was filled with exultation and a great pride. Few other men, he thought, perhaps none, could have penetrated safely to the very threshold of this most impregnable of all places in the Solar System.

He did not relax his caution. A large mass of equipment went with him down the dark stairway, including the scanner. The valve closed automatically behind him and below in a small chamber he waited until pressure had build up and another door automatically opened. He found nothing more of menace except a system of alarm bells, which he put out of commission—not because there was anyone to hear them but because he knew there would be recorders and he wanted no signs, audible or visible, of his visit.

The recorders themselves were relatively easy to detect. With an instrument brought for the purpose he blanked off their relay systems and went on across the great circular central chamber with the glassite dome through which the sunlight poured. He peered with a scientist’s fascinated wonder at the laboratory apparatus of various sorts in that and the smaller chambers which opened off it until he came to what of all things he was looking for—the heavy locked door of a vault, sunk deep in the lunar rock.

Garrand worked for a long time over that door. The silence was beginning to get to him and the uneasy knowledge that he was where he had no right to be. He began to listen for the voices and the steps of those who might come in and find him.

They were far away and Garrand knew that he was safe.

But he was not a criminal by habit and now that the challenge to his skill was past he began to feel increasingly guilty and unclean. Personal belongings accused him, an open book, a pair of boots, beds and chests and clothing. If it had been merely a laboratory he would not have minded so much—but it was also a dwelling place and he felt like a common thief.

That feeling was forgotten when he entered the vault. There were many things in that vast lunar cavern, but Garrand had no more than a passing glance for any of them except the massive file-racks where the recorded data which related to voyages were spooled and kept.

Under the clear light that had come on of itself with the opening of the door Garrand searched the racks, puzzling out the intricate filing system. He had taken off his helmet. His hands shook visibly and his breathing was loud and irregular but these were only secondary manifestations.

His mind, faced with a difficult problem to solve, slipped by long habit into calculating-machine efficiency and it was not long before he found what he wanted.

He took the spool in his two hands, as tenderly as though it were made of the delicate stuff of dreams and apt to shatter at a breath. He carried it to the large table that stood by the racks and fed the end of the tape into a reader. His face had grown pale and quite rigid except that his mouth twitched a little at the corners. He set up his last piece of equipment beside the reader, a photosonic recorder used to make copies of a master spool, synchronized them and then closed the switches.

The two spools unwound, one giving, the other receiving, and Garrand remained motionless over the viewer, seeing visions beyond price and listening to the voices that spoke of cosmic secrets. When the spool was finished it was a long time before he moved. His eyes were still busy with their visions and they were strangely dull and shining all at once, shining and far away.

At last he shook himself and laughed, small gasping sound that might well have been a sob. He replaced the original in the rack and put the second spool into a special pouch on his belt. In the vault he left everything exactly as he had found it and when he came out again onto the Moon’s surface he reset the hidden trigger that guarded the outer door.

As he had penetrated the defences on the plain, so he went back through them again, in a double agony lest now, when he had the thing he had taken such incredible chances for, he should blunder and be killed. The shadows of the crater edge were crawling toward him, sharp and black. The last premonitory clicking of the detector, the last fading of the warning pip from red to white and he was safe, running toward the ship into the knife-edged darkness of the shadow.

Long before night came Garrand was gone, plunging across the narrow gulf to Earth. He did not know how to give vent to the wildness of his exultation, so he held it in but it burned in his face and eyes.

“Tomorrow,” he said aloud to himself, over and over. “Tomorrow we’ll be on our way.” He laughed, addressing someone who was not present. “You said I couldn’t do it, Herrick. You said I couldn’t!”

Behind him the darkening face of Ihe Moon looked after him.

CHAPTER II

Cosmic Secret

Four came home to the Moon after many days. Four, of whom only one was an ordinary man.

Curt Newton, the man—Otho, the android or artificial man who was human in everything but origin—Grag, the towering metal man or intelligent robot—and Simon Wright, he who had once been a man but whose brain only now lived on in a strange mechanical body.

Their ship came down like a thunderbolt of metal from the sky. The camouflaged doors of an underground hangar opened silently to receive it and closed as silently.

Into the great circular room beneath the observatory dome the four Futuremen came. Curt Newton paused by the wall to activate the recorder panel. It showed blank. It always showed blank.

He sat down slowly, a tall man with red hair and a bronzed face that looked now very tired.

“Do you think our work out there will stick, Simon?” he asked.

He addressed the small square metal case hovering on motor-beams before him, its strange “face” of lens-eyes turned toward him. The serum-case, in which Simon Wright’s brain lived its life.

“I am confident,” said Simon with his precise articulation of metallic artificial accents, “that there will be no more trouble between Uranus Mines and the natives.” Curt frowned and sighed. “I hope so. When will they learn how to deal with planetary primitives?”

Grag spoke up loudly. He was standing, a seven-foot giant of metal, with his head turned and his photoelectric eyes staring intently across the big room.

“Curt, someone’s been here,” his great voice boomed.

“No. I checked the recorders,” Newton said without turning.

“I don’t care,” Grag persisted. “That chair by the vault door has been moved. I was the last one out when we left and I remember exactly where it stood. It’s been moved a good three inches.”

Otho burst into laughter. “Listen to Old Hawkeye. Three inches!” The android, so perfectly human in appearance that only something bright and strange lurking in his green eyes betrayed an inner difference, went on mockingly, “Are you sure it’s not two and a half inches?”

Grag began to protest angrily in his foghorn voice. Curt swung around irritably to silence them. But Simon Wright said gravely, “Wait, Curtis. You know that the constitution of Grag’s metal brain makes his memory absolutely photographic. If he says the chair has been moved it has been moved.”

“But the recorders?”

“They could have been blanked, you know. It’s theoretically possible.”

“Only theoretically—” Curt began and then he stopped and swore. “Blast you, Grag! Why did you have to raise a doubt in my mind? Now I’ll have to take down the recorders to check them and that’s the devil and all of a job.”

Irritation riding him, he went out of the big room and came back with tools. He scowled at Grag. “You’d better be right!” Simon and Otho helped him in the delicate work of disassembling the recorders. They examined both the microfilm and the interior relay circuits bit by bit.

Curt’s irritation left him suddenly. He looked sharply at the others. He had found it—the minute blurred line where the film had started to roll and been arrested. The relay circuits were a fraction of a decimal out of synchronization now.

Otho whistled softly. “Blanked!” he said. “And so beautifully done—nothing fused or blown out, the derangement so small that you’d never notice it unless you were searching for it.”

“So I was right?” Grag boomed triumphantly. “I knew I was right. When I see a thing that’s changed I—”

“Shut up,” Curt Newton told him. He looked, puzzled, at Simon. “No criminal did this—no ordinary criminal. The job of blanking these relays required tremendous scientific ability.”

Simon brooded, hovering. “That’s obvious. Only an expert in sub-electronics would be capable. But that seems incongruous. Why would a top scientist come prowling in here like a common thief?”

Curt turned. “Grag, will you see if anything else has been moved or taken?” The metal giant started stalking through the rooms. Curt remained silent and thoughtful, the frown on his tanned face deepening.

Grag came back. “No. Nothing else has been tampered with.”

“Yet it was,” Curt said slowly. He looked again at Simon. “I’ve been thinking. An expert in sub-electronics… Do you remember the nuclear physics man down at New York Tech whom we met at Government Center a few months ago?”

“Garris? Garrand—some name like that? I remember. A nice little man.”

“Yes, I thought so too—very eager about his work. But I remember now he asked me a question—”

Curt broke off suddenly. He went rapidly across the big room, unlocked the vault door and inside the silent lunar cavern he went straight to the files.

Simon had followed him. And when Simon saw the spool that Curt drew from the file his lens-eyes turned to Curt’s face with a startled swiftness.

“Curtis, no! You don’t think—”

“It was what he asked me about,” Curt said. “The Birthplace.”

The word went echoing solemnly back and forth around the cold rock walls. And Curt stared at Simon, not really seeing him, seeing uncanny awesome things that lived in memory, and a strange look came into his face—a strange look indeed for the man Curt Newton. A look of fear.

Simon said, “How could he know of the Birthplace?”

That word had never been spoken to anyone. They hardly spoke it even among themselves. Such a secret was not for the knowledge nor the use of men and they had guarded it more carefully than the sum total of all other knowledge they possessed. Now the very sound of that name brought Grag and Otho to the door and wrought a sudden tension that filled the cavern with a waiting stillness.

Curt said heavily, “He connected the theoretical possibility with the work we did on Mercury. He’s a brilliant man, Simon—too brilliant.”

“Perhaps,” said Grag, “he only looked for the secret and couldn’t find it. After all, our filing system…”

Curt shook his head. “If he could get in here he could find what he wanted.” He examined the spool. “He could make a copy of this and there would be no way of telling that it had been done.”

He stood motionless for a moment longer and no one spoke. Otho studied his face and shot one quick bright glance at Simon. Simon moved uneasily on his gliding force-beams.

Curt replaced the spool and turned. “We’ve got to find out about this man. We’ll go to New York, at once.”

Very soon thereafter the Comet rose from the dark gap of the hangar-mouth and shot away toward the great green globe of Earth.

Not much later, at headquarters of the Planet Police in New York, old marshal Ezra Gurney stared at Curt Newton in blank amazement.

“Garrand?” he said. “But he’s a reputable man, a scientist!”

“Nevertheless,” said Curt grimly, “I want all the information you can get and fast.”

Simon spoke. “This is urgent, Ezra. We cannot afford delay.”

The grizzled old spaceman glanced from one to the other, and then to Otho. “Something really bad, eh? All right, I’ll do what I can.”

He went out of the office. Otho leaned against the wall and remained motionless, watching Curt. Simon hovered near the desk. Neither one of them was afflicted with nerves. Curt moved restlessly about, brooding, his hands touching things and putting them down again in wire-taut gestures. The intricate multichron on the wall whirred softly and the minutes slid away, on Earth, on Mars, on the far-flung worlds of the System. No one spoke and Ezra did not come back.

Simon said at last, “It would take time, even for Ezra.”

“Time!” said Curt. “If Garrand has the secret we have no time.”

He paced the small neat room, a man oppressed with heavy thoughts. The sound of the door opening brought him whirling around to face Ezra almost as though he were facing his executioner.

“Well?”

“Garrand took off from Earth on the twenty-first,” said Ezra. “He flew a ship of his own, apparently an experimental model on which he has been working for some time in company with a man named Herrick, who is also listed as chief pilot. Destination, none. Purpose, cosmic ray research beyond the System. Because of Garrand’s reputation and standing there was no difficulty about the clearance. That was all I could get.”

“That’s enough,” said Curt. “More than enough.” His face was bleak and the color had gone out of it under the tan. He looked very tired and in a way so strange that Ezra came up to him and demanded, “What is it, Curt? What did Garrand take from the laboratory?”

Curt answered, “He took the secret of the Birthplace of Matter.”

Ezra stared, uncomprehending. “Is that a secret you can tell me?”

Curt said hopelessly, “I can tell you now. For it’s known now to Garrand and this other man.”

“What is it, then?”

“Ezra, it is the secret of creation.”

There was a long silence. It was obvious from Gurney’s face that the term was too large for him to understand. Yet Curt Newton did not continue as yet. He looked beyond them and his face was drawn and haggard.

“We’ll have to go back there,” he said, his voice low. “We’ll have to. And I hoped never to go back.”

Simon’s expressionless eyes were fixed on him. Otho said loudly, “What’s there to be afraid of? We ran the whirls before. And as for Garrand and the other one—”

“I am not afraid of them,” Curt Newton said.

“I know,” said Simon. “I was the only one who was with you in the shrine of the Watchers there. I know what you are afraid of—yourself.”

“I still don’t get it,” Ezra said. “The secret of creation? Creation of what?”

“Of the universe, Ezra. Of all the matter in the universe.”

A strange wonder came on Gurney’s timeworn face. He said nothing. He waited.

“You remember,” Curt told him, “when we came back from our first deep-space voyage? You remember that right after that we designed the electron-assembly plants that they’ve used ever since to replenish Mercury’s thinning atmosphere? Where do you think we got the knowledge to do that, to juggle electrons into desired types of matter on a big scale?”

Gurney’s voice was a whisper now. “You got that knowledge out in deep space?”

“In deep, deep space, Ezra. Near the center of our galaxy, amid the thick star-clusters and nebulae beyond Sagittarius. There lies the beating heart of our universe.”

He made a gesture. “Back in the Twentieth Century the scientist Millikan first guessed the truth. The matter of the universe constantly melts away into radiation. Millikan believed that somewhere in the universe was a place where radiation was somehow built back into matter and that the so-called cosmic rays were the ‘birth-cry’ of the newborn matter. The fount of our material universe, the birthplace of material creation.”

Awe was in Ezra’s faded old eyes. “And you found that? And never told—never let anyone guess—”

“Garrand guessed,” Curt said bitterly. “He connected our work at Mercury with our mysterious voyage. He tried to learn what I knew and when I would tell him nothing he came to the Moon and risked death to steal our records. And now he’s gone to find it for himself.”

Simon Wright said somberly, “He will only reap disaster if he tries to take it. I saw what almost happened there to you, Curtis.”

“It’s my fault,” Curt said harshly. “We should have left no record. But I could not quite destroy it.” He paused, then went on rapidly. “We’ve got to overtake him. What the other man, Herrick, may have in mind we can’t tell. But Garrand is a fanatical researcher, who will tamper with the instruments of the Watchers as I did. He won’t stop where I stopped!”

Ezra jumped to his feet. “I can have cruisers after him in an hour.”

“They couldn’t catch him now, Ezra. The Comet might. We’ll have to make certain preparations and they’ll take time. But even so we may catch him.”

He turned, moving swiftly toward the door as though physical action were a relief from overpowering tension. Ezra stopped him. “Curt, wit! Let me go with you. I should, you know, if it’s a case of catching a lawbreaker.”

Newton looked at him. “No, Ezra. You’re only trapped by the lure of this thing as I was. As I was… No.”

Simon’s metallic voice intervened. “Let him go with us, Curtis. I think we might need him—that you might need him.”

A look passed between them. Then, silently, Curt nodded.

Back to the Moon, with five instead of four, went the Comet on wings of flame. In the hours that followed, the closed hangar-doors in silent Tycho gave no hint of the desperate rushed activity beneath.

But less than twenty-four hours after its return from Uranus the ship left the Moon a second time. It went out through the planetary orbits like a flying prisoner breaking out through bars, poised for a moment beyond Pluto to shift into a new kind of motion, then was gone into the outer darkness.

CHAPTER III

The Birthplace

The Comet was a fleck, a mote, a tiny gleam of man-made light falling into infinity. Behind it, lost somewhere along the farthest shores of a lightless sea, lay Earth and Sol and the outposts of familiar stars. Ahead was the great wilderness of Sagittarius, the teeming star-jungle that to the eye seemed crowded thick with burning Suns and nebulae.

The five within the ship where silent. Four were busy with the memories they had of the time they had come this way before, with the knowledge of what was still to be encountered. One, Ezra Gurney, could find no words to speak. He was a veteran spaceman. He had been a veteran when Curt Newton was born. He knew the Solar System from Pluto to Mercury and back again and he knew how the naked undimmed stars could shine.

But this was different—this voyaging of deepest space, this pursuing of the fleets and navies of the stars to their own harbor, this going in among them. In a way Ezra Gurney was afraid. No man, not even Curt Newton, could look at that flaming sky ahead and not be a little afraid.

The Comet had come into the region of the great clusters. Mighty hives of gathered Suns blazed and swarmed, rolling across space and time, carrying after them sweeping trains of scattered stars. Between and beyond the clusters and their trailing star-streams shone the glowing clouds of nebulae, banners of light flung out for a million miles across the firmament, ablaze with the glow of drowned and captured Suns. And beyond them all—the nebulae, the clusters and the stars—there showed the black brooding lightless immensity of a cloud of cosmic dust.

The soul of Ezra Gurney shook within him. Men had no business here in this battleground of angry gods. Men? But was he here with men?

“One-point-four degrees zenith,” came the metallic voice of Simon Wright from where he hovered above a bulky instrument.

“Check,” Curt Newton said and moved controls slightly. Then he asked, “Dust?”

“Definitely higher than average interstellar density now,” Otho reported, from his own place at the wide instrument panel. “It’ll thicken fast as we approach the main cloud.”

Ezra looked at them—at the square, hovering metal case of the living brain, at the lithe eager android peering forward into the abyss with burning green eyes, at the giant imperturbable metal bulk of the robot.

Not men, no! He was out here in the great deeps, rushing toward the mightiest secret of infinity, with creatures unhuman, with—

Curt turned, and smiled briefly and wearily at him. And the clamoring panic in Ezra was suddenly gone. Why, these were his oldest staunchest friends, unshakably loyal and true.

He drew a ong breath. “I don’t mind telling you that it’s nearly got me down.”

“You’ve got worse coming,” Curt said uncomfortingly. “We’ll hit the main cloud soon.”

“The cloud?”

“The great cloud of cosmic dust that surrounds the Birthplace. That dust is born from the Birthplace—and flows out in mighty tides through our hole universe.”

“To be born into new worlds?”

“Yes. Weizsacker fathomed that part of the cycle, long ago in the nineteen forties when he formulated his theory of the gathering of the cosmic dust into new planets.”

Before them now rose a wall of Suns, glaring like cyclopean furnaces as the Comet seemingly crawled toward them. Almost it seemed that they could hear the clang and thunder of cosmic forges as their tiny craft approached and went between the flaming giants.

White and wild flared a far-flung nebula to the left beyond that rampart of stars. But ahead there gloomed farther still the black cloud that now seemed eating up the universe with jaws of darkness as they steadily approached it.

“No sign of any other ship outside the cloud,” Otho reported coolly. “Our detectors won’t range inside it, of course.”

“They had too big a start,” Curt said broodingly. “Two many days. Garrand and the other must already have been on the world of the Watchers for some time.”

“Unless the whirls wrecked them,” Otho suggested.

“Wishful thinking,” Curt said. “We ran the whirls and so could they.”

Simon said, “Curtis, you will not go into the shrine of the Watchers again?”

Curt Newton did not look at him. “I’ll have to if that’s where Garrand is.”

“You don’t have to, Curtis. We three could go.”

Now, Curt looked at Simon, his tanned face set and unreadable. “You don’t trust me with the power of the Watchers?”

“You know what that power almost did to you before. It is for you to say.”

Curt looked ahead and said doggedly, “I am not afraid and I will go in there after him.”

Ezra Gurney, puzzled by the tension between them, asked, “Who are the Watchers?”

“They have been dead for ages,” Curt said slowly. “But long ago they penetrated the Birthplace and conquered its secret and set up instruments to wield its powers. It’s why we have come. Garrand must not use those instruments.”

“Nobody must use them,” said Simon. Curt said nothing to that.

Gurney, looking ahead, saw the black cloud widening out across the starry universe like a great tide of doom, steadily blotting out the stars. A fitting cosmic shroud for the greatest of cosmic secrets, he thought. Its fringes engulfed bright stars that shone wanly through the dimness like dying eyes.

“This dust,” said Simon, “is newborn matter, spawned by the Birthplace and pumped outward by pressure of radiation to flow out to the whole universe.”

“And the—the secret itself—is inside?”

“Yes.”

There was no moment when the Comet plunged suddenly within the cloud. Rather the dust thickened steadily until all about the flying ship was a deepening haze, deepest and darkest ahead but drawing more and more veils behind them so that the stars back there shone like smothered witch-fires.

The ship began to tremble as it encountered flowing spatial currents of denser dust. Struts and girders protested with slight creakings and then more loudly. They strapped into the recoil-chairs at Curt’s orders.

“Here it comes,” said Grag in loud complaint. “I remember last time almost every bone in my body was broken.”

Otho laughed. He started a caustic retort but had no time to voice it.

To Gurney the Comet seemed suddenly to have crashed. The tell-tales on the panel went crazy and the recoil-chairs screamed in outrage as the ship was batted through the haze by unseen giant hands.

There was nothing they could do but hang on. There was nothing even for Curt to do. The automatic pilot and stabilizers had to do it all now or they were finished.

The mechanisms functioned staunchly. Again and again they snatched the buffeted little ship out of raging eddies of dust-currents and hurled it forward again. Now the whole hull was creaking and groaning from constantly changing stresses and the hiss of dust against its plates became a rising and falling roar.

Ezra Gurney felt a quaking dread. He had already seen too much, had come too far. Now he felt that a universe become sentient and hostile was wrathfully repelling them from its hidden heart, from its supreme secret.

The Comet fought forward, relentlessly impelled by its own mechanical brains, until the dust began to thin. It tore onward, still buffeted by swirling currents and drenched by radiation. And now, ahead, Ezra saw a vast hazy space inside the denser blackness of the cloud. And far away in this inner space, looming in vague gigantic splendor…

“Good God!” said Ezra Gurney and it was a prayer. “Then that—that…” Curt Newton’s eyes were alight with a strange glow. “Yes—the Birthplace.”

The hazy space within the denser cloud was vast. And at its center bulked and gleamed and shifted an enigmatic glory—a colossal spinning spiral of white radiance. Its whirling arms spanned millions of miles and it uttered cosmic lightnings of radiation that lanced out through the haze.

Beating heart of the universe, fiery womb that spawned the stuff of worlds, awesome epicenter of cosmos! Cloaked and shrouded by the dense black cloud of its own making, safe behind its ramparts of terrible whirlpools and the wild tide-runs of untamed matter fresh from creation, it flamed across its millions of miles of space, shaped like a spiral nebula, spinning, whirling, sending forth its seed to the farthest corners of the galaxy.

And to Ezra Gurney, cowering in his seat and staring at that far-off misty glory, it seemed that the eyes of men were not meant to see nor their minds to comprehend this shining Birthplace. “Surely,” he whispered, “surely we’re not going into that!

Curt Newton nodded. He had still that strange look in his eyes, a look almost mystic, as though he could see beyond the wonder and the glory of the Birthplace to its innermost secret heart and glimpse there the hidden laws by which it worked and carried out its destiny.

“Yes,” said Curt, “we’re going in.” He leaned forward over the controls, his face bathed in the misty radiance so that it seemed not his familiar face at all but the countenance of a being half godlike with the strange light flickering in his eyes.

“You see how it is, Ezra?” he asked. “How it spins like a great centrifuge, sucking in the spent energy of Suns and whirling it in currents of incalculable strength until, in some utterly undreamable way, the energy coagulates into electrons and protons which are thrown off in never-ending streams from the rim of the vortex.

“They form the shining haze that fills this hollow around the Birthplace. Then, farther out, they unite to form the atoms of cosmic dust. The pressure of radiation forces them on across the galaxy. And out of them new worlds are made.”

Ezra Gurney shivered. He did not speak.

“Curtis!” Simon’s voice was loud with a kind of warning and Curt Newton started, leaning back in his seat and turning again to the controls of the Comet. His face had tightened and his eyes were veiled.

AND the ship sped on across that vast hollow in the heart of the dark cloud. And swift as its flight was it seemed only to creep slowly, slowly, toward the misty wheel of radiance. Pale witch-fires danced along its hull, growing brighter until the metal was enwrapped in veils of flame, tenuous, cold and having about them an eerie quality of life. The Comet was double-shielded against the radiation but even so Ezra Gurney could feel the echoes of that terrible force in his own flesh.

The flaming arms of the Birthplace reached wider and wider across space. The radiance deepened, became a supernal brilliance that seared the flinching eyeballs. The ship began to be shaken now and again by subtle tremors as the farthest edges of out-thrown currents touched it and passed by.

Ezra shut his teeth hard to keep from screaming. He had been driven once too close to the Sun and he had looked hard into the depths of the atomic furnace that was about to swallow him. He had not then known one tenth of the fear that he knew now.

Slitting his eyes against the glare he could make out the central sphere from which the spiral arms curved out, a gigantic vortex of flaming force, the wheel-hub of the galaxy. The Comet was plunging straight toward it and there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing…

Curt sent the ship driving in between two of the sweeping arms. Tidal-waves, torrents of energy picked them up and flung them, a leaf in the cosmic millrace, toward the grip of a curving arm that burned and seethed with all the ultimate fires of hell. And Curt fought the controls and tore away again, heading in, heading in…

The central sphere of force loomed up like a wall of flame higher than all the skies of space, and then they were in it.

It was as though a million Suns had exploded. The force and fire took the Comet and whirled it tumbling away through a blind and terrible violence. Ezra sagged half-conscious in his seat and he thought that he had come a long, long way to die. No ship, no body, could live for long in this.

The forces of the cosmic centrifuge would tear their substance, powder it to atoms and then still down into the fine raw stuff of atoms, send it out to join with the black dust, to begin the timeless pilgrimage across the empty spaces, to be built at last into the foundations of some new world to circle an alien Sun. Human, robot and android, they would all be one in the end.

The Comet crashed suddenly clear of that hellish tempest of light and force into quiet space. Into a space enclosed by the spinning central sphere of the Birthplace itself, a calm at the very center of cosmic storm.

Dazzled, half-stunned, Ezra heard Simon saying, “In here at the center is only one world—the world of the Watchers, where—”

Curt Newton, leaning forward, interrupted with a strange low cry.

“Simon, look! Look! There are other worlds here now—worlds and Suns and—” His voice seemed strangled by a surprise and terror too great for utterance.

Ezra strained desperately to regain use of his dazzled eyes. As they began to clear he too peered tautly forward. At first what he saw did not seem so terrifying. Here, in the wide calm space at the heart of the Birthplace, there was a cluster of Suns and planets.

Ruby Suns, flaring like new blood, green and white and somber smoky-gold Suns! Planets and moons that circled the changing Suns in sweeping trains, themselves ever changing! Comets that shot in living light between the worlds, meteor swarms rushing and wheeling, an astronomical phantasmagoria enclosed within this comparatively little space!

“You said there were no worlds but one here,” Ezra began, bewildered.

“There were none.” Curt’s face was deathly, and something in it struck at Ezra’s heart. “There were none but that little blue world—that alone.”

Ezra glimpsed it at the center of the strange, close-packed cluster—a little blue planet that was a geometrically perfect sphere.

“The powers of the Watchers are there—the instruments by which they could tap the Birthplace itself,” Curt was saying hoarsely. “And Garrand has been there with those instruments for days.”

A comprehension so monstrous that his mind recoiled from it came to Ezra Gurney. “You mean that Garrand…”

He could not finish, could not say it. It was not a thing that could be said in any sane universe.

Curt Newton said it. “Garrand by tapping the Birthplace, has created the Suns and worlds and comets and meteors of that cluster. He has fallen victim to the old allurement, the strongest in the universe.”

“As you almost fell victim once!” Simon Wright warned.

“Can a man make worlds?” Ezra felt shaken and sick inside. “Curt, no—this thing—”

“One who can harness the Birthplace can create at will!” Curt exclaimed. “And the instruments of the Watchers do harness it!”

A kind of madness had come over him. Under his hands the Comet leaped forward at terrible speed. Ezra heard him talking, whether to the others or himself he never knew.

“There is a balance of forces—always a balance! It cannot be tampered with too much. The Watchers left a warning, a plain and dreadful warning.”

The ship rushed forward toward the distant small blue world, careening wildly through the unholy stars and worlds and comets whose creation had blasphemed against the natural universe.

CHAPTER IV

Power of the Watchers

The blue world shimmered in the light of the monstrous aurora, a perfect jewel, with no height of mountain nor roughness of natural growth to mar its symmetry. Its surface showed a gloss that made Ezra think of porcelain or the deep gleam of polished lapis.

“The Watchers made it long ago,” said Curt. “They made it out of the forces of the Birthplace and it was their outpost in this universe, where they studied the secrets of creation. There exists a city…”

The Comet sped low across the curving plain. For a time there was nothing but the blank expanse of blue—what was it, glass or rock or jewel-stone or some substance new in the universe? Above them the little suns with their planets wheeled and shone, laced about with the fire of comets, and above those again was the golden sky of the Birthplace. Curt’s face, bent forward toward the blue horizon, was intense and pale and somehow alien.

“There it is!” cried Otho, and Curt nodded. Ahead there were the tips of slender spires flashing in the light and a gleam and glow of faceted surfaces that made a web of radiance like the aura sometimes seen in dreams. The spires lifted into graceful height, shaped themselves into the form of a city.

Walls of the same translucent blue enclosed the towers and in the center, rising high above them all, there was a citadel, a cathedral-form as massive and as delicate as the castles that sometimes stand upon the tops of clouds on Earth. And it was dead, the blue and graceful city. The walls, the streets, the flying arches that spanned the upper levels of the towers, all were silent and deserted.

“Garrand’s ship,” said Curt and Ezra saw it on the plain before the city, an ugly dark intruder on this world that had not been made for men.

Curt set the Comet down beside it. There was air on this planet, for the Watchers had been oxygen-breathers even though they were not human. The lock of Garrand’s ship stood open but there was no life nor movement that Curt could see.

“It seems deserted,” he said, “but we’d better make sure.”

Ezra roused himself. He went out with the others and somehow the mere act of moving and the possibility of facing a human and comprehensible danger was a relief, almost a pleasure. He walked beside Curt with Otho beyond him. Their boots slipped and rang on the glassy surface. Apart from that there was no sound. The city brooded and was still.

They went through the open airlock into the other ship. There did not seem to be anything to fear, but they moved with the caution of long habit. Ezra found that he was waiting, hoping for action, for attack. He needed some escape valve for the terrors that had grown within him during this flight into the heart of the universe. But the narrow corridors were empty and nothing stirred behind the bulkhead doors.

Then, in the main cabin, they found a man.

He was sitting on the padded bench formed by the tops of the lockers along one wall. He did not move when they came in except to lift his head and look at them. He was a big man, of a breed that Ezra Gurney knew very well, having fought them all his life across the Solar System. But the hardness had go ne out of him now. The strong lines of his face had sagged and softened and his eyes held only hopelessness and fear. He had been drinking but he was not drunk.

“You’re too late,” he said. “Way too late.”

Curt went and stood before him. “You’re Herrick,” he said. “Are you alone?”

“Oh, yes,” said Herrick. “I’m alone. There were Sperry and Forbin but they’re dead now.” Herrick had not shaved for some time. The black stubble on his jaw was flecked with white. He ran his hand across it and his fingers trembled. “I wouldn’t be here now,” he said, “but I couldn’t run the whirls alone. I couldn’t take this ship clear back to Earth alone. I couldn’t do anything but sit and wait.”

Curt said, “Where’s Garrand?”

Herrick laughed. It was not pleasant laughter. “You know where he is. Go in and get him. Make him come out. That’s how Sperry and Forbin died, trying to make him. I don’t know why I’m alive myself. I don’t know if I want to be alive after what I’ve seen.”

HE GOT up. It was hard for him to rise, hard to stand. It was as though fear had eaten the bones away inside him, dissolved the strength from his muscles, leaving him only a hulk, a receptacle for terror. His eyes burned at them.

“You know me,” he said. “You know my kind. You can guess why I came with Garrand to get the secret of the Birthplace, what I was going to do with it afterward. I didn’t figure Garrand would get in my way. I needed his brains, all right, but there would come a time when I wouldn’t need them anymore.” He made a gesture, as of brushing away an insect with his hand. “As easy as that.” He began to laugh again and it was more weeping than laughter.

“Stop it!” said Curt and Herrick stopped quite obediently. He looked at Curt as though a thought had just come to him, creeping through the fear-webs that shrouded his brain.

“You can get me out of here,” he said. There was no threat in his voice, only pleading, the voice of a man caught in quicksand and crying for release. “It’s no use going after Garrand. He’ll die in there anyway. He won’t eat or sleep, he’s gone beyond those things, but whatever he thinks he is he’s human and he’ll die. Just go! Take me aboard your ship and go!”

“No,” said Curt.

Herrick sat down again on the bench. “No,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t. You’re as mad as he is.”

Simon said, “Curtis…”

He had remained in the shadowy background, listening, but now he came forward and spoke and Curt turned on him.

“No!” he said again. “I can’t go away and leave a madman there to play with the forces of the Birthplace till he dies!”

Simon was silent for a time and then he said slowly, “There is truth in what you say but only part of it. And I am sorry, Curtis—for I am no more proof against this madness than you. Even less, perhaps, than you.

“I shall stay out here with Grag to guard the ships and Herrick.” His lens-like eyes turned upon Ezra Gurney. “I think that you, of all of us, will resist the lure most strongly. You are like Herrick, a man of your hands—and Herrick, who came to steal the secret, felt only terror when he found it.”

He said no more but Ezra knew what he meant. Simon was giving Curt Newton into his hands to save him from some destruction which Ezra did not understand. There was a coldness around Ezra’s heart and a sickness in his belly and in his mind a great wish that he had never left Earth.

Curt said to Herrick, “Go to my ship and wait. When we leave you’ll go with us.” Herrick shook his head. His eyes lifted slowly to Curt Newton’s and dropped again. He said, “You’ll never leave.”

Ezra left the ship with Curt and Otho and he was sorry that Herrick had said those last three words.

They walked again across the ringing glassy plain, this time toward the city wall and the tall gateway that was in it. The leaves of the portal stood open and there was a look about them as though they had not been touched or closed for more ages than Ezra could think about. He and Otho passed through them, following Curt. Beyond, at a little distance, were two dark statues facing each other across the way. Ezra looked at them and caught his breath in sharply.

“The Watchers?” he whispered. “Where they like that? But what were they then?” Otho said, “They came from another universe. Simon thought they must have been liquescent from the formless structure of their bodies.”

Out of each amorphous figure stared two round yellow eyes, full of light from the glowing sky and uncannily lifelike. Ezra shuddered and hurried by, glancing as he did so at the strangely inscribed letters upon the bases of the statues. He assumed that that was the warning Curt had referred to and he did not want to enquire too closely into it.

“Go quietly,” Curt said. “Two men have already died here. We want to get as close to Garrand as we can before he kno ws we’re here.”

“Where is he?” demanded Ezra for the city was utterly dead and still. Curt pointed to the citadel.

“In there.”

They made their way as silently as they could along the blue translucent street. High above them the slender spires made soft bell-notes where the wind touched them and the crystal spans thrummed like muted harps. And the shimmering castle loomed close before them and the strange stars sparkled in the golden sky. Ezra Gurney was afraid.

There was a portal, tall and simply made, with an unknown symbol cut above it. They passed it, treading softly, and stood within a vast cathedral vault that soared upward until the tops of the walls were lost in a golden haze and Ezra realized that it was open to the sky.

The floor was of the same blue substance as the city and in the center of it, under the open vault, was a massive oblong block almost like a gigantic altar except that its top was set with hundreds of little, shining keys. Beside this block stood Garrand. He was not looking at it nor at the two men and the android who had entered. He was looking upward into that distant sky and through the opening Ezra could see the glittering of stars. Garrand was smiling.

Curt Newton walked out across the floor.

“Don’t came any closer,” said Garrand mildly. “Just where you are—that’s close enough.”

Curt stopped. Otho had begun to edge away along the curve of the wall very slowly, like a drifting shadow. Ezra stood a little behind Curt and to one side.

GARRAND turned toward them and for the first time Ezra saw his face quite clearly. Unshaven and deathly white, its cheeks and temples sunken with hunger and exhaustion, its eyes dark and burning, there was a beauty about it that had never been there before, something sublime and glorious and calm, as a sea is calm or a frozen river, with the potentials of destruction sleeping in it. And Ezra understood the danger that Simon had spoken of in regard to Curt. He understood now what the power that was here could do to a man.

“So, after all, you followed me,” Garrand said. “Well, it doesn’t matter now.” He stepped behind the block that was like an altar, so that it was between him and Curt.

Curt said quietly, “You must leave here, Garrand. You’ll have to leave some time, you know. You’re only human.”

‘“Am I?” Garrand laughed. His hand lightly caressed the bank of little shining keys. “Am I? I was once. I was a little physicist who thought adding to scientific knowledge supremely important and I stole and risked my life to come here for more knowledge.” His eyes lit up. “I came searching for a scientific secret and I found the source of godhead!”

“So now, because you’ve tampered with the Watcher’s powers and tapped the Birthplace, you’re a god?” Curt’s tone was ironic but Ezra could see the sweat standing out on his forehead.

Garrand took no offence. He was armored by an egocentric emotion so great that he merely smiled wearily and said, “You can go now—all of you. I dislike chattering. I dislike it so much that I will quite willingly call destruction in here to engulf you unless you go.”

His fingers had ceased straying, had come to rest on certain keys. Ezra Gurney felt a slow freezing of his flesh. He whispered hoarsely, “You’ll have to kill him, Curt.”

He knew the swiftness with which Newton could draw and fire the weapon at his belt. But Curt made no move.

“Can I fire into that bank of controls?” Curt muttered. “Otho’s speed is our only chance.”

He flung up his hand, his fingers crooked. He said loudly, “Garrand, I warn you—”

His gesture had been both a feint to draw attention, a signal. A signal that sent Otho lunging toward the oblong altar.

The phenomenal swiftness of the android, the reaction speed of nerves and muscles that were not human, made Otho’s movement almost blurring to the eye. But Garrand saw and with a low cry he pressed the keys.

To Ezra, in the next moment, the air around them seemed suddenly charged with power. The golden haze spun about him, darkened, thickened, all in a heartbeat. He felt the imminent materialization of an agency of destruction drawn from the great matrix of force about them.

He glimpsed through the thickening haze Otho pulling Garrand back from the altar. He saw Curt leaping in, his face desperate and raising the depressed keys.

And Ezra felt the half-materialized shadowy force around him melting back into nothingness. “What—” he stammered, still standing frozen.

“Death,” said Curt. “As to the form of it who knows but Garrand? Anyway, it’s over now.” His voice was unsteady and his hands shook on the keys. He looked down. Garrand had gone limp in Otho’s arms. Ezra thought at first that he was dead and then he saw the shallow breathing, the faint twitching of the mouth.

“Hunger and exhaustion,” said Curt. “Strain. He was already at the end of his rope. Get him back to the ship, Otho, and have Simon take care of him.”

Otho lifted the unconscious man without effort but he did not yet move away. “Aren’t you coming, Curt?”

“Not yet.” He glanced upward through the opening at the brilliant stars that swarmed where no stars ought to be. “I can’t leave this imbalance at the heart of the Birthplace. The Watchers were careful about that. They built their one small planet at the exact center of stress, where it wouldn’t upset anything. But those creations of Garrand’s—I don’t dare leave them here, Otho.”

Still Otho did not move and Curt said, “Go on, Otho. Garrand needs help.”

SLOWLY and reluctantly the android turned and as he did so he looked at Ezra, a look of warning, a pleading look. Then, he went out, carrying Garrand.

Curt Newton bent over the keys. “I haven’t forgotten,” he whispered to himself. “How could anyone ever forget?” He touched the gleaming keys, not pressing them, just touching them lightly and feeling the power that was in them, the unimaginable control of matter.

Ezra said hoarsely, “What are you going to do?”

Curt looked upward to where the little suns swam in the golden haze, the little suns that could create havoc in this cosmic womb where only the seed of matter belonged.

“Watch,” he said. “I am going to dissolve what Garrand created.”

Ezra watched. Slowly, carefully, Curt pressed a certain pattern on the keys and around a ruby star waves and bands of golden force began to flicker like faint auroras. They grew and strengthened and became streams of raw electrons, pouring their substance into the little Sun.

Ezra shielded his eyes, but not soon enough. The star had become a nova, but without the second, the collapsed stage of novas. The fury of electronic force launched upon it from outside in this universal vortex of such forces had swept away each fragment of the exploding atoms to return them to the parent cloud.

The ruby star had ceased to exist and its worlds had vanished with it.

Swifter now, more surely, Curt’s hands flashed across the keys. And Ezra Gurney cowered beside the altar, blinded, stunned, shaken by the savage explosions of far-distant matter, riven and burst apart.

How long he crouched there while the great lights flared in the sky and the cosmic hammers beat he never knew. But there came a time when everything was still and he looked up and saw Curt standing there with his hands motionless on the keys and his head strained back so that he could search the farthest reaches of the sky.

He spoke and Curt did not answer. He touched him and spoke again, and it was like speaking to a statue except that under his fingers he could feel the subtle tremors of Curt’s hard flesh, the taut quivering.

“Curt!” he cried out. And Curt very slowly lowered his head and looked at him with a kind of amazement in his eyes, as though he had forgotten Ezra Gurney.

“Is it finished, Curt?”

“Yes. It’s finished.”

“Then come away.”

Newton’s gaze, the unfamiliar gaze that did not see small things like men but looked on larger distances, slipped away to the banks of keys and upward to the sky again.

“In a moment,” he said. “In just a moment.”

Two red bars burned across the bones of his cheeks and the rest of his face was like marble. Ezra saw in it the beginning of the exaltation, the terrible beauty that had marked the face of Garrand. Curt smiled and the sinews of his hands moved delicately as he stroked his fingers across the keys.

“The worlds that I could make,” he whispered. “Garrand was only a little man. I could create things he never dreamed of.”

“Curt!” cried Ezra in a panic. “Come away!” But his voice was swallowed up in dreams and Curt whispered very softly, “I wouldn’t keep them. I would dissolve them afterward. But I could create…”

His fingers were forming a pattern on the keys. Ezra looked down at his gnarled old hands and knew that they were not strong enough. He looked at his gun and knew that he could not use it in any way. Searching desperately for a way to pierce through the dreams he cried, “Could you create another Earth?”

For awhile he was not sure that Curt had heard him, not sure but that he was beyond hearing. Then a vaguely startled look came into Curt’s eyes and he said, “What?”

“Could you create another Earth, Curt? Could you put the mountains and the seas together and build the cities and fill them with men and women and the voices of children? Could you create another Otho or Grag or Simon?”

Curt slowly looked down at his fingers, curved and hungry on the waiting keys, and a kind of horror flashed across his face. He snatched his hands away and spun around, turning his back to the altar. He looked sick, and shamed, but the dreams were no longer shadowing his face, and Ezra began to breathe again.

“Thanks, Ezra,” he said hoarsely. “Now let’s go. Let’s go, while I can.”

THE black cloud lay behind them and the Comet fled away from it like a frightened thing, back through the great blazing clusters of Suns that had now no terrors for them. Curt Newton sat silently at the controls and his face was so brooding that Ezra Gurney did not venture to speak.

Ezra looked ahead because he did not want to look back into the main cabin. He knew that what Simon was doing there was perfectly harmless and utterly necessary but there was something so uncanny about it that he did not want to see it being done.

He had looked in once and seen Simon hovering over the strange projector that Grag and Otho had rigged above the heads of the drugged unconscious Garrand and Herrick. He had come away from there quickly.

He sat unspeaking beside Curt, watching the great clusters wheel slowly past them until at last Simon Wright came gliding into the control-room.

“It is done,” said Simon. “Garrand and Herrick will not wake for many hours. When they do they won’t remember.”

Curt looked at him. “You’re sure that you expunged every memory of the Birthplace?”

“Absolutely sure. I used the scanner to block every memory-path on that subject—and checked by questioning them hypnotically. They know nothing of the Birthplace. You’ll have to have a story ready for them.”

Curt nodded. “We picked them up out here in deep space when their ship cracked up in cosmic ray research. That fits the circumstances—they’ll never doubt it.” Ezra shivered a little. Even now the blocking of part of a man’s memories, the taking away forever of a bit of his experience, seemed an eerie thing to do.

Curt Newton saw his shiver and understood it. He said, “It doesn’t harm them, Ezra—and it’s necessary.”

“Very necessary, if the secret of the Birthplace is not to get out again,” said Simon.

There was a little silence among them and the ship crawled on and on through the cosmic glare and gloom. Ezra saw that the somber shadow on Newton’s face deepened as he looked out through the wilderness of Suns and nebulae toward the far, far spark of Sol.

“But someday,” Curt said slowly, “someday not too far in the future, many men will be pushing out through these spaces. They’ll find the Birthplace sooner or later. And then what?”

Simon said, “We will not be here when that happens.”

“But they’ll do it. And what will happen when they do?”

Simon had no answer for that nor had Ezra Gurney. And Curt spoke again, his voice heavy with foreboding.

“I have sometimes thought that life, human life, intelligent life, is merely a deadly agent by which a stellar system achieves its own doom in a cosmic cycle far vaster and stranger than anyone has dreamed. For see—stars and planets are born from primal nothingness and they cool and the cooling worlds spawn life and life grows to ever higher levels of intelligence and power until…”

There was an ironical twist to Curt’s lips as he paused and then went on “…until the life of that world becomes intelligent enough to tap the energies of the cosmos! When that happens is it inevitable that fallible mortals should use those energies so disastrously that they finally destroy their own worlds and stars? Are life and intelligence merely a lethal seed planted in each universe, a seed that must inevitably destroy that universe?”

Simon said slowly, “That is a terrible thought, Curtis. But I deny its inevitability. Long ago the Watchers found the Birthplace, yet they did not try to use its powers.”

“We are not like the Watchers, we men,” Curt said bitterly. “You saw what it did to Garrand and to me.”

“I know,” said Simon. “But perhaps men will be as wise as the Watchers were by the time they find the Birthplace. Perhaps they too will then be powerful enough to renounce power. We can only hope.”

CORRIDORS OF THE STARS

If the shadow trailing him was danger, Vance Evers wanted to know it now. He stood, the hand in his pocket clutching the sweaty hilt of his gun, and peered back along the street.

It was night, but the unpaved street was not dark. There was no artificial illumination, for Valloa was too backward and barbaric a world for that. But the jungles of that world are rich in crystalline outcrops, and the squat and oddly-architectured houses and shops and taverns were all built of shimmering crystal blocks, a fairy-like glass town flashing back the radiance of the River of Stars in the sky.

Evers felt desperately uncertain. There were many Valloan men and women in the street back there, going about their own affairs. Yet he could not shake off the conviction that one of them was following him. He felt suddenly too tired and numb to cope with another danger now—too crushed down by the weight of the past weeks, by the weight of the most perilous secret in the galaxy.

“Too far,” thought Evers. “The dark between the galaxies, the dark that universes drown in, and oh God, to go all that way and come back to this—”

A chime of intolerable sweetness sounded across the shimmering town. The men of Valloa make many things of crystal, and the music of their bells is famous. But the rising, tinkling chorus of carillons only clawed at Evers’ taut nerves.

He stood, backed against a glassy wall, his dishevelled blond hair and weary, copper-tanned face making him a stand-out among the white-skinned, flame-haired Valloans. He looked back for minutes, while the bells talked in sweet and complex chimings above his head.

Nothing. Yet he was still sure that someone had followed him almost from the time he had come into the town.

He had to go on. There was nothing else he could do. Out in their ship, which they had landed with such secrecy in the jungle, his two comrades were waiting—Straw hurt, and Lindeman near a physical breakdown. And he, Evers, was their one hope now.

He went on abruptly, down the dusty street between the fairy crystal houses, with the singing of the bells all about him and the great belt of light lying like a sword across the black sky. Valloa was a fringe world, on the very rim of the galaxy, and because of that its people forever saw the galaxy edge-on, and called it the River of Stars. And also because it was a fringe world, it had only lately been touched by galactic civilization, and its hunters and thieves and crystal-miners had not much altered their ancient ways. Only a brassy neon glare of limited extent far ahead of Evers proclaimed the whereabouts of the Galactic Federation spaceport and offices and schools.

Evers went that way. He knew very well how risky it was, but there was a man he knew, a man named Garrow who was in the scientific mission that had been sent to this fringe world. If he could find Garrow without letting himself be caught, he might be able to pass on the explosive secret that they three had brought back from the shores of infinity.

He had had to argue that out with Lindeman before he left the Phoenix. Lindeman, his face drawn and yellow with fatigue so that he looked like a starved marmoset, had been against it.

“We know that the Galactic Control all over the galaxy will be on the lookout for us,” he had said. “And Schuyler’s agents.”

“Which means,” Evers had pointed out, “that we’ve got to get word up to the top brass at Earth, before we dare come out in the open. Garrow can do it, if I can contact him.”

And so he had left them in the ship in the jungle, and had trudged into the crystal town, and that big “if” was coming up fast now.

Again, Evers looked back uneasily. There were fewer people in the street now, as he approached the edge of the Valloan town and the limits of the Federation area. The only near one was a Valloan girl with hair like a torch, sauntering along with her hips wiggling in her skin-tight silken pants, pure provocation to all male eyes that might be watching. He could see no one else within a block, and he decided that he was starting at shadows.

He went beyond the last crystal house, and the glaring lighted buildings and starport of the compound rose up ahead of him. And over the crystal chiming, a harsh voice spoke suddenly behind him.

“Just a minute, mister—do I know you?”

It was an Earthman’s voice, and it had Galactic Control in every timbre of it. Evers swung around frantically, his fist balled.

The GC patrolman who had spoken from the deep doorway was too fast for him. He leaped back, and his energy-gun was in his hand as he finished the movement.

“Thought so,” he said with satisfaction. “Know every Earthman on Valloa. We’ll just have a look at your ident—”

His voice trailed off. He looked at Evers’ coppery, sweating face, illumined by the soft radiance of the River of Stars. And the patrolman suddenly stiffened.

“Just hold still, mister,” he said, his voice now low and even. “I wouldn’t move if I were you.”

The gun in his hand still covered Evers. The patrolman fished a little plastic gadget out of his pocket, with the other hand. He touched it, and a pinpoint of light shone from it. He stared into it, holding it up so that his view would also include Evers.

Evers knew very well what it was. A microfilm file with its own magnifier. Every GC patrolman carried one, and in it would be—

“Vance Evers!” The patrolman spoke the name with excitement that had a touch of awe in it. His gun came up a trifle higher. “So you’re one of the—” He broke off, then asked swiftly, “Where are the others?”

“The others?” said Evers. He felt a fierce rage and disappointment, and he knew that he was going to do a fool thing. He knew he would try to jump the patrolman and he knew he would fail.

“Eric Lindeman, John Straw,” rapped the patrolman. “Don’t try to dummy up. Evers. It’s all in the micro-bulletin with your pictures. Wanted for violation of Galactic Council directives and—”

Evers saw something move behind the man. It was a small hand, flat and edge-on, that flashed up and struck the back of the patrolman’s neck.

The GC man’s eyes suddenly widened and filmed. His mouth opened ludicrously, and he toppled swiftly forward, stunned.

Evers looked over his fallen form at the red-haired Valloan girl. She had come up behind the patrolman quite silently on her bare feet. He gawked at her, and her green eyes flashed at him impatiently.

“Do you want to be taken?” she demanded. Her hand grabbed his wrist. “All right, come on then.”

Evers was tugged along by her, around the corner and then in a half-run down a narrow alley between the close-clustered crystal houses, before he found his voice.

“Why the devil would you—”

She turned swiftly and faced him. “I hate police. Earthman. It’s reason enough. But if you’d rather I hadn’t interfered, all right!”

Evers, his brain beginning to work, thought that she was probably telling the truth about her hatred of police. Valloans were a race to whom the profession of thief was hereditary and respected.

Over the ringing sweetness of the chimes that filled the air cut the harsh shrillness of a siren whistle. Instantly, Evers was reminded of the desperate nature of his situation. He had failed to reach Garrow, and the attempt must be given over for now. He had to get back to the hidden ship and wait for another chance.

The Valloan girl seemed to read his face, for she turned and ran up a stairway that broke the crystal facade beside them. “This way!”

Evers ran after her, his boots slipping clumsily on the worn crystal steps. The girl ahead of him was not wiggling and bouncing now—her long legs moved like an antelope’s. Drugged with fatigue as he was, Evers was panting when they reached the roof.

Under the radiance of the cataract of suns that belted the sky, stretched a bewildering labyrinth of glittering roofs. The chiming of crystal bells was overpoweringly loud up here, coming from all directions but loudest from just ahead. Then he saw, on the next flat roof, the old Valloan man who squatted before his double row of queer conical crystal bells, tapping them with his little hammers, adding his own peculiar chiming rhythm to the ringing confusion that throbbed through the night. Mentally, Evers damned the Valloan fondness for their queer music that kept some of them on the roofs half the night.

“It’s all right, old Oriden never sees anything when he’s at his bells,” said the girl. “We’d better hurry.”

Evers thought they had better. More whistles had joined the first, back toward the Federation compound. He went across the roofs with the girl and didn’t ask where it was they went.

She ducked down a stairway in the middle of the roof, and he followed her down into a corridor that was almost totally dark. He felt glad to be out of the full impact of those chimes.

She opened a door, and he followed her through into a room equally dark. The door closed, and then Evers uttered a little exclamation, his eyes wincing. She had suddenly struck fire to a lamp, and he was momentarily dazzled. The soft little flame of the lamp was reflected brilliantly from the faceted crystal walls and floor and ceiling.

“How you people can stand all this crystal—,” he began, and then stopped. He looked at her suspiciously. “What’s this place? And who are you?”

“I’m Sharr,” she said. “And it’s my place. And you’re safe here—for a while.”

Evers looked around, and thought that it was a hell of a thing that his great dream, the great thing that he and Straw and Lindeman had done—should have led him only to this—a backwater fringe-planet and a poorly furnished room of crystal, and a Valloan girl with red hair and a sexy shape, who stood and inspected him with curious green eyes.

“You didn’t stick your neck out just because you hate police,” Evers told her. “Why did you?”

She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Earthmen are rich. Everyone knows that. One would pay well, I thought, to escape arrest.”

Evers ran his hand wearily over his face, and told her, “I’ve got a few credits on me, but not too many. But I’ll have more later, and—”

He stopped. Sharr wasn’t listening to him. She was looking past him, at the door behind him, and her green eyes were wide with fear, her mouth falling open.

Evers spun around instantly, his hand frantically scooping in his pocket for his weapon.

There was nobody at all behind him.

He heard a hand whizz through the air but he couldn’t turn back in time. A stunning blow hit the nerve-centers in his neck, and skyrockets went off gloriously inside his head.

He woke, how much later he did not know, with a filthy headache. It was some minutes before he became conscious of anything but the pounding of his head. When he did, it was to find his face against the smooth crystal floor.

Evers began to remember. Raging, he tried to scramble up, and discovered at once that his wrists were tightly bound behind him.

He rolled over. The girl Sharr sat in a low chair three feet away, one silk-clad leg crossed over the other, smiling down at him with happy eyes.

“Did you think I didn’t know who you are?” she said. “Why do you suppose I followed you, and risked snatching you away from that GC man? A fortune—and you walk right into my hands!”

“You’re out of your mind,” Evers said thickly. “I told you how much I have.”

Sharr laughed. “It’s not how much you have, but how much you’ll bring. You’re Vance Evers. One of the men who went to Andromeda Galaxy.”

CHAPTER II

The crystal chimes of Valloa whispered down into the room from above, their throbbing tinkling rising and falling in the silence.

Evers lay and looked up at the girl, and then he laughed mirthlessly. “Do you have any idea how far away Andromeda Galaxy is?”

“Very far, they say,” Sharr answered. “They told exactly how far, in the news.” She added. “We do get the news bulletins now, you know, since the Federation decided to civilize us.”

Evers said nothing. This red-haired piece was intelligent, and not to be bluffed, and he was in trouble right up to his neck.

“The bulletins told,” Sharr continued sweetly, “about a man named Eric Lindeman who was a Federation scientist, an astronautical engineer-designer, they called him. And how he wanted to make a starship go faster and farther than ever before.”

Yes, Evers thought heavily. Lindeman’s big dream. It had brought them all to this, all three of them. And yet, even now, he could not regret the dream and their passion for it. It had been worth while.

Long ago, man had won the stars, by the invention of the overdrive that hurled ships in a shortcut through hyper-space, thousands of times as fast as light. Out through the galaxy had spread the ships, the commerce and civilization of the Federation, to thousands of suns and worlds.

But beyond the shores of our galaxy, out across the vast ocean of outer space, glimmered other great continents of stars, other galaxies. Could a ship cross that gulf, could man win the galaxies too, if the overdrive were stepped up so that an even tighter dimensional shortcut attained speeds tens of thousands of times greater?

Lindeman was sure it could be done. It had, he pointed out, always been theoretically possible, but nobody had tried it yet. He would try it. And he had infected his assistants—Evers and Straw—with his own enthusiasm. They had eagerly laid their plans for the building of the Lindeman drive.

And then, from the chief of their Bureau, had come the peremptory order to discontinue the research as “impractical and unnecessary at the present time.” All appeals and arguments had been flatly rejected.

Disappointed and angry, Lindeman had quit the Bureau—and had taken Evers and Straw with him. They would build the drive. If not for the Federation, then for themselves. Lindeman had a few past patents that had brought him credits. He used them to buy a four-man express cruiser, and they three had built the Lindeman drive into it. Man was going to step out into inter-galactic space.

But he wasn’t, they soon learned. From Galactic Control, the branch that governed all space travel, came a formal directive that was backed by a decision of the Council itself. No experimental voyages outside the galaxy were permitted, now or in the near future.

“There are thousands of fringe planets in our own galaxy that need development,” said the directive. “There is work for many generations along our own starways. To start a star-rush to another galaxy could fatally cripple the orderly development of our own. Permission denied.”

Lindeman had had enough. His ship had the drive in it and was ready to go. He had cursed the Council, GC and all Bureaus, he had explained to Straw and Evers the penalties they would face if they violated an official directive, and then the three of them had taken off, had plunged out of the galaxy and hit for Andromeda.

And this, Evers thought bitterly, was their homecoming from that voyage. Straw was hurt, and Lindeman was hiding with him in the ship in the jungle, and he lay here trussed up like a pig with a Valloan wench gloating over him.

The girl was saying, “You made quite a stir, you know. Most people thought you’d die out there. But in case you ever did come back, GC had all kinds of notices out about you.”

Evers said sourly, “All right, you’ve been clever. You spotted me and got me away from the GC man, and have me all to yourself. But what makes you think I’m worth a fortune to you?”

“To Schuyler Metals,” said Sharr casually, “fifty thousand credits is just small change.”

Evers’ worst fears were realized. It would have been bad enough to be picked up by Galactic Control. But the real danger, ever since they came back from Andromeda, was Schuyler.

Peter Schuyler. The man who owned, lock, stock and barrel, the biggest metals corporation in the galaxy. From the first moment that he and Lindeman and Straw had made their appalling discovery at Andromeda, they had known that when they got back their lives would be worth just nothing if Schuyler got hold of them.

He said, “Then Schuyler Metals has been offering rewards for us?”

Sharr nodded her red head. “Of course. They sent agents to every fringe world where you’d be likely to land, secretly passing out pictures of you with their reward-offers.” She laughed. “Half the people on Valloa would have recognized you, if I hadn’t seen you first.”

“It won’t work,” Evers said harshly. “You can’t possibly get me out of here and deliver me to them, without being seen by GC men.”

“I don’t have to,” she assured him. “While you were unconscious, I sent them a message. They’ll be along for you—with the money.”

The certainty of defeat, the blasting of his last hopes, snapped Evers’ temper. “Why, you thieving little tramp—”

He went on, telling her what he thought of her, using simple words of one syllable and great force.

Sharr flushed with anger and raised her hand to slice down at him in the Valloan nerve-stunning blow. Then she stopped, and shrugged.

“Go ahead.” she said. “I suppose I’d feel the same way, in your place.”

She went back and sat down and continued to swing one leg over the other, watching him with cool green eyes.

Evers’ brain was a confusion of raging, desperate thoughts. He knew what would happen to him—to all of them—if Schuyler got hold of them. The course Schuyler would follow was crystal clear. Three men had come back from Andromeda galaxy, and they must die for having gone there.

He wished now they’d simply landed and surrendered to Galactic Control in the first place, and told their story. But that was the trouble—they might never have been given a chance to tell that story, from a GC cell or anywhere else.

Schuyler Metals had the power to reach into many places. That it swung heavy weight inside the Galactic Bureaus was now evident. The directive that had forbade them to build or try out an inter-galactic ship—he was sure now that that had been inspired by Schuyler. And if Schuyler had that kind of influence, he could arrange to have them silenced fast if they surrendered. Their one chance had been to get their information secretly up to the Council through a contact, first. And the chance had failed, thanks to an alert GC patrolman and this damn girl.

A thought occurred to Evers’ desperately groping mind. He didn’t think it was worth much, but it was the only card he had left.

He looked up at Sharr and asked, “Why do you think Schuyler Metals is willing to pay so much for us?”

She shrugged her bare, shapely shoulders lightly. “How would I know? All I care is that they pay well. I suppose they want the secret of your ship?”

Evers shook his head. “Lindeman didn’t keep his drive a secret. It was formally patented. Besides, what good is it when GC forbids extra-galactic flight?”

Her green eyes became interested and intent. “I hadn’t thought of that. Why do they want you so badly, then?”

“Because of something we found at Andromeda,” he said.

“Something that Schuyler Metals wants?”

“No,” he said. “Not that at all. Something we found there that they don’t want anyone to know about.”

Her brows drew together. “I don’t understand that. What did you find there?”

Evers looked up at her somberly. The question took him back to that unforgettable moment, when their little ship had come out of overdrive, the long nightmare traverse through hyper-space ended, and they three had looked out wild and eager at the vast burning cloud of Andromeda’s alien suns, blazing across the whole firmament.

“What will we find here?” Straw had cried. “What?”

And remembering that moment of eager anticipation, and the ironic and appalling sequel to it, Evers’ voice was heavy as he answered,

“We found out something there. Something so dangerous that we’re going to be killed by Schuyler just because we know it.”

Sharr stared at him, and then suddenly got to her feet. “Oh, no,” she said with sudden passion. “You’re not going to appeal to my sympathies. I don’t have any—for Earthmen.”

HER GREEN EYES blazed. “So I am a thief, and the daughter of thieves. I’m also a Valloan. And what have Earthmen brought Valloa but new ways that we do not want, and teaching that is given with contempt!”

“So you don’t like Earthmen,” Evers said. “You like your own skin, don’t you? And you’re in danger, as well as I.”

She stared at him unbelievingly. He went on rapidly, making his pitch for all it was worth.

“There’s something going on at Andromeda that Schuyler can’t allow to be known. He’ll put us out of the way, to silence us. And just in case, he’ll also put out of the way anyone we could have told that secret to, since we returned. That means you, Sharr.”

She came over and looked down at him with narrowed eyes. “You’re clever. Earthman. But you can’t trick me.”

“Can’t I?” he said. “Think it over, Sharr. If Schuyler dares to grab three men right out of the hands of GC to shut them up, do you think he’ll take any risks that a Valloan baggage might be able to talk?”

She thought it over, walking back and forth in the crystal room. She turned and shot a sudden look at him.

“I still don’t believe it. But Earthmen are capable of anything. I’m turning you over for the money—but I’ll take no chances.”

She went to a little wooden cupboard and took out of it an energy-gun—Evers’ own gun. She stood with it in her hand, looking down doubtfully at herself.

The skin-tight silken white pants and the band she wore across her breasts were a fine costume for showing off her bold, leggy beauty. But they had their drawbacks.

“I don’t see where you’re going to hide the gun,” he gibed.

Sharr ignored him. She went back to the chair she had been sitting in, and slipped the gun under the straw cushion there.

She suddenly straightened, and Evers rolled half over and listened intently. From outside, faint above the last tinkling of the crystal chimes, came a rushing scream of sirens.

Hope flared for a moment in Evers. Better the GC patrols than what was facing him! But the sirens got even fainter, and then died away, and there was only the dying echoes of the Valloan bells.

Sharr, at a little window peering, said with satisfaction, “They went across town. They’re on a wrong trail.”

“Yes,” said a man’s flat voice from behind them. “We know. We set up the decoy to get them out of this district.”

Sharr flung around to face the door, and Evers rolled over fast. He knew when he saw the two men that his pitch had failed, that it was too late now for tricks.

They were Earthmen, and they were not young. They had tough-guy written all over them in a quiet, unobtrusive way. The stocky one with the flat, brick-like face kept his hands in his pockets, and the tall, dark smiling one came forward and looked down at Evers.

“It’s him,” he said. “Evers. One of them.”

The stocky man came forward too. He said to Evers, “Where are Lindeman and Straw?”

Evers shrugged. “At Andromeda. I came back alone.”

The tall man smilingly drew back his foot for a kick, but Flat-face shook his head. “Not that way. Makes no difference anyway. They’re out in the jungle somewhere, and we can soon find them. We’d better get going.”

Sharr came forward and demanded, “What about my fifty thousand credits?”

“You’ll get it,” said Flat-face.

“I want it now!”

“Listen,” said Flat-face patiently, “we do things in a certain way. The money will be paid when we have all three men. You’re to come along with us, and the boss will give you your money then.”

The tall smiler was hauling Evers to his feet. Evers shot Sharr a glance that had a harsh meaning in it. The Valloan girl’s face became tight and quiet, and she went and sat down in the chair and said,

“I found your man for you and I’m not going anywhere till I get paid.”

“Oh, yes, you are,” said Flat-face. He started toward her. “Now listen—”

Her hand slipped down beside the cushion. Evers suddenly uttered a loud yell. It startled Flat-face and he turned irritably.

“Will you shut him up?” he snapped to his comrade. “He can’t be heard in here, but once we get outside—”

The diversion of Evers’ yell had given Sharr her chance, as he had intended. She came up out of the chair like a hunting leopard, with the gun in her hand.

“I am not going anywhere and neither are you till I get my credits,” she said to Flat-face as he turned back toward her.

Flat-face hesitated, for the Valloan girl looked dangerous now.

But the tall man holding Evers let go of him and grabbed inside his jacket.

Evers’ hands were bound behind him but there was one thing he could do. He lowered his head and butted the tall man in the stomach. The tall man cried out in pain and staggered away, bumping into Flat-face. Flat-face instantly seized the opportunity to snatch for his own gun.

Evers, trying to keep his balance, yelled, “Shoot!”

Sharr did so. The nasty little beam from her gun, notched to stunner strength, hit Flat-face and his pal as they did a sort of clumsy staggering waltz together. They both dropped like sacks.

Evers went over to the girl, who was looking blankly down at the two senseless men. He said grimly,

“You might as well cut me loose. You’re in as much trouble now as I am.”

CHAPTER III

Sharr stared at him, suddenly no longer a self-assured adventuress, but a worried girl.

“You were right,” she said. “They would have made me go with them. They wouldn’t have paid me.”

“The money means nothing to Schuyler,” Evers said. “But there’s a secret that means a great deal to him, and you might have learned it. I think if he catches you you’ll be as dead as I’ll be if he catches me.”

He added, “You know you can’t sell me out now.”

Sharr made no move. She asked, “Where will you go if I release you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m not safe here now. There’ll be others come to see what happened to these two. They’ll search everywhere. I’ve got to have some place to go.”

Evers gave her a sour smile. “You think fast, don’t you? Chase with the hounds or run with the hare. All right, I see your point. You free me and I’ll promise to take you with me.”

“Where?”

“To the Phoenix, our ship. It’s out in the jungle and my friends are waiting there. We’ll have to get away from Valloa fast and try some other world.”

Sharr went to the cupboard and came back with a crystal knife and slashed the hide thongs around his wrists. Evers rubbed his wrists painfully.

His heart sank at the thought of going back to Lindeman and Straw and reporting his failure.

But there was nothing else for it. They’d be lucky if they got away from Valloa, now. And the news that they’d returned from outer space would set a hue and cry for them wherever they went.

He took the gun out of the senseless Flat-face’s pocket, stuck it in his own pocket, and went out with the girl hurrying silently after him.

The street was darker now, the River of Stars low in the black sky. And it seemed very silent, for now the nightly calling of the bells had ceased.

As he stood in the narrow, empty street between the glimmering crystal houses, trying to figure the direction, Evers heard the silence suddenly broken. A far-off keening and wailing came sweeping through the town toward him.

“That tears it!” he said. “The GC men—they found out it was a false lead, and are back to comb the town some more!”

He felt desperate. Long before they could get to the edge of town, to the jungle, the fast cars would have overtaken them. In these empty streets, he and Sharr would be spotted instantly.

But what if the streets were crowded? Evers had an idea which he would have rejected in a less desperate situation. He snatched the gun back out of his pocket.

“You people think a lot of those bells, I’ve heard?” he said.

Sharr flashed him a worried, wondering look. “Yes—the bells go from father to son, for generations. But why—”

He didn’t answer. On a roof a little back along the street shimmered a great row of the conical crystal bells, deserted now that the night-music time was over. Evers notched his gun to the highest power and fired up at the row of bells.

Sharr uttered a gasp of horror and clutched at his arm. “No, do not—”

Her voice was instantly drowned in the terrific, ringing crash as his beam shattered the bells. Agonizing to the ears, like the falling of millions of crystal goblets on a stone floor, the big chimes seemed to utter a ringing, throbbing death-cry across the dark town.

Almost at once, even before the ringing dissonances had ebbed away, voices cried out and people began to run into the streets. Yells of rage came from the next block, Valloan voices rising in a tumult, all the crystal houses disgorging their occupants to mill in the streets and point up at the shattered bells.

Evers already had Sharr by the wrist and was pulling her along with him, down the dark street away from the gathering uproar.

“That’ll keep the GC men busy for a little while,” he said. “Hurry!”

“It was sacrilege!” she cried. “The bells are older than your Earth—”

“I’ll pay for them sometime if I live long enough—which is doubtful,” he grunted. “Come on.”

They ran on through the dark streets with the River of Stars in their faces, a magnificent cataract of light belting the sky just above the dark jungle.

When Evers hit the fields at the edge of town he skirted along them, trying to find the road of the crystal-miners by which he had entered the Valloan town. The uproar was still going on behind them, though dimmed by distance. He guessed that GC was having its hands full with the outraged Valloans.

He found the road—hardly more than a wide trail. The dark jungle took them in.

He was near exhaustion. He had had too much, for too long a time, and the last few hours had about used him up. He slowed to a walk, and the Valloan girl slowed down too.

Evers, his breath pumping harshly, uttered a little laugh that had no mirth in it.

“And we thought when we started, that when we came back we’d get a heroes’ welcome. Even though we broke regulations, we thought we’d be heroes—the men who went to Andromeda!”

It seemed now to him such a long and weary time ago, that takeoff into the outer gulf. They had felt like Columbus, not dreaming of the appalling knowledge that was waiting for them out there across the abyss, the knowledge that had doomed them to a fateful homecoming…

The dark jungle got darker as the blazing River of Stars sank lower toward the horizon. The smells and sounds of this Valloan forest were alien to Evers, but he was too numb with fatigue to be sensitive to them now. He stumbled a little as he went along the trail, and he would have passed the broken limb he’d left to mark his turn-off, if Sharr had not caught his arm.

“Is this it?”

“Yes, this is it. The Phoenix is this way.”

He forced his way through the brush, reeds smashing under his feet, with Sharr behind him. No need to worry about leaving a trail now!

He came into the little clearing, and there loomed the dark bulk of the Phoenix. It seemed a small ship, to have gone so far. It seemed a tired ship, its flanks crusted with the dust of undreamably far worlds.

A lethal beam flashed from the ship, ripping and scorching the brush beside them.

“Eric, for God’s sake, it’s me!” yelled Evers.

The beam cut off, and he heard an exclamation. He went forward, and in the square of darkness that was the airlock door of the ship he saw the darker blob that was Lindeman.

Lindeman held a gun and also, in his other hand, a torch. He let it shine briefly, and beyond its dazzle Evers saw his scrawny little form leaning tensely forward, peering.

“I wasn’t expecting two to come back,” Lindeman said hastily. “I—who’s the girl? Did you contact Garrow?”

“No, I didn’t,” Evers said bitterly. “Schuyler’s agents nearly had me, and they and GC are hunting me, and we’d better get off Valloa quick before they find us.”

He pushed the stammering, protesting Lindeman ahead of him into the ship, slamming shut the airlock door. Inside Straw was waiting—a towering, dark young giant with an absurdly round, boyish face that gave no hint of the first-class brain behind it. His upper left arm was bandaged and his face was still a little pale, but that did not prevent him from uttering a low whistle of appreciation when he saw Sharr.

“I can see you’re feeling better,” said Evers.

“Oh, sure, I’m all right,” said Straw. “Who is she?”

“She’s the reason I failed,” Evers said. “GC has every world alerted for us, and this Valloan girl spotted me and tried to sell me to Schuyler.”

Lindeman peered at her in myopic anger, his ruff of thin brown hair making him look more than ever like an enraged marmoset.

“If so, why the devil did you bring her here?”

“Had to, to get here myself,” Evers told him. “Schuyler’s men are after her too, now. Will you stop babbling? We’ve got to clear out of here fast.”

He pushed forward into the control-room of the little ship, a crowded iron coop, and took the pilot-chair.

“But where can we go?” asked Lindeman, on a note of desperation.

“Anywhere that isn’t Valloa will do, for a starter,” Evers said. “Look, will you strap Sharr into a chair? Have you ever been in a starship before?”

He addressed the latter question to the Valloan girl, as Lindeman strapped her into a recoil-chair. Her green eyes were very wide as she looked at him.

“No,” she said.

“Good,” he grunted. “You’ll catch hell when you feel overdrive for the first time. It’ll pay you back for that chop on the neck.”

She called him what sounded like the Valloan equivalent of a nasty name, but he was too busy with the controls to pay any heed. He had no time to waste. He set up an elementary takeoff pattern, fed it into the computers, punched the generator switch, and blasted the Phoenix up out of the jungle in a roaring rush.

He wondered how much more the old ship could take, how much more any of them could take. It wasn’t fair to ask a ship or a man to cross the ocean that lies between the galaxies, and come back again, and still have to go on and on.

Valloa fell away and Evers shifted fast into overdrive. The lights turned blue and the Phoenix shivered and fell a billion miles into nothingness, falling right out of the continuum into hyper-space. The starry blackness outside the windows became an evilly blurred and streaked grayness.

He set a tentative course along the rim of the galaxy, and then sagged in the chair. Lindeman came and looked at him, and said,

“Now where? The GC will have ships out after us fast, and we’re bound to be spotted soon.”

“I know,” said Evers.

“Then where?”

There was a little silence, except for the eery hum of the drive, and in the silence the girl Sharr sat looking from one to another of them, her face white and strained and wondering.

“We’ve tried to sneak back into the galaxy and get our story to the Council secretly,” said Evers. “It didn’t work, and it won’t work, now. GC won’t believe our story, and while we’re trying to prove it to them. Schuyler’s men will get to us and shut us up for good.” Straw said, “We could call GC on the communic and tell them our story, before we surrender to them.”

Evers said wearily, “We’ve been over that before. The minute we use the communic we tell Schuyler’s outfit where we are, and they’ll be right onto us.”

Lindeman pounded on the control-board in a kind of anguish. “Then what are we going to do?”

Evers had been thinking. Through his fog of exhaustion, a slow, sullen anger had been growing in him. He was tired of being hunted.

He said, “We’ve got to prove what Schuyler’s doing, before we surrender to GC. Then they’ll have to believe us.”

He looked at the three-dimensional representation of this sector of the galaxy in the “tank.” He said, “The planet Arkar, where Schuyler has his home, isn’t too far from here along the Rim.”

Lindeman’s eyes became round and horrified. “Go to Arkar? It’d be walking right into Schuyler’s hands. He owns that planet.”

Evers nodded. “And it’s the one place where he won’t be expecting us to go.”

“And when we get there?”

Evers said, “Schuyler must be running his secret operation from Arkar. The secret would be bound to get out if he used any of his company’s ordinary bases. Only on that private world of his could he maintain secrecy. If we go there, we can maybe blast his operation wide open for the whole galaxy to see.”

“How can we? Three men, against Schuyler’s whole bunch there—”

Evers shrugged. “You said yourself that GC cruisers will soon spot us, and be after us. All right. We’ll lead them right to Arkar, and show them what’s going on there.”

Lindeman said, “If we’re still living when they get there. Schuyler would put us away fast before GC ever arrives, if we’re caught.”

“I know,” said Evers. “That’s the chance we have to take.”

“I say, take it,” said Straw. “To the devil with weaselling around like this.”

Lindeman looked sick with worry. “It’s crazy. But we’ve got to prove to the galaxy somehow what we found at Andromeda.”

Evers got up out of the pilot chair and stood, swaying a little on his feet.

“Keep her headed for Arkar, then. GC will spot us soon enough. I’ve got to get some sleep or I’m through.”

He started back through the control-room, as Lindeman took the pilot-chair. Sharr had got out of her chair too, and he looked at her and shook his head.

“You’d have been safer back on Valloa,” he told her. “But you would come.”

“I’m not afraid,” she flashed. And then she asked, “What did you find out there at Andromeda galaxy?”

“We found the one thing we didn’t expect,” said Evers. “We found that we weren’t the first Earthmen to reach Andromeda, after all.”

She stared. “Not the first? But who was there before you?”

He said, “Schuyler and his men were there before us!”

He stumbled on back toward the cabin.

CHAPTER IV

Evers dreamed as the ship fled on, and in his sleep a nightmare memory and vision rose before him.

For again he seemed to be in Andromeda galaxy, their little ship forging through mighty halls and corridors of suns, on and on through that solemn vastness of space and fire and strangeness. And then they were landing upon a world, in a city. Under the orange sun it flashed and glittered, an unearthly metropolis of plastic and silvery metal, laced with slender shining cables upon which swiftly came and went forms that were not human.

Destruction had been in that city. Great scorched slashes had been torn in the alien buildings, and many of the shining cables hung broken and useless, and there was a whispering susurration in the air, a sound of grief.

A face rose before Evers, white and hairless and strange, with two enormous dark and shining eyes that were bent upon him in an accusing gaze. From the little mouth came speech, and Evers heard the accusation and he cried out a denial.

“No, no! We did not slay the K’harn!”

He woke on his own yell, and he was sweating in his bunk in the little cabin of the Phoenix, and Sharr was bending over him, her green eyes wide and startled.

She said, “I came—you were yelling—”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said. He unfastened his straps and sat on the edge of his bunk, still shaking.

He looked forward toward the control-room. He could see Lindeman asleep in one chair, his monkey-like head lolling, and Straw was in the pilot-chair. They were still in overdrive.

The red-haired Valloan girl was looking down at him puzzledly, unconsciously rubbing her left ankle with her bare right foot. It was a ridiculously childish gesture for one who, in that costume, was obviously not at all a child.

“Who are the K’harn?” she asked.

Evers looked at her. “I must really have been yelling.” He said, broodingly, “They’re far away. They live on the outer worlds of Andromeda galaxy.”

Sharr stared at him with a touch of awe in her eyes. “Then there are people there?”

Evers looked up at her. “I’m not sure you’d call them people. They’re not human, hardly even humanoid—yet they’re what the human seed might have developed into in another universe. Four-limbed, strange, but—yes, they’re people. Peaceful, intelligent people, who never deserved what Schuyler brought them.”

She shook her red head wonderingly. “I still can’t believe—how could Schuyler and his men get to that other galaxy before you, and no one ever suspect? How long has he been going there?”

Evers thought. “As near as we can figure it out, Schuyler’s task-forces have been secretly visiting Andromeda galaxy for two years. He has a lot of scientific brains in his pay. Some of them must have figured out how to speed up the overdrive, just as Lindeman did—it was always theoretically possible. With his money and facilities, it’d be quite easy for Schuyler to fit ships with the new drive and send them to Andromeda in total secrecy. To maintain that secrecy, they’ve been waiting to kill us when we got back.”

“But why? What are they doing there?”

“They’re stealing, that’s what they’re doing,” Evers said grimly. “The K’harn, the inhabitants of the Andromeda fringe worlds, are a pretty advanced folk scientifically. Their cities are rich in metals that are rare or unknown here, scientific devices developed along lines unthought of by us, whole treasures of alien knowledge. But, as I said, the K’harn are a peaceful, cooperative folk. War and weapons they don’t know about. It’s been easy for Schuyler’s ships, equipped with heavy weapons, to systematically loot the K’harn cities.”

Sharr’s eyes flashed. “Earthmen—they’re all the same. Why don’t they stay on their own world!”

“I’m an Earthman,” Evers reminded her. “So are my friends. We’re not helping Schuyler, we’re trying to stop what he’s doing.”

He added somberly, “But I don’t blame you. The K’harn thought the same thing when we landed first on one of their worlds. Schuyler’s task-force had been there months before. They thought we were more of the same. They tried to kill us—they did wound Straw—before we made them understand we knew nothing about it.

“We stayed there. The K’harn taught us their language. They were desperately anxious to find out where we came from and where Schuyler’s ships came from, anxious to know if there would be any more marauders from the sky.”

Evers laughed, a jarring sound.

“And when in turn we learned from them what had happened, we couldn’t believe it at first. We’d been so sure we were the first Earthmen to reach Andromeda.

And we found that others had been there for a long time, looting. We went to other K’harn worlds, saw what Schuyler’s men had done. It was one of their wrecked, discarded ships that told us it was Schuyler’s men. We saw enough destruction, enough dead K’harn, to do us. We headed back home, to tell the whole galaxy what they were doing out there. But we knew we’d never get a chance to tell much unless we landed on a world like Valloa and got word secretly to the Council.”

“And I trapped and betrayed you!” cried Sharr. She said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’d help you stop the evil they’re doing, if I could.”

Evers rose to his feet. “The only way to stop it is to drag it out for everyone to see. That’s why we’re going to Arkar.”

HE WENT FORWARD to the control-room, Sharr trailing after him. They were still in overdrive and the windows still showed only a formless grayness streaked with crazy squiggles of light. In the tank-chart, the blip that was the Phoenix was crawling through a swarm of light-flecks that were suns. Beyond this small Rim cluster was an isolated minor sun with one planet—Arkar.

Few men in the history of the galaxy had ever owned a planet. Schuyler did, legally. He had applied for a perpetual lease on Arkar. It was then an arid, lifeless globe, a desert of dust, with only crumbling stone ruins of infinite age to show that men had once lived there before their world dried and died. There was no one else who wanted the deathly place, and the lease was granted. Promptly some of the Schuyler millions had been poured into it, setting up great electronic water-synthesizers, bringing in vegetation, levelling a spaceport and building the castle that was Schuyler’s home. Arkar, thus Earth-conditioned, had become a flowering, livable world—and it was Schuyler’s world.

Straw looked up at him with a mirthless smile on his round face. “Your little plan is working just fine, Vance. See back there?”

Evers looked at the right-hand edge of the tank. Three blips, widely separated from each other, were crawling through the wilderness of suns. Their courses converged toward the Phoenix.

“GC’s big radar station on Tinno must have picked us up, right away.” said Straw. “We can’t use the inter-galactic drive in here. They’ll soon catch up to us.”

Evers calculated mentally. “It’s cutting things’close, but we should reach Arkar at least twelve hours before them. I’ll take over.”

Straw got up, stretching his towering young figure and tenderly feeling his bandaged arm, as Evers took the pilot-chair.

Lindeman woke up, and looked at them with eyes still red-rimmed from fatigue and sleep. He studied the tank.

Then he shook his head. “We’ll have to move fast on Arkar. And how can we, without Schuyler’s toughs grabbing us the first move we make?”

“Only one thing to do,” Evers said. “Arkar’s a forested world now—remember those stories of the giant vegetation Schuyler grew there? Land the Phoenix in the forest, sneak in to his spaceport there, find his galactic-drive ships and his loot from Andromeda, and then show them to the GC men when they arrive there looking for us.”

Lindeman said gloomily, “But Schuyler’s radar-station will spot us when we come in.”

“Sure they will. And they’ll track where we land, and will come looking for our ship. But while they’re finding it, we will be on foot making for their spaceport.”

“Harebrained, but the only thing we can try,” muttered Lindeman. He glanced at Sharr, standing beside the pilot-chair. “What about that Valloan wench? She’ll give the show away first chance she gets.”

“I will not!” said Sharr. “I did not know the thing that Schuyler is doing, before!”

“Oh, sure, now you’re noble-minded and everything,” said Lindeman. “My eye!”

Evers interrupted, before Sharr could retort to that. “She’ll be all right. If nothing else, she knows by now that she’s in as much danger from Schuyler as we are.”

Straw, grinning, took the furious girl by the arm. “Forget them, honey. Come on back and help me break out some ration-capsules.”

They went aft, but within a few minutes Straw returned, ruefully rubbing his cheek. “Some right arm that baby’s got!”

Evers told him, “You’re lucky you haven’t a broken neck. The Valloans have a kind of judo that’s murder, and she knows it. Better let her alone.”

They took the ration capsules and the Phoenix droned on through the formless grayness of hyper-space. And in the great chart in the tank, the three blips that were GC cruisers crept on their trail.

Evers watched the chart, and thought. He thought their chances were no better than Lindeman’s estimate. He thought that he might just have been too clever entirely in thrusting themselves right into the stronghold of their enemy. But what else could they do? A black and evil work was going on there away on the fringes of Andromeda galaxy. It would go on for years if it wasn’t exposed. It was up to them to expose it, in any way, at any risk.

Evers’ face hardened and he told himself, “If we can’t do it any other way, I’ll kill Schuyler.”

He looked again and again at the tank as the hours went by. Arkar was drawing closer, and the three GC cruisers were still far back.

Lindeman and Straw hung over his chair now, studying the chart anxiously. Sharr watched the light-streaked evil grayness outside the windows with a horrified fascination. Time went by.

“We’re close enough to switch out of overdrive,” said Lindeman, finally.

Evers shook his head. “Not yet. I want to get in as close as we can, first.”

“It’s dangerous to come out of overdrive too near a planet!”

Evers did not turn but he heard Straw answer Lindeman. “Dangerous? Do you think we’re good insurance risks, no matter how we do this?”

Now very fast, in the chart, the dot that was the sun of Arkar and the smaller dot that was the planet closed toward the blip of the Phoenix.

“Strap in,” said Evers, still without turning.

He waited, his hands sweating on the switches. He hoped their instruments had not gone erratic after all they had been through. If they were only a shade off, three men and a girl would go to glory in a spectacular way.

He switched out of overdrive.

The brilliant glare of sunlight hammered through the windows, replacing the evil grayness, and the throb of the generators rose to a shriek beyond hearing, and the atoms of Evers’ body shivered again from nauseating shock as they fell back through dimensions.

And the Phoenix was in normal space, black space with the dull-red sun blazing big ahead of them, and the greenish globe of Arkar rolling toward them on its orbit, looking up big…

“That tears it!” yelled Straw suddenly. “Look down there!”

Two small hornets of metal, catching the ruddy light on their sides, had swung up out of the shadow of the planet and were curving up toward them.

“I knew Schuyler’s radar here would spot us!” Lindeman cried.

Evers ignored that, and hit the blast-switches hard. The Phoenix jumped at full power, heading toward the northern hemisphere of the half-shadowed planet as the two little spacers came up from under it.

“We’ve got a chance yet,” he said rapidly. “Give me the coordinates of the spaceport here, quick!”

Lindeman punched buttons, and as the microfile of standard interstellar navigational data flashed the information, he read it off. As he heard it, Evers fed the information into the computer.

The landing-pattern he wanted sprang out before him as a graph of light on a small screen. He read it and then hit the blasts again, altering course, aiming to swing low around the northern pole of Arkar.

The planet spun under them, half in bright light, half in shadow. Their goal was on the shadowed half, and that was good if they could make it. He thought they could beat those two metal hornets in by a few seconds.

He thought wrong. Blinding flares exploded silently in space right around them. The instrument-panel went Click! and Sharr cried out and put her hand to her dazzled eyes.

Lindeman said, in a tone of wonder, “They’re firing energy-shells. No private ship in the galaxy is allowed to carry weapons that size.”

Evers said harshly, “A lot that would worry a man who’s robbing whole worlds. Their men on Valloa must have sent them word about us. Better hold on.”

He didn’t look to see if they obeyed. There would be another burst of energy-shells in a moment, and he had plenty to do.

He hit the blast-buttons like a man gone insane, sending the Phoenix down in a corkscrew, crazy course toward the shadowed forests on the night side of Arkar. Evers was an astronautical engineer and a good pilot. But the men in those metal hornets were not just good, they were expert. They hung right after him and they fired again.

Evers, leveling out and suddenly changing course, saw blinding light and heard the crash of severed metal and smelled super-hot air.

“Grazed our tail!” Straw yelled. “Set her down!”

It was that or nothing, for the Phoenix was falling out of control. Evers set her down, fast and hard. They crashed down through boughs and leaves and smacked solid ground, and then the wounded ship rolled over and over through the forest.

CHAPTER V

Strapped in their chairs, they went round and round with the rolling ship, feeling the impact each time it crashed over one of the smaller trees. Then it hit something entirely too big to crush, something that stopped it with an authoritative whack, and for a moment Evers saw stars.

He shook his head to clear it. Everything was quiet and still now. He hung in the chair-straps at a sixty-degree angle, the floor of the ship being now its upper wall.

“Everybody okay?” he asked. Their voices answered shakenly in the dark, one by one. “Wait till I get down and I’ll help you down, Straw,” he said.

They presently stood on the slippery curved wall that had become the floor. A big rent had been torn open in the hull aft, and a faint ray of starlight came through it to show them the splintered beams, the torn and crumpled walls, and each other’s white faces.

He saw a glimmer of wetness in Lindeman’s eyes as he stared woefully around. “She’ll never fly again,” said Lindeman.

Evers didn’t blame him for being near to tears. It was hard on a man to cherish a dream for half a lifetime, and then have it end like this. To dream of being the Columbus of a new galaxy, to put everything you had into it, to dare all risks—and then to find you were not and never would be the first discoverer, and to come back and end your voyaging like this…

“The devil with that now,” said Evers, purposefully harsh. “We won’t go anywhere again either, unless we get out of here fast.”

As though to emphasize his words, there came from somewhere overhead the muffled, ripping B-R-ROOM—BOOM! of a ship going fast.

“They’re landing!” exclaimed Straw.

“No, not in this tangle of trees,” Evers said. “But they’ll keep buzzing the spot where we crashed, while they call Schuyler. We’ll have men here fast. Step on it!”

He shoved Lindeman and then Sharr and Straw out through the rent in the hull. He paused himself to snatch up a trio of energy-pistols, pawing for them in a buckled locker till he found them.

He squeezed out of the opening in the hull and dropped three feet to the ground, and stared around the warm, humid darkness.

Arkar had no moon and only a little starlight filtered down through the mighty branches overhead. For the Phoenix, in its rolling, had fetched up against a cluster of trunks like those of a mighty banyan, the immense branches and foliage a hundred feet over their heads. The ship had broken its back against those massive trunks.

“Smells like lilacs, somehow,” murmured Straw, and Evers instantly recognized the hauntingly sweet fragrance in the air.

“That’s what it is,” said Lindeman, nodding toward the colossal tree.

“Lilacs? You’crazy? Why—” Lindeman said, “Schuyler planted Arkar with Earth-plants, that in this chemically different soil went into giantism. The telenews had a lot about it at the time. The big man had to have the biggest flowers—damn him.”

“Will you stop chattering and move!” Evers said frantically. He grabbed Sharr’s wrist and started with her away from the wrecked ship. Lindeman and Straw followed.

The roar of the unseen hornet-ship as it went over above the lofty branches quickened them. When they were out of the shade of the giant lilac. Evers swiftly studied the stars. He remembered their bearings before the crash, and he thought he knew the direction in which Schuyler’s private spaceport lay.

He passed out the guns he had grabbed up, to Sharr and Lindeman and Straw. The guns, he thought poignantly, that they had taken with them to guard against the dangers of Andromeda.

“We haven’t got much time,” he said. “Those pilots would call the minute we crashed—there’ll be men on their way here from Schuyler’s base right now.”

“But then if we go toward the base, we’ll run right into them!” Sharr objected, and Straw said, “She’s right, Vance.”

Evers said furiously, “Do you suppose I don’t know that? It’s why we’ve got to hurry if we’re to have any chance.”

HE PRESSED forward, leading the way. Almost at once they were in a thicket of ten-foot canes, growing so closely together that they sometimes had to squeeze between them. With a shock, Evers suddenly realized that the tall canes were in fact ordinary Earth grass. Everything here was Earth vegetation, gone into giantism. Arkar’s own native vegetation had long ago died for lack of water, and it had been Schuyler’s whim, when he had the planet seeded after giving it water, to bring all the seeds from Earth.

Evers searched the obscurity ahead for more trees. He didn’t think they had very much time. He did not know how far ahead Schuyler’s mansion and spaceport were, but it could not be very far.

A heavy perfume drifted to him on the moist air, from the right. He altered course in that direction. A grove of sixty-foot trees, stiff and angular with trunks thickly studded with foot-long spikes, loomed up before him.

Straw sniffed the air and whispered, “I’ll be damned, they’re roses.”

“We’re climbing this one,” Evers said rapidly. “If we’re lucky, they’ll go under us. You and Sharr first, Eric. I’ll help Straw get up.”

The climb should have been easy. The spikes were fairly close together and formed a good ladder all around the great trunk. Lindeman disappeared up in the darkness, and Sharr followed him up like a cat. But Straw had heavy going with one arm half-useless, and Evers had to climb beside him to steady him.

They reached a crotch, twenty feet from the ground. It was big enough to hold them if they squeezed together. Not daring now to speak, Evers made a gesture, and they crouched down.

He could feel Sharr warm beside him. She was not trembling, but the rapid pounding of her heart was right against him. He was afraid of her losing her nerve and patted her hand encouragingly. She made a small sound like a sniff of resentment.

The drowsing, heavy tide of perfume flowed down on them from above and he could glimpse the outline of the giant blooms up there, against the starry sky.

Sharr stiffened against him. Her ears had been quicker than his. It was moments later before he heard the sound of men coming.

Evers peered down. The men were not trying to be utterly silent, but neither were they making any unnecessary noise. They were strung in a line, ten feet apart, and advanced in the direction where the wreck lay, turning their porta-lights this way and that.

They moved fast, and went past the clump of giant rose-trees in a minute. Evers waited till their lights were out of sight, and then whispered,

“When they find the wreck and us not in it, they’ll spread out fast. Hurry!”

They pressed forward, and came to a clearing in the giant vegetation. Lindeman tripped on a loose stone, and then Evers saw that around them were low, ancient, crumbling walls of dark stone, eaten down by time so that only broken bits of them remained. He knew these were some of the remnants of the long-perished people of ancient Arkar, pathetic shards of a folk gone ages ago. But he had no time to feel that pathos, he felt too naked and exposed in this clear place, and pushed the others forward.

Ten minutes later the four of them crouched in the deep shadow of big, bushy, fronded trees that Evers thought might be peonies, and looked out into an open space.

Here was the real nerve-center of a vast industrial empire. Far across the galaxy stretched the great mines and smelters and spaceports of Schuyler Metals. But here, on this privately owned planet, was the home of the man who was Schuyler Metals. The fabulous mansion itself was not in sight. But this was the spaceport that served it.

It was too big, this spaceport. Far too big for a few private yachts. It had docks for a score of ships, with aprons and cranes and work-pits. In five of the docks, starships loomed up into the night, and they too were far too big for mere private use. Between the docks and the four fugitives, large metal warehouses glinted dully in the light of suspended krypton-arcs.

Sounds of activity came to them from the far side of the docks. Some of them were the ordinary sounds of men working with tools and machines around ships. But there were other, heavier, clanking sounds that Evers didn’t like. He hoped Schuyler had no Workers here. Men they might be able to face, but Workers were another matter.

“You were right, Evers,” whispered Lindeman. “He’s running the Andromeda operation from here. Those warehouses—”

Evers looked at his watch and calculated swiftly. “It’ll be at least twelve hours before those GC cruisers following us get here,” he said. “If we can get into the warehouses, we can hide till then. When the GC cruisers arrive, we’ll surrender to them—and show them Schuyler’s loot and special ships!”

“That should give them all the proof they want.” muttered Straw. “All right, let’s get at it.”

Sharr said suddenly, “No, wait.”

“Wait? For what?”

The Valloan girl, lying flat beside them, had been searching the edges of the compound with her eyes. Now she pointed.

“See the shrubs planted here and there around the edge? Why should they be planted there? There’s a little metal post inside that one clump—I can just glimpse it.”

Evers understood, and turned a little cold. He said, “Detectors?”

She nodded her red head. “I think a hidden network of beams around the whole compound.”

Straw swore softly. “Never thought of that. Say, this wench’s being from that thieves’ world comes in handy.”

Sharr bristled up at that, turning her head with her green eyes flaring, but Evers hastily pressed her arm.

“Shut up, Straw. We’ve got to figure how to get through the beam.”

He couldn’t think of any way. Sharr whispered that the beam would surely be too high and too deep to leap over or dig under. Their whispered conference was interrupted by the distant roar of a motor.

A half-trac loaded with men, its headlights flaring, was racing across the compound in their general direction.

“Oh, oh—they’ve found the Phoenix empty and have called back for more searchers,” said Straw.

“They’ll have to go out through the beam,” Evers said rapidly. “Here’s our chance. Be ready to jump when that trac crosses the line.”

His idea was simple, but he thought it would work. When the half-trac crossed the detector beam, the alarms would register automatically—unless they lifted the beam for a moment. In either case, it was the one moment when they themselves could cross without arousing notice.

The half-trac, avoiding the clump of peony-trees in which they crouched, reached the edge of the compound a few hundred yards from them. As it cut across invisible beams, loud bells rang clangorously somewhere back on the spaceport. The iron clangor ceased a moment later, as the half-trac plunged on out into the forest.

But during that moment of clangoring alarms, Evers and his three companions had plunged across the invisible barrier. They ran low through the dim starlight toward the shadow of the nearest warehouse, and crouched against the cool metal wall.

Evers, looking along the wall, said, “No doors this side. I want a look in here. We’ll look in all these warehouses till we find what we’re after.”

“Yeah,” said Straw. “Well, having Starr along will help us. You know the saying, Set a thief—”

In a hissing whisper, Sharr said to Evers, “I will stun this man if he calls me more names.”

“He’s only kidding rough,” Evers said hastily. “Anyway, I know that on Valloa the hereditary profession of thief is no disgrace.”

“It is not, but when an Earthman says it, it is different!”

“Why the devil did you have to get her going?” Evers demanded of Straw. “Is this any time for your brand of teasing? Eric—”

But Lindeman was not beside them. The little scientist had crept away around the corner of the warehouse.

They followed hastily, holding their guns. They found Lindeman beside the warehouse door.

“Locked,” he said.

“I could blast the lock but it’d be noisy,” Evers said. “Do you think you can open it, Sharr?”

“I will not for Earthmen who laugh at thieves,” she said sulkily.

He took her by her bare shoulders and spoke to her, his voice an earnest whisper. “We look on such things differently on Earth, and you must not mind what Straw said. This is our only chance, Sharr.”

She was silent, and then she said, “I’ll try.”

From inside the belt of her silken pants she took two delicate steel probes, as thin as wires. In the darkness, her fingers explored the heavy lock and then she crouched close to it and began to work.

They waited, not happy about waiting, with a coming and going of half-tracs audible far across the compound. Evers thought it was lucky that the search in the forest seemed to have pulled everyone away from the warehouse area, but he didn’t think their luck would go on much longer.

Something clicked in the lock, and Sharr drew back. She said triumphantly, “There were alarm-wires in it—but I shorted them before I opened the lock.”

“You’re wonderful,” he told her, and meant it. He slid the door open a little more than a foot, and they went quickly inside.

Lindeman’s pocket torch sent its little beam angling around the dark interior. He uttered an exclamation.

“This stuff is from Andromeda, all right—look at those things! Plastic and metal bonded together, just like the things we saw in that K’harn city.”

He was swinging the beam around and it illuminated the strange tangle of objects that half-filled the warehouse.

These instruments and machines were unearthly and looked it, the product of a technology and a psychology utterly alien to this galaxy. Silvery metal disks hung suspended in an oval plastic framework, in one incomprehensible gadget. Next to it towered an eight-foot-high cluster of diverging metal rods that sprang from a cage-like metal base, the base being linked by thick ribbons of a darker metal to a black cube. There was a thing of crystal spheres grouped around a larger sphere that looked almost like an enormous toy. Yes, they had seen objects like these in the faraway alien cities of the K’harn.

Evers felt staggered by the sheer magnitude of Schuyler’s depredations. Here was a plundered science brought home from the farthest shores of space, from worlds that were old when Earth was still savage. He had seen some of those robbed worlds, and he thought of the sum of agony that these things had cost.

“Wait till GC gets here and we show them this stuff!” crowed Straw. “It’s proof enough to cook Schuyler for—”

Evers suddenly motioned Lindeman to snap out his torch, and ran to the closed door and laid his ear against it. “Listen!”

In the sudden silence, he heard trac-cars roaring past the warehouse. One of the cars pulled up and then he heard voices, loud and urgent.

“Check every warehouse! They’re not out in the forest and the boss says they must be here or in the docks!”

Startlingly loud outside the door at which Evers listened, came another voice. “Hey, Alden, look here! This lock’s been tampered with—”

Evers jumped back as the door slid suddenly open. A man, with a heavy pistol in his hand, appeared in the opening silhouetted against the glimmer of starshine outside.

Instantly, Evers notched his gun to stunner strength and shot. His beam dropped the man in a huddled heap.

Outside, the first voice yelled, “They’re in there—get them!”

There was a rush of feet.

“Stunner-power!” Evers exclaimed. “We’ll have enough explaining to do for GC without dead men.”

Four or five men piled through the doorway in a rush. They hadn’t a chance, coming into the dark, interior of the warehouse against the light outside. The beams of the three men and Sharr dropped them before they could shoot.

More half-tracs were roaring up and stopping outside. Then the loud voice called.

“Lindeman! Come out with your hands empty and you won’t be hurt! You and Straw and Evers haven’t got a chance!”

Evers shouted back. “Next time, it’ll be lethal beams—better stay out!”

He whispered to the others then,

“If we could hold them till the GC ships come, we’d be all right.”

“Yeah,” said Straw, without conviction. “Twelve hours, maybe. We’d be all right if we can do that.”

Time went by, and more half-tracs came, and they waited in the dark Then they heard that same voice outside, not too far from the open door.

“Don’t go any nearer, Mr. Schuyler—they might make a rush out.”

A hard, flat voice answered him. “What the devil’s the matter with you, Alden? We haven’t got all night. Get a Worker over here and use it.”

Lindeman started to move forward. “It’s Schuyler. I’m going out there and get him. I saw those Andromeda worlds, I—”

He was almost babbling in his shaking rage. Evers caught him and held him back. “Don’t be a fool, our only chance is to wait them out.”

“What is a Worker?” Sharr asked worriedly.

Evers said, “The Workers are the big remote-controlled robots used for heavy jobs. Schuyler used some of them, fitted up with destruction-beams, out there at Andromeda, from what we heard. I was afraid he’d have some of them here.”

He made up his mind. “Listen, Sharr, they don’t know you’re here with us. They’d never guess that you, who tried to sell me to them, would jump Valloa with us. You hide back in the loot here. When it’s over, wait till GC gets here and then if you get a chance, tell the GC men about everything.”

“I won’t hide!” she said instantly. “Earthmen may think Valloans are thieves, but nobody ever thought us cowards!”

“I know you’re not afraid,” he said. “But it won’t help if Schuyler gets you too. And you can help us by hiding till you can tell GC the truth.”

She was silent, and now they could hear a steely, thumping sound outside, an odd but regular rhythm, getting closer and louder.

“All right,” Sharr finally said, reluctantly, and slipped back into the darkness.

They waited. The steely sound was now a heavy, measured clanking outside the door.

The half-open warehouse door suddenly opened wide, and in it there loomed up the towering silhouette of a Worker.

CHAPTER VI

It was more awesome than any man. It was a colossus of blue metal, shaped like an upright cylinder with rounded top, towering up fifteen feet on its metal legs. It came through the high warehouse door on those legs, stepping fast with a mechanical precision, the big bulk of it poised surely by the gyroscopic stabilizers inside it, the long metal arms that ended in specialized pincer-tools held rigidly at its sides. The striding legs could take the thing over rough rubble and terrain that no wheeled vehicle could cross. It had no mechanical vision, no lens-eyes, but it had a built-in radar far more sensitive and precise than vision.

These powerful remote-controlled machines had been designed for heavy toil. Schuyler had found another use for them. He had had them fitted with high-power destruction-beams, that could be flashed from two eye-like apertures high in the cylinder. And he had sent such deadly altered Workers with his looters to Andromeda. Evers had heard from the K’harn about the stalking metal terrors and what they had done.

Evers expected the destroying beams to stab toward them as the Worker entered. But they did not.

Instead, the metal colossus came striding in toward them, raising its great arms.

“Three beams together might burn through a leg and bring it down,” Evers whispered. “The left leg at the joint, full strength. Now!”

Their weapons flashed and the three beams converged on the joint of the massive metal limb.

They had no effect whatever on the tough metal. Next instant, with a ponderous agility, the thing sprang in with great pincer-like hands reaching.

They darted back from it, scattering. It stood, as though contemplating them, immobile but infinitely threatening. It was impossible to remember that it was a machine actuated by the control of someone outside, impossible to think of it as other than alive.

Evers, crouched ready to move and hoping for a shot at a vital part of the thing, heard a voice outside saying,

“I can cut them down fast with the beams!”

And he heard Schuyler’s flat voice answering commandingly, “No! No beams. It must look as though they crashed and were killed in their ship.”

The Worker sprang again, this time at Straw.

Straw fired, and his delaying to do so was fatal. His beam splashed harmlessly off the big cylinder. The great pincer-hand swung with blurring speed toward him. Unable to draw back in time, Straw tried to duck the metal hand, and it struck the side of his head and knocked him into a tumbled heap.

Lindeman screeched in pure anger and ran in at the Worker, firing. The metal arm that had just felled Straw instantly darted and encircled Lindeman’s small figure, pressing him helpless against the cylinder. And, holding Lindeman, the Worker leaped toward Evers.

Evers, possessed by a cold rage, had no intention of attacking the Worker. Such attack had been proved futile. It seemed to him that they were done for and his only wish now was to take Schuyler with them.

He plunged past the Worker, heading for the doorway and the man outside whom he wanted to kill.

He almost made it. He was at the door, his gun raised, when he heard the rush of clanking feet right behind him and the Worker’s metal arm flashed around him and gripped crushingly. He was drawn against the cold metal side, his arms pinioned, his bones cracking.

“Got them!” said a voice outside, and then the men out there came in.

Strangled in that iron embrace, Evers hung helpless and looked down at them.

THERE WAS a man in the front of the group who was dressed in a rich, shimmering blue coverall. He was a tall man, who had run a little to fat. You didn’t notice that at first because his face held you. It was plump with good living, but there was nothing soft about it. It was the face of an emperor who has had power so long that people are no longer people to him, but creatures to be given their orders. His eyes had no pity in them as he surveyed Evers and Lindeman, only a certain resentment.

“You’ve made a lot of trouble,” he said in that hard, flat voice. “Too bad for you you had to go where you weren’t wanted.”

Lindeman said, “Schuyler.” He said other things, and his voice shook, and Schuyler paid no attention at all but turned impatiently to the bald, lean, hard-bitten man beside him.

“Take them back out to their ship, Alden. You know what to do. Remember, it must absolutely look to GC as though they died in the crash.”

Alden, the bald man, nodded curtly. “Yes, Mr. Schuyler. The Worker can take these two out—it’s safer.”

One of the other men had gone and was bending over Straw. He said, “This one’s dead. Whole skull crushed in.”

Lindeman, his face pale and tragic, looked at Evers. And Evers thought of how brief a man’s obituary could be. All the things that Straw had done, the dreams he had dreamed and the things he had laughed at, and all of a sudden it was all wrapped up and put away forever with the three words, “This one’s dead.”

“All right, bring him along,” Alden said impatiently.

There was another man with a small control-box slung on his chest. It had many buttons on it and he played upon them as expertly as an accordionist. In answer to his playing, the Worker turned ponderously.

Evers did not struggle as the Worker started out through the door with them. You could not struggle against that iron grip, and anyway the sooner they all left the warehouse, the less likely was Sharr to be discovered.

It wasn’t only that he felt sorry for the Valloan girl who had unwisely stepped into a game too big and deadly for her. He still had a bitter hope—not for themselves, they were all through, but a hope that Sharr might keep hidden till the GC cruisers came. If she could, Schuyler might still be exposed, even though he and Lindeman were dead.

But Lindeman struggled. Straw’s death had stunned him to silence for a moment but now as they were carried out, the little scientist raged back at Schuyler.

“You won’t get away with it forever, Schuyler! Sooner or later, someone else will go to Andromeda and the K’harn will tell them what they told us, and you’ll be all through.”

Evers desperately wished that Lindeman would shut up. Talk would do no good now, and might only get Sharr discovered. But Lindeman had reached the end of all self-control.

“All the dead out there, all the agony you’ve caused, you’ll pay for it, Schuyler, when—”

Schuyler’s voice cut across Lindeman’s raging. “Hold it,” he said sharply.

He spoke to the man controlling the Worker, for the Worker holding Evers and Lindeman suddenly stopped its clanking stride just outside the warehouse.

Schuyler came and looked up at the two captives. It seemed to Evers that there was an alert new expression on Schuyler’s face.

Schuyler said, “You say the K’harn told you what we’d done there? How could you understand their language?”

“We understood them,” Lindeman shouted. “We learned their language well enough to understand everything they told us of what you’d done there, damn you!”

Evers saw that Schuyler was paying no attention to the rest of Lindeman’s furious maledictions. The magnate seemed to be thinking fast and hard, looking up at the two of them.

He said suddenly to Alden, “Plans are changed. Take these two to the house.”

Alden hesitated. “But the warning we got about GC ships coming here after them! When they don’t find any bodies in that wreck, they’ll start searching here for these three.”

An uneasy stir ran through the men grouped around them in the starlight. It was obvious that the last thing they wanted was for GC to start investigating on Arkar.

“That’s easily taken care of,” snapped Schuyler. “Put the dead one in the wreck, fuse the fuel-bunkers, and blow it up. Make it look as though their ship blew when they crashed.”

Alden’s face cleared in relief. “Yes. Yes, that should do it.”

The man controlling the Worker touched his controls. The iron grip suddenly relaxed, dropping Evers and Lindeman to the ground.

When Evers scrambled to his feet, it was to find that he faced the guns of two tough-faced men, who stood carefully covering him and Lindeman.

Schuyler turned away, saying over his shoulder, “I don’t want these two hurt. Bring them along to the house.”

He got into a car and was driven away. One of the tough-faced men motioned Evers and Lindeman toward another car.

Evers looked back, as they went. Straw’s body had been carried out, and was being put in the back of a half-trac. The warehouse door was being locked again. He thought that Sharr was safe for the time being. She would surely be able to pick the lock again and get out when the GC ships arrived.

Evers and Lindeman got into the back seat of the car, and the two tough-faced men got into the front. One of the men drove and the other sat turned around, his gun covering the two prisoners. The car darted away across the spaceport. Through the window, Evers saw the half-trac hurrying away toward the forest.

Goodbye, Straw…

Their car went fast under the flaring krypton lights, past the docks. There was activity around the starships there—men hurrying, a couple of towering Workers clanking away with heavy loads, whistles and orders sounding from back in the dark. They raced past a Communic building with tall masts and radar-installations. Trees were ahead now—trees that were flowers of old Earth grown to incredible size on this chemically different planet. The car sped down a narrow road between daisies as tall as eucalyptus trees, scarlet poppies with blooms like great bowls, dandelion shrubbery that was ten feet high.

Evers was trying to figure it all out, and couldn’t. Why had Schuyler suddenly countermanded the order for their killing? He wanted something from them, that went without saying, but what?

The house loomed at the end of the road, bowered in gigantic peonies, roses, lilies, softly illuminated by concealed outside floodlights, as though Schuyler was proud of his house and wanted to see it by day and by night. Evers thought he had reason to be proud.

The greatest metals magnate in the galaxy had built of metal, boldly and imaginatively. The main mass of the house, curved and domed of roof, was of sheening chrome-steel, or a metal that looked like it. The heaviness of its mass was counterbalanced by dainty, fairy-like towers that rose smoothly from its sides, high enough to brush the giant flowers all around. The house could have been grotesque, but it was not. It was a dream of unreal beauty.

They got out of the car and the Earthmen with guns walked well behind them as they went up the wide copper steps. They went into a gleaming hallway, and then into a big room whose walls were all of tawny bronze, warm and welcoming, its casual furniture giving it an air of graciousness and comfort that Evers found not at all reassuring at this moment.

Schuyler was sitting down behind a desk. He motioned to chairs beside a little table. There was a bottle and glasses on the table.

“Have a drink,” said Schuyler. “You look as though you could use it.”

Lindeman paid no heed, but sat down and put his face in his hands. He said Straw’s name in a whisper.

Evers reached for the bottle. He didn’t think that refusing would hurt Schuyler any, and he did need the drink. He poured and drank a big one. As he sat the glass down he saw, back against the bronze wall, the two tough-faced men with the guns standing and watching them.

Schuyler said incisively, “It must be obvious to you that you’ve been spared because you can be useful to me.”

They said nothing, but Lindeman raised his head and looked at Schuyler with a weary hate. Schuyler got the look, and his plump face hardened slightly.

“Let’s understand each other,” he said. “You consider me a ruthless monster. I consider you fools. But we can deal. I can give you something you want—your lives.”

“And what do you want from us in exchange?” Evers demanded.

“Help,” said Schuyler promptly. “Help in dealing with a certain problem in our Andromeda operation.”

Lindeman started to speak and Schuyler said boredly, “Spare me your moral indignation. To me, what you call moral laws are just rules that other men have laid down. I play it all by my own rules.”

He went on, tapping with a gold pencil on the desk. “Two years ago, I first went to Andromeda. It was obvious that someone would go there soon, the inter-galactic drive was possible at any time. I decided to get there first without telling anyone, and see what I could pick up before the rush started. I was looking for rare metals. I found a lot more than that. I found the K’harn and their alien science. The value of that totally different science, its instruments and potentialities, was obvious.”

Evers nodded. “So you robbed them and killed those of them who objected.”

Schuyler shrugged. “Only when they tried resistance. Unfortunately for them, they hadn’t developed any war-weapons. Since that first trip, I’ve had cruisers working the fringe worlds of Andromeda, bringing back instruments of K’harn science that could be invaluable. The trouble is that they’re so alien in concept, my own technicians don’t understand them. It may take years for them to puzzle out those gadgets.”

He paused, then told Evers and Lindeman, “You say you learned the K’harn language. You must have spent a good bit of time with the K’harn, to do that.”

Evers thought he understood now. “We did,” he said. “They accepted us as friends, when they found we weren’t part of your outfit. But we do not know how to operate or explain K’harn scientific instruments, so I think you’re wasting your time.”

Schuyler smiled slightly. “I seldom waste my time. You’re under a misapprehension. It’s your ability to speak the K’harn language that interests me.”

Evers stared, puzzled. “Why?”

Schuyler said, “When I found my technicians weren’t getting anywhere on those gadgets, I gave orders for my men out there to bring back a couple of K’harn scientists who could explain all that stuff to us. Two scientists of the K’harn were captured and brought here, but one unwisely attempted an escape and was killed. The other is still here, but he’s uncooperative and refuses even to speak to us. We don’t know his language, yet it’s essential that we get him to cooperate.”

Lindeman slowly began to rise to his feet, staring at Schuyler in absolute unbelief as the magnate went on.

“If you know the K’harn language, you can talk to him. Tell him my proposition—that as soon as he’s explained all the machines to my technicians, he’ll be returned to Andromeda. Emphasize to him that—”

It was as far as Schuyler got. Lindeman’s hoarse voice interrupted him, saying,

“So it wasn’t enough for your filthy greed to rob and kill out there, you had to bring two of them here prisoners. Why, you—”

He plunged toward Schuyler’s desk. Evers jumped up but before he could take a step, one of the tough-faced men had fired. The pallid beam from his gun dropped Lindeman like a heap of old clothes.

“You move and you get it too,” said the tough-faced man.

Schuyler said bitingly to the man, “Couldn’t you have grabbed him? There was no need to stun him, you fool.”

The man looked uncomfortable. “I thought—”

“Blockheads trying to think make most of my troubles,” said Schuyler. “Take him down to one of the lower rooms and let him sleep it off.”

The man hastily lifted Lindeman as though he were a mannikin and toted him out. The other tough-faced man remained, his gun in full evidence.

Schuyler turned his gaze back to Evers, who stood with fists tightly clenched. He said, “Your friend will be all right in an hour or so. Now what about my proposition—will you talk to this K’harn?”

“If I do—what?” asked Evers.

“You stay living,” said Schuyler promptly. “I keep my promises. You won’t leave Arkar, but neither of you will be killed or harmed.”

Evers thought about it, mastering his fury. He had no intention whatever of helping Schuyler but he thought himself justified in fighting the devil with fire. If he could stall till the GC ships reached Arkar…

He said slowly, “I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him what you say. But I won’t advise him to accept your proposition. That’s up to him.”

“You have nice scruples,” said Schuyler ironically. “You can also tell him that there are many ways of making people—even not-human people—talk, if we have to use them.” He looked at the man with the gun. “All right, put him in with the K’harn.”

The man who had taken Lindeman away returned. The two men shepherded Evers out of the bronze room, and along gleaming metal corridors to a stairway. They walked behind him, their guns out.

The stairway went down two levels before it ended in another corridor. There were two doors on each side of the short corridor, and each of the doors had a heavy combination-lock.

“Listen,” said Evers to the men, “you know that GC is on its way here right now, don’t you?”

One of the men said simply, “Shut up.”

Evers shut up. He knew when a thing was no use, and it was no use now.

He was halted in front of one of the doors. One of the men went to it and started turning the combination-lock. The other man stood behind Evers, his gun levelled.

The door was suddenly swung open by the man who had unlocked it. The man behind Evers shoved him powerfully at the same moment. Evers plunged forward, into a narrow metal cell. The door slammed shut behind him.

As Evers picked himself up he heard a movement in the corner of the cell. There, in the shadows, the K’harn stood watching him.

Weird child of another universe, this crouching, spidery shape—yet familiar to Evers’ eyes. The semi-human torso, the four powerful limbs that were neither arms nor legs yet were both, the fourfingered hands or feet, the white, hairless face and great dark eyes…

Evers started forward, and then as he opened his mouth to speak, the spidery figure rushed forward and he went down again, with alien hands upon his throat.

CHAPTER VII

Evers rolled on the floor of the cell, frantically trying to break the grip of his unhuman attacker. But two of the K’harn’s limbs pinioned his arms, and the other two hands were at his throat, strangling him. The big dark eyes blazed with a deadly rage, only inches from his own.

He could not breathe and he could not speak and the edges of things were beginning to darken. Evers knew he would be dead in a minute unless he broke that grip. His legs were free, and he brought his knees up in a battering smash at the weird torso.

The K’harn grunted, and the grip of his limbs on Evers relaxed for a brief second. Evers used his doubled-up legs as a lever, put all his strength into them, and thrust his spidery antagonist clear off him.

Instantly, with incredible quickness, the K’harn flashed in toward him again.

“Wait!” choked Evers in the K’harn language. “Friend—I—”

The terrible grip was on him again before he could say more, and he had done all he could and it wasn’t enough.

But the K’harn paused, holding him. His blazing eyes searched Evers’ face, and for the moment he did not tighten his grip.

That strange face so close to Evers, white and hairless, the eyes enormous, the nose rudimentary and the mouth small and lipless, was like a gargoyle-mask glaring down at him. Then the K’harn spoke for the first time, in his oddly-aspirated language.

“Where did you learn our speech?” he hissed. “Are there others of the K’harn prisoned here now?”

Evers could hardly speak at all with the hold still on his throat, but he forced out the syllables of that alien tongue in a husky whisper.

“I am a prisoner like yourself. There are no other K’harn here. I learned your speech from your own folk. I have stood on the worlds of Lah and Ameramm and Ky.”

The great, flaming eyes searched his face. “Ky?” whispered the K’harn. “You have been there?”

“I was there, and I saw the destruction and death that had been dealt there by the evil ones of my own race,” said Evers. “I and my two friends learned your language there, in the looted House of Knowledge.”

“What name has the Master of the House of Knowledge on Ky?” demanded the other.

Evers searched his memory frantically, and then said, “Janja is his name.”

For the first time, the grip relaxed. The K’harn drew back a little. He stood facing Evers, and there was still a menace in the tenseness of his four limbs, the poise of his head, the glare in his eyes.

“Yes,” he whispered. “That is his name. You could not have learned that had you been of the looters. For they only stayed long enough to kill, to seize the instruments of Knowledge, and to take them away and with them, two of us lesser Masters.”

Evers began to realize that this K’harn was half-mad, and he did not wonder at it. To see their peaceful city shattered by the sudden eruption of Schuyler’s ships from the sky, to have death strike from unfamiliar weapons, to be captured and brought on the nightmare traverse between galaxies, to be prisoned and questioned and threatened for weeks, maybe months—he thought he would have gone crazy himself.

“The men who hold us here are my enemies as they are yours,” Evers told him. He began to talk more rapidly, hesitating often as he tried to remember the unfamiliar phrases, telling how he and Lindeman and Straw had gone to Andromeda and of the terrible surprise that had awaited them on the fringe worlds there. He concluded, “We came back to stop what they are doing to your worlds. My people, our government, would stop it if they knew. But we had to prove it, and in trying we were discovered, and one of my friends is dead and one is senseless and I am in this cell with you.”

The K’harn had listened with feverish attention, and some of the tenseness and menace went out of his attitude. He began to walk back and forth in the narrow cell—the swift, gliding spidery walk of his race.

“And the evil goes on and the worlds of my people are ravaged, and I can do nothing!” he said. “If I had been slain like Oll, it would have been better. I thought you one of my enemies, and attacked you so that I would be slain.”

Evers said, “Oll? Schuyler said that he’d captured two of you K’harn scientists—and that one was killed trying to escape—”

The K’harn said, “That was Oll. I am Rrulu of Ky. We two were taken when they looted the House of Knowledge. They have kept me here—how long? They have tried to make me speak, and I would not.”

Evers nodded. “They want you to explain the workings of the instruments of Knowledge.”

“I guessed that,” said Rrulu. “I will die before I speak or tell them anything. They are murderers.”

Evers had learned enough of the K’harn temperament to understand the peculiar loathing that Rrulu put into that last word. The culture of the K’harn was a purely pacific one. Developing on the fringe worlds of Andromeda with no enemies and no lack of resources to cause fight between themselves, they had become a people to whom violence was a grotesque and horrible thing.

“We have never killed,” said Rrulu. “We thought that only beasts killed. And that was our weakness, when the robbers came. But we shall learn to kill!”

He came closer to Evers. The only light in the little cell was from one tiny bulb in the high ceiling, but it was light enough to show the terrible resolve on that unhuman face.

“I have thought much in the time I have been here,” said Rrulu. “In the past, we have only created. But the instruments that create can be altered so that they will destroy. If I ever get back to my people—”

He stopped, and Evers saw the hopelessness that came into his strange eyes.

“You can get back, Rrulu!” he exclaimed. “At least there is a chance, if you will do as I say.”

The K’harn looked at him. “How? The door is locked. There is always a guard in the corridor outside. I have tried more than once and could not break out. Oll was killed, trying.”

“Not that way,” said Evers. “We’ve got to use our wits. There will be ships of law arriving here ten hours or so from now. What we have to do is use our wits to stay alive till GC gets here.”

He went on to explain to Rrulu that Sharr was in hiding in the warehouse of loot, unsuspected by anyone, and that when the GC cruisers arrived, the Valloan girl could come out of hiding and tell the GC men everything.

Evers added, “We’ve got to stall until then. Schuyler put me in here because I speak your language. I am to offer you safe return to your own galaxy if you will explain the workings of the machines and instruments they brought from Andromeda.”

Rrulu stiffened. “Those things are the looted instruments of Knowledge from our worlds. I saw them taken, I saw K’harn shot down defending them. I will not help these killers. Not now, not ever.”

Evers said hastily, “I know. I don’t want you to. What I do want you to do is to bluff Schuyler along, make a pretense of being willing to explain all those gadgets.”

But it seemed that deception was as new and difficult a concept to the K’harn’s thinking, as violence had formerly been.

“I will tell them nothing,” he said.

Evers began to sweat. He feared now that the obsession of hatred which dominated Rrulu was going to cross out their only chance. He tried another approach.

“You say you’ve thought up a way by which your people could adapt their scientific instruments into weapons, to use against Schuyler’s ships?”

Rrulu’s eyes blazed. “Yes—by reversing our synthesizers. You do not understand our science. But we create metal, plastics, any element, by mechanisms that generate a force which causes free sub-atomic particles, free energy, to cohere into matter. The same mechanisms could be quickly reversed to de-cohere any chosen elements into energy again. We could utterly destroy invading ships!”

“Then if you could return to Ky, you could teach your people how to defend themselves,” Evers said. He added quickly, “But my way is the only way you can live to return—by pretending to yield to Schuyler.”

Slowly, the K’harn’s expression changed. He was silent for moments, and then said, “I will do as you say.”

“Good!” breathed Evers. “Now listen. They’ll be back soon to ask me what your answer is. I’ll say that you’re tired of imprisonment, and will explain the instruments and their powers, with me as interpreter.”

“But then they will demand that I do so at once,” objected Rrulu. “And they will at once find out that it is all deception, that I mean to tell them nothing.”

“I’m betting that they won’t ask you to start explaining things right away, but wait till later,” Evers said. “Don’t you see—the GC ships will be here before long. Schuyler has to keep you and I and Lindeman strictly under cover until the GC has come and gone. He’ll wait till after they’ve left, before starting to question you.” He concluded grimly, “But he won’t get a chance. When GC gets here and Sharr comes out and blows the gaff on the whole thing, Schuyler is through right then.”

He could see that Rrulu was doubtful and uneasy about the whole plan. The K’harn, lacking the human capacity for intrigue, was poorly fitted for such a bluff. Evers anxiously drilled him over and over, warning him that he must appear beaten, not defiant.

Of a sudden, there was a sound at the door that brought Evers sharply around. It was the sound of the lock outside the door being turned.

“Here they are,” said Evers. “They didn’t give me as much time to persuade you as I’d expected. But remember, if we bluff them now, it’ll work.”

He could hear the lock turning this way and that, for what seemed to his tautly strung nerves an interminable time. Finally the door swung open.

In its opening stood Sharr.

The Valloan girl was silhouetted against the brightly lighted corridor outside. She had a gun in one hand, and her lithe body was tense as she peered into the comparatively dark cell.

Evers bounded forward. “Sharr! For God’s sake, how—what—”

Her hand grasped his sleeve and her green eyes were brilliant as she babbled up to him.

“I’ve found you! I was afraid they’d killed you! I found the other—Lindeman—but he’s stunned, sleeping. I—”

“But why did you leave the warehouse?” Evers demanded. “Did they find your hiding-place?”

“No!” said Sharr. “But I saw them taking you away. I had to try to reach you, before they tortured or killed you. I had the gun you’d given me, and I got through the darkness to this house, and slipped in a servant-door, and hid and watched. When I saw one of the men who had taken you come up from below, I came down here. There was another guard—”

Evers felt the death-knell of his hopes. Everything had depended on Sharr, whose presence on Arkar nobody suspected, remaining in hiding until the GC came and she could emerge and tell them the truth. Instead, she had come out and used the consummate skill of the hereditary thieves of Valloa to seek and find him.

His whole plan was in ruins, for it was still hours till the GC cruisers would arrive and he did not now think they were likely to live that long. Yet how could he reproach Sharr, when she had risked her own safety to find them?

“You shouldn’t have—”, he began, and then he stopped. Sharr’s face had gone white, and her eyes, looking over his shoulder into the shadowy cell behind him, were distended. Her mouth opened on a scream.

He knew instantly that she had seen Rrulu in the shadows back there, and that the totally unexpected sight of the big, spidery K’harn was the cause of her horror.

Evers’ hand clapped over her mouth, stifling the scream. He gripped her and spoke in her ear.

“He is a friend. A friend. One of the K’harn I told you about. A prisoner like myself.”

He did not trust her until her efforts to squirm loose and screech quieted down. Then he removed his hand from her mouth.

Sharr shivered, but kept quiet. Only her eyes never left the unhuman figure of the K’harn.

Evers felt the desperation of defeat. They might get out and hide for a little while but their escape would soon be discovered and they would be caught long before GC came, and Schuyler would win after all.

“Damn it, no!” he told himself. “There must be some way to beat him, even if we go under.”

Rrulu moved restlessly forward, and Sharr shivered. And of a sudden, Evers seized on a possibility. It might be a poor one, but it was the only one left.

He said swiftly to Rrulu, “You said you could adapt the instruments of Knowledge of the K’harn for destruction.”

“Yes!” said Rrulu, a somber flash lighting his eyes. “In all this time alone I have calculated the way to do that—something no K’harn ever thought of before.”

“There are many instruments looted from your Houses of Knowledge, in that warehouse,” Evers said. “Could you use them? How long would it take?”

“Not long, if the right instruments are there,” said the K’harn. “If there is a synthesizer there I could reverse the polarity of its forces and—”

Evers interrupted. “All right. We’ll try it. What I want you to do, if you can, is to cause as much destruction as possible here. Then, even if they get us, GC will surely investigate what’s going on here on Arkar.”

He told Sharr rapidly then, and added, “I think we’re gone geese anyway, but if Rrulu can do some spectacular damage, it’ll surely blow the lid off things here. Where’s Lindeman?”

“In the next room,” she whispered. “I did not know which you were in, I had to open them all. A six-year-old child of Valloa would laugh at such locks.” She added, “They didn’t hurt you?”

There was something in her face as she asked the last, and Evers bent forward and kissed her. He took the gun from her hand and went out into the bright corridor.

Rrulu had said there was always a guard on duty but there was no one in the corridor now. Evers hastened to the next door, with Sharr trailing close behind him and looking back fearfully at the K’harn following them.

The door was closed but not locked. He stepped inside and stopped, startled.

Lindeman lay on a cot, stirring and moaning a little as the effect of the stunner began to wear off.

On the floor with his face upward lay one of the tough-faced men.

“He was in the corridor when I came down,” Sharr said. “I shot him. I dragged him in here in case anyone came down.”

Evers thought to himself that Sharr was a true daughter of barbaric Valloa. She had given the man a full-strength beam. Remembering Straw, he could not be sorry.

He sprang forward and began to chafe Lindeman’s wrists and smack his cheeks, trying to bring him back to consciousness.

Lindeman moaned, “Damn you, Schuyler.” But he did not open his eyes.

“We can’t bring him around,” Evers said. “We’ll have to carry him, for we’ve got little time.”

Sharr suddenly turned her head sharply; and then ran to the door.

“There is no time at all,” she whispered. “Listen!”

CHAPTER VIII

Evers sprang to the door, snatching out his weapon. He pushed Sharr back into the room, and stood in the doorway listening.

Boots were clumping down the stair at the end of the hallway. It was only one man, and as his feet came into view on the stair, the man was saying loudly,

“Roy, I—”

At that moment the man’s face came into view as he descended the stair. It was the other tough-faced man. Alarm flashed into his battered face as he saw no one in the corridor.

Before he could move, Evers stepped out into the corridor with his energy-gun levelled.

“It’s on lethal,” Evers said. “Keep your hands away from your sides. Walk this way.”

The tough-faced man looked at him. He was estimating his chances. Whatever was in Evers’ face seemed to be enough to convince him that his chances were not good. He spread his arms out and walked down the corridor.

Sharr, keeping well out of Evers’ line of fire, reached out and took the weapon from the man’s belt. Evers gestured to the open doorway of the cell.

“In there.”

The tough-faced man walked in. He glanced swiftly at Rrulu, crouched burning-eyed and grotesque and terrible, and at Lindeman, lying on the cot. Then he looked at the man on the floor, at his blank face and sightless eyes.

“There’s Roy,” said Evers. “He’s dead. You’ll likely be right with him in another minute.”

The man looked from the figure on the floor to Evers, and his face became gray and sick.

“You can live,” said Evers. “We’re going out of here, and we don’t want to be seen. You lead us out and if no one sees us, you live.”

The touch-faced man was sweating. He said hoarsely, “There’s no way I can do that.”

“That’s too bad for you,” said Evers.

“Kill him,” said Rrulu in his hissing speech.

The man could not understand the words but he understood the menace in the tone and in the unhuman, flaring eyes. He seemed to wilt.

“There’s a stair up to the back car-park, for unloading stuff,” he said.

“That’ll do fine,” said Evers. He spoke to the K’harn in his own language. “Bring my friend, we are going out.” And then to the tough-faced man he said, “All right. Keep right ahead of me.”

They started down the corridor in a strange little procession, the man in front, Evers behind him with the gun in his back, the red-haired Valloan girl and then the big, spidery K’harn, carrying the half-conscious Lindeman by one limb as easily as a doll, and walking with a scuttling glide on the other three.

Their unhappy guide went past the bottom of the stair, and opened a door beyond it. There was a ramp there, leading upward. It ended in another closed door. The tough-faced man swung the door outward and started through.

He suddenly moved very fast. He sprang out and at the same time swung the door violently back to hit Evers in the face.

Evers was taken off guard, yet the trick did not succeed. The door hit his extended foot and that checked its swing. Instantly Evers lunged through it.

Out here in the open, he dared not risk firing a crackling blast from the gun. Instead, as he swung, he raised the weapon and brought its barrel down on the tough man’s head.

He was just in time. A loud yell that had been in the man’s throat came out as a grunt, and he collapsed.

EVERS DRAGGED him into the concealment of nearby dandelion shrubs, and then looked around. They were in the shadow of the metal castle’s great wall, near the rear. Through the darkness he descried two parked vehicles under towering lily-trees farther back—a car and two tracs.

“We’ll take that car,” he said instantly to Sharr. “If you and Rrulu and Eric keep down, I can pass as a driver on an errand, in the darkness.”

“It will soon be daylight!” she warned. “The sky shows a little light, that way.”

Two minutes later, Evers drove the car with deliberate lack of haste away from the looming mansion and down the road of giant flowers. There was indeed a thin band of ruddy light low in the dark sky ahead, and he resisted the temptation to go fast. In the back seat, Sharr crouched down beside the unconscious Lindeman, keeping herself well away from the crouching figure of the K’harn.

Evers drove out onto the compound of the dock area. But he kept his course so as to circle around behind the docks, toward the warehouses. The men working under krypton lights around the starships, though they must have heard him, did not look up as he went unhurriedly by. Breathing more easily, he drew the car up in the shadow behind that warehouse in which Straw had died.

Rrulu, with a fierce impatience, bounded out of the car. Evers gave Sharr a torch he found under the dash, and then he picked up Lindeman and followed the K’harn and the Valloan girl.

The warehouse door was still unlocked as Sharr had left it. They went inside and he closed the door and set Lindeman down on the floor. Sharr’s torch came on, playing over that tangle of incomprehensible mechanisms and instruments, and Rrulu uttered a low, passionate exclamation.

“The treasures of a dozen Houses of Knowledge, riven away from my people!”

Evers asked rapidly, “What can you do with them?”

The K’harn took the torch from Sharr and ran forward, examining the great pile of loot.

Sharr was bending over Lindeman. She looked pale and crumpled, and not at all like the cocksure Valloan girl who had impudently taken him away from a GC man not too long before.

Evers was tired too, and feeling a sick foretaste of ultimate defeat. It had been a foolish thing, he felt now, to pin their last gamble on the half-mad K’harn’s obsession. As far as he could see, Rrulu was doing nothing, just poking and prying amid the mass of mechanisms.

He told Sharr, “Stay by the door and watch through the crack. Call if anyone comes.”

She said, “And if they do?”

“I’m afraid it’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’,” he said. “Cheer up, Sharr. It may be finish for us but if Rrulu can do anything it’ll wind up Schuyler too.”

He left her at the door and went to where the K’harn had brought a glittering mechanism out of the mass, and was crouching beside it.

It was the big object which had formerly reminded Evers of an enormous toy. There was a two-foot crystal sphere at its center, and around that on metal tracks were mounted a dozen smaller crystal spheres of varying size. There was a complex of wiring underneath, linked to one of the black cubes that Rrulu had called power-cubes.

The K’harn, crouching beside the enigmatic mechanism like a great spider by its prey, was intently engaged in moving the small crystals from one “orbit” to another exchanging their places, revising the wiring.

“What can the thing do?” Evers asked him, but it was a minute before the busy K’harn answered.

“It is a synthesizer. As I told you, it can generate a force that converts free energy into any chosen elements. When I get through with it, it will reverse that process.”

Evers was increasingly dubious. He was a scientist himself and he could imagine no way by which the glittering thing could accomplish such a feat.

“Then you can destroy with it—enough to call the attention of the GC men when they come?”

“Be sure of that,” said Rrulu. “But it will take a little time, to alter the circuits—”

Evers thought heavily that time was the last thing they would be allowed, and with the thought came a call from Sharr at the door.

“I think your escape is discovered,” said the girl.

Evers bounded to the door. The whole sky was turning crimson as the red sun of Arkar showed its rim above the horizon. The blood-like rays illuminated the compounds, the docks and starships, the tall flower-trees and their giant blooms, the arrogant dome of Schuyler’s metal mansion towering in the distance above everything.

From the direction of the mansion, two cars were racing toward the dock area. Men ran from the cars into shops and barracks. Then a warning siren began to scream.

“Yes, they’re going to start searching for us,” Evers muttered. He swung around to the K’harn, whose weird hands were now flying over the wires of crystals of the machine. “How much longer, Rrulu?”

“Several minutes, at least. I can’t do it any faster—”

Evers, coming to an icy decision, drew his gun. He thought they were all of them near the end of their rope, but till he stopped breathing he meant to hit back at Schuyler. A few minutes might do it—

He said to Sharr, “Only one way to give Rrulu time enough—and that’s to decoy them away from here. I’m going to hit for the forest. They’ll hear the alarm and follow me, and won’t bother the warehouse for a while.”

“But they’ll catch you and kill you!” she cried. “Schuyler will take no more chances—”

He paid no attention to her objections. He opened the warehouse door a little and slid out, and plunged for the neighboring forest.

He Crossed the invisible detector beam, and the bells started their clangoring alarm. Evers glanced back and saw men back by the docks pointing and running forward.

He also saw Sharr, running silently right behind him on her bare feet.

“Why didn’t you stay?” he cried.

“I go with you!” she said. “I—”

“Duck!” he yelled, and grabbed her and hit the dirt just inside the forest, as lethal beams ripped the foliage over their heads.

He took her hand and scrambled up and ran on, through the underbrush beneath the lovely, looming flower-trees, with the red sunlight strong now in their faces.

“Keep in the brush,” Evers panted. “Their tracs can’t follow us in it, and the longer we keep going the more time it gives Rrulu.”

Ironically, almost as he said that, they heard a sound of crashing progress through the brush at several places behind them.

“What is it?” asked Sharr, seeing his face.

“They’re following us with Workers,” Evers said.

He needed to say no more. The Workers could go through anything, and faster than any human.

They plunged on, the thorny shrubs ripping their garments, scratching their arms and legs, and the ominous crashing strides behind them came closer each moment.

It seemed incredible to Evers that this should be the end of everything, and yet he knew it was—the cruelly anti-climactic conclusion of Lindeman’s great dream.

They burst suddenly out of the brush into the rubbly dark stones of the ancient ruins of Arkar. Sharr’s foot twisted on a loose bit of rock, and she cried out in pain and fell. Evers stooped to help her up.

She screamed, and he heard the thump-crash-thump close behind him, and whirled around.

A Worker, its giant blue metal body towering enormous in the bloody light, was striding out of the brush after them. Its human controller was keeping back out of sight, using the robot’s radar “vision” to find the fugitives.

Evers fired at the mindless giant, and knew as he triggered that his beam could not harm the thing.

Yellow destruction-beams flashed out of the eye-like apertures in the Worker’s metal body, almost instantly.

The beams missed.

Incredulously, Evers saw that the Worker was staggering and floundering as though out of control, its beams flashing aimlessly and blasting the dark stones nearby. He heard cries of astonishment and terror from back in the brush toward the spaceport.

Next moment, a band of pulsing, cold, white light seemed to expand from back there toward them. The light engulfed the staggering Worker.

The Worker’s metal body wavered hazily, changed, melted into blue vapor—and was gone.

The expanding white light reached Evers and Sharr. He looked down stupefiedly at his hand. The gun in it was changing to smoke, drifting away, and his fingers closed on emptiness.

Then he understood.

“By God, Rrulu did it! A wave of force, that’s tuned to de-cohere metals and nothing else into energy—”

He got Sharr to her feet and started back with her, running toward the compound on the wide open trail that the Worker had made.

He reached the edge of the compound. They stopped, staring.

The warehouse in which he had left Rrulu and Lindeman was gone. So was everything that had been in it, except Lindeman’s senseless form, and Rrulu, and the machine of crystal over which the K’harn bent.

The crystal spheres of that alien mechanism were silently spinning around the central sphere, faster than the eye could follow. Light, blazing force, pulsed out from them as though pumped outward. Here was the source of that expanding ring of metal-destroying force.

The ring of force had expanded across half the compound. The other warehouses were gone. The starships in the docks were all gone but one, and even as Evers stared that one ship melted into vapor, and so did the Workers stalking beyond it, and the cranes and machinery beyond them.

The men of Schuyler were standing paralyzed by the incredible, stupefied by the vanishing of the weapons in their hands, the cars and tracs they had been driving, the ships upon which they had been working.

Evers and Sharr ran to Rrulu. The K’ham’s great eyes flared with triumph.

“You did it—but you destroyed all the things that were stolen from your own worlds!” cried Evers.

“And that is well,” said Rrulu. “Those things will never be used by murderers. Nor this one—when its work is done, I will destroy it too.”

A hoarse voice yelling in the distance swung Evers around. It came from a tall figure in a silken blue coverall who was shouting frenziedly to the stupefied, staring men. It was Schuyler.

“Get them with your bare hands!” Schuyler was yelling. “Stop them before—”

One of the men pointed, crying out, and Schuyler turned and looked. And there in the distance the expanding ring of force had reached the looming metal mansion. The proud dome wavered, shifted into smoke, and then was gone from among the tall flower-trees.

Schuyler turned back and came straight on toward Evers and Rrulu, and his face was now the face of a madman.

“Don’t kill him!” cried Evers.

Rrulu had bounded forward, a terrible figure in his scuttling spidery rush, and had seized the magnate.

Evers ran toward them. “Don’t kill him! He’s our hostage against his men—when they recover from their daze, we’ll need him to hold them back till GC gets here!”

He pried the K’harn’s hands away from Schuyler’s throat. Schuyler’s face was already distorted and blue, but he was still breathing.

Across the compound, the men were still standing like men in a dream, some of them babbling, some of them just staring wildly.

Rrulu reached out and touched the base of the machine, and the spinning crystal spheres slowed their revolutions. The ring of force disappeared. They looked at each other, and then across the compound from which everything metal, every man-made structure, had disappeared.

There was no triumph in Rrulu’s face now. It was sick and strained and strange as he looked at Evers. He said.

“I am the first K’harn ever to use our wisdom for destruction. It was necessary. But I am ashamed.”

In the GC cruiser speeding away from Arkar, Lindeman lay sleeping. Evers gave up all idea of awakening him yet, and he and Sharr went out of the little cabin.

The commander of the cruiser met them in the corridor. He said,

“I’ve been down to see our prisoners. Schuyler’s all right, and talking about his lawyers.”

“He won’t squeeze out of this, will he?” said Evers.

The commander laughed. “A dozen of his men are ready right now to give evidence. He hasn’t got a chance. If nothing else, your queer friend’s testimony would be enough.”

He looked along the corridor to where Rrulu stood beside a window, looking somberly at the blurred grayness outside.

The GC officer shivered. “He surely did a job. Never saw anything like it. I’ll be glad when he and his knowledge are back in their own galaxy.” He added, his face hardening, “That’ll be as soon as we can build the Lindeman drive into a dozen cruisers. We’re going to Andromeda in force—and any of Schuyler’s looters still there will get a nasty surprise.”

When the GC man had gone, Sharr said, “I will soon be back in my own home, too. It will be good. I don’t like Earthmen.”

She did not look at him as she said it. Evers looked down at her. He said,

“You know very well that you’re not going back to Valloa, that I love you and you’re going with me. You just want to make me say it.”

She still did not look up at him, but she came and put her head against him and began to cry.

Evers, holding her, patted her red head. He said, “Only two things. On Earth, people don’t understand the respectability of being an hereditary thief. So no more of that.”

“No more,” said Sharr muffledly.

He felt the back of his neck. “And no matter what arguments we have, no more Valloan judo. Absolutely no more.”