“Surely nothing can live where there is no air,” I muttered in amazement.
The sea-lion was pointing to letters and words.
“Not so surprising as you think,” he indicated.
“But how can they breathe?”
“They don’t. Their bodies have natural chemical reservoirs of oxygen.”
“But the lack of pressure?”
“Specially tough skins.”
“How can they fly when there is no air for their wings to beat upon?”
“At will their wings become impervious in one direction only to the light pressures, cosmic radiations, gravity and electric or magnetic radiations of space. This creates terrific pressure sending their bodies hurtling in any direction at enormous speed.”
So now we know the next step in evolution. It is a creature that can fly through space. Feasible enough, in a way, I suppose. But at first it had me, and all of us, bewildered.
“What shall we do?” Vans asked. “Tell them to keep their distance,” Usulor rapped. He might not understand what was happening, but he was always ready for a fight. So was Vans.
Our radio began to blare orders. The amazing birds came on. I doubt whether they had receivers to pick up our message.
“Talk to them with rays,” barked Usulor.
Dissolving rays and death rays stabbed out. But, do you know, we did not hit one of them. They wheeled, banked and whirled so fast that we could not turn the aiming mechanism quickly enough to catch them. They seemed able to see our rays and fly round them. The aiming lights were useless out here, too.
The nearer the amazing army came the more impossible it was to hope to hit them. Presently some of them had landed on our hull.
“We’re sunk,” I muttered to myself, despairingly.
Vans leaped for a space-suit. I saw what he meant to do. He was going out to fight the space-birds outside, on the hull. Usulor and I did the same.
We heard the odd sizzling noise of a dissolving ray. The space-birds were cutting through our hull.
“Into a suit,” I told Wimpolo. “Our air will escape.”
The flamingo and the sea-lion were fumbling awkwardly with suits of their own. I helped Wimpolo into hers and followed Vans and Usulor into the airlock.
We got out onto the hull.
CHAPTER IV
The Fight
SACE-BIRDS were all round us. I wielded a death-ray, because the apparatus was lighter and the beam broader. The two Martians had dissolving rays, with heavier apparatus producing a beam rather of less diameter than a lead pencil. Whatever solid matter that beam touched behaved like butter touched by a red-hot needle. Atomic cohesion neutralized, it turned into gas and fluid.
We could not hit those space-birds. I could not hold my beam on one of them long enough to do any harm. A fraction of a second only was needed, but they moved too fast for that. The two Martians, with their more deadly weapons but slow, ponderous movements, could not touch a bird at all.
It was like slashing at mosquitoes with a walking-stick. They swooped and whirled and made sudden right-angle turns. One, I was certain, was laughing at me. He would hover for a moment right in front of me, inviting me to shoot at him. A flick of my wrist would turn my ray towards him, but he would be gone, high over my head.
When they came close they moved so last that my eyes could not follow them at all. A crack pitcher can throw a bail too fast for an ordinary man to see it. And those space-birds went too fast for me. And I, sweating, nearly fainting with the heat, began to get a feeling that I was playing an odd game of space baseball, with deathray for bat and space-birds for balls.
We were on the sunward side of the ship, and was it hot! I could feel the hot metal of the ship burning my feet through my magnetic shoes. The sun beat upon us and the heat was reflected back’by the polished metal of the spaceship. Walking was awkward. With only the feeble grip of the magnetic shoes holding on to the hull one careless step would send one’s body shooting away from the ship into space. There would be no getting back.
We had been standing in a sort of triangle protecting each other’s backs. The space-birds had stopped cutting through the ship’s hull on our side. But on the far side of the hull they were busy. We could feel the vibration through our feet.
Vans strode away on his own to attack them.
Woops!
A bird with the head of a goat swooped down and butted him in the back. Gosh! It was almost funny to see the enormous wrestling champion go shooting into space, arms and legs spread wide like the figure “X”. But it was not funny when one realized the awful slow fate in store for the simple but courageous fellow, alone in the depths of space.
Usulor and I stood back to back. The vibration had stopped. The space-birds were inside the ship. I wondered if it would not perhaps be best to go back inside ourselves. Even as I thought of it, it was too late. The small guiding rockets of the ship began to blast. The metal floor under our feet whisked sideways. The ship had been thrown into a sudden spin.
It was like standing in a train when the train starts suddenly. We were thrown off our feet. But one does not fall in space. We remained suspended, looking down at the spinning ship.
The space-birds, with an amazing variety of beaks and jaws wide open, seemed to be laughing at us.
THE spin stopped. Then the nose of the ship began to go away from us while the stern came round. Another type of spin was being started, an end over end spin. In technical terms, the first spin had been around the line of flight. The axis of the second spin was at right angles to the line of flight.
The stern of the ship hit us, crack! Those space-birds were playing baseball with us all right. Using the ship as a club they had batted us far into space.
After the first crushing impact everything seemed oddly peaceful. The ship and the space-birds were rushing away from me at great speed. The Emperor of Mars was shooting off in another direction. I could not see a sign of Vans. What had happened to Wimpolo, my Martian bride, I had no idea.
I was alone in space. No water, no food, no means of renewing my fast-fouling air supply. But there was no need to worry about any of those things. Very soon none of them would matter.
The sun blazed blue before me. You have no idea how hot the sunshine can be until you are in space. There is no shade out there, not even the smallest cloud or the tiniest cooling breeze.
Before long the temperature of my space suit would be so high that life would be impossible inside it.
And all this had happened because I had not persuaded Wimp from her foolish idea of a space honeymoon.
It was all my fault. If only I had backed up my father-in-law.
I must have gone partly unconscious. Stars, sun and Mars looked blurry. I thought I saw a spread of white wings and felt the beak of a flamingo take hold of the middle of my back. I seemed to be being towed through space. Spreading wings between me and the sun seemed to cool me.
Delirium, I thought. But a glorious feeling of peace it brought. I dozed off to sleep.
WHEN the three of us went out of the ship to fight the space-birds, Princess Wimpolo tried to follow. I quickly pushed the door closed. She beat on it with her fists.
“Let me come,” she shouted. “I can fight as well as any of you.”
“Stay where you are safe,” her father ordered.
“Safe?” she snapped. “What do you call safe? I’m no safer in here than I’d be out there.”
Then the air whistling out of the airlock made talking difficult. But we could hear her metal shoes banging against the door.
She backed away from the door, fuming.
“Aren’t men fools!” she muttered.
Then she heard the dissolving ray sizzling through the hull of the ship. Grabbing her death-ray, she clattered down the zig-zag stairs as fast as the weightlessness of space would let her. The flamingo and the sea-lion had now given up trying to get into space suits made for men. The bird flapped its wings and flew along the central funn
el of the ship, carrying a death-ray in its beak. The sea-lion took a header off the landing and dived the length of the ship.
Wimpolo was in doubt as to which compartment the noise was coming from, but the animals seemed to know.
They waited outside a door. She opened it and felt a rush of air whistling out of the ship.
A weird collection of winged monstrosities was swarming through a hole in the hull. Two death rays and one dissolving ray stabbed into the mass, annihilating it in an instant. Others, half way in, got out again in a hurry.
The sea-lion was coughing in distress. She thought it had been hit, but it was the fall in air-pressure that hurt it. The sea-lion waddled out of the door.
The sizzling noise came now from another direction.
“Hell and damnation!” Wimpolo grunted. “What are those fools doing outside? Why can’t they stop this?”
With the flamingo she went to repel this second attack. This time there were no space-birds inside the ship. They had just cut a hole and left it at that. Letting all the air out of the ship seemed to be their idea.
The only thing to do was to close that compartment against further loss of air. Then off to do the same with the next punctured compartment.
She missed the flamingo suddenly. The poor girl must have collapsed from lack of air, Wimpolo decided.
There was a curious green smoke in the air. It didn’t look quite like the gas produced by dissolving rays. The inside of her suit smelled funny. Someone must have neglected to see that the suits were kept properly clean.
The inside of the ship looked oddly blurred.
“Hell and damnation!” exclaimed Princess Wimpolo.
SHE had realized that the green smoke was gas. It was a gas that seeped through the rubber joints of her space-suit. The space-birds were attacking her with a penetrating atomic gas.
She could see the gas whistling through a hole in one of the compartment doors. The space-birds must be in that compartment squirting gas at her. She’d show them.
Lurching awkwardly on drunken feet she played her death-ray on the door. It would work through the door almost as well as with no door there. But the gas still came through. Gas was coming through other doors now.
Nearly overcome with gas, she flung open the door. A great surge of gas came out at her. There were no space-birds here, but a rubbery sheet covered the hole in the hull, and through a hole in the sheet gas came in jets. She tried to aim her death-ray, but her fumbling hands couldn’t find the buttons. The box slipped out of her hands and floated away.
She didn’t fall, because she was weightless. She just passed out on her feet. Space-birds swarmed into the ship. They seemed to be laughing at her. Unable to resist, she felt her arms tied. Then the ship spun under her, making her fall and roll. It stopped, and spun the other way, end over end. That sent her with a heavy bump to the far end of the compartment. Luckily her suit was of tough Martian make, very resistant to violence. An Earth faceplate of glass would have shattered.
Vaguely she was aware that space-birds were carrying her, or, rather, towing her through the air.
She wished she knew what they were laughing at.
CHAPTER V
Dangers of Deimos
OLLA the flamingo had not fainted for lack of air. Nor had she been gassed. She had merely gone out through one of the holes on reconnaissance, to have a look round.
Lack of air gave her no trouble. She too was a space-bird, she discovered. She tried making her wings impervious in one direction to gravity, light-pressure and so forth. Woosh! She went flying through space so fast it frightened her.
“Lawks! I’m a space-bird!” she laughed. “I don’t need a ship to take me from Mars to Deimos!”
She looked with pitying condescension at the humans fighting their hopeless fight against her colleagues, the other space-birds. She saw Vans, her husband, go shooting into space at the impact of a full-blooded charge in the back. That annoyed her. She might want him again one day. Stranger things had happened. Besides, who was to feed her now?
She flew after him, stopped his flight, put her head against his suit and made cooing noises.
“Thanks Olla,” he said. “Where is the King? And Don?”
She had seen us batted into space. Miles away as the King was, Olla, getting into the right position, was able to pick out the sunlight reflected from his suit. By the time he had been towed back I had gone so far away that it was only with great difficulty that Olla’s keen eyes were able to pick me out. She fetched me back too.
I awoke from a peaceful dream to find myself floating in space, Vans and Usulor in their suits beside me and Olla spreading her wings over all three of us to shade us from the sun. The space-birds were busily patching up the ship. We were to sunward of them, and consequently practically invisible to them against the blackness of space. Our suits were connected by telephone wires. Olla had produced from a pocket or something she kept tucked under a wing a slate she used to communicate with Vans.
“I’ll tow you back to Mars,” she wrote.
We all three protested. What about Wimpolo?
Olla thought we had better give up hope of Wimpolo. Usulor protested stoutly. As long as there was any chance that she was still alive we would not leave her. Vans and I, of course, agreed.
All this while the ship and ourselves had been drifting towards Deimos. The little world was as prominent as Mars in the sky now. The ship was clearly still making for Deimos.
“Ancient Martian history tells of colonies on Deimos, of cities, air-plants and supplies left intact when the place was evacuated,” Usulor told us. “Many thousands of years ago, of course. But most of it is probably still usable.”
“Why was the world evacuated?” I asked.
“Because of radiations, the old books say. That might mean cosmic rays, or ultra-violet or radium emanations. It might mean almost anything.”
We resumed our journey to Deimos, towed now by the wings of the grumbling Olla.
“All this trouble over that cat of a Princess,” she grumbled. But her words were only bird twitterings to us.
AS WE got nearer to Deimos we saw that what looked like disks of pale green glass were dotted about the surface of the tiny world, some of them miles in diameter.
“Air and temperature traps,” Usulor explained. “Former Martian colonies. Radiant heat goes in through the glassite readily but seeps out only very slowly.”
I could easily understand that. I have grown tomatoes in a hothouse or greenhouse. On Deimos men had tried to live in giant greenhouses. Without much success, it appeared.
Olla’s slender legs must have been as strong as steel. Gripping Usulor and me in the claws of one leg and Vans in the other she could apply the most terrific acceleration or deceleration to us. It was uncanny to watch her, slender wings stretched wide and motionless, a mere effort of volition causing the invisible forces of the universe to operate so powerfully at her bidding. We tried to sleep, so as to conserve our oxygen supply, but the acceleration strain was heavy. And all the while those dazzling white wings fended off from us the cruel, burning heat of the sun.
After a long, long journey we reached Deimos. A desert, uninviting world, apart from the hothouse colonies. Jagged mountains, thin air, polar icecaps, no extensive seas, some stunted vegetation in the valleys. No place for a honeymoon.
Flying in an orbit some fifty miles above the surface we saw the space-ship resting inside one of the larger “hothouses.”
“Shall we land nearby?” I asked Usulor.
“Best find a usable hothouse about a hundred miles away, if we can. No trouble to come closer in this light gravity.”
The gravity of Deimos is very slight indeed. I believe Vans could have stood on its surface and thrown a stone so hard that it would never come down at all.
Most of the hothouses were barren and empty. Glassite covers had become cracked or chipped from various causes, letting the air out. Some were a riot of giant mildew and fungi.
Others a profusion of tropical vegetation, giant tree-ferns, trailing vines and gorgeous flowers many yards across. Everything was on an enormous scale, due to the light gravity I suppose.
“Air in some of these must be foul and poisonous,” Usulor reflected. “We can judge the quality of the air only by the vegetation growing within. All our instruments are on the ship. Which of these hot spots would you consider the most wholesome-looking, Prince Don?”
I selected one full of tree-ferns. I chose it because I saw ripples made by some swimming creature in the water and small animals moving among the tall grass. Where other animals could live, I argued, so could we. The others agreed.
We hunted for an air-lock. We found one at last. It had ten successive compartments before the dome itself was reached. Those ancient Martian colonists had been very careful. Necessary, I suppose.
And the air inside was good. An excellent drop of air. Ozone-laden, free of carbon-dioxide and flavored with flower perfumes and pollen. It only wanted a salt-sea tang to make it perfect.
If you want to know what I mean by an excellent drop of air, try breathing some after hours and hours in one of the stinking, cramped ovens they call spacesuits.
Honest, I’ve never tasted a better drop of air.
WE felt cheerful at once, lighthearted and even partly lightheaded. I remember offering to carry Vans round the perimeter of the hothouse. I did lift him off the ground. Which, remembering that Vans would have registered more than a ton on the scales on Earth, shows how very light Deimos gravity is. Vans offered to throw me “clean off the globe,” so that Olla would have to fetch me back.
“And crack the glassite dome and let the air out,” Usulor put in. “Ha, ha, ha!” he roared, throwing up stones so that they rang noisily against the dome so high above.
Then we all tried seeing how high we could jump. Vans and the King looked so ungainly, jumping, that I roared with laughter, and so did they. And the raucous shrieks of merriment from the flamingo sounded above us all.
The Complete Saga of Don Hargreaves Page 20
