My heart sank in despair as I recognized poor Vans.
THE fellow who had questioned me began on Vans.
“Come along now. Tell us the whole story. Who are you, who sent you here, how much do you know about us? You might as well tell everything, because your buddy the little Earthling, has already spilled the beans. We know it all, but just want to check up.”
“You’ve got Don?” asked Vans, as though he could hardly believe.
“We have.”
“I don’t believe it,” snapped Vans stoutly, “Neither you nor anybody else on Mars could hold that little man for long. Unless he was unconscious. He’d slip through your fingers like water. Where is he? Show me him.”
“Well,” admitted the giant, in a nasty grin, “he has slipped through our fingers for the moment. But not for long. We are putting our trained rats on his trail. They will follow him by scent, and when they find him they’ll tear him to pieces.”
“Don will kill your rats with his sword.”
“I think not. Your Don has lost his sword already in one fight with a rat. He was caught unawares in a confined space, and if I had not rescued him he would soon have been cold meat. I shall not rescue him again.”
Just then the noise beside me became louder, a light came on, and a voice began to give the news in Martian.
I had hidden in a radio set.
“THE police are still without clues in their search for the two escaped husbands, Don Hargreaves, Earthling, and Vans Holors, wrestler. Listeners are reminded that a reward of ten thousand crowns will be paid to any person giving information leading to the capture, alive and unharmed, of these two men. Princess Wimpolo is herself adding an additional ten thousand crowns for anyone who can catch her husband for her,” said the radio. (Right then I’d have given a fairly big reward myself to get the pair of us captured by Princess Wimpolo.)
Descriptions of the two of us followed, then the rest of the day’s news.
“The semi-annual ball at the Imperial Palace was a great success, being attended by . . . Some gloom was cast over the proceedings by the absence of Princess Wimpolo, who was unwell. A message of sympathy was sent, with the hope that her husband would soon be caught.”
(That made me feel mean. Poor old Wimp was too upset to join in the dancing.)
“Rescue work is proceeding in the town of Horvin, recently overwhelmed by rock falls from a cavern roof. A serious outflow of lava is reported from the country of Cuspikor, and it is said heavy casualties may result. Good progress is reported in the campaign of the King of Ossalandok to rid that country of man-eating snakes.”
A typical Martian day’s news. Then came this:
“A very important item of news has just come in. A message on the space radio, interplanetary section, has been received by King Usulor, our Emperor and Overlord. It is from His Highness King Wyandott, Emperor of the cloud-wrapped planet, glorious Venus.
“Emperor Wyandott sends greetings to his royal friend, and wishes that every possible happiness and prosperity shall attend his reign. He also sends the information that the notorious Venusian pirate commonly known as Belangor the Butcher is still free, despite the efforts of Emperor Wyandott’s space police to destroy him. Investigations, and the examination of radio direction-finding probes, prove that Belangor frequently eludes the patrols when approaching Mars. The facts seem pretty convincing that Belangor’s hide-out is actually somewhere on the surface of Mars.
His Highness, the Emperor of Venus, requests that his police be granted permission to land on Mars and conduct a search for this blood-stained criminal. There has not yet been time for a reply to be sent, but a high official at the Palace stated today that it was quite possible that permission might be granted. Precedents exist for this. It is not considered likely that Belangor, if he is on Mars, will have penetrated below the surface of the planet.”
Now I knew where I was and who these men were. Vans and I had blundered into the hide-out of Belangor, Venusian pirate. I had heard one of them mention the name. Yes, everything fitted. Belangor had penetrated into the underground world of Mars. And the elastic men must be still other natives of Venus.
WHEN the radio finished there was a buzz of excitement. One of the pirates came and took away the printed copy of the news that the radio had tapped out while it broadcast.
It was odd, in this beastly place, to get a direct message from Wimp, her dad and my friends. I wished I could send back to them. But this set, powerful as it was, was only a receiver and not a transmitter. Perhaps I could oscillate, though. The radio was of a type I understood reasonably well, no doubt a Martian set stolen by the pirates. Detaching the loud-speaker, I fiddled with the wires. Any listener tuned in to that wave-length now would hear a series of long and short whining noises. I transmitted in English, since it seemed that the pirates would understand any message I sent in Martian. And I had not yet learned the Martian Morse Code, anyway. My hope was that some of the little Earth colony that lived in or near Usulor’s palace would pick me up.
“S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S.” I sent, since that was the form of letters most likely to be recognized. “Don Hargreaves calling. S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S. I am a prisoner of pirate Belangor in a deep cave. S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S. Vans Holors is with me.” And so on with the plenty more “S.O.S.’s.” I could not tell where the cavern was, but only hoped they could get some direction-finders on the job and locate me more or less before I had to stop transmitting. And it was not long before I had to stop.
I could hear howls coming from loud-speakers in other caverns. The other sets of the pirates were getting the full benefit of my oscillating. Pirates dashed about trying to find out where the interference was coming from. Two of them came to look at the set I was hiding in. I thought it best to keep quite still. A hand began to operate knobs and dials. I thought it best to re-attach the speaker then. Music at once poured from the speaker, to the surprise of the pirates.
Just then three great rats came scampering in through the door, snuffing and squawking excitedly. They made straight for the radio set, one over the top and one from each side. I was trapped among the valves and components.
I managed to electrocute one, burning out valves as I did so. The others were too wily for me. They nosed their way through a now dead set. If only I had my sword, I would have made a fight of it. Or if I had been able to run. But here I was trapped. I took a long sliver of glass from a broken valve.
“Those rats will eat up twenty thousand Martian crowns,” I heard a pirate say. “We are losing the reward.”
“What of it? I would not give up the secret of our hide-out here for twenty million crowns,” another growled. Belangor, I suppose.
“No need to give up the secret,” suggested another.
“What do you mean? Think we can let them go back and trust their promises not to talk?”
“Yes, if we send them back in such a state that they’ll never talk again about anything any more.”
“Wheeeee! You got something there. Collect a ransom, say twenty million crowns. I’m sure that Princess would pay that to save her dearly beloved husband from being cut up into little pieces. Then return him, same as we promised, but cut his throat first. Capital wheeze. Call those rats off.” Which they did, and not any too soon, either.
CHAPTER III
The Ace of Spades
BELANGOR hauled me out of the radio set. And his way of doing it was not a very nice one. He lifted me out by my ears. The pull on my ears and on my neck was pretty nasty. I felt so mad at him I could have spit in his eyes. And Belangor and all of them roared with laughter to see me kicking and struggling and trying to haul myself up by Belangor’s wrists to ease the weight on my ears.
“So you are Don Hargreaves, are you?” asked Belangor. “Future Emperor of Mars? Well, you don’t look much, anyway.”
Another roar of laughter.
“Anyone went to buy an Emperor?” Belangor went on. “Going for one Martian sousa.” (About five cents.) �
��Emperors are cheap today.”
More laughter.
“No offers? Well I must admit he’s a bit on the small side. And not too good-looking. Still, if he was well cleaned up he might look almost human, in a bad light. Of course, it’s no use my trying to pretend he’s sweet tempered. Not while you can see that expression on his face.”
And a lot more like that, while I hung, squirming nearly all my weight hanging from my ears in Belangor’s huge hands. Vans Holors, helplessly bound, looked on. I wasn’t trying to fight just then. I was saving it up for Belangor.
Presently he got so pleased with himself with his jokes and the dutiful laughter of the “yes-men” round him that he got careless. He lowered me far enough for my toes to touch the ground. And I let him have it. Yes, sir, I kicked him. I planted my right foot squarely just where it would do most good. And when I say kicked, I mean kicked; not tapped.
Belangor didn’t think of any more jokes after that. In fact, he didn’t say anything you could understand. He just made queer noises as he leaned against a wall, opening and shutting himself like a pocket-knife and trying to breathe.
The other pirates were, for the moment, too amazed to do anything. But I knew that would not last long. I dived for the dissolving ray box, the one Vans had used, which had been brought in here and dumped beside his table. Whether these blighters knew what that box could do I can’t say, but, anyway, they weren’t taking much care of it.
One of the pirates said something, “Grab him!” I suppose, in Venusian. Anyhow, one of the elastic men plunked himself right in my way and put out his hands. I dived between his legs. Another one grabbed at me. I jumped.
I swear I cleared twenty-four feet in that jump. But it wasn’t enough. That elastic man just stretched himself, reached me and pulled me down. I have learned since that those elastic men can reach over thirty feet in the air when fully elongated, arms, legs and body. So it was useless for little me to try to jump over their heads, even though, on Mars, I weighed only about a quarter of my normal weight.
But I wasn’t done. Not quite. I had a long splinter of glass in my pocket. I had got it from the broken valves of the radio set. A kick would not damage the rubbery flesh of that elastic man. He was too resilient. But a sharp edge could cut him, especially where he was stretched.
And it did; half through his arm with a rush of green, bubbly blood. He dropped me with a queer howl, and in a moment more I had doubled round him and got the dissolving ray.
“STAND back!” I bellowed. “This ray can kill all of you in one sweep.”
Everybody froze.
I heard a whistle, but didn’t know where it came from.
Through the crowd those three man-hunting rats, with glowing eyes, came leaping at me.
It only took a merest touch of the ray for each of them, and they all fell dead in mid-air, with deep gashes in their bodies and a queer smell in the air.
But the pirates were all round me. Those behind me might be seizing all sorts of weapons I knew nothing about. I swept my ray at the light hanging from the ceiling. It crashed. The place was in darkness.
I dashed to one side. Something crashed where I had been standing. I stabbed with the ray about where I judged the missile, whatever it was, had come from. There were groans. Something heavy fell.
I decided to try a little bluff.
“Now, outside, all of you! We Earthlings can see in the dark. Outside, or I’ll cut you all down.”
As I spoke I moved, so that anything aimed at my voice would miss me. Slowly, they all shuffled out.
I felt for Vans, cut his bonds and looked round the room by the light of his searchlight, still on his forehead. The place was empty except for one dead pirate and the dead rats.
Something whizzed past us.
I slammed the door.
“Prince!” said Vans, admiringly, “that was a smart bit of work. A real smart bit of work.”
“Don’t talk!” I said.
Outside I could hear Belangor gasping, “Gas them! Gas them through the ventilating system!” He was still half winded.
Three walls of the room were of solid rock, but the fourth looked more flimsy. I cut a large hole in it by means of what was almost the last bit of power in the ray, and looked through.
Darkness outside, and a gleam of water far below.
“Dive!” I said to Vans.
“Ah! But I am still cramped, Prince!” he said, but dived.
I followed, into almost inky blackness.
We landed in the same stagnant pool that Vans had first fallen into, with the giant fungi on the shore. Natural plants of Venus, I guessed, and the food of the elastic men.
The zekolos met us on the shore, and showed, by clicking their pincers together, how pleased they were to see us. The two elastic men were here too, whimpering with fright at having been captured by the zekolos, of whom they were terrified. They didn’t understand Martian, but I made them understand by signs that I wanted them to show us a way out of here.
Swimming to a distant end of the stagnant pool, they dived deep in that unpleasant lake and led us under the water. To Vans and the zekolos the swim was nothing, but I was in distress by the time we broke surface once more. I had swallowed a lot of that foul water.
Now we were in a vast cavern, lighted by many orange lamps on standards. There was much activity here, elastic men bustling about, and pirates directing them. These unfortunate elastic men were, I afterward learned, Venusians who had been captured by the pirates and forced to work for them as slaves. The pirates, I know now, were originally Martians who had left Mars countless years ago and gone to Venus where they dominated the timid, peace-loving people of that planet until the Venusians finally drove them away. Or at least, they were the descendents of those adventurers.
“Look, Vans,” I said. “The pirate ship!”
AND it was a ship! It was the shape and color of the ace of spades.[*]
It had no portholes, only four glassite observation bulges. Who wants portholes in a space-ship anyway? There is nothing to see in space, anyhow, except stars.
But it was the color of the ship that proved it to be a raider. It was black, dull black, except that white dots had been painted all over it to represent stars. Such a ship would be as good as invisible in space, against a background black and star-sprinkled.
Space camouflage! An Ace of Spades ship!
Such a ship, rocket drive shut off, could creep upon its unsuspecting prey, unseen until the moment came to strike. Belangor, the Butcher, left no witnesses.
The black ship lay now on her side, resting on three large wheels arranged in a triangle. Each wheel rested in a grooved metal runway that vanished in a distant round, black hole.
“That’s the way out, Vans,” I mused aloud. “That tunnel obviously leads to the surface of Mars.”
“That way out is no use to us, Don,” said Vans sadly.
“Maybe. Or maybe not, Vans. We’ve got to think up some plan.”
“My head’s just splitting with trying to think up plans,” said the simple fellow. “I’ve got such a sharp headache through trying to think up plans I could shave with it, if I had some soap.”
“Let me think aloud then, and don’t interrupt.”
The two elastic men were stretching themselves out on the ground. Feet hooked round rocks, they stretched their bodies and hooked their fingers into crevices nearly forty feet away. They looked certain to snap any moment with the strain of so much stretching.
Suddenly, “Whang!”
“Whang!”
Now they have snapped, I thought.
But they hadn’t. They had simply unhooked their feet. The flying back of their bodies, stretched so tightly, sent them shooting through the air like stones from catapults. Such was the release of tension that they landed about a quarter of a mile away, got up and went to meet their fellows.
They had escaped us.
Timid creatures! Vans’ enormous fists could not hurt them, but they
feared the pincers of the zekolos, which could cut their bodies in halves. Let them go. They were no use to us.
“No, but they’ll tell the others where we are,” Vans objected.
“And when the others get here we’ll be somewhere else.”
In the enormous cavern, lighted only in one or two places, it was possible to move a long way under cover.
“No search party could hope to find us among all these rocks,” I said.
“And the trained rats?” Vans asked quietly.
“HELL!” I said.
Vans seemed to think I had some scheme ready to deal with the pirates’ rats, which would smell us out like bloodhounds. I hadn’t.
“Ride on the zekolos,” I suggested. “They may have given the rats the smell of us from articles of clothing we may have lost, but I do not see how they can have given them the smell of the zekolos.”
But they had, somehow. Presently we could see almost the whole population of the cavern after us, led by rat-bloodhounds on leashes. And searchlights, from the “dock” where the pirate ship lay, probed the rocks for us ahead of the party. But Vans knew a trick to beat that. At the proper word of command the zekolos reached up and began to travel upside-down on the cavern roof, though how even those huge pincers of theirs managed to support the terrific weight of Vans Holors I do not know.
Anyway, we gave our pursuers the slip. The space ship looked almost deserted now, nearly everybody having joined in the chase of us. And suddenly the plan I had been looking for came into my head.
“Vans,” I said, suddenly. “We’ve got to stow away on board that ship.”
“And what’ll we do when the ship is in space? Mutiny, overwhelm the pirate crew and capture the ship? Or make ourselves parachutes and jump out?”
“All right,” I said, offended, “if you can think of a better plan, let’s hear it.”
But, as a matter of fact, Vans was probably serious. He was brave enough, and dumb enough, to try either of the suicidal plans he spoke of, if only I had told him to.
The Complete Saga of Don Hargreaves Page 25
