So, we went out, pinned the notice on the door, locked the door and took away the key. We found the guards getting worried.
“A strange ship getting nearer every minute. All the guns should be manned.
Nothing is being done. We can’t find the Captain and the Prince is sick!” they told us.
“What ship can it be?” I whispered to Hektorum.
“Usulor’s,” said he. “You don’t think I came to Phobos without sending a complete report to the Emperor first? Of course a fully armed ship followed as fast as it could be got ready.”
“But there are enough arms here to blow any ship of Usulor’s to bits.”
“That is why we have to move fast.” To the nervous guards he said, “We’ll take charge!”
“Who are you?” they asked.
“This is the famous pirate, Belangor the Butcher. And I am his Chief of Staff,” declared Hektorum.
A murmur of relief went round at the famous name. Who would not trust the Terror of the Space-ways?
Hektorum knew just what defenses Grumbold had those on the ship he had attended to. There was also a fort on the solid ground of Phobos itself.
“Now, all get to your guns,” ordered Hektorum. “And do nothing, not even test the guns until I give the order. Anyone who does will have his head cut off. The enemy must not even guess that we are armed until he is too close to have any chance of getting away. Right! Lead us to the fort.”
WE WERE led among the beautiful glass bubbles of Phobos to Grumbold’s ugly concrete fort, leaving the space-ship behind.
“I want all the staff of the fort to meet in the main hall and hear the orders of Belangor the Butcher. Every man . . . Are you all here? Every last man? All right, suckers! Reach!” He said the last bit as grimly as a bad man from an M.G.M. movie. All five of us had swung huge deathrays on the crowd.
“Drop your weapons. Now file into that room.”
It was a cell kept for prisoners.
One man tried a break. It was too bad for those round him, as well as himself.
“That will show you I mean business. Get in! And when you are in remember that these rays can still kill through the door.”
They piled in. Vans smashed his chloroform bottle on the floor inside just to keep them quiet.
“Now teleview the coming ship. Tell them all big guns and rays are either out of action or captured, and there will be no resistance worth the name.”
We were just in time. The Captain, his orders to surrender not being answered, was just about to open fire. Spaceboats crammed with fighting men poured down. Only in a few spots did small groups of men put up a fight with hand ray-guns. In less than an hour the entire tiny world of Phobos had been captured by Usulor’s army.
Worst of it was, Prince Grumbold got away after all. Somebody busted in that door and carried him off in a spaceboat that was painted black so that it could not be seen in space. The Prince’s tame Professor I reckon. We should have chloroformed that man, too.
Still, one can’t have everything. We had not done badly.
“WELL,” said old Usulor, when we met in council at the Imperial Palace, “I still can hardly believe that you are my daughter, my son-in-law, my chief detective, Vans Holors and Bruny Hudells, even now that you have got your proper clothes on again. You made a good job of disguising them, Hektorum. I don’t wonder Grumbold didn’t know them. But how a man like Holors could pass as a woman I cannot understand. You must have had a very good shave that day, Holors.”
“Our patent Beard-Suppressor, Your Highness,” began Hek. “Beard-Suppressor!”
“A ray that stuns the hair-cells and stops the hair growing. It also causes the bristles to sink back into the skin. Saves a lot of money in shaving-soap, Your Highness.”
“So I should think! I see I shall never be really up-to-date in all these scientific developments!”
“Say!” called Vans suddenly, in alarm.
“What’s eating you?”
Vans was anxiously looking at his face in a mirror.
“I hope my face will come back all right again. This girlish shape and these girlish colors you have given it. I wouldn’t like it to stay that way.”
“Don’t worry, Holors. All trace of your disguise will be gone in a month. The same with the others.”
“I’m glad of that too,” said a gigantic woman, who actually was the giant, Bruny Hudells.
“And now,” said Usulor, “now that our two enormous friends are sure they have not lost their faces forever, though why that should worry them I don’t know, I can go on with what I was talking about. You haven’t done a bad job, Hek. A nasty nest of rebels has been cleaned up, even if the two chief conspirators did get away. But I can’t say you looked after my daughter as well as you might have done.”
Wimp jumped to her feet at once.
“I like that!” she hooted. “Do you think I am going to stay cooped up on Mars when anything is going on?”
“In future,” barked Usulor, “you will stay cooped up and like it! Supposing you got killed!”
“Oh, I will, will I? We’ll see!” flared his unruly daughter.
WE ALL knew that Emperor Usulor’s orders could make all Mars shake, but when they were addressed to his daughter they were just hot air and a waste of time. Which just shows that a man may be able to rule a whole world but not able to rule one girl.
“I must plead guilty to that,” said Hek, sadly. “I had the most awful bad luck.”
“I should say so. Getting the wrong fuel on that space-ship was part of it. Not like you te make such a silly blunder.” Old Usulor sounded severe.
“Oh, that wasn’t a blunder,” said Hek, smiling. “That was part of my plan.”
“What?”
We all jumped up and faced him. “Yes. You see, I first pretended to give Grumbold a chance to kidnap the Princess. He took the bait and fell into the trap. Then I tried to get rid of my unwanted assistants and follow him. But they clung to me like leeches. So I fixed it so we would have to land on Deimos, where I figured the Princess would be safe until Grumbold was locked up.”
“But,” I gasped, “if I had not been able to land on Deimos we would have been stranded in space without fuel!”
“Oh, I had a few cans of the right fuel tucked away, just in case,” said Hektorum, calmly.
Wimp’s face had been getting redder and redder. Now she jumped to her feet.
“You made a fool of me!” she barked, dashing at Hektorum.
But once again the great detective thought quicker than anybody else. He was out of the door and along the passage in a second.
“Hrrrumph!” said Usulor. “As a father I have the greatest respect for a man who can get his own way against my daughter. But since he is absent now, tell him when you see him that I have decided to confer an Order of Merit on him . . . Now everything is cleared up, apart from your powder, Hudells. Since the scientist got away we cannot make him give up the secret.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Hudells. “When I was running loose in that ship, dressed as a woman, I found a bottle of the powder. Here it is.”
Usulor looked at the bottle.
“Looks like salt to me,” he said. “Take it along to Professor Winterton. I hope it will work out all right.” Winterton tasted the powder.
“Seems like ordinary Vitamin C to me. Flavored. But we tried that and it didn’t work. Strange.”
He made some tests.
“Well, I have been a fool,” he said at last. “Fancy not thinking of that before! This is dextro-rotary Ascorbic Acid!”
“Does it bite?” I asked.
“No, that is exactly what it does not do.” And he began a long explanation. This is what I made of it.
Vitamin C, or laevo-rotary Ascorbic Acid, is the cement worker of your body and mine. It cements the cells of flesh and bone together. Without Vitamin C our bodies would just fall apart. With only a little Vitamin C our teeth get loose, our bones break easily and we b
ruise easily.
Only, that synthetic body Bruny Hudells was using, was put together by left-handed cement workers, or, by Vitamin C that is the Mirror image of the Vitamin C that you and I use.
Got it? Well, I can’t say I have either, not properly. But, anyway, it worked. Bruny’s aches and pains vanished like magic.
So that was that.
Oh, and one more thing. Vans Holors has got a new nickname now. Everybody in Mars calls him “The Vamp” ! You should see his face go red with temper about it, too!
PRINCESS WIMPOLO, daughter of Emperor Usulor and heiress to the throne and to the overlordship of all Mars, is the dearest girl I’ve ever known and everything to me that a wife should be, even though, she weighing half a ton to my seven stone, I can’t sit her on my lap as most husbands do but have to sit on hers instead. True, she is used to giving orders and likes to have her own way, but so would you if you were the only child of the boss of a whole planet.
The little Earth colony on Mars might not have nearly such a good time if it was not for Wimp. We are very few among the gigantic people who live in the underground world of Mars. We might get kicked around pretty badly.
But, thanks to the sweetness of Wimp, we got taken up as pets and playthings of the rich people of Mars. Rich ladies would take their little Earthlings around with them saying, in Martian, “Come along, Fido!”
“Balance this lump of sugar on your tiny nose, Johnny!”
“Watch the little darling jump right over my head when I point up and whistle!”
“Huh! Talk about your Jacko! My Alice can balance herself on one hand on the top of my head for a whole minute!” In the light gravity of Mars we could do surprising tricks. Not very dignified, but the best of everything there was in Mars we got.
All that was altered when Wimp married me. We still do tricks in parlors and at tea-parties, but now we are honored guests. Many Martian ladies did as Wimp did and married their pet Earthlings. The more muscular of them carried their husbands around in their shopping bags. Can’t say I quite liked that. Gave me a nasty feeling that a store for the sale of husbands from Earth might be opened one day. But as long as Wimp is looking after us, any Martian who hurts an Earthling has to answer for it to her.
I don’t say there isn’t some jealousy about, mind you. Many Martian Princes had been sweet on Wimp. You can’t help that sort of thing. Some of them made a lot of trouble. And lately a Space Pirate named Belangor had been sticking his nose into Martian affairs quite a bit.
Not that Wimp worried. She was not the nervous sort. I reckon she must have steel wires for nerves. If no trouble came to her she’d go out and find some. That was Wimp. She was quite capable of going out and hunting Belangor on her own.
It isn’t fair really. Nearly worries her father daft sometimes. Me too. But you can’t keep a girl like Wimp quiet. She isn’t made that way.
Sometimes I don’t even know what she’s up to till I’m in the middle of it. Like the time she came dashing into our room, barked, “What, haven’t you finished dressing yet? Oh, well, no time to finish now. Have to finish on the ship.”
I had just time to say, “What ship?” when she picks me up, tucks me under her arm and did one of her elephant charges along the length of the palace corridor.
And me with only half my clothes on in front of all those ladies-in-waiting. But there it is. Because we are so small the Martians seem to think we ought to have no feelings that way. They must think of us as babies.
AND there in the palace yard was a round, glassy traffic sphere waiting, with my shadow at the wheel. That is what I call Vans ever since Wimp appointed him my Official Bodyguard. As though I needed a bodyguard. And one weighing more than a ton, too. Still, I always feel that Wimp is safer with Vans around. Stout fellow, Vans, even if he isn’t very quick-witted.
Anyway, Wimp lifts me by the slack of my pants and chucks me in the back, jumps in after me and says, “Get cracking!” to Vans.
Vans grins and starts the sphere.
By that time I knew where I was. Wimp was up to another of her games. She hadn’t told me in case I told her father and he put a stop to her foolishness.
So I got up and I said, trying to sound as dry as I felt, “And where is it this time?”
And Wimp looks round and she says, the hussy, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m so sorry.”
And I said, “No, I reckon you must have sort have forgotten to do so,” all sarcastic.
And all she did was to tickle me under the ear and say, “Poor little Twiddleums! Was ums little dignity hurt?”
That’s the sort of thing I have to put up with.
So, I turned to Vans, and I said, “Perhaps you can tell me where we are going.”
He looks at Wimp, and she nods. (I believe they thought I didn’t see.) And he says, “We are going to Deimos, Prince.”
“Deimos!” I said with a start. “I don’t wonder you didn’t want your father to know. That’s about the most dangerous trick you could get up to. I reckon your dad would have called out the entire army to stop you.”
“Just what I was afraid of,” she said carelessly.
“What’s the attraction on Deimos, anyway?” I asked.
“The pirate ship,” says Wimp. “Meaning the Ace of Spades?” I asked. “The ship of Belangor the Butcher, Venusian Space Pirate which we captured? That crashed.”
“It’s been repaired now.”
“And the men on it?”
“All in my father’s jails now. Reached Mars yesterday.”
“Do you mean to say,” I gasped, “that that beautiful ship has just been left on Deimos without anybody to look after it?”
“Afraid so.”
“And what do you aim to do?”
“Go for a run round in it. Isn’t it a shame that a lovely ship like that should be doing nothing?”
“Sure it is. But your dad—”
“Oh, him! He’d keep me tied to the end of a piece of string while he always held the other if he had his way.”
“He’s only looking out for your safety,” I said. “All the same I’d enjoy a run in that ship myself.”
CHAPTER II
The Emperor in Pursuit
EMPEROR USULOR had a sore head and was making everybody round him pay for it. General Stan Dattease went out of the Emp’s room with tears running down his face. It was not usual for Martian generals to walk about crying. But Dattease had an excuse. The Emp had got so excited he had grabbed hold of the general’s mustache and nearly pulled it off his lip. “And I’d throw my hand in and tell him to run his own blooming army,” the general growled to a friend, “if I didn’t know he’d send for me tomorrow and say he didn’t mean it and let’s be friends and won’t I have one of his special drinks with that vitamin in it that his doctors have only just discovered and don’t know what it does to you yet?”
Then the Emp found that return number ZK17652/L (in Martian) was not complete. And you should have heard him. But the Secretary of State said the forms were not printed yet. That did it! He called the printers on the teleview and really did let himself go that time. Then the master printer got a word in and said he hadn’t got the okay for printing because the Emp hadn’t made up his mind whether the form should be diamond shaped or circular or in red ink on green paper or yellow ink on blue paper.
Well, naturally, when the master printer told the Emp he hadn’t printed the forms because the Emp himself hadn’t given the okay, that made the Emp madder than ever. Because he couldn’t chew himself up and pull his own mustache. Not without looking silly, anyway. And that made him like a boiler without a safety-valve. All steam up and nobody to go for sort of style.
And that, naturally, had to be the moment when somebody walks in and says, “Her Highness, Princess Wimpolo, is missing!”
A WEIRD cry rang through the palace, echoing through miles of caverns, the way very loud sounds do in Mars. It was the cry of the lulong or Martian tiger, an enormous and terrible creature, no
w, luckily, rather rare. Guards snatched up their death rays. Searchlights were turned on. Parties began to search the palace grounds and all caverns within miles of the Imperial Palace.
Usulor stopped with his mouth open.
“Where did that noise come from?” he demanded.
“I thought it came from somewhere near the Emperor,” murmured somebody.
“What nonsense! My voice was drowned by that thing. What useless guards I must have to let such creature get so close to the palace! Why have I nobody but fools and ninnies ’round me?”
But he couldn’t stop to explain to the guards exactly what he thought of them just now. He had something that mattered more on his hands.
“Teleview Weil Hektorum,” ordered the Emperor.
“Hektorum’s office is tuned out of the television circuit,” said an official.
“Then use my master key, you tub of grease!”
The teleview caught Hektorum unlucky. His secretary was sitting on his knee. Hek and the secretary both looked up as the sound of the hooting of an owl came from the television screen. And they saw the face of the Emperor.
The secretary, mouth wide open in alarm, jumped off and ran.
“I was just training the girl in the wiles of a secret agent,” said Hektorum, who was Chief of Emperor Usulors Secret Service and the greatest detective on Mars.
“Hrrrmmmph!” said Usulor. At least, he tried to. But at the same moment a roar like that of an angry bear rang through the palace.
“When you have time,” said Emperor Usulor, “I’d like you to find out who has turned my palace into a home for wild animals. Every time I open my mouth an owl squawks or a donkey brays. But I’ve got another job for you now. Wimp has done it again!”
“Oh, my socks!” groaned Hektorum. “Cuss the girl!”
“What did you say?”
“I said that I would carry out Your Excellency’s wishes as rapidly as I can.”
“See you do. Report to me here at once.”
“But look here—”
Emperor Usulor had rung off. Hek sighed and threw a switch.
The Complete Saga of Don Hargreaves Page 34
