by Earl
Stella led the way to the open-air laboratory, walking slowly, as too much exertion in that dense atmosphere brought dizziness and incapacity to Earthly lungs, used to thinner mediums. When they came to the huge glass vats in which the raw ores were treated with certain acids to bring the radium compounds into solution, Guyon got his first close-up of a Jovian, native to this planet.
They were short, squat creatures with four boneless arms that looked like tentacles. But the thing that startled Guyon was that instead of feet or legs, they had two large rimmed wheels of flesh and bone! He watched one of them carrying a sack. Balancing on one of the wheel-legs, the Jovian leaned forward. Like a well-oiled machine, the wheel rolled along, and the upper body with it. Then, quick as a flash, and without lessening his forward progress, the creature leaned to its other side and the second wheel rolled him along. His speed was at least equal to that of a Mercurian, which was very fast.
Guyon turned to his companion. “Impossible! Tell me I’m dreaming! A wheel in nature—unthinkable!”
Stella smiled. “Not quite a wheel, Guyon. Notice that as one wheel moves him along, the other is coincidentally unwinding. They are really modified legs with very flexible ankles that can make about ten turns before tightening to a knot. Then all the Jovian does is use the other wheel and let the ankle unwind to normal.”
Guyon saw those things as he looked closer. They were a different form of leg admirably suited to a gravity which made the ordinary up and down movement of feet a wasteful, tiring, and laborious sort of progress. Here the Jovian wasted none of his energy lifting his feet directly against gravity. He simply shifted his center of gravity and applied muscular power to the ankles, which were the ‘axles’ of his wheel-legs. The resultant motion was eminently satisfactory, as Guyon could see by the ease with which the Jovians moved.
GUYON now looked around the immensity of the open-air laboratory. The Jovians for the most part stood before huge dishes of opaque glass, stirring them with large ladies. Walking up and down the aisles were Mercurians, who acted as slave-drivers. They had long, weighted sticks with which they whacked the Jovians at times, apparently to keep up the routine stirring.
“What an abominable record Castor is putting behind him!” said Guyon with inner rage. “Subjugation of native races was prohibited two centuries ago. He is reverting to practices long illegal in the Solar System.”
But the worst of it was, and both knew it without saying, that there was no one to stop him. And when Guyon looked at Stella and saw again the utter weariness in her step, the despair in her face, the marks of an ultra-tropical environment on her woman’s body, he thought that not the least of the traitor scientist’s sins was what he was making her go through.
Guyon’s black thoughts were interrupted by the words of Stella. She began explaining the long process by which the pure radium was obtained. Most of the initial refining steps, took place out here in the open, where endless crystallizations went on under the influence of heat and dry air. Then various reagents were added in the giant glass vats. Then the solutions were concentrated in smaller pans on long tables. The final concentrates went to The Master’s house, where it was understood there was a laboratory, although only a few highly trusted Mercurians were ever allowed in there. In this laboratory, the final processes were gone through which separated the radium from the barium compounds. There also it was stored, underground, in heavy lead-lined chambers.
“All of it?” asked Guyon. “Hasn’t Castor shipped any of it to Mercury yet, to his warships?”
“No, because he fears the loss of the balance of power, I suppose. If those ships were powered, the Mercurians could easily sweep down here and end his reign. And I rather think they have little love for him. He is a hard task-master. He is waiting till he has sufficient radium to power all the ships and also all the dis-guns. Each ship has one, and that takes a lot of radium. He will not strike till production passes the point of powering all war equipment.”
As they returned to their hut in the glare of the night lights, a figure approached them. Guyon clenched his fists and frowned.
“Greetings!” hailed Castor, coming up. “So now, Guyon, you have an idea of how invincibly my plans go along. Ah, Stella, you look worn and tired. Poor soul! But there is no need for it. You know my offer is always open. My house is Heaven compared to the rest of the open valley. It is artificially refrigerated and comfortably furnished. Just like a home on Earth. Good food, cool water. Say just a word, take me as your lord and master—and lover, and you will live in comfort!”
Stella said not a word, but glared at him eloquently.
Castor shrugged, and smirked confidently. “Some day, Stella—” He turned to Guyon, who had listened with fits of angered trembling. “And you, Guyon. Has the resourceful man with the tattooed ‘X’ on his arm devised a way to save the universe?”
They left abruptly with the triumphant, deriding laughter of the scientist ringing in their ears.
“I see now why he let me live,” muttered Guyon. “In pure malicious spite!”
CHAPTER TWO
The Mark of Courage
LIFE on Jupiter, in the radium valley of the Great Red Spot, settled down to monotonous, heartbreaking routine for Guyon. The Master assigned him to the chemical factory as an analytical expert. Guyon was glad to do something that could keep his mind off the smothering heat, the thick nauseous air, the bothersome red glow, and the inexorable doom of civilization. Not far away, within eyesight, worked Stella. The smiles she occasionally flashed him made his lot easier to bear.
In fact, except for her, Guyon might long ago have flung himself at Castor and fought the fight that could have ended in only one way—death to the younger man. Almost every day the scientist came to taunt him with polite-sounding, claw-sheathed words. Guyon suppressed all signs of resistance or aggravation. He could sense that Castor would have liked nothing better than to see the snap of his fortitude.
And Castor was invulnerable.
Every week of Jovian days, Guyon got his ration of Protection Salt, along with Stella and Cleve. It took the form of a pill of drugs, which, acting through the blood stream, built up tissue chemically to the point where deadly radium rays did no harm. Castor had had to solve this problem before invading the Red Spot, which even the hardiest of explorers shunned. The vials of pills were brought by a Mercurian, sometimes by Castor himself. In the latter case, each of them preserved a stony silence, refusing to be baited into showing their despair and misery.
Short though the days were, Guyon was glad to lie down after five hours of wakefulness. His body ached from dawn to dark with the ache of hardship. Sometimes he looked at Stella and wondered what marvelous fortitude upheld her woman’s body. Uncomplaining, at times actually cheerful, she brought rays of sunshine where otherwise there would have been deep depression. Her smile, the one thing that even the trials of Jovian existence could not eradicate, reminded Guyon of the silver moonlight of summering Earth.
Every night before he fell asleep, Guyon told himself—“There must be a way! There must be a way!” But each day, as he learned more and more of the clever web of defense and forethought displayed by Castor, his hope grew fainter.
One night, sitting at their evening meal, Guyon wiped the perspiration from his brow and broke a depressed silence.
“Cleve and Stella, we’ve done nothing. And yet something should be done. If we cannot escape and warn the System, we must then do the one thing left. And that is kill Castor himself! Without him the Mercurians couldn’t carry on.”
Cleve raised horrified eyes. “Kill him! You wouldn’t dare try!”
Guyon wrenched the short sleeve of his right arm upward. “Look—‘45X’. What is that?”
“Courage!” breathed Stella.
“But it’s a futile move in the first place,” argued Cleve, his eyes still dilated with horror. “The Master is invulnerable—chain-mail, weapons, poison gas. Why, we haven’t even a knife.”
Gu
yon paced up and down for a moment, meal forgotten. Stella followed him with wide eyes. She dropped them and flushed once as he glanced at her.
“Invulnerable, is he?” hissed Guyon suddenly, stopping. “Suppose, Cleve, that you and I were to come upon him alone, in darkness. Suppose you tackled him first around the legs and threw him down. Suppose I then grabbed away his weapons, out of his reach, and put my fingers about his throat and squeezed—and squeezed—and squeezed—” His hands were working around an invisible neck.
“Yes, but the gas!” cried Cleve.
“Suppose we held our breaths—”
THE daring plan was carried out two nights later, when Stella rushed in and informed them that The Master was walking to the house—alone. Furthermore, it was just the time of day when the sun was setting and the night lights were not yet on, so that it was quite gloomy outside.
As the scientist approached, Cleve and Guyon crouched on the other side of the hut. No Mercurians were within eyesight. As Castor passed the corner, Guyon nudged Cleve. The latter, pale and trembling, darted around the corner and flung himself frenziedly at the green-eyed man’s legs. Not a second later Guyon ripped away the silken robe as Castor crashed to the ground, jerked away the two pistols, and reached for his throat. Tensed for the gas, he promptly held his breath as it puffed from the little tubes, and gripped the bared throat eagerly. It was the scientist’s Achilles heel!
Even as Guyon jammed his thumb down on the man’s Adam’s apple, he wondered why Castor hadn’t made a sound. Perhaps the fall had stunned him. But no, for there were those hideous green eyes, staring at him—staring with a disdain that seemed entirely out of place. But this was no time for idle conjecture.
“Snake of hell!” hissed Guyon, as he pressed tighter.
Then, suddenly, he sagged limply to the ground. Castor staggered erect, pulling apart the arms of the likewise incapacitated Cleve. He kicked at Guyon.
“Fool! Did you think you’d succeed? Do you know what happened? My faithful slaves in the house that I inhabit are instructed to keep me under observance whenever I come here to your hut, for just this sort of emergency. They have a projector, also operated by radium, which sprays a paralyzing ray. Whomever it touches simply loses all muscular control. You will recover in a few minutes. For your attempt at my life, I should kill you, as I would any wild animal that attacked me. But I will let you live. You will suffer more alive—” He laughed harshly.
Guyon, completely paralyzed on the ground, heard the receding laughter of the turncoat scientist, as he left.
A few minutes later he staggered to his feet, shook his fist in the direction of The Master’s house, and thereby showed he was not yet beaten. But he found it harder after that to say, before falling asleep—“There must be a way!”
GUYON one day trembled as he ate his evening meal. Stella noticed it. “Is there something wrong, Guy on?” she asked quickly.
He pushed the food away abruptly and turned to Cleve. “I’ve just thought of something. If we could somehow build a radio and power it with some filched radium—Cleve, you’ve had enough higher physics to devise a simple radio. There’s lots of wire and other odds and ends in the plant that we could sneak away.”
Cleve at first had said dubiously, “Pretty hard to make a seven-prong tube, which is necessary for long-range broadcasting through space.”
“But, man, it’s worth a try!” Guyon insisted.
“We can’t get at Castor himself, it seems. Regardless of the difficulties, we’ve got to try this radio idea.”
And try they did. Cleve lost sleep and weight over the problem of constructing a workable seven-prong tube. Guyon filched the odd parts they needed from the electro-chemical laboratory. It was Stella, however, who got the radium. She sneaked it from the power-box of a train when it stood idle and unguarded.
Finally it was ready and they prepared for the attempt at spatial communication with the crude apparatus. Cleve, nervous and keyed-up, sent out the SOS call while Stella stood guard at the door. For a half hour this went on, the two men alternating in calling the distress signal and giving the approximate frequency for a return call. They were using the Ganymedian frequency as nearly as the crudeness of the affair would admit.
But the tiny diaphragm of the receiver only buzzed and crackled with static. No human voice greeted them from the void.
Suddenly Stella screamed. Even before she cried out, “The Master!”, he was in the room, leering at them.
“So, Guyon of Ganymede, one of the respected class of ‘X’, has made attempt number two!” The scientist laughed shortly. “Again a useless attempt. I could have told you before you started that radio communication is impossible from and into the Red Spot, because of the blanketing effect of radium emanation!”
He picked up the seven-prong tube and toyed with it. “You are clever, but not clever enough. Perhaps by now you realize that Castor, the future dictator of the Solar System, cannot be circumvented. I should put you two men out of the way. Your plotting, futile as it is, is becoming annoying.”
He turned to the girl, who stood by the door, as coldly silent and depressed as the men.
“But that would sadden sweet Stella. I will let you live, Guyon and Cleve, till existence becomes obnoxious to you. As for Stella—I think she would rather have me than death.”
“You flatter yourself!” she snapped.
Castor departed with his laugh of triumph resounding from outside. Sadly, in the throes of utter despair, they discarded the radio.
“Well, after all,” said Guyon in forced tones, “it was worth a try, and we haven’t lost anything.”
But he knew he was lying, for they had lost the last shred of hope.
UNENDING monotony. Ceaseless torture from the heat and the thick, miasmic air. Hopeless, purposeless existence. Red glare. Constant drain of vitality. Biting sarcasm from the man who was no longer a man but a green-eyed fiend. The daily round of fagging spirit. Dismal, feverish, mind-searing sameness.
“It’s all right for the Mercurians,” raged Cleve one evening. “They are more or less at home in this heat and they come from a world just a little less harsh and trying. Castor—worms of space eat his rotten heart!—is comfortable enough in his refrigerated rooms. But with us—good God!”
Guyon was a little more sturdy by nature, Stella seemed imbued with almost divine strength and courage. But one and all, they called it hell.
Then Guyon again lived up to the “X” in his name. Stella dispiritedly related, while eating one evening, of her overhearing Castor telling one of his Mercurians that he was taking a trip in his space ship and would be back four days later. Guyon sprang erect with an exclamation.
“Now’s our chance! Cleve—Stella—the hangar is turned partially away from The Master’s headquarters. When he comes out of the front end, he will be out of sight of the Mercurian at the paralysis gun. There is the time and place to attack him. Only the intervention of the paralyzing ray last time saved him. This time he won’t have that timely help!”
The attempt was made, four days later, and this time success seemed theirs. They were able to ambush The Master out of view of his quarters, throw him down, disarm him, and begin choking him, holding their breaths against the anesthetic gases.
Then Guyon groaned as he realized they had again lost, for the numbing paralysis that they had avoided so carefully swept over them. His limp fingers fell away from the red-marked throat.
Castor pushed Guyon’s limp body aside and staggered to his feet without a word. Guyon saw his saturnine face leering down at him. He had retrieved the pistols.
Castor rubbed his sore neck and the black frown on his face presaged evil. Guyon wished he could dose his eyes. Then the scientist spoke. “What defeated you this time is that I have telepathic contact with my Mercurian officers at all times. It was simple to tell them by this means that I was being attacked, although we were hidden from view. I see now that you will never give up, Guyon of Ganymede. I thought
to break your spirit, but it seems adamant. Although you are no danger, you are annoying.”
His voice seemed to hold suppressed anger and Guyon saw him toy with a pistol and look at it speculatively. But suddenly he put it aside, in its holster. “You and Cleve must be punished,” he went on, his voice low but ominous. “Not only punished but put out of the way. I know of no better way than to deprive you both of the Protection Salt! Radium emanations are all around you, constantly arising from the loam. Without the Salt, your flesh will waste away. You will literally die by fire—only the torture of that slow death is far worse than burning at the stake. About fourteen Jovian days and all will be over. When you are gone, I will take Stella to my rooms with me!” The curdling laugh of the monster above them throbbed in their ear-drums. It died suddenly.
“I will give you something to think about for the short time of life left to you. My plans are coming to a head. A month of Jovian days from now my fleet will rise and make me emperor of the Solar System! Pleasant dreams, Guyon of Ganymede. And now one more thing—if you make any more foolish attempts at my life, I will pour a solution of radium salt down your throats and let the flesh burn away from your bones!”
CHAPTER THREE
Fourteen Days to Live!
NEXT day a Mercurian came to the hut and handed Stella a vial, but there was only one pill in it. “The Master will send one pill each day,” explained the Mercurian, eyeing them maliciously. “It is for the girl.” He left.
They stayed in the hut, the three Earth people. It would have been a sorry farce to have gone to their old places in the chemical plant. Cleve rested inertly on his bunk all day. Stella offered food and water, and glanced at Guyon at times. He seemed in a trance, either standing looking out of the door, or seated in a chair. Cleve dozed once and awoke screaming from a nightmare. Their nerves were tattered to jangling shreds. Already that first day without the Protection Salt, the irksome prickling came to the men. Next morning it was worse.
