The alphabet and “books” of the Malakarji remained unreadable, though he did spend a day listing the various symbols and their colored variations and trying to decipher them. He caught no evidence anywhere of pictures and never learned just what the Malakarji Vegans looked like.
It was at a time when he was about halfway between Mars and the orbit of Venus when he happened to make a routine check of his control room radar board. Phobos was long off the board and out of sight, probably nearing its destination. Mars was a red disk barely visible toward the rear of a side window. No other objects showed on his board, no asteroids of which he had passed a few, not even meteor clusters which registered briefly as blue sparks.
He saw on the edge of the board, in the direction of Mars, a little yellow dot. Now red was for planetary objects, white for his own ship, blue were meteors, and a wisp of green had appeared once for a small comet. But what did yellow represent?
He watched the dot and even as he watched, a second yellow dot appeared, then a third. He caught his breath, wondered. Then four more yellow dots appeared. The first dot was now visibly closer to his central white square, and as he watched, the others began to fan out behind it like the V of a flight of wild ducks.
An unnatural movement, thought Nelson, as he watched in puzzlement. The sort of thing intelligence would do, not some astral phenomena. And then it struck him. These must be spaceships. Following him, able to close in on him even at his tremendous rate of speed, too fast for any Earth-made craft to match.
The Marauders had arrived, had spotted him, were chasing him!
Anxiously Nelse watched as an eighth and a ninth yellow dot appeared on his board, joining the formation. He saw by their apparent speed across his dial that they were traveling much faster than he was, that they were going directly for him, would catch him soon.
He hesitated over his controls for a moment. Possibly the cubical spaceship was capable of more speed than it had—in fact he knew it was. But Telders had laid out a carefully plotted course for his craft to follow. Nelson knew that if he changed speed or otherwise altered the exact path that the navigator had calculated for him, his chances of getting back to Earth would rapidly vanish.
Space flight is such a difficult thing to calculate. Unlike traveling on the seas of Earth, with which it is sometimes compared, it is much more like trying to hit one of a flight of wild ducks with a strong slingshot while riding on the back of another flying bird going in a different direction. Each planet is moving at different speed; each affects the other as it goes. To travel between them requires an exact knowledge of all the immediate locations, directions and speeds, and the ability to figure out at lightning speed the same relationships at any given time in die future. It was work performed by intricate machines, built into the controls of Earth’s ships.
Probably there was such machinery built into the Vegan spaceship too, but Nelson had never located it, and if he had, would not likely have been able to determine how to use it. Furthermore, he lacked the astrogators’ charts which every ship carried giving the figures for the solar system planets.
At this moment there was a difficult decision for him to make—one that he must make without delay. If he tried to outrace the Marauders, it might possibly work, but it would result in his becoming desperately lost, perhaps doomed to chase Earth around the sun by hit-or-miss efforts for years to come—if the cubical space house’s mysterious power source held out that long.
Yet not to change speed would mean his capture or destruction for sure. For an instant he hung over the plugs at his odd control table, his hands hanging motionless. For an instant thoughts of Earth ran through his head, of its men and women rushing to prepare defenses, of spaceships being hastily equipped with available weapons to stand off invasion. Every second, every hour, every day gained for them was valuable. The life of one man was nothing. He smashed down on his speed plug, watched the green bulb suddenly flare blindingly as his fingers relentlessly pressed down the plug.
He felt a strain growing on him. In spite of the excellent system of gravity and compensational effects built into the amazing cubeship, it was evident that he was under tremendous acceleration. On his observation dial he saw the flying wedge of yellow dots suddenly pull back, start to disappear off the board, as they were outstripped.
Now their progress off the board stopped as only one was left in sight at the edge of the board. Stubbornly it lingered, refusing to disappear. Then, to Nelson’s horror, it slowly, slowly, began to crawl back.
The green speed bulb still blazed, and yet tire pursuing ship was coming back and then the second and third yellow dots fought their way back into range and slowly the others began to creep up.
Nelson knew that his die was cast. He was already ahead of Telders’ carefully plotted course, at what speed, the unreadable gauges of his Malakarji craft could not tell him. There were no planets near him. He was somewhere near the orbit of Venus, but that body was far away. Nelson punched the controls that would turn the ship, swerve it off.
If he could not outrun his pursuers, he could dodge, twist, turn, give them a chase for their money!
The cube swung far away and the yellow dots swerved off the board again. Now Nelson headed on, at right angles to the course he had been following. He took the time to glance out of the visual window panels, but he could not see the Marauders. He knew he wouldn’t, for they must be tens of thousands of miles distant and invisible against the star-strewn blackness of the sky.
He went back to his panel, and again the yellow dots had come into sight, swinging after him, catching up. He watched awhile as they drew closer and closer. He had another idea now.
When he felt that they must be very close, when their V was well into the board, nearing the white square central light that was Nelson’s ship, he yanked up the speed plug completely. The green indicator suddenly dimmed and went out. His ship’s engines were off.
He felt a vertigo as the little house’s gravity vanished with the silencing of the engines. His feet drifted up from the deck and his head reeled as weightlessness returned.
On the panel he saw the yellow dots sweep past his cube fast and vanish off it in the other direction. Nelson punched a direction plug, rammed down his speed again, and the white cube started to reverse its speed, to dash away in another direction.
For a while it seemed to work. Anxiously Nelson hovered over the panel, but the yellow dots continued to be absent. For a moment he thought uneasily that perhaps the Marauders had not been chasing him, had been headed toward Earth, and that he had sacrificed his course needlessly. Perhaps he had only mistakenly supposed they knew of his existence, and had simply misinterpreted their change of direction.
He realized that he was perspiring freely as he watched the board. His ship was probably heading back out toward Mars again if its speed had been fully reversed. He wondered if it was so, because he knew that it would have been impossible for any Earth-built rocket to make such a reversal. But the capacities of this cube were unknown.
He supposed that some sort of magnetic lines of force were the guiding means of its propulsion. His father had briefly mentioned something about cosmic power lines of force unknown to terrestrial science, about accumulators, and had ventured the hint that the cubeship’s power might be attained in some such way. But the capacities of such a vessel were still unclear, if indeed that was the means.
Well, maybe it had worked. Maybe the Marauders were left behind, but if they were roving the solar system, he’d encounter them again. Nelson realized that he had better investigate the cube’s weapons.
There were what seemed to be gun projections on each of the four walls—at least he remembered seeing the little bulges as he had gone into the craft for the first time. He went into the outer shell, saw that there were such bulges at the inside, but that apparently the controls for them were also in the central room. He returned, hunted for them.
He slid aside a metal panel on one wall and saw four s
mall polished disks set therein. He pressed one of the several plugs set neatly beneath each one. Instantly the disk became transparent and he saw that it was a small visual panel giving a view of space similar to that shown by the major “windows.” Across this disk appeared various spidery cross lines, directional lines.
Nelson pushed a second plug and a glow appeared in the center of the crossbars. It changed slowly from blue to green as he watched. He heard a humming sound coming from the board. The green changed slowly to yellow and began to work into orange. In a flash of intuition it struck Nelson that a force charge was building up, that something was charging the weapon in that wall.
The orange changed to a burning red dot, and then there was a click, and a plug popped out. The red dot remained, and now Nelson was sure that all he had to do was to push the new plug in and the weapon would discharge.
Taking no chances, young Parr proceeded to activate and charge the other three gunsights. Then he returned to the main control observation panel.
Even as he went toward it he knew the yellow dots were back. He leaned over the panel. The V of nine pursuers was there, reversed, coming again straight as an arrow for Nelson's ship.
He could dodge again, but eventually they would catch him. He decided to try his luck with the ship's guns.
Nelson watched the yellow dots creep slowly closer to his ship. He stepped over to the wall panel and the four visual disks. On one of them a spot of yellow had appeared at one far edge. The first of the Marauders was in sight of the ship’s detectors.
Nelson risked a glance out the actual window panel, but he could see nothing against the stars. But the gun-sights showed the enemy moving slowly closer to the central line of crossbars.
Another yellow dot appeared dimly behind the first one, but the first was visibly glowing brighter. Nelson watched closely with held breath as the yellow dot drew nearer the glowing point of scarlet. Minutes passed as he stood, keyed on edge, waiting for the two dots to overlap. At last the red dot began to eclipse the yellow one, to show an orange tint. He watched, his hand on the plug, and then came the moment that there was but a single dot in the exact center of the disk—a bright pure orange.
Nelson pushed the plug in.
There was an instantaneous flash of blinding white, and when Nelson s eyes stopped blinking, the disk was dark, one yellow spot—that of the second ship-hovering near the rim, and a dimmed yellow dot rapidly moving out to the edge and vanishing. A spot of blue shone in the crossbars and began to build up to green, as a new charge was loading into the gun.
Evidently the weapons launched a bolt of atomic power, like a huge lightning blast. He wondered whether it had destroyed the Marauder or only disabled it.
Now he glanced at the three other weapon disks and was dismayed to see that two of them carried yellow dots in sight. While he had been waiting, the rest of the pursuers had come up, were surrounding his ship, closing in.
He had not yet tasted the power of their weapons* His shot had probably taken them completely by surprise. But now they would come for him with their weapons blazing. Nelson realized that if they did, he had but scant moments to live.
He gritted his teeth. Well, he’d put up a fight as long as he could. All his four guns were activated, and on two of them, yellow dots were closing in to his target sight. He watched them come, bracing himself unconsciously for the blow that must surely be heading his way.
But somehow they were holding their fire. He was wet with perspiration as another red fire spot turned orange with its target. He slammed down the plug, and was rewarded by another blinding white flash, taking care this time to look away so that his sight would not be dazzled.
But when he looked back the yellow dot was still in the center of the disk and glowing brighter and brighter. He gazed with horror. Somehow the shot had been neutralized, deflected!
There came a terrific clap of thunder in his ears and the cube jolted violently. Nelson was thrown from his feet. The ship’s lights dimmed almost to darkness as he slid across the floor, tingling as if a mighty hand had slapped him.
He sat up dazed and shaken. Slowly the ship’s lights struggled back into brightness again. Nelson got to his knees, and then to his feet, dizzy from the shock. He shook his head, forced himself back to his full senses, groped back to the defense panel. But all four disks were black, lifeless, burned out.
Somehow, he thought, they were able to catch that thunderbolt, toss it back on its track, back to me! The ship was now helpless!
He hurried back to the control panel, but to his horror, it too was dark. They had blown the ship’s control system entirely. He was now boxed up, blind in space, out of control.
Nelson sat down and stared a moment. Would the Marauders leave him there now, go on their way? No, he decided, it wasn’t like them. They’d come in person to look the ship over, to see what they had captured. Well, he’d give them a fight if they did!
He got up, went to the room he’d been using as sleeping quarters, found his spacesuit, climbed into it. He buckled it on fully, secured his space helmet tightly, leaving only the face panel open. Attired thus, he went to the ladderway to the lower level, descended, and found the cabinet of tools that he had discovered there in his tour of exploration. He found a nice thick metal bar, a couple feet long, a perfect crowbar or cudgel. Armed with this, he clambered back up to the central chamber.
He didn’t have too long to wait. In a little while he heard a bump and a scraping sound along the outside of the ship. There was a clanging as if something was being affixed to the outside. Then there was a buzzing sound, and he recognized the noise of the outer space lock door being opened. There was a vibration in the floor as heavy feet tramped through and a sudden stir in the ship’s air as the inner lock door slid open.
Nelson closed his helmet face panel, slipped up to the entry to his chamber, and hefted his crowbar. He heard the clang of heavy feet stamping around down on the floor below. Then suddenly a black metallic helmet popped up through the round passageway in the floor. Nelson swung at it, and the head pulled back.
He had a glimpse of a curiously ridged black helmet, of a broad eye panel beneath it, and a brief glimpse of two eyes darkly within. At least the Marauders were humanoid, Nelson thought.
He waited. Then suddenly the opening seemed to erupt figures. Three, four black metal-clad men popped up through the floor trap as if shot from guns. Nelson swung his bar, dashed in at them.
He felt his weapon thud satisfyingly against a metal-clad body. There was a yelling. He got a glimpse of a man’s face glaring at him through a helmet, as a black form loomed suddenly over him ... a dark face with pale blue eyes, set under a jutting pair of red eyebrows. Nelson swung his club, but it was tom from his hands, and a second later there came a terrific thud on the side of his helmet, a second crash as someone else struck him, and everything went dark.
Chapter 17 Incredible Daybreak
Nelson Parr turned over in bed, snuggling his face against his pillow. Gradually he became aware that he had been asleep, that he was waking up. Still, the drowsiness of slumber kept him from opening his eyes. He was warm, comfortable, and snug in bed, and the feel of the sheets was good.
He wondered whether there would be school today, down at the main junction, but then he remembered that he had graduated long ago. Well, then, he was going to Earth to study. Again, this thought did not ring true. No, he thought, still snuggled down, still unwilling to drop his last moments of sleep, that had been done and he was home now. So then what was he supposed to do today?
He lay still awhile, thinking. Gradually an uneasiness began to fill his mind. Various thoughts and strange memories pushed into his brain. They were going to evacuate Mars? But they already had! And he’d gone somewhere with his dad .. . oh, yes, to Phobos and Deimos. There’d been Jim Worden, he remembered now, and a cold chill suddenly struck him.
Why, Jim was dead, and terrible things had happened, and there had been Kunosh and his lies
and treachery and then the cubical ship and then a chase.
The Marauders! The thought exploded in Nelson’s head like a bomb. His eyes popped open and he sat up in bed with a start.
He blinked. The first thing he saw was a triangular piece of cloth tacked to the wall bearing the inscription in bright red letters, Solis Lacus General School. It was his old school banner. He swiftly moved his eyes about. There was a carefully hand-framed fix-photo of his father and some ceremony. Against the wall was a jumping stick and other athletic equipment. His eyes fell on his old bureau, on his little folding desk, on a chair. On the chair was a pile of clothes, neatly folded. His rocket-travel jumper, his shoes.
He looked at his bed, and it was his own bed and this was his own room in his father’s house on Mars. Nelson rubbed his eyes, looked at his hands. Could this all have been a dream?
But the memory was too vivid. He rubbed his head and winced a little. There was a tender spot on his scalp where the Marauder club had struck him. This was no dream! But how had he got here? And what had happened to the space plunderers?
He climbed out of bed, half expecting someone to rush in, attack him. But he heard nothing. He was dressed in a pair of his own pajamas, a pair he remembered having left behind.
Hastily he changed clothes, got dressed. He glanced at himself in a mirror. He seemed changed, space-tanned. He looked as if he had been through an experience, no doubt about it.
Dressed, he stared around the bedroom he thought he had left behind forever. It seemed unchanged, and yet... he carefully enumerated everything in it. There was a change. Something caught his eye on the main wall. There had always been a blank panel there, a Martian picture panel presumably, inactive like all the Martian mysteries. It was still there—but it was no longer black and dull.
The Secret of the Martian Moons Page 13
