by Anthology
Frequently they examined the sky behind them, expecting momentarily to discover the tiny speck of flitting silver that would be the Selba. But if the ship was pursuing them it had not yet come close enough to be seen.
However, there was another, and perhaps greater menace which kept their eyes turning this way and that, searching for signs of danger. Clusters of dully-glowing specks in any quarter of the heavens would be the first indications of its presence. They would grow larger, come hurtling on like racing meteors in the sun's glow. Only there would be an odd wobbly motion about their darting flight. Shelby tested the trips of the two machine guns. Spurts of green flame plumed out of the muzzles.
He had set the radio transmitter in operation, and was sending occasional signals for assistance. But he knew that this was practically a useless move. Hekalu had taken them far off the beaten track, and they were still half a million miles from the Terrestro-Martian traffic lane. The range of the transmitter of this craft was only ten thousand miles. Even if they had been much nearer the chances of their signals being picked up were slight.
The Martian disc was growing larger. It had become an ochre sphere delicately ringed and mottled with greens and browns like a cloudy opal. The flier was fairly eating up the distance.
Shelby had just said: "I believe we're going to make it, Jan," and then the signs which they had hoped would not appear came. Ahead of them and a little to their right, a vague cluster of specks glimmered into view. It wavered like a wisp of luminous smoke buffeted by a light breeze. This was the one thing that distinguished it from a meteor cluster.
Rapidly the individual points of light grew, becoming tiny stars that glowed by the reflected light of the sun. Within five minutes there was no longer any chance of mistaking their identity, for their flat disc-like shapes and the half-human forms of the things that rode them were already visible through the binoculars. They were approaching at terrific velocity. Both Jan and Austin knew them to be subjects of Alkebar. There was no mistaking their motive. Doubtless orders had been flashed to them from the disabled Selba.
Realizing that these fleet space riders could easily catch up with his flier if they so chose, Shelby made no attempt to elude them. Instead he clung doggedly to the straight course toward Mars.
The twin machine guns, responding obediently to their directing mechanism, swung on their swivel toward the hurtling foes. Shelby peered into the eye-piece of the "sighter," a complicated arrangement of mirrors and lenses which enabled the pilot to always look directly through the ring-sights regardless of what direction the gun barrels were pointing. He pressed the trips, and soundlessly, out in the vacuum of space, the guns went into action. Flickering green flames of detonating radio-active explosive darted from their muzzles.
Almost immediately there were answering flashes among the approaching shapes, for the high-calibre bullets were also loaded with explosive. One projectile took effect—another! Emerald flares of light, and nothing remained of two bold space men and their queer disc-like vehicles but torn fragments of flesh and metal.
The Space Men were very close now. Jan and Shelby could see the light flashing on their jeweled harnesses and on the weapons which they flourished defiantly. There must have been almost five hundred in the party. Somehow their wild charge was vaguely reminiscent of a band of fierce Bedouin marauders, racing madly across the desert, bent on pillage. Only it was the Arabs who suffered by this comparison, for the desert of these mysterious Space Men was the whole of interstellar emptiness; and their forms and those of the things they rode, were the forms of the forces of Iblees himself.
Apparently these henchmen of Alkebar had some object in view other than the mere destruction of the flier, for they made no move to use their weapons. They were pulling upon levers on their vehicles, checking their headlong flight.
Now they were coursing with the little craft, swarming about it, edging nearer, at the same time taking care to keep out of range of Shelby's guns.
There was a scraping against the hull and a light jolt as a talon secured a hold on an eyelet ring. A black bulk dropped down on the nose of the craft. A pair of hands gripped the barrels of the machine guns, and with an easy tug, tore them from their mountings. There were shifting scratching sounds coming through the flier's light shell—heavy bodies moving about, and then a sudden ripping vibration. The control lever felt loose in Shelby's hand. He could no longer guide the vessel. And there was nothing either he or Jan could do except wait. The rocket motors still purred evenly.
"I guess they've got us this time, Jan," the young man said to his companion. "I wonder what they are going to do with us?" He spoke as casually as though this latest unfavorable turn of fortune was no more serious than the loss of a game of chess.
Janice Darell was equally cool. "Next time we win," she laughed. It is odd how human beings so often react to strange and terrifying situations. "I'm always ready, you see. Here I was crouching behind you throughout the fight with this perfectly useless pistol in my hand, hoping foolishly that I might be able to use it. That's loyalty."
They fell to studying the two monsters which rested on the nose of the craft in front of the pilot's observation window, where the guns had been. The Space Man was crouching out there trying to peer in at them. He was very much like Alkebar—only not so large, and his equipment and adornment did not boast so many jewels.
Shelby felt a peculiar sense of the unreality of the creature. He looked into its face and saw its eyes. Beside the left orb was a mottled area that must have been a scar. It seemed as concrete as anything he had ever seen, and yet for the second time, he told himself that such a creature wasn't possible!
Time honored tradition had said: "Life can exist only where there is oxygen, water and warmth." And all three of the requisites were lacking in the void. Shelby realized that tradition might be wrong, but the question still remained: How did these creatures of space live? Whence came the energy that kept their bodies functioning? If not from the combustion of food with oxygen, then where? If there were no moisture in their bodies, and there certainly couldn't be, for it would have been frozen in an instant and diffused through sublimation, how could vital fluids flow through their veins? He put these questions to Jan, but she shook her head.
"Hekki informed me that these people inhabited a region somewhere beyond Mars, but he did not tell how it was that they could live in space," she said. "It might be that they have had a development similar to terrestrial insects with the skeleton of armor enclosing their flesh."
The vehicles of the Space Men were even greater puzzles. How did they fly out here where the rocket was the only human invention that could move? Many of the vehicles were visible now through the flier's windows. They were disc shaped platforms of a strange lusterless metal. In the center of the top was an opening in which the Space Men sat. Projecting from the discs were a series of levers, permitting evidently simple control. But no hint of their principle of operation was given. They emitted no rocket jets; no beams projected from them.
Austin realized that there were many mysteries of the universe with which he was not acquainted; this was certainly one.
The sound of bodies moving about on the outer shell of the flier was still audible. Presently there was a sharp explosion somewhere toward the stern. The rockets immediately fell silent. The fugitives saw that some of the Space Men were now busying themselves with long metal cables. Deftly and expertly they were looping them through the eyelet rings set at frequent intervals along the sides of the flier.
The other ends of the cables they fastened firmly to similar rings on their vehicles. They finished the job with all the efficiency of trained military engineers. Then, with the small interplanetary vessel in tow, the Space Men began to move off toward Mars, rapidly gaining momentum until their speed must have considerably exceeded that which most space craft could equal. They deflected their course somewhat from the direct path to the Red Planet, probably to avoid a meeting with any wandering ship
.
Throughout the fantastic voyage Shelby and Janice Darell found little to do but stare dumbfounded at their weird captors and to watch the rapidly dropping needle of their oxygen supply-gauge. But as it proved, there was little danger of suffocation, for the Space Men were making good time.
And so, after two hours of flying they came to Mars—not to Taboor which the fugitives had previously hoped to reach, but to a deep valley in the desert of the Taraal. The strange caravan circled around to the night side of the planet, and then, slowly and carefully, but with a hint that they understood their work well, they proceeded to lower the disabled craft through the atmosphere to the ground below.
The door of the flier was torn open like a paper thing, and a black giant fully as huge and burly as Alkebar himself hustled the adventurers roughly out into the open.
The pock-marked face of Loo, the Martian name for their nearer moon, was in the sky, and by its light they could see hundreds of Space Men crowding about them. Plainly this Martian colony was fairly well peopled, for there were many more than the five hundred who captured them. The attitude of the onlookers was one of casual curiosity. For the moment at least they were not showing the more brutal side of their characters.
The fugitives were given but a moment to look about, while their jailer apparently carried on a silent conversation with one of his lieutenants.
They saw the sandy floor of the huge rectangular enclosure dotted with strange mounds which must have been some kind of shelter, the encircling walls crowned by square towers at regular intervals. Those walls were amber-colored in the moonlight, and cast dense shadows that shifted visibly as Loo raced in its meteoric course toward the east. Here and there before the mounds huge vague shapes squatted. At the center of the enclosure a tall spire of silvery girders rose, supporting at its summit a cone of a dull black substance. It looked like the creation of either Earthmen or Martians.
Beyond the wall the rounded summits of desert hills, over which in ages past, a restless ocean had poured and flowed, were visible. In spite of their position the two young Earthians could not help but marvel at the silent grandeur of this exotic scenery. A light though chilly desert wind blew refreshingly against their faces.
The black giant had kept a hand on each of his prisoners during his brief conference, and now, none too gently, he guided them to the entrance of one of the mound dwellings. The Space Man ushered his charges into a corridor, and then, fumbling with a curious lock he opened a heavy door and shoved them into the dim-lit room beyond. With a rattling clink the great stone panel closed behind them.
A lump of self-luminous rock set in the stone ceiling gave a faint illumination to the bare interior. There was no furniture—only the sand-covered floor and rough rocky walls. On the floor a Space Man, larger and more magnificently-muscled by far than any they had yet seen, sprawled. He was either unconscious or dead; they could not tell which. There were hideous welts and gashes and half-healed scars all over his body. The gashes were caked with a viscid purplish substance.
With the coming of the sudden Martian dawn which flashed through a narrow embrasure high in the wall, the jailer returned. His first act was to thrust the needle of what appeared to be a form of hypodermic syringe into the arm of the unconscious Space Man. Then he led his Earthian captives out into the open.
Neither Jan nor Austin were surprised when they saw the Selba squatting near the base of the spire. Several Space Men, directed by the slave Koo Faya, moved about the ship, working the fueling pump.
Walking down the gangplank which led up to the entrance of the vessel was Alkebar, and beside him, Hekalu himself. The latter sauntered leisurely toward his captives, and the Chieftain moved off toward a group of Space Men standing some distance away.
Chapter VII
Ankova's Story
The Martian made a brief nervous sign to the jailer. "Gently, Rega," he said. The Space Man relaxed his painful grip on his prisoners. The noble surveyed them smiling. Defiantly, half contemptuously, Shelby was smiling back.
Finally, with a mocking casual air, Hekki spoke: "There is a very ancient saying on your planet," he said, "to the effect that bad pennies always return." The corners of his mouth twitched with sardonic amusement. His manner grew more serious, yet still there was an undercurrent of sarcasm: "Miss Darell and Mr. Shelby, I want to compliment you on your remarkable cleverness and daring. Words cannot express my admiration for you. You have every right to be proud of yourselves."
Shelby nodded. "We are," he told him drily. "Is there anything more on your mind?" He turned away with an expression of bored contemptuous indifference.
"I have little to say except that we are about to continue our recently interrupted journey tonight, Mr. Shelby," said the Martian.
He saw the Earthman and the girl casting interested glances at the disc vehicles that surrounded them everywhere.
"You like my people?" Hekki inquired. "You find them entertaining? Perhaps you have discovered things in their habits which you cannot understand. Shall I give you explanations?" For the moment at least there was a serious earnest ring in Hekalu's voice.
"Flag of truce, Jan. This should be interesting," Shelby said. His eyes were full of eagerness as he turned back toward the Martian. "How do they live out there?" he cried. "There isn't any air or water, and it's almost as cold as it can get anywhere. Why, the thing is utterly impossible according to the laws of common sense!"
Immediately all of Hekalu's lazy air of careless mockery was gone, and the dynamic aura of the tireless experimenter and inventor that had hidden beneath it showed out clear. His voice was husky with suppressed excitement when he spoke:
"I too was dumbfounded when, some five Earth years ago, I first ran across the Space Men out there. (He waved his hand toward the west away from the sun.) But after I had studied them for a time, I knew that there was really nothing very remarkable or impossible about the nature of their living. It is actually quite similar to our own.
"Why do we need air? Simply because by the chemical combination of oxygen with food we obtain the energy necessary to make our brains to think, our limbs to move, and our hearts to beat. Energy is life. But doesn't it occur to you that this vital thing might be obtained in some other manner? The Space Men do. Their principal food is the radio-active element, atomic number 109, as yet undiscovered on the planets. It is a purplish liquid that is fairly abundant on a number of the planetoids. Daily, like radium, it gives off vast quantities of energy; and when in the systems of the Space Men it supplies them with power more efficiently than food and oxygen ever could do for us.
"Why can't we survive the intense cold of space? The answer is a simple one. The protoplasm of all forms of living things that we know of, including the Space Men themselves, is a colloidal jelly the principal portion of which is, and must be, a liquid. Cells must be bathed and nourished, and impurities washed away. Without liquids there seems to be no likelihood that there would be any life, unless in some manner a gas could perform this fluid function. Solids would remain forever dead and motionless.
"If anything happens to chill even slightly the protoplasm of any of the higher forms of planetary life, the body fluid becomes sluggish and death may result. No mammals or birds that we know of can live actively with their body temperatures at all approaching the freezing point of water. However, in the polar seas of both planets there are creatures whose systems function quite normally with their blood temperatures just above this point. But beyond this deadline, zero degrees Centigrade, or a little lower or higher, depending on the actual congealing point of the water in their bodies, even they cannot go, for there, the cold limit of Terrestro-Martian life has been reached.
"Why couldn't these polar fish survive the cold of space? Simply because the protoplasm of their tissues, based on water, would instantly become solid, and in solids as I have said, there can be no real life except perhaps in the form of suspended animation.
"The Space Men face no such danger, f
or first, their bodies are protected by this heat-resisting outer covering; and second, the liquid in their veins freezes only at absolute zero, and since it is radio-active—producing heat from within itself—it cannot get that cold even in the void. And that, friends, is the whole stupendous, simple explanation."
"And how do the Space Men's vehicles move?" asked Jan.
Hekki shook his head. "Except that a strange propulsive ray is involved, I know very little about it. I have not yet discovered how the Space Men manage to produce the ray. The works of Nature ever surpass the works of man.
"And that is all I have time for now, my friends. Breakfast is ready aboard ship. Enjoy my hospitality to the fullest!" Hekki's mask of smiling sardonic cruelty had dropped again. He waved something to Sega.
Janice, sensing that she was about to be separated from her lover, threw herself into his arms. The series of things she had gone through in the past twenty-four hours had frayed her nerves almost to the breaking point.
"Don't let them take me away from you, Austin. Don't let them! Oh, Hekki, please!"
Hekalu's face reddened, and then Sega tore the two apart. Shelby struggled but it was useless. Sega's huge muscles were quite equal to the task of mastering a dozen of the best fighting men of Earth.
He dragged his captives aboard the Selba, and guided by the inscrutable Koo Faya, locked them in chambers from which escape would now be definitely impossible. Jan was thrust into the room she had occupied before, but Shelby was put into a chamber somewhat larger than his original prison.
An almost ungovernable fury had taken possession of the young Earthman. If for only a moment he could get his hand on the smooth Hekalu! His fingers clutched and unclutched spasmodically as he hurriedly paced the room. When presently, he found himself hammering on the walls with the frenzy of a trapped gorilla, a realization of where he was headed came to him. "Stop where you are, you fool!" he muttered to himself.
