Midos Ken, guided by his marvelous hearing, led the way back to the elevator shaft. They stepped out into the ray which cut off the planet’s gravitational pull. The uprushing current of air swept them back to the floor of the great hall, where they were set down gently beside the shaft.
Then, as silently as possible, they ran down the length of the hall. They were in considerable danger.
“No ray weapons can be used now,” Midos Ken had warned them as they left the cell. “Even the electric force that killed those who attacked me in the hall will now be valueless. For all these depend upon vibrations in the ether. And the ether has been exhausted from about us by the bomb.
“Your weapon, Dick, would still operate. But since you cannot see your mark, it might be so near that the explosion of what you hit would knock us down, as it did you.
“So, if we run into Garo Nark’s men, there is nothing to keep them from overpowering us by mere force of numbers. The only advantage we have is that I am used to utter darkness, and can guide you others through it—while Nark and his men must be stumbling blindly about.”
To Dick, the progress of their escape was an endless turmoil of confusion, a sort of nightmare. He could see nothing. He had no idea in which direction they were going. He could only stumble on and on, led by Thon’s hand on his arm.
There was a time—he supposes they were outside in the streets of the city, if Nuvon, the capital of Garo Nark, had streets—when they heard voices. A party, apparently, was searching for them in the darkness.
They stood still, and waited silently until the searchers were gone.
And another party stumbled into them. They stood as still as possible. A man blundered into Dick, gasped with astonishment. Dick was alert, ready, having felt the man as he first brushed against him. He got his hands on the neck of the unfortunate searcher before he had recovered enough from his surprise to call for aid.
He throttled that man without making sound enough to rouse the attention of his fellows, without letting him cry out. Later he wondered how he did it, how he found the strength and the ferocity. Was he, as Garo Nark had taunted him with being, an apeman from the past, stronger than the average man of this age? He supposed so, since his time was two million years nearer the jungle.
They came upon an empty flier, it seems, in the outskirts of the city. It had been abandoned. Dick had high hopes of reaching the Ahrora in it, until Midos Ken reminded him that no mechanism using etheric vibrations as energy could operate in this space from which the ether was exhausted.
But that was not wholly a disadvantage, since their enemies were also forced to keep to the ground. In fact, it would appear that the fliers which happened to be in the air when the ether was exhausted must have crashed down with their crews.
Though they had no way to measure time, it must have taken several days to reach the Ahrora. Dick marveled at Midos Ken’s ability to guide them in the right direction, to warn them of danger. Five times they entered buildings, to find food and water. But they did not sleep.
To Dick it was all a nightmare, relieved only by the calm, sure courage of Midos Ken, the daring and the boundless good humor of Don Galeen, and the hope, and confidence, and sweetness of Thon Ahrora.
Many times Dick felt too weary and hopeless to go on. On each such occasion, old Midos Ken held under his nostrils a bit of the substance from which the pungent, invigorating vapor rose. The drug restored his strength and courage; he was able to keep up the struggle.
At some time during these days, Thon told him of the adventures that had led her to the cell with Don Galeen, where they had found her. About twenty-four hours after she had left the Ahrora, she walked into the inhabited areas of the planet.
The first person she met, it seems, was an old gardener or forester, caring for groves of trees which grew on the outskirts of the settled belt of the planet. To him she represented herself as a wealthy citizen of Garo Nark’s empire, a favorite of one of the governors of the pirate planet. Dick could hardly imagine Thon, innocent and ingenuous as she was, assuming such a role.
But she was successful. The old forester believed her story and accepted the generous bribe she gave him to assist her. She told him she wanted to reach a friend of hers imprisoned in Garo Nark’s dungeons. He took her to the city of Nuvon, and after exacting an additional bribe, introduced to her a kinsman of his who was one of the palace guards.
By this time, by listening to casual gossip of the court, she had heard about Don Galeen, the interplanetary adventurer, whom Garo Nark had captured on another planet. He was in the palace dungeons, she heard, soon to be tortured to make him reveal the location of some wonderful treasure he had discovered in space.
Cautious inquiry, and a few more of the diamond tokens, brought her knowledge of the location of Don’s cell. Another generous bribe overcame the scruples of the palace guard against conducting her to the cell. But after he had left Thon in front of Don Galeen’s cell, her guide betrayed her, raising the alarm—perhaps in the hope of another reward, from Garo Nark.
By the time the guards arrived, Thon had cut the cell door open with her El Ray. With her weapons she was able to stand off the guards. But she and Don were unable to leave the cell, without meeting forces they could not face.
Thus they had been at bay when Dick and Midos Ken had found them.
DICK will never forget the relief he felt when they arrived at the Ahrora. For hours before, they had been stumbling through the snow, over the rugged floor of the canyon. The cold had not been painful, for cold is merely the absence of heat, and the space about them, from which the ether had been exhausted, was as opaque to heat as to light. Thus the warmth of their bodies had not been radiated and lost.
But those last hours had been hours of hell, of torture, of blind, endless effort—hours of pain. They were hours when it took every ounce of his will to take each stumbling step. Hours when he seemed alone in a universe of night, and the voices of his companions came from other far universes.
Then they felt the ship. It had not been molested—Midos Ken had seen to it that it would not be, by setting automatic weapons to bring down any man or ship that ventured near it. Even without such protection, the ship would probably have been safe—it would have been impossible for any power of Garo Nark’s to break her neutronium armor.
Midos Ken voiced a series of low, humming notes to open the combination lock. He flung open the heavy door. Dick had just consciousness left to realize that they were safe at last, and to stumble into his stateroom. He threw himself down on his berth, his ragged garments still clinging to his weary body, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
Garo Nark’s men found the Ahrora before the darkness left. There was nothing they could do, however, save wait outside, or hammer in vain on the neutronium hull of the flier. The etherless space was shelter against all electromagnetic weapons.
When Dick woke from a long, dreamless sleep, feeling refreshed, though his muscles were still a bit stiff, the darkness was still about them, a pall of utter midnight. He was still lying in his berth when light came back. The green, luminous walls of the little cabin burst suddenly into view, with a brilliance that, at first, was blinding and painful to his eyes.
At once, he sprang up, and ran from his room along the corridor to the domed bridge-room. Swinging open one of the shutters over the crystal observation windows, he saw the dark mountains about them once more, with the strange stars above, and the dim glow of light in the south, above the cities of the planet.
About the ship were hundreds of men. He could see them by flares they were lighting, and in the glare of searchlights that were turned upon the flier. Near them was a strange machine, looking a little like a huge searchlight, Dick says, but probably a weapon erected to be ready for use when the ether should return. A group of men were busy about it.
Then Thon came bounding into the control room.
“Quick, the lever!” she cried.
Before Dick had had time to mo
ve, her fingers were upon the little control lever, with its white accelerator button. Upward they flashed from the surface of the planet. When Dick looked for it a few minutes later, the Dark Star was but a tiny speck of light lost in the hosts of the unfamiliar firmament.
“How are you?” the girl asked solicitously.
“Oh, I’ll be good enough after a bath and a shave and some clean clothes and a little breakfast,” he said, grinning. “And how are you? You seem to have enjoyed most of those things already—except of course, the shave!”
For Thon Ahrora was beautiful, her lithe body clean and glowing from a bath, clad in a garment of the brilliantly blue silk which was her favorite.
“Yes, I got up when it was still dark,” she was saying, when Midos Ken and Don Galeen came up to the bridge. The two of them had slept in the larger stateroom of the old scientist, Don occupying an extra berth.
Don Galeen, tanned and powerful, clad in his soft brown leathern garment, seemed unaffected by their terrible journey back to the flier. His weather-beaten face glowed with smiling good humor. He greeted Thon with such unfeigned and unhidden admiration that Dick, to hide his jealousy, hurried out, on the pretext of making himself presentable again.
It was an hour later when he returned to the bridge, shaved, washed, and freshly clad.
He found Thon conferring with her father, and making intricate computations on a huge sheet of that white material used as paper. Don Galeen was looking on, evidently supplying information and suggestions.
“We are plotting our course for the Green Star,” Thon told him. “Don is helping make a map of that part of the universe in which it lies.
“So we are off for the Green Star, now?”
“We are already driving toward it with the full power of the generators,” Midos Ken told him.
“How soon should we get there?”
“It is well over fifty thousand light years—it should take over one hundred days, perhaps four months.”
Thon, Dick, and Don Galeen were to stand regular watches of four hours each. On Dick’s first watch, a few hours later, he fell to observing the Dark Star through the ship’s telescopic instruments. At first the faint speck of light that was the pirate planet slowly grew more indistinct, as they drew away from it. But presently it seemed to lose no more in brilliance.
“Something must have happened to the generators,” Dick muttered. “We aren’t leaving it as we should!”
A few minutes later, a little disturbed, he called Midos Ken into the bridge.
“I’ve been watching the Dark Star,” he said. “And it doesn’t seem to be getting fainter as it should. Can there be something wrong——”
“The Dark Star still in sight?” the old man was astonished.
“It is.”
“Then Garo Nark has beaten us again!” _
Surprise and dazed apprehension in his manner, Midos Ken called Thon. She looked at the Dark Star,
still visible in the instrument and growing no fainter, and consulted her charts.
“Yes, Dad,” she said at length. “The Dark Star is following us.”
“The Dark Star is following us!”
Dick shouted the words, in incredulous amazement.
“Following us? What do you mean?”
“The planet is moving behind us,” Thon told him.
“Garo Nark’s scientists must have developed K-ray generators powerful enough to move their planet like a ship,” Midos Ken added. “It has been known, for ages, of course, that the energy of atoms is powerful enough to swing planets from their orbits. But never before has it been done in practice—no K-ray generators large enough to accomplish such a feat have ever been built—or had been built, rather, until Garo Nark built them!
“The Lord of the Dark Star wishes to seize the fruits of our work for his own evil ends, of course. He wants the secret of life; wants endless youth for himself and his favorites.
“He would rob humanity of the secret of immortality for his own benefit!
“He is following us! Following with a whole planet. Our best chance is to lose him, and beat him to the Green Star.”
CHAPTER IX
Fire of the Green Star
LONG days went by, endless and monotonous. The Ahrora was flashing through interstellar space with her generators developing their utmost power. The little white cylinder of the accelerator was kept locked down. Thon, Don Galeen, and Dick stood watch after watch, as the little flier hurtled forward.
Faint flecks of light appeared in the abyss of utter midnight before them and grew swiftly brighter, until they became dazzling stars, became flaming suns, flashed past, and dwindled behind them.
Directly behind them hung always a dim speck of light, invisible without the highest power of their telescopes. It was the Dark Star, a planet plunging after them in a titanic chase through space.
As soon as they had found that the pirate planet followed them, their direction of flight had been changed a little, so that it would not give a clue to the location of the Green Star. But the damage, Dick thought, had already been done. The planet must have been moving for several hours before they discovered it.
Thon and Don Galeen spent hours in the narrow generator room in the tail of the flier, nursing the throbbing apparatus, trying to make the generators deliver an extra ounce of power.
Midos Ken spent days in thought, trying he said, to devise some way of making their ship invisible as Garo Nark’s fliers were. For it was evident that powerful telescopes upon the Dark Star must be following them. The ether-exhausting bombs would have met the need, but for the fact that they would stop the generators and make them helpless. Finally the old scientist had to admit that here was one problem that he could not solve.
For weeks that tremendous race continued. A planet plunging through interstellar space, headlong, in pursuit of a tiny ship! An empire of pirates pitted against three men and a girl!
Slowly the Ahrora drew ahead. The point of light that was the Dark Star dimmed slowly through the weeks. At last, five weeks after the astounding chase had begun, the image of the pursuer vanished from the screen.
For two weeks more, for the sake of safety, the little flier was kept on the same course. Then the direction of the hurtling flight was changed.
They drove straight for the Green Star.
Don Galeen provided most of the entertainment for his companions during the interminable months of the voyage. Ordinarily he was not a great talker. But his life had been one long adventure, on many planets—he had even been born on a K-ray liner, flashing from sun to sun. And he told long stories, for the edification of Dick and Thon and Midos Ken. Stories of voyages with his father, who had been owner of a small K-ray flier trading among the planets of several suns. Stories of the mutineers who had killed his father and captured the ship, forcing Don, then about twelve years old, to become a member of their crew. Stories of his life upon the jungle-ridden inner planet of Sirius, where he had been a driver of monstrous beasts of burden, and had learned to smoke the tian—the malodorous drug which he still used frequently, sitting in front of the intake fan of the ventilating apparatus, to keep the fumes from asphyxiating the others. Stories of other long years of adventure, of the search for the lost K-ray liner, of the ill-fated attempt to smuggle escaping prisoners from the Dark Star.
Several times he told them again of his quest for the catalyst of life, of the discovery of the Green Star, of the strange green fire that shone from its barren hills and its desolate wastes of snow, of the horrors that he had met upon that weird world, of the cones of blue flame that were its cities, and of the alien and indescribable entities that ruled it, guarding the catalyst.
But Don Galeen seemed reluctant to talk about it. Horror seemed to fill him at the very thought of what he had experienced there—though he was always glad enough to tell of hair-raising adventures on other worlds. Always he hastened through his story, telling them that the Green Star and its beings were so far beyond human e
xperience as to be indescribable in terms of human thought. He hastened to finish his story, and fall into the drugged forgetfulness of the tian.
By this time Dick realized fully that he was in love with Thon. His heart leapt at sight of her in the bridge-room—cool and lovely in her shimmering blue garment, body strong and softly curved, skin smooth and aglow with health, wavy hair falling in a glistening cascade of brown and ruddy golden gleams to her white shoulders, her keen blue eyes alight with humor and the zest of living. He thrilled deliciously at the contact when he brushed past her in the narrow corridor. When he slept he had dreams of her—dreams so vivid that they disturbed his waking hours.
Several times he was on the point of telling her what he felt. But the old inhibitions of his own age clung to him. He had a sense of his ignorance of the culture of this marvelous universe, even of an intellectual inferiority to Thon. There had been two million years of human evolution since he was born, he thought. Did he seem to these people, as Garo Nark had taunted him with being, an ape? True, he could see only slight physical differences; but he could not be sure.
And Thon and Don Galeen seemed to be closest friends. Dick had seen the admiration in the rugged adventurer’s eyes when he looked at the lovely girl; he knew that Don fairly worshiped her. And Thon, having known the rugged fellow since her childhood, seemed to return his devotion with warmest affection.
Dick said nothing of his love. His mental state was far from tranquil. But being a normal young man, he kept in robust health, with an excellent appetite.
At her hurtling pace, the Ahrora carried them swiftly beyond the limits of the galactic stellar system. The Milky Way was no longer a great circle about the hollow celestial sphere—it became a broad bar of misty white behind them. Ever the midnight curtain before them was studded with fewer stars. The strange constellations widened, brightened, flashed past as flaming suns, and left black and empty space before the plunging ship.
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