* * * *
They forged on for hours, ever west across the dim desert. The Planeteers followed closely behind their glowing guides, but the three comrades were beginning to tire from the weight of their asterium-coated space-suits, while the two radioactive women showed no sign of fatigue.
'Damn the gravitation of this world!' Gunda gritted. 'It's as strong as Earth's, and it shouldn't be half that strong on a little planet like this.'
'The huge radioactive core of this world gives it its unusual mass,' Sua Av declared. 'And the radiation from it is responsible for the warmth that permits a gaseous atmosphere here,'
Thorn's heart quickened as she saw beyond their radiant guides, a low, barren dark range of mountains looming up through the haze.
'We're getting there!' Thorn cried eagerly.
Clyme Nison and her radioactive Martian comrade led them on through a pass between two peaks. The mountains towered a few thousand feet on either side, somber, bare rock slopes faintly luminous with the emanations throbbing from their radioactive atoms.
On into the tumbled peaks, through valleys thick with the shining blue haze, over long ridges, Nison led the way. For the space-pioneer who had wandered this dreary world for nine long centuries seemed to know each square yard of its surface.
They entered a deep chasm, a gloomy gorge with precipitous shining walls and a floor strewn with fallen masses of radiant rock. Along this the two radioactive women led the way. The shimmering sand of the chasm floor was deeply marked by a path, that had been trodden by many women coming and going in past times.
To the Planeteers, this gorge was an awesome and uncanny place. The great shining boulders through which the path wound, the feebly radiant cliffs that towered on either side, the strip of starry black sky far overhead, all combined to depress the spirit by their alien, forbidding atmosphere.
Through the blue, shimmering hazes that floated thick in the chasm, Clyme Nison and her companion led the way. At last Nison turned.
'The radite lies in a niche in the side of the cliff, just ahead,' she said heavily to the Planeteers. 'We must be careful now, for there are almost sure to be some of my poor fellow sufferers near it, bathing in its rays.'
'I hope not,' Gunda Welk muttered. 'If these radioactive women can't be killed, they'd be tough customers.'
They moved on, Nison and the glowing Martian leading, going more slowly and cautiously now.
As they rounded a turn in the crooked chasm, they saw ahead a place where the sand had been beaten down by many feet, over a long time. There was a small natural niche in the chasm wall there-but there was no radite in it.
'The radite's gone!' cried Clyme Nison in amazement, staring unbelievingly at the empty niche in the rock.
'Gone?' exclaimed Joan Thorn. Her heart sank with despair. 'Then Cheerly has been here ahead of us. She's taken the radite, and—'
'Listen!' Sua Av cried, turning her helmeted head sharply. 'Hear that?'
'They heard, then. A dim uproar of raging voices from farther along the chasm, punctuated every few moments by the rumbling thunder and crash of great rocks falling.
'What can it be?' Nison wondered, her radiant face perplexed.
'I have an idea what it is!' Thorn cried. 'Come on!'
They pressed on along the gloomy gorge. In a few minutes they had rounded another turn in it, and stopped short, petrified by the astounding scene ahead.
A few hundred feet ahead in the chasm was gathered a mob of dozens of glowing women. Radioactive women like Nison and the Martian, garbed in ragged remnants of clothing that showed they were of every time in the last nine centuries, of every world. Glowing women who had come to Erebus in past centuries and had been trapped here, transmitted into radioactive beings!
This crowd of glowing women was wildly seeking to storm a narrow ledge that jutted from the chasm wall a dozen feet up from the floor. With shrill, raging cries, the radioactive mob would scramble up to win the ledge, but would be repelled by the rocks rolled down upon them by the defenders.
The defenders of the ledge were three women clad in asterium-coated space-suits like those of the Planeteers. Behind them was another figure in a coated space-suit, but with arms bound together. And also on the ledge was a rude sledge of black asterium, upon which was tied a small mass of something that had been carefully wrapped in thick sheets of asterium.
'It's Cheerly and her women, and the bound figure is Lann!' Thorn exclaimed hoarsely. 'And that mass on the sledge—'
'Must be the radite!' Gunda Welk cried. 'Cheerly got the stuff from the niche, but the radioactive women caught her taking it!'
The Three Planeteers For All Page 30
