"I should tear out your tongue for speaking in that tone to an officer of Giri-Vaaka," the officer said. His voice had the high pitched and metallic quality typical of his race, and he bared his pointed teeth in a not unfriendly grin, "but the torturers of the Lord Lansa will take care of you soon enough. I am Toll, commander of astrikkain the border guards."
"Where are you taking us?"
Toll grinned wickedly.
"To the palace of Lansa, overlord of all Venus."
Gerry noticed that this countryside of Giri-Vaaka was very different from the pleasant and cultivated fields of Savissa over which he had passed the day before. The roads were dirt and half over-grown. Not much of the country was under cultivation. Strange purple bushes with thorns a foot long covered much of the land, crowding close on the patches of forest where ten-foot ferns towered high overhead. Sometimes they came upon a grazing herd of the yard-long giant ants, who would go galloping away with their antennæ waving in the air and their hard-shelled leg-joints clicking loudly.
Depression hung on Gerry Norton's chest like a physical weight. It was not alone the fact that every stride carried them deeper into a grim and hostile land—prisoners whose doom was probably already sealed—that set him biting his lower lip till he tasted the salt blood on his tongue. Nor even the fact that Closana shared the same fate because she happened to have been with him at the time of the raid. It was also the utter strangeness of everything. Yesterday, in Savissa, the people and the mode of life had been nearly enough to normal so that he was not deeply conscious of the strange vegetation and the other things in which Venus differed from Earth and Mars.
Now everything seemed different, and alien. The lowering yellow skies of Venus were ominous. The hot winds brought strange smells and seemed to carry a hint of doom. The one thought that gave him any real hope was the fact that Portok the Martian had not been captured with the rest of them. He must have missed them soon after the abduction. There might be a chance that he and Steve Brent would bring theVikingto look for them.
They had begun to pass occasional small farms. These were scanty fields carved out of the creeping masses of purple thorns, usually with a roughly thatched hut in the center. On one such occasion the farmer and his family stood apathetically at the roadside to watch the patrol of Reptile Men go by.
"But they're not scaly!" Gerry exclaimed. Closana shook her head.
"No. They are of the Green Men of Giri. Once they held this land while the Scaly Ones dwelt in the marshes of Vaaka farther west, but the Scaly Ones have now been masters of this place for many generations."
The Green Men, Gerry noticed, looked like ordinary Earthlings except for a slight greenish cast to their skin. Probably, like the Golden Amazons, they were also descended from the Old Ones who had come from Mars so long ago. The ragged and mud-stained farmer gave Toll a perfunctory salute, and then leaned on his hoe to watch the column pass by.
The warriors of Toll swaggered along the road with the insolent assurance of men who know themselves masters of all around them. The farmer's green face was carefully expressionless, but there was a gleam in his eyes that spoke of no great liking for his scaly masters. When his glance lingered on Gerry's for an instant, the Earth-man read a definite sympathy in it.
They camped that night in a clearing beside a small stream. One of the guards shot a giant ant with his gas-gun, then cracked open the horny shell with his sword. They cut long strips of the meat and roasted it over a fire. Though the taste was peculiar the stuff was edible, and the three prisoners managed to swallow it.
"The condemned man ate a hearty meal!" Angus McTavish said with grim humor, wiping his fingers on the coarse yellow grass beside him.
Olga had gone on with a faster-moving detachment, and only a dozen Scaly Ones remained with Toll to guard the three prisoners. Gerry and Closana sat side by side before the fire, their bare shoulders touching. The ruddy and flickering glow of the firelight touched Angus' giant frame a little farther around the circle, and then the scaly skins and long snouts of the reptile men watching them. Gerry clasped his arms around his knees.
"Y'know Angus, at the moment we're living as our ancestors must have lived long generations ago. No ray-tubes or dura-steel armor. No portable electro-phones. Not even a low-speed rocket car to carry us along. It must have been this way back in the days when they built that little old building that's now used for a museum in New York. The Empire State Building."
"You've got your dates mixed, laddie," McTavish yawned. "The Empire State was built in the twentieth century, and even the people of those queer old days were more advanced than most of what we've seen of life on this planet of Venus."
"I don't suppose those Ancients knew what they were missing."
"Maybe they were better off! At least they only got into trouble on their own Earth instead of wandering off to other planets like a pack of fools as we have!"
Toll and two of his men came toward them, carrying the ropes with which they had earlier been bound.
"Sorry, but I must tie you up for the night," he said. For an instant Gerry thought of making a break. If he could get away he might find some way of rescuing the others. Then he decided against it. One of the reptile men would be almost sure to bring him down with a gas-gun before he got out of the circle of firelight, in spite of the greater strength of his Earthly muscles. So he shrugged, and allowed the guards to tie him up again. For quite a while he lay awake, hoping to hear the hum of theViking'smotors, but at last he fell asleep.
On the third day of their journey, the trail led upward, into a range of bleak and rocky hills. A few mean huts were the only signs of human habitation. Then, as they rounded a bend in the trail which at this point clung to the face of a cliff, they saw the answer to a mystery that had puzzled the civilized world for two years.
It was the wreck of the space-shipStardust. She lay at the foot of a cliff across the valley, her steel and duralite hull still gleaming brightly through the thick green creepers that had grown up around it. Even from this distance Gerry could see the hopelessly crumpled rocket-tubes at the stern, and the gaping holes where plates had been ripped away to make the submarine that had brought them out of the city of Larr.
"So that was the end of theStardust!" Gerry muttered. "I wonder what happened to her crew!"
"We'll probably find out soon enough!" McTavish replied grimly. "I'll bet all the gold in Savissa against an empty rocket-oil tin that we're headed for the same fate right now."
"Poor devils—I suppose the Scaly Ones did get them. I never liked Walter Lansing, as you know, but I could have wished him better luck than this!"
At last they crossed the hills and saw a broad valley before them. Dim and snow-capped mountains notched the yellow sky on the far side of the Valley. A river wound through the plain, and on the shore of the saffron waters of a mighty lake they saw the gray walls of a city. Toll, the reptilian captain, pointed across the valley.
"Yonder lies the city of Vaaka-hausen. Soon you will stand before the Lord Lansa, and then," he added with a grim and ghoulish humor, "neither I nor anybody else will be bothered with you any more."
The countryside immediately around the city of the Scaly Ones was better kept and more cultivated than what they had seen of the rest of Giri-Vaaka. There were a number of small villages. Then they passed in through the walls, gray stone ramparts that seemed to be very old and were in poor repair. The muzzles of heavy caliber gas-guns peered over the battlements here and there.
The crowds in the streets stared curiously as Toll led his prisoners toward the center of the city. Tall reptile men swaggered through the crowds with their swords slung on their hips, but the shorter Green Men were in the great majority. Most of them, men and women alike, stared at the captives without any particular sign of emotion. This gray and crowded city of Vaaka-hausen had none of the atmosphere of pleasant friendliness that Gerry had noticed in Larr. It seemed a place of fear and oppression.
The palace of the ruler of the Scaly Ones was a squat gray building in the center of the city. An arm of the river swept along beneath one wall, with the muddy waters lapping at the aged gray stones. An iron gate swung aside to let the newcomers into the courtyard. Men who wore black metal breast-plates over their scales took over the prisoners from Toll, leading them down a long flight of stairs into the dungeons beneath the palace. They waited in a vaulted chamber where the only light was a shaft of yellow radiance that came from a narrow slit high up near the ceiling.
"It won't be long now!" Gerry muttered.
Then a gong sounded somewhere nearby. It was a very resonant and deep-throated gong, and instantly the rock-walled chamber became filled with a green light. It had no visible source, seeming to come from the walls or from the very air itself. Again the gong rolled.
"The Lord Lansa comes!" barked the captain of the guards, "the overlord of Venus is at hand. Down on your knees, captives and slaves."
Closana went to her knees, though otherwise holding herself proudly erect with her hands tied behind her back. In the greenish light her long blonde hair looked like molten gold. Angus McTavish muttered savagely in his beard and stayed on his feet. Instantly one of the reptile guards drew his sword and held the blade horizontally behind the Scot's knees.
"Kneel—or I cut the tendons!" he snapped.
"Come down, you stiff-necked idiot!" Gerry growled. With a muttered oath Angus dropped to his knees, and the guard stepped back into line.
Then the door opened, and three men came slowly into the room. Two were gray-scaled guards who carried their gas-guns cocked and ready. The third was a tall man in a loose green robe. His head was hooded, so that nothing of his face could be seen at all, his hands were tucked in the sleeves of his robe. There was something deadly and almost grotesque about that silent figure. Gerry knew that at last he was in the presence of Lansa, Lord of the Scaly Ones and ruler of Giri-Vaaka, self-styled Overlord of all Venus!
The seconds passed in silence. The guards were frozen motionless at attention. At last Lansa spoke, his voice coming hollowly from the shadows of his hood.
"Take them to the cells. Their doom shall be decided when the Serpent Gods have spoken. I have ordered it!"
The tyrant of Venus gestured sharply, and the guards closed in about the prisoners. For a fleeting instant Gerry had a glimpse of a thin green hand, a hand where the finger was missing at the second joint. Then Lansa went out and the door closed behind him. The deeply resonant gong sounded again, and the pulsating green light instantly vanished so that there was again no light except for the thin trickle of yellow radiance that came in the single high window. The prisoners were pulled to their feet.
There was no chance to speak to Angus or Closana again. Gerry's guards led him down a narrow corridor, past the steel doors of cells. It was very dim and silent. From some of the cells he heard a faint rattle of chains, from others a low groaning. Otherwise there was no sound but their own footfalls. At last the guards opened the door of a cell, pushed Gerry inside, and cut the ropes that bound his arms. As they slammed the heavy steel door behind them he heard the rasp of bolts. Then the slapping tread of the guards' webbed feet died away and he was left alone.
Dim as the light in the corridor had been, that in the cell was so much less that Gerry had to wait half a minute before he could see at all. Then he made out the outlines of a small, bare cell with a bunk made of a light and flexible metal at one side. There was nothing else in the place. Gerry rubbed his wrists a moment to restore circulation, then sat down on the edge of the bunk and dropped his head in his hands.
He seemed to be about at the end of his trail. Well—that was fate. He did not mind so much for himself and Angus. You knew you were taking risks when you signed up for interplanetary travel in the first place! But he was sorry that Closana had been dragged into it.
Gerry had now lost all hope of rescue by theViking. He did not doubt that her duralite hull could withstand the explosive bullets of even the heaviest caliber gas-guns, nor that her three-inch ray-tubes could blast a way into these underground dungeons in a few minutes. If only Steve Brent knew where to come! That was the rub. There was now no way for Brent to learn where the prisoners were being held, and he could not search all the land of Giri-Vaaka.
Something small and furtive was moving about on the floor a few feet away. Gerry scuffed his feet on the stones, and the creature scampered quickly away. Probably a rat! It seemed that he was going to have pleasant company during his stay in this place.
Restless and gloomy, Gerry stood up again. He started to walk up and down the few feet that the length of his cell allowed him. Then he froze motionless! A faint tapping was sounding from somewhere to his left. Someone was knocking lightly on the wall of the adjoining cell. Then a voice spoke softly in Martian.
"You there! You in the next cell! Can you hear me?"
Gerry knelt down on the damp floor and put his head close to the base of the wall. Now he could hear the man more clearly, could even hear his heavy breathing. Gerry's groping fingers found a place between two of the stones where the mortar had been picked away to leave a small air space.
"Yes, I hear you!" he called softly. He heard a dry chuckle.
"Good! I have been waiting a long time for them to put someone in the next cell. Some of the stones are loose. I will come in."
There was a soft rattle of falling mortar, and a scrape of sliding stones. Gerry saw the head and shoulders of a man thrust through the opening, and then the man crawled laboriously into the cell.
"Who are you?" he whispered. "Your accent is not like that of the Green Men of Giri. Wait, I have a light here."
A small flashlight clicked on. Its beam pointed up into Gerry's face. Then the man gasped.
"Good Lord!" he whispered. "It ... it's Gerry Norton!"
Then the man swung the light so that it swung on himself. Gerry saw a tall, gaunt man in the tattered remains of a blue and silver uniform. It was Major Walter Lansing, once of the Interplanetary Fleet, who had commanded the ill-fatedStardustwhen she set out on her voyage into space!
"Norton!" he gasped in a hoarse whisper. "Man, I never expected to see anyone from Earth again!"
"We thought you were dead."
"I might as well be!" Lansing said grimly. "But tell me how you come to be here."
As they squatted there in the darkened cell, Gerry whispered the story of theViking'sexpedition and of his own capture. Lansing told him how theStardusthad been wrecked on the rim of the mountains when landing, and how the Scaly Ones had captured all the crew.
"They have kept me alive because the signs pointed that way when they cast the omens before the Serpent Gods," Lansing said, "but all the rest of the crew were used as bait for hunting the giant Dakta. They died. You and your companions will probably meet the same fate."
"Pleasant prospect!" Gerry said grimly. Lansing gripped his arm.
"There's a chance, Norton! Listen! I've been able to get these scaly devils to bring me a good many things from the wreck. I couldn't get a ray-tube, they were too wise for that, but I did get a portable radio by telling them it was my tribal god. I have it in my cell. We'll go over and you can phone your ship to come after us." He eyed Gerry eagerly.
"Let's go!"
They both crawled through the gap in the wall. It was like Gerry's own, but it was piled with an assortment of junk from the wrecked space-ship. In one corner stood a compact two-way radio telephone set with its tubes still intact.
"Think you can tell them how to come?" Lansing whispered.
"I'm not sure. They marched us along the roads, and the route was winding, and...."
"I'll draw you a map!" Lansing interrupted. "You hold the light."
While Gerry held the flash, the other man spread out a piece of crumpled paper on the floor and began to draw on it with the stub of a graphite stylus. He talked as he wrote, in a shrilly, excited whisper. Gerry had never liked the man in the old days, considering him excitable and undependable, and it was evident that the long captivity had not improved Walter Lansing's self-control. That did not matter. The main thing was to get out of this place. And then Gerry saw something that stiffened every muscle and made the short hair prickle all down the back of his neck. The ring finger of Lansing's left hand was missing at the second joint!
The suspicion that had come to Gerry Norton seemed impossible. Walter Lansing ... the Lord Lansa. It couldn't be. And yet—he was sure he had seen that same mutilated hand thrust out from the sleeve of a green robe an hour before! Lansing was still talking as he bent over the improvised map.
"Here's the line of the Giri River. Tell them to cross by the bald gray hill, then bear west-six-north, using Venusian magnetic bearings. After that...."
He suddenly stopped and looked up, catching Gerry's grim glance fixed on his left hand. Hastily he jerked it aside into the shadows. He must have read in Gerry's eyes that his move had been too late, for his own gaunt face hardened.
"You rat!" Gerry hissed between his teeth. His right hand shot out, clutching for the other man's throat, but Lansing twisted aside and jerked a dark object from his pocket. An instant later a stinging cloud of the paralysis gas took Gerry in the face, and he fell limply to the floor.
Lansing straightened up and tossed aside the flask that had held the gas. There was a savage gleam in his narrow eyes.
"All right, Norton," he said, "we'll do it the other way. Ho—guards!"
A gong sounded in the corridor, the pulsating green light immediately flooded the cell. Scaly-skinned guards swarmed in and saluted. Lansing ripped off the torn uniform, revealing a tight-fitting green garment beneath it, and one of the guards helped him on with the cowled robe he had worn before. He glanced down at Gerry for a moment.
"Bring him and the others up to me when he recovers the use of his muscles," he said.
By the time Gerry Norton recovered from the effects of the gas he had been securely bound again. Two guards led him to the end of a corridor and up a flight of stairs to the level above. This was also part of the prison zone of the castle, but built in an entirely different manner. Walls and floor were of a polished green metal. Super-charged electronic locks fastened each door, holding death for anyone who attempted to tamper with them. Metal globes gave a steady light. Mirrors above each cell door gave the guards who lounged in the corridors a complete view of the inside of every cell.
This, Gerry realized, was actually the prison used by the lords of Giri-Vaaka. He had been placed in the old and abandoned dungeons beneath as part of the scheme to lure him into calling theVikingto her doom. Glancing in the door-mirrors of the cells as he went by, Gerry saw that most of the occupants were men and women of the Green Race of Giri, with a fair number of Golden Amazons and a few reptile men who had been guilty of some crime or infraction of discipline.
Then he saw Closana! The girl was tightly spread-eagled against one of the polished metal walls of her cell, her outstretched wrists and ankles held by steel cuffs. Gerry's jaw jutted stubbornly forward, and for a moment he twisted helplessly against the cords that held his arms behind him.
The guards halted before a door deep in the interior of the palace, where a pair of scaly warriors stood on guard with gas-guns cocked and ready. The opening itself was not closed by any door, but by what looked like a tightly stretched curtain of some transparent green material. On closer inspection he saw that it glowed with a steady pulsation, while occasional specks of green fire ran through it. When one of the guards moved incautiously back so that the tip of his scabbard touched the green glow filling the door, there was a crackling hiss. The tip of the scabbard simply vanished. It was as though it had been cleanly cut off by a very sharp knife.
A challenge came from within, and one of Gerry's guards shouted a reply. The green glow suddenly vanished from the doorway. Whatever elemental force it was that blocked the passage had been withdrawn, and they walked freely in through the opening.
The wide room before them was walled with slabs of polished black marble. The figures of writhing snakes and rearing reptiles were inlaid into the black walls with some iridescent green stone. Their eyes were inlaid jewels. Thin trails of pungent smoke drifted upward from their nostrils. A low and throbbing music, full of the thunder of muted drums, came from unseen source. At regular intervals around the walls stood tall golden standards with glowing globes atop them.
This was the throne room of Lansa, Lord of Giri-Vaaka, who had once been an officer in the flying forces of Earth. The man himself sat on a black marble throne with a dozen of the higher officers of his scaly warriors grouped around him. These Inner Guards wore breast-plates and helmets of a bright green metal, and their pointed ears protruded upward through twin openings in the sides of the helmets.
Lansa's swarthy face was gloatingly triumphant. It had always been Gerry Norton's private opinion that Walter Lansing was slightly mad. Brilliant in many ways, but definitely unstable. At last he appeared to have slipped over that shadowy border that divides the rational from the insane.
"It is unfortunate that my little scheme to have you summon your space-ship here did not work," Lansa said in English. "But we will find some other way of persuading you to do it."
"You think you're quite the little tin god, don't you?" Gerry sneered.
"Iama god—to these people," Lansa replied quietly. "Though theStardustwas damaged too badly to return to earth, little of her equipment was harmed except for the rocket tubes themselves. Within six months after landing I had made myself master of these primitive but obedient people. The submarine that brought you from the city of Larr shows what can be done with them. In the meantime I had communicated with friends on Earth by means of a secret radio frequency, and waited for the sending of the next space-ship...."
He broke off as a door behind the throne opened and a woman came into the room. It was Olga Stark, now wearing a long gown of shimmering green. Metal strands of the same color were braided into her dark hair, which was crowned by a circlet bearing the design of a rearing serpent. All the officers and courtiers lifted their arms in salute. The woman walked over and stood beside Lansa's throne, looking down at Gerry with a cold and impersonal scorn. It had not taken Olga Stark very long to fit herself into the role of the queen of Giri-Vaaka!
A number of things were clear to Gerry Norton now! It had been Olga Stark with whom Lansing had secretly communicated after he made himself master of the Scaly Ones, and that explained her insistent requests to join the expedition. Again, it had been Olga who had been surreptitiously using the radio to talk to Lansing that day when Gerry had stepped into the radio room on hearing the hum of the generator. They had been arranging the details of his abduction. Only—who was Olga's confederate who had knocked him over the head when he had walked in on them that time? There was still some traitor on board theViking.
"I have now developed the resources of this country to the point where the final campaign is ready," Lansa boasted, "all these reptile men needed was a man of sufficient brains and initiative to lead them. We are making ray-tubes, modeled on those aboard theStardust, and will soon be able to blast down the guardian forts of Savissa and to conquer those few other portions of this planet that still stand against me. Then I will return to the Earth in yourViking, taking with me enough gold to buy a vast fleet of ships. There is more gold available here on Venus than all your banks on Earth have ever imagined! I could make myself ruler of Earth with all that gold, but I will choose another method. I will bring back the space-ships, and load them up with my scaly warriors—and then sail to conquer the Outer Planets and whatever else may lie beyond the Solar System!"
Gerry Norton stared at Lansa in a grim silence. The man was undoubtedly mad. Stark, raving mad! No one but a maniac would cherish such a wild dream of Universal conquest. He had that dangerous combination of natural cleverness and distorted values that has often distinguished leaders who have taken nations into the shadowy valleys of ruin. For a moment Lansa hesitated, his narrow eyes blazing and one arm flung up in a dramatic gesture. Then some of the fire went out of him, and he returned to more prosaic and immediate things.
"But all that lies in the future. At the moment I must ask you to radio-phone theVikingto come to this city and land in the plain just below the walls."
"I'll see you in hell first!" Gerry snapped. Lansa shrugged.
"I expected you to indulge in some such heroics! Your type always does. I have not forgotten your attacks on my reputation back on Earth some years ago, Norton, nor your charges that I was unfit to command theStardust. It will give me considerable pleasure to watch what is about to happen to you. Ho—guards! Bring him down to the torture chamber."
The place of torture was a circular and low vaulted chamber. Gerry was led across to one of the walls, and his bound hands fastened behind him to a metal ring. The place was lit by a dim green light that had no visible source, though in one spot there was a ruddy glow where irons were heating in a brazier of burning charcoal. A bench was placed for Lansa and Olga to sit on, and four of their guards stood beside them.
The torturers themselves had been selected from among the Green Men of Giri, instead of the scaly skinned warrior race of Vaaka. They were squat and heavy men, those torturers, evidently of the most brutal and debased type that Lansa had been able to find. One in particular, whose wide green face was made hideous by an old scar that had put out one of his eyes, licked his thick lips in ghoulish anticipation as his fingers prodded the flesh about Gerry's ribs and felt the Earth-man's muscles.
"Bring in the other two," Lansa commanded.
All about the room were the tools of the torturer's art. Some were familiar things that have been used since men first began to mistreat his fellow creatures—leaded whips and stretching-racks and cradles lined with pointed spikes. Others were strange looking and probably even more horrible mechanisms of coils and wires and electrodes. Gerry licked his lips. The place had the hushed stillness of a chamber that has been thoroughly sound-proofed. Probably no screams of agonized victims ever penetrated beyond those smooth walls of polished green metal.
They brought Angus McTavish in first. He looked like some shaggy red giant, wearing only a loin-cloth with his hair and beard all awry. Then came Closana. Her crossed wrists were tied together before her by a cord that was held by one of the guards, and she was very pale.
Lansa nodded quickly.
"Let them begin," said Lansa tonelessly.
"A suggestion, sir!" Olga leaned forward on the bench. The glance of her brooding eyes was fixed on the young Amazon princess. "Let them work on the girl first. It will probably succeed more quickly. I think the man Norton has fallen in love with that empty headed young savage, and you know how men are."
"You are right. Let it be done that way."
Closana was spread-eagled in mid-air, her upstretched arms fastened to ropes that led to the ceiling and her ankles lashed to metal rings in the floor below. She could move nothing but her head as Olga Stark walked up to stand before her.
"This will repay for the condescension with which I was treated in Savissa!" the Earth-woman said venomously. Closana looked at her in silence for a moment, and then suddenly spat squarely in the other woman's face.
"Atta girl!" roared Angus with all the power of his big lungs. Olga struck the helpless girl twice in the mouth with her clenched fist, then returned to her seat.
"Begin!" she commanded.
One of the torturers tossed Closana's long hair forward on either side of her neck, to leave her back entirely bare for the lash. The girl's eyes were closed again, and there was a thin trickle of blood at one corner of her mouth. The torturer shook out the lash, whirled it once through the air and then brought it smashing across the middle of Closana's back.
The girl's whole body writhed convulsively for a moment. There was an instant red welt where the whip had struck. A low moan escaped between her clenched teeth. Then Gerry Norton leaned forward where he stood bound against the wall.
"You win, Lansing!" he said hoarsely, "stop it! Make them leave her alone and I'll do as you say."
"I thought you would," the renegade officer said softly. There seemed to be a definite disappointment in his cruel eyes. "I will have the radio set brought here and you can call the ship right now."
"Have them lower the girl down."
"She stays where she is until you have finished."
The portable radio-phone from the wreckedStardustwas brought in and set up on a stand immediately in front of Gerry. Olga set up the sigmoid antenna on its duralite frame, and twisted the dials to the space-ship's wave length. Then she took the transmitter.
"Calling Steve Brent on theViking! Calling Steve Brent on theViking! Please come in!" she repeated over and over.
At last the answering signal lit up, and Steve's familiar voice came from the receiver.
"This is Steve Brent. Who is calling?"
Olga held the transmitter before Gerry's mouth. Lansa nodded to one of the torturers, who drew a white hot iron from one of the braziers and held it a little way from Closana's face.
"One false word and that iron goes into the girl's eyes," the Lord of Giri-Vaaka warned in a low hiss. "After that, all of you will live in agony for weeks before we have finished. Tell him to land near the city and bring all but a single watch-man to the east gate where they will be well received."
"Hello Steve. This is Gerry Norton!" Gerry said. Brent's voice shook with excitement.
"Jumping ray-blasts, chief, we all thought you were done for! Where did you go? What happened? Where are you now?"
"I'm being well entertained in the city of Vaaka-Havson. These Scaly Men are very pleasant and friendly when you get to know them. Cross the Giri River by a bald hill...."
Gerry finished the directions for the coming of theVikingand the landing of its crew as ordered by Lansa. As the radio was turned off, the Lord of the Scaly Ones stood up with his thin lipped smile.
"Good! Our plans progress. Now you three will go back to a cell. And, since you are no longer of any value to us, you will be used when we hunt the giant Dakta on the shore tomorrow."
The three prisoners were placed in the same cell, all spread-eagled against the wall with their outstretched arms held by metal cuffs. Angus McTavish's face was sour and glowering as he turned to Gerry.
"That was an ill thing that ye did, Gerry Norton," he growled.
"I could not see them whip her any more."
"The three of us will probably meet as bad a fate soon anyway, from what that thin faced devil said at the end, and, meanwhile, ye've lured our comrades to destruction."
"It couldn't be helped," Gerry said, and closed his eyes. He had taken what was probably the longest chance of his career, and he was not in a mood to talk about it. Particularly when every faintest syllable uttered in one of these metal cells could be heard by the guards in the corridor outside!
There was little rest for any of them, chained in that awkward position and with the cell always filled with that pitiless green light. Gerry dozed fitfully from time to time. Closana seemed to have fallen asleep, drooping forward in her bonds with her head hanging low, but her long hair covered her face and it was hard to tell. Angus made no attempt to sleep at all, and for most of the intervening time he was muttering many tongued curses into his beard.
At last they were freed from their chains. They were given water in metal cups, and a bowl of some kind of stew to eat. For perhaps an hour they rested and eased their stiffened muscles. Then more guards came and bound their hands behind them and took them away.
It was again broad daylight when they were taken out into the streets of the city, the peculiarly yellow daylight that filtered through the cloudy canopy overhead. The three prisoners were surrounded by a heavy guard of reptile men who marched them across the city and out through a gate in the far wall. Here a broad plain swept down to the waters of a saffron colored lake, a sheet of water so vast that its far shore was no more than a dun line along the horizon. A sort of grandstand had been erected along one side of the plain.
"I think I begin to understand the point of this little game!" McTavish muttered, squinting as he peered ahead, "and I don't fancy the idea at all."
"I don't get what you mean?"
McTavish snorted.
"Did ye never see a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap?"
Then Gerry himself began to understand. On a broad platform before the grandstand stood a line of men armed with gas-guns. Some were gray scaled officers of the fighting forces, and others were dandified Green Men of the decadent minority that had fawned upon and mingled with their conquerers. In the flat and marshy expanse of the plain before them there had been driven a number of short but heavy stakes like tent pegs, each with a metal ring set in the top. There were long rows of them. Gray scaled guards were busy fettering prisoners to the pegs, making them fast by tying to the metal ring the other end of the long cord with which their hands were tied behind them. The hunters and the audience were ready, the bait was being prepared.
Closana was a few feet away from Gerry, fastened to the next stake. She stood erect, her shoulders drawn back by the strain of her bonds and her long hair blowing in the wind.
"This is the end, Geree," she said, "if not today, then tomorrow or the next day. This was the tale told in Larr of what happens to the prisoners of the Scaly Ones, but I never believed it till now."
There were sixty or eighty prisoners fastened in the field to serve as bait for the giant dakta. About half were Golden Amazons captured in various raids. The remainder were men and women of the Green People of Giri, prisoners condemned to death by the grim and ruthless tribunals of the Scaly Ones. Now a dozen attendants carrying leather buckets ran up and down the lines of the captives, splashing each victim with a dipper full of a purple colored and very pungent oil.
"Now what's the game?" Gerry muttered. Angus bent his head to sniff at the heavy liquid trickling down his hairy chest.
"It smells like a harlot's dream!" he muttered sourly, "probably intended to make us more attractive to whatever kind of creature it is that's coming after us!"
The attendants had hurried away with their buckets of oil, and now the crowds in the grandstand and on the plain settled down to wait. They were in holiday mood, laughing and talking in their shrill voices.
Then a black dot appeared high up in the sky. A murmur of anticipation ran over the crowd. The dakta came plummeting earthward as its super-keen senses saw and smelled the attractive bait waiting below. The thing, as it came near, was like some figment from a nightmare. It had a reptilian body between a twenty-foot spread of leathery wings, and a long beak with a double row of pointed teeth. One of the things that Gerry had seen flying over that lonely sea when he first brought theVikingdown through the canopy of clouds that covered the planet of Venus!
"Sothatis a dakta!" Angus muttered, "bonny little creature!"
The winged lizard checked its flight momentarily some ten feet off the ground, directly above one of the captive Amazons. Then he dove down. The girl screamed and twisted away to the length of her tether, and the toothed beak just missed her. The first of the hunters fired as the dakta whirled and lashed out again, but the bullet exploded off to one side.
Gripping the writhing Amazon with his beak and his clawed feet, the dakta flapped his great wings and soared upward again. Two more of the hunters fired together. One of the explosive bullets missed entirely, the other blew one of the girl's legs to pieces but did not harm the monster that held her.
Then Lansa tossed aside his green robe and stood up. Gerry saw that he held a ray-tube, either one from theStardustor one of the new ones he now claimed to be able to make in Giri-Vaaka. The tube slanted upward. Murky light played around its muzzle. The dakta gave a shrill and almost human scream. Then it dropped its mangled victim and fell twitching to the ground. Its leathery skin was turned black where the ray-blast had struck it. Along the edge of the field, the close packed crowds broke into wild cheering and Lansa acknowledged it with a condescending gesture of one upraised arm.
The hunt went on. Sometimes the dakta came singly, sometimes in pairs. The hunters had the range better now, and dropped them consistently. On several occasions the flying lizards were brought down before they had time to seize a victim at all, but most of the time one of the prisoners was killed or mortally wounded before the dakta was slain. A Green Man tethered to the stake next beyond Closana had been ripped about the throat by the raking teeth of a dakta's bill, and was breathing with a sort of gurgling moan as he bled to death. So far, that was the nearest that one of the flying lizards had come to Gerry or his two companions.
And then Gerry saw the thing for which he had been watching. There was a streak of fire along the eastern horizon. The blast of speeding rocket tubes! A cigar shaped hull of gleaming blue and silver came streaking across the saffron sky with a trail of smoke behind it.The Vikinghad come!
A swelling uproar came from the crowds which began to mill about in confusion. Lansa had risen to his feet and was peering upward with one hand raised to shade his eyes. Yellow flames played about theViking'sbow as the reverse rockets checked her momentum. A pair of swooping dakta veered away from her, then dropped down toward the bait tethered below. One of them was headed straight for Angus McTavish.
Instantly one of the forward ray-guns on the space-ship glowed into life, and the winged lizard crumpled in mid-flight. Gerry knew then that someone on board had been looking down through the powerful viewing glasses, and had recognized him and Angus. He shouted hoarsely, knowing he would not be heard but unable to keep silent.
Drums were throbbing a swift alarm, and the milling crowds were in wild confusion. Companies of the scaly warriors were firing by volley, but the explosive bullets only flashed harmlessly against theViking'sduralite hull. Some of the heavier gas-guns set on the battlements above hissed into life then, but even the larger caliber explosives could make no impression on tempered duralite. With her ray-guns flashing and ripping black swathes in the scaly ranks below, with her helicopters spinning to take the strain as the blast of the rockets died away, theVikingsettled rapidly groundward.
"By Lord, Steve came a-fightin'!" McTavish roared.
"Of course, you old goat!" Gerry shouted back, "did you really think I'd call the ship into a trap? You're as bad as that maniac who calls himself Lansa. I knew that if I spoketoostrongly of what nice fellows these scaly devils are, Steve would have the sense to know that I was under pressure and in a trap."
And then came swift disaster! Over the edge of the nearest black and battlemented wall of Lansa's palace thrust the muzzle of a large caliber ray-gun. Steve Brent saw it, too, and tried to lift the nose of his ship to bring his own guns to bear on this new menace, but he was too late. The muzzle of the ray-gun on the battlements glowed dully, the blast of the supode-rays struck the row of spinning helicopters on top of theViking'shull. The blades of the big propellors went spinning into space, their shafts bent and crumpled like straws in a gale. Robbed of their support, essential when lacking rocket power of at least 300 miles per hour, the space-ship plunged downward like a falling star. She struck the waters of the lake with a mighty splash. Spray dashed as high as the walls of Lansa's castle, and when it was gone the space-ship had vanished.
Gerry Norton stood motionless. He was staring at the muddy and foam flecked waters of the lake, and at the spreading ripples that still beat on the shore as the effect of that mighty splash subsided. At the moment he felt old and tired and defeated, his brain numbed. TheVikingwas gone! Freckled Steve Brent, and the cheerful Portok, and all the rest of them were gone. Buried deep in the muddy bottom of a Venusian lake.
The second expedition from Earth to this cloud-veiled and ill-fated planet had also ended in disaster. In the future theVikingwould be classed with theStardust—simply another luckless space-ship that sailed away into the void and vanished. The men of her crew and what they tried to accomplish would be forgotten, their names would only remain on some yellowing record buried in the maze of government files. So deep was Gerry Norton's bitter brooding that he scarcely heard the words Angus McTavish was shouting in his ear.
"Come on, Gerry lad! Let's get away while there's all this confusion."
Ever since they had been brought to this field beside the lake, Angus had been working at his bonds. He was a very strong man anyway, and the swell of his earthly muscles was far greater than the strength of any of the races that the Scaly Ones were accustomed to making prisoners. While the attention of all the guards was absorbed in the appearance and subsequent wreck of theViking, Angus had managed to snap his own bonds and was now unhurriedly freeing Gerry's wrists.
Gerry ran to Closana and untied her hands, while Angus freed the nearest other prisoner who was a stocky and broad shouldered Green Man with a heavily lined face. As soon as his hands were free, the latter wheeled to face them.
"My thanks,hiziren!" he panted, "now go while you can. You are more easily spotted in a crowd than I. Hurry! I will free as many of these others as possible. Get into the city, and try to reach the place men call 'The Square of the Dragon.' Say that Sarnak sent you. Hurry!"
Even though he was carrying Closana in his arms, Gerry's Earthly muscles allowed him to run in mighty six-foot bounds. Angus went leaping along before him. So great was the confusion that they were half way across the plain to the city before anyone noticed them at all. Then a shouting officer of the Scaly Ones threw himself in front of them with his drawn sword in his hand.
The big engineer roared like an angry bull, and leaped clean over the man. Before the scaly warrior could turn the Scot had him from behind. An instant later Angus had the sword and was racing ahead, while the Venusian lay sprawled in the mud with his neck broken and his long head twisted grotesquely awry.
The half dozen guards posted in the arch of the gate stared indecisively at the white skinned trio racing toward them. Angus had a sword in each hand by this time, and he leaped at the guards with a shout. The fugitive broke through the line of swordsmen by sheer momentum and dashed into the city. There was no pursuit. The first of the panic stricken throng rushing back for the shelter of the city reached the gate a moment later, and the guards were swamped by a jostling mob of mingled Scaly Ones and Green Men.
Gerry and his two companions darted into the nearest of the many narrow alleys that twisted about this part of the city. They dodged from one dingy thoroughfare to the next. When they met a woman of the Green People, Gerry unceremoniously tore off her robe and shielding veil and flung them to Closana to hide her own tawny skin and golden hair. Later, when he and Angus had also disguised themselves in the rough garments worn by the poorer folk of this city of Vaaka-hausen, they were able to walk quietly down the streets without fear of detection unless they met a patrol at close range.
At last they came to a dingy plaza that was surrounded by ramshackle buildings of great age. It had probably once been a prosperous and fashionable part of the city, centuries ago, before the Scaly Ones overran the land of Giri. Now grass grew up between the paving stones, and the roofs of the dingy buildings sagged close to the breaking point, and piles of festering rubbish lay along the gutters. The place was a slum of the sort that had not existed on the more enlightened planets of Earth and Mars for many generations. A canal flowed along one side of the square, and in the center of the plaza stood the eroded and ancient black marble statue of a rearing dragon.
"This must be the place!" Angus muttered from the shadows of the hood that he had drawn up over his head.
As they hesitated, a few people peered furtively out at them from the broken windows and sagging doors of the houses around the square. Then a man came toward them. He was bent and crippled, a beggar wearing filthy rags. His matted hair hung down over his eyes, and his whole body seemed covered with the caked filth of one who had never thought of washing. As the man came forward with a sort of limping shuffle, Gerry instinctively laid his hand on the hilt of the sword he carried concealed under his cloak, while Closana drew the concealing veil more closely over her face.
"Alms,hiziren! A little charity of your generosity!" the beggar whined as he came closer.
"What place is this?" Gerry asked, trying to give his voice the soft tone and lisping accent characteristic of the Green Men.
The beggar limped a little closer and peered up into the shadows of Gerry's hood. What he saw seemed to satisfy him.
"Take your hand from your sword hilt, friend!" he said in a low voice quite unlike his previous whine, "what place do you seek?"
"The Place of the Dragon."
"This is it. Who sent you?"
"Sarnak sent us."
"It is good." The beggar pointed down a flight of worn stone steps that led to the canal whose surface was some eight or ten feet below the level of the plaza. "Go down there, below the bridge, and tap on the stone that bears a rusted iron ring. You will find friends. Go quickly, while there are no strangers to observe you."
"Do you trust that man?" Angus whispered in English as they turned away. Gerry shrugged.
"We've got to. It's our only chance, We're too easy to recognize, in spite of these clothes, to stay free in this city for long."
The black waters of the canal flowed sluggishly along between slimy stone walls. Refuse drifted on the surface. The water itself had a foul and penetrating odor. Gerry walked down the steps, and then along the walk that stretched beside the water at one edge of the canal until he was under an arch that served as a bridge to support the street above. The arch was wide enough so that they were now completely hidden from the view of anyone in the plaza above.
On one of the stones of the arch, at about the height of his shoulder, Gerry saw a rusted iron ring. He tapped on that stone with the hilt of his sword. He heard a faint click, and though there was no visible change in the surface of the pitted stone wall before him he heard a whispered question:
"Who knocks?"
"Friends," Gerry replied.
"Who sent you?"
"Sarnak sent us."
There was a low, metallic jingle. A section of the wall about the height of a man and some three feet wide swung quietly inward. As soon as the three of them had stepped through the opening into a small room that was built in the interior of the arch, the door swung shut behind them.
There were half a dozen men in this low roofed and stone walled chamber. All were of the Green People, dressed as ragged beggars but with the bearing and appearance of warriors. Drawn steel gleamed in their hands. Their faces were heavy with suspicion. One of the men had gone to stand with his back against the closed door behind them.
"Who are you, that come using the name of Sarnak?" snapped the leader.
Suspicion became blended with puzzled surprise as Gerry and Angus threw back their hoods and the outlaws saw their white skins. Hastily Gerry told the tale of the dakta hunt and of their subsequent escape.
"So Sarnak got away!" the leader of the Green Men exulted. "Ho! That is the best news that we of the Dragon's Teeth have heard in many weeks! All right, Slag, take these strangers through to the inner places."
One of the Green Men beckoned to Gerry to follow him down a narrow flight of steps at the back of the room. It ended in a circular pool of water like a large well, the steps going on down below the surface. Their guide opened a cupboard built into the wall and took out four glass helmets. The helmets were attached to leather pads that fitted tightly about the shoulders and chest, with straps to hold them in place. A cylindrical metal tank was attached to the back of each helmet, with a tube that led to a valve at the side. The guide also took out some heavily leaded sandals.
"Put on these helmets and then open the valves," he explained, "then follow me down the steps. Be careful not to fall in the darkness. After we get around the first bend in the corridor below there will be light."
Gerry put the globular glass helmet over his head, opening the valve as soon as he had adjusted the straps. The air in the helmet immediately took on a faintly chemical odor, but it was pleasant and in no way oppressive. As soon as all of them were ready, the man called Slag beckoned and then started down the steps.
Warm black water rose to Gerry's knees, then to his waist. As it came up to his shoulders he saw the top of Slag's helmet disappear below the surface ahead of him. For a moment the smooth surface of the water was level with Gerry's eyes as it rose around his own helmet. Then he stepped down into a darkness as black and impenetrable as though he were immersed in ink.
Gerry guided himself with his left hand on the slime covered stones of the wall beside him. He reached back with his other hand to steady Closana who was just behind. All together he counted thirty steps, feeling carefully with his feet each time, before the floor leveled off. The wall curved around to the right. Gerry followed it, rounded a bend, and was no longer in darkness.
They stood in a straight passage that was lined with blocks of polished stone. Metal plates, set in the ceiling at regular intervals, glowed with a greenish-yellow light that was nearly as bright as the cloudy Venusian daylight. The place was completely filled with water.
It was an eerie sensation! Slag was standing a few feet ahead, grinning at them through the glass of his helmet, but now he turned and walked slowly down the corridor. Gerry followed him, bent well forward as he walked, forcing himself ahead against the resistance of the water. All their movements were sluggish and slow, but the heavily leaded sandals held them down and gave their feet purchase.
Small fishes swam past them along the passage, their round eyes peering in through the helmet glasses as they passed. Clumps of colored sea-weed grew out from the walls and ceiling, their long streamers waving gently in the slow currents set up by the passage of the men. In spite of the brightness of the light from the ceiling plates, the effect of the water made it difficult to see far down the passage ahead. The outlines of Slag were clear enough as he plodded along directly ahead of Gerry, but everything beyond him was a little blurred and uncertain. It was like living in a mirage.
At last they came to a point where the passage branched. Here they passed a sentry who wore a glass helmet and a tight fitting green rubber uniform. On his chest was the insignia of a rampant black dragon. He was armed with a very thin, almost needle-like sword whose point was razor keen. Gerry realized the reason for that peculiarly designed weapon when the sentry swung his sword upward to salute their guide. The blade was so thin that it offered little resistance to the water, and its power of being quickly wielded made it a far more effective weapon under water than a heavier sword would have been.
They passed more branching passages, and more rubber-clad sentries who stared at them curiously as they went by. There was a whole network of corridors in this underwater world! At last Slag opened a metal door at the end of the particular passage he had followed, and they all crowded into a small room. Slag closed the door and dogged it, then tapped on a glass panel across the room.
A silvery flood of air bubbles came pouring out the end of a pipe that protruded through the wall. At the same time Gerry heard the thud of heavy pumps starting to suck water through gratings at the base of the wall. The water level dropped rapidly. When it was down to their waists, Slag took off his helmet and slipped the leaded sandals from his feet. He motioned to the others to do the same.
"We are about to enter the hidden realm of Luralla, the home of the Dragon's Teeth!" he said. "If you can prove your right to be here you will be welcome. Otherwise you will go back into one of these waterlocks—without any helmets on."
He grinned cheerfully.
The water dropped below the level of the door sills. The pumps sucked noisily on the last few foaming inches for a moment, and then they ceased. The inner door was opened by a sentry whose tight fitting green uniform with its black dragon was made of dry cloth instead of dripping rubber. He wore a plumed metal helmet, and carried a heavy sword instead of one of the thin water blades.
"Come in, Slag," he said, "who are these strangers?"
They were in a sort of guardroom, a square chamber where glass water helmets stood in long rows on metal shelves and many weapons hung in racks on the walls. The control levers of the pumps were just to the left of the door. There were half a dozen uniformed men standing about the room, one of them bearing the silver insignia of an officer on his chest. When Slag had given a hasty account of the coming of Gerry and the others, the officer nodded toward an inner door.
"Prince Sarnak has just returned. You will find him in the great hall. Take these strangers there."
The sound of music and laughter, and the confused babel of many voices, came to Gerry's ears as soon as the far door was opened. They entered a vast hall. It was low ceiled, as were all the water-locked chambers of this strange place, but it was broad and spacious. Heavy stone columns carved like giant sea-horses supported the roof. Patterns of sea-weed and star fish and other denizens of the deep were inter-mingled with rearing dragons in the painted designs along the walls. The room was filled with wide tables flanked by long benches.
The men and women who sat at the tables, or stood gossiping in noisy groups in corners of the hall, were nearly all of the Green People of Giri, but there were a few escaped Golden Amazons who came flocking eagerly around Closana. In outward appearance these green skinned men and women were similar to the folk who lived in the city overhead with their scaly masters, but there was a subtle difference. These people had none of the cowed and subjugated air of the citizens who lived above ground. There was a different look in their eyes, a more confident note in their voices, a firmer set to their shoulders. These folk had the air of free men and warriors, not slaves.
A stocky and merry eyed man caught sight of them and came striding across the hall. It was Sarnak, the man who had been tethered next to them in the field of the dakta hunt.
"Welcome to the halls of Luralla!" he boomed, "we are glad to have you come to the hidden realm of the Dragon's Teeth.Hizirenand comrades, these are the outlanders from afar who freed me this afternoon so that I and a dozen more of our people escaped death at the hands of the Scaly Ones!"
"Thrice hail!" roared the crowd, while a hundred blades flashed in the golden light. Angus McTavish wrung the water out of his dripping beard.
"These look like men of spirit," he rumbled cheerfully, "I think I'm going to enjoy myself again."
A little later, wearing dry clothes, the three of them sat down with Sarnak and his officers at a table in the corner of the hall. Young girls brought them dishes of fried sea-urchins, and broiled steaks of the grappa fish, and other savory dishes.
"We who call ourselves the Dragon's Teeth are outlaws descended from outlaws," Sarnak explained. "Our ancestors were men and women who never acknowledged the rule of the Scaly Ones when they overran this once pleasant land of Giri. I was born in this hidden place, as was my father before me and his father before him. We live here in the water-locked Halls of Luralla, and harass the tyrants in what ways we can, and try to keep alive the traditions and glory of the old days when the Dragon Kings ruled in this city and the Scaly Ones were still lurking in their Vaaka marshes to the westward."
"Does Lansa know of this place?"
"He knows that the Dragon's Teeth exist, as all rulers of the Scaly Ones have known it, but the location of our hiding place has never been betrayed."
"Then," roared Angus, pounding his big fist on the table till the dishes rattled, "why don't you revolt? I'll go with you myself to strike a blow against those reptile skinned devils up above!"
"Count me in, too!" Gerry said quietly.
Angus' voice had boomed out through the big hall. It was answered by a lilting shout as men sprang to their feet. Hundreds of sword blades flashed clear of their scabbards. Only Sarnak himself remained seated, slowly shaking his head. There was a twisted smile on his broad and heavily lined face. His eyes held bitterness.
"It would only be pointless suicide,hiziren!" he said grimly. "We number only about a thousand all together, we hunted men of the Dragon's Teeth, against the countless thousands of Lansa's scaly hordes. It would be different if our countrymen up above could be inspired to a mass uprising, but the time is not yet. Too long have they lived under the rule of the tyrants. They are cowed. They have lost their spirit, and some of the younger ones have even become fawning satellites of the conquerors! If there comes a day when the forces of the Scaly Ones are engaged in some major war along the frontier, as in this suggested assault upon the barrier forts of Savissa that Lansa is said to be planning, then we may be able to do something. For the present we must continue to lie hidden and bide our time."
Gerry Norton was uncertain about his own course. Now that theVikingand her crew had been lost, with all hope of a return to Earth cut off, he felt hopelessly adrift. Sarnak urged his visitors to stay in Luralla. The place was a remarkable engineering feat, completely under water and with its air constantly re-conditioned and preserved, but Gerry felt restless and cramped there. Though the outlaws carried on a constant guerilla warfare with the Scaly Ones, it was all on a small scale. Gerry felt that he would rather return to Savissa, where at least the people were free and the Amazon warriors kept ceaseless watch on their frontiers. Closana, of course, was very anxious to return home.
"Suits me, too," Angus rumbled, "in that country they at least show a proper respect for a man of my attainments."
"Meaning your whiskers?" Gerry asked.
"Look out, Angus," Closana warned with a smile, idly running her slender fingers along the keen edge of her dagger. "Some Savissan princess will choose you for her husband as I have chosen Geree here."
"I told you we wouldn't talk about that for the present...." Gerry began. Closana's hand moved swiftly as a striking dakta. The keen blade bit through the cloth of Gerry's sleeve and pinned it to the table top.
"You'll never get away from me, Geree," the girl said quietly. Angus McTavish burst out in a great roar of laughter.
"Might as well admit you're licked now, lad! These Venusian women seem to be verra strong minded lassies!"
They started two days later. There was, of course, neither night nor day in the sub-aqueous halls of Luralla but the outlaws ran their lives on a normal schedule. Sarnak supplied Gerry and the others with rubber uniforms and complete equipment including the thin bladed water-swords in the long feathery scabbards.
"I will have you guided out to one of our exits that is a quarter mile off shore from the place where the dakta hunt was held," Sarnak offered.
"I thought that water was a lake," Gerry said. Sarnak shook his head.
"No. It is an estuary, an arm of the Great Sea. The chemical tanks on your water helmets will keep the air pure for several days travel, and the sentries at the last outpost will give you trained saddle-dolphins so that you will make better time toward the coastal regions of Savissa."
Sarnak went with them to the guardroom at the edge of the water filled passages, and personally checked over their equipment.
"These are our new type of helmet with the audiphones that let the wearers talk to each other under water," he said, touching the tiny microphones set into the curved glass. "Well—you had better start. May the Dragon Gods be with you!"
They strapped on their helmets and adjusted the valves. A uniformed guide stepped into the water-lock with them. Sarnak shook hands, saluted, and then stepped back through the door which closed behind him. The guide lifted his hand in a signal, and a second later a torrent of water rushed out of the gratings to foam about their feet. They were ready to leave Luralla!
Again they went through the maze of water-filled passages, passing occasional sentries. After a while the character of the corridor changed. It was wider, and was arched instead of square, and there was a carpet of soft natural sand beneath their feet instead of a stone floor.
"We come to the last outpost of Luralla,hiziren!" the guide said.
They stepped out of the end of the passage and found themselves in the open sea, many fathoms down. A broad and slightly sloping floor of smooth sand studded with lumps of coral and clusters of sea-weed stretched before them. Some were giant ferns stretching twelve and fifteen feet high, others were low and sponge-like growths. A school of tiny red fishes shot swiftly past them. Larger fish sailed majestically by overhead. The top of the water was a gleaming golden ceiling far above them, the greenish yellow light lessening in intensity as it came down to the depths.
The end of the passage was surrounded by a barrier of piled coral. Outlaw swordsmen stood on guard, also armed with a sort of compressed air cross-bow that shot a heavy metal needle with great force. From a corral at one side an orderly brought three saddle-dolphins.
The big fish were equipped with rubber saddles strapped around the body, and short stirrups. They were guided by a bridle similar to that used on Earthly horses. As Gerry swung up to the saddle his dolphin bucked once or twice with quick flips of his tail, then steadied down as he felt the tight pressure of his master's knees. When the other two were mounted, the officer commanding the outpost lifted his arm in salute.
"The Dragon Gods be with you!" he said. At a distance of fifteen or twenty feet the sound of his voice was slightly muted, but the words were perfectly clear in the ear-pieces of Gerry's helmet. He lifted his own rubber gloved hand to his globular helmet and returned the salute.
They rode off at an easy pace, the dolphins rising above the tops of the tallest vegetation. Gerry found that it was easy to sit the saddle as long as he bent a little forward to overcome the resistance of the water against his chest. They were about thirty or forty feet down. On Earth such a depth would have been uncomfortable, but the lighter gravity of Venus made it easily bearable.
Gerry glanced back. Closana was riding a few feet behind him, slender and erect, controlling her restless dolphin as easily as though she had been accustomed to such steeds all her life. Angus was grinning broadly through his globular glass helmet as he sat astride a particularly big dolphin and swung his light bladed water-sword from side to side.
"If any of our friends back on Earth could see us now in some sort of an astral spectroscope," the big Scot cried, "they'd think themselves crazy. Maybe this is only a nightmare at that! Do you think we'll wake up soon and find ourselves safe back on board theViking?"
"I'm afraid not," Gerry answered. He wondered in what part of this vast sea the twisted hulk of theVikingwas now lying.
All day they rode, roughly following the shoreline to the northward. Whenever it got so deep that nothing was visible below but a vast green shadow Gerry headed inland until the tops of the sea gardens again came into view. Sarnak had told them that by the middle of the next day it should be safe for them to come above water and check their maps and put fresh chemical cartridges in the cylinders of their helmets. The Scaly Ones patrolled their coast line in shallow open boats, but they did not go beyond their own borders.
Once Gerry checked his dolphin and then headed downward as he caught sight of something big and dark lying on the sand. The others followed him. It was the broken and rusting hulk of a space-ship, a vessel of a strange type with a name in an unknown tongue still visible on the shattered stern. The wreck must have been there for a very long time, for the sand was heaped high about it and sea-weeds grew up through the open hatches.
"Leaping ray-blasts!" McTavish said softly. "Yon craft never came from either Earth or Mars."
"Probably from some far distant planet in outer space that we've never heard of," Gerry said. "Some adventurous wanderer of the interstellar regions who came to grief in this lonely spot."
It was desolate and forlorn, the sight of that wrecked vessel from so long ago. It made Gerry think of his own lost command. There were clean picked white bones of strange shape lying about on the sand. Gerry saluted, a tribute to those strange and forgotten wanderers of space, and then urged his dolphin to a higher level again.
When the dimming light showed that it was dusk above the water they rode in to the four-fathom shallows and halted in a smooth patch of yellow sand. Gerry unsaddled the dolphins and tethered them to lumps of coral where they browsed contentedly on the short vegetation. Then the three exiles sat down in a circle on the sand. McTavish stretched his long legs, bouncing a few feet off the ground as he did so and then floating slowly down again.
"I'll never forget this journey if I live to be older than the whole Solar System itself!" he said. "Also—I'm hungry."
"There's nothing we can do about that until noon tomorrow," Gerry grunted. "Maybe the fasting will make you lose some of that surplus bulk of yours. But I'll admit I could do with some of that special coffee Portok used to brew in the ward room on theVikingin the evenings."
"I'd give a lot for a drink of plain water," Closana said wistfully. "Acres of water around us and nothing to drink!"
When the last of the light was gone they lit a small lamp that Sarnak had given them. It illumined a circle some twenty feet across, a little patch of light in the midst of the utter blackness of the depths of the sea. They sat there talking for a while, then Gerry stretched out on the sand with one arm hooked around a lump of coral to hold himself in place. He was thankful that the waters of Venus were always warm. It would scarcely have been possible to sleep at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans in this manner, even with the equipment with which Sarnak had supplied them.