Men were gathering about the air-lock, under the direction of the Prince, assembling mining equipment.
"Shall we be able to go out without vacuum suits?" Bill asked Captain Brand.
"I think so, when it gets warm enough. The air is light—the amount of oxygen at the surface is about equal to that in the air nine miles above sea level on earth. But the pull of gravity here is only about one-third as much as it is on the earth, and less oxygen will be required to furnish energy. I think we can stand it, if we don't take too much exertion."
The rays of the oddly small sun beat fiercely through the thin air. Soon the Prince went into the air-lock, closed the inner door behind him and started the pumps. When the dial showed the pressures equalized he opened the outer door, and stepped out upon the red rocks.
All were watching him intently, through the vitrolite panels. Paula clasped her hands in nervous anxiety. Bill saw the Prince step confidently out, sniff the air as though testing it, and take a few deep breaths. Then he drew his legs beneath him and made an astounding leap, that carried him twenty feet high. He fell in a long arc, struck on his shoulder in a pile of loose red sand. He got up, gasping for air as if the effort had exhausted him, and staggered back to the air-lock. Quickly he sealed the outer door behind him, opened the valve, and raised the pressure.
"Feels funny," he said when he opened the inner door. "Like trying to breathe on top of a mountain—only more so. The jump was great fun, but rather exhausting. I imagine it would be dangerous for a fellow with a weak heart. All right to come out now. Air is still cool, but the rocks are getting hot under the sun."
He held open the door. "The guards will come first."
Six of the thirty-odd members of the crew had been detailed to act as guards, to prevent surprise. Each was to carry two rocket torpedoes—such a burden was not too much upon this planet, with its lesser gravity. They would watch from the cliffs at the edge of the little plateau upon which the sunship had landed.
Bill and four other men entered the air-lock—and Paula. The girl had insisted upon having some duty assigned to her, and this had seemed easier than the mining.
The door was closed behind them, the air pumped out until Bill gasped for breath and heard a drumming in his ears. Then the outer door was opened and they looked out upon Mars. Motion was easy, yet the slightest effort was tiring. Bill found himself panting merely from the exertion of lifting the two heavy torpedoes to his shoulders.
With Paula behind him, he stepped through the outer door. The air felt chill and thin. Loose red sand crumbled yieldingly under their feet.
They separated at the door, Bill starting toward the south end of the pleateau, Paula toward the north point, and the men going to stations along the sides.
"Just lie at the top of the cliffs and watch," the Prince had ordered. "When you have anything to report, flash with your ray pistols, in code. Signal every thirty minutes, anyhow. We will have a man watching from the bridge. Report to him anything moving. We will fire off a red signal rocket when you are to come back."
He had tried to keep Paula from going out, but the girl had insisted. At last he had agreed.
"Better to have you keeping watch than handling a pick and shovel, or pushing a barrow," he had told her. "But I hate to see you go so far off. Something might happen. If they find us, though, they will probably get us all. Don't get hurt."
Bill had seen the Prince looking anxiously at the slender, brown-eyed girl as they entered the air-lock. He had seen him move forward quickly, as though to ask her to come back—move forward, and then turn aside with a flush that became a bitterly cynical smile.
As Bill walked across the top of the barren red plateau, he looked back at the girl moving slowly in the opposite direction. He had glanced at her eyes as they left the ship. They were shadowed, heavy-lidded. In their brown depths lurked despair and tragic determination. Bill, watching her now, thought that all life had gone out of her. She seemed a dull automaton, driven only by the energy of a determined will. All hope and life and vivacity had gone from her manner. Yet she walked as if she had a stern task to do.
"I wonder——" Bill muttered. "Can she mean—suicide?"
He turned uncertainly, as if to go after her. Then, deciding that his thought was mere fancy, he trudged on across the red plateau to his station.
Behind him, he saw other parties emerging from the air-lock. The Prince and Dr. Trainor were setting up apparatus of some kind, probably, Bill thought, to take magnetic and meteorological observations. Men with prospecting hammers were scattering over all the plateau.
"Almost any sort of ferruginous rock is sure to contain the tiny amount of cerium we need," Dr. Trainor had said.
Bill reached the end of the plateau. The age-worn cliffs of red granite and burned lava fell sheer for a hundred feet, to a long slope of talus. Below the rubble of sand and boulders the flat desert stretched away, almost visibly curving to vanish beneath the near red horizon.
It was a desolate and depressing scene, this view of a dead and sun-baked planet. There was no sign of living thing, no moving object, no green of life—the canals, with their verdure, were far out of sight.
"Hard to realize there's a race of vampires across there, living in great metal domes," Bill muttered, as he threw himself flat on the rocks at the lip of the precipice, and leveled one of the heavy torpedoes before him. "But I don't blame 'em for wanting to go to a more cheerful world."
Looking behind him, he soon saw men busy with electric drills not a hundred yards from the slender silver cylinder that was theRed Rover. The earth quivered beneath him as a shot was set off, and he saw a great fountain of crushed rock thrown into the air.
Men with barrows, an hour later, were wheeling the crushed rock to gleaming electrical reducing apparatus that Dr. Trainor and the Prince were setting up beside the sunship. Evidently there had been no difficulty in finding ore that carried a satisfactory amount of cerium.
Bill continued to scan the orange-red desert below him through the powerful telescope along the rocket tube. He kept his watch before him, and at half-hour intervals sent the three short flashes with his ray pistol, which meant "All is well."
Two hours must have gone by before he saw the blue globe. It came into view low over the red rim of the desert below him, crept closer on a wavering path.
"Martian ship in view," he signalled. "A blue globe, about ten feet in diameter. Follows curious winding course, as if following something."
"Keep rocket trained upon it," came the cautiously flashed reply. "Fire if it observes us."
"Globe following animals," he flashed back. "Two grayish bipeds leaping before it. Running with marvelous agility."
He was peering through the telescope sight of the rocket tube. Keeping the cross hairs upon the little blue globe, he could still see the creatures that fled before it. They were almost like men—or erect, hairy apes. Bipeds, they were, with human-like arms, and erect heads. Covered with short gray hair or fur, they carried no weapons.
They fled from the globe at a curious leaping run, which carried them over the flat red desert with remarkable speed. They came straight for the foot of the cliff from which Bill watched, the blue globe close behind them. When one of them stumbled over a block of lava and fell sprawling headlong on the sand, the other gray creature stopped to help it. The blue globe stopped, too, hanging still twenty feet above the red sand, waited for them to rise and run desperately on again.
Bill felt a quick flood of sympathy for the gray creatures. One had stopped to help the other. That meant that they felt affection. And the globe had waited for them to run again. It seemed to be baiting them maliciously. Almost he fired the rocket. But his orders had been not to fire unless the ship were discovered.
Now they were not a mile away. Suddenly Bill perceived a tiny, light-gray object grasped close to the breast of one of the gray bipeds. Evidently it was a young one, in the arms of its mother. The other creature seemed a male. It was the mother that had fallen.
They came on toward the cliff.
They were very clearly in view, and not five hundred yards below, when the female fell again. The male stopped to aid her, and the globe poised itself above them, waited. The mother seemed unable to rise. The other creature lifted her, and she fell limply back.
As if in rage, the gray male sprang toward the blue globe, crouching.
A tiny purple spark leapt from it. A flash of violet fire enveloped him. He was flung twisted and sprawling to the ground. Burned and torn and bleeding, he drew himself to all fours, and crept on toward the blue globe.
Suddenly the sphere dropped to the ground. A round panel swung open in its side—it was turned from Bill, so that he could not see within. Green things crept out. They were creatures like the one he had seen in the Mexican desert—a cluster of slender, flexible green tentacles, with suction disks, an insignificant green body, and three malevolent purple eyes, at the ends of foot-long stalks.
There were three of the things.
The creeping male flung himself madly upon one of them. It coiled itself about him; suction disks fastened themselves against his skin. For a time he writhed and struggled, fighting in agony against the squeezing green coils. Then he was still.
One of the things grasped the little gray object in the mother's arms. She fought to shield it, to cover it with her own body. It was torn away from her, hidden in the hideously writhing green coils.
The third of the monsters flung itself upon the mother, wrapping snake-like tentacles about her, dragging her struggling body down shuddering and writhing in agony while the blood of life was sucked from it.
Bill watched, silent and trembling with horror.
"The things chased them—for fun!" he muttered fiercely. "Just a sample of what it will be on the earth—if we don't stop 'em."
Presently the green monsters left their victims—which were now mere shriveled husks. They dragged themselves back into the blue globe, which rose swiftly into the air. The round panel had closed.
From his station on the cliff, Bill watched the thing through the telescope sight of the rocket, keeping the cross hairs upon it. It came up to his own level—above it. Suddenly it paused. He was sure that the things in it had seen theRed Rover.
Quickly, he pressed a little nickeled lever. A soft whir came from the rocket tube. He pressed the red button. The torpedo leapt forward, with the white rays driving back. The empty shell was flung back in Bill's hand.
A great burst of vivid orange flame enveloped the cobalt globe. It disintegrated into a rain of white metal fragments.
"Take that, damn you!" he muttered in fierce satisfaction.
"Globe brought down successfully," he flashed. "Evidently it had sighted us. Green Martians from it had killed gray bipeds. May I inspect remains?"
"You may," permission was flashed back from the Prince. "But be absent not over half an hour."
In a moment another message came. "All lookouts be doubly alert. Globe may be searched for. Miners making good progress. We can leave by sunset. Courage!——The Prince."
Strapping the remaining rocket torpedo to his shoulders, and thrusting his ray pistol ready in his belt, Bill walked back along the brink of the precipice until he saw a comparatively easy way to the red plain below, and scrambled over the rim. Erosion of untold ages had left cracks and irregularities in the rock. Because of the slighter gravity of Mars, it was a simple feat to support his weight with the grip of his fingers on a ledge. In five minutes he had clambered down to the bank of talus. Hurriedly he scrambled down over great fallen boulders, panting and gasping for breath in the thin air.
He reached the red sand of the plain—it was worn by winds of ages into an impalpable scarlet dust, that rose in a thin, murky cloud about him, and settled in a blood-colored stain upon his perspiring limbs. The dry dust yielded beneath his feet as he made his way toward the silent gray bodies, making his progress most difficult.
Almost exhausted, he reached the gray creatures, examined them. They were far different from human beings, despite obvious similarities. Each of their "hands" had but three clawed digits; a curious, disk-like appendage took the place of the nose. In skeletal structure they were far different fromhomo sapiens.
Wearily Bill trudged back to the towering red cliff, red dust swirling up about him. He was oddly exhausted by his exertions, trifling as they had been. The murky red dust he inhaled was irritating to his nostrils; he choked and sneezed. Sweat ran in muddy red streams from his body, and he was suddenly very thirsty.
All the top of the red granite plateau—it was evidently the stone heart of an ancient mountain—was hidden from him. He could see nothing of theRed Roveror any of her crew. He could see no living thing.
The flat plain of red dust lay about him, curving below a near horizon. Loose dust sucked at his feet, rose about him in a suffocating saffron cloud. The sun, a little crimson globe in a blue-black sky, shone blisteringly. The sky was soberly dark, cold and hostile. In alarmed haste, he struggled toward the grim line of high, red cliffs.
Then he saw a round white object in the red sand.
Pausing to gasp for breath and to rub the sweat and red mud from his forehead, he kicked at it curiously. A sun-bleached human skull rolled out of the scarlet dust. He knew at once that it was human, not a skull of a creature like the gray things behind him on the sand.
With the unpleasant feeling that he was opening the forbidden book of some forgotten tragedy, he fell to his knees in the dust, and scooped about with his fingers. His right had closed upon a man's thigh bone. His left caught in a rotten leather belt, that pulled a human vertebra out of the dust. The belt had a tarnished silver buckle, and he looked at it with a gasp.
It bore an elaborate initial "E."
"E!" he muttered. "Envers! He got to Mars. And died here. Trying to get to the mountain, I guess. Lord! what a death! A man all alone, in the dust and the sun. A strange world. Strange monsters."
The loneliness of the red desert, the mystery of it, and its alien spirit, wrapped itself about him like a mantle of fear. He staggered to his feet, and set off at a stumbling run through the sand toward the cliff. But in a moment he paused.
"He might have left something!" he muttered.
He turned, and plodded back to where he had left the skull and the rotted belt, and dug again with his fingers. He found the rest of the skeleton, even bits of hair, clothing and human skin, preserved in the dry dust. He found an empty canteen, a rusty pocketknife, buttons, coins, and a ray pistol that was burned out.
Then his plowing fingers brought up a little black book from the dust.
It was Envers' diary.
Most of it was still legible. It is available in printed form today, and gives a detailed account of the tragic venture. The hopeful starting from earth. The dangers and discouragements of the voyage. A mutiny; half the crew killed. The thrill of landing on a new planet. The attack of the blue globes. How they took the ship, carried their prisoners to the pens, where they tried to use them to breed a new variety of domestic animals. Envers' escape, his desperate attempt to find the ship where they had landed in the desert.
Bill did not read it all then. He took time to read only that last tragic entry.
"Water all gone. See now I will never reach mountain where I landed. Probably they have moved sunship anyhow. Might have been better to have stayed in the pen. Food and water there.... But how could God create such things? So hideous, so malignant! I pray they will not use my ship to go to earth. I hoped to find and destroy it. But it is too late."
Thick red dust swirled up in Bill's face. He tried to breathe, choked and sneezed and strangled. Looking up from the yellowed pages of the dead explorer's notebook, he saw great clouds of red dust hiding the darkly blue sky in the east. It seemed almost that a colossal red-yellowed cylinder was being rolled swiftly upon him from eastward.
A dust-storm was upon him! One of the terrific dust-storms of Mars, so fierce that they are visible to astronomers across forty million miles of space.
Clutching the faded notebook, he ran across the sand again, toward the red cliffs. The wind howled behind him, overtook him and came screaming about his ears. Red dust fogged chokingly about his head. The line of cliffs before him vanished in a murky red haze. The wind blew swiftly, yet it was thin, exerting little force. The dusty air became an acrid fluid, choking, unbreathable.
Blindly, he staggered on, toward the rocks. He reached them, fought his way up the bank of talus, scrambling over gigantic blocks of lava. The base of the cliff was before him, a massive, perpendicular wall, rising out of sight in red haze. He skirted it, saw a climbable chimney, scrambled up.
At last he drew himself over the top, and lay flat. Scarlet dust-clouds swirled about him: he could not see twenty yards. He made no attempt to find theRed Rover; he knew he could not locate it in the dust.
Hours passed as he lay there, blinded, suffocating, feeling the hot misery of acrid dust and perspiration caked in a drying mud upon his skin. Thin winds screamed about the rocks, hot as a furnace-blast. He leveled his torpedo, tried to watch. But he could see only a murky wall of red, with the sun biting through it like a tiny, round blood-ruby.
The red sun had been near the zenith. Slowly it crept down, toward an unseen horizon. It alone gave him an idea of direction, and of the passage of time. Then it, too, vanished in the dust.
Suddenly the wind was still. The dust settled slowly. In half an hour the red sun came into view again, just above the red western horizon. Objects about the mile-long plateau began to take shape. TheRed Roverstill lay where she had been, in the center. Men were still busily at work at the mining machinery—they had struggled on through the storm.
"All lookouts signal reports," the Prince flashed from the ship.
"Found Envers' body and brought his diary," Bill flashed when it came his turn.
"Now preparing to depart," came from the Prince. "Getting apparatus aboard. Have the required cerium. Return signal will be fired soon."
Bill watched the dusty sky, over whose formerly dark-blue face the storm had drawn a yellowish haze. In a few minutes he saw a blue globe. Then another, and a third. They were far toward the southeast, drifting high and fast through the saffron haze. It seemed that they were searching out the route over which the globe that he had brought down must have come.
"Three globe-ships in sight," he signalled. "Approaching us."
Some of the other lookouts had evidently seen them, for he saw the flicker of other ray pistols across the plateau.
Without preamble, the red signal rocket was fired. Bill heard the report of it—sharp and thin in the rare atmosphere. He saw the livid scarlet flare.
He got to his feet, shouldered the heavy rocket tube, and ran stumbling back to theRed Rover. He saw other men running; saw men struggling to get the mining machinery back on the ship.
Looking back, he saw the three blue globes swimming swiftly nearer. Then he saw others, a full score of them. They were far off, tiny circles of blue in the saffron sky. They seemed to be rapidly flying toward theRed Rover.
He looked expectantly northward, toward the end of the plateau to which Paula had gone. He saw nothing of her. She was not returning in answer to the signal rocket.
He was utterly exhausted when he reached the sunship, panting, gasping for the thin air. The others were all like himself, caked with dried red mud, gasping asthmatically from exertion and excitement. Men were struggling to get pieces of heavy machinery aboard the flier—vitalium power generators that had been used to heat the furnaces, and even a motor ray tube that had been borrowed from the ship's power plant for emergency use in the improvised smelter.
The Prince and Dr. Trainor were laboring furiously over an odd piece of apparatus. On the red sand beside the silver sunship, they had set up a tripod on which was mounted a curious glistening device. There were lenses, prisms, condensers, mirrors. The core of it seemed to be a strange vacuum tube—which had an electrode of cerium, surrounded with a queer vitalium grid. A tiny filament was glowing in it; and the induction coil which powered the tube, fed by vitalium batteries, was buzzing incessantly.
"Better get aboard, and off!" Bill cried. "No use to lose our lives, our chance to save the world—just for a little mining machinery."
The Prince looked up in a moment, leaving the queer little device to Dr. Trainor. "Look at the Martian ships!" he cried, sweeping out an arm. "Must be thirty in sight, swarming up like flies. We couldn't get away. And against those purple atomic bombs, the torpedoes wouldn't have a chance. Besides, we have some of the ship's machinery out here. Some generators, and a ray tube."
Bill looked up, saw the swarming blue globes, circling above them in the saffron sky, some of them not a mile above. He shrugged hopelessly, then looked anxiously off to the north again, scanning the red plateau.
"Paula! What's become of her?" he demanded.
"Paula? Is she gone?" The Prince turned from the tripod, looked around suddenly. "Paula! What could have happened to her?"
"A broken heart has happened to her," Bill told him.
"You think—you think——" stammered the Prince. There was sudden alarm in his dark eyes, and a great tender longing. His bitterly cynical smile was gone.
"Bill, she can't be gone!" he cried, almost in agony.
"You know she was on lookout duty at the north end of the plateau. She hasn't come back."
"I've got to find her!"
"What is it to you? I thought you didn't care!" Bill was stern.
"I thought I didn't, except as a friend. But I was wrong. If she's gone, Bill—it will kill me!"
The Prince spun about with abrupt decision.
"Get everything aboard, and fit the ship to take off, as soon as possible," he ordered. "Dr. Trainor is in command. Give him any help he needs. Brand, test everything when the tube is replaced; keep the ship ready to fly." He turned swiftly to Trainor, who still worked deftly over the glittering little machine on the tripod. "Doc, you can operate that by yourself, as well as if I were here. Do your best—for mankind! I'm going to find your daughter."
Trainor nodded in silent assent, his fingers busy.
The Prince, sticking a ray pistol in his belt, set off at a desperate run toward the north end of the plateau. After a moment's hesitation, Bill staggered along behind him, still carrying the rocket torpedo strapped to his back.
It was only half a mile to the end of the plateau. In a few minutes the Prince was there. Bill staggered up just as he was reading a few scrawled words on a scrap of paper that he had found fastened to a boulder where Paula had been stationed.
"To the Prince of Space," it ran. "I can't go on. You must know that I love you—desperately. It was maddening to be with you, to know that you don't care. I know the story of your life, know that you can never care for me. The red dust is blowing now, and I am going down in the desert to die. Please don't look for me—it will do no good. Pardon me for writing this, but I wanted you to know—why I am going. Because I love you. Paula."
CHAPTER VIII
The Vitomaton
"I love Paula!" cried the Prince. "It happened all at once—when you said she was gone. Like a burst of light. Yet it must have been growing for weeks. It was getting so I couldn't work in the lab, unless she was there. God! It must have been hard for her. I was fighting it; I tried to hide what I was beginning to feel, tried to treat her as if she were a man. Now—she's gone!"
Bill looked back to theRed Rover, half a mile behind them. She lay still, burnished silver cylinder on the red sand. He could see Trainor beside her, still working over the curious little device on the tripod. All the others had gone aboard. And a score of blue globe-ships, like little sapphire moons, were circling a few thousand feet above, drifting around and around, with a slow gliding motion, like buzzards circling over their carrion-prey.
The Prince had buried his face in his hands, standing in an attitude of utter dejection.
Bill turned, looked over the red flat sand of the Martian desert. Far below, leading toward the near horizon, he saw a winding line of foot-prints, half obliterated by the recent dust-storm. Far away they vanished below the blue-black sky.
"Her tracks," he said, pointing.
"Tracks!" the Prince looked up, eager, hopeful determination flashing in his dark eyes. "Then we can follow! It may not be too late!"
He ran toward the edge of the cliff.
Bill clutched his sleeve. "Wait! Think what you're doing, man! We're fighting to save the world. You can't run off that way! Anyhow, the sun is low. It is getting cool already. In two minutes after the sun goes down it will be cold as the devil! You'll die in the desert!"
The Prince tugged away. "Hang the world! If you knew the way I feel about Paula—Lord, what a fool I've been! To drive her to this!"
Agony was written on his dark face; he bit his thin lip until blood oozed out and mingled indistinguishably with the red grime on his face. "Anyhow, thevitomatonis finished. Trainor can use it as well as I. I've got to find Paula—or die trying."
He started toward the brink of the precipice again. After the hesitation of a moment, Bill started after him. The Prince turned suddenly.
"What the devil are you doing here?"
"Well," said Bill, "theRed Roveris not a very attractive haven of refuge, with all those Martian ships flying around it. And I have come to think a good deal of Miss Paula. I'd like to help you find her."
"Don't come," said the Prince. "Probably it is death—"
"I'm not exactly an infant. I've been in tight places before, I've even an idea of what it would be like to die at night in this desert—I found the bones of a man in the dust today. But I want to go."
The Prince grasped Bill's hand. For a moment a tender smile of friendship came over the drawn mask of mingled despair and determination upon his lean face.
Presently the two of them found an inclining ledge that ran down the face of the red granite cliff, and scrambled along to the flat plain of acrid dust below. In desperate haste they plodded gasping along, following the scant traces of Paula's foot-prints that the storm had left. A hazy red cloud of dust rose about them, stinging their nostrils. They strangled and gasped for breath in the thin, dusty air. Sweaty grime covered them with a red crust.
For a mile they followed the trail. Then Paula had left the sand for a bare ledge of age-worn volcanic rock. The wind had erased what traces she might have left here. They skirted the edge of the ledge, but no prints were visible in the sand. The small red eye of the sun was just above the ocherous western rim of the planet. Their perspiring bodies shivered under the first chill of the frozen Martian night.
"It's no use," Bill muttered, sitting down on a block of time-worn granite, and wiping the red mud from his face. "She's probably been gone for hours. No chance."
"I've got to find her!" the Prince cried, his lean, red-stained face tense with determination. "I'll circle about a little, and see if I can't pick up the trail."
Bill sat on the rock. He looked back at the low dark rim of cliffs, a mile behind, grim and forbidding against the somber, indigo sky. The crimson, melancholy splendor of the Martian sunset was fading in the west.
The silver sunship was out of sight behind the cliffs. But he could see the little blue globes, like spinning moons of sapphire, circling watchfully above it. They were lower now, some of them not a thousand feet above the hidden sunship.
Abruptly, one of them was enveloped in a vivid flare of orange light. Its blue gleam flickering out, and it fell in fragments of twisted white metal. Bill knew that it had been struck with a rocket torpedo.
The reply was quick and terrible. Slender, dazzling shafts of incandescent whiteness stabbed down toward the ship, each of them driving before it a tiny bright spark of purple fire, coruscating, iridescent.
They were the atomic bombs, Bill knew. A dozen of them must have been fired, from as many ships. In a few seconds he heard the reports of their explosions—in the thin, still air, they were mere sharp cracks, like pistol reports. They exploded below the line of his vision. No more torpedoes were fired from the unseen sunship. Bill could see nothing of it; but he was sure that it had been destroyed.
He heard the Prince's shout, thin and high in the rare atmosphere. It came from a hundred yards beyond him.
"I've found the trail."
Bill got up, trudged across to follow him. The Prince waited, impatiently, but gasping for breath. Just half of the red disk of the sun was visible in the indigo sky above the straight horizon, and a chill breeze blew upon them.
"I guess that ends the chance for the world!" Bill gasped.
"I suppose so. Some fool must have shot that torpedo off, contrary to orders. Thevitomatonmight have saved us, if Trainor had had a chance to use it."
They plodded on through the dust, straining their eyes to follow the half-obliterated trail in the fading light. It grew colder very swiftly, for Mars has no such thick blanket atmosphere to hold the heat of day as has the earth.
Twilight was short. Splendid wings of somber crimson flame hung for a moment in the west. A brief golden glow shone where it had been. Then the sky was dark, and the million stars were standing out in cold, motionless majesty—scintillantly bright, unfeeling watchers of the drama in the desert.
Bill felt tingling cold envelope his limbs. The sweat and mud upon him seemed freezing. He saw the white glitter of frost appear suddenly upon his garments, even upon the red dust. The thin air he breathed seemed to freeze his lungs. He trembled. His skin became a stiff, numb, painful garment, hindering his movements. The Prince staggered on ahead of him, a vague dark shadow in the night, crying out at intervals in a queer, strained voice.
Bill stopped, looked back, shivering and miserable. "No use to go on," he muttered. "No use." He stood still, vainly flapping his numb arms against his sides. A vivid picture came to him—a naked, staring, sun-bleached skull, lying in the red dust. "Bones in the dust," he muttered. "Bones in the dust. Envers' bones. And Paula's. The Prince's. Mine."
He saw something that made him stare, oblivious of the cold.
The red cliff had become a low dark line, below the star-studded sky. The score of little cobalt moons were still drifting around and around, in endless circles, watching, waiting. They were bright among the stars.
A little green cloud came up into view, above the dark rim of the cliff. A little spinning wisp of greenish vapor. A tiny sphere of swirling radiance. It shone with the clear lucent green of spring, of all verdure, of life itself. It spun, and it shone with live green light.
With inconceivable speed, it darted upward. It struck one of the blue globes. A sparkling mist of dancing emerald atoms flowed over the azure sphere, dissolved it, melted it away.
Bill rubbed his eyes. Where the sapphire ship had been was now only a swirling mass of green mist, a cloud of twinkling emerald particles, shining with a supernal viridescent radiance that somehow suggestedlife.
Abruptly as the first tiny wisp of green luminescence had appeared, this whirling cloud exploded. It burst into scores of tiny globes of sparkling, vibrant atoms. The green cloud had eaten and grown. Now it was reproducing itself like a living thing that feeds and grows and sends off spores.
And each of the little blobs of viridity flew to an azure sphere. It seemed to Bill as if the blue ships drew them—or as if the green globules of swirling mist werealive, seeking food.
In an instant, each swirling spiral of emerald mist had struck a blue globe. Vibrant green haze spread over every sphere. And the spheres melted, faded, vanished in clouds of swirling viridescent vapor.
It all happened very suddenly. It was hardly a second, Bill thought, after the first of the swirling green blobs had appeared, before the last of the Martian fliers had become a mass of incandescent mist. Then, suddenly as they had come, the green spirals vanished. They were blotted out.
The stars shone cold and brilliant, in many-colored splendor, above the dark line of the cliffs. The Martian ships were gone.
"Thevitomaton!" Bill muttered, "The Prince said something about thevitomaton. A new weapon, using the force of life. And the green was like a living thing, consuming the spheres!"
Suddenly he felt the bitter cold again. He moved, and his garments were stiff with frost. The cold had numbed his limbs—most of the pain had gone. He felt a curious lightness, an odd sense of relief, of freedom—and a delicious, alarming desire for sleep. But leaden pain of cold still lurked underneath, dull, throbbing.
"Move! Move!" he muttered through cold-stiffened lips. "Move! Keep warm!"
He stumbled across the dust in the direction the Prince had taken. The cold tugged at him. His breath froze in swirls of ice. With all his will he fought the deadly desire for sleep.
He had not gone far when he came upon a dark shape in the night. It was the Prince, carrying Paula in his arms.
"I found her lying on the sand," he gasped to Bill. "She was awake. She was glad—forgave me—happy now."
The Prince was exhausted, struggling through the sand, burdened with the girl in his arms.
"Why go on?" Bill forced the words through his freezing face. "Never make it. They shot atomic bombs atRed Rover. Then something happened to them. Green light."
"Thevitomaton!" gasped the Prince. "Vortex of spinning, disintegrated atoms. Controlled by wireless power. Alive! Consumes all matter! Disintegrates it into atomic nothingness!"
He staggered on toward the dark line of cliffs, clasping the inert form of the girl to his body.
"But Paula! I love her. I must carry her to the ship. It is my fault. We must get to the ship."
Bill struggled along beside him. "Too far!" he muttered. "Miles, in the night. In the cold. We'll never——"
He stopped, with a thin, rasping cry.
Before him, above the narrow black line of the cliffs, a slender bar of luminescent silver had shot up into view. It was the slim, tapering cylinder of theRed Rover, with her twelve rear motor rays driving white and dazzling against the mountain she was leaving. The sunship, unharmed, driving upward into space!
"My God!" Bill screamed. "Leaving us!" He staggered forward, a pitiful, trembling figure, encased in stiff, frost-covered garments. He waved his arms, shouted. It was vain, almost ludicrous.
The Prince had stopped, still holding Paula in his arms.
"They think—Martians got us!" he called in a queer voice. "Stop them! Fire torpedo—at boulder. They will see!"
Bill heard the gasping voice. He unfastened the heavy tube that he still carried on his shoulder, leveled it before him. With numb, trembling fingers, he tried to move the levers. His fingers seemed frozen; they would not move. Tears burst from his eyes, freezing on his cheeks. He stood holding the heavy tube in his arms, sobbing like a baby.
Above them, the slender white cylinder of theRed Roverwas driving out into star-gemmed space, dazzling opalescent rays shooting back at the dark mountain behind her.
"They go," Bill babbled. "They think we are dead. Have not time to wait. Go to fight for world."
He collapsed in a trembling heap upon the loose, frosty sand.
The Prince had suddenly laid Paula on the ground, was beside him.
"Lift the rocket," he gasped. "Aim. I will fire."
Bill raised the heavy tube mechanically, sighted through the telescope. His trembling was so violent that he could hardly hold it upon the rock. The Prince tried with his fingers to move the lever, in vain. Then he bent, pressed his chin against it. It slipped, cut a red gash in his skin. Again he tried, and the whir of the motor responded. He got his chin upon the little red button, pressed it. The empty shell drove back, fell from Bill's numbed hands and clattered on the sand.
The torpedo struck with a burst of orange light.
The Prince picked up Paula again, clasped her chilled body to him. Bill watched theRed Rover. Suddenly he voiced a glad, incoherent cry. The white rays that drove her upward were snapped out. The slim silver ship swung about, came down on a long swift glide.
In a moment, it seemed, she swept over them, with a searchlight sweeping the red sand. The white beam found the three. Quickly the ship dropped beside them. Grotesque figures in vacuum suits leapt from the air-lock.
In a few seconds they were aboard, in warmth and light. Hot, moist air hissed into the lock about them, and they could breathe easily again. The sizzling of the air through the valves was the last impression of which Bill was conscious, until he found himself waking up in a comfortable bed, feeling warm and very hungry. Captain Brand was standing with his blue eyes peering through the door.
"Just looked in to see you as I was going on duty, Bill," he said. "Doctor Trainor says you're all right now. The Prince and Paula are too. You were all rather chilled, but nothing was seriously frozen. Lucky you shot off the rocket. We had given up hope for you—didn't dare stay.
"Funny change has come over the Prince. He's been up a good while, sitting by Paula's bed. How's that for the misogynist—the hermit outlaw of space? Well, come on up to the bridge when you've had some breakfast. The battle with Mars is going to be fought out in the next few hours. Ought to be something interesting to see."
Having delivered his broadside of information so fast that the sleepy Bill could hardly absorb it, the gruff old space-captain withdrew his head, and went on.
An hour later Bill entered the bridge-room.
Gazing through the vitrolite panels, he saw the familiar aspect of interplanetary space—hard, brilliant points of many-colored light scintillating in a silver-dusted void of utter blackness. The flaming, red-winged sun was small and far distant. Earth was a huge green star, glowing with indescribably beautiful liquid emerald brilliance; the moon a silver speck beside it.
The grim red disk of Mars filled a great space in the heavens. Bill looked for a little blue dot that had been visible upon the red planet for so long—the tiny azure circle that he had first seen from the telescope in Trainor's Tower. He found the spot where it should be, on the upper limb of the planet. But it was gone.
"The thing has left Mars," Captain Brand told him. "It has set out on its mission of doom to Earth!"
"What is it?"
"It is armored with one of their blue vibratory screens. What hellish contrivances of war it has in it, and what demoniac millions of Martians, no one knows. It is enormous, more than a mile in diameter."
"Can we do anything?"
"I hardly see how we can do anything. But we can try. Trainor and the Prince are coming with theirvitomaton."
"Say, didn't they shoot their atomic bombs at the ship last night?" Bill asked. "It was out of sight, but I imagined they had wrecked it."
"One of the lookouts who was late getting back brought down one of their globes with a rocket. They fired a lot of the purple bombs to scare us. But I think they meant to take us alive. In the interest of their science, I suppose. And Dr. Trainor got thevitomatonready before they had done anything."
Bill was peering out into the star-strewn ebon gulf. Captain Brand pointed. He saw a tiny blue globe, swimming among the stars.
"There's the infernal thing! Carrying its cargo of horror to our earth!"
In a few moments Dr. Trainor, the Prince, and Paula came one by one up the ladder to the bridge. Trainor carried the tripod; the Prince brought a little black case which contained the strange vacuum tube with the cerium electrode, and its various accessories; Paula had a little calculating machine and a book of mathematical tables.
Trainor and the Prince set up the tripod in the center of the room, and mounted the little black case upon it. The apparatus looked not very different from a small camera. Working with cool, brisk efficiency, Paula began operating the calculating machine, taking numbers from the book, and calling out the results to the Prince, who was setting numerous small dials on the apparatus.
Dr. Trainor peered through a compact little telescope which was evidently an auxiliary part of the apparatus, training the machine on the tiny blue disk that was the messenger of doom from Mars. From time to time he called out numbers which seemed to go into Paula's calculations.
Looking curiously at Paula and the Prince, Bill could see no sign of an understanding between them. Both seemed absorbed in the problem before them. They were impersonal as any two collaborating scientists.
At last Dr. Trainor raised his eyes from the little telescope, and the Prince paused, with his fingers on a tiny switch. The induction coil, in the circuit of a powerful vitalium generator, was buzzing monotonously, while purple fire leapt between its terminals. Paula was still efficiently busy over the little calculating machine, pressing its keys while the motors whirred inside it.
"We're all ready," Trainor announced, "as soon as Paula finishes the integration." He turned to Bill and Captain Brand, who were eying the apparatus with intense interest. "If you will look inside this electron tube, when the Prince closes the switch, you will see a tiny green spark come into being. Just at the focus of the rays from the cerium electrode, inside the vitalium helix grid.
"That green spark is a living thing!"
"It has in it the vital essence. It can consume matter—feed itself. It can grow. It can divide, reproduce itself. It responds to stimuli—it obeys the signals we send from this directional beam transmitter." He tapped an insignificant little drum.
"And it ceases to be, when we cut off the power.
"It is a living thing, that eats. And it is more destructive than anything else that eats, for it destroys the atoms that it takes into itself. It resolves them into pure vibratory energy, into free protons and electrons."
Paula called out another number, in her soft, husky voice. The Prince swiftly set a last dial, pressed a tiny lever. Bill, peering through the thin walls of a little electron tube, saw a filament light, saw the thin cerium disk grow incandescent, apparently under cathode bombardment. Then he saw a tiny green spark come into being, in a fine helix of gleaming vitalium wire. For a little time it hung there, swinging back and forth a little, growing slowly.
Deliberately, one by one, the Prince depressed keys on a black panel behind the tube. The little green spark wavered. Suddenly it shot forward, out through the wall of the tube. It swam uncertainly through the air in the room, growing until it was large as a marble. The Prince flicked down another key, and it darted out through a vitrolite panel, towards the blue globe from Mars.
It had cut a little round hole in the transparent crystal, a hole the size of a man's finger. The matter in it had vanished utterly. And the little viridescent cloud of curdled light that hung outside had grown again. It was as large as a man's fist—a tiny, whirling spiral of vibrant emerald particles.
Air hissed through the little hole, forming a frozen, misty cloud outside. Captain Brand promptly produced a little disk of soft rubber, placed it against the opening. Air-pressure held it tight, sealing the orifice.
The Prince pressed another key, the little swirling green sphere was whisked away—it vanished. The Prince stood intent, fingers on the banks of keys, eyes on red pointers that spun dizzily on tiny dials. Another key clicked down suddenly. He moved a dial, and looked expectantly out through the vitrolite panel.
Bill saw the green film run suddenly over the tiny blue globe floating among the stars. The azure sphere seemed to melt away, to dissolve into sparkling green radiance. In a moment, where the great blue ship had been, was only a spinning spiral of glistening viridescence.
"Look at Mars!" cried the Prince. "This is a challenge. If they want peace, they shall have it. If they want war, they shall feel the power of thevitomaton!"
Bill turned dazedly to look at the broad disk of the red planet. It was not relatively very far away. He could see the glistening white spot that was the north polar cap, the vast ocherous deserts, the dark equatorial markings, the green-black lines of the canals. For all the grimness of its somber, crimson color, it was very brilliant against the darkness of the spangled void.
An amazing change came swiftly over Mars.
A bluish tinge flowed over orange-red deserts. A thin blue mist seemed to have come suddenly into the atmosphere of the planet. It darkened, became abruptly solid. A wall of blue hid the red world. Mars became a colossal globe. Her surface was as real, as smooth and unbroken, as that of the ship they had just destroyed.
Mars had become a sphere of polished sapphire.
"A wall of vibration, I suppose," said the Prince. "What a science to condemn to destruction!"
Huge globes of purple fire—violet spheres large as the ship they had just destroyed—driven on mighty rays, leapt out from a score of points on the smooth azure armor that covered a world. With incredible speed, they converged toward theRed Rover.
"Atomic bombs with a vengeance!" cried the Prince. "One of those would throw the earth out of its orbit, into the sun." He turned briskly to Paula. "Quick now! Integrations for the planet!"
She sprang to the calculating machine; slim fingers flew over the keys. Trainor swung his apparatus toward the smooth azure ball that Mars had become, peered through his telescope, called out a series of numbers to Paula. Quickly she finished, gave her results to the Prince.
He bent over the banks of keys again.
Bill watched the enormous blue globe of Mars in fascinated horror, followed the huge, luminescent red-purple atomic bombs, that were hurtling out toward them, driven on broad white rays.
"An amazing amount of power in those atomic bombs," Dr. Trainor commented, his mild eyes bright with scientific enthusiasm. "I doubt that space itself is strong enough to hold up under their explosion. If they hit us, I imagine it will break down the continuum, blow us out of the universe altogether, out of space and time!"
Bill was looking at the whirling green spiral that hung where the Martian flier had been. He saw it move suddenly, dart across the star-dusted darkness of space. It plunged straight for the blue ball of Mars, struck it. A viridescent fog ran quickly over the enormous azure globe.
Mars melted away.
The planet dissolved in a huge, madly spinning cloud of brilliant green mist that shone with an odd light—with a light oflife! A world faded into a nebulous spiral of green. Mars became a spinning cloud of dust as if of malachite.
A tiny lever flicked over, under the Prince's fingers. And the green light went out.
Where Mars had been was nothing! The stars shone through, hot and clear. A machine no larger than a camera had destroyed a world. Bill was dazed, staggered.
Solemnly, almost sadly, the Prince moved a slender, tanned hand across his brow. "A terrible thing," he said slowly. "It is a terrible thing to destroy a world. A world that had been eons in the making, and that might have changed the history of the cosmos.... But they voted for war. We had no choice."
He shook his head suddenly, and smiled. "It's all over. The great mission of my life—completed. Doctor, I want you to pack thevitomatonvery carefully, and lock it up in our best safe, and try to forget the combination. A great invention. But I hope we never need to use it again."
Then the Prince of Space did a thing that was amazing to most of his associates as the destruction of Mars had been. He walked quickly to Paula Trainor, and put his arms around her. He slowly tilted up her elfin face, where the golden eyes were laughing now, with a great, tender light of gladness shining in them. He bent, and kissed her warm red lips, with a hungry eagerness that was almost boyish.
A happy smile was dancing in his eyes when he looked up at the astounded Captain Brand and the others.
"Allow me," he said, "to present the Princess of Space!"
Some months later, when Bill was landed on Trainor's Tower, on a visit from his new home in the City of Space, he found that the destruction of Mars had created an enormous sensation. Astronomers were manfully inventing fantastic hypotheses to explain why the red planet had first turned blue, then green, and finally vanished utterly. The sunships of the Moon Patrol were still hunting merrily for the Prince of Space. Since the loss of theTriton'streasure, the reward for his capture had been increased to twenty-five million eagles.
The End