nondescript, patheticallydelighted. With a sharp, eager bark, it leaped up at Thad, pawing athis armor and licking it, standing on its hind legs and reachingtoward the visor of his helmet.
It was very thin, as if from long starvation. Both ears were raggedand bloody, and there was a long, unhealed scratch across theshoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a serious wound.
The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy. But Thad thought he sawfear in them. And even through the stiff fabric of the Osprey suit, hefelt that the dog was trembling.
Suddenly, with a low whine, it shrank close to his side. And anothersound reached Thad's ears.
A cry, weird and harrowing beyond telling. A scream so thin and sohigh that it roughened his skin, so keenly shrill that it tortured hisnerves; a sound of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing thanany bodily pain.
When silence came again, Thad was standing with his back against thewall, the welding arc in his hand. His face was cold with sweat, and aqueer chill prickled up and down his spine. The yellow dog crouchedwhimpering against his legs.
Ominous, threatening stillness filled the ship again, disturbed onlyby the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog. Trying to calm hisoverwrought nerves, Thad listened--strained his ears. He could hearnothing. And he had no idea from which direction the terrifying soundhad come.
A strange cry. Thad knew it had been born in no human throat. Nor inthe throat of any animal he knew. It had carried an alien note thatovercame him with instinctive fear and horror. What had voiced it? Wasthe ship haunted by some dread entity?
* * * * *
For many minutes Thad stood upon the deck, waiting, tensely graspingthe welding tool. But the nerve-shattering scream did not come again.Nor any other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear. Itleaped up at his face again, with another short little bark.
The air must be good, he thought, if the dog could live in it.
He unscrewed the face-plate of his helmet, and lifted it. The airthat struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply,gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: acurious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.
The dog kept leaping up, whining.
"Hungry, boy?" Thad whispered.
He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit, found a slab ofconcentrated food, and tossed it out through the opened panel. The dogsprang upon it, wolfed it eagerly, and came back to his side.
Thad set at once about exploring the ship.
First he ascended the ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it,studded with transparent ports. Charts and instruments were in order.And the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of the ship.
* * * * *
Thad had no expert's knowledge of the flier's mechanism. But he hadstudied interplanetary navigation, to qualify for his license to carrymasses of metal under rocket power through the space lanes and intoplanetary atmospheres. He was sure he could manage the ship if itsmechanism were in good order, though he was uncertain of his abilityto make any considerable repairs.
To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials revealed nothing wrong.
He started the gyro motors, got the great wheels to spinning, and thusstopped the slow, end-over-end turning of the flier. Then he went tothe rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes, and set them tofiring. The vessel answered readily to her helm. In a few minutes hehad the red fleck of Mars over the bow.
"Yes, I can run her, all right," he announced to the dog, which hadfollowed him up the steps, keeping close to his feet. "Don't worry,old boy. We'll be eating a juicy beefsteak together, in a week. AtComet's place in Helion, down by the canal. Not much style--but theeats!
"And now we're going to do a little detective work, and find out whatmade that disagreeable noise. And what happened to all yourfellow-astronauts. Better find out, before it happens to us!"
He shut off the rockets, and climbed down from the bridge again.
When Thad started down the companionway to the officers' quarters, inthe central one of the five main compartments of the ship, the dogkept close to his legs, growling, trembling, hackles lifted. Sensingthe animal's terror, pitying it for the naked fear in its eyes, Thadwondered what dramas of horror it might have seen.
The cabins of the navigator, calculator, chief technician, and firstofficer were empty, and forbidding with the ominous silence of theship. They were neatly in order, and the berths had been made sincethey were used. But there was a large bloodstain, black and circular,on the floor of the calculator's room.
The captain's cabin held evidence of a violent struggle. The door hadbeen broken in. Its fragments, with pieces of broken furniture, books,covers from the berth, and three service pistols, were scattered aboutin indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among thefrightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing, of dissimilarfabrics. The guns were empty.
* * * * *
Attempting to reconstruct the action of the tragedy from those grimclues, he imagined that the five officers, aware of some peril, hadgathered here, fought, and died.
The dog refused to enter the room. It stood at the door, lookinganxiously after him, trembling and whimpering pitifully. Several timesit sniffed the air and drew back, snarling. Thad thought that theunpleasant earthy odor he had noticed upon opening the face-plate ofhis helmet was stronger here.
After a few minutes of searching through the wildly disordered room,he found the ship's log--or its remains. Many pages had been torn fromthe book, and the remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff blackmass.
Only one legible entry did he find, that on a page torn from the book,which somehow had escaped destruction. Dated five months before, itgave the position of the vessel and her bearings--she was then justoutside Jupiter's orbit, Earthward bound--and concluded with a remarkof sinister implications:
"Another man gone this morning. Simms, assistant technician. A fine workman. O'Deen swears he heard something moving on the deck. Cook thinks some of the doctor's stuffed monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous, of course. But what is one to think?"
Pondering the significance of those few lines, Thad climbed back tothe deck. Was the ship haunted by some weird death, that had seizedthe crew man by man, mysteriously? That was the obvious implication.And if the flier had been still outside Jupiter's orbit when thosewords were written, it must have been weeks before the end. A lurking,invisible death! The scream he had heard....
* * * * *
He descended into the forecastle, and came upon another such silentrecord of frightful carnage as he had found in the captain's cabin.Dried blood, scraps of cloth, knives and other weapons. A fearfulquestion was beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies ofthose who must have died in these conflicts? He dared not think theanswer.
Gripping the welding arc, Thad approached the after hatch, giving tothe cargo hold. Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he wasdetermined to find the sinister menace of the ship, before it foundhim. The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him,contributing nothing to his peace of mind.
The hold proved to be dark. An indefinite black space, oppressive withthe terrible silence of the flier. The air within it bore still morestrongly the unpleasant fetor.
Thad hesitated on the steps. The hold was not inviting. But at thethought that he must sleep, unguarded, while taking the flier to Mars,his resolution returned. The uncertainty, the constant fear, would beunendurable.
He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He found it, as hisfeet touched the floor. Blue light flooded the hold.
It was filled with monstrous things, colossal creatures, such asnothing that ever lived upon the Earth; like nothing known in thejungles of Venus or the deserts of Mars, or anything that has beenfound upon Jupiter's moons.
They were monsters remotely resembling insects or crusta
ceans, but aslarge as horses or elephants; creatures upreared upon strange limbs,armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons, frightful, saw-toothedsnouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow and green. They leeredat him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow and purple.
They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light....
* * * * *
A cold shock of horror started along Thad's spine, at sight of thoseincredible nightmare things. Automatically be flung up the weldingtool, flicking over the lever with his thumb, so that violet electricflame played about the electrode.
Then he saw that the crowding, hideous things were motionless, thatthey stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were supportedupon metal bars. They were dead. Mounted. Collected specimens of somealien life.
Grinning wanly, and conscious of a weakness in the knees, he muttered:"They sure will fill the museum, if everybody gets the kick out ofthem that I did. A little too realistic, I'd say. Guess these are