CHAPTER VI
The Space Men Attack
First stepping to the oxygen supply valve and opening it a trifle wider,Shelby hastened to assist the girl in her quest. Their ears wereringing. The air pressure within the hull was dropping rapidly.Diligently they ransacked every nook and corner, but found nothing morevaluable than a can of thick grease. Shelby smeared some of it over thecrevice; it helped but did not by any means check the flow of theescaping air entirely.
"It's a race with time now, Jan," he said quietly.
She looked at him. Her face was a trifle pale, but her lips and eyeswere smiling. "Are we on our way to Mars, Captain?" she enquired.
He nodded. "We are, Admiral. The fuel tanks are full and if our airlasts we'll get there."
"And when we do," she put in, "the best of luck to Hekki and hisfriends!"
A vision swept through Shelby's mind--batteries of fantastic machineswhose maws spewed flames of faint lavender fire--blinding flashes oflight and world-rocking explosions: a hideous thing to dream of--hideousyet glorious, for the civilizations and freedom of two worlds dependedupon it. To the Red Planet--they _must_ make it!
Janice Darell had placed her hand lightly on Shelby's arm. Herexpression was serious, almost hard. "Austin," she said, "tell metruthfully, can we really reach Mars? It is likely that we shall getthere before we go out?"
"Certainly, darling," he replied, putting as much assurance into thewords and expression as was possible. "Why do you ask?"
There was something that suggested doubt, perhaps even displeasure inher answer: "We have a duty to perform, Austin--a duty infinitely biggerthan our own petty existences. You have not seen what I have seen--smallscouting patrols that came to the _Selba_ riding strange round thingsthat must have been machines of some kind. One look at those henchmen ofAlkebar, their great black bodies, their quick nervous movements--likeeager panthers, their wicked-looking weapons which they carried withsuch an air of easy assurance, and you would have known what they hopedto do. Most of these devils are within the orbit of Mars for the firsttime. Certainly Hekki has told you something about them?"
Shelby nodded. "Very little; but I have noticed a few of Alkebar'sremarkable peculiarities," he said.
"Well," she continued, "if we can't get to Taboor, there is one thing wecan do--destroy the _Selba_, and with it Hekki and Alkebar."
"Destroy the _Selba_!" Shelby exploded, "with what? Those toy machineguns on the nose of this bus? The bullets wouldn't even make noticeablescratches in the hide of that tough old girl."
"Not with the machine guns," Jan said slowly, "with this flier! A littleluck and it would work."
The idea flashed through Shelby's brain. Ram the _Selba_ at high speed!Absolutely certain self-murder! A wave of tremendous admiration for thegirl came over him. She had something more in her favor than mere beautyand intelligence.
"Your idea is a pretty good one, Jan," he told her. "But rest assuredthat unless you can overpower me, it will never be put into execution.However, I'll tell you the truth: we have about a fifty-fifty chance ofreaching the Red Planet alive."
And so they tore on their way across the void while they watched thedial on the oxygen tank. They were racing with a tiny needle that creptever nearer to the zero point that was its goal.
By allowing the pressure within the flier to drop to the lowest pointthat they could endure, they managed to conserve considerable oxygen,for then the rate of escape from the crevice the torpedo fragment hadmade was naturally not so rapid.
Frequently they examined the sky behind them, expecting momentarily todiscover the tiny speck of flitting silver that would be the _Selba_.But if the ship was pursuing them it had not yet come close enough to beseen.
However, there was another, and perhaps greater menace which kept theireyes turning this way and that, searching for signs of danger. Clustersof dully-glowing specks in any quarter of the heavens would be the firstindications of its presence. They would grow larger, come hurtling onlike racing meteors in the sun's glow. Only there would be an odd wobblymotion about their darting flight. Shelby tested the trips of the twomachine guns. Spurts of green flame plumed out of the muzzles.
He had set the radio transmitter in operation, and was sendingoccasional signals for assistance. But he knew that this was practicallya useless move. Hekalu had taken them far off the beaten track, and theywere still half a million miles from the Terrestro-Martian traffic lane.The range of the transmitter of this craft was only ten thousand miles.Even if they had been much nearer the chances of their signals beingpicked up were slight.
The Martian disc was growing larger. It had become an ochre spheredelicately ringed and mottled with greens and browns like a cloudy opal.The flier was fairly eating up the distance.
Shelby had just said: "I believe we're going to make it, Jan," and thenthe signs which they had hoped would not appear came. Ahead of them anda little to their right, a vague cluster of specks glimmered into view.It wavered like a wisp of luminous smoke buffeted by a light breeze.This was the one thing that distinguished it from a meteor cluster.
* * * * *
Rapidly the individual points of light grew, becoming tiny stars thatglowed by the reflected light of the sun. Within five minutes there wasno longer any chance of mistaking their identity, for their flatdisc-like shapes and the half-human forms of the things that rode themwere already visible through the binoculars. They were approaching atterrific velocity. Both Jan and Austin knew them to be subjects ofAlkebar. There was no mistaking their motive. Doubtless orders had beenflashed to them from the disabled _Selba_.
Realizing that these fleet space riders could easily catch up with hisflier if they so chose, Shelby made no attempt to elude them. Instead heclung doggedly to the straight course toward Mars.
The twin machine guns, responding obediently to their directingmechanism, swung on their swivel toward the hurtling foes. Shelby peeredinto the eye-piece of the "sighter," a complicated arrangement ofmirrors and lenses which enabled the pilot to always look directlythrough the ring-sights regardless of what direction the gun barrelswere pointing. He pressed the trips, and soundlessly, out in the vacuumof space, the guns went into action. Flickering green flames ofdetonating radio-active explosive darted from their muzzles.
Almost immediately there were answering flashes among the approachingshapes, for the high-calibre bullets were also loaded with explosive.One projectile took effect--another! Emerald flares of light, andnothing remained of two bold space men and their queer disc-likevehicles but torn fragments of flesh and metal.
The Space Men were very close now. Jan and Shelby could see the lightflashing on their jeweled harnesses and on the weapons which theyflourished defiantly. There must have been almost five hundred in theparty. Somehow their wild charge was vaguely reminiscent of a band offierce Bedouin marauders, racing madly across the desert, bent onpillage. Only it was the Arabs who suffered by this comparison, for thedesert of these mysterious Space Men was the whole of interstellaremptiness; and their forms and those of the things they rode, were theforms of the forces of Iblees himself.
Apparently these henchmen of Alkebar had some object in view other thanthe mere destruction of the flier, for they made no move to use theirweapons. They were pulling upon levers on their vehicles, checking theirheadlong flight.
Now they were coursing with the little craft, swarming about it, edgingnearer, at the same time taking care to keep out of range of Shelby'sguns.
There was a scraping against the hull and a light jolt as a talonsecured a hold on an eyelet ring. A black bulk dropped down on the noseof the craft. A pair of hands gripped the barrels of the machine guns,and with an easy tug, tore them from their mountings. There wereshifting scratching sounds coming through the flier's light shell--heavybodies moving about, and then a sudden ripping vibration. The controllever felt loose in Shelby's hand. He could no longer guide the vessel.And there was nothing either he or Jan could do except wait.
The rocketmotors still purred evenly.
"I guess they've got us this time, Jan," the young man said to hiscompanion. "I wonder what they are going to do with us?" He spoke ascasually as though this latest unfavorable turn of fortune was no moreserious than the loss of a game of chess.
Janice Darell was equally cool. "Next time we win," she laughed. It isodd how human beings so often react to strange and terrifyingsituations. "I'm always ready, you see. Here I was crouching behind youthroughout the fight with this perfectly useless pistol in my hand,hoping foolishly that I might be able to use it. That's loyalty."
They fell to studying the two monsters which rested on the nose of thecraft in front of the pilot's observation window, where the guns hadbeen. The Space Man was crouching out there trying to peer in at them.He was very much like Alkebar--only not so large, and his equipment andadornment did not boast so many jewels.
Shelby felt a peculiar sense of the unreality of the creature. He lookedinto its face and saw its eyes. Beside the left orb was a mottled areathat must have been a scar. It seemed as concrete as anything he hadever seen, and yet for the second time, he told himself that such acreature wasn't possible!
Time honored tradition had said: "Life can exist only where there isoxygen, water and warmth." And all three of the requisites were lackingin the void. Shelby realized that tradition might be wrong, but thequestion still remained: How did these creatures of space live? Whencecame the energy that kept their bodies functioning? If not from thecombustion of food with oxygen, then where? If there were no moisture intheir bodies, and there certainly couldn't be, for it would have beenfrozen in an instant and diffused through sublimation, how could vitalfluids flow through their veins? He put these questions to Jan, but sheshook her head.
"Hekki informed me that these people inhabited a region somewhere beyondMars, but he did not tell how it was that they could live in space," shesaid. "It might be that they have had a development similar toterrestrial insects with the skeleton of armor enclosing their flesh."
The vehicles of the Space Men were even greater puzzles. How did theyfly out here where the rocket was the only human invention that couldmove? Many of the vehicles were visible now through the flier's windows.They were disc shaped platforms of a strange lusterless metal. In thecenter of the top was an opening in which the Space Men sat. Projectingfrom the discs were a series of levers, permitting evidently simplecontrol. But no hint of their principle of operation was given. Theyemitted no rocket jets; no beams projected from them.
Austin realized that there were many mysteries of the universe withwhich he was not acquainted; this was certainly one.
* * * * *
The sound of bodies moving about on the outer shell of the flier wasstill audible. Presently there was a sharp explosion somewhere towardthe stern. The rockets immediately fell silent. The fugitives saw thatsome of the Space Men were now busying themselves with long metalcables. Deftly and expertly they were looping them through the eyeletrings set at frequent intervals along the sides of the flier.
The other ends of the cables they fastened firmly to similar rings ontheir vehicles. They finished the job with all the efficiency of trainedmilitary engineers. Then, with the small interplanetary vessel in tow,the Space Men began to move off toward Mars, rapidly gaining momentumuntil their speed must have considerably exceeded that which most spacecraft could equal. They deflected their course somewhat from the directpath to the Red Planet, probably to avoid a meeting with any wanderingship.
Throughout the fantastic voyage Shelby and Janice Darell found little todo but stare dumbfounded at their weird captors and to watch the rapidlydropping needle of their oxygen supply-gauge. But as it proved, therewas little danger of suffocation, for the Space Men were making goodtime.
And so, after two hours of flying they came to Mars--not to Taboorwhich the fugitives had previously hoped to reach, but to a deep valleyin the desert of the Taraal. The strange caravan circled around to thenight side of the planet, and then, slowly and carefully, but with ahint that they understood their work well, they proceeded to lower thedisabled craft through the atmosphere to the ground below.
The door of the flier was torn open like a paper thing, and a blackgiant fully as huge and burly as Alkebar himself hustled the adventurersroughly out into the open.
The pock-marked face of Loo, the Martian name for their nearer moon, wasin the sky, and by its light they could see hundreds of Space Mencrowding about them. Plainly this Martian colony was fairly wellpeopled, for there were many more than the five hundred who capturedthem. The attitude of the onlookers was one of casual curiosity. For themoment at least they were not showing the more brutal side of theircharacters.
The fugitives were given but a moment to look about, while their jailerapparently carried on a silent conversation with one of his lieutenants.
They saw the sandy floor of the huge rectangular enclosure dotted withstrange mounds which must have been some kind of shelter, the encirclingwalls crowned by square towers at regular intervals. Those walls wereamber-colored in the moonlight, and cast dense shadows that shiftedvisibly as Loo raced in its meteoric course toward the east. Here andthere before the mounds huge vague shapes squatted. At the center of theenclosure a tall spire of silvery girders rose, supporting at its summita cone of a dull black substance. It looked like the creation of eitherEarthmen or Martians.
Beyond the wall the rounded summits of desert hills, over which in agespast, a restless ocean had poured and flowed, were visible. In spite oftheir position the two young Earthians could not help but marvel at thesilent grandeur of this exotic scenery. A light though chilly desertwind blew refreshingly against their faces.
The black giant had kept a hand on each of his prisoners during hisbrief conference, and now, none too gently, he guided them to theentrance of one of the mound dwellings. The Space Man ushered hischarges into a corridor, and then, fumbling with a curious lock heopened a heavy door and shoved them into the dim-lit room beyond. With arattling clink the great stone panel closed behind them.
A lump of self-luminous rock set in the stone ceiling gave a faintillumination to the bare interior. There was no furniture--only thesand-covered floor and rough rocky walls. On the floor a Space Man,larger and more magnificently-muscled by far than any they had yet seen,sprawled. He was either unconscious or dead; they could not tell which.There were hideous welts and gashes and half-healed scars all over hisbody. The gashes were caked with a viscid purplish substance.
With the coming of the sudden Martian dawn which flashed through anarrow embrasure high in the wall, the jailer returned. His first actwas to thrust the needle of what appeared to be a form of hypodermicsyringe into the arm of the unconscious Space Man. Then he led hisEarthian captives out into the open.
Neither Jan nor Austin were surprised when they saw the _Selba_squatting near the base of the spire. Several Space Men, directed by theslave Koo Faya, moved about the ship, working the fueling pump.
Walking down the gangplank which led up to the entrance of the vesselwas Alkebar, and beside him, Hekalu himself. The latter saunteredleisurely toward his captives, and the Chieftain moved off toward agroup of Space Men standing some distance away.