9
"You, Snap!"
"Gregg! But how...?"
"Hush! They might hear us."
"They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think."
"Anita and Venza are here."
"I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can'twalk."
"Careful," I whispered. "You can crack your head on something with theleast false step. Are they taking us ashore?"
"I guess so. How did you happen...?"
"Tell you later."
They had come for me in that dark pressure-port, taken me along a dimcorridor of the ship, which evidently had landed a few moments before.Then Snap, with strange figures around him, had been flung at me.
These weird beings! The brains were here, but not many; I saw half adozen on the ship. They could move easily now. They bounced upon theirsmall arms and legs, hitching with little leaps of a few feet. Closeat hand they were gruesome; from a distance they had the aspect ofthirty-inch ovoids, bouncing of their own volition. And I saw too thatunderneath, toward the back, was a shriveled body.
The other figures were wholly different; they seemed at first to beten-foot, upright insects. The two legs were like stilts, the bodynarrow but with bulging chest. The neck was thin, holding the smallround head, about the size of my own.
Words seem futile to picture this thing which was a man of Wandl.There was no skin, but instead what seemed to be a glossy, hard brownshell. It was laid in scales; and upon the legs was a brown fuzz ofstiff hair. There were many joints, both of the legs and the torso.Clothing was worn; a single garment, hanging from a wide belt halfwaydown the legs seemed incongruous, fantastically aping humanity.
This was the worker, equipped by nature for mechanical tasks. Therewere not two arms, but at least ten. From what could have been calledthe shoulders, they were tentacles, half the length of an elephant'strunk, with many-fingered hands at the ends. From the waist dependedhuge lobster-like pincers; and from the chest and back the arms weresmaller, each with a different type finger-claw.
The head and face were most of all a personal mocking of mankind.Wide, upstanding, listening ears were upon the sides of the head, oneon the forehead and one on the back. The face was mobile, with tinybrown scales small as a fish. A nose orifice, with two protrudingbrown eyes above it was set outward on stems, and an upended slit of amouth. There was an eye in the back of the head.
Probably, over eons of upward development from what was perhaps anoriginal single type, these two specialized forms had developed. The"Masters," as they were known upon Wandl, neglected the body for thebrain, and the "Workers," the reverse. There was no separateindividual for the female. As is the case with primitive organisms,they were all bi-sexual, the parent dying in the reproduction ofoffspring.
Of necessity I have been forced into digression. But at the time, Snapand I clung together, whispering, as a group of workers pushed us downa descending incline. Snap, back there in Greater New York when Molo'scontact light had burst into existence, had fallen, half unconscious.They picked him up. Molo was going to kill him, but the girlspersuaded him to take Snap with them.
"Anita and Venza pretended never to have seen me before," Snapwhispered to me now. "You take the same line."
"If we get with them."
"We will."
It was weird, this landing upon Wandl. We had left the vessel'sside-port and were descending what seemed a narrow, hundred-footlanding incline. We were outdoors, and it was night. Shafts of coloredradiance flashed around us. The ship was poised on a disc-likeplatform, with skeleton legs. It seemed a hundred feet or more down tothe ground level from where the colored lights were darting up.Overhead was a cloudless, purple-red sky of blurred, reddish stars. Nodoubt the curious atmosphere of Wandl gave the sky and stars thisabnormal look.
Later, what a multiplicity of obscure wonders we were to glimpse uponWandl! The slowing rotation of the Earth caused climatic changesthere, volcanic and tidal disturbances, but Wandl rotated and stoppedat will. Undoubtedly she was equipped to withstand the shock. Herinternal fires could not break into eruption; she had very littlefluid surface. And the nature of her atmosphere was such that it wasnot easily disturbed into storms. Only if there was laxity in thehandling of the planet's motion would a storm come.
But now, questions pounded at me. Earth, Venus and Mars were to betowed into interstellar space; all life on our worlds would perish inthe cold of that stellar journey. Yet Wandl had made that journey. Washer atmosphere inherently such that it did not transmit rays of heat?
Snap and I had been pushed down the incline with half a dozen figuresin advance of us. Without difficulty we could have leapt down thathundred feet, unaided. Figures were leaping into mid-air from severalpressure-ports of the ship. They did not fall, but floated, drifteddown. I saw one of the insect-like workers drop with motionlessoutstretched arms. Others came mounting up, using their arms and legswith sweeping strokes, as though swimming. It was like being underwater.
It was a strange, weird scene, the vessel wavering above us; theflashing lights; waving beams of radiance. A fantastic structurenearby reared itself several hundred feet with lights on top andoutlining its many lateral balconies one above the other. The air wasfull of the leaping, swimming insect-like figures. The brains, themasters, were not in evidence; then I saw one of them being carried,and others, floating down like distended falling balloons, to becaught by the workers in small nets and thus saved from jarringcontact.
Snap was suddenly whispering: "That fellow back of us is our guard. Ican feel his ray. Some form of attraction; it's pulling at me."
Snap was a little behind me. I turned and saw the faint radiance of anarrow light-beam upon him. It came from an instrument in an uppershoulder hand of the insect figure following us, no doubt the reverseform of the same ray which had been used to thrust the wrecked_Cometara_ toward the Moon.
We reached the bottom. I saw now that the group of workers in advanceof us were carrying metal cubes, seemingly of considerable weight;they also had to use the incline.
We stood presently on a smooth ground surface. We had not seen Anitaand Venza, nor Molo and his sister. The insect figure who was ourguard came forward. "You stand here. Molo comes."
"Where is he?" I demanded. "I want to see him." I stopped myselfquickly; I had very nearly mentioned the girls. "And talk with him."
"He comes soon."
"I'm hungry." I gestured to my stomach. "Food. You know what that is?"
The brown scaly face contorted for a smile, a ghastly grimace. "Yes.You shall have food and drink."
It seemed that the hollow voice came not from the neck but from theshell-like, bulging chest. He stood aside, with the globular weapon ofthe ray in a pincer hand.
We waited, standing gingerly together, wavering with our slightweight. A wind would have blown us away, but there was no wind.Instead, there was a heavy, sultry air, warm as a mid-summer Earthnight, warmer even than the Neo-time of Venus.
Snap and I were dressed much the same, wearing heavy boots, for whichweight we were thankful, tight, puttee-like trousers, flaring at thetop, and high-necked white blouses. Both of us were bare-headed.Doubtless we were as fantastic a sight to these Wandlites as they tous. Some of the workers crowded up, reaching out to pluck at us, butSnap waved them away and our guard dispersed them.
One of the master brains came bouncing up. Upon his little uprightbody the great head wavered.
"You will wait here." His eyes glowed up at us.
"But listen," Snap began.
"You will wait here for the Martian. He has his orders to take you tothe Great Intelligence." The little arm from the side of the head hada hand with a finger pointing for a gesture. "There is a meeting placethere. We decided now what to do to destroy the warships of yourworlds. I do not like your thoughts; they are black. I will inform theGreat Intelligence when he can spare the thought for you."
He added something in the Wandl tongue. A worker came forward;
liftedhim carefully, held him in the hollow of an encircling tentacle. Andwith a bound, the worker sailed upward and was gone.
Again we stood through an interval. I noticed now that the toweringstructure near us, with its storied balconies, was not perpendicular.Its front curved up and back. It was convex, somewhat in the fashionof an irregular globe, a three-hundred foot ball, with a flattenedbase set here on the ground. The balconies were segments of its frontcurve. At the top, the roof was as though the ball had been slicedoff, like a giant apple with a slice gone for a base and another forthe roof. At the bottom was a huge portal with a glow of light fromwithin. And at the terraced balcony levels were lighted windows.
"Is that the meeting place?" Snap whispered.
"Probably. And look to the side of it, Snap."
It was a city. There was a vista of distance to one side of the greatglobe structure. Now that our eyes were more accustomed to thequeerness of this night upon Wandl, we could ignore the coloredlight-beams of the landing stage and the disembarking palisade uponwhich we were standing. Gazing into the distance, the curvature of thesurface of this little world was immediately apparent. The reddishfirmament of stars came down to meet the sharply-curving surface at ahorizon line which seemed about a mile away.
Spread upon this near distance were a variety of structures withlittle roads of open space winding between them. Most of the buildingsseemed globular in shape. Some were small, little round mound-shapedindividual dwellings. Others were larger. Some were tiered like half adozen apples speared in a row upon a stick and set upright.
I saw a ribbon of what might be a river in the distance, with thereddish starlight glinting upon it. To our left, half a mile awayperhaps, was a row of buttes and rocks which stood like a miniaturerange of mountains. The city seemed entirely to encompass them; andevery little rock-peak had upon its top a globelike dwelling.
Lights were winking everywhere and figures bounded a hundred feet andmore, and sailed in an arc, coming down to the ground to bound again.A row of workers went by overhead, not swimming or leaping but stifflymotionless. Tiny opalescent rays went from them to the ground, asthough to give them power.
Five minutes of Earth-time might have passed while Snap and I gazed atthis busy night scene in this Wandl city upon the occasion of thelanding of their ship so triumphantly returned from its mission toEarth. As I stood, certainly a helpless captive if ever there was one,nevertheless a strange sense of my own power was within me.
This was so small a world; the people were so flimsy. With a poke ofmy fist I could kill any one of these master brains. The ten-footworkers seemed mere shells, light and fragile; even the buildings werelight and flimsy. The little globe-houses on their sticks seemed towaver, almost like nodding flowers. If we ran amuck we could smasheverything we saw here on Wandl.
We became aware of Molo approaching. What a solid giant thisseven-foot Martian seemed now in the midst of this buoyant, almostweightless city! He was still bare-headed and wearing his garments ofornamented leather, with his brawny legs bare. Upon his feet werestrange-looking, wide-soled shoes. His hands and forearms were thrustinto loops of small shields. These shields appeared to be constructedof a heart-shaped flexible framework, covered with an opaque membrane.They were about two feet long and half as wide. With a hand andforearm thrust into fabric loops, the shield appeared to serve aswings so that the arms had more thrust against the air. He came at uswith a sort of swimming stroke. He landed somewhat awkwardly,half-stumbled and almost fell, but gathered himself up and confrontedus.
He gained his balance and waved our guard aside. His gaze went to me.
"You are the new prisoner taken from that wrecked Earth-ship?"
"Yes."
"What is your name? You are an Earthman, evidently."
"Yes." I hesitated. I had seen Molo and heard him talk, back there inGreater New York; but he had not seen me nor heard of me probably.
"Gregg Haljan." I added, "I am a skilled navigator; perhaps it wasfortunate you saved me."
He flung me a look and there was a tinge of amusement in it. "Youwould save your own skin now?"
"Why not? You're a Martian, and this is a war also against Mars."
His look darkened, but then again sardonic amusement struck him.
"We shall see what the Great Master says. There will be a few of ourtype humans, men and women, wanted when the worlds begin anew. TheGreat Master said so. He wants to study life on Earth as it was beforethe destruction."
Molo's glance swept behind us. I turned to see three figuresapproaching. My heart pounded. They were Anita, Venza and Molo'ssister, Meka. They came slowly, trying to walk, with balancingoutstretched arms. With a dozen curious Wandl workers crowding them,they came and joined Molo before us. My heart was pounding, but Iflung them a curious, impersonal stare.
"You are here," said Molo. "Good. We go now." He bent over Snap andme. "I advise you make no effort to leap away, though it may lookeasy."
"Not me," said Snap. "Where would I go alone in this damned world? Ican't very well leap back to Earth, can I?"
"True enough," said Molo. "You have sense, little fellow. But I justwarn you: the guard who will watch you always is very sharp of eye.And the weapons here bring very swift death."
I could feel Anita's gaze upon me, but I did not dare look her way.
"Let's go," I said, "You will have no trouble with me."
With Molo leading us, and the giant insect-like guard following closebehind, we made our slow, awkward way across the esplanade portals ofthe huge globular building.
And within, we traversed a cylinder-like, padded corridor and camepresently upon the strangest interior scene I had ever beheld.