Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу автора  Vandals of the Void

James Morgan Walsh

Vandals of the Void

James Morgan Walsh

Chapter 1 Off to Mars

THE message that was to change the whole course of my life came through on the General Communicator about 10 P.M., Earth Time, while we were still within the planet's atmospheric envelope. The interstellar liner Cosmos, bound from New York (Earth) to Tlanan (Mars) had lifted from the Madison Landing scarcely an hour before and we were still making altitude when the call came through from Harran.

This was to have been my first interplanetary trip as a private passenger, my first carefree holiday in years. Not that the journey itself held any attraction for me or that I was new to the outer reaches of space. On the contrary.

As an official of the Interplanetary Guard, which is responsible for the smooth running of traffic and the maintenance of law and order in the void between the inner planets, I had seen rather too much of them. Nevertheless I was looking forward to a holiday free from emergency calls, the long restful voyage to the Red Planet and the hope, if time allowed, of a stopover on Venus on the way home.

Captain Hume—a man of Earth parentage, though he had first seen the light on Mars—and I were old friends and I expected a heartier welcome than usual, since on this particular trip I had no official status. As a rule the captains of the interplanetary liners look askance at us.

We mean trouble for them, the endless scrutinizing of passengers and documents and often as not the complete suspension, where the need justifies it, of the skipper's own functions.

I boarded the Cosmos early in the evening while the liner was still tilting in the slips. Captain Hume was then in his cabin. His own particular duties would not begin until after the takeoff and in the meanwhile the running was in the hands of the first and second officers.

The first, a man named Gond with whom I had some slight acquaintance, came up to me as I crossed the gangway and told me the skipper would be glad to see me as soon as I could make time, presumably after I got settled in my cabin.

That did not take long. To one used to the stark simplicity of the Guard-ship accommodation, the passenger cabins spelled luxury. But I did not linger, as my training had taught me how to dispose of my few belongings in the minimum of time with the minimum of effort. Then I made my way in what I judged to be the direction of Hume's cabin.

The Cosmos was a new type of craft to me. She was the first to be commissioned of the new giant liners that were meant ultimately to ply to the outer planets, though until the entire fleet was ready she was being tried out on the home run between Earth, Mars and Venus.

She embodied features with which I was not familiar, and in many ways her designers had departed from the standardized plan laid down by the Board of Control in the year 2001, when the first regular space service was begun following on that disastrous business of the War of the Planets.

I had some difficulty in finding my way and once I was stopped by an officer I did not know with the intimation that this part of the ship was not free to passengers. I flashed my badge at him however, that silver model of a Guard-ship with the letters I. P. G. stamped across it, asked to be directed to the captain's quarters. Rather surlily he conducted me through a maze of cross-passages to a stairway and told me that I would find what I sought at the head.

I came out on the observation deck and here I was more at home, for in this part of the ship the original design had not been departed from, I pressed the button on the door that would show my face in the vision-plate on the captain's table and waited. Almost immediately the door swung open and Hume's hearty voice cried, "Come in!"

IT was like coming into another world after the bare bleak passage outside—a warm cozy room lit by suffused daylight from the store-tanks, a room picked out in restful white that some how lulled the senses and soothed the eyes.

In most respects it was like any other skipper's cabin, with the televox, the ground screens of the television, the dial charts and the thousand and one compact gadgets necessary to an interplanetary captain's hand at any hour of the day or night. One new feature however caught my eye, the book-machines racked up on the shelves.

"So you've come along at last, Sanders, and for once other than as a trouble-maker," Hume boomed at me. "Make yourself comfortable. I've nothing to do for thirty clicks or so."

He nodded at the clock above his table. I had been subconsciously aware of the humming buzz of the seconds passing but almost on the heels of his words came the click-click-click of three minutes past the hour. This, too, was a new feature. We in the Guard-ships have another type of clock, one that measures in half-seconds, for when we travel it is at a tremendous speed and our chronometers need to be accurate to the last least degree.

In answer to a question of Hume's I told him something of my plans. My knowledge of the surface of the planets was rudimentary, I had been a dozen times in Tlanan and once to Shangun, the capital of Venus, but these had all been flying trips—literally—and I knew nothing of either land in the way I had come to know my own world.

Hume chuckled. "Mars you'll like," he said. "Next to Tellus"—he meant Earth—"it's the sweetest little planet I know and I've seen some and mean to see more. But Venus—" He gave a mock shudder. "It's certainly beautiful, though I can't abide the perpetual cloud-drift. I like empty skies with the hot sun pouring down."

"I don't," I said. "Perhaps too much work in the absolute zero of space has tempered my regard for the sun."

"You chill being! But all you Guards are the same. Have something as a warmer for a change."

He did not wait for my nod but pressed a button in the wall behind him. A panel slid away and a tray shot out with two glasses on it filled with—pure water!

He chuckled again at my look, then took a small metal box from a drawer of his table. The box held a hundred or more tiny brown pellets, of which he selected two, dropped one in each glass and watched the water discolor as the pair dissolved. When a stream of hissing bubbles rose to the surface he handed me my glass.

"Martian Oxcta," he explained, though it was a thing I had never heard of. "It has all the virtues of Earth whiskey without its drawbacks. Drink up."

I tasted it, just the merest sip. Liking it, I swallowed the rest at a gulp. There was exhilaration in the draught and something more. In all my interplanetary experience I had never tasted the like and I said so.

"You wouldn't. Earthmen don't as a rule. Mars still keeps some of its own secrets, But I happened to have been born there. As you know my wife's a Tlananian, and that counts too."

He slipped the box back in the drawer and I heard a click as the automatic lock engaged. The care he took of it made me wonder about some of those other secrets at which he had hinted and what, if anything, would happen to anyone who betrayed them.

It came to me suddenly, sitting there, that the situation had its illegal side. "Hume," I said. "I'm a friend of yours, you're a friend of mine. Put it that way. This stuff of yours we've just drunk?"

"Yes?" He cocked one eye at me.

"Only this. I'm a Guard. They pick us for integrity, moral, physical and every other way. Should I, knowing what you have, say nothing? There's an Earth-law banning alcohol even on spaceships in the void."

He laughed heartily. "There's not a taste or trace of alcohol in it. Giving it to you transgresses no law in the Universe. Can you take my word for that?"

I nodded. "I know you, Hume."

"Good." And there the matter dropped.

QUITE a little thing, it seemed—then. Looking back I'm not so sure. That odd Martian Oxcta, it appears to me, had something to do with the events that were to come.

We never felt the lift, the Cosmos rose so lightly from the slips. Insulated from all sound as we were in the cabin, we heard none of the blare of departure either. Only, the warning glow of the red bulb above the dial chart on the opposite wall told us that New York, the whole American continent indeed, was sliding away beneath us.

In the old days there was none of this gentleness in the take-off. We had not as yet learnt to control gravity with our screens. We could only nullify it, a practice that sometimes had dire results.

We sat and talked and time went on. Soon the call would come for Hume to take over and sling the ship out of the Earth's envelope of air, always a ticklish business. Already he had his eyes on the ship's communicators, awaiting reports from the various control departments.

A shutter dropped in the wall, and a call came through from the communications room. Hume touched a button. The face of the operator glowed in the screen and his voice came.

"Call through for Mr. Sanders," he said. "Televox."

I rose to my feet and Hume caught my eye.

"I'd better leave you to it," he mumbled.

"No need," I said. I knew it didn't matter. He couldn't hear what was said if I didn't wish.

I stood before the screen, my fingers on the buttons that made contact. The surface of the screen flashed the room first of all, that room in Headquarters Building I knew so well. Then the view narrowed, centering on Harran's chair until Harran's face itself, lean, tanned and immobile, completely filled the picture.

"Hello, Jack," his voice came. "Release."

The command might have been Greek to Hume but it carried a definite meaning to me. I released one button, that which intensifies the voice, and clapped my free hand over my ear. Hume could not have seen, even had he been looking, the flat black disk no larger than a penny that I held against my ear.

The moment I put it into position the disk functioned. Harran's voice, which before had filled the room, faded away entirely. The screen itself grew dark. But I could still hear him talking, a tiny voice in my ear, clear and marvellously distinct, though a man standing at my elbow could not hear a sound.

What Harran had to say was startling enough. Two spaceships had come in that night with all communications paralyzed. In each case the trouble had occurred in open space and was preceded by a feeling of intense cold, though the heating apparatus in each ship was working perfectly. Some passengers, indeed, had succumbed to the cold. Whether they could be revived had not yet been ascertained.

"Where do I come in?" I asked. Harran told me. It might be some as yet undiscovered property of space that had caused the trouble. It might— he thought it quite likely—be the work of some alien forces. But whatever it was I was to keep an eye lifted.

"Hold on," he cut in on his own orders. "There's something else."

"Quickly," I warned him. "We're near the edge of the atmosphere now." Once we were away from the Earth's atmosphere, of course, the televox would not function.

Why is beyond me.

"Reports through from entry ports of Venus and Mars," Harran took up again, "state number of craft overdue and failing to answer calls. The Guards are being notified at their stations but to be on the safe side we're tuning in on all, who like yourself, are space-traveling. Use your own discretion but solve your end of the mystery if you can."

"Is that all?" I asked.

The screen flashed up again and I saw him nod. "That's all," he answered.

"Good… "

He meant “Good-bye,” but the last word came to me only as the thin ghost of a whisper. We had passed beyond the atmosphere and were now out in free space.

I slipped the disk back into my pocket, and looked around.

The cabin was empty.

Chapter 2 Sanders Acts

FEELING free of the cabin I sat down to think the matter out. Some space-ships overdue—two others reporting excessive cold though the heaters were working all right—that was all. Yet it was enough to galvanize Harran to activity, enough in his opinion to justify him calling me on duty.

What did it mean? What was that odd hint of alien forces? One felt disposed to say nonsense.

Nothing is nonsense nowadays. Less than a century ago mankind sighed because there was nothing left to explore. Today we have reached beyond the world. We have discovered other worlds or had them discover us—not quite the same as I may some day relate. At least we know that we have much to learn.

We have set foot on four of the nine planets, the other five are in the process of being explored and we are not without hopes that soon the Galaxy may be penetrated by our space liners. Not much when one comes to think of it.

Idle speculation, of course, which took me nowhere. Hume, I must see and talk to. It was clearly a matter of which he should be informed.

I got up in search of him but the moment I sealed the door behind me I turned the other way and went instead down to my own cabin.

Everything was as I had left it. My baggage was still packed. My steward would have opened it and stowed my things away in the ordinary course had I not warned him to leave it alone. There were things in it I had no wish for anyone to see.

I opened one grip, delved down t the bottom and sighed with relief as I felt my hand touch the cold metal of the box I had hidden there. It was sealed and locked but I broke the one and undid the other and drew out the ray tube from its nest of cottonwool.

It was a queer little weapon, six inches long and no thicker than a lead pencil, but it could do deadly work up to fifty yards. I slipped the full magazine of twelve charges, no bigger than match heads, into the hollow butt and slid the catch over. A spare tube and the two thousand extra charges that were still in the box made me hesitate.

There was a little ledge over my bed, One of the supporting girders of the deck above rested on the partition separating my cabin from its neighbor, formed an angle and a dark shelf where the light did not penetrate. I slipped my little box in there, pushed it far back so that no abrupt motion of the ship would dislodge it.

Then I went in search of Captain Hume. On the way up to the control room I slipped my silver badge out of my pocket and fastened it in my coat. A warning would not hurt him. He would guess the moment he saw it and not be altogether taken by surprise.

A light metal ladder—had it been detached I could have carried it easily in one hand—led from the promenade deck to the control deck above. The upper end of it was closed by a bar set into place, charged, as I knew too well from experience, with a current that would give a nasty shock to any unauthorized person who attempted to force a passage.

One of the crew stood guard beside it, a ray tube in hand. It was all more or less show for not once in a hundred trips does the need arise to use it. But routine is routine. The man flung the tube forward dramatically as my head appeared above the level of the deck flooring.

"I want to see Captain Hume," I said. "It's important. The name is Sanders."

As I spoke I kept my hand clutched over the left lapel of my coat. It looked like a purely nervous gesture such as any man might make but it was not. I did it of design, to hide the blaze of the badge pinned to my coat. I had no mind to broadcast my service before the appropriate moment.

THE fellow stared doubtfully at me. "Stay there," he said harshly. I could see him plainer now, as he could see me. A touch of the Martian in him, I thought, though I could not be sure.

The scrutiny no doubt satisfied him of my lack of evil intent for he touched a button on the rail beside him and the bar lifted, giving me passage. The pressure of the button, too, must have set a signal for Hume, for even as I reached the deck level a door opened and a face looked out.

It was Hume himself. He looked by no means pleased to see me. Perhaps from what had gone before he already guessed at the possibilities of disturbance behind me.

"You wanted to see me?" he said. "What is the trouble now, Jack?"

I slanted an eye towards the control room. "You're not alone?" I said.

"Something for my private ear?" he said with a frown. "Well, you can say it just as well out here. There are four pairs of ears in there, you know."

I dropped my hand from my lapel, and the flash of the badge caught his eye. His face went nearly purple at the sight.

"By the Planets!" he exploded. "This is intolerable! No man's command is his own these days."

"Steady," I hushed him. "It's not as bad as that. I've no wish to supersede you. What I want is cooperation. I'll tell you why."

He cooled down at that and I gave him the gist of my communicator message. "I don't like it," he said at the end. "There may be nothing in it—on the other hand there may be a lot. What am I to do?"

"What I'd like you to do, if you don't mind;" I said mildly, "is this. Call me the moment you sight or find your instruments recording anything out of the ordinary. I'd like a chat with any other space-ship we pass. And, of course, if we meet a Guards Patrol… "

"May the Guards fuse!" he snapped. "No, I didn't mean that, Jack. But no skipper likes to think that at any click of the clock he may cease to be master in his own ship. You know that."

"I know. I'd prefer not to take command. I've never done it yet where I could find a skipper willing to work in conjunction with me."

I held out my hand. For a moment he hesitated, then gripped it.

"There will be no trouble between us, that I'll warrant you," he assured. "I'll see you're kept posted and whoever is on watch will have instructions to call you at any hour of the twenty-four if anything appears."

He stopped. His eyes lingered on my badge. I slipped the badge into my pocket. "There's no need," I said, "to advertise trouble before it comes."

He looked relieved. "I'm having you put at my table," he remarked. "I'll see you there the first meal I'm free. By the way, do you want to scan—"

"The ship's papers?" I said and hesitated.

He met me halfway. "Perhaps it would be better if you did. I'll have the purser warned. He's a discreet soul. You'd better confide in him."

He walked back with me to the bar at the head of the stairs and spoke to the man on guard. "Mr. Sanders is to be admitted whenever he wishes," he said and the man saluted. I fancied he looked at me more curiously than ever and I wondered if he suspected my official status.

Parey, the purser, was still in the throes of documentation when I appeared but he took my intrusion in good part. "I've seen you before," he said. "What's it now? Something broken loose?"

"I hope not," I returned. "I'm coming to you in confidence though." I told him much of what I had told Hume.

I THOUGHT he was a little shaken by the revelation but he tried to make light of it.

"You fellows are always alarmists," he said, "particularly the shore-end." It was odd how the old sea-jargon still lingered in speech.

"The shore-end, AS you call it," I reminded him, "is staffed with men who have all graduated in space."

"That's the trouble," he grinned "They don't realize that conditions have changed since they came back to the atmosphere. However, here's the passenger list, shore-compiled, so any errors aren't mine. You'll mark that."

I took it—the crew list too. Nothing startling in either—an average ship's company, an average passenger list Earthmen preponderantly, the minority of Martians and Venusians about equally balanced. One name caught my eye as I ran down the list.

"Nomo Kell?" I said puzzled. "Queer name, that. It isn't of Earth origin."

Parey smiled. "Nor Mars nor Venus either, I'll be bound. Like to see his prints?"

He meant the duplicate identification papers and photographs that are always handed in for checking at the office when an interplanetary passage is booked. Strictly speaking Parey had no right to offer me the documents. They are supposed to be confidential and even had I demanded sight of them he should have surrendered them only under protest. But I think he realized that in my case the more I knew the less harm was likely to come to anyone.

The details were not illuminating. They ran to the effect that Nomo Kell was a Martian citizen, qualification the statutory one of twenty years residence. The spaces that should have contained his birthplace, parentage and so on were bracketed by the one word Unknown.

"Queer," I commented.

"Queerer still," said Parey as he handed me the photo. "Look at this and see why."

I held the thing up to the light and looked it over. The colors came out exceptionally well and threw the man's features into vivid relief. The scale at the side of the picture showed that he stood between seven and eight feet in height, a giant of his kind.

His eyes were an odd kind of purple. Even in that color print they seemed extraordinarily alive. His skin, face, ears and hands, was an odd red that gave the suggestion of having been boiled.

But the queerest thing of all about him was the shape of his head, I had never seen anything like it before. It was crested. A ridge of something that looked like horn started a little above his forehead and ran back, as I found from the note, to his occiput.

"Where in the Universe does such a one come from?" I asked. "Is he a freak?"

Parey frowned. "Anything but that," he said. "He came across on our last drift. In talk with some other passengers certain questions about Mercury came up. He flatly contradicted the others' views, told them quite definitely they were wrong, let it appear that in some way he knew what he was talking about. See the suggestion?"

"That he is a Mercurian. But that's nonsense."

PAREY looked at me owlishly. "Because we haven't made that planet yet eh? Too close to the Sun our scientists say, too risky. Perhaps so. Nonetheless it would be easier for Mercurians, granted there are any such, to come to us than it would be for us to go to them."

"We don't even know it is inhabited," I pointed out.

"We don't even know that it isn't," he countered.

He was right there. I drew up a report that night before I went to bed, condensed it as much as possible and took it to the signals room for transmission to Harran. The operator looked it over in a puzzled fashion.

"What the blazes is this?" he asked. "Don't you know all messages must be written in a recognizable tongue?"

"That doesn't apply where I'm concerned," I said. "Send it as it stands."

"Why?" he said, a trifle defiantly.

I showed him why. He stared at my badge with a droop to his lip. It was marvellous the effect that little silver shape could have on the recalcitrant.

I could see, however, that he was still curious as to the language in which the message was written. I did not tell him it was a tongue that had ceased to be a living language on Earth nearly fifteen hundred years ago. He was too young to know that it was only three-quarters of a century since it had ceased to be taught in the schools as a so-called classical language.

I waited until the fading of the helio glow showed the message had gone through and the flash-back brought an acknowledgment of its receipt. Then I went off with the intention of turning in.

I had been but a few hours on the Cosmos but in that short space of time my plans had been materially altered. What else might happen before we entered the Martian atmosphere was purely a matter of conjecture. I preferred not to speculate.

Chapter 3 The Lunar Call

I AWOKE to the sound of buzzing in my ears. It came to me that I had overslept, that this was the warning note of the breakfast call. How many, I wondered, would face the tables this morning.

Not many, I fancied. Even in these enlightened days a goodly proportion of folk still suffer from a kind of space-sickness akin, no doubt, to the mal-de-mer that once used to attack travellers on Earth's oceans.

However the tables were fairly crowded when I reached the saloon. Either our doctor was not a popular man—there was a fair sprinkling of ladies present—or else he knew his work so well that he preferred prevention to cure.

Hume, heavy-eyed and with his face lined, was halfway through his meal when I appeared. He caught my glance as I entered and beckoned me to a vacant space beside him. I noted as I took my seat that my name had already been affixed to the chair-back.

A Martian woman was my opposite, quite the loveliest creature I had ever seen. She could not have been more than twenty-five and the full glow of health made her fine eyes sparkle and her dark cheeks glow with a greater vitality than we Earth people are used to seeing on our own planet. Strange how, despite their height, these Martian girls seem so wonderful. Her name, I learnt as introductions went around, was Jansca Dirka.

The man who sat a plate away was a Dirka too but it did not transpire whether he was her father or her brother and there was nothing outwardly to show which he was. The way that they wear their age is, to an Earthman, another puzzling feature of the Martians. I have heard it said that they retain their bloom right to the very last, then fade and die almost in a night.

Knowing Hume's leaning towards his wife's folk I was not surprised to find I was the only Tellurian at the table. I had expected more Martians if anything. Instead the remaining four were Venusians, those quaint, not unlovable people, who somehow remind one almost equally of a bird and a butterfly.

Father, mother and two daughters they were, the latter three very interested in everything strange and new, yet with an interest that one felt was purely evanescent. That, I am told, is the impression one always receives on first making contact with Venusians. How far from true of the race as a whole it is may be judged from the fact that it was the Venusians who first discovered for us the practically inexhaustible deposits of rolgar on our moon.

Rolgar, as everyone knows nowadays, is the substance—one can hardly call it a mineral—without which space-flying could not have attained its present ease and safety. The Venusian himself was an official of the Rolgar Company, he told me, and was bound for the Archimedes Landing on the Moon with a party of Earth miners. His wife and daughter were stopping over with him. "No place for women," I hazarded.

"Not such a wilderness as used to be imagined," he answered me. "Little troubles to be faced—due to variations of pressure and extremes of temperature but on the whole quite a change for short period."

His wife and daughters seemed anxious to sample the new experience as all women, no matter what their planet, welcome a novel sensation. Mir Ongar himself—such was his name—had paid more than one visit to our satellite, so counted himself something of an authority on it.

HUME rose from his seat in the midst of our talk, gave me a careless nod, then as he came round the back of my chair dropped a whispered word in my ear. "Control room as soon you're ready," he said.

I could have lingered there at the table merely for the sake of stealing glances at Jansca Dirka but something in Hume's look more than his speech made me imagine an urgency behind his parting words. Also, oddly now I come to think of it, I had a wish to see what Nomo Kell looked like in the flesh.

As I came out onto the promenade deck I glanced through the quartzite windows. We were veering in now towards the Moon and its disk was beginning to fill the void ahead of us. The Earth behind was dwindling, though its size was still considerable. I judged we had not yet reached the midpoint gravity, for an odd quiver of the hull showed the propulsive power of the rolgar engines was still on. In a little they would be cut off and we could use the Moon's attraction to draw us onward until it became necessary to counteract the pull and decelerate.

"A light-message for you," said Hume as I entered. He took an envelope from the drawer and handed it to me. "I thought it better not to mention the matter at table. One never knows."

Cautious, extra cautious man. Well, better that than a loose-lipped babbler. I spread the flimsy out in front of me and translated as I read. Though it came over Harran's signature it was merely an acknowledgment of my overnight report, with the added note that if in the event of a Guard's ship being handy when anything untoward occurred I need not interrupt my holiday but could hand over investigation to the patrol.

"Formal acknowledgment of my last night's report merely," I said off-handedly to Hume.

"I thought as much," was his comment. "Though if more of these messages keep coming and going our operators will be getting headaches. It's a code none of them has handled before."

"If they'd lived a century ago," I said a mite incautiously, "it would have been child's play for them to read it."

He flashed a glance at me. "A dead language," he remarked and said no more about it.

"By the way," I asked, not that it mattered much, but it gave him something new to think about, "these Dirkas—who are they?"

"They're friends of my wife and myself. Dirka himself—her father—is a Director of the Martian Canal Company. The girl is nothing. Being a Martian woman she need not work for a living."

That, from an Earth-man, was a subtle jibe at conditions on his own planet or rather the planet of his race. I passed it by, however. There was nothing to be gained by retorting that on Earth many women preferred to work.

He eyed me curiously. "Sanders, how old are you?"

"Thirty-three," I said. "Why?"

"And unmarried as yet," he went on. "Well, there's time and, friend of mine, by the comet's tail, the best I wish you is no worse luck than I had myself."

I grinned. Thoughts of love had never come to me. Even now they seemed as remote in thought as Alpha Centauri was in fact.

He ran on. "I suppose you have the whole ship's company more or less neatly taped by now."

"No need of that," I returned."There's only one person aboard this ship that I'm interested in and that only as a matter of curiosity."

"Who?" he said with a lift of the eyebrows. "I had no idea we were harbouring any interesting personages—from your point of view—this trip."

"Nomo Kell," I said.

He drew his eyebrows together at that, as though the name seemed familiar, yet he could not quite place it. Briefly I described the fellow to him.

"Queer," he remarked. "It strikes something in my memory, something I wish I could recall clearly," he explained. "I can't, though. Some legend of my wife's people."

"Perhaps the other Martians on board?" I hazarded.

He shook his head. "They would not know," he said quite definitely but did not explain why.

AS I passed back along the promenade deck, I met Nomo Kell himself for the first time in the flesh. It was well that I had been warned of his appearance. Had I come upon him without foreknowledge of what I would see I don't quite know how it would have affected me. Yet he was not fearsome. It was the utter unexpectedness of him that astounded.

Nomo Kell's print had flattered him. Leave out the flaring purple of his magnetic eyes, the crested abnormality of his head—size of his body apart—and there was little to differentiate him from the ordinary planetarian.

But seen now, walking within a few paces of me, I sensed something else. A force, perhaps—a radiation. I could not tell.

He gave me a fleeting incurious glance and passed by. I might have stood there staring after him but for a voice in my ear and the touch of a hand on my arm.

"You find him interesting, Mr. Sanders?"

It was Jansca Dirka at my elbow. I reddened. I had been caught in an act of rudeness, no light matter when one is likely to tramp on touchy interplanetary conventions.

"And a little more, Miss Dirka," I said, using the Earth style of address. I have never quite accustomed myself to the long string of phrases, flowery and complimentary, which these Martians employ.

"I thought you would," she said gravely. "You have noticed his steps?"

I had not. I hardly gave them a glance until she drew my attention to them. Now I saw that he walked with a peculiar mincing gait, a sort of gingerliness, as though each movement was carefully timed and measured.

"He seems," I said slowly as it dawned on me, "to be deliberately shortening his steps, walking with extra care as we would on the Moon's surface."

"Exactly. The Cosmos is adjusted Earth gravity. We travelled Martians and Venusians have become so accustomed to its variations from our planets that our reaction is automatic, But he… " She flung out her hands with a curiously expressive gesture.

I caught the flash of the idea in mind. "It looks almost," I said, still a trifle doubtfully, "as though he was used to a larger planet than we."

"It looks like that," she mimicked. "I might even suggest it would be well not to let such an idea—or its opposite—lie dormant in the back of your mind."

With that and a tingling glance she turned and was gone, leaving me wondering. What did she see or know I could or did not? What indeed made her suggest anything of the sort to me? No hint of my office, I could swear, escaped Hume. I could only think I somehow, uncannily, she may have guessed.

Our engines shuddered, a shiver ran through our whole framework, then died away. We had passed the midpoint of gravity, and with our motors off were utilizing the Moon's pull to draw us rapidly towards her.

Chapter 4 The Wreck in the Void

I have spoken of the Moon as airless, yet that is not strictly correct. Habit, however, is a hard thing to cast aside, and one clings stubbornly to old beliefs even in the face of the newer facts. Our satellite, as we have known for centuries, lacks atmosphere such as we possess, and its day and night, each of fourteen Earth days in duration, swing from torrid heat in the one to the extremes of perishing cold in the other. But in the rifts and hollows and the abysmal depths of the craters, air still lingers, tenuous and all but unbreathable to us, but air nevertheless. Such life as there exists on the Moon lives mostly underground, or did until the advent of the rolgar mines.

To counteract the extremes of heat and cold, and secure a constant supply of air at earth pressure, huge buildings have been erected. Each mine is practically an enclosed city, entered through airlocks. It was on one of these airlocks that the Cosmos had come to rest; one of her ports was jointed to a port in the airlock, forming a sort of enclosed gangway, through which passengers ascended and descended.

Apart from the mechanical ingenuity that aided the embarkation there was nothing to see of any interest. Give me a landing in the free air every time. From where I stood I could see through the quartzite side of the promenade deck above and beyond the airlock, while I was able at the same time to run a speculative eye over the passengers leaving and arriving. Those taking off were mostly Earth miners, rough, rugged fellows, with an odd Earth official with them, and, of course, my acquaintances the Venerian family of Mir Ongar.

There were not so many coming on board. Mostly Venerians. A couple of those ubiquitous planet-trotting Martians with them to add a leaven to the dish. We took on no Earth-men. When one comes to think of it, it is a curious thing that the Moon should hold least attraction for those who are closest to it. If it had not been for the Venerians and their discovery of rolgar I believe we would have been content for ever to sheer past it into space. As it is the Moon—or rather its rolgar mines—gives us the means of holding the balance of peace in the Universe; the sinews of interplanetary war are to a great extent ours, and none can fight should we decide to cut off supplies.

Our stay on the Moon was only of short duration. An airport inspector or two donned oxygen helmets and made a thorough examination of our landing gear and gravity screen apparatus before passing us out. As soon as that was done and our clearance had been issued our port was sealed and disconnected from that of the airlock, the signal given, and the lift begun.

Beneath us Archimedes dropped away until the black circle of its crater was no more than a shrivelled ring. Mars flared up redly ahead, though presently we shifted our course a little as though we meant to leave it to our left. This however, was due merely to the fact that we were in a sense, circle sailing. It must not be forgotten that if we were travelling in space, so too was the planet of our destination. Our course was set exactly for that point in the void, where, according to our astronomical charts, our orbit, if one can use the expression, and that of Mars should intersect. A ticklish job, you must understand, is this of space navigation, requiring a remarkable intricacy of calculation and cross-calculation.

So the days passed. Once we sighted a meteor heading, it seemed, directly for us, but our repeller ray sent it rocketing off on a new path.

A finger touching me lightly on the shoulder brought me with a jerk out of the depths of sleep. I touched a button at the wall side of my bunk and the light tube above my head glowed brightly. I blinked. Gond, the first officer, was standing beside me. Seeing that I was awake:

"Quickly, Mr. Sanders," he said in a half-whisper. "The skipper wants you."

"What is it?" I queried.

"I don't know. Something I sighted out in the void of space. It was my control hour. I called him, he sent me to call you."

"I'm coming." I slid out of my bunk. "I'll be there—control room, I suppose?—as soon as I can dress."

"Quickly, quickly," he breathed again. He knew not what it was he had sighted—some wandering mystery of space, no doubt—but that the urgent need of my presence had been impressed on him deeply enough it was plain to see.

"I won't waste a minute," I said. "You can go back. I'll follow almost on your heels."

Indeed, I was half dressed before the door shut on him. A Guard sleeps often in his clothes; when he does not he can get into them with a minimum loss of time.

It wanted two seconds to the minute I had allowed myself when I slipped through the door in my turn, fastening buttons as I went. At that hour no one save the officers and crew was likely to be about; I need not fear that, half-clad, I would run into any of the passengers.

Hume himself awaited me, dressed only in tunic and shorts. The control room was warm enough to make up for any deficiencies of costume.

"What is it?" I asked the moment I stood beside him. He did not reply but motioned me to the screen that communicated with our look-out "eyes." The screen darkened momentarily, then flashed into light as the beam from our searchlight shot out and picked up the object that had occasioned the alarm.

For some seconds I was not quite sure what it was. Possibly because it was drifting towards us end on, I thought for a moment that it was a meteor, but the slowness of its approach should have warned me from the start that it was not that at all. Then as we swung round and I could see it broad-side on it looked more like a space-flier. That indeed was what I would have felt satisfied it was but for the absence of lights on board. A long cigar-shaped object, tapering to a point at one end, made blunt and warty at the other by the discharge tubes that clustered there.

"Can you get her name?" Hume whispered to me.

I could not. But I made sundry adjustments to the scale knobs at the side of the screen and the projection of the space-flier seemed suddenly to leap forward and become closer.

With some little difficulty I at last picked out her name. "M-E 75 A/B," I read from the line painted near her prow.

"Mars-Earth," Hume amplified. "Carrying A and B class traffic, passengers and freight. Um. This is your job, Sanders, I think. I wonder what's gone dead in her?"

"That's yet to learn. How did you pick her up?"

"Our locator positioned her long before we were able to see her. We— Gond, that is—thought it was another meteorite. But you see it isn't."

He paused and looked at me.

"Sanders," he said abruptly, "I am in your hands. What am I to do?"

"I'd like a look at her, a closer one, if I may. Can we lie alongside?"

"We can board her if you wish."

"I'd better. I wish you'd give the orders."

He threw me a smile at that. This big bluff man had his weakness, and I played on it that night, partly from a sense of courtesy, partly because it was policy. As long as I did not interfere with his command, just so long as I asked him as favours what I was entitled to order or demand, he was my grateful warm-hearted friend. Something of his appreciation of my consideration, my care not to humiliate him before his own officers showed in his face. I left it to him to give instructions, and set myself to watch the craft itself. We had veered a little, our speed was slackening, yet we would have to move round in a wide circle before, perhaps in another half-hour, we could come back and sheer in beside the stranger craft. Our engines, which had for a while been silent—for in free space once a certain pace is reached impetus and freedom from friction carry us onward—took up an odd pulsation, just enough to steady us.

Momentarily I lost sight of the derelict, picked her up again and again from all sorts of odd angles as the movable "eye" mounted on our prow swung round as we altered our course. Then abruptly I saw the length of the derelict looming large beside us, a black bulk that almost filled the vision screen. Came there a slight jar and I realized that our attractors had caught and held her.

Word came up from the port control that we were connecting and that our air-tight extension had been sealed against the derelict's nearest port.

As I turned away from the vision screen Hume caught my arm.

"Can I come?" he whispered in my ear. "I'm interested… "

I nodded. "Certainly. I'd like a witness, and someone to check my own observations. What are her tests?"

He spoke into a tube, then turned to me. "Normal interior air pressure," he reported. "Temperature 28 degrees Fahrenheit."

I whistled. Four degrees below freezing point. Something queer there. Either she should have dropped to absolute zero, or else maintained the normal interior temperature. What in the name of the Universe was holding her constant?

I took down one of the emergency coats from a hook, a heavy fur-lined fabric that covered me from chin to ankle, slipped my feet into the insulated boots one of our helpers held towards me, and drew them thigh-high. With the coat drawn in and its bifurcations buttoned tightly round each leg I was insulated against cold. I could even feel the warmth of the heater wires in the fabric as the current from the battery fixed to the back thrilled through them. I drew on my gloves and someone clamped on my air helmet, sealing it temperature tight on to the metal collar at the neck of my coat.

Each helmet contained a radio attachment that provided means of communication with each other and with the ship if necessary. I tried mine. It sparked, and a fraction of second later I heard Hume's voice burring in the receiver at my ear. Sealed against air and temperature variations, we could yet converse as we chose.

"Ready, Sanders?" he said, and when I answered in the affirmative he led the way down the direct ladder to the connecting port.

The connecting port, really a long metal tube that could collapse in on itself telescope fashion, had been extended to the wall of the derelict and clamped there. The door the latter's port had been opened mechanically, but the blasts of normally heated air the fans were sending through our craft pulsed along the connecting tube and kept the temperature there from diminishing perceptibly.

The moment we stepped through the open port of the stranger vessel, however, we sensed the change. Despite our heated emergency kit the cold air lapped round us, clutching our limbs with icy fingers. For the moment the grip of it, no less than the inky blackness of the ship's interior, halted us. I had a feeling that the cold was not so much the absence of heat as a sentient thing in itself.

Hume touched the button of the portable light at his belt and I followed suit. The white beams sprang out, filling the place with a light akin to natural daylight.

There was nothing to see there, but then neither of us expected that there would be anything. It was up in the control departments and the living quarters that we hoped or feared; neither of us was quite sure which—to make our discoveries.

The direct ladder that led straight to the upper control department seemed clear, and with my place as an Interplanetary Guard to sustain I took the lead. The trap-door was closed, but it opened at a touch and I climbed into the compartment, then turned to give a hand to my colleague. A moment later we stood together, staring round the cabin.

It was nothing like as modern as its equivalent on the Cosmos. From some of the devices, it seemed the craft was at least ten years old. I made for the log book. Search brought it to light in the drawer of the captain's table, and a comparison of dates showed that it had been written up within twenty-four hours. Therefore whatever had happened to render the craft derelict had occurred within the measure of one Earth day.

Both of us had naturally expected to find some trace of humanity in the control room, bodies, if not living creatures. But there was no sign of anyone and no sign of a struggle. For all we could see the men on duty might have walked out the door in as orderly a fashion as though they were going ashore.

"What do you think of it?" I asked Hume.

His voice buzzed with a perturbed note in my ear. "I don't know what to think," he said. "It's weird, uncanny. It's—" Whatever else he was going to say, he pulled himself up with a jerk.

"We can't form any definite opinion about anything until we've searched the ship from control to keel."

"Quite so," I agreed, but as he made a move towards the door I stayed him.

"Let us read the dials before we go," I suggested.

He moved towards me again, and we studied the indicators. The engine dials showed an ample supply of fuel, and the stud had been pushed over to "Stop." No question about that then. The engines had not run down or been brought up automatically. Human agency or something akin to it had been at work here.

Mindful of what Harran had told me, I turned to the heating machinery indicator. It showed that the apparatus was still running. Yet here we were in an atmosphere at present a few degrees below freezing point, whereas the thermometer should actually have registered something between sixty and seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

Curious on this point I turned to the wall thermometer. The glass was shattered, the mercury had vanished. From the way in which the glass had broken it was impossible to say whether the damage was deliberate or due to excessive cold. If it was the latter the control cabin itself must have at one period endured a temperature of at least forty-four degrees below zero!

Hume clutched my arm convulsively.

"What is it?" I asked, starting.

"I thought… I felt," he spoke in a strained voice, "as though someone… or something… had just come in."

I swung round sharply. The door, which a moment or so before had been closed, was now open a space. Even as I stared the gap seemed perceptibly to widen.

Chapter 5 The Sleepers

As a man I am no braver that the rest. I know there are more things in the Universe than we have as yet managed to tabulate, forms of life, abodes of intelligence, that may appear monstrous to us, just as perhaps we appear monstrous to them. But as against this I believe— and experience has yet to prove me wrong—that everything there is must face dissolution sooner or later, that it can indeed be killed suddenly and violently, provided only that one can reach a vital spot.

My courage was oozing from the tips of my insulated boots as I turned towards the door, and I was already aware of an uncomfortable, prickly sensation about the region of my backbone. Nevertheless the fact of another's presence gave me comfort, so, taking my ray tube in my free hand, I swung the door wide open with the other, and sent the beam of my lamp searching down the dark passage outside. I saw nothing. No visible entity appeared. My audiphones, which would have recorded the sound of any movement, however faint, remained stubbornly silent. Only a wave of cold that threatened to bite through the warmth of my emergency coat seemed to flow in on us like a living thing.

"Nothing there," I said in a tone meant to be reassuring.

"Nothing," Hume repeated, and I could have sworn to a faint note of relief in his voice. "I'll tell you what, Jack," he ran on, "it's the uncanniness of this place that's giving us the creeps, that's what it is. The sooner we pry into every nook and corner the better. We're losing time as it is and letting our nerves get the better of us."

There was sound good sense in that, but oh, how I wished we had brought some others with us. I would have given much then to have had a couple of my own sturdy, hardheaded Guards beside me. Something of what I was thinking must have impinged on Hume's consciousness. "It's a pity we didn't bring a man or two with us," he grumbled in his helmet.

"And have them take a risk we don't care to face?" I countered.

"Oh, well, there's that to it," he answered. "Let's get ahead before we start thinking over things."

He tried to push past me, no doubt in the hope that in action he would find a spur to his own courage, but I stayed him. These space-captains may rate themselves as highly as they please, but when it comes to facing the dangers of the unknown it is the Guards' privilege to lead. I think he guessed my motive, for he flung me a whimsical smile, plain to see through the glass front of his helmet.

I shut the door carefully behind us. I was more or less sure now that some unnoticed motion of the vessel had sent it stealing open, but I had no mind in case I was mistaken that I should be taken unawares. If that door should open again I would know of a certainty that there was an intelligent agency at work.

As we traversed the passage to the promenade deck my mind played round what was to me the most significant feature we had so far come across, the utter emptiness of the control room. I could not imagine any officer of the Interplanetary Service leaving his post unless there was good reason for it. And everything pointed to the supposition that the desertion, if such it could be called, had included everyone on duty in its scope.

Our beams wavered down the line of the promenade deck, fell on the chairs spread about the space, and simultaneously we stopped dead, and looked fearfully at each other.

"Did you see it?" Hume whispered.

"See what?" I asked, for I wanted corroboration of the reliability of my own eyesight.

"The people sitting in their chairs… still… lifeless."

So I was not dreaming. Hume had seen what I had seen.

"Hume," I said abruptly, "we haven't thought of it before. We've taken certain things for granted. But there should be buttons about the wall here… lights… better than our own portable lamps. Perhaps after all they may be working."

He swung the beam of his own lamp round, then his mittened hand closed over a stud and drew it down. Instantly the length of the promenade deck sprang into light. I shuddered. Row on row of chairs, most with occupants, met our eyes. They sat as stiff and still as figures carven from wood. Dead, it seemed, without a doubt.

I leaned over and touched the nearest figure, a woman, on the cheek, and even through the heated thickness of my gloves her flesh struck cold. I drew back with a gasping sigh.

"Hume," I said, "this is beyond us. We must know how these people died, if they're dead; if not, what's wrong with them. And that's a doctor's job."

"That's what I'm thinking," he agreed. "I'd better call him up?" He looked to me for approval.

I nodded.

He adjusted his communicators to the ship's, and purely out of curiosity I listened in on him.

"That you, Gond?" I heard him say. "Good. It's Hume speaking. Send Dr. Spence over at once. What's he to bring? I'm sure I can't say. Oh, yes"—I'd whispered to him—"say it may be suspended animation, or cold exposure. That's data enough for him. And, yes, better send two men with him. The most reliable. And give them a ray tube each. They can reach us through the control room. No, nothing yet… of any importance."

I liked that. He was not giving anything away, forgetful, no doubt, that with the stranger ship's lights on and the two craft riding side by side the deck we were on would be plainly visible. Thanks be it was during the sleep-hours, else we would have had eager, excited, curious, perhaps fearful passengers peering at us across the gap from the quartzite windows. I thought of that, thought too what might happen if some sleepless individual began to wander along the deck, saw, gaped, and went off to wake his friends.

"Tell Gond," I cut in in a quick whisper, "to close his shutters on the promenade deck. Else we may be watched. What we have to do may be better done without curious onlookers."

He put that through, and I heard the click as he cut out.

"We'd better wait," I said in answer to Hume's unspoken question. "More may turn on what Spence can tell us than we think." Nevertheless I put in some of the time of waiting by looking about me. It seemed that everyone had been frozen into immobility as he or she sat. The thing itself had come upon them suddenly, for there was nothing either of surprise of horror in any face.

The doctor came with his attendants, stared at the still figures, made such tests as he could, then straightened up and faced us. In the white light of the vessel's deck I could see his face show blank through the glass front of his helmet. His hand went up to make some adjustment of his audiphone before he spoke.

"Frankly," he said in answer to my question, "I can't tell you what it is. They've been frozen, that's what it amounts to, but several of the characteristic signs are absent."

I guessed what he meant. I'd looked closely for the blue and purple splotches, the other signs of a man frozen to death, and had failed to find them. Frozen they were in a sense, yet perhaps turned to stone more nearly described them. A little bead of perspiration trickled from my forehead down my nose; the glass front of my helmet seemed to be clouding a little; there was a feeling of warmth that I had not noticed before beginning to permeate my body under the emergency coat. Of a sudden the meaning of it came to me.

"Hume, Spence," I called through the audiophone, "It's getting warmer. Can't you feel it, both of you?"

Something akin to a blank consternation showed for the moment in Hume's face; the doctor looked interested, albeit a trifle puzzled.

"Don't you see," I ran on, "this cold's disappearing? The heaters are beginning to make themselves felt. All the time they've been warming up the air, not perceptibly until now. But it's a big lift from forty-four degrees below zero up to the twenty-eight it was when we came on board. That means that from the time this happened—whatever it was—- until the moment we stepped aboard the heaters had raised the temperature a matter of seventy-two degrees, from minus to plus, a tremendous lift. What's more, they're still doing it. It must be getting back to normal now."

"But why," said Hume, puzzled, "didn't the heaters freeze out too when this happened?" He made a clumsy gesture of his mittened hand to include the figures on the chairs.

The answer to that hit me almost the instant he asked the question.

"Simple," I explained. "The heater plant runs in a vacuum. External cold couldn't effect it."

"Of course." His voice was tingling. "I should have thought of that before."

"I didn't until just now." I put my hands up clumsily and caught at the fastenings at the back of my helmet.

"Steady, man, what are you doing?" Hume said agitatedly.

"I'm beginning to roast. Perhaps we can take our kit off now. At least I'll be the first to try."

"But the air," Hume's voice was vibrant with warning. "We got a normal pressure, but there may be something in it, something inimical to life."

"I'll take the risk," I answered. I had seen something out of the corner of my eye, something that looked a mite uncanny. I preferred not say what it was—yet. But it made me think that the air was safe, breathable at any rate.

I fumbled at the fastenings myself, for Hume mumbled he did not want what might happen on his conscience if anything went wrong, and in the circumstances I was not inclined to press him to help me. But I saw the doctor was following my example, though the two men waited to see what their skipper was doing first.

The helmet came off at last and the cool air hit my face. Cool air, not cold. The temperature, as I had surmised, was lifting degree by degree as the heaters struggled with and overcame whatever it was had caused the cold. The air was breathable. At least I could sense no foreign element in it, nothing to account for that abrupt drop in temperature.

In a moment I had stripped my emergency coat, leaving only my boots. They did not matter so much. The doctor was free of his trappings by this time, too. He took one gulp of the air, and looked across at me, then I saw his eyes widen.

His glance had travelled past me to the chair at my back. I whirled round. The woman whom I had first examined was stirring, yes, visibly stirring. Her bosom rose and fell, gently at first, then more rapidly as she gulped in the air. Her eyes opened… wide. She stared about her. Her glance fell on us. One expression after another chased with the rapidity of light across her face—astonishment—incredulity, fear, I thought.

An inarticulate cry, a sort of strangled scream, issued from her lips, and her head dropped forward in a faint. Spence sprang to her aid.

But the little cry, almost soundless though it was, might have been some signal already agreed upon. All over the deck figures were stirring. It seemed that one surprise on another was being stacked up in front of us.

Hume, with his helmet off and himself half-way out of his coat, uttered an exclamation. I gasped as I followed the direction he indicated. A tall man with the insignia of an Interplanetary skipper on his collar and coat-sleeves had risen languidly from a chair some distance down the deck, coming to his feet slowly, with a bewildered expression on his face, as though he had just been roused out of a sound sleep.

His expression changed as he saw us. Surprise, anger at this seeming alien invasion of his vessel, seized on him. He made a quick movement forward, then came striding down the deck towards us.

"What's… what's the meaning of this?" he demanded. Then a puzzled look came into his eyes and he passed one hand across his forehead.

"How… how did I get here?" he said bewilderedly. "The last I remember was in the control room, thinking it was getting rather on the cold side, wondering if anything had gone wrong with the heaters."

I took his arm. "Captain," I said, "there's a mystery here. With your help we'll solve it. We came on you, floating in free space, without lights, you… your people stretched out apparently dead… as you were just now."

"Who… what are you? From what ship?" he asked quickly, the light of an odd fear in his eyes.

I slipped my fingers in a pocket, found my badge and extended it flat in my palm towards him.

"You're safe… in good hands," I said. "Whatever you have to tell, you can say without fear."

For the moment he hesitated, staring away from us through the quartzite windows of his ship at the black shadow of the shuttered bulk of the Cosmos floating a few yards away.

"My officers, the men who were with me… " he said a trifle incoherently, running his eyes down the long lines of chairs.

The passengers were stirring now, coming back to life, all a little bewildered if one could judge from their expressions. The woman who had fainted had now revived, and it struck me that she was the only one of the lot who had shown any sign of fear on regaining consciousness. Could it be that she alone of all that company had seen something? At least I was not minded to leave the ship until I had had a chance of questioning her.

"Good," I said, "your first duty is to your officers. I think you'll find them all here, on this deck." You see, I was beginning to have a glimmer of what had happened, though the precise motive behind it all eluded me. "Get them together, bring them somewhere where we can talk. All that were on duty when… when whatever it was happened."

I dropped my voice an octave, came a little closer to him. "Captain," I said, "Don't look round. But tell me quick, who is that woman just behind us?"

He turned slowly as though looking down the run of the deck. I could have sworn his eyes did not so much as touch the woman in passing, but:

"A Mrs. Galon," he whispered back. "An Earth-woman, she says, though I take leave to doubt it. Why?"

"We'll want her," I told him. "After we've talked with you. But see she doesn't move away. I'd rather she had no opportunity to speak with the others in the interval."

"As you wish," he said deferentially. There was magic in that little badge of mine, a magic that made me proud to belong to the Service it represented. After all, we Guards may hold up schedules, and interfere much in many ways, but it can never be said that we use our power at any time for anything but good. Perhaps that is in the long run the secret of our power.

"Better," the captain shot at me in a whisper, "better get your men to tend her. Mine… I don't know… Everything's bound to be disorganized."

I gave the cue to Hume, and he passed the word to his two men. I gathered they were to cut Mrs. Galon out a moment after we left, shepherd her after us, and keep her waiting in the outer room until we were ready for her. As it was, while the skipper was rousing the watch on duty, the others of us unobtrusively slid between her and the rest of the passengers.

I don't think she noticed it, or if she did she gave no sign. Her interest seemed centred on Spence, perhaps because the was the first of our company with whom she had come in contact, the only one at any rate who had paid any sort of attention to her. That it had been purely medical attention did not, I felt certain, matter in the least.

A moment it seemed and the space-ship's captain came striding back to us, behind him a little straggle of his men.

"I'm ready now, gentlemen," he said, "if you will follow me."

He led the way along the deck, but it struck me in the instant's glimpse I had caught of his face as he passed that he seemed of a sudden to have grown worried and a little afraid.

The captain of the M-E 75 pushed open the door we had so recently shut, switched on the light and stood aside for us to enter. We went in followed by the duty man, the second in command and the captain himself.

When the door was shut—"My name is James Bensen, am I am captain of this ship," he said. "We are homeward bound from Enghan, Mars, to London, Earth. Crew, sixteen all told. Passengers, forty-three adults, two children. Cargo, Marsonite in bulk. Here"—he flung open a drawer of his table, and drew out a steel box—"here are my papers."

"Thanks," I said, as I took them. He had made merely the formal declaration and carrying traffic that is required of every space boat that is stopped and challenged by the Interplanetary Guard. Before I went further I ran through his papers, found they agreed with his declaration.

"And now," I went on, "before you start your story, it may help if I tell you what I found."

I gave him in detail a sketch of all that had transpired from the moment our locators had picked up his ship drifting free until the time he regained consciousness on his own promenade deck. I was careful, however, not to hint that other ships had apparently suffered in the same way.

His brow knitted as my story proceeded. It was plain he was more perturbed and bewildered than ever.

"I don't know that I can tell you anything much at all," he said half apologetically. "Things were going as usual, I was in control. My second and duty man were with me when I fancied it was getting a bit on the cold side. The indicator showed, however, that the heating machinery was running as usual."

I interrupted. "Can you give me any idea of the time of this?"

He did a brief calculation in his head. The Pause made me realize that he was still running on Enghan (Martian) time.

"It would be the equivalent of about eight P.M. Earth Western time," he said. "The passengers would have just finished dinner, I fancy. I was on the point of ordering the duty men to call up the heater control and ask what was wrong when I suddenly dropped into unconsciousness. When I came to I was propped up in a chair on the promenade deck."

"Thank you," I said formally.

He looked at me a trifle anxiously. "It doesn't help matters much, does it?"

"It's hard to say—as yet," I told him.

"Now the others."

The second and the duty man had much the same story to tell.

"On the face of it," said Bensen at the end, "it looks as though we were carried from here down the deck while we were unconscious. Though," he added thoughtfully, "I can't see how anyone could have existed through the sort of cold that we felt."

"You did," I pointed out. "All of you."

"I'm afraid I didn't put that too well," he said. "I should have said 'retained consciousness' rather than 'existed.' A cold chilling enough to send us into a torpor for some hours should have had the same effect on anything—anybody else, I mean."

"Not necessarily," I said. "Suppose the people—we'll assume that's what they were—who moved you came on board in emergency suits like ours, insulated against cold."

A light sprang up in Bensen's eyes. "You're assuming, of course, that the cold was an artificially induced state but it seems to me that there's one point you've overlooked. Assuming you're correct, the cause of the cold must have been introduced from outside, perhaps in the form of a gas. The biggest argument against that however, is the fact that we are to all intents and purposes hermetically sealed between ports besides being insulated against the cold of space."

"We're dealing with facts," I said a trifle testily, "not with theories. The fact is that something happened here to lower the temperature to such a degree that everyone lost consciousness. The heaters are functioning perfectly normally, so whatever occurred was not due to any breakdown on their part.

"And if you want any further evidence that it was the work of an intelligent agency you have it in the fact that you and the others on duty recovered consciousness in another part of the ship."

THE captain looked crestfallen. "That's true," he admitted wryly. "That being so," I went on, "the point to clear up at the start is whether the trouble originated on board or arrived from outer space."

"You mean to say," Bensen cut in with a light in his eyes, "that there's a possibility that someone on board, some passenger perhaps, was at the back of this? That would appear too patently impossible."

"In what way?" I demanded.

"Cold like heat has to be manufactured," he explained. "You need apparatus and chemicals and so on."

I saw what he was driving at. Even in the fourth decade of the twentieth century science was beginning to realize that cold was not the absence of heat but a state quite as distinct and as readily induced, even though it happened to be at the other end of the temperature scale.

"And what you're working up to, I've no doubt," I said, "is that no such apparatus or chemicals could possibly be smuggled on board. The examination of passengers' baggage on embarking is pretty strict at the Earth ports but how about the other planets?"

"Mars," Hume put in in his deep voice, "is even stricter if possible. No, my friend, you can rest assured that nothing of the sort could have got past the examiners at Enghan."

"Very good," I said. "That's impossible. Remains the other alternative then—that some space visitors half-froze you into a state of unconsciousness then boarded the vessel with some object yet to discern."

"One moment." It was Hume who interrupted. "Tell me why everyone was half-frozen—if you're correct in saying that—instead of being wholly frozen, stiff and stark."

"The answer seems simple enough," I retorted. "The heaters were running all the time, and once the nadir of temperature was reached they gradually managed to overcome the condition. No one was left in the frozen state long enough for harm to ensue."

"But even that's only the beginning," Bensen said glumly. "Admitting we've reasoned rightly up to this juncture, admitting further that by some means yet to be discovered space raiders made a entrance to the ship, we've still to settle who or what they were and what exactly they came for."

"What of value have you on board?"

"Nothing," he told me, "other than our Marsonite cargo and that as you can see from the indicators still shows intact. Looks as if the whole thing was absolutely without motive."

I wondered what, if anything, had been removed from the other space-ship Harran had told me about.

"If I'm not mistaken," I said, quickly "we have a witness of sorts— Mrs. Galon. I think she knows or saw something. Will you have somebody bring her in?"

She came, glancing questioningly from one to the other of our little group. Even the presence of the doctor did not seem to reassure her. I imagine that during the wait she must have been turning matters over in her mind, perhaps finding a lengthening fear beginning to throw its shadow across her path.

Yet she was a woman of character and decision. Before any of us could speak she lifted her head, quite regally and swept us with a glance one could almost call defiant. "Well, gentlemen," she said, "why have I been brought here and kept under guard awaiting your pleasure?" She turned to the one man of our little group she knew. "Perhaps you, Captain Bensen, can explain it?"

"The doing is not mine, Mrs. Galon," he said. "I'm under orders too. We are in the hands of the Guard."

IN such a moment one can imagine all sorts of things, most of them with no foundation in fact at all, I thought, however, though probably I was mistaken, that a glance of understanding passed between them.

"At least in the hands of one representative of it," I said, and bowed.

She looked at me with a genuine interest she had not hitherto displayed, irritation at her detention appeared to have vanished entirely.

"Then—" she said. "Then, I wasn't dreaming. It wasn't a nightmare if the Guard is playing a part in it."

"You saw something," I said sharply. "In those few minutes on the deck in it chair before you fell asleep something happened. What was it?"

"If I said just what I saw or rather what I fancy I saw—noone would believe me," she said a little fearfully.

"No one will doubt you," I told her. "Listen to me, Mrs. Galon. I can tell you something that may help you. I can trust you to keep it to yourself, not breathe a word

of it to the other passengers?"

"Of course," she said. "I won't say a word to a soul."

Frankly I did not believe her. Not that it mattered much. But thinking she was being taken into my confidence she was almost certain to tell me without reservation everything she knew.

"This, then," I said slowly, "is not the only ship that has had a similar adventure. This, however, is the first ship I've boarded and it is my business to get to the bottom of this particular mystery. If you can give me the slightest help, the Service and I will forever be your debtor."

Flowery, you will say, and so I thought and hated myself while saying it—but something told me she was the type to whom such phrases were meat and drink. Out of the corner of one eye I saw Hume frowning.

"Oh," she said. "We-ell, I don't know if there is much to tell really. I was just sitting in my chair on the deck just where you found me. Of a sudden I began to feel cold. I wondered if anything had happened to the heaters. Then I thought perhaps I'd better go to my cabin for a wrap.

"But I could not move a limb, not even a finger, only my eyes. Why they weren't paralyzed too I can't say. Then there was that feeling of intolerable cold and another feeling on top of it just as if I were sinking away into unconsciousness under an anesthetic. Not actually an unpleasant feeling at that.

"I think I must have been on the verge of going, for things seemed very misty before my eyes. Then the odd thing happened that I'm still not sure wasn't something I dreamt. Two figures carrying someone came down the length of the deck, The person being carried, a limp unconscious body, must have been Captain Bensen or one of the officers. I could see only the uniform.

"But it was the people, things, whatever you care to call them that were carrying the body that—that made me think I was dreaming. Figures perhaps eight or nine feet high, higher than any Martian. They weren't real, not tangible, They seemed just like mist.

"But the most horrifying thing about them was that I could see clean through them. As they passed I could see the side of the deck and the quartzite windows and even a star or two in the black void beyond, just as if they were transparent, made of glass themselves. It was horrible!

"Well, after that I don't quite know what happened. Either I fainted right off or the lights went out: I don't know which. All I can say is that everything seemed to go dark. The next I remember is seeing you good folk round me."

Chapter 6 The Guard-Ship

SHE finished and looked expectantly from one to the other as though she fancied we would treat her tale with derision. Yet there was nothing in it to laugh at.

"Can you describe the figures more closely?" I asked, but she shook her head.

"I'm afraid I can't. I saw only the vaguest outlines and they seemed to flicker."

"As though a faint light were playing on them?" I suggested.

"Yes, that's just what it looked like," she said quickly. "How do you know?"

"I don't," I said smiling. "I merely guessed right, it seems."

Truth to tell all the while she had been speaking one idea after another had been tumbling through my mind. Something about light and its refractive qualities, something about things being made invisible through the light beams’ being bent. I had a book in my luggage on the Cosmos—one of the old print books—that dealt with problems of the kind.

"I'd better take her disks and prints," I said when she had gone.

The radio operator, who had been with us all the time and whose business it was to attend to such matters, turned to the little wall machine. A compact piece of mechanism that recorded every word that had been uttered and every gesture made in the room since the moment Mrs. Galon entered. It was so cleverly hidden that I doubt if any outsider would have suspected its existence.

The operator pushed a button placed in an inconspicuous part of the machine and a little panel slid back, revealing the cavity from which he took a roll of still dripping film, and three or four disks. The spoken word was recorded at the side of the film, of course, but since it was not always possible to run the film through when one wanted to consult it, the sound was also recorded on the disks rather after the style of old gramophone records.

"Be careful of that film," the operator said as he handed it over. "It's not quite dry yet. Perhaps I'd better dry it out for you."

"Go ahead," I answered. I could spare five minutes.

I saw Hume shift from one foot to the other, then glance nervously at watch. It was evident he was getting impatient and wondering how much longer he was going to be held up. I tried to hurry things as much as possible.

"Captain Bensen," I said, "you been boarded in mid-space and subjected to a deal of inconvenience and annoyance. On the other hand your cargo shown by your indicators is intact and nothing has been touched here in this cabin. Is that a fair summing up?"

"More or less," Bensen agreed. "Except that you'd better record that there's nothing to show who our visitors were or even that we had any at all."

"Only Mrs. Galon's statement," I cut in.

"Barely visible entities!" he said.

"I imagine," I said mildly, "that it would be hard to explain what has happened in any other way."

"I think," said Bensen with almost my own intonation, "that you will find it hard to explain matters in that way."

WHAT more he might have said can only guess, for at that moment came the low whine of the locator, a shutter on the wall of the cabin dropped and a red bulb glowed to life.

The operator sprang to the television screen, connected the communicator, and with the receivers to his ears took the call. "Interplanetary Guard-ship E Twenty-two calling," he said. "Want to know what the trouble is."

The E. 22!—my own Guard-ship! For the moment no one moved in the little control room.

"What shall I reply, sir?" the operator asked abruptly.

It was significant that he looked not at me but at his own captain.

Bensen flashed me a look. "It's for Mr. Sanders to say," he said dryly.

"If I may," I said, "I'd like to answer that call."

"Go ahead," said Bensen gruffly. To the operator he added, "Mr. Sanders will tell you what to reply."

"Do you mind," I said silkily, "if send the message myself?"

HE did not answer but stepped aside with what I thought an ill grace. There is a certain close communion between these service operators that leads them to resent the intrusion of an outsider, more particularly when the latter has the power to ride rough-shod over them.

The change-over did not occupy more a quarter of a minute, nevertheless it was long enough for the man on the E.22 to show impatience. Even as I fixed earphones over my head the crackle of his signalled questions sounded in my ears.

"Don't be impatient," I signalled back as fast as I could work the button with my finger. Then without giving the E.22's people time to think up something snappy in return I changed over to the Guard-ship code. The vision screen beside me was now showing up their control- room, just as ours must have becoming visible to them.

A man was standing near the operator watching the screen that reflected the interior of our control room. It was Glenn Vance, my relief. Recognition came to him almost at the moment it came to me.

I gave Vance an outline of the situation, told him why I was here and waited for the suggestion I hoped he would make. It came without hesitation.

"Pity to interrupt your holiday," the reply clicked in my ear. "I'll take over if you wish."

I signalled delighted agreement.

"Coming over at once," he signalled back. "Will clamp on to your vacant opposite side to the Cosmos." The screen went blank and the crackle died in my ears. I turned to Bensen. "The E. Twenty-two is coming over," I told him. "She'll probably escort you to the atmosphere's edge, if you wish."

Bensen nodded. "Anything that will get us safely and quickly to our destination sounds good to me now. But you?"

"I'm going back to the Cosmos as soon as I've handed over," I said. "I'm no more anxious for delay than you are. Also I have Captain Hume's feelings to consider. I've upset his schedule enough as it is."

"Oh, don't worry about me," said Hume. "We're all in the hands of the Guard nowadays."

I scented an undertone of smouldering sarcasm that might yet burst into flame. I was saved from saying something that might have led to an exchange of remarks for which we would all be sorry later by the glow of the warning bulbs advising us the E.22 was connecting and would want the port opened on signal. It came a second later, a dull buzzing that filled the room.

Bensen gave the order to open the starboard port. Came first the clump of feet up the ladder, then the smiling face of Glenn Vance appeared.

"So it's really you, Jack, in trouble as usual," was his greeting as he gained level flooring and came towards me.

"The only trouble I'm in is that of delay," I said a little sharply. I was not in the mood for banter. "The sooner you can take over and let us be off the better we'll be pleased."

"So?" he said agreeably. "Well, tell me what it's all about and you can hand over at once."

He had already had my resume over the power beam and it only needed filling in. He seemed to find the matter vastly interesting and did not appear altogether surprised. As I learnt presently Harran had sent him a flash, an all-ships call, setting out the situation in outline.

Thereafter we speeded things up as much as possible, and in a little less than ten minutes from the time Vance had arrived Hume and I and our people were making our way back to the Cosmos. As I turned to go I put my hand in my pocket and drew out the compact little packet of film and disks.

"You'd better take these," I said to my colleague. "Mrs. Galon's statement."

"Good. They'll do as a check. Well, good-bye and a good journey. I wouldn't change with you anyway. I'm in the thick of it here, trying to unravel this mystery, while you—"

"While I," I said, "am out of it, leading a calm and placid existence."

"Vegetating for the duration," he laughed. "Well, you'll hear all about it when you get back to duty—and will probably want to kick yourself for being out of the climax of the most interesting investigation in years."

"Probably," I agreed.

We got back to the Cosmos, closed our port, and signalled our imminent departure to the others.

Chapter 7 A Martian Girl Seeking Knowledge

I SLEPT until the steward at the door filled my cabin with the grotesque wail of the sounder. I came to with a start, dimly realizing what had happened.

After our adventure in mid-space and our return to the Cosmos I had tumbled into bed dog-tired. I had locked my door against intrusion, but had forgotten everything beyond that. Since I had slept beyond the normal, and not answered the breakfast call and there was no indication in my message grid beside the door of the time I wished to be called my steward had not unnaturally concluded that something was wrong.

I sprang out of bed the moment the wailing started and made shift to open my door. My steward's face showed relief when I appeared.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Sanders," he said, awkwardly apologetic, "but when you didn't appear for breakfast and there was no message in your grid I thought… "

"Quite right," I told him. "My fault entirely. I'll be more careful next time. What's the hour now?"

"Ten A.M. Earth Western time," he told me. "We change to Martian time at midnight tonight. We're working up to velocity now."

That was news to me, good news in a way, for it showed our trip would be over sooner than I thought. I might have guessed it for the vessel quivered slightly to the steady pulse of the rolgar engines. Not often are they used in free space, save to take off or slow down. Evidently Hume had decided we had wasted enough time over the unscheduled stop last night.

The steward lingered. "If you want something to eat now I think I can manage it," he said hesitantly.

Looking out for an extra tip no doubt, the rascal. Well, it didn't matter much. He'd looked after me well to date and I could do with something to eat and drink.

I made ready while he was away. A certain giddiness that I did not like attacked me from time to time as I moved about. It was nothing much when all was said and done. Nevertheless it worried me. In some ways it was akin to space vertigo, an affliction I dread, for it would mean the end of my career in the Service. In all my eleven years in the Interplanetary Guard-ships I had not been troubled by it and so concluded I was immune.

The trouble passed away, however, by the time my tray arrived. Probably it was no more than momentary weakness engendered by the exertion and the tenseness of the night. The fact that it left me completely, once I had made my meal, seemed to satisfy me on that point.

A knock came on the door just as I was putting the finishing touches to my toilet before venturing out. I called, "Come in."

It was another steward, a man whose face I had not seen before. He had a message from Hume. The skipper was inquiring after me. If I was up he would like a word with me.

"I'll see him," I said. "Where is he? In the control-room?"

In bed, the steward told me. That was rather a surprise. It set me wondering, wondering if there were any connect between my recent giddiness and Hume's indisposition.

Hume was sitting propped up in bed when I entered. He looked a little grey. He did not speak until I had closed the door and we were alone.

"Glad to see you about, Jack," he said then. "I was beginning to wonder."

"Wonder what?" I asked. "What's wrong with you, anyway?"

HE made a wry face. "I thought it was space vertigo when it came on," he said. "I was up before the breakfast call, not much sleep naturally, seeing what we were at during the night. But when I tried to move about, the cabin started spinning round me."

"That's bad. And then?"

"I won't bore you with my symptoms. I got a scare, however, began to imagine space vertigo was seizing me, saw my career snapping off short and all helped to make me worse, I suppose. However, the long and short of it is that Dr. Spence came down, tested my reflexes, and decided it wasn't space vertigo after all."

"I had a somewhat similar experience this morning myself." I gave him details. "What do you make of that?"

"What Dr. Spence thinks is that we got out of our emergency suits too soon last night There must have been something in the air of M-E 75, something other than the cold, an ingredient with a slightly anesthetizing property. We're feeling the after-kick of it now."

"What's Spence ordered you to do?"

"Stay in till I'm better," Hume smiled.

"I'm feeling that way already and—if you don't mind—we'll have the complete cure in a moment or two."

"Oxcta," he went on. "You'll find the box in that drawer. The lock's a simple switch one. The white button breaks the circuit, the red one opens it."

I did as he told me, drew out the little box I had seen my first evening on board and handed it to him.

"Now the water," Hume said.

When I handed him the glass, "I'm glad you were able to come," he said.

"I wouldn't risk getting out for things myself and I've no mind to let others into my secrets."

"I needed that," he said as he swallowed the last of the draught. Then he eyed me. "I've been thinking of myself solely. You need a taste of it too. Draw yourself a glass."

I did and felt immeasurably the better for it. I said so. He did not answer, merely nodded and still eyed me, a trifle more thoughtfully now.

"Jack," he said, "I've been thinking. Last night put a fancy or two into my head. Yours isn't altogether a pleasant job though no doubt it has its romantic side. Still you may get into tighter corners than I'm ever likely to. Corners of the sort we were both in last night.

"A few of these on hand"—he held out a dozen of the Oxcta pellets to me—"might be valuable. Only I must ask you never to say that you have them in your possession, never indeed acknowledge that you know of their existence."

"In that case," I said, not taking the pellets, "perhaps you shouldn't offer them."

"A time may come when you'll be glad I did. You've seen their effect on me. You've felt it twice on yourself. Here, take them. Call it humoring me if you like."

"All right, since you're so pressing."

"Keep them in a metal box, steel for preference. You've got one you can use? No? Well, you'll find an empty one in the same drawer. It's Earth-made so there's nothing to connect it up with them."

I found the box, and transferred to it the dozen pellets he had given me. A lot of fuss to make about them. After all, if his assurances were to be believed, as I felt they were, they were no more than a remarkable tonic whose constituents were kept a close secret by the Martian manufacturers. The box slid into my pocket.

"As far as we are concerned," said Hume a trifle anxiously, "I take it last night's affair is over and done with."

We still kept to the old Earth style of dividing the day into periods of darkness and light though here there was neither. We saw only the blackness of space with the stars and the planets doubly bright, doubly brilliant with the absence of air.

"The Guard-ship's taken over," I pointed out. "That should end it as far as this voyage goes. But there may be enquiries at Tlanan when we reach there. It depends on what the Martian authorities think."

"At any rate we won't have our schedule upset," Hume remarked.

"I shouldn't think so. In a day or so we'll pass the beat of the last of the Earth Guard-ships, and the Martian ones, I'd imagine, would be more interested in speeding us towards Tlanan for an inquiry than in hanging us up in mid-space."

"I hope so." He did not seem so sure of that. Perhaps he knew the Martians better than I.

A MOMENT'S silence, then, "Well, Jack, if you don't mind clearing out I'd like to get up," he said. "I'm feeling fit to face things again, now that I know it isn't space vertigo coming on. Also the Oxcta has made a new man of me. By the way, use the stuff sparingly. It will lose its effect if you take it too often."

"Never fear. I don't like forming habits, good, bad or indifferent," I told him. With that and a nod I left him.

There were many things to think about. Free though I was of the necessity of probing further the particular mystery of the M-E 75 I was still interested deeply. Here was a mystery doubly intriguing. It seemed to defy solution, yet ever and again I had a queer feeling that I was very close to a revelation.

It was not unlikely that contact with my fellow beings might not only clear my befogged brain but perhaps set it working along new lines. For some reason or other there were few about at that hour. My chair had already been marked out for me though so far I had made no use of it. Now I found it without difficulty, dropped into it and began to fill my pipe. That alone of Earth's vices was left me for comfort.

I felt drowsy. I must have dozed, for the next I remember was a voice musical in my ear. I opened my eyes with a start. Jansca Dirka was standing beside me, smiling. I jerked upright in my chair and began some remark about having dropped off to sleep.

"I'm sorry," she said in a voice that held just the faintest trace of accent. "I wouldn't have disturbed had I known."

I drew up a vacant chair beside me. "Sit here," I invited her. I did not believe her statement that she did not know I was dozing. Patently she wanted to talk with me.

She seated herself and half-turned towards me. "You do not mind?" she said.

"Go ahead," I said, amused. "I can see you want to ask questions. What is it now?"

Her eyebrows lifted archly. "Nothing of any importance. I am merely a Martian girl seeking knowledge."

"In that case I'll be happy to tell anything I can."

"I have been reading," she went on gently, "delving into the ship's library of your Earth books. Somehow I prefer them to the book-machines. They are not noisy. One can read them and at the same time maintain privacy without the need of sound insulators."

"I'm glad you like them," I said simply. "I, too, have a leaning towardsold print. In many ways I like the old ideas. The book-machines seem to lack something. Yet we took them from you."

She frowned. "From Mars," she said thoughtfully, using the Earth title for her planet. "Well, not all that comes from us is good." She stopped abruptly, thinking perhaps of that disastrous War of the Planets that came near wrecking the civilizations of the Inner Planets.

Abruptly she pulled herself back to the conversation. "I found amongst those books an old one by a man named Wells—'The War of the Worlds,'" she said slowly. "I thought at first it was an actual history, then discovered as I read that it is what you call… " She hesitated, looking to me to supply the elusive word.

"A romance?" said I.

"An imaginative romance," she qualified. "I read on and on. Tell me, was Earth really like that? Did men at one time drive animals about?"

"As a picture of those times, I fancy it is pretty accurate," I said. "That is, course, if you leave out the invasion part of it."

SHE shuddered. "To think that Earthmen once imagined we might assume those shapes—the things that came in the cylinders. Octopus shapes. Loathsome things." Then quickly before I could comment, she ran on. "Yet it was you Earth-people who first voyaged to the distant planets."

"I've often wondered about that," I said. "Time and time again it has puzzled me why neither your people nor the Venusians branched out in that way."

"There were many reasons," she told me. "You are a predatory folk, an exploring, restless race. Also you had certain things we lacked. We could fly but we had not that urge to reach out for stars that is your heritage."

In this she was not quite accurate. Interplanetary travel would never have become the accomplished fact it is today had it not been for the discovery of rolgar. True, we found it on the Moon, in our own territory so to speak, though we did not immediately realize its significance.

Even with the improvements Leyton Browne introduced in 1975, which enabled our space explorers to extend the radius of their travels, interplanetary voyages could not have become a commercial proposition. It was only when we made contact with the Venusians and learnt from them the true value of rolgar that we began to make any progress at all.

It is odd to recall that to the Venusians rolgar was practically a theoretical substance, one as rare, if not rarer, to them than radium is on Earth. The Earth, ignorant of its value and its almost incalculable powers, possessed on our moon a practically unlimited supply. Sad to think that it was over rolgar that the first, and we hope, the last of the dreadful interplanetary wars was fought…

"Do you think then"—I switched back to the immediate subject—"that there would never have been communication between us had it not been for Earth-folk?"

"Do you?" she said and for the moment I failed to realize that the question was merely rhetorical. "Do you ever pause to think, Mr. Sanders, whether somewhere in the Universe there may not be others, intelligent beings, like us in form, immeasurably our superiors in intellect, who may even now be reaching out to contact with us? One hears strange stories."

I stared at her. What she was saying ran so close to the ideas in my own mind, paralleled so nearly my own recent experiences that I asked myself if she weren't throwing out feelers. A Martian girl seeking knowledge…

"You know it!" I said. I might have phrased it otherwise, have said, "You've guessed!" But I used instinctively the one word that accurately summed up the situation. She knew.

"I know," she said, this Martian maiden seeking knowledge, and her hand dropped comfortingly on mine. "Indeed I am more aware of you than perhaps you think. You see, you have interested me—us. My father and I."

She did not take her hand away. A moment later I had prisoned it in mine. "You know," I said challengingly. "But how much do you know?"

"Enough to startle you," she told me. "That you are no private tourist, that you hold a high position in Earth's Guard-ship Fleet."

"I am not unknown. It is quite possible that many travellers on the space-liners should have seen me in an official capacity, and have remembered."

"That is so," she agreed. "But do not worry. If you wish to preserve your secret, it is safe with us. But as you say that is a little thing, no sure test of the knowledge I boasted I possessed."

She leaned a little closer to me, so close that I could have taken her in my arms without effort had I wished. "Suppose"—her voice dropped to a whisper—-"suppose I were to tell you what else I know, of the things that have worried you and threatened to upset your holiday, of the events of last night, of the ship adrift in space, and the sleeping, half-frozen men you found there."

"There must have been a leak somewhere," I said. "Someone has talked."

"You could explain it so," she agreed. "But what you could not explain by that or any other form of reason is this, a thing known only to you and Captain Hume that in this pocket"—she tapped it lightly—"you have a little steel box containing twelve pellets of Martian Oxcta."

Chapter 8 A Friend, or Perhaps a Little More

I STARED at her stupefied—while the unrecoverable seconds ticked remorselessly away. I scarcely knew what to say or with what counter to meet this frank revelation. The fact that she knew something and no doubt guessed more of the mystery in which I had played my little part did not matter so much. It was the uncanny knowledge she displayed of something trifling in itself, yet about which no one but myself and the captain should know anything, that was so disconcerting.

"Tell me," I demanded, still in the same soft whisper she herself had used. "Tell me how you know all this. It's… " In my turn I halted for a word and this time it was she who supplied the needed one.

"Uncanny," she suggested and when I nodded, "No, Mr. Sanders, it isn't. It's anything but that. To show you what I mean I'll tell you something more. Wait a moment, please."

She thrust her hand through the V opening at the bosom of her dress, kept her hand there under the shadow of the material almost as though she held something in her palm, something at which she looked and frowned a little, with a drawing together of those fine eyebrows of hers.

"Face me squarely," she commanded. "Ah, that's it. Now—under the left lapel of your coat, where you can show it in a moment if necessary, is your interplanetary badge, a silver badge in the shape of a space-ship with the letters—I. P. G. spread along its length."

"Go on," I said with interest. So much she could have told me from memory if she had ever—as no doubt she had—seen a Guard's badge before.

"You're still a little doubtful," she whispered. "We-ell—on the back of the Badge is a number—seven-twenty-five. Beneath the number are the two letters S. C."

She could not have known without having seen my badge—which I swear she had never done—could not possibly have known that I was number 725 of the Interplanetary Guard and that my rank was Space Captain.

She went on calmly, "In your right-hand coat pocket you have an envelope, buff in color. It contains a space radio form. The message on the form is written in an Earth-language I do not know. It is not one in use, that is all I can say. But I can spell out the words to you." She spelled it through until I thought it time to call a halt.

"Please!" I said almost breathlessly. "I'm convinced."

She looked up mischievously at me. Her hand came out of the bosom of her dress, empty, as it had gone in. Yet I could swear that the moment she raised her eyes to meet mine I heard a slight click as of a spring being released.

"And of what are you convinced?" she whispered.

"Of the reality of what you're saying—or doing," I told her. "But it's magic, witchcraft."

"No. Applied science, that's all. A little toy it is, yet how it shakes you, saps your confidence and makes you talk of magic, of witchcraft, of things no sane planetarian really believes in."

"Tell me," I said quickly, "why do you do this thing? I am sure it is not merely to puzzle me."

"It is," she said, "because I want to help you, if only in my small way."

"With that little toy? What is it? May I see it?"

She took my questions in order. "Yes, with that little toy, as you call it. It is worked on the principle of your X-rays, something analogous, at any rate. But I cannot show it to you here. There may be prying eyes about."

She flung a swift glance about the deck. No one seemed in the least interested in our talk but then that was nothing to go by. Men—women too—can watch and listen without showing the slightest outward sign of interest. "Mr. Sanders, you are Earth-born. You have conventions that are not ours. We have conventions that possibly you do not understand. Would you therefore think it a thing that should not have been said if I were to ask you to come down to the seclusion of my cabin where we can talk undisturbed?"

MY hesitation was but for the moment. "No, of course not," I said readily.

"Leave me now," she said. "My cabin is C-eight. In ten minutes you will find me there. We had better not go together."

There was wisdom in her suggestion. With a brightly-flung word and a cheery nod for the benefit of anyone who might chance to be watching, I rose to my feet, sauntered off along the deck, stopped to relight my pipe, strolled through the saloon.

So casually I made my way to the accommodation deck, and presently located C-eight. The glow of a light tube streaming through the grille over the door told me it was in occupancy. I glanced at the name grid. Jansca Dirka, that was all. She then had the whole cabin to herself.

She closed the door behind me, snapped the switch and shut the sound insulators. Then she turned to me with a smile.

"Why," I said, "are you doing all this?"

"Because," she said, "I would be your friend."

"A friend or perhaps a little more," I said softly, overwhelmed by that other-world intoxication of her presence, that lure that was not Earth's. I had her hands in mine as I spoke. She said nothing but I felt them drawn softly away.

"We can," she said with meaning, "speak of such matters after. There are more important things to talk of now."

She turned swiftly away from me for a moment. What she did or where it came from I could not say, but when she faced me the next second in the palm of her outstretched hand there lay glittering a watchlike thing with a tiny thread-thin chain attached.

"Take it," she said. "It is yours. It will help you."

It was shaped like a watch, save that back and front were made of some vitreous substance, neither glass nor quartzite. As I looked into one crystal face I could see nothing till the girl leaned over, touched a spring I had not noticed. I nearly let it drop, for the floor of the cabin under the crystal face seemed to vanish and I found myself looking into the deck below, seeing everything beneath me as clearly as though the floor were made of glass.

"It is rather startling when one sees it for the first time," she said, "but as I've told you the principle underlying it is quite simple. It is merely a matter of penetrative rays."

"It is rather astounding," I said as soon as I recovered my composure. "You don't know then how the principle is applied?"

Slowly, seriously she shook her head. "I do not know," she said deliberately, "and if I did I would not tell. I am giving you this little instrument because I know it will help you but not even for you would I betray the secrets of my people."

I turned on her, suddenly contrite. "Of course!" I said. "You are doing a wonderful thing even in giving me this. I should not have asked you any such question."

She waved that aside, came a little closer and, as though afraid that even in that soundproof cabin she might be overheard, dropped her voice to the merest thread of a whisper.

"Keep it there," she said, pointing. "On the inside of your buttoned jacket. Make a pocket for it there to keep it hidden out of sight. You have only to put your hand down—you need never pull it out more than is necessary—to see the dial face on one side or the other."

"Your father?" I suggested.

"He does not know," she said quickly. "I do not want him to know. He is well-disposed towards you, as who would not be? But even he, if he knew that I was even to this extent betraying a Martian secret to one not of our race by blood or by adoption, would be harsh with me."

Her voice trailed into silence.

"Tell me," I said quickly, "if this were known—what would happen to you? Anything dire?"

She did not answer but the droop of her head told me all I wished to know. This Martian maiden, in so many ways like an Earth-girl, in so many other ways unlike, was for me taking the stars knew what risks.

"Tell me," I begged. "Is it merely that I am an alien, because I have no Sonjho blood in me that you would be punished?" In my eagerness, anxiety, call I what you will, I had stumbled into using the Martian word itself.

"Yes," she said slowly, thoughtfully "yes, it is because you have no Sonjho blood in you that I must fear for myself."

For a space she paused. I saw the glitter of the little knife in her hand and sprang forward but she thrust me back with one hand, and for once I was not minded to use force.

"Stay," she said fiercely. "I mean harm to you or anyone else. But I see a way."

Something in her eyes compelled me to wait. She took the little knife, made a tiny scratch in the fleshy part of her left arm, waited until the red blood came.

Suddenly she thrust the arm towards me, and spoke commandingly. "See," she said, "I have drawn blood. With your lips remove it."

She came of a long line of those born to rule, this girl. There was something of their concentrated magnetism in her, something too that was all her own. Scarcely knowing what I did, I obeyed her. My lips touched her warm flesh.

SHE drew her arm away and as I straightened, looked at me with a new light in her eyes.

"You are one of us," she said with a strange dignity and a stranger softness in her manner. "Now you can always say with truth that you are of the Sonjho blood for you have that blood, my blood, in you."

It was no barbaric rite, no ancient survival of blood brotherhood such as once existed amongst certain peoples on Earth. It was her way, the only way she knew, of giving me power to claim if necessary the rights by blood of a citizen of Mars.

The deed, as much as the thought behind it, amazed me. I knew enough of her planet's customs to realize that it would hold as binding in any Martian community but whether it had any deeper implication I could not say.

Our eyes met. She stepped back a pace, drew a long breath, and slid the tiny knife into a sheath at her girdle.

"I had better explain," she said in studied calm tones, "the working of the—" She used a word I did not catch, a Martian phrase new to me. She smiled at my puzzled expression. "That little instrument I gave you," she explained.

I took the thing from my pocket—for lack of a better name I called it in my own mind "The Crystal Eye" and as such it will be referred to hereafter—and handed it to her. She showed me that the spring at the top was in reality a sort of screw. It could be adjusted to suit the distance in much the same way that one adjusts binoculars.

"Tell me one thing before I go," I said, for it was a thought that worried me. "Do all Martians carry these?"

"No," she said slowly, "no. Only those of—only a favored few carry them."

I read in her eyes the meaning of that hesitation, could almost hear the word she had left unsaid. I knew without a doubt that she had meant to say "Only those of the blood," and had pulled herself up just in time. Well, it seemed—if suppressions and hesitations went for anything—that now it was a matter not to be referred to between us again.

Blindly I made a step forward, fumbled, caught her in my arms, I kissed the lips that for the moment feigned resistance, then clung passionately to mine.

Chapter 9 I Take Over

THROUGHOUT most of that day the ether must have been super-heated with the messages between worlds. In the administrative centers of the three confederated planets, men must have been working feverishly, preparing to deal with a menace whose actual purpose, whose identity even, had not yet become manifest.

To us sealed up in our space-ship hurtling through the void to our destination, nothing of this was known. It was not until the dinner hour that night that the first repercussions of the trouble became apparent.

Supremely happy in my new-found love I had taken my seat at the table to meet the ardent glance from Jansca's glowing eyes and the approving look from her father, whom I had already seen and talked with. I noticed as a thing of little moment that Hume's place was unoccupied.

Jansca leaned across the table and said something to me. I was about to make some light answer to Jansca's remark, when a finger touched me on the shoulder and I heard my name spoken. It was one of the officers.

"Captain Hume would like to see you at once, Mr. Sanders," he said.

"Oh, well." I shrugged my shoulders.

"I suppose I'll have to go."

I faced Jansca and she leaned across to catch my words. "My dear," I said, "I'm afraid I'm wanted. Apparently urgently."

"Go," she said swiftly. "Don't wait. I think I understand." Her hand, reaching across the table, caught mine and gave it a gentle pressure.

I met her eyes. There was something in them that startled me. Agony, fear, anxiety—all somehow mixed together. Then I rose to my feet and swung off behind the man who had summoned me.

Hume sat before a desk littered with papers. He raised a grave face as I was ushered in. "Sit down there, Jack," was his greeting. Then to the officer who had conducted me, "Insulate us against all outside interference."

"Man, what is it?" I cried.

His brow furrowed into lines. "Jack," he said earnestly, "I'd give a lot to be able to answer that question. But perhaps this may tell you something."

He pushed a message form to me. It was written in plain English and it had been sent out from New York headquarters of the Earth division of the Interplanetary Board of Control not two hours before.

I stared at it, for it began with the triple call of urgency, that call we seldom get more than once in a generation. The gist of it can be given in a sentence. It was a general call to all space-ships to rendezvous at the nearest Guard-ship base as quickly as possible and wait for escort before proceeding to their destinations.

"Well, what do you make of it?" I asked.

For answer he passed me another wad of sheets. The top one was a similar message, sent from London. It was timed a few minutes later. I turned to the others. One was from Shangun, the Venusian capital, in that planet's international language. The third message also indecipherable, was, I guessed from the office of dispatch in Tlananian, the language of two-thirds of the Martian peoples.

"There's no doubt about the urgency of the matter," I said slowly. "The fact that the Venusian and Martian messages have been broadcast in their own tongue shows that to my mind. They couldn't afford to waste the time to translate them into international code."

"Or meant them solely for their own ships, knowing Earth messages would reach liners like us," Hume said with a puckering of the forehead. "But what's behind it all?"

"The space-visitors—the things—people—that were responsible for the trouble on M-E 75. Perhaps I'm wrong. I hope I am—it looks as though something has happened, some new development that menaces the safety of every space liner from the three planets en route at the moment. Such a thing has never been heard of since space-travelling became an accomplished fact."

"But what are you going to do? Is this the crisis your instructions cover?"

"It's hard to say. Looks to me like a matter for individual judgment. But at present, providing there are no further developments, I can make no move in any direction. You have already got your orders. I think in the circumstances you will be wise to abide by them."

"I've changed course already." He pointed to the dial chart, where the quivering pointer showed us edging off at an angle from the red line that had hitherto marked our route to intercept the orbit of Mars. "Also, our locators are sounding space to pick up the nearest Guard-ship. It will probably be a Martian one now, we're so far advanced on our way."

"Whatever it is does not matter as long as it is a Guard-ship," I said wearily. A heaviness had come over me, a weight on my heart.

HUME shot a glance at me from under his tired drooping lids. "Sick of it, already," he said. "Ah, well, you've no responsibilities, no—"

"You're wrong," I cut in before he could go further. "I have responsibilities, one big one at least aboard this ship."

"Aboard the Cosmos!" he exclaimed. "What… who is it?"

"Jansca," I said. "Jansca Dirka."

"You mean that, Jack? Is it fact or merely a hope?"

"A fact accomplished. We agreed only this morning that our paths lay together. Her father knows and has approved."

For one long second he looked at me, then across the table his hand reached out and gripped mine heartily.

"I understand," he said at last. "Of course our safety means more to you perhaps even than it does to me." Then, almost under his breath. "But a Dirka!"

I caught the word. "Why a Dirka?" I demanded. "What is strange in that?"

"Your luck. Call it that. The Dirkas are the nearest to a race of kings Mars has had in a thousand years. But, Jack, coming back to immediate urgencies, what are we to do?"

"Follow instructions. We can't make any other preparations, for we don't know what we may have to face."

"Our armament—" he suggested tentatively.

"What have you in that way?"

"The two rays—heat and the repeller rays. The former won't function too well free space, I should imagine."

"Why not? It doesn't need an atmosphere. It will go where light goes. We'll—rather I hope we won't have the need to see. We—"

There came a warning crackle, thrice repeated, from the sounder at his elbow.

"More messages," he said wearily. "Manners, take them."

My conductor made the sundry adjustments that allowed the door to be opened. It was a messenger from the transmitting room—the Cosmos was big enough to have a separate one of her own—with a sealed envelope in his hand. "For Mr. Sanders," he said. "I was told he was here."

Manners passed it to me, the messenger sped away and the insulating barrage went up again. As I thought, it was from Harran.

Have reason to suppose that concerted attack is to be made on all space-ships. Possible invasion of three planets projected. Confirm general rendezvous order. All Guards are to hold in readiness for immediate duty. All emergency regulations to be put into operation forthwith. No private messages to be transmitted from space-ships or if received aboard to be delivered to addressees, except under direction and at discretion of Guard until further orders. Emergency regulations in force from moment of receipt of this message. (Signed) Harran—Tellus, Tambard—Mars, Clinigo—Venus.

I thrust the translation over to Hume. "You had better read this," I said.

Slowly he read it through and as he read his face blanched. At the end he handed it back to me. "It means," he said, "that you are now in command."

"It means that," I agreed. "But it means more—that you and I and all the rest of us must work together for the safety of our ship and passengers."

"Yet," he said heavily, "there is so little we can do."

I nodded. "Arm your men," I said. "Serve out your ray tubes at once. Are all your officers trustworthy?"

"Every one of them."

"I want them paraded at once—here. Would you care to advise them or shall I?"

"Better you, Jack. I won't cavil at what you say or do in a time like this. About the operators. Had they better come too?"

"Yes—all except the men on duty."

He called Manners and gave his orders and soon the emergency signals were sounding in each man's quarters.

ONE by one they came to the room—the three officers—the apprentices who were actually junior officers in training—the purser, Parey—the doctor and others. All told there was a round dozen of them.

Hume wasted no time in preliminaries. "You've been called here," he said, "because of certain matters of importance with which you should be acquainted at the earliest opportunity. What they are Mr. Sanders will explain."

I saw curious eyes turn wonderingly towards me. Even Parey, who knew who I was, knitted his brows. I pinned my Guard's badge in the lapel of my coat where it was plain for all to see. Even then I could see most of them were still frankly puzzled.

I gave a brief sketch of the condition in which we had found M-E 75—there was no need to enlarge on that as it was already more or less common property amongst the after-guard—and added that similar things had happened to other space-ships.

I insisted that as yet we did not know anything about the motive behind these visitations—one could hardly call them attacks—and certainly had no idea from which planet the vandals had come. Then to round everything off I read out the message signed by The Three. I finished, and glanced round the little company.

"Any questions?" I asked. "We may not have the opportunity to ask or answer them later."

Parey caught my eye. "Does this mean, Mr. Sanders," he said, "that you are in absolute command here?"

"It means," I said deliberately, "that I am responsible to the Interplanetary Board of Control for the safety of this ship and her complement. If anything goes wrong it is I who will be to blame. But let us have no talk of absolute or any other kind of command."

"Captain Hume and I have discussed the matter thoroughly between us and are agreed, as I want you all to be agreed, that unless each man does his utmost we may fail to pull through. It may hearten you to realize that in a thousand ships all up and down the void this message is being repeated and similar scenes enacted."

The first officer, Gond, took a step forward. "I think I can speak for the others. What you say goes with us, the more so as Captain Hume is backing you up. That's a mouthful, I think."

I smiled at the quaint archaisms in his little speech but I could not smile at his sincerity. It was too affecting for that. A murmur that rose from the little group showed how well he had expressed the sentiments of all of them.

"That's that then," I said. "Captain Hume, will you take over, please?"