8
It seemed that the small room had a very faint radiance showing
through my vizor pane. Narrow enclosing walls were visible. It was a
triangular-shaped space, fifteen feet or so down one side, with a
concave ceiling overhead. I was lying on the floor. The darkness at
first had been impenetrable. The figures which had flung me down and
seized my knife were gone; I had not seen them nor where they went.
For a moment I lay cushioned by my bloated suit. When I struggled to
my feet, I was almost weightless. The movement of getting upright
flung me upward as though I were a tossed feather. My helmet struck
the metal ceiling, so sharp a blow that I feared for an instant I had
smashed the helmet.
From the ceiling, with flailing arms and legs, I sank back to the
grid-floor; and in a moment I was able to stand upright with so slight
a feeling of weight that I could have been a bit of thistle ready to
blow away in the least wind.
There was, as I stood there balancing myself, a queer feeling of
triumph within me. A triumphant hope; for coming down in the ship's
capacious funnel--larger than it had seemed from a distance--I had
seen what appeared to be a small projectile, resting in some strange
landing gear. The disc bearing me had settled on a stage alongside it.
Was that the projectile from Earth?
A growing air pressure was around me; the tiny Erentz dials within my
helmet had been immovable, but now they were showing outside pressure. I
stood waiting. Whatever sounds were here I could not tell. Then
presently the dials stopped. They registered seventeen pounds--whatever
that might mean here. I loosed the helmet and took it off.
With the first gasping breath my senses reeled. I sank to the floor,
and though I tried to replace the helmet, it was too late. My thoughts
were fading. A strange chemical odor was in my nostrils. It was like
breathing a thin, perfumed water.
The drifting away was pleasant.
Tortured dreams came with my awakening. I found myself in the same dim
room upon the floor. I could breathe better now, and in a few more
hours the strangeness had almost gone. I found now that I was not
injured, but I was ravenously hungry.
Again, gingerly as before, I stood up and slid my space-suit from me;
and now I was aware of movement and sound. The floor-grid vibrations
were apparent. And there was a dim, distant, tiny throbbing; it was
much like the interior of the _Cometara_ while in flight.
And there were other sounds, indescribably faint, yet strangely clear.
I thought they might be distant voices.
I took a cautious step. I could see a dim blank wall nearby with what
seemed a bowl-like article of furniture on the floor against the wall.
For all my caution, I sailed upward; but this time I held my balance.
And I found that with my negligible weight, I could almost swim in
this strange air! I hit the wall and slid slowly down it to the floor
again, like a man sinking to the bottom of a tank.
It suddenly occurred to me to put my ear against the wall. At once the
sounds all became incredibly louder. It was a confusion of sound: the
mechanisms of the vessel, some of which I thought I could identify,
and some not; the strange swish and thump of what might have been
people moving; and there were voices.
The voices seemed mingled babble coming from everywhere. The timber of
the sound was very strange. It held no suggestion of how far away from
me the voices might be. There were so many of them I could only think
they were scattered about the ship; and yet they all seemed together.
After a moment, the blend was less confusing. Again, very strangely my
hearing seemed able to separate one from the other.
I was to learn that the atmosphere handled sound vibrations
differently from that of Earth. Voices had a muffled tone, as though
they were smothered. There was undoubtedly a vibrational distortion;
and a sound-wave speed slower than Earth's normal-pressure rate of
1,050 feet a second, perhaps as slow as 700. Yet sounds remained
audible over longer distances than on Earth.
In this instance now, as I listened with my ear to the wall of the
ship, I was hearing all its sounds picked up and carried by the metal.
Now I heard a strange tongue: two types of voices, slow, measured,
carefully-intoned phrases, and voices of a curiously sepulchral,
hollow sound. My mind went back to the Red Spark restaurant room.
And suddenly I realized that amid the babble I was hearing English. A
man's voice, talking English. I caught, very clearly the phrase:
"Master, yes. She means well. Can you not see it?"
Molo's voice! Then the girls must be here also.
Another voice: "I am not sure. Perhaps. The Great Intelligence will
talk with her when we are arrived." It was the slow measured voice of
one of the brains.
"When will that be? Pretty soon now, won't it, Molo?"
Venza! A great wave of thankfulness swept me. And then I heard Anita.
"Your two captives, where are they? You're not going to kill them, are
you?"
"No," said Molo. "Perhaps not. No one has inspected the new one yet.
The other is being cared for. The Great Intelligence will question him
when we arrive."
"We are arriving," said Venza. "That's your world, Wandl, down there,
isn't it?"
"Yes. We are dropping fast."
The voice of the brain: "Come, Wyk. The instruments are showing events
on our captured worlds. Take me to watch. I am tired of movement."
"Yes. Master."
It seemed that the brain was being carried away; Molo and the two
girls were being left alone. I had thought at first that they were in
the adjacent room to me, but they could have been far distant. They
had mentioned two captives. One, obviously, was myself. Was the other
Snap?
"Come," Molo was saying, "stand here with me and we will watch this
world. Not mine, Venza _chia_, as you just called it, But my adopted
world. And it will be yours, until we rule the new Mars."
I heard them moving to gaze through the window-port. Then came Anita's
voice: "If it's anything like this ship, it will be very strange."
"Strange indeed, little dove. I was there only once, a month ago, and
for a few hours only. The Great Intelligence, as they call him, talked
with me, absorbing my knowledge: they call it that. And he was much
impressed by me, and made very wonderful promises in exchange for my
fidelity. And for my sister, too."
I learned further how Molo and Meka became identified with the
Wandlites; it was as we had suspected.
"You will rule Mars?" Venza was saying. "When this is over, you mean
you will really be given Mars to rule?"
"I would rather live on the Earth," said Anita. "There was a young man
there."
"He will not be there much longer." Molo laughed. "You are very lucky
that I fancy you!"
"Lucky indeed," Venza echoed. "No death for me. I'm too young."
"But all those millions dead. It seems so terrible."
"It is, for them!" Molo was in high good humor, pleased with himself
and with these girls. "See down there; that blurring is the heavy air.
We're almost down into it now."
I heard the sound of someone joining them, and then the hollow voice
again: "Molo! Bad tidings come from Mars. One of the Masters was
captured there in Ferrok-Shahn. They tortured him as they did the one
on Earth. But he did not die unyielding. He spoke and told our plans!"
"Hah! Did I not advise you to keep those helpless things on Wandl?"
"But it is done now. The worlds know our purpose. They are preparing
spaceships. Already some are rising from Ferrok-Shahn, from Grebhar
and from Greater New York."
"We knew they were doing that."
"But now they know our purpose. The Master Intelligence fears that
they will come raiding Wandl. Our vessels are being made ready to go
out and repel them."
The hollow voice ceased.
"Your purpose discovered?" asked Anita. "What does that mean? Won't
you tell us now? Twin queens for your future Mars, and you treat us
like children!"
"That light-beam he so cleverly planted in Greater New York," Venza
hinted.
"Yes, I will tell you. Without me in New York and my men who went with
these Wandlites to Ferrok-Shahn and Grebhar, the vital gravity beams
could never successfully have been planted. The apparatus was
complicated; you saw it. You saw the labor I had making the contact?"
"But what are the light-beams for?"
I listened, breathless, as he told them. The electronic beams could
not be destroyed; a disintegration of the rock atoms had been set up.
With each rotation of the Earth it was sweeping the sky. From a great
control station, Wandl was flinging attraction gravity upon that beam,
using it as a monstrous lever upon the rotation of Earth. With every
daily passage now the force was being exerted. The rotation was
slowing. In a few days it would stop, with the end of the beam drawn
to Wandl and held there.
And the beams from Grebhar and Ferrok-Shahn were the same. Three giant
chains! Then Wandl, traveling of its own gravitational volition, would
withdraw from our solar system. The gravitational chains would pull
the Earth, Venus and Mars after it!
Titanic tow-ropes! The destruction, not of our worlds, but of all life
upon them, for the cold of interstellar space would leave no living
organism. Three dead worlds; Wandl would draw them to her own Sun and
then free them, send them, with new orbits, around the distant blazing
star. Three new worlds brought home triumphantly by Wandl to join the
little family of inhabited planets revolving around this other Sun.
Three fair and lovely worlds, warmed back by the other sunlight to be
green mansions untenanted, ready to receive the new beings who would
come and possess them.
9
"You, Snap!"
"Gregg! But how...?"
"Hush! They might hear us."
"They can do more than that. They can almost hear you think."
"Anita and Venza are here."
"I know it. I was with them for a time. This accursed gravity! I can't
walk."
"Careful," I whispered. "You can crack your head on something with the
least false step. Are they taking us ashore?"
"I guess so. How did you happen...?"
"Tell you later."
They had come for me in that dark pressure-port, taken me along a dim
corridor of the ship, which evidently had landed a few moments before.
Then Snap, with strange figures around him, had been flung at me.
These weird beings! The brains were here, but not many; I saw half a
dozen on the ship. They could move easily now. They bounced upon their
small arms and legs, hitching with little leaps of a few feet. Close
at hand they were gruesome; from a distance they had the aspect of
thirty-inch ovoids, bouncing of their own volition. And I saw too that
underneath, toward the back, was a shriveled body.
The other figures were wholly different; they seemed at first to be
ten-foot, upright insects. The two legs were like stilts, the body
narrow but with bulging chest. The neck was thin, holding the small
round head, about the size of my own.
Words seem futile to picture this thing which was a man of Wandl.
There was no skin, but instead what seemed to be a glossy, hard brown
shell. It was laid in scales; and upon the legs was a brown fuzz of
stiff hair. There were many joints, both of the legs and the torso.
Clothing was worn; a single garment, hanging from a wide belt halfway
down the legs seemed incongruous, fantastically aping humanity.
This was the worker, equipped by nature for mechanical tasks. There
were not two arms, but at least ten. From what could have been called
the shoulders, they were tentacles, half the length of an elephant's
trunk, with many-fingered hands at the ends. From the waist depended
huge lobster-like pincers; and from the chest and back the arms were
smaller, each with a different type finger-claw.
The head and face were most of all a personal mocking of mankind.
Wide, upstanding, listening ears were upon the sides of the head, one
on the forehead and one on the back. The face was mobile, with tiny
brown scales small as a fish. A nose orifice, with two protruding
brown eyes above it was set outward on stems, and an upended slit of a
mouth. There was an eye in the back of the head.
Probably, over eons of upward development from what was perhaps an
original single type, these two specialized forms had developed. The
"Masters," as they were known upon Wandl, neglected the body for the
brain, and the "Workers," the reverse. There was no separate
individual for the female. As is the case with primitive organisms,
they were all bi-sexual, the parent dying in the reproduction of
offspring.
Of necessity I have been forced into digression. But at the time, Snap
and I clung together, whispering, as a group of workers pushed us down
a descending incline. Snap, back there in Greater New York when Molo's
contact light had burst into existence, had fallen, half unconscious.
They picked him up. Molo was going to kill him, but the girls
persuaded him to take Snap with them.
"Anita and Venza pretended never to have seen me before," Snap
whispered to me now. "You take the same line."
"If we get with them."
"We will."
It was weird, this landing upon Wandl. We had left the vessel's
side-port and were descending what seemed a narrow, hundred-foot
landing incline. We were outdoors, and it was night. Shafts of colored
radiance flashed around us. The ship was poised on a disc-like
platform, with skeleton legs. It seemed a hundred feet or more down to
the ground level from where the colored lights were darting up.
Overhead was a cloudless, purple-red sky of blurred, reddish stars. No
doubt the curious atmosphere of Wandl gave the sky and stars this
abnormal look.
Later, what a multiplicity of obscure wonders we were to glimpse upon
Wandl! The slowing rotation of the Earth caused climatic changes
there, volcanic and tidal disturbances, but Wandl rotated and stopped
at will. Undoubtedly she was equipped to withstand the shock. Her
internal fires could not break into eruption; she had very little
fluid surface. And the nature of her atmosphere was such that it was
not easily disturbed into storms. Only if there was laxity in the
handling of the planet's motion would a storm come.
But now, questions pounded at me. Earth, Venus and Mars were to be
towed into interstellar space; all life on our worlds would perish in
the cold of that stellar journey. Yet Wandl had made that journey. Was
her atmosphere inherently such that it did not transmit rays of heat?
Snap and I had been pushed down the incline with half a dozen figures
in advance of us. Without difficulty we could have leapt down that
hundred feet, unaided. Figures were leaping into mid-air from several
pressure-ports of the ship. They did not fall, but floated, drifted
down. I saw one of the insect-like workers drop with motionless
outstretched arms. Others came mounting up, using their arms and legs
with sweeping strokes, as though swimming. It was like being under
water.
It was a strange, weird scene, the vessel wavering above us; the
flashing lights; waving beams of radiance. A fantastic structure
nearby reared itself several hundred feet with lights on top and
outlining its many lateral balconies one above the other. The air was
full of the leaping, swimming insect-like figures. The brains, the
masters, were not in evidence; then I saw one of them being carried,
and others, floating down like distended falling balloons, to be
caught by the workers in small nets and thus saved from jarring
contact.
Snap was suddenly whispering: "That fellow back of us is our guard. I
can feel his ray. Some form of attraction; it's pulling at me."
Snap was a little behind me. I turned and saw the faint radiance of a
narrow light-beam upon him. It came from an instrument in an upper
shoulder hand of the insect figure following us, no doubt the reverse
form of the same ray which had been used to thrust the wrecked
_Cometara_ toward the Moon.
We reached the bottom. I saw now that the group of workers in advance
of us were carrying metal cubes, seemingly of considerable weight;
they also had to use the incline.
We stood presently on a smooth ground surface. We had not seen Anita
and Venza, nor Molo and his sister. The insect figure who was our
guard came forward. "You stand here. Molo comes."
"Where is he?" I demanded. "I want to see him." I stopped myself
quickly; I had very nearly mentioned the girls. "And talk with him."
"He comes soon."
"I'm hungry." I gestured to my stomach. "Food. You know what that is?"
The brown scaly face contorted for a smile, a ghastly grimace. "Yes.
You shall have food and drink."
It seemed that the hollow voice came not from the neck but from the
shell-like, bulging chest. He stood aside, with the globular weapon of
the ray in a pincer hand.
We waited, standing gingerly together, wavering with our slight
weight. A wind would have blown us away, but there was no wind.
Instead, there was a heavy, sultry air, warm as a mid-summer Earth
night, warmer even than the Neo-time of Venus.
Snap and I were dressed much the same, wearing heavy boots, for which
weight we were thankful, tight, puttee-like trousers, flaring at the
top, and high-necked white blouses. Both of us were bare-headed.
Doubtless we were as fantastic a sight to these Wandlites as they to
us. Some of the workers crowded up, reaching out to pluck at us, but
Snap waved them away and our guard dispersed them.
One of the master brains came bouncing up. Upon his little upright
body the great head wavered.
"You will wait here." His eyes glowed up at us.
"But listen," Snap began.
"You will wait here for the Martian. He has his orders to take you to
the Great Intelligence." The little arm from the side of the head had
a hand with a finger pointing for a gesture. "There is a meeting place
there. We decided now what to do to destroy the warships of your
worlds. I do not like your thoughts; they are black. I will inform the
Great Intelligence when he can spare the thought for you."
He added something in the Wandl tongue. A worker came forward; lifted
him carefully, held him in the hollow of an encircling tentacle. And
with a bound, the worker sailed upward and was gone.
Again we stood through an interval. I noticed now that the towering
structure near us, with its storied balconies, was not perpendicular.
Its front curved up and back. It was convex, somewhat in the fashion
of an irregular globe, a three-hundred foot ball, with a flattened
base set here on the ground. The balconies were segments of its front
curve. At the top, the roof was as though the ball had been sliced
off, like a giant apple with a slice gone for a base and another for
the roof. At the bottom was a huge portal with a glow of light from
within. And at the terraced balcony levels were lighted windows.
"Is that the meeting place?" Snap whispered.
"Probably. And look to the side of it, Snap."
It was a city. There was a vista of distance to one side of the great
globe structure. Now that our eyes were more accustomed to the
queerness of this night upon Wandl, we could ignore the colored
light-beams of the landing stage and the disembarking palisade upon
which we were standing. Gazing into the distance, the curvature of the
surface of this little world was immediately apparent. The reddish
firmament of stars came down to meet the sharply-curving surface at a
horizon line which seemed about a mile away.
Spread upon this near distance were a variety of structures with
little roads of open space winding between them. Most of the buildings
seemed globular in shape. Some were small, little round mound-shaped
individual dwellings. Others were larger. Some were tiered like half a
dozen apples speared in a row upon a stick and set upright.
I saw a ribbon of what might be a river in the distance, with the
reddish starlight glinting upon it. To our left, half a mile away
perhaps, was a row of buttes and rocks which stood like a miniature
range of mountains. The city seemed entirely to encompass them; and
every little rock-peak had upon its top a globelike dwelling.
Lights were winking everywhere and figures bounded a hundred feet and
more, and sailed in an arc, coming down to the ground to bound again.
A row of workers went by overhead, not swimming or leaping but stiffly
motionless. Tiny opalescent rays went from them to the ground, as
though to give them power.
Five minutes of Earth-time might have passed while Snap and I gazed at
this busy night scene in this Wandl city upon the occasion of the
landing of their ship so triumphantly returned from its mission to
Earth. As I stood, certainly a helpless captive if ever there was one,
nevertheless a strange sense of my own power was within me.
This was so small a world; the people were so flimsy. With a poke of
my fist I could kill any one of these master brains. The ten-foot
workers seemed mere shells, light and fragile; even the buildings were
light and flimsy. The little globe-houses on their sticks seemed to
waver, almost like nodding flowers. If we ran amuck we could smash
everything we saw here on Wandl.
We became aware of Molo approaching. What a solid giant this
seven-foot Martian seemed now in the midst of this buoyant, almost
weightless city! He was still bare-headed and wearing his garments of
ornamented leather, with his brawny legs bare. Upon his feet were
strange-looking, wide-soled shoes. His hands and forearms were thrust
into loops of small shields. These shields appeared to be constructed
of a heart-shaped flexible framework, covered with an opaque membrane.
They were about two feet long and half as wide. With a hand and
forearm thrust into fabric loops, the shield appeared to serve as
wings so that the arms had more thrust against the air. He came at us
with a sort of swimming stroke. He landed somewhat awkwardly,
half-stumbled and almost fell, but gathered himself up and confronted
us.
He gained his balance and waved our guard aside. His gaze went to me.
"You are the new prisoner taken from that wrecked Earth-ship?"
"Yes."
"What is your name? You are an Earthman, evidently."
"Yes." I hesitated. I had seen Molo and heard him talk, back there in
Greater New York; but he had not seen me nor heard of me probably.
"Gregg Haljan." I added, "I am a skilled navigator; perhaps it was
fortunate you saved me."
He flung me a look and there was a tinge of amusement in it. "You
would save your own skin now?"
"Why not? You're a Martian, and this is a war also against Mars."
His look darkened, but then again sardonic amusement struck him.
"We shall see what the Great Master says. There will be a few of our
type humans, men and women, wanted when the worlds begin anew. The
Great Master said so. He wants to study life on Earth as it was before
the destruction."
Molo's glance swept behind us. I turned to see three figures
approaching. My heart pounded. They were Anita, Venza and Molo's
sister, Meka. They came slowly, trying to walk, with balancing
outstretched arms. With a dozen curious Wandl workers crowding them,
they came and joined Molo before us. My heart was pounding, but I
flung them a curious, impersonal stare.
"You are here," said Molo. "Good. We go now." He bent over Snap and
me. "I advise you make no effort to leap away, though it may look
easy."
"Not me," said Snap. "Where would I go alone in this damned world? I
can't very well leap back to Earth, can I?"
"True enough," said Molo. "You have sense, little fellow. But I just
warn you: the guard who will watch you always is very sharp of eye.
And the weapons here bring very swift death."