I struck the rocks and fell twenty feet beyond him. I jerked out my
gravity projector, but I did not know what I wanted to do with it. And
in that second I saw that the standing Molo was aiming at me. Directly
over my head the inert bound bodies of Venza and Snap were falling.
A flash leaped over the dark rocks from Molo. There was a split-second
when I thought it was the end of me. But I was still alive. The bodies
of Venza and Snap struck my head and shoulders; knocked me down. I
felt Molo's ray upon me. Not death, but only his gravity ray, like a
giant hand pulling me. Apparently he wanted us alive. I was scrambling
on the rocks, entangled with Venza and Snap. Molo's radiance clung.
All three of us went tumbling forward toward him. I flashed my own
ray, but I was rolling end over end, and it went wild.
I dropped it, saw Molo's beam vanish, saw his upright standing figure
towering above me. Snap, Venza and I were in a heap at his feet. He
leaned down and seized me. "Now, Gregg Haljan, I will teach you not to
try escaping like this!"
With the huge, muscular Martian gripping me, his fist striking for my
face but missing and hitting my shoulder, this was a semblance of
normality. I could understand fighting like this. I wrapped my legs
around him; my fingers reached for his brawny throat as he kicked us
into the air free of the entangling bodies of Snap and Venza.
We rose a few feet and sank back, gripping each other, lunging and
striking. He was very powerful, this Martian. I caught the round
pillar of his throat with my hands. For an instant I shut off his
wind, but I could not hold the grip. He struck me a glancing blow in
the face, then the heel of his hand was under my chin. It forced back
my head, broke my hold on his throat. With returning breath, he gasped
an inhalation. And I heard his exulting words: "You are not strong
enough!"
We rolled and bumped over the rocks. I caught a blow from his fists
full in my face. It was almost the end; I felt my strength going. He
laughed as he struck away my answering swing. I was on my back against
the rocks, with his body on top of me. Then beyond and behind his
hulking shoulder, silhouetted against the sky, I saw Anita rise up.
She was lifting a jagged gray mass of stone, full four feet in
diameter. She poised it, then crashed it down on Molo's head. He sank
away from me; his arms relaxed. The boulder rolled beside him.
It was over now. Wyk was dead; his gruesome body with its smashed face
lay near us. Molo was unconscious, breathing heavily, lying
motionless, with a wound on the back of his head, the blood welling
out, matting his hair.
Anita and I were uninjured, victorious--but what a hollow victory. On
the rocks here, bound together by that strange wire, Snap and Venza
lay inert. We bent over them. The wire was cold to the touch now. It
resisted our efforts to untwine it. We pulled frantically as we
pleaded: "Snap, speak to us! Venza, can't you speak?"
Their eyes were open. I was aware that there was no starlight above
us, but instead, a lurid sky of flying clouds, shot with a greenish
cast. The darkness here was green. The glow of it struck upon the
wide-open staring eyes of Venza and Snap. It seemed that there was
intelligence in those eyes.
"Snap, can't you hear us?"
His eyelids came down and up again, slowly, as though by a horrible
effort. "Can you move, Snap?"
His right eyelid moved. Was his answer, no?
Anita and I had never felt so horrible a sense of aloneness as that
which swept us in those succeeding minutes. A breeze was springing up
in the lurid green night. It came from the mountains. It wafted across
the nearby river, rippling the surface which was now green and sullen.
We did not know where to go, what to do.
We found at last that we could untwist the stiffly clinging wire. We
laid Venza and Snap on the rocks side-by-side, about thirty feet back
from the river. The glowing wire had burned their clothes only a
little, as the current was absorbed by the contact with their bodies.
"Snap, are you in pain?"
His eyes seemed to be trying to talk to me. Anita rose from Venza:
"Oh, Gregg, what shall we do? Can't we carry them?"
But where? To what purpose? Wild thoughts thronged me: Wandl's control
station, bringing chaos and death upon Earth. Mars and Venus. What was
that now to me? I thought of Molo's ship.
"Anita, if we can get to the _Star-Streak_, seize it and escape from
this world...."
"Carry Snap and Venza there now? But we don't know where it is. Can we
make Molo lead us?"
But Molo lay unconscious. I could not rouse him.
Anita and I were so alone! We clung together.
"Gregg, look at that sky!"
The mounting wind was tugging at us. It whined through the dark
mountain defiles, surged out over the river where the water now was
beginning to toss with waves crossing the swift current. The sky was
shot with green shafts of radiance. Over us, the lowering, leaden
clouds were scudding, riding the wind.
It burst now upon us; I found suddenly that Anita and I were bracing
against it. A puff dislodged us, so that we were blown a dozen feet,
bringing up against a crag, as though we were balloons.
"Anita--this wind--we can't maintain ourselves here. We...."
Horror checked me at the thought of Venza and Snap, lying there on the
rocks. We saw the body of Wyk, like a great dried insect, lifted by
the wind, whirled like a brown leaf over and over, and carried away.
A little pebble came hurtling and struck me. Then a rain of pebbles,
like hailstones was pelting at us.
The storm was probably caused by the axial rotation of Wandl. The
light-beam upon Earth had been attacked by the Wandl control station
without axial rotation. But to attack the beam from Mars, a
manipulation of Wandl was necessary. The planet's rotation was
started; and suddenly checked. It remained night now, here in this
hemisphere. Perhaps there were natural storm tendencies here; perhaps
the operators of the control station were unduly eager, manipulating
the rotation too suddenly.
At all events, it was frightening. I shouted above its whine and the
clatter of the pebbles: "Hold onto me! We'll get to Venza and Snap."
We reached the two inert forms, where they had blown into a niche
between two boulders. "Can't stay here, Anita."
"No! If it begins again!"
"Over there! A cave!"
We got Venza and Snap into it, just as another gust came, with a rain
of dirt and loose stones pelting past outside.