The Pirate Planet

The Pirate Planet

BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL

_By Charles W. Diffin_

[Illustration: Like rats in a cage, the planes of the 91st Squadron
were darting and whirling.]

[Sidenote: A strange light blinks on Venus, and over old Earth hovers
a mysterious visitant--dread harbinger of interplanetary war.]


CHAPTER I

Lieutenant McGuire threw open his coat with its winged insignia of the
air force and leaned back in his chair to read more comfortably the
newspaper article.

He glanced at Captain Blake across the table. The captain was deep in
a game of solitaire, but he looked up at McGuire's audible chuckle.

"Gay old girl!" said Lieutenant McGuire and smoothed the paper across
his knees. "She's getting flirtatious."

The captain swore softly as he gathered up his cards. "Not
interested," he announced; "too hot to-night. Keep her away."

"Oh, she's far enough away," McGuire responded; "about seventy million
miles. Don't get excited."

"What are you talking about?" The captain shuffled his cards
irritably.

"Venus. She's winking at us, the old reprobate. One of these
star-gazers up on Mount Lawson saw the flashes a week or so ago. If
you'll cut out your solitaire and listen, I'll read you something to
improve your mind." He ignored the other's disrespectful remark and
held the paper closer to see the paragraphs.

"Is Venus Signalling?" inquired the caption which Lieutenant McGuire
read. "Professor Sykes of Mt. Lawson Observatory Reports Flashes.

"The planet Venus, now a brilliant spectacle in the evening sky, is
behaving strangely according to a report from the local observatory on
Mount Lawson. This sister star, most like Earth of all the planets, is
now at its eastern elongation, showing like a half-moon in the big
telescopes on Mt. Lawson. Shrouded in impenetrable clouds, its surface
has never been seen, but something is happening there. Professor Sykes
reports seeing a distinct flash of light upon the terminator, or
margin of light. It lasted for several seconds and was not repeated.

"No explanation of the phenomenon is offered by scientists, as
conditions on the planet's surface are unknown. Is there life there?
Are the people of Venus trying to communicate? One guess is as good as
another. But it is interesting to recall that our scientists recently
proposed to send a similar signal from Earth to Mars by firing a
tremendous flare of magnesium.

"Venus is now approaching the earth; she comes the nearest of all
planets. Have the Venusians penetrated their cloak of cloud masses
with a visible light? The planet will be watched with increased
interest as it swings toward us in space, in hope of there being a
repetition of the unexplained flash."

* * * * *

"There," said Lieutenant McGuire,"--doesn't that elevate your mind?
Take it off this infernally hot night? Carry you out through the cool
reaches of interplanetary space? If there is anything else you want to
know, just ask me."

"Yes," Captain Blake agree, "there is. I want to know how the game
came out back in New York--and you don't know that. Let's go over and
ask the radio man. He probably has the dope."

"Good idea," said McGuire; "maybe he has picked up a message from
Venus; we'll make a date." He looked vainly for the brilliant star as
they walked out into the night. There were clouds of fog from the
nearby Pacific drifting high overhead. Here and there stars showed
momentarily, then were blotted from sight.

The operator in the radio room handed the captain a paper with the
day's scores from the eastern games. But Lieutenant McGuire, despite
his ready amusement at the idea, found his thoughts clinging to the
words he had read. "Was the planet communicating?" he pictured the
great globe--another Earth--slipping silently through space, coming
nearer and nearer.

Did they have radio? he wondered. Would they send recognizable
signals--words--or some mathematical sequence to prove their reality?
He turned to the radio operator on duty.

"Have you picked up anything peculiar," he asked, and laughed inwardly
at himself for the asking. "Any new dots and dashes? The scientists
say that Venus is calling. You'll have to be learning a new code."

The man glanced at him strangely and looked quickly away.

"No, sir," he said. And added after a pause: "No new dots and dashes."

"Don't take that stuff too seriously, Mac," the captain remonstrated.
"The day of miracles is past; we don't want to commit you to the
psychopathic ward. Now here is something real: the Giants won, and I
had ten dollars on them. How shall we celebrate?"

* * * * *

The radio man was listening intently as they started to leave. His
voice was hesitating as he stopped them; he seemed reluctant to put
his thoughts into words.

"Just a minute, sir," he said to Captain Blake.

"Well?" the captain asked. And again the man waited before he replied.
Then--

"Lieutenant McGuire asked me," he began, "if I had heard any strange
dots and dashes. I have not; but ... well, the fact is, sir, that I
have been getting some mighty queer sounds for the past few nights.
They've got me guessing.

"If you wouldn't mind waiting. Captain; they're about due now--" He
listened again to some signal inaudible to the others, then hooked up
two extra head-sets for the officers.

"It's on now," he said. "If you don't mind--"

McGuire grinned at the captain as they took up the ear-phones. "Power
of suggestion," he whispered, but the smile was erased from his lips
as he listened. For in his ear was sounding a weird and wailing note.

No dots or dashes, as the operator had said, but the signal was
strong. It rose and fell and wavered into shrill tremolos, a ghostly,
unearthly sound, and it kept on and on in a shrill despairing wail.
Abruptly it stopped.

The captain would have removed the receiver from his ear, but the
operator stopped him. "Listen," he said, "to the answer."

* * * * *

There was silence, broken only by an occasional hiss and crackle of
some far distant mountain storm. Then, faint as a whisper, came an
answering, whistling breath.

It, too, trembled and quavered. It went up--up--to the limit of
hearing; then slid down the scale to catch and tremble and again
ascend in endless unvarying ups and downs of sound. It was another
unbroken, unceasing, but always changing vibration.

"What in thunder is that?" Captain Blake demanded.

"Communication of some sort, I should say," McGuire said slowly, and
he caught the operator's eyes upon him in silent agreement.

"No letters," Blake objected; "no breaks; just that screech." He
listened again. "Darned if it doesn't almost seem to say something,"
he admitted.

"When did you first hear this?" he demanded of the radio man.

"Night before last, sir. I did not report it. It seemed too--too--"

"Quite so," said Captain Blake in understanding, "but it is some form
of broadcasting on a variable wave; though how a thing like that can
make sense--"

"They talk back and forth," said the operator; "all night, most.
Notice the loud one and the faint one; two stations sending and
answering."

Captain Blake waved him to silence. "Wait--wait!" he ordered. "It's
growing louder!"

* * * * *

In the ears of the listening men the noise dropped to a loud grumble; rose
to a piercing shriek; wavered and leaped rapidly from note to note. It was
increasing; rushing upon them with unbearable sound. The sense of something
approaching, driving toward them swiftly, was strong upon Lieutenant
McGuire. He tore the head-phones from his ears and rushed to the door. The
captain was beside him. Whoever--whatever--was sending that mysterious
signal was coming near--but was that nearness a matter of miles or of
thousands of miles?

They stared at the stormy night sky above. A moon was glowing faintly
behind scudding clouds, and the gray-black of flying shadows formed an
opening as they watched, a wind-blown opening like a doorway to the
infinity beyond, where, blocking out the stars, was a something that
brought a breath-catching shout from the watching men.

Some five thousand feet up in the night was a gleaming ship. There
were rows of portholes that shone twinkling against the black
sky--portholes in multiple rows on the side. The craft was
inconceivably huge. Formless and dim of outline in the darkness, its
vast bulk was unmistakable.

And as they watched with staring, incredulous eyes, it seemed to take
alarm as if it sensed the parting of its concealing cloud blanket. It
shot with dizzy speed and the roar of a mighty meteor straight up into
the night. The gleam of its twinkling lights merged to a distant star
that dwindled, shrank and vanished in the heights.

The men were wordless and open-mouthed. They stared at each other in
disbelief of what their eyes had registered.

"A liner!" gasped Captain Blake. "A--a--liner! Mac, there is no such
thing."

* * * * *

McGuire pointed where the real cause of their visitor's departure
appeared. A plane with engine wide open came tearing down through the
clouds. It swung in a great spiral down over the field and dropped a
white flare as it straightened away; then returned for the landing. It
taxied at reckless speed toward the hangars and stopped a short
distance from the men. The pilot threw himself out of the cockpit and
raced drunkenly toward them.

"Did you see it?" he shouted, his voice a cracked scream. "Did you see
it?"

"We saw it," said Captain Blake; "yes, we saw it. Big as--" He sought
vainly for a proper comparison, then repeated his former words: "Big
as an ocean liner!"

The pilot nodded; he was breathing heavily.

"Any markings?" asked his superior. "Anything to identify it?"

"Yes, there were markings, but I don't know what they mean. There was
a circle painted on her bow and marks like clouds around it, but I
didn't have time to see much. I came out of a cloud, and there the
thing was. I was flying at five thousand, and they hung there dead
ahead. I couldn't believe it; it was monstrous; tremendous. Then they
sighted me, I guess, and they up-ended that ship in mid-air and shot
straight up till they were out of sight."

It was the captain's turn to nod mutely.

"There's your miracle," said Lieutenant McGuire softly.

"Miracle is right," agreed Captain Blake; "nothing less! But it is no
miracle of ours, and I am betting it doesn't mean any good to us. Some
other country has got the jump on us."

To the pilot he ordered: "Say nothing of this--not a word--get that?
Let me have a written report: full details, but concise as possible."

He went back to the radio room, and the operator there received the
same instructions.

"What are you going to do?" the lieutenant questioned.

Captain Blake was reaching for a head-set. "Listen in," he said
briefly; "try to link up that impossible ship with those messages,
then report at once to the colonel and whoever he calls in. I'll want
you along, Mac, to swear I am sober."

* * * * *

He had a head-set adjusted, and McGuire took up the other. Again the
room was still, and again from the far reaches of space the dark night
sent to them its quavering call.

The weird shrillness cried less loudly now, and the men listened in
strained silence to the go and come of that variable shriek. Musical
at times as it leaped from one clear note to another, again it would
merge into discordant blendings of half-tones that sent shivers of
nervous reaction up the listeners' spines.

"Listen," said McGuire abruptly. "Check me on this. There are two of
them, one loud and one faint--right?"

"Right," said Captain Blake.

"Now notice the time intervals--there! The faint one stops, and the
big boy cuts in immediately. No waiting; he answers quickly. He does
it every time."

"Well?" the captain asked.

"Listen when he stops and see how long before the faint one answers.
Call the loud one the ship and the faint one the station.... There!
The ship is through!"

There was pause; some seconds elapsed before the answer that whispered
so faintly in their ears came out of the night.

"You are right, sir," the operator said in corroboration of McGuire's
remark. "There is that wait every time."

"The ship answers at once," said McGuire; "the station only after a
wait."

"Meaning--?" inquired the captain.

"Meaning, as I take it, that there is time required for the message to
go from the ship to the station and for them to reply."

"An appreciable time like that," Captain Blake exclaimed, "--with
radio! Why, a few seconds, even, would carry it around the world a
score of times!"

Lieutenant McGuire hesitated a moment. "It happens every time," he
reminded the captain: "it is no coincidence. And if that other station
is out in space--another ship perhaps, relaying the messages to yet
others between here and--Venus, let us say...."

* * * * *

He left the thought unfinished. Captain Blake was staring at him as
one who beholds a fellow-man suddenly insane. But the look in his eyes
changed slowly, and his lips that had been opened in remonstrance came
gradually in a firm, straight line.

"Crazy!" he said, but it was apparent that he was speaking as much to
himself as to McGuire. "Plumb, raving crazy!... Yet that ship _did_ go
straight up out of sight--an acceleration in the upper air beyond
anything we know. It might be--" And he, too, stopped at the actual
voicing of the wild surmise. He shook his head sharply as if to rid it
of intruding, unwelcome thoughts.

"Forget that!" he told McGuire, and repeated it in a less commanding
tone. "Forget it, Mac: we've got to render a report to sane men, you
and I. What we know will be hard enough for them to believe without
any wild guesses.

"That new craft is real. It has got it all over us for size and speed
and potential offensive action. Who made it? Who mans it? Red Russia?
Japan? That's what the brass hats will be wondering; that's what they
will want to find out.

"Not a word!" he repeated to the radio man. "You will keep mum on
this."

He took McGuire with him as he left to seek out his colonel. But it
was a disturbed and shaken man, instead of the cool, methodical
Captain Blake of ordinary days, who went in search of his commanding
officer. And he clung to McGuire for corroboration of his impossible
story.

* * * * *

There was a group of officers to whom Blake made his full report.
Colonel Boynton had heard but little when he halted his subordinate
curtly and reached for a phone. And his words over that instrument
brought a quick conference of officers and a quiet man whom McGuire
did not recognize. The "brass hats," as Blake had foreseen, were avid
for details.

The pilot of the incoming plane was there, too, and the radio man.
Their stories were told in a disconcerting silence, broken only by
some officer's abrupt and skeptical question on one point and another.

"Now, for heaven's sake, shut up about Venus," McGuire had been told.
But he did not need Captain Blake's warning to hold himself strictly
to what he had seen and let the others draw their own conclusions.

Lieutenant McGuire was the last one to speak. There was silence in the
office of Colonel Boynton as he finished, a silence that almost echoed
from the grim walls. And the faces of the men who gathered there were
carefully masked from any expression that might betray their thoughts.

It was the quiet man in civilian attire who spoke first. He sat beside
another whose insignia proclaimed him of general's rank, but he
addressed himself to Colonel Boynton.

"I am very glad," he said quietly, "very glad. Colonel, that my
unofficial visit came at just this time. I should like to ask some few
questions."

Colonel Boynton shifted the responsibility with a gesture almost of
relief. "It is in your hands. Mr. Secretary," he said. "You and
General Clinton have dropped in opportunely. There is something here
that will tax all our minds."

The man in civilian clothes nodded assent. He turned to Captain Blake.

"Captain," he said, "you saw this at first hand. You have told us what
you saw. I should like greatly to know what you think. Will you give
us your opinion, your impressions?"

* * * * *

The captain arose smartly, but his words came with less ease.

"My opinion," he stated, "will be of little value, but it is based
upon these facts. I have seen to-night, sir, a new type of aircraft,
with speed, climb and ceiling beyond anything we are capable of. I
can only regard it as a menace. It may or may not have been armed, but
it had the size to permit the armament of a cruiser; it had power to
carry that weight. It hung stationary in the air, so it is independent
of wing-lift, yet it turned and shot upward like a feather in a gale.
That spells maneuverability.

"That combination, sir, can mean only that we are out-flown,
out-maneuvered and out-fought in the air. It means that the planes in
our hangars are obsolete, our armament so much old iron.

"The menace is potential at present. Whether it is an actual threat or
not is another matter. Who mans that ship--what country's insignia she
carries--is something on which I can have no opinion. The power is
there: who wields it I wish we knew."

The questioner nodded at the conclusion of Blake's words, and he
exchanged quiet, grave glances with the general beside him. Then--

"I think we all would wish to know that, Captain Blake," he observed.
And to the colonel: "You may be able to answer that soon. It would be
my idea that this craft should be--ah--drawn out, if we can do it. We
would not attack it, of course, until its mission is proved definitely
unfriendly, but you will resist any offensive from them.

"And now," he added, "let us thank these officers for their able
reports and excuse them. We have much to discuss...."

* * * * *

Captain Blake took McGuire's arm as they went out into the night. And
he drew him away where they walked for silent minutes by themselves.
The eyes of Lieutenant McGuire roamed upward to the scudding clouds
and the glimpse of far, lonely stars; he stumbled occasionally as he
walked. But for Captain Blake there was thought only of matters
nearby.

"The old fox!" he exclaimed. "Didn't he 'sic us on' neatly? If we mix
it with that stranger there will be no censure from the Secretary of
War."

"I assumed that was who it was," said McGuire. "Well, they have
something to think about, that bunch; something to study over....
Perhaps more than they know.

"And that's their job," he concluded after a silence. "I'm going to
bed; but I would like a leave of absence to-morrow if that's O. K."

"Sure," said Captain Blake, "though I should think you would like to
stick around. Perhaps we will see something. What's on your mind,
Mac?"

"A little drive to the top of Mount Lawson," said Lieutenant McGuire.
"I want to talk to a bird named Sykes."


CHAPTER II

Lieutenant McGuire, U. S. A., was not given as a usual thing to vain
conjectures, nor did his imagination carry him beyond the practical
boundaries of accepted facts. Yet his mind, as he drove for hours
through the orange-scented hills of California, reverted time and
again to one persistent thought. And it was with him still, even when
he was consciously concentrating on the hairpin turns of Mount
Lawson's narrow road.

There was a picture there, printed indelibly in his mind--a picture of
a monstrous craft, a liner of the air, that swung its glowing lights
in a swift arc and, like a projectile from some huge gun, shot up and
up and still up until it vanished in a jet-black sky. Its altitude
when it passed from sight he could not even guess, but the sense of
ever-increasing speed, of power that mocked at gravitation's puny
force, had struck deep into his mind. And McGuire saw plainly this
mystery ship going on and on far into the empty night where man had
never been.

No lagging in that swift flight that he had seen; an acceleration that
threw the ship faster and yet faster, regardless of the thin air and
the lessened buoyancy in an ocean of atmosphere that held man-made
machines so close to Earth. That constant acceleration, hour after
hour, day after day--the speed would be almost unlimited;
inconceivable!

He stopped his car where the mountain road held straight for a hundred
feet, and he looked out over the coastal plain spread like a toy world
far below.

"Now, how about it?" he asked himself. "Blake thinks I am making a
fool of myself. Perhaps I am. I wonder. It's a long time since I fell
for any fairy stories. But this thing has got me. A sort of hunch, I
guess."

* * * * *

The sun was shining now from a vault of clear blue. It was lighting a
world of reality, of houses where people lived their commonplace
lives, tiny houses squared off in blocks a mile below. There was smoke
here and there from factories; it spread in a haze, and it meant
boilers and engines and sound practical machinery of a practical world
to the watching man.

What had all this to do with Venus? he asked himself. This was the
world he knew. It was real; space was impenetrable; there were no men
or beings of any sort that could travel through space. Blake was
right: he was on a fool's errand. They couldn't tell him anything up
here at the observatory; they would laugh at him as he deserved....

Wondering vaguely if there was a place to turn around, he looked ahead
and then up; his eyes passed from the gash of roadway on the
mountainside to the deep blue beyond. And within the man some driving,
insistent, mental force etched strongly before his eyes that picture
and its problem unanswered. There was the ship--he saw it in
memory--and it went up and still up; and he knew as surely as if he
had guided the craft that the meteor-like flight could be endless.

Lieutenant McGuire could not reason it out--such power was beyond his
imagining--but suddenly he dared to believe, and he knew it was true.

"Earthbound!" he said in contempt of his own human kind, and he looked
again at the map spread below. "Ants! Mites! That's what we
are--swarming across the surface of the globe. And we think we're so
damn clever if we lift ourselves up a few miles from the surface!

"Guess I'll see Sykes," he muttered aloud. "He and his kind at least
dare to look out into space; take their eyes off the world; be
impractical!"

He swung the car slowly around the curve ahead, eased noiselessly into
second gear and went on with the climb.

* * * * *

There were domed observatories where he stopped: rounded structures
that gleamed silvery in the air; and offices, laboratories: it was a
place of busy men. And Professor Sykes, he found, was busy. But he
spared a few minutes to answer courteously the questions of this slim
young fellow in the khaki uniform of the air service.

"What can I do for you?" asked Professor Sykes.

"No dreamer, this man," thought McGuire as he looked at the short,
stocky figure of the scientist. Clear eyes glanced sharply from under
shaggy brows; there were papers in his hand scrawled over with strange
mathematical symbols.

"You can answer some fool questions," said Lieutenant McGuire
abruptly, "if you don't mind."

The scientist smiled broadly. "We're used to that," he told the young
officer; "you can't think of any worse ones than those we have heard.
Have a chair."

McGuire drew a clipping from his pocket--it was the newspaper account
he had read--and he handed it to Professor Sykes.

"I came to see you about this," he began.

The lips of Professor Sykes lost their genial curve; they straightened
to a hard line. "Nothing for publication," he said curtly. "As usual
they enlarged upon the report and made assumptions and inferences not
warranted by facts."

"But you did see that flash?"

"By visual observation I saw a bright area formed on the
terminator--yes! We have no photographic corroboration."

"I am wondering what it meant."

"That is your privilege--and mine," said the scientist coldly.

"But it said there," McGuire persisted, "that it might have been a
signal of some sort."

"_I_ did not say so: that is an inference only. I have told you,
Lieutenant"--he glanced at the card in his hand--"--Lieutenant
McGuire--all that I know. We deal in facts up here, and we leave the
brilliant theorizing to the journalists."

* * * * *

The young officer felt distinctly disconcerted. He did not know
exactly what he had expected from this man--what corroboration of his
wild surmises--but he was getting nowhere, he admitted. And he
resented the cold aloofness of the scientist before him.

"I am not trying to pin you down on anything," he said, and his tone
carried a hint of the nervous strain that had been his. "I am trying
to learn something."

"Just what?" the other inquired.

"Could that flash have been a signal?"

"You may think so if you wish: I have told you all that I know. And
now," he added, and rose from his chair, "I must ask to be excused; I
have work to do."

McGuire came slowly to his feet. He had learned nothing; perhaps there
was nothing to be learned. A fool's errand! Blake was right. But the
inner urge for some definite knowledge drove him on. His eyes were
serious and his face drawn to a scowl of earnestness as he turned once
more to the waiting man.

"Professor Sykes," he demanded, "just one more question. Could that
have been the flash of a--a rocket? Like the proposed experiments in
Germany. Could it have meant in any way the launching of a
projectile--a ship--to travel Earthward through space?"

* * * * *

Professor Sykes knew what it was to be harassed by the curious mob, to
avoid traps set by ingenious reporters, but he knew, too, when he was
meeting with honest bewilderment and a longing for knowledge. His
fists were placed firmly on the hips of his stocky figure as he stood
looking at the persistent questioner, and his eyes passed from the
intent face to the snug khaki coat and the spread wings that
proclaimed the wearer's work. A ship out of space--a projectile--this
young man had said.

"Lieutenant," he suggested quietly--and again the smile had returned
to his lips as he spoke--"sit down. I'm not as busy as I pretend to
be. Now tell me: what in the devil have you got in your mind?"

And McGuire told him. "Like some of your dope," he said, "this is not
for publication. But I have not been instructed to hush it up, and I
know you will keep it to yourself."

He told the clear-eyed, listening man of the previous night's events.
Of the radio's weird call and the mystery ship.

"Hallucination," suggested the scientist. "You saw the stars very
clearly, and they suggested a ship."

"Tell that to Jim Burgess," said McGuire: "he was the pilot of that
plane." And the scientist nodded as if the answer were what he
expected.

He asked again about the ship's flight. And he, too, bore down heavily
upon the matter of acceleration in the thin upper air. He rose to lay
a friendly hand on McGuire's shoulder.

"We can't know what it means," he said, "but we can form our own
theories, you and I--and anything is possible.

"It is getting late," he added, "and you have had a long drive. Come
over and eat; spend the night here. Perhaps you would like to have a
look at our equipment--see Venus for yourself. I will be observing her
through the sixty-inch refractor to-night. Would you care to?"

"Would I?" McGuire demanded with enthusiasm. "Say, that will be
great!"

* * * * *

The sun was dropping toward the horizon when the two men again came
out into the cool mountain air.

"Just time for a quick look around," suggested Professor Sykes, "if
you are interested."

He took the lieutenant first to an enormous dome that bulged high
above the ground, and admitted him to the dark interior. They climbed
a stairway and came out into a room that held a skeleton frame of
steel. "This is the big boy," said Professor Sykes, "the one
hundred-inch reflector."

There were other workers there, one a man standing upon a raised
platform beside the steel frame, who arranged big holders for
photographic plates. The slotted ceiling opened as McGuire watched,
and the whole structure swung slowly around. It was still, and the
towering steel frame began to swing noiselessly when a man at a desk
touched various controls. McGuire looked about him in bewilderment.

"Quite a shop," he admitted; "but where is the telescope?"

Professor Sykes pointed to the towering latticework of steel. "Right
there," he said. "Like everyone else, you were expecting to see a big
tube."

He explained in simple words the operation of the great instrument
that brought in light rays from sources millions of light years away.
He pointed out where the big mirror was placed--the one hundred-inch
reflector--and he traced for the wondering man the pathway of light
that finally converged upon a sensitized plate to catch and record
what no eye had ever seen.

He checked the younger man's flow of questions and turned him back
toward the stairs. "We will leave them to their work," he said; "they
will be gathering light that has been traveling millions of years on
its ways. But you and I have something a great deal nearer to study."

* * * * *

Another building held the big refractor, and it was a matter of only a
few seconds and some cryptic instructions from Sykes until the
eye-piece showed the image of the brilliant planet.

"The moon!" McGuire exclaimed in disappointed tones when the professor
motioned him to see for himself. His eyes saw a familiar half-circle
of light.

"Venus," the professor informed him. "It has phases like the moon. The
planet is approaching; the sun's light strikes it from the side." But
McGuire hardly heard. He was gazing with all his faculties centered
upon that distant world, so near to him now.

"Venus," he whispered half aloud. Then to the professor: "It's all
hazy. There are no markings--"

"Clouds," said the other. "The goddess is veiled; Venus is blanketed
in clouds. What lies underneath we may never know, but we do know that
of all the planets this is most like the earth; most probably is an
inhabited world. Its size, its density, your weight if you were
there--and the temperature under the sun's rays about double that of
ours. Still, the cloud envelope would shield it."

McGuire was fascinated, and his thoughts raced wildly in speculation
of what might be transpiring before his eyes. People, living in that
tropical world; living and going through their daily routine under
that cloud-filled sky where the sun was never seen. The margin of
light that made the clear shape of a half-moon marked their daylight
and dark; there was one small dot of light forming just beyond that
margin. It penetrated the dark side. And it grew, as he watched, to a
bright patch.

"What is that?" he inquired abstractedly--his thoughts were still
filled with those beings of his imagination. "There is a light that
extends into the dark part. It is spreading--"

* * * * *

He found himself thrust roughly aside as Professor Sykes applied a
more understanding eye to the instrument.

The professor whirled abruptly to his assistant. "Phone Professor
Giles," he said sharply; "he is working on the reflector. Tell him to
get a photograph of Venus at once; the cloud envelope is broken." He
returned hurriedly to his observations. One hand sketched on a waiting
pad.

"Markings!" he said exultantly. "If it would only hold!... There, it
is closing ... gone...."

His hand was quiet now upon the paper, but where he had marked was a
crude sketch of what might have been an island. It was "L" shaped;
sharply bent.

"Whew!" breathed Professor Sykes and looked up for a moment. "Now that
was interesting."

"You saw through?" asked McGuire eagerly. "Glimpsed the surface?--an
island?"

The scientist's face relaxed. "Don't jump to conclusions," he told the
aviator: "we are not ready to make a geography of Venus quite yet. But
we shall know that mark if we ever see it again. I hardly think they
had time to get a picture.

* * * * *

"And now there is only a matter of three hours for observation: I must
watch every minute. Stay here if you wish. But," he added, "don't let
your imagination run wild. Some eruption, perhaps, this we have
seen--an ignition of gasses in the upper air--who knows? But don't
connect this with your mysterious ship. If the ship is a menace, if it
means war, that is your field of action, not mine. And you will be
fighting with someone on Earth. It must be that some country has
gained a big lead in aeronautics. Now I must get to work."

"I'll not wait," said McGuire. "I will start for the field; get there
by daylight, if I can find my way down that road in the dark."

"Thanks a lot." He paused a moment before concluding slowly: "And in
spite of what you say, Professor, I believe that we will have
something to get together on again in this matter."

The scientist, he saw, had turned again to his instrument. McGuire
picked his way carefully along the narrow path that led where he had
parked his car. "Good scout, this Sykes!" he was thinking, and he
stopped to look overhead in the quick-gathering dark at that
laboratory of the heavens, where Sykes and his kind delved and probed,
measured and weighed, and gathered painstakingly the messages from
suns beyond counting, from universe out there in space that added
their bit of enlightenment to the great story of the mystery of
creation.

He was humbly aware of his own deep ignorance as he backed his car,
slipped it into second, and began the long drive down the tortuous
grade. He would have liked to talk more with Sykes. But he had no
thought as he wound round the curves how soon that wish was to be
gratified.

* * * * *

Part way down the mountainside he again checked his car where he had
stopped on the upward climb and reasoned with himself about his
errand. Once more he looked out over the level ground below, a vast
glowing expanse of electric lights now, that stretched to the ocean
beyond. He was suddenly unthrilled by this man-made illumination, and
he got out of his car to stare again at the blackness above and its
myriad of stars that gathered and multiplied as he watched.

One brighter than the rest winked suddenly out. There was a
constellation of twinkling lights that clustered nearby, and they too
vanished. The eyes of the watcher strained themselves to see more
clearly a dim-lit outline. There were no lights: it was a black
shape, lost in the blackness of the mountain sky, that was blocking
out the stars. But it was a shape, and from near the horizon the pale
gleams of the rising moon picked it out in softest of outline; a vague
ghost of a curve that reflected a silvery contour to the watching eyes
below.

There had been a wider space in the road that McGuire had passed; he
backed carefully till he could swing his car and turn it to head once
more at desperate speed toward the mountain top. And it was less than
an hour since he had left when he was racing back along the narrow
footpath to slam open the door where Professor Sykes looked up in
amazement at his abrupt return.

The aviator's voice was hoarse with excitement as he shouted: "It's
here--the ship! It's here! Where's your phone?--I must call the field!
It's right overhead--descending slowly--no lights, but I saw it--I saw
it!"

He was working with trembling fingers at the phone where Sykes had
pointed. "Long distance!" he shouted. He gave a number to the
operator. "Make it quick," he implored. "Quick!"


CHAPTER III

Back at Maricopa Flying Field the daily routine had been disturbed.
There were conferences of officers, instructions from Colonel Boynton,
and a curiosity-provoking lack of explanations. Only with Captain
Blake did the colonel indulge in any discussion.

"We'll keep this under our hats," he said, "and out of the newspapers
as long as we can. You can imagine what the yellow journals would do
with a scarehead like that. Why, they would have us all wiped off the
map and the country devastated by imaginary fleets in the first three
paragraphs."

Blake regarded his superior gravely. "I feel somewhat the same way,
myself. Colonel," he admitted. "When I think what this can mean--some
other country so far ahead of us in air force that we are back in the
dark ages--well, it doesn't look any too good to me if they mean
trouble."

"We will meet it when it comes," said Colonel Boynton. "But, between
ourselves, I am in the same state of mind.

"The whole occurrence is so damn mysterious. Washington hasn't a
whisper of information of any such construction; the Secretary
admitted that last night. It's a surprise, a complete surprise, to
everyone.

"But, Blake, you get that new ship ready as quickly as you can.
Prepare for an altitude test the same as we planned, but get into the
air the first minute possible. She ought to show a better ceiling than
anything we have here, and you may have to fly high to say 'Good
morning' to that liner you saw. Put all the mechanics on it that can
work to advantage. I think they have it pretty well along now."

"Engine's tested and installed, sir," was Blake's instant report. "I
think I can take it up this afternoon."

* * * * *

He left immediately to hurry to the hangar where a new plane stood
glistening in pristine freshness, and where hurrying mechanics
grumbled under their breaths at the sudden rush for a ship that was
expected to take the air a week later.

An altitude test under full load! Well, what of it? they demanded one
of another; wouldn't another day do as well as this one? And they
worked as they growled, worked with swift sureness and skill, and the
final instruments took their place in the ship that she might roll
from the hangar complete under that day's sun.

Her supercharger was tested--the adjunct to a powerful engine that
would feed the hungry cylinders with heavy air up in the heights where
the air is thin; there were oxygen flasks to keep life in the pilot in
the same thin air. And the hot southern sun made ludicrous that
afternoon the bulky, heavily-wrapped figure of Captain Blake as he
sat at the controls and listened approvingly to the roaring engine.

He waved good-by and smiled understandingly as he met the eyes of
Colonel Boynton; then pulled on his helmet, settled himself in his
seat and took off in a thunderous blast of sound to begin his long
ascent.

* * * * *

He had long since cracked open the valve of his oxygen flask when the
climb was ended, and his goggles were frosted in the arctic cold so
that it was only with difficulty he could read his instrument board.

"That's the top," he thought in that mind so light and so curiously
not his own. He throttled the engine and went into a long spiral that
was to end within a rod of where he had started on the brown sun-baked
field. The last rays of the sun were slanting over distant mountains
as he climbed stiffly from the machine.

"Better than fifty thousand," exulted Colonel Boynton. "Of course your
barograph will have to be calibrated and verified, but it looks like a
record, Blake--and you had a full load.

"Ready to go up and give merry hell to that other ship if she shows
up?" he asked. But Captain Blake shook a dubious head.

"Fifty thousand is just a start for that bird," he said. "You didn't
see them shoot out of sight, Colonel. Lord knows when they quit
_their_ climb--or where."

"Well, we'll just have a squadron ready in any event," the colonel
assured him. "We will make him show his stuff or take a beating--if
that is what he wants."

They were in the colonel's office. "You had better go and get warmed
up," he told the flyer: "then come back here for instructions." But
Blake was more anxious for information than for other comforts.

"I'm all right," he said: "just tired a bit. Let me stretch out here,
Colonel, and give me the dope on what you expect of our visitor and
what we will do."

* * * * *

He settled back comfortably in a big chair. The office was warm, and
Blake knew now he had been doing a day's work.

"We will just take it as it comes," Colonel Boynton explained. "I
can't for the life of me figure why the craft was spying around here.
What are they looking for? We haven't any big secrets the whole world
doesn't know.

"Of course he may not return. But if he does I want you to go up and
give him the once over. I can trust you to note every significant
detail.

"You saw no wings. If it is a dirigible, let's know something of their
power and how they can throw themselves up into the air the way you
described. Watch for anything that may serve to identify it and its
probable place of manufacture--any peculiarity of marking or design or
construction that may give us a lead. Then return and report."

Blake nodded his understanding of what was wanted, but his mind was on
further contingencies: he wanted definite instructions.

"And," he asked; "if they attack--what then? Is their fire to be
returned?"

"If they make one single false move," said Colonel Boynton savagely,
"give them everything you've got. And the 91st Squadron will be off
the ground to support you at the first sign of trouble. We don't want
to start anything, nor appear to do so. But, by the gods, Blake, this
fellow means trouble eventually as sure as you're a flyer, and we
won't wait for him to ask for it twice."

* * * * *

They sat in silence, while the field outside became shrouded in night.
And they speculated, as best they could from the few facts they had,
as to what this might mean to the world, to their country, to
themselves. It was an hour before Blake was aware of the fact that he
was hungry.

He rose to leave, but paused while Colonel Boynton answered the phone.
The first startled exclamation held him rigid while he tried to piece
together the officer's curt responses and guess at what was being
told.

"Colonel Boynton speaking.... McGuire?... Yes, Lieutenant.... Over
Mount Lawson?... Yes--yes, the same ship, I've no doubt."

His voice was even and cool in contrast to the excited tones that
carried faintly to Blake standing by.

"Quite right!" he said shortly. "You will remain where you are: act as
observer: hold this line open and keep me informed. Captain Blake will
leave immediately for observation. A squadron will follow. Let me know
promptly what you see."

He turned abruptly to the waiting man.

"It is back!" he said. "We're in luck! Over the observatories at Mount
Lawson; descending, so Lieutenant McGuire says. Take the same ship you
had up to-day. Look them over--get up close--good luck!" He turned
again to the phone.

There were planes rolling from their hangars before Blake could reach
his own ship. Their engines were thundering: men were rushing across
the field, pulling on leather helmets and coats as they ran--all this
while he warmed up his engine.

A mechanic thrust in a package of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee
while he waited. And Captain Blake grinned cheerfully and gulped the
last of his food as he waved to the mechanics to pull out the wheel
blocks. He opened the throttle and shot out into the dark.

He climbed and circled the field, saw the waving motion of lights in
red and green that marked the take-off of the planes of the 91st, and
he straightened out on a course that in less than two hours would
bring him over the heights of Mount Lawson and the mystery that
awaited him there. And he fingered the trigger grip that was part of
the stick and nodded within his dark cockpit at the rattle of a
machine gun that merged its staccato notes with the engine's roar.

But he felt, as he thought of that monster shape, as some primordial
man might have felt, setting forth with a stone in his hand to wage
war on a saurian beast.


CHAPTER IV

If Colonel Boynton could have stood with one of his lieutenants and
Professor Sykes on a mountain top, he would have found, perhaps, the
answer to his question. He had wondered in a puzzled fashion why the
great ship had shown its mysterious presence over the flying field. He
had questioned whether it was indeed the field that had been the
object of their attention or whether in the cloudy murk they had
merely wandered past. Could he have seen with the eyes of Lieutenant
McGuire the descent of the great shape over Mount Lawson, he would
have known beyond doubt that here was the magnet that drew the eyes of
whatever crew was manning the big craft.

It was dark where the two men stood. Others had come running at their
call, but their forms, too, were lost in the shadows of the towering
pines. The light from an open door struck across an open space beyond
which McGuire and Professor Sykes stood alone, stood silent and
spellbound, their heads craned back at a neck-wrenching angle. They
were oblivious to all discomforts; their eyes and their whole minds
were on the unbelievable thing in the sky.

Beyond the fact that no lights were showing along the hull, there was
no effort at concealment. The moon was up now to illumine the scene,
and it showed plainly the gleaming cylinder with its long body and
blunt, shining ends, dropping, slowly, inexorably down.

"Like a dirigible," said McGuire huskily. "But the size, man--the
size! And its shape is not right; it isn't streamlined correctly; the
air--" He stopped his half-unconscious analysis abruptly. "The air!"
What had this craft to do with the air? A thin layer of gas that hung
close to the earth--the skin on an apple! And beyond--space! There was
the ethereal ocean in which this great shape swam!

The reality of the big ship, the very substance of it, made the space
ship idea the harder to grasp. Lieutenant McGuire found that it was
easier to see an imaginary craft taking off into space than to
conceive of this monstrous shape, many hundreds of tons in weight,
being thrown through vast emptiness. Yet he knew; he knew!

And his mind was a chaos of grim threats and forebodings as he looked
at the unbelievable reality and tried to picture what manner of men
were watching, peering, from those rows of ports.

* * * * *

At last it was motionless. It hung soundless and silent except for a
soft roar, a scant thousand feet in the air. And its huge bulk was
dwarfing the giant pines, the rounded buildings; it threw the men's
familiar surroundings into a new and smaller scale.

He had many times flown over these mountains, and Lieutenant McGuire
had seen the silvery domes of the observatories shining among the
trees. Like fortresses for aerial defense, he had thought, and the
memory returned to him now. What did these new-comers think of them?
Had they, too, found them suggestive of forts on the frontier of a
world, defenses against invasion from out there? Or did they know them
for what they were? Did they wish only to learn the extent of our
knowledge, our culture? Were they friendly, perhaps?--half-timid and
fearful of what they might find?

A star moved in the sky, a pin-point of light that was plain in its
message to the aviator. It was Blake, flying high, volplaning to make
contact and learn from the air what this stranger might mean. The
light of his plane slanted down in an easy descent; the flyer was
gliding in on a long aerial toboggan slide. His motor was throttled;
there was only the whistle of torn air on the monoplane's wings.
McGuire was with the captain in his mind, and like him he was waiting
for whatever the stranger might do.

Other lights were clustered where the one plane had been. The men of
the 91st had their orders, and the fingers of the watching, silent man
gripped an imaginary stick while he wished with his whole heart that
he was up in the air. To be with Blake or the others! His thoughts
whipped back to the mysterious stranger: the great shape was in
motion: it rose sharply a thousand feet in the air.

* * * * *

The approaching plane showed clear in the moon's light. It swung and
banked, and the vibrant song of its engine came down to the men as
Blake swept in a great circle about the big ship. He was looking it
over, but he began his inspection at a distance, and the orbit of his
plane made a tightening spiral as he edged for a closer look. He was
still swinging in the monotonous round when the ship made its first
forward move.

It leaped in the air: it swept faster and faster. And it was moving
with terrific speed as it crashed silently through the path of the
tiny plane. And Blake, as he leaned forward on the stick to throw his
plane downward in a power dive, could have had a vision, not of a ship
of the air, but only of a shining projectile as the great monster
shrieked overhead.

McGuire trembled for the safety of those wings as he saw Blake pull
his little ship out of the dive and shoot upward to a straight climb.

But--"That's dodging them!" he exulted: "that's flying! I wonder, did
they mean to wipe him out or were they only scared off?"

His question was answered as, out of the night, a whistling shriek
proclaimed the passage of the meteor ship that drove unmistakably at
the lone plane. And again the pilot with superb skill waited until the
last moment and threw himself out of the path of the oncoming mass,
though his own plane was tossed and whirled like an autumn leaf in the
vortex that the enemy created. Not a second was lost as Blake opened
his throttle and forced his plane into a steep climb.

"Atta-boy!" said McGuire, as if words could span across to the man in
the plane. "Altitude, Blake--get altitude!"

The meteor had turned in a tremendous circle; so swift its motion that
it made an actual line of light as the moon marked its course. And the
curved line straightened abruptly to a flashing mark that shot
straight toward the struggling plane.

* * * * *

This time another sound came down to the listening ears of the two
men. The plane tore head on to meet the onslaught, to swing at the
last instant in a frantic leap that ended as before in the maelstrom
of air back of the ship. But the muffled roar was changed, punctured
with a machine-gun's familiar rattle, and the stabbing flashes from
Blake's ship before he threw it out of the other's path were a song of
joy to the tense nerves of the men down below.

This deadly rush could only be construed as an attack, and Blake was
fighting back. The very speed of the great projectile must hold it to
its course; the faster it went the more difficult to swerve it from a
line. This and much more was flashing sharply in McGuire's mind.
But--Blake!--alone against this huge antagonist!... It was coming
back. Another rush like a star through space....

And McGuire shouted aloud in a frenzy of emotion as a cluster of
lights came falling from on high. No lone machine gun now that tore
the air with this clattering bedlam of shots: the planes of the 91st
Squadron were diving from the heights. They came on a steep slant
that seemed marking them for crashing death against the huge cylinder
flashing past. And their stabbing needles of machine-gun fire made a
drumming tattoo, till the planes, with the swiftness of hawks, swept
aside, formed to groups, tore on down toward the ground and then
curved in great circles of speed to climb back to the theater of
action.

* * * * *

Lieutenant McGuire was rigid and quivering. He should go to the phone
and report to the colonel, but the thought left him as quickly as it
came. He was frozen in place, and his mind could hold only the scene
that was being pictured before him.

The enemy ship had described its swift curve, and the planes of the
defenders were climbing desperately for advantage. So slowly they
moved as compared with the swiftness of the other!

But the great ship was slowing; it came on, but its wild speed was
checked. The light of the full moon showed plainly now what McGuire
had seen but dimly before--a great metal beak on the ship, pointed and
shining, a ram whose touch must bring annihilation to anything it
struck.

The squadron of planes made a group in the sky, and Blake's monoplane,
too, was with them. The huge enemy was approaching slowly: was it
damaged? McGuire hardly dared hope ... yet that raking fire might well
have been deadly: it might be that some bullets had torn and
penetrated to the vitals of this ship's machinery and damaged some
part.

It came back slowly, ominously, toward the circling planes. Then,
throwing itself through the air, it leaped not directly toward them
but off to one side.

* * * * *

Like a stone on the end of a cord it swung with inconceivable speed in
a circle that enclosed the group of planes. Again and again it
whipped around them, while the planes, by comparison, were motionless.
Its orbit was flat with the ground: then tilting, more yet, it made a
last circle that stood like a hoop in the air. And behind it as it
circled it left a faint trace of vapor. Nebulous!--milky in the
moonlight!--but the ship had built a sphere, a great globe of the gas,
and within it, like rats in a cage, the planes of the 91st Squadron
were darting and whirling.

"Gas!" groaned the watching man: "gas! What is it? Why don't they
break through?"

The thin clouds of vapor were mingling now and expanding: they
blossomed and mushroomed, and the light of the moon came in pale
iridescence from their billowing folds.

"Break through!" McGuire had prayed--and he stood in voiceless horror
as he saw the attempt.

The mist was touching here and there a plane: they were engulfed, yet
he could see them plainly. And he saw with staring, fear-filled eyes
the clumsy tumbling and fluttering of unguided wings as the great
eagles of the 91st fell roaring to earth with no conscious minds
guiding their flight.

The valleys were deep about the mountain, and their shadowed blackness
opened to receive the maimed, stricken things that came fluttering or
swooping wildly to that last embrace, where, in the concealing
shadows, the deeper shadows of death awaited....

* * * * *

There was a room where a telephone waited: McGuire sensed this but
dumbly, and the way to that room was long to his stumbling feet. He
was blinded: his mind would not function: he saw only those fluttering
things, and the moonlight on their wings, and the shadows that took
them so softly at the last.

One plane whistled close overhead. McGuire stopped where he stood to
follow it with unbelieving eyes. That one man had lived, escaped the
net--it was inconceivable! The plane returned: it was flying low, and
it swerved erratically as it flew. It was a monoplane: a new ship.

Its motor was silenced: it stalled as he watched, to pancake and crash
where the towering pines made a cradle of great branches to cushion
its fall.

No thought now of the colonel waiting impatiently for a report; even
the enemy, there in the sky was forgotten. It was Blake in that ship,
and he was alive--or had been--for he had cut his motor. McGuire
screamed out for Professor Sykes, and there were others, too, who came
running at his call. He tore recklessly through the scrub and
undergrowth and gained at last the place where wreckage hung dangling
from the trees. The fuselage of a plane, scarred and broken, was still
held in the strong limbs.

* * * * *

Captain Blake was in the cockpit, half hanging from the side. He was
motionless, quiet, and his face shone white and ghastly as they
released him and drew him out. But one hand still clung with a grip
like death itself to a hose that led from an oxygen tank. McGuire
stared in wonder and slowly gathering comprehension.

"He was fixed for an altitude test," he said dazedly; "this ship was
to be used, and he was to find her ceiling. He saw what the others
were getting, and he flew himself through on a jet of pure oxygen--"
He stopped in utter admiration of the quickness of thought that could
outwit death in an instant like that.

They carried the limp body to the light. "No bones broken so far as I
can see," said the voice of Professor Sykes. "Leave him here in the
air. He must have got a whiff of their devilish mist in spite of his
oxygen; he was flying mighty awkwardly when he came in here."

But he was alive!--and Lieutenant McGuire hastened with all speed now
to the room where a telephone was ringing wildly and a colonel of the
air force must be told of the annihilation of a crack squadron and of
a threat that menaced all the world.

* * * * *

In that far room there were others waiting where Colonel Boynton sat
with receiver to his ear. A general's uniform was gleaming in the
light to make more sober by contrast the civilian clothing of that
quiet, clear-eyed man who held the portfolio of the Secretary of War.

They stared silently at Colonel Boynton, and they saw the blood recede
from his face, while his cool voice went on unmoved with its replies.

"... I understand," he said; "a washout, complete except for Captain
Blake; his oxygen saved him.... It attacked with gas, you say?... And
why did not our own planes escape?... Its speed!--yes, we'll have to
imagine it, but it is unbelievable. One moment--" He turned to those
who waited for his report.

"The squadron," he said with forced quiet, though his lips twitched in
a bloodless line, "--the 91st--is destroyed. The enemy put them down
with one blow; enveloped them with gas." He recounted the essence of
McGuire's report, then turned once more to the phone.

"Hello, Lieutenant--the enemy ship--where is it now?"

He listened--listened--to a silent receiver: silent save for the sound
of a shot--a crashing fall--a loud, panting breath. He heard the
breathing close to the distant instrument; it ended in a choking gasp;
the instrument was silent in his ear....

He signalled violently for the operator: ordered the ringing of any
and all phones about the observatory, and listened in vain for a sound
or syllable in reply.

"A plane," he told an orderly, "at once! Phone the commercial flying
field near the base of Mount Lawson. Have them hold a car ready for
me: I shall land there!"


CHAPTER V

To Captain Blake alone, of all those persons on the summit of Mount
Lawson, it was given to see and to know and be able to relate what
transpired there and in the air above. For Blake, although he appeared
like one dead, was never unconscious throughout his experience.

Driving head on toward the ship, he had emptied his drum of cartridges
before he threw his plane over and down in a dive that escaped the
onrush of the great craft by a scant margin, and that carried him down
in company with the men and machines of the squadron that dived from
above.

He turned as they turned and climbed as they climbed for the advantage
that altitude might give. And he climbed faster: his ship outdistanced
them in that tearing, scrambling rush for the heights. The squadron
was spiraling upward in close formation with his plane above them when
the enemy struck.

He saw that great shape swing around them, terrible in its silent
swiftness, and, like the others, he failed to realize at first the net
she was weaving. So thin was the gas and so rapid the circling of the
enemy craft, they were captured and cut off inside of the gaseous
sphere before the purpose of the maneuver was seen or understood.

He saw the first faint vapor form above him; swung over for a steep
bank that carried him around the inside of the great cage of gas and
that showed him the spiraling planes as the first wisps of vapor swept
past them.

He held that bank with his swift machine, while below him a squadron
of close-formed fighting craft dissolved before his eyes into unguided
units. The formations melted: wings touched and locked; the planes
fell dizzily or shot off in wild, ungoverned, swerving flight. The air
was misty about him; it was fragrant in his nostrils; the world was
swimming....

* * * * *

It was gas, he knew, and with the light-headedness that was upon him,
so curiously like that of excessive altitudes, he reached
unconsciously for the oxygen supply. The blast of pure gas in his face
revived him for an instant, and in that instant of clear thinking his
plan was formed. He threw his weight on stick and rudder, corrected
the skid his ship was taking, and, with one hand holding the tube of
life-giving oxygen before his face, he drove straight down in a dive
toward the earth.

There were great weights fastened to his arm, it seemed, when he tried
to bring the ship from her fearful dive. He moved only with greatest
effort, and it was force of will alone that compelled his hands to do
their work. His brain, as he saw the gleaming roundness of observatory
buildings beneath him, was as clear as ever in his life, but his
muscles, his arms and legs, refused to work: even his head; he was
slowly sinking beneath a load of utter fatigue.

The observatories were behind him; he must swing back; he could not
last long, he knew; each slightest movement was intolerable effort.

Was this death? he wondered; but his mind was so clear! There were the
buildings, the trees! How thickly they were massed beyond--

He brought every ounce of will power to bear ... the throttle!--and a
slow glide in ... he was losing speed ... the stick--must--come--back!
The crashing branches whipped about him, bending, crackling--and the
world went dark....

* * * * *

There were stars above him when he awoke, and his back was wrenched
and aching. He tried to move, to call, but found that the paralysing
effect of the gas still held him fast. He was lying on the ground, he
knew: a door was open in a building beyond, and the light in the room
showed him men, a small group of them, standing silent while
someone--yes, it was McGuire--shouted into a phone.

"... The squadron," he was saying. "... Lost! Every plane down and
destroyed.... Blake is living but injured...." And then Blake
remembered. And the tumbling, helpless planes came again before his
eyes while he cursed silently at this freezing grip that would not let
him cover his face with his hands to shut out the sight.

The figure of a man hurried past him, nor saw the body lying helpless
in the cool dark. McGuire was still at the phone. And the enemy
ship--?

His mind, filled with a welter of words as he tried to find phrases to
compass his hate for that ship. And then, as if conjured out of
nothing by his thoughts, the great craft itself came in view overhead
in all its mighty bulk.

It settled down swiftly: it was riding on an even keel. And in silence
and darkness it came from above. Blake tried to call out, but no sound
could be formed by his paralyzed throat. Doors opened in silence,
swinging down from the belly of the thing to show in the darkness
square openings through which shot beams of brilliant yellow light.

There were cages that lowered--great platforms in slings--and the
platforms came softly to rest on the ground. They were moving with
life; living beings clustered upon them thick in the dark. Oh God! for
an instant's release from the numbness that held his lips and throat
to cry out one word!... The shapes were passing now in the shelter of
darkness, going toward the room.... He could see McGuire's back turned
toward the door.

Man-shapes, tall and thin, distorted humans, each swathed in bulging
garments; horrible staring eyes of glass in the masks about their
heads, and each hand ready with a shining weapon as they stood waiting
for the men within to move.

* * * * *

McGuire must have seen them first, though his figure was half
concealed from Blake where he was lying. But he saw the head turn;
knew by the quick twist of the shoulders the man was reaching for a
gun. One shot echoed in Blake's ears; one bulging figure spun and fell
awkwardly to the ground; then the weapons in those clumsy hands hissed
savagely while jets of vapor, half liquid and half gas, shot
blindingly into the room. The faces dropped from his sight....

There had been the clamor of surprised and shouting men: there was
silence now. And the awkward figures in the bloated casings that
protected their bodies from the gas passed in safety to the room.
Blake, bound in the invisible chains of enemy gas, struggled silently,
futilely, to pit his will against this grip that held him. To lie
there helpless, to see these men slaughtered! He saw one of the
creatures push the body of his fallen comrade out of the way: it was
cast aside with an indifferent foot.

They were coming back: Blake saw the form of McGuire in unmistakable
khaki. He and another man were carried high on the shoulders of some
of the invaders. They were going toward the platforms, the slings
beneath the ship.... They passed close to Blake, and again he was
unnoticed in the dark.

A clamor came from distant buildings, a babel of howls and shrieks,
inhuman, unearthly. There were no phrases or syllables, but to Blake
it was familiar ... somewhere he had heard it ... and then he
remembered the radio and the weird wailing note that told of
communication. These things were talking in the same discordant din.

* * * * *

They were gathering now on the platforms slung under the ship. A
whistling note from somewhere within the great structure and the
platforms went high in the air. They were loaded, he saw, with papers
and books and instruments plundered from the observatories. Some made
a second trip to take up the loot they had gathered. Then the black
doorways closed; the huge bulk of the ship floated high above the
trees; it took form, dwindled smaller and smaller, then vanished from
sight in the star-studded sky.

Blake thought of their unconscious passenger--the slim figure of
Lieutenant McGuire. Mac had been a close friend and a good one; his
ready smile; his steady eyes that could tear a problem to pieces with
their analytic scrutiny or gaze far into space to see those visions of
a dreamer!

"Far into space." Blake repeated the words in his mind. And: "Good-by
Mac," he said softly; "you've shipped for a long cruise, I'm
thinking." He hardly realized he had spoken the words aloud.

* * * * *

Lying there in the cold night he felt his strength returning slowly.
The pines sang their soothing, whispered message, and the faint night
noises served but to intensify the silence of the mountain. It was
some time before the grind of straining gears came faintly in the air
to announce the coming of a car up the long grade. And still later he
heard it come to a stop some distance beyond. There were footsteps,
and voices calling: he heard the voice of Colonel Boynton. And he was
able to call out in reply, even to move his head and turn it to see
the approaching figures in the night.

Colonel Boynton knelt beside him. "Did they get you, old man?" he
asked.

"Almost," Blake told him. "My oxygen--I was lucky. But the others--".
He did not need to complete the sentence. The silent canyons among
those wooded hills told plainly the story of the lost men.

"We will fight them with gas masks," said the colonel; "your
experience has taught us the way."

"Gas-tight uniforms and our own supplies of oxygen," Blake
supplemented. He told Boynton of the man-things he had seen come from
the ship, of their baggy suits, their helmets.... And he had seen a
small generator on the back of each helmet. He told him of the small,
shining weapons and their powerful jets of gas. Deadly and unescapable
at short range, he well knew.

"They got McGuire," Blake concluded; "carried him off a prisoner. Took
another man, too."

For a moment Colonel Boynton's quiet tones lost their even steadiness.
"We'll get them," he said savagely, and it was plain that it was the
invaders that filled his mind; "we'll go after them, and we'll get
them in spite of their damn gas, and we'll rip their big ship into
ribbons--"

Captain Blake was able to raise a dissenting hand. "We will have to go
where they are, Colonel, to do that."

Colonel Boynton stared at him. "Well?" he demanded. "Why not?"

"We can't go where _they_ went," said Blake simply. "I laughed at
McGuire; told him not to be a fool. But I was the fool--the blind one;
we all were, Colonel. That thing came here out of space. It has gone
back; it is far beyond our air. I saw it go up out of sight, and I
know. Those creatures were men, if you like, but no men that we
know--not those shrieking, wailing devils! And we're going to hear
more from them, now that they've found their way here!"


CHAPTER VI

A score of bodies where men had died in strangling fumes in the
observatories on Mount Lawson; one of the country's leading
astronomical scientists vanished utterly; the buildings on the
mountain top ransacked; papers and documents blowing in vagrant winds;
tales of a monster ship in the air, incredibly huge, unbelievably
swift--

There are matters that at times are not allowed to reach the press,
but not happenings like these. And the papers of the United States
blazed out with headlines to tell the world of this latest mystery.

Then came corroboration from the far corners of the world. The mystery
ship had not visited one section only; it had made a survey of the
whole civilized sphere, and the tales of those who had seen it were no
longer laughed to scorn but went on the wires of the great press
agencies to be given to the world. And with that the censorship
imposed by the Department of War broke down, and the tragic story of
the destruction of the 91st Air Squadron passed into written history.
The wild tale of Captain Blake was on every tongue.

An invasion from space! The idea was difficult to accept. There were
scoffers who tried to find something here for their easy wit. Why
should we be attacked? What had that other world to gain? There was no
answer ready, but the silent lips of the men who had fallen spoke
eloquently of the truth. And the world, in wonder and consternation,
was forced to believe.

Were there more to come? How meet them? Was this war--and with whom?
What neighboring planet could reasonably be suspected. What had
science to say?

The scientists! The scientists! The clamor of the world was beating at
the doors of science and demanding explanations and answers. And
science answered.

A conference was arranged in London; the best minds in the realms of
astronomy and physics came together. They were the last to admit the
truth that would not be denied, but admit it they must. And to some of
the questions they found their answer.

* * * * *

It was not Mars, they said, though this in the popular mind was the
source of the trouble. Not Mars, for that planet was far in the
heavens. But Venus!--misnamed for the Goddess of Love. It was Venus,
and she alone, who by any stretch of the imagination could be
threatening Earth.

What did it mean? They had no answer. The ship was the only answer to
that. Would there be more?--could we meet them?--defeat them? And
again the wise men of the world refused to hazard a guess.

But they told what they knew; that Venus was past her eastern
elongation, was approaching the earth. She of all the planets that
swung around the sun came nearest to Earth--twenty-six million miles
in another few weeks. Then whirling away she would pass to the western
elongation in a month and a half and drive out into space. Venus
circled the sun in a year of 225 days, and in 534 days she would again
reach her eastern elongation with reference to the earth, and draw
near us again.

They were reluctant to express themselves, these men who made nothing
of weighing and analyzing stars a million of light years away, but
_if_ the popular conception was correct and _if_ we could pass through
the following weeks without further assault, we could count on a year
and a half before the menace would again return. And in a year and a
half--well, the physicists would be working--and we might be prepared.

Captain Blake had made his report, but this, it seemed, was not
enough. He was ordered to come to Washington, and, with Colonel
Boynton, he flew across the country to tell again his incredible
story.

* * * * *

It was a notable gathering before which he appeared. All the branches
of the service were represented; there were men in the uniform of
admirals and generals; there were heads of Departments. And the
Secretary of War was in charge.

He told his story, did Blake, before a battery of hostile eyes. This
was not a gathering to be stampeded by wild scareheads, nor by popular
clamor. They wanted facts, and they wanted them proved. But the
gravity with which they regarded the investigation was shown by their
invitation to the representatives of foreign powers to attend.

"I have told you all that happened," Blake concluded, "up to the
coming of Colonel Boynton. May I reiterate one fact? I do not wonder
at your questioning my state of mind and my ability to observe
correctly. But I must insist, gentlemen, that while I got a shot of
their gas and my muscles and my nervous system were paralyzed, my
brain was entirely clear. I saw what I saw; those creatures were
there; they entered the buildings; they carried off Lieutenant McGuire
and another man.

"What they were or who they were I cannot say. I do not know that they
were men, but their insane shrieking in that queer unintelligible talk
is significant. And that means of communication corresponds with the
radio reception of which you know.

"If you gentlemen know of any part of this earth that can produce such
a people, if you know of any people or country in this world that can
produce such a ship--then we can forget all our wild fancies. And we
can prepare to submit to that country and that people as the masters
of this earth. For I must tell you, gentlemen, with all the
earnestness at my command, that until you have seen that ship in
action, seen its incredible speed, its maneuverability, its
lightning-like attack and its curtain of gas, you can have no
conception of our helplessness. And the insignia that she carries is
the flag of our conquerors."

* * * * *

Blake got an approving nod from the Secretary of War as he took his
seat. That quiet man rose slowly from his chair to add his words. He
spoke earnestly, impressively.

"Captain Blake has hit the nail squarely on the head," he stated. "We
have here in this room a representative gathering from the whole
world. If there is any one of you who can say that this mystery ship
was built and manned by your people, let him speak, and we will send
you at once a commission to acknowledge your power and negotiate for
peace."

The great hall was silent, in a silence that held only uneasy
rustlings as men glanced one at another in wondering dismay.

"The time has come," said the Secretary with solemn emphasis, "when
all dissensions among our peoples must cease. Whatever there is or
ever has been of discord between us fades into insignificance before
this new threat. It is the world, now, against a power unknown; we can
only face it as a united world.

"I shall recommend to the President of the United States that a
commission be appointed, that it may co-operate with similar bodies
from all lands. I ask you, gentlemen, to make like representations to
your governments, to the end that we may meet this menace as one
country and one man; meet it, God grant, successfully through a War
Department of the World."

* * * * *

It was a brave gesture of the President of the United States; he dared
the scorn and laughter of the world in standing behind his Secretary
of War. The world is quick to turn and rend with ridicule a false
prophet. And despite the unanswerable facts, the scope and power of
the menace was not entirely believed. It was difficult for the
conscious minds of men to conceive of the barriers of vast space as
swept aside and the earth laid open to attack.

England was slow to respond to the invitation of the President: this
matter required thought and grave deliberation in parliament. It might
not be true: the thought, whether spoken or unexpressed, was clinging
to their minds. And even if true--even if this lone ship had wandered
in from space--there might be no further attack.

"Why," they asked, "should there be more unprovoked assaults from the
people of another planet? What was their object? What had they to
gain? ... Perhaps we were safe after all." The answer that destroyed
all hope came to them borne in upon a wall of water that swept the
British coast.

The telescopes of the world were centered now on just one object in
the heavens. The bright evening star that adorned the western sky was
the target for instruments great and small. It was past the half-moon
phase now, and it became under magnification a gleaming crescent, a
crescent that emitted from the dark sphere it embraced vivid flashes
of light. Sykes' report had ample corroboration; the flash was seen by
many, and it was repeated the next night and the next.

What was it? the waiting world asked. And the answer came not from the
telescopes and their far-reaching gaze but from the waters of the
Atlantic. In the full blaze of day came a meteor that swept to the
earth in an arc of fire to outshine the sun. There must have been
those who saw it strike--passengers and crews of passing ships--but
its plunge into the depths of the Atlantic spelled death for each
witness.

* * * * *

The earth trembled with the explosion that followed. A gas--some new
compound that united with water to give volumes tremendous--that only
could explain it. The ocean rose from its depths and flung wave after
wave to race outward in circles of death.

Hundreds of feet in height at their source--this could only be
estimated--they were devastating when they struck. The ocean raged
over the frail bulwark of England in wave upon wave, and, retreating,
the waters left smooth, shining rock where cities had been. The stone
and steel of their buildings was scattered far over the desolate land
or drawn in the suction of retreating waters to the sea.

Ireland, too, and France and Spain. Even the coast of America felt the
shock of the explosion and was swept by tidal waves of huge
proportions. But the coast of Britain took the blow at its worst.

The world was stunned and waiting--waiting!--when the next blow fell.
The flashes were coming from Venus at regular intervals, just twenty
hours and nineteen minutes apart. And with exactly the same time
intervals the bolts arrived from space to lay waste the earth.

They struck where they would: the ocean again; the Sahara; in the
mountains of China; the Pacific was thrown into fearful convulsions;
the wheat fields of Canada trembled and vanished before a blast of
flaming gas....

Twenty hours and nineteen minutes! Where it would strike, the next
star-shell, no man might say; that it surely would come was a deadly
and nerve-shattering certainty. The earth waited and prayed under
actual bombardment.

* * * * *

Some super-gun, said science with conviction; a great bore in the
planet itself, perhaps. But it was fixed, and the planet itself aimed
with an accuracy that was deadly; aimed once as each revolution
brought its gun on the target. Herein, said science, lay a basis for
hope.

If, in that distant world, there was only one such bore, it must be
altering its aim as the planet approached; the gun must cease to bear
upon the earth. And the changing sweep of the missiles' flight
confirmed their belief.

Each meteor-shell that came rushing into Earth's embrace burned
brilliantly as it tore into the air. And each flaming arc was
increasingly bent, until--twenty hours and nineteen minutes had
passed--twenty minutes--thirty--another hour ... and the peoples of
Earth dropped humbly to their knees in thankful prayer, or raised
vengeful eyes and clenched fists toward the heavens while their
quivering lips uttered blasphemous curses. The menace, for the time,
had passed; the great gun of Venus no longer was aiming toward the
earth.

"No more ships," was the belief; "not this time." And the world turned
to an accounting of its losses, and to wonder--wonder--what the
planet's return would bring. A year and one half was theirs; one year
and a half in which to live in safety, in which to plan and build.

* * * * *

A column, double leaded, in the _London Times_ voiced the feeling of
the world. It was copied and broadcast everywhere.

"Another attack," it concluded, "is not a probability--it is a
certainty. They are destroying us for some reason known only to
themselves. Who can doubt that when the planet returns there will be a
further bombardment; an invasion by armed forces in giant ships; bombs
dropped from them miles high in the air. This is what we must look
forward to--death and destruction dealt out by a force we are unable
to meet.

"Our munitions factories may build larger guns, but can they reach the
heights at which these monster ships of space will lie, with any faint
probability of inflicting damage? It is doubtful.

"Our aircraft is less than useless; its very name condemns it as
inept. Craft of the air!--and we have to war against space ships which
can rise beyond the thin envelope of gas that encircles the earth.

"The world is doomed--utterly and finally doomed; it is the end of
humankind; slavery to a conquering race at the very best, unless--

"Let us face the facts fairly. It is war--war to the death--between
the inhabitants of this world and of that other. We are men. What they
are God alone can say. But they are creatures of mind as are we; what
they have done, we may do.

"There is our only hope. It is vain, perhaps--preposterous in its
assumption--but our sole and only hope. We must meet the enemy and
defeat him, and we must do it on his own ground. To destroy their
fleet we must penetrate space; to silence their deadly bombardment we
must go out into space as they have done, reach their distant world
as they have reached ours, and conquer as we would have been
conquered.

"It is a tenuous hope, but our only one. Let our men of mundane
warfare do their best--it will be useless. But if there be one spark
of God-given genius in the world that can point the way to victory,
let those in authority turn no deaf ear.

"It is a battle now of minds, and the best minds will win. Humanity--all
humankind--is facing the end. In less than one year and a half we must
succeed--or perish. And unless we conquer finally and decisively, the story
of man in the history of the universe will be a tale that is told, a record
of life in a book that is ended--closed--and forgotten through all
eternity."


CHAPTER VII

A breath of a lethal gas shot from the flying ship had made Captain
Blake as helpless as if every muscle were frozen hard, and he had got
it only lightly, mixed with the saving blast of oxygen. His heart had
gone on, and his breathing, though it became shallow, did not cease;
he was even able to turn his eyes. But to the men in the observatory
room the gas from the weapons of the attacking force came as a
devastating, choking cloud that struck them senseless as if with a
blow. Lieutenant McGuire hardly heard the sound of his own pistol
before unconsciousness took him.

It was death for the men who were left--for them the quick darkness
never lifted--but for McGuire and his companion there was reprieve.

He was lying flat on a hard floor when remembrance crept slowly back
to his benumbed brain. An odor, sickish-sweet, was in his nostrils;
the breath of life was being forcibly pumped and withdrawn from
laboring lungs; a mask was tight against his face. He struggled to
throw it off, and someone bending over removed it.

Someone! His eyes stared wonderingly at the grotesque face like a
lingering phantasm of fevered dreams. There were others, he saw, and
they were working over a body not far away upon the floor. He
recognized the figure of Professor Sykes. Short, stocky, his clothes
disheveled--but Sykes, unmistakably, despite the mask upon his face.

He, too, revived as McGuire watched, and, like the flyer, he looked
wonderingly about him at his strange companions. The eyes of the two
met and held in wordless communication and astonishment.

* * * * *

The unreal creatures that hovered near withdrew to the far side of the
room. The walls beyond them were of metal, white and gleaming; there
were doorways. In another wall were portholes--round windows of thick
glass that framed circles of absolute night. It was dark out beyond
them with a blackness that was relieved only by sharp pin-points of
brilliance--stars in a night sky such as McGuire had never seen.

Past and present alike were hazy to the flyer; the spark of life had
been brought back to his body from a far distance; there was time
needed to part the unreal from the real in these new and strange
surroundings.

There were doorways in the ceiling, and others in the floor near where
he lay; ladders fastened to the wall gave access to these doors. A
grotesque figure appeared above the floor and, after a curious glance
at the two men, scrambled into the room and vanished through the
opening in the ceiling. It was some time before the significance of
this was plain to the wondering man--before he reasoned that he was in
the enemy ship, aimed outward from the earth, and the pull of
gravitation and the greater force of the vessel's constant
acceleration held its occupants to the rear walls of each room. That
lanky figure had been making its way forward toward the bow of the
ship. McGuire's mind was clearing; he turned his attention now to the
curious, waiting creatures, his captors.

There were five of them standing in the room, five shapes like men,
yet curiously, strangely, different. They were tall of stature, narrow
across the shoulders, muscular in a lean, attenuated fashion. But
their faces! McGuire found his eyes returning in horrified fascination
to each hideous, inhuman countenance.

A colorless color, like the dead gray of ashes; a skin like that of an
African savage from which all but the last vestige of color had been
drained. It was transparent, parchment-like, and even in the light of
the room that glowed from some hidden source, he could see the
throbbing lines of blood-vessels that showed livid through the
translucent skin. And he remembered, now, the fingers, half-seen in
his moments of awakening--they were like clinging tendrils, colorless,
too, in that ashy gray, and showed the network of veins as if each
hand had been flayed alive.

* * * * *

The observer found himself analyzing, comparing, trying to find some
earthly analogy for these unearthly creatures. Why did he think of
potatoes sprouting in a cellar? What possible connection had these
half-human things with that boyhood recollection? And he had seen some
laboratory experiments with plants and animals that had been cut off
from the sunlight--and now the connection was clear; he knew what this
idea was that was trying to form.

These were creatures of the dark. These bleached, drained faces showed
skin that had never known the actinic rays of the sun; their whole
framework proclaimed the process that had been going on through
countless generations. Here was a race that had lived, if not in
absolute darkness, then in some place where sunlight never shone--a
place of half-light--or of clouds.

"Clouds!" The exclamation was startled from him. And: "Clouds!" he
repeated meditatively; he was seeing again a cloud-wrapped world in
the eye-piece of a big refracting telescope. "Blanketed in clouds,"
Professor Sykes had said. The scientist himself was speaking to him
now in bewildered tones.

"Clouds?" he inquired. "That's a strange remark to make. Where are we,
Lieutenant McGuire? I remember nothing after you fired. Are we
flying--in the clouds?"

"A long, long way beyond them, is my guess," said McGuire grimly. It
was staggering what all this might mean; there was time needed for
fuller comprehension. But the lean bronzed face of the flyer flushed
with animation, and in spite of the terrors that must surely lie ahead
he felt strangely elated at the actuality of an incredible adventure.

* * * * *

Slowly he got to his feet to find that his muscles still were
reluctant to respond to orders; he helped the professor to arise. And
from the group that drew back further into the far end of the room
came a subdued and rasping tumult of discordant sound.

One, seemingly in charge, held a weapon in his hand, a slender tube no
thicker than a common wire; and ending in a cylinder within the
creature's hand. He pointed it in threatening fashion while his voice
rose in a shrill call. McGuire and Professor Sykes stood quiet and
waited for what the next moment might have in store, but McGuire waved
the weapon aside in a gesture that none could fail to read.

"Steady," he told his companion. "We're in a ticklish position. Do
nothing to alarm them."

From up above them came an answering shrill note. Another of the
beings was descending into the room.

"Ah!" said Lieutenant McGuire softly, "the big boss, himself. Now
let's see what will happen."

If there had seemed something of timidity in the repulsive faces of
the waiting creatures, this newcomer was of a different type. He
opened flabby thin lips to give one sharp note of command. It was as
sibilant as the hissing of a snake. The man with the weapon returned
it to a holder at his side; the whole group cringed before the power
and authority of the new arrival.

The men that they had seen thus far were all garbed alike; a
loose-fitting garment of one piece that was ludicrously like the play
rompers that children might wear. These were dull red in color, the
red of drying blood, made of strong woven cloth. But this other was
uniformed differently.

McGuire noted the fineness of the silky robe. Like the others this was
made of one piece, loosely fitting, but its bright vivid scarlet made
the first seem drab and dull. A belt of metal about his waist shone
like gold and matched the emblem of precious metal in the turban on
his head.

* * * * *

All this the eyes of the flyer took in at a glance; his attention was
only momentarily diverted from the ashen face with eyes narrow and
slitted, that stared with the cold hatred of a cat into those of the
men.

He made a sound with a whistling breath. It seemed to be a question
directed to them, but the import of it was lost.

"An exceedingly queer lot," Professor Sykes observed. "And this chap
seems distinctly hostile."

"He's no friend of mine," said McGuire as the thin, pendulous lips
repeated their whistling interrogation.

"I can't place them," mused the scientist. "Those facial
characteristics.... But they must be of some nationality, speak some
tongue."

He addressed himself to the figure with the immobile, horrid face.

"We do not understand you," he said with an ingratiating smile.
"_Comprenez vous Francaise?_... _Non?_"... German, perhaps, or
Spanish?... "_Sprecken sie Deutsche?_ _Usted habla Espanola?_..."

He followed with a fusillade of questions in strange and varying
tongues. "I've even tried him with Chinese," he protested in
bewilderment and stared amazed at his companion's laughter.

There had to be a reaction from the strain of the past hours, and
Lieutenant McGuire found the serious questioning in polyglot tongues
and the unchanging feline stare of that hideous face too much for his
mental restraint. He held his sides, while he shook and roared with
laughter beyond control, and the figure before him glared with evident
disapproval of his mirth.

* * * * *

There was a hissing order, and two figures from the corner sprang
forward to seize the flyer with long clinging fingers. Their strength
he had overestimated, for a violent throw of his body twisted him
free, and his outstretched hands sent the two sprawling across the
room. Their leader took one quick step forward, then paused as if
hesitating to meet this young adversary.

"Do go easy," Professor Sykes was imploring. "We do not know where we
are nor who they are, but we must do nothing to antagonize them."

McGuire had reacted from his hilarious seizure with an emotional swing
to the opposite extreme. "I'll break their damn necks," he growled,
"if they get rough with me." And his narrow eyes exchanged glare for
glare with those in the face like blood and ashes before him.

The cold cat eyes held steadily upon him while the scarlet figure
retreated. A louder call, shrill and vibrant, came from the thin lips,
and a swarm of bodies in dull red were scrambling into the room to
mass about their scarlet leader. Above and behind them the face under
its brilliant turban and golden clasp was glaring in triumph.

The tall figures crouched, grotesque and awkward; their long arms and
hands with grasping, tendril-like fingers were ready. McGuire waited
for the sharp hissing order that would throw these things upon him,
and he met the attack when it came with his own shoulders dropped to
the fighter's pose, head drawn in close and both fists swinging free.

There were lean fingers clutching at his throat, a press of blood-red
bodies thick about him, and a clustering of faces where color blotched
and flowed.

The thud of fists in blows that started from the floor was new to
these lean creatures that clawed and clung like cats. But they
trampled on those who went down before the flyer's blows and stood
upon them to spring at his head; they crowded in in overwhelming
numbers while their red hands tore and twined about his face.

* * * * *

It was no place now for long swings; McGuire twisted his body and
threw his weight into quick short jabs at the faces before him. He was
clear for an instant and swung his heavy boot at something that clung
to one leg; then met with a rain of hooks and short punches the faces
that closed in again. He saw in that instant a wild whirl of bodies
where the stocky figure of Professor Sykes was smothered beneath his
taller antagonists. But the professor, if he was forgetting the
science of the laboratory, was remembering that of the squared
circle--and the battle was not entirely one sided.

McGuire was free; the blood was trickling down his face from
innumerable cuts where sharp-nailed fingers had sunk deep. He wiped
the red stream from his eyes and threw himself at the weaving mass of
bodies that eddied about Sykes in frantic struggle across the room.

The face of the professor showed clear for a moment. Like McGuire he
was bleeding, and his breath came in short explosive gasps, but he was
holding his own! The eyes of McGuire glimpsed a wildly gesticulating,
shouting figure in the rear. The face, contorted with rage, was almost
the color of the brilliant scarlet that the creature wore. The
blood-stained man in khaki left his companion to fight his own battle,
and plunged headlong at a leaping cluster of dull red, smashed through
with a frenzied attack of straight rights and lefts, and freed himself
to make one final leap at the leader of this unholy pack.

He was fighting in blind desperation now; the two were out-numbered by
the writhing, lean-bodied creatures, and this thing that showed in
blurred crimson before him was the directing power of them all. The
figure symbolized and personified to the raging man all the repulsive
ugliness of the leaping horde. The face came clear before him through
the mist of blood, and he put the last ounce of his remaining strength
and every pound of weight behind a straight, clean drive with his
right fist.

His last conscious impression was of a red, clawing hand that was
closed around the thick butt of a tube of steel ... then down, and
still down, he plunged into a bottomless pit of whirling, red flashes
and choking fumes....

There were memories that were to occur to Lieutenant McGuire
afterward--visions, dim and hazy and blurred, of half-waking moments
when strange creatures forced food and water into his mouth, then held
a mask upon his face while he resisted weakly the breathing of sweet,
sickly fumes that sent him back to unconsciousness.

There were many such times; some when he came sufficiently awake to
know that Sykes was lying near him, receiving similar care. Their
lives were being preserved: How, or why, or what life might hold in
store he neither knew nor cared; the mask and the deep-drawn fumes
brought stupor and numbness to his brain.

A window was in the floor beside him when he awoke--a circular window of
thick glass or quartz. But no longer did it frame a picture of a sky in
velvet blackness; no unwinking pin-points of distant stars pricked keenly
through the night; but, clear and dazzling, came a blessed radiance that
could mean only sunshine. A glowing light that was dazzling to his
sleep-filled eyes, it streamed in golden--beautiful--to light the
unfamiliar room and show motionless upon the floor the figure of Professor
Sykes. His torn clothing had been neatly arranged, and his face showed
livid lines of healing cuts and bruises.

McGuire tried gingerly to move his arms and legs; they were still
functioning though stiff and weak from disuse. He raised himself
slowly and stood swaying on his feet, then made his uncertain way to
his companion and shook him weakly by the shoulder.

Professor Sykes breathed deeply and raised leaden lids from tired eyes
to stare uncomprehendingly at McGuire. Soon his dark pupils ceased to
dilate, and he, too, could see their prison and the light of day.

"Sunlight!" he said in a thin voice, and he seemed to know now that
they were in the air; "I wonder--I wonder--if we shall land--what
country? ... Some wilderness and a strange race--a strange, strange
race!"

He was muttering half to himself; the mystery of these people whom he
could not identify was still troubling him.

* * * * *

McGuire helped the other man to his feet, and they clung to each to
the other for support as they crossed to kneel beside the floor-window
and learn finally where their captors meant to take them.

A wilderness, indeed, the sight that met their eyes, but a wilderness
of clouds--no unfamiliar sight to Lieutenant McGuire of the United
States Army air service. But to settle softly into them instead of
driving through with glistening wings--this was new and vastly
different from anything he had known.

Sounds came to them in the silence, penetrating faintly through thick
walls--the same familiar wailing call that trembled and quavered and
seemed to the listening men to be guiding them down through the mist.

Gone was the sunlight, and the clouds beyond the deep-set window were
gloriously ablaze with a brilliance softly diffused. The cloud bank
was deep, and they felt the craft under them sink slowly, steadily
into the misty embrace. It thinned below them to drifting vapor, and
the first hazy shadows of the ground showed through from far beneath.
Their altitude, the flyer knew, was still many thousands of feet.

"Water," said McGuire, as his trained eyes made plain to him what was
still indistinct to the scientist. "An ocean--and a shore-line--" More
clouds obscured the view; they parted suddenly to show a portion only
of a clear-cut map.

* * * * *

It stretched beyond the confines of their window, that unfamiliar line
of wave-marked shore; the water was like frozen gold, wrinkled in
countless tiny corrugations and reflecting the bright glow from above.
But the land,--that drew their eyes!

Were those cities, those shadow-splashed areas of gray and rose?...
The last veiling clouds dissolved, and the whole circle was plain to
their view.

The men leaned forward, breathless, intent, till the scientist,
Sykes--the man whose eyes had seen and whose brain recorded a dim
shape in the lens of a great telescope--Sykes drew back with a
quivering, incredulous breath. For below them, so plain, so
unmistakable, there lay an island, large even from this height, and it
formed on this round map a sharp angle like a great letter "L."

"We shall know that if we ever see it again," Professor Sykes had
remarked in the quiet and security of that domed building surmounting
the heights of Mount Lawson. But he said nothing now, as he stared at
his companion with eyes that implored McGuire to arouse him from this
sleep, this dream that could never be real. But McGuire, lieutenant
one-time in the forces of the U. S. A., had seen it too, and he stared
back with a look that gave dreadful confirmation.

The observatory--Mount Lawson--the earth!--those were the things
unreal and far away. And here before them, in brain-stunning
actuality, were the markings unmistakable--the markings of Venus. And
they were landing, these two, in the company of creatures wild and
strange as the planet--on Venus itself!

(_To be continued._)

* * * * *

[Advertisement: ]