The Project Gutenberg eBook of The prince of space

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Title: The prince of space

Author: Jack Williamson

Illustrator: Leo Morey

Release date: June 1, 2024 [eBook #73750]

Language: English

Original publication: Jamaica, NY: Experimenter Publications Inc, 1931

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCE OF SPACE ***

The Prince of Space

By Jack Williamson

Author of "The Metal Man," "The Green Girl," etc.

Illustrated by MOREY

Even the Lick Observatory, which was built at the summit of Mount Wilson, 5885 feet high, at tremendous expense, cannot satisfy the astronomers. An observatory that would reach about twice that height, such as the one built by the scientist in this story, would be more likely to hit the mark. Certainly, the views obtained of the Moon, and even of Mars, through our present apparently gigantic telescopes, undoubtedly call for a higher observatory, fitted with a more enormous telescope, which will some day be established. What may be seen then cannot be foretold with certainty. But that's where the imagination—with scientific visualizations—enters. Mr. Williamson's writing is not new to our readers. At that, this story is sure to make stronger friends for him, and add many new ones to his ever fast-growing list of admirers.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories January 1931.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

CHAPTER I

Ten Million Eagles Reward!

"Space Flier Found Drifting with Two Hundred Dead! Notorious Interplanetary Pirate—Prince of Space—Believed to Have Committed Ghastly Outrage!"

Mr. William Windsor, a hard-headed, grim-visaged newspaperman of forty, stood nonchalantly on the moving walk that swept him briskly down Fifth Avenue. He smiled with pardonable pride as he listened to the raucous magnetic speakers shouting out the phrases that drew excited mobs to the robot vending machines which sold the yet-damp news strips of printed shorthand. Bill had written the account of the outrage; he had risked his life in a mad flight upon a hurtling sunship to get his concise story to New York in time to beat his competitors. Discovering the inmost details of whatever was puzzling or important or exciting in this day of 2131, regardless of risk to life or limb, and elucidating those details to the ten million avid readers of the great daily newspaper, The Herald-Sun, was the prime passion of Bill's life.

Incidentally, the reader might be warned at this point that Bill is not, properly speaking, a character in this narrative; he is only an observer. The real hero is that amazing person who has chosen to call himself "The Prince of Space." This history is drawn from Bill's diary, which he kept conscientiously, expecting to write a book of the great adventure.

Bill stepped off the moving sidewalk by the corner vending machine, dropped a coin in the slot, and received a copy of the damp shorthand strip delivered fresh from the presses by magnetic tube. He read his story, standing in a busy street that rustled quietly with the whir of moving walks and the barely audible drone of the thousands of electrically driven heliocars which spun smoothly along on rubber-tired wheels, or easily lifted themselves to skimming flight upon whirling helicopters.

Heliographic advices from the Moon Patrol flier Avenger state that the sunship Helicon was found today, at 16:19, Universal Time, drifting two thousand miles off the lunar lane. The locks were open, air had escaped, all on board were frozen and dead. Casualties include Captain Stormburg, the crew of 71 officers and men, and 132 passengers, of whom 41 were women. The Helicon was bound to Los Angeles from the lunarium health resorts at Tycho on the Moon. It is stated that the bodies were barbarously torn and mutilated, as if the most frightful excesses had been perpetrated upon them. The cargo of the sunship had been looted. The most serious loss is some thousands of tubes of the new radioactive metal, vitalium, said to have been worth nearly a million eagles.

A crew was put aboard the Helicon from the Avenger, her valves were closed, and she will be brought under her own motor tubes to the interplanetary base at Miami, Florida, where a more complete official examination will be made. No attempt has been made to identify the bodies of the dead. The passenger list is printed below.

Military officials are inclined to place blame for the outrage upon the notorious interplanetary outlaw, who calls himself "The Prince of Space." On several occasions the "Prince" has robbed sunships of cargoes of vitalium, though he has never before committed so atrocious a deed as the murder of scores of innocent passengers. It is stated that the engraved calling card, which the "Prince" is said always to present to the captain of a captured sunship, was not found on the wreck.

Further details will be given the public as soon as it is possible to obtain them.

The rewards offered for the "Prince of Space," taken dead or alive, have been materially increased since the outrage. The total offered by the International Confederation, Interplanetary Transport, Lunar Mining Corporation, Sunship Corporation, Vitalium Power Company, and various other societies, corporations, newspapers, and individuals, is now ten million eagles.

"Ten million eagles!" Bill exclaimed. "That would mean a private heliocar, and a long, long vacation in the South Seas!"

He snorted, folded up the little sheet and thrust it into his green silk tunic, as he sprang nimbly upon the moving sidewalk.

"What chance have I to see the Prince of Space?"

About him, the slender spires of widely spaced buildings rose two hundred stories into a blue sky free from dust or smoke. The white sun glinted upon thousands of darting heliocars, driven by silent electricity. He threw back his head, gazed longingly up at an amazing structure that rose beside him—at a building that was the architectural wonder of the twenty-second century.

Begun in 2125, Trainor's Tower had been finished hardly a year. A slender white finger of aluminum and steel alloy, it rose twelve thousand feet above the canyons of the metropolis. Architects had laughed, six years ago, when Dr. Trainor, who had been an obscure western college professor, had returned from a vacation trip to the moon and announced his plans for a tower high enough to carry an astronomical observatory giving mountain conditions. A building five times as high as any in existence! It was folly, they said. And certain skeptics inquired how an impecunious professor would get funds to put it up. The world had been mildly astonished when the work began. It was astounded when it was known that the slender tower had safely reached its full height of nearly two and a half miles. A beautiful thing it was, in its slim strength—girder-work of glistening white metal near the ground, and but a slender white cylinder for the upper thousands of feet of its amazing height.

The world developed a hungry curiosity about the persons who had the privilege of ascending in a swift elevator to the queer, many-storied cylindrical building atop the astounding tower. Bill had spent many hours in the little waiting room before the locked door of the elevator shaft—bribes to the guard had been a heavy drain upon a generous expense account. But not even bribery had won him into the sacred elevator.

He had given his paper something, however, of the persons who passed sometimes through the waiting room. There was Dr. Trainor, of course, a mild, bald man, with kindly blue eyes and a slow, patient smile. And Paula, his vivaciously beautiful daughter, a slim, small girl, with amazingly expressive eyes. She had been with her father on the voyage to the moon. Scores of others had passed through; they ranged from janitors and caretakers to some of the world's most distinguished astronomers and solar engineers—but they were uniformly reticent about what went on in Trainor's Tower.

And there was Mr. Cain—"The mysterious Mr. Cain," as Bill had termed him. He had seen him twice, a slender man, tall and wiry, lean of face, with dark, quizzical eyes. The reporter had been able to learn nothing about him—and what Bill could not unearth was a very deep secret. It seemed that sometimes Cain was about Trainor's Tower and that more often he was not. It was rumored that he had advanced funds for building it and for carrying on the astronomical research for which it was evidently intended.

Impelled by habit, Bill sprang off the moving walk as he glided past Trainor's Tower. He was standing, watching the impassive guard, when a man came past into the street. The man was Mr. Cain, with a slight smile upon the thin, dark face that was handsome in a stern, masculine sort of way. Bill started, pricked up his ears, so to speak, and resolved not to let this mysterious young man out of sight until he knew something about him.

To Bill's vast astonishment, Mr. Cain advanced toward him, with a quick, decisive step, and a speculative gleam lurking humorously in his dark eyes. He spoke without preamble.

"I believe you are Mr. William Windsor, a leading representative of the Herald-Sun."

"True. And you are Mr. Cain—the mysterious Mr. Cain!"

The tall young man smiled pleasantly.

"Yes. In fact, I think the 'mysterious' is due to you. But Mr. Windsor——"

"Just call me Bill."

"——I believe that you are desirous of admission to the Tower."

"I've done my best to get in."

"I am going to offer you the facts you want about it, provided you will publish them only with my permission."

"Thanks!" Bill agreed. "You can trust me."

"I have a reason. Trainor's Tower was built for a purpose. That purpose is going to require some publicity very shortly. You are better able to supply that publicity than any other man in the world."

"I can do it—provided——"

"I am sure that our cause is one that will enlist your enthusiastic support. You will be asked to do nothing dishonorable."

Mr. Cain took a thin white card from his pocket, scrawled rapidly upon it, and handed it to Bill, who read the words, "Admit bearer. Cain."

"Present that at the elevator, at eight tonight. Ask to be taken to Dr. Trainor."

Mr. Cain walked rapidly away, with his lithe, springy step, leaving Bill standing, looking at the card, rather astounded.

At eight that night, a surprised guard let Bill into the waiting room. The elevator attendant looked at the card.

"Yes. Dr. Trainor is up in the observatory."

The car shot up, carrying Bill on the longest vertical trip on earth. It was minutes before the lights on the many floors of the cylindrical building atop the tower were flashing past them. The elevator stopped. The door swung open, and Bill stepped out beneath the crystal dome of an astronomical observatory.

He was on the very top of Trainor's Tower.

The hot stars shone, hard and clear, through a metal-ribbed dome of polished vitrolite. Through the lower panels of the transparent wall, Bill could see the city spread below him—a mosaic of fine points of light, scattered with the colored winking eyes of electric signs; it was so far below that it seemed a city in miniature.

Slanting through the crystal dome was the huge black barrel of a telescope, with ponderous equatorial mounting. Electric motors whirred silently in its mechanism, and little lights winked about it. A man was seated at the eyepiece—he was Dr. Trainor, Bill saw—he was dwarfed by the huge size of the instrument.

There was no other person in the room, no other instrument of importance. The massive bulk of the telescope dominated it.

Trainor rose and came to meet Bill. A friendly smile spread over his placid face. Blue eyes twinkled with mild kindliness. The subdued light in the room glistened on the bald dome of his head.

"Mr. Windsor, of the Herald-Sun, I suppose?" Bill nodded, and produced a notebook. "I am very glad you came. I have something interesting to show you. Something on the planet Mars."

"What——"

"No. No questions, please. They can wait until you see Mr. Cain again."

Reluctantly, Bill closed his notebook. Trainor seated himself at the telescope, and Bill waited while he peered into the tube, and pressed buttons and moved bright levers. Motors whirred, and the great barrel swung about.

"Now look," Trainor commanded.

Bill took the seat, and peered into the eyepiece. He saw a little circle of a curious luminous blue-blackness, with a smaller disk of light hanging in it, slightly swaying. The disk was an ocherous red, with darker splotches and brilliantly white polar markings.

"That is Mars—as the ordinary astronomer sees it," Trainor said. "Now I will change eyepieces, and you will see it as no man has ever seen it except through this telescope."

Rapidly he adjusted the great instrument, and Bill looked again.

The red disk had expanded enormously, with great increase of detail. It had become a huge red globe, with low mountains and irregularities of surface plainly visible. The prismatic polar caps stood out with glaring whiteness. Dark, green-gray patches, splotched burned orange deserts, and thin, green-black lines—the controversial "canals" of Mars—ran straight across the planet, from white caps toward the darker equatorial zone, intersecting at little round greenish dots.

"Look carefully," Trainor said. "What do you see in the edge of the upper right quadrant, near the center of the disk and just above the equator?"

Bill peered, saw a tiny round dot of blue—it was very small, but sharply edged, perfectly round, bright against the dull red of the planet.

"I see a little blue spot."

"I'm afraid you see the death-sentence of humanity!"

Ordinarily Bill might have snorted—newspapermen are apt to become exceedingly skeptical. But there was something in the gravity of Trainor's words, and in the strangeness of what he had seen through the giant telescope in the tower observatory, that made him pause.

"There's been a lot of fiction," Bill finally remarked, "in the last couple of hundred years. Wells' old book, 'The War of the Worlds,' for example. General theory seems to be that the Martians are drying up and want to steal water. But I never really——"

"I don't know what the motive may be," Trainor said. "But we know that Mars has intelligent life—the canals are proof of that. And we have excellent reason to believe that that life knows of us, and intends us no good. You remember the Envers Expedition?"

"Yes. In 2099. Envers was a fool who thought that if a sunship could go to the moon, it might go to Mars just as well. He must have been struck by meteorites."

"There is no reason why Envers might not have reached Mars in 2100," said Trainor. "The heliographic dispatches continued until he was well over half way. There was no trouble then. We have very good reason to think that he landed, that his return was prevented by intelligent beings on Mars. We know that they are using what they learned from his captured sunship to launch an interplanetary expedition of their own!"

"And that blue spot has something to do with it?"

"We think so. But I have authority to tell you nothing more. As the situation advances, we will have need for newspaper publicity. We want you to take charge of that. Mr. Cain, of course, is in supreme charge. You will remember your word to await his permission to publish anything."

Trainor turned again to the telescope.

With a little clatter, the elevator stopped again at the entrance door of the observatory. A slender girl ran from it across to the man at the telescope.

"My daughter Paula, Mr. Windsor," said Trainor.

Paula Trainor was an exquisite being. Her large eyes glowed with a peculiar shade of changing brown. Black hair was shingled close to her shapely head. Her face was small, elfinly beautiful, the skin almost transparent. But it was the eyes that were remarkable. In their lustrous depths sparkled mingled essence of childish innocence, intuitive, age-old wisdom, and quick intelligence—intellect that was not coldly reasonable, but effervescent, flashing to instinctively correct conclusions. It was an oddly baffling face, revealing only the mood of the moment. One could not look at it and say that its owner was good or bad, indulgent or stern, gentle or hard. It could be, if she willed, the perfect mirror of the moment's thought—but the deep stream of her character flowed unrevealed behind it.

Bill looked at her keenly, noted all that, engraved the girl in the notebook of his memory. But in her he saw only an interesting feature story.

"Dad's been telling you about the threatened invasion from Mars, eh?" she inquired in a low, husky voice, liquid and delicious. "The most thrilling thing, isn't it? Aren't we lucky to know about it, and to be in the fight against it!—instead of going on like all the rest of the world, not dreaming there is danger?"

Bill agreed with her.

"Think of it! We may even go to Mars, to fight 'em on their own ground!"

"Remember, Paula," Trainor cautioned. "Don't tell Mr. Windsor too much."

"All right, Dad."

Again the little clatter of the elevator. Mr. Cain had come into the observatory, a tall, slender young man, with a quizzical smile, and eyes dark and almost as enigmatic as Paula's.

Bill, watching the vivacious girl, saw her smile at Cain. He saw her quick flush, her unconscious tremor. He guessed that she had some deep feeling for the man. But he seemed unaware of it. He merely nodded to the girl, glanced at Dr. Trainor, and spoke briskly to Bill.

"Excuse me, Mr. Win—er, Bill, but I wish to see Dr. Trainor alone. We will communicate with you when it seems necessary. In the meanwhile, I trust you to forget what you have seen here tonight, and what the Doctor has told you. Good evening."

Bill, of necessity, stepped upon the elevator. Five minutes later he left Trainor's Tower. Glancing up from the vividly bright, bustling street, with its moving ways and darting heliocars, he instinctively expected to see the starry heavens that had been in view from the observatory.

But a heavy cloud, like a canopy of yellow silk in the light that shone upon it from the city, hung a mile above. The upper thousands of feet of the slender tower were out of sight above the clouds.

After breakfast next morning Bill bought a shorthand news strip from a robot purveyor. In amazement and some consternation he read:

PRINCE OF SPACE RAIDS TRAINOR'S TOWER

Last night, hidden by the clouds that hung above the city, the daring interplanetary outlaw, the self-styled Prince of Space, suspected of the Helicon outrage, raided Trainor's Tower. Dr. Trainor, his daughter Paula, and a certain Mr. Cain are thought to have been abducted, since they are reported to be missing this morning.

It is thought that the raiding ship drew herself against the Tower, and used her repulsion rays to cut through the walls. Openings sufficiently large to admit the body of a man were found this morning in the metal outer wall, it is said.

There can be no doubt that the raider was the "Prince of Space" since a card engraved with that title was left upon a table. This is the first time the pirate has been known to make a raid on the surface of the earth—or so near it as the top of Trainor's Tower.

Considerable alarm is being felt as a result of this and the Helicon outrage of yesterday. Stimulated by the reward of ten million eagles, energetic efforts will be made on the part of the Moon Patrol to run down this notorious character.

CHAPTER II

Bloodhounds of Space

Two days later Bill jumped from a landing heliocar, presented his credentials as special correspondent, and was admitted to the Lakehurst base of the Moon Patrol. Nine slender sunships lay at the side of the wide, high-fenced field, just in front of their sheds. In the brilliant morning sunlight they scintillated like nine huge octagonal ingots of polished silver.

These war-fliers of the Moon Patrol were eight-sided, about twenty feet in diameter and a hundred long. Built of steel and the new aluminum bronzes, with broad vision panels of heavy vitrolite, each carried sixteen huge positive ray tubes. These mammoth vacuum tubes, operated at enormous voltages from vitalium batteries, were little different in principle from the "canal ray" apparatus of some centuries before. Their "positive rays," or streams of atoms which had lost one or more electrons, served to drive the sunship by reaction—by the well-known principle of the rocket motor.

And the sixteen tubes mounted in twin rings about each vessel served equally well as weapons. When focused on a point, the impact-pressure of their rays equaled that of the projectile from an ancient cannon. Metal in the positive ray is heated to fusion, living matter carbonized and burned away. And the positive charge carried by the ray is sufficient to electrocute any living being in contact with it.

This Moon Patrol fleet of nine sunships was setting out in pursuit of the Prince of Space, the interplanetary buccaneer who had abducted Paula Trainor and her father, and the enigmatic Mr. Cain. Bill was going aboard as special correspondent for the Herald-Sun.

On the night before the Helicon, the sunship which had been attacked in space, had been docked at Miami by the rescue crew put aboard from the Avenger. The world had been thrown into a frenzy by the report of the men who had examined the two hundred dead on board.

"Blood sucked from Helicon victims!" the loud speakers were croaking. "Mystery of lost sunship upsets world! Medical examination of the two hundred corpses found on the wrecked space flier show that the blood had been drawn from the bodies, apparently through curious circular wounds about the throat and trunk. Every victim bore scores of these inexplicable scars. Medical men will not attempt to explain how the wounds might have been made.

"In a more superstitious age, it might be feared that the Prince of Space is not man at all, but a weird vampire out of the void. And, in fact, it has been seriously suggested that, since the wounds observed could have been made by no animal known on earth, the fiend may be a different form of life, from another planet."

Bill found Captain Brand, leader of the expedition, just going on board the slender, silver Fury, flagship of the fleet of nine war-fliers. He had sailed before with this bluff, hard-fighting guardsman of the space lanes; he was given a hearty welcome.

"Hunting down the Prince is a good-sized undertaking, from all appearances," Bill observed.

"Rather," big, red-faced Captain Brand agreed. "We have been after him seven or eight times in the past few years—but I think his ship has never been seen. He must have captured a dozen commercial sunships."

"You know, I rather admire the Prince—" Bill said, "or did until that Helicon affair. But the way those passengers were treated is simply unspeakable. Blood sucked out!"

"It is hard to believe that the Prince is responsible for that. He has never needlessly murdered anyone before—for all the supplies and money and millions worth of vitalium he has taken. And he has always left his engraved card—except on the Helicon.

"But anyhow, we blow him to eternity on sight!"

The air-lock was open before them, and they walked through, and made their way along the ladder (now horizontal, since the ship lay on her side) to the bridge in the bow. Bill looked alertly around the odd little room, with its vitrolite dome and glistening instruments, while Captain Brand flashed signals to the rest of the fleet for sealing the locks and tuning the motor ray generators.

A red rocket flared from the Fury. White lances of flame darted from the down-turned vacuum tubes. As one, the nine ships lifted themselves from the level field. Deliberately they upturned from horizontal to vertical positions. Upward they flashed through the air, with slender white rays of light shooting back from the eight rear tubes of each.

Bill, standing beneath the crystal dome, felt the turning of the ship. He felt the pressure of his feet against the floor, caused by acceleration, and sat down in a convenient padded chair. He watched the earth become a great bowl, with sapphire sea on the one hand and green-brown land and diminishing, smokeless city on the other. He watched the hazy blue sky become deepest azure, then black, with a million still stars bursting out in pure colors of yellow and red and blue. He looked down again, and saw the earth become convex, an enormous bright globe, mistily visible through haze or air and cloud.

Swiftly the globe drew away. And a tiny ball of silver, half black, half rimmed with blinding flame, sharply marked with innumerable round craters, swam into view beyond the misty edge of the globe—it was the moon.

Beyond them flamed the sun—a ball of blinding light, winged with a crimson sheet of fire—hurling quivering lances of white heat through the vitrolite panels. Blinding it was to look upon it, unless one wore heavily tinted goggles.

Before them hung the abysmal blackness of space, with the canopy of cold hard stars blazing as tiny scintillant points of light, at an infinite distance away. The Galaxy was a broad belt of silvery radiance about them, set with ten thousand many-colored jewels of fire. Somewhere in the vastness of that void they sought a daring man, who laughed at society, and called himself the Prince of Space.

The nine ships spread out, a thousand miles apart. Flickering heliographs—swinging mirrors that reflected the light of the sun—kept them in communication with bluff Captain Brand, while many men at telescopes scanned the black, star-studded sweep of space for the pirate of the void.

Days went by, measured only by chronometer, for the winged, white sun burned ceaselessly. The earth had shrunk to a little ball of luminous green, bright on the sunward side, splotched with the dazzling white of cloud patches and polar caps.

Sometimes the black vitalium wings were spread, to catch the energy of the sun. The sunship draws its name from the fact that it is driven by solar power. It utilizes the remarkable properties of the rare radioactive metal, vitalium, which is believed to be the very basis of life, since it was first discovered to exist in minute traces in those complex substances so necessary to all life, the vitamins. Large deposits were discovered at Kepler and elsewhere on the moon during the twenty-first century. Under the sun's rays vitalium undergoes a change to triatomic form, storing up the vast energy of sunlight. The vitalium plates from the sunshine are built into batteries with alternate sheets of copper, from which the solar energy may be drawn in the form of electric current. As the battery discharges, the vitalium reverts to its stabler allotropic form, and may be used again and again. The Vitalium Power Company's plants in Arizona, Chili, Australia, the Sahara, and the Gobi now furnish most of the earth's power. The sunship, recharging its vitalium batteries in space, can cruise indefinitely.

It was on the fifth day out from Lakehurst. The Fury, with her sister ships spread out some thousands of miles to right and left, was cruising at five thousand miles per hour, at heliocentric elevation 93.243546, ecliptic declination 7°, 18' 46" north, right ascension XIX hours, 20 min., 31 sec. The earth was a little green globe beside her, and the moon a thin silver crescent beyond.

"Object ahead!" called a lookout in the domed pilot-house of the Fury, turning from his telescope to where Captain Brand and Bill stood smoking, comfortably held to the floor by the ship's acceleration. "In Scorpio, about five degrees above Antares. Distance fifteen thousand miles. It seems to be round and blue."

"The Prince, at last!" Brand chuckled, an eager grin on his square chinned face, light of battle flashing in his blue eyes.

He gave orders that set the heliographic mirrors flickering signals for all nine of the Moon Patrol fliers to converge about the strange object, in a great crescent. The black fins that carried the charging vitalium plates were drawn in, and the full power of the motor ray tubes thrown on, to drive ahead each slender silver flier at the limit of her acceleration.

Four telescopes from the Fury were turned upon the strange object. Captain Brand and Bill took turns peering through one of them. When Bill looked, he saw the infinite black gulf of space, silvered with star-dust of distant nebulae. Hanging in the blackness was an azure sphere, gleaming bright as a great globe cut from turquoise. Bill was reminded of a similar blue globe he had seen—when he had stood at the enormous telescope on Trainor's Tower, and watched a little blue circle against the red deserts of Mars.

Brand took two or three observations, figured swiftly.

"It's moving," he said. "About fourteen thousand miles per hour. Funny! It is moving directly toward the earth, almost from the direction of the planet Mars. I wonder——" He seized the pencil, figured again. "Queer. That thing seems headed for the earth, from a point on the orbit of Mars, where that planet was about forty days ago. Do you suppose the Martians are paying us a visit?"

"Then it's not the Prince of Space?"

"I don't know. Its direction might be just a coincidence. And the Prince might be a Martian, for all I know. Anyhow, we're going to find what that blue globe is!"

Two hours later the nine sunships were drawn up in the form of a great half circle, closing swiftly on the blue globe, which had been calculated to be about one hundred feet in diameter. The sunships were nearly a thousand miles from the globe, and scattered along a curved line two thousand miles in length. Captain Brand gave orders for eight forward tubes on each flier to be made ready for use as weapons. From his own ship he flashed a heliographic signal.

"The Fury, of the Moon Patrol, demands that you show ship's papers, identification tags for all passengers, and submit to search for contraband."

The message was three times repeated, but no reply came from the azure globe. It continued on its course. The slender white sunships came plunging swiftly toward it, until the crescent they formed was not two hundred miles between the points, the blue globe not a hundred miles from the war-fliers.

Then Bill, with his eye at a telescope, saw a little spark of purple light appear beside the blue globe. A tiny, bright point of violet-red fire, with a white line running from it, back to the center of the sphere. The purple spark grew, the white line lengthened. Abruptly, the newspaperman realized that the purple was an object hurtling toward him with incredible speed.

Even as the realization burst upon him, the spark became visible as a little red-blue sphere, brightly luminous. A white beam shone behind it, seemed to push it with ever-increasing velocity. The purple globe shot past, vanished. The white ray snapped out.

"A weapon!" he exclaimed.

"A weapon and a warning!" said Brand, still peering through another eyepiece. "And we reply!"

"Heliograph!" he shouted into a speaking tube. "Each ship will open with one forward tube, operating one second twelve times per minute. Increase power of rear tubes to compensate repulsion."

White shields flickered. Blindingly brilliant rays, straight bars of dazzling opalescence, burst intermittently from each of the nine ships, striking across a hundred miles of space to batter the blue globe with a hail of charged atoms.

Again a purple spark appeared from the sapphire globe, with a beam of white fire behind it. A tiny purple globe, hurtling at an inconceivable velocity before a lance of white flame. It reached out, with a certain deliberation, yet too quickly for a man to do more than see it.

It struck a sunship, at one tip of the crescent formation.

A dazzling flash of violet flame burst out. The tiny globe seemed to explode into a huge flare of red-blue light. And where the slim, eight-sided ship had been was a crushed and twisted mass of metal.

"A solid projectile!" Brand cried. "And driven on the positive ray! Our experts have tried it, but the ray always exploded the shell. And that was some explosion! I don't know what—unless atomic energy!"

The eight sunships that remained were closing swiftly upon the blue globe. The dazzling white rays flashed intermittently from them. They struck the blue globe squarely—the fighting crews of the Moon Patrol are trained until their rays are directed with deadly accuracy. The azure sphere, unharmed, shone with bright radiance—it seemed that a thin mist of glittering blue particles was gathering about it, like a dust of powdered sapphires.

Another purple spark leapt from the turquoise globe.

In the time that it took a man's eyes to move from globe to slim, glistening sunship, the white ray had driven the purple spark across the distance. Another vivid flash of violet light. And another sunship became a hurtling mass of twisted wreckage.

"We are seven!" Brand quoted grimly.

"Heliograph!" he shouted into the mouthpiece. "Fire all forward tubes one second twenty times a minute. Increase rear power to maximum."

White rays burst from the seven darting sunships, flashing off and on. That sapphire globe grew bright, with a strange luminosity. The thin mist of sparkling blue particles seemed to grow more dense about it.

"Our rays don't seem to be doing any good," Brand muttered, puzzled. "The blue about that globe must be some sort of vibratory screen."

Another purple spark, with the narrow white line of fire behind it, swept across to the flier from the opposite horn of the crescent, burst into a sheet of blinding red-violet light. Another ship was a twisted mass of metal.

"Seven no longer!" Brand called grimly to Bill.

"Looks as if the Prince has got us beaten!" the reporter cried.

"Not while a ship can fight!" exclaimed the Captain. "This is the Moon Patrol!"

Another tiny purple globe traced its line of light across the black, star-misted sky. Another sunship crumpled in a violet flash.

"They're picking 'em off the ends," Bill observed. "We're in the middle, so I guess we're last."

"Then," said Captain Brand, "we've got time to ram 'em."

"Control!" he shouted into the speaking tube. "Cut off forward tubes and make all speed for the enemy. Heliograph! Fight to the end! I am going to ram them!"

Another red-blue spark moved with its quick deliberation. A purple flash left another ship in twisted ruin.

Bill took his eye from the telescope. The blue globe, bright under the rays, with the sapphire mist sparkling about it, was only twenty miles away. He could see it with his naked eye, drifting swiftly among the familiar stars of Scorpio.

It grew larger very swiftly.

With the quickness of thought, the purple sparks moved out alternately to right and to left. They never missed. Each one exploded in purple flame, crushed a sunship.

"Three fliers left," Bill counted, eyes on the growing blue globe before them. "Two left. Good-by, Brand." He grasped the bluff Captain's hand. "One left. Will we have time?"

He looked forward. The blue globe, with the dancing, sparkling haze of sapphire swirling about it, was swiftly expanding.

"The last one! Our turn now!"

He saw a tiny fleck of purple light dart out of the expanding azure sphere that they had hoped to ram. Then red-violet flame seemed to envelope him. He felt the floor of the bridge tremble beneath his feet. He heard the beginning of a shivering crash like that of shattering glass. Then the world was mercifully dark and still.

CHAPTER III

The City of Space

Bill lay on an Alpine glacier, a painful broken leg inextricably wedged in a crevasse. It was dark, frightfully cold. In vain he struggled to move, to seek light and warmth, while the grim grip of the ice held him, while bitter wind howled about him and the piercing cold of the blizzard crept numbingly up his limbs.

He came to with a start, realized that it was a dream. But he was none the less freezing, gasping for thin, frigid air, that somehow would not come into his lungs. All about was darkness. He lay on cold metal.

"In the wreck of the Fury!" he thought. "The air is leaking out. And the cold of space! A frozen tomb!"

He must have made a sound, for a groan came from beside him. He fought to draw breath, tried to speak. He choked, and his voice was oddly high and thin.

"Who are——"

He ended in a fit of coughing, felt warm blood spraying from his mouth. Faintly he heard a whisper beside him.

"I'm Brand. The Moon Patrol—fought to the last!"

Bill could speak no more, and evidently the redoubtable captain could not. For a long time they lay in freezing silence. Bill had no hope of life, he felt only very grim satisfaction in the fact that he and Brand had not been killed outright.

But suddenly he was thrilled with hope. He heard a crash of hammer blows upon metal, sharp as the sound of snapping glass in the thin air. Then he heard the thin hiss of an oxygen lance.

Someone was cutting a way to them through the wreckage. Only a moment later, it seemed, a vivid bar of light cleft the darkness, searched the wrecked bridge, settled upon the two limp figures. Bill saw grotesque figures in cumbrous metal space suits clambering through a hole they had cut. He felt an oxygen helmet being fastened about his head, heard the thin hiss of the escaping gas, and was once more able to breathe.

Again he slipped into oblivion.

He awoke with the sensation that infinite time had passed. He sat up quickly, feeling strong, alert, fully recovered in every faculty, a clear memory of every detail of the disastrous encounter with the strange blue globe-ship springing instantly to his mind.

He was in a clean bed in a little white-walled room. Captain Brand, a surprised grin on his bluff, rough-hewn features, was sitting upon another bed beside him. Two attendants in white uniform stood just inside the door; and a nervous little man in black suit, evidently a doctor, was hastily replacing gleaming instruments in a leather bag.

A tall man appeared suddenly in the door, clad in a striking uniform of black, scarlet, and gold—black trousers, scarlet military coat and cap, gold buttons and decorations. He carried in his hand a glittering positive ray pistol.

"Gentlemen," he said in a crisp, gruff voice, "you may consider yourselves prisoners of the Prince of Space."

"How come?" Brand demanded.

"The Prince was kind enough to have you removed from the wreck of your ship, and brought aboard the Red Rover, his own sunship. You have been kept unconscious until your recovery was complete."

"And what do you want with us now?" Brand was rather aggressive.

The man with the pistol smiled. "That, gentlemen, I am happy to say, rests largely with yourselves."

"I am an officer in the Moon Patrol," said Brand. "I prefer death to anything——"

"Wait, Captain. You need have none but the kindest feelings for my master, the Prince of Space. I now ask you nothing but your word as an officer and a gentleman that you will act as becomes a guest of the Prince. Your promise will lose you nothing and win you much."

"Very good, I promise," Brand agreed after a moment. "——for twenty-four hours."

He pulled out his watch, looked at it. The man in the door lowered his pistol, smiling, and walked across to shake hands with Brand.

"Call me Smith," he introduced himself. "Captain of the Prince's cruiser, Red Rover."

Still smiling, he beckoned toward the door.

"And if you like, gentlemen, you may come with me to the bridge. The Red Rover is to land in an hour."

Brand sprang nimbly to the floor, and Bill followed. The flier was maintaining a moderate acceleration—they felt light, but were able to walk without difficulty. Beyond the door was a round shaft, with a ladder through its length. Captain Smith clambered up the ladder. Brand and Bill swung up behind him.

After an easy climb of fifty feet or so, they entered a domed pilot-house, with vitrolite observation panels, telescopes, maps and charts, and speaking tube—an arrangement similiar to that of the Fury.

Black, star-strewn heavens lay before them. Bill looked for the earth, found it visible in the periscopic screens, almost behind them. It was a little green disk; the moon but a white dot beside it.

"We land in an hour!" he exclaimed.

"I didn't say where," said Captain Smith, smiling. "Our landing place is a million miles from the earth."

"Not on earth! Then where——"

"At the City of Space."

"The City of Space!"

"The capital of the Prince of Space. It is not a thousand miles before us."

Bill peered ahead, through the vitrolite dome, distinguished the bright constellation of Sagittarius with the luminous clouds of the Galaxy behind it.

"I don't see anything——"

"The Prince does not care to advertise his city. The outside of the City of Space is covered with black vitalium—which furnishes us with power. Reflecting none of the sun's rays, it cannot be seen by reflected light. Against the black background of space it is invisible, except when it occults a star."

Captain Smith busied himself with giving orders for the landing. Bill and Brand stood for many minutes looking forward through the vitrolite dome, while the motor ray tubes retarded the flier. Presently a little black point came against the silver haze of the Milky Way. It grew, stars vanishing behind its rim, until a huge section of the heavens was utterly black before them.

"The City of Space is in a cylinder," Captain Smith said. "Roughly five thousand feet in diameter, and about that high. It is built largely of meteoric iron which we captured from a meteorite swarm—making navigation safe and getting useful metal at the same time. The cylinder whirls constantly, with such speed that the centrifugal force against the sides equals the force of gravity on the earth. The city is built around the inside of the cylinder—so that one can look up and see his neighbor's house apparently upside down, a mile above his head. We enter through a lock in one end of the cylinder."

A vast disk of dull black metal was now visible a few yards outside the vitrolite panels. A huge metal valve swung open in it, revealing a bright space beyond. The Red Rover moved into the chamber, the mighty valve closed behind her, air hissed in about her, an inner valve was opened, and she slipped into the City of Space.

A huge metal valve swung open in it, revealing a bright space beyond.... An inner valve was opened, and Red Rover slipped into the City of Space.

They were, Bill saw, at the center of an enormous cylinder. The sides, half a mile away, above and below them, were covered with buildings along neat, tree-bordered streets, scattered with green lawns, tiny gardens, and bits of wooded park. It seemed very strange to Bill, to see these endless streets about the inside of a tube, so that one by walking a little over three miles in one direction would arrive again at the starting point, in the same way that one gets back to the starting point after going around the earth in one direction.

At the ends of the cylinder, fastened to the huge metal disks, which closed the ends, were elaborate and complex mechanisms, machines strange and massive. "They must be for heating the city," Bill thought, "and for purifying the air, for furnishing light and power, perhaps even for moving it about." The lock through which they had entered was part of this mechanism.

In the center of each end of the cylinder hung a huge light, seeming large and round as the sun, flooding the place with brilliant mellow rays.

"There are five thousand people here," said Captain Smith. "The Prince has always kept the best specimens among his captives, and others have been recruited besides. We are self-sustaining as the earth is. We use the power of the sun—through our vitalium batteries. We grow our own food. We utilize our waste products—matter here goes through a regular cycle of life and death as on the earth. Men eat food containing carbon, breathe in oxygen, and breathe out carbon dioxide; our plants break up the carbon dioxide, make more foods containing the same carbon, and give off the oxygen for men to breathe again. Our nitrogen, our oxygen and hydrogen, go through similar cycles. The power of the sun is all we need from outside."

Captain Smith guided his "guests" down the ladder, and out through the ship's air-lock. They entered an elevator. Three minutes later they stepped off upon the side of the great cylinder that housed the City, and entered a low building with a broad concrete road curving up before it. As they stepped out, it gave Bill a curious dizzy feeling to look up and see busy streets, inverted, a mile above his head. The road before them curved smoothly up on either hand, bordered with beautiful trees, until its ends met again above his head.

The centrifugal force that held objects against the sides of the cylinder acted in precisely the same way as gravity on the earth—except that it pulled away from the center of the cylinder, instead of toward it.

A glistening heliocar came skimming down upon whirling heliocopters, dropped to rubber tires, and rolled up beside them. A young man of military bearing, clad in a striking uniform of red, black, and gold, stepped out, saluted stiffly.

"Captain Smith," he said, "the Prince desires your attendance at his private office immediately with your guests."

Smith motioned Bill and Captain Brand into the richly upholstered body of the heliocar. Bill, gazing up at the end of the huge cylinder with a city inside it, caught sight, for the first time, of the exterior of the Red Rover, the ship that had brought them to the City of Space. It lay just beside the massive machinery of the air-lock, supported in a heavy metal cradle, with the elevator tube running straight from it to the building behind them.

"Look, Brand!" Bill gasped. "That isn't the blue globe. It isn't the ship we fought at all!"

Brand looked. The Red Rover was much the same sort of ship that the Fury had been. She was slender and tapering, cigar-shaped, some two hundred feet in length and twenty-five in diameter—nearly twice as large as the Fury. She was cylindrical, instead of octagonal, and she mounted twenty-four motor tubes, in two rings fore and aft, of twelve each, instead of eight.

Brand turned to Smith. "How's this?" he demanded. "Where is the blue globe? Did you have two ships?"

A smile flickered over Smith's stern face. "You have a revelation waiting for you. But it is better not to keep the Prince waiting."

They stepped into the heliocar. The pilot sprang to his place, set the electric motors whirring. The machine rolled easily forward, took the air on spinning helicopters. The road, lined with green gardens and bright cottages, dropped away "below" them, and other houses drew nearer "above." In the center of the cylinder the young man dextrously inverted the flier; and they continued on a straight line toward an imposing concrete building which now seemed "below."

The heliocar landed; they sprang out and approached the imposing building of several stories. Guards uniformed in scarlet, black and gold standing just outside the door held ray pistols in readiness. Smith hurried his "guests" past; they entered a long, high-ceilinged room. It gave a first impression of stately luxury. The walls were paneled with rich dark wood, hung with a few striking paintings. It was almost empty of furniture; a heavy desk stood alone toward the farther end. A tall young man rose from behind this desk, advanced rapidly to meet them.

"My guests, sir," said Smith. "Captain Brand of the Fury, and a reporter."

"The mysterious Mr. Cain!" Bill gasped.

Indeed, Mr. Cain stood before him, a tall man, slender and wiry, with a certain not unhandsome sternness in his dark face. A smile twinkled in his black, enigmatic eyes—which none the less looked as if they might easily flash with fierce authority.

"And Mr. Win——or, I believe you asked me to call you Bill. You seem a very hard man to evade!"

Still smiling enigmatically, Mr. Cain took Bill's hand, and then shook hands with Captain Brand.

"But—are you the Prince of Space?" Bill demanded.

"I am. Cain was only a nom de guerre, so to speak. Gentlemen, I welcome you to the City of Space!"

"And you kidnaped yourself?"

"My men brought the Red Rover for me."

"Dr. Trainor and his daughter——" Bill ejaculated.

"They are friends of mine. They are here."

"And that blue globe!" said Captain Brand. "What was that?"

"You saw the course it was following?"

"It was headed to intersect the orbit of the earth—and its direction was on a line that cuts the orbit of Mars where that planet was forty days ago."

The Prince turned to Bill. "And you have seen something like that blue globe before?"

"Why, yes. The little blue circle on Mars—that I saw through the great telescope on Trainor's Tower."

A sober smile flickered across the dark lean face of the Prince.

"Then, gentlemen, you should believe me. The earth is threatened with a dreadful danger from Mars. The blue globe that wrecked your fleet was a ship from Mars. It was another Martian flier that took the Helicon. I believe I have credit for that ghastly exploit of sucking out the passengers' blood." His smile became grimly humorous. "One of the consequences of my position."

"Martian fliers?" echoed Captain Brand. "Then how did we come to be on your ship?"

"I haven't any weapon that will meet those purple atomic bombs on equal terms—though we are now working out a new device. I had Smith cruising around the blue globe in our Red Rover to see what he could learn. He was investigating the wrecks, and found you alive."

"You really mean that men from Mars have come this near the earth?" Captain Brand was frankly incredulous.

"Not men," the Prince corrected, smiling. "But things from Mars have done it. They have already landed on earth, in fact."

He turned to the desk, picked up a broad sheet of cardboard.

"I have a color photograph here."

Bill studied it, saw that it looked like an aerial photograph of a vast stretch of mountain and desert, a monotonous expanse of gray, tinged with green and red.

"A photograph, taken from space, of part of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. And see!"

He pointed to a little blue disk in the green-gray expanse of a plain, just below a narrow mountain ridge, with the fine green line that marked a river just beside it.

"That blue circle is the first ship that came. It was the things aboard it that sucked the blood out of the people on the Helicon."

Captain Brand was staring at the tall, smiling man, with a curious expression on his red, square-chinned face. Suddenly he spoke.

"Your Highness, or whatever we must call you——"

"Just call me Prince. Cain is not my name. Once I had a name—but now I am nameless!"

The thin dark face suddenly lined with pain, the lips closed in a narrow line. The Prince swept a hand across his high forehead, as if to sweep something unpleasant away.

"Well, Prince, I'm with you. That is, if you want an officer from the Moon Patrol." A sheepish smile overspread his bluff features. "I would have killed a man for suggesting that I would ever do such a thing. But I'll fight for you as well as I ever did for the honor of the Patrol."

"Thanks, Brand!" The Prince took his hand, smiling again.

"Count me in too, of course," said Bill.

"Both of you will be valuable men," said the Prince.

He picked up a sheaf of papers, scanned them quickly, seemed to mark off one item from a sheet and add another.

"The Red Rover sets out for the earth in one hour, gentlemen. We're going to try a surprise attack on that blue globe in the desert. You will both go aboard."

"And I'm going too!" A woman's voice, soft and a little husky, spoke beside them. Recognizing it, Bill turned to see Paula Trainor standing behind them, an eager smile on her elfinly beautiful face. Her amazing eyes were fixed upon the Prince, their brown depths filled, for the moment, with passionate wistful yearning.

"Why, no, Paula," the Prince said. "It's dangerous!"

Tears swam mistily in the golden orbs. "I will go! I must! I must!" The girl cried out the words, a sobbing catch in her voice.

"Very well, then," the Prince agreed, smiling absently. "You father will be along of course. But anything will be likely to happen."

"But you will be there in danger, too!" cried the girl.

"We start in an hour," said the Prince. "Smith, you may take Brand and Windsor back aboard the Red Rover."

"Curse his fatherly indifference!" Bill muttered under his breath as they walked out through the guarded door. "Can't he see that she loves him?"

Smith must have heard him, for he turned to him, spoke confidentially. "The Prince is a determined misogynist. I think an unfortunate love affair was what ruined his life—back on the earth. He left his history, even his name, behind him. I think a woman was the trouble. He won't look at a woman now."

They were outside again, startled anew by the amazing scene of a street of houses and gardens, that curved evenly up on either side of them and met above, so that men were moving about, head downward directly above them.

The heliocar was waiting. The three got aboard, were lifted and swiftly carried to the slender silver cylinder of the Red Rover, where it hung among the ponderous machinery of the air-lock, on the end of the huge cylinder that housed the amazing City of Space.

"I will show you your rooms," said Captain Smith. "And in an hour we are off to attack the Martians in Mexico."

CHAPTER IV

Vampires in the Desert

Forty hours later the Red Rover entered the atmosphere of the earth, above northern Mexico.

It was night, the desert was shrouded in blackness. The telescopes revealed only the lights at ranches scattered as thinly as they had been two centuries before.

Bill was in the bridge-room, with Captain Smith.

"The blue globe that destroyed your fleet has already landed here," Smith said. "We saw both of them before they slipped into the shadow of night. They were right together, and it seems that a white metal building has been set up between them."

"The Prince means to attack? In spite of those purple atomic bombs?" Bill seemed surprised.

"Yes. They are below a low mountain ridge. We land on the other side of the hill, a dozen miles off, and give 'em a surprise at dawn."

"We'd better be careful," Bill said doubtfully. "They're more likely to surprise us. If you had been in front of one of those little purple bombs, flying on the white ray!"

"We have a sort of rocket torpedo that Doc Trainor invented. The Prince means to try that on 'em."

The Red Rover dropped swiftly, with Smith's skilled hands on the controls. It seemed but a few minutes until the dark shadow of the earth beneath abruptly resolved itself into a level plain scattered with looming shapes that were clumps of mesquite and sagebrush. The slim silver cylinder came silently to rest upon the desert, beneath stars that shone clearly, though to Bill they seemed dim in comparison with the splendid wonders of space.

Three hours before dawn, five men slipped out through the air-lock. The Prince himself was the leader, with Captains Brand and Smith, Bill, and a young officer named Walker. Each man carried a searchlight and a positive ray pistol. And strapped upon the back of each was a rocket torpedo—a smooth, white metal tube, four feet long and as many inches thick, weighing some eighty pounds.

Dr. Trainor, kindly, bald-headed old scientist, was left in charge of the ship. He and his daughter came out of the air-lock into the darkness, to bid the five adventurers farewell.

"We should be back by night," said the Prince, his even white teeth flashing in the darkness. "Wait for us until then. If we don't come, return at once to the City of Space. I want no one to follow us, and no attempt made to rescue us if we don't come back. If we aren't back by tomorrow night we shall be dead."

"Very good, sir," Trainor nodded.

"I'm coming with you, then," Paula declared suddenly.

"Absolutely you are not!" cried the Prince. "Dr. Trainor, I command you not to let your daughter off the ship until we return."

Paula turned quickly away, a slim pillar of misty white in the darkness. Bill heard a little choking sound; he knew that she had burst into tears.

"I can't let you go off into such danger, without me!" she cried, almost hysterical. "I can't!"

The Prince swung a heavy torpedo higher on his shoulders, and strode off over bare gravel toward the low rocky slope of the mountain that lay to northward, faintly revealed in the light of the stars. The other four followed silently. The slender sunship, with the old scientist and his sobbing daughter outside the air-lock, quickly vanished behind them.

With only an occasional cautious flicker of the flashlights the five men picked their way over bare hard ground, among scattered clumps of mesquite. Presently they crossed a barren lava bed, clambering over huge blocks of twisted black volcanic rock. Up the slope of the mountain they struggled, sweating under heavy burdens, blundering into spiky cactus, stumbling over boulders and sagebrush.

When the silver and rose of dawn came in the purple eastern sky, the five lay on bare rock at the top of the low ridge, overlooking the flat, mesquite-covered valley beyond. The valley floor was a brownish green in the light of morning, the hills that rose far across it a hazy blue-gray, faintly tinged with green on age-worn slopes.

Like a string of emeralds dropped down the valley lay an endless wandering line of cottonwoods, of a light and vivid green that stood out from the somber plain. These trees traced the winding course of a stream, the Rio Casas Grandes.

Lying against the cottonwoods, and rising above their tops, were two great spheres of blue, gleaming like twin globes of lapis lazuli in the morning light. They were not far apart, and between them rose a curious domed structure of white, silvery metal.

Each of the five men lifted his heavy metal tube, leveled it across a boulder before him. The Prince, alert and smiling despite the dust and stain of the march through the desert, spoke to the others.

"This little tube along the top of the torpedo is a telescope sight. You will peer through, get the cross hairs squarely upon your target, and hold them there. Then press this nickeled lever. That starts the projectile inside the case to spinning so that inertia will hold it true. Then, being certain that the aim is correct, press the red button. The torpedo is thrown from the case by compressed air, and a positive ray mechanism drives it true to the target. When it strikes, about fifty pounds of Dr. Trainor's new explosive, trainite, will be set off.

"Walker, you and Windsor take the right globe. Smith and Brand, the left. I'll have a shot at that peculiar edifice between them."

Bill balanced his torpedo, peered through the telescope, and pressed the lever. The hum of a motor came from the heavy tube.

"All ready?" the Prince inquired.

"Ready," each man returned.

"Fire!"

Bill pressed the red button. The tube drove heavily backward in his hands, and then was but a light, sheet-metal shell. He saw a little gleam of white light before him, against the right blue globe, a diminishing point. It was the motor ray that drove the torpedo speeding toward its mark.

Great flares of orange light hid the two azure spheres and the white dome between them. The spheres and the dome crumpled and vanished, and a thin haze of bluish smoke swirled about them.

"Good shooting!" the Prince commented. "This motor torpedo of Trainor's ought to put a lot of the old fighting equipment in the museum—if we were disposed to bestow such a dangerous toy upon humanity.

"But let's get over and see what happened."

Grasping ray pistols, they sprang to their feet and plunged down the rocky slope. It was five miles to the river. Nearly two hours later it was, when the five men slipped out of the mesquites, to look two hundred yards across an open, grassy flat to the wall of green trees along the river.

Three great heaps of wreckage lay upon the flat. At the right and the left were crumpled masses of bright silver metal—evidently the remains of the globes. In the center was another pile of bent and twisted metal, which had been the domed building.

"Funny that those blue globes look like ordinary white metal now," said Smith.

"I wonder if the blue is not some sort of etheric screen?" Brand commented. "When we were fighting, our rays seemed to take no effect. It occurred to me that some vibratory wall might have stopped them."

"It's possible," the Prince agreed. "I'll take up the possibilities with Trainor. If they have such a screen, it might even be opaque to gravity. Quite a convenience in maneuvering a ship."

As they spoke, they were advancing cautiously, stopping to pick up bits of white metal that had been scattered about by the explosion.

Suddenly Bill's eyes caught movement from the pile of crumpled metal that had been the white dome. It seemed that a green plant was growing quickly from among the ruins. Green tendrils shot up amazingly. Then he saw on the end of a twisted stalk a glowing purple thing that looked somehow like an eye.

At first sight of the thing he had stopped in amazement, leveling his deadly ray pistol and shouting, "Look out!"

Before the shout had died in his throat, before the others had time to turn their heads, they caught the flash of metal among the twining green tentacles. The thing was lifting a metal object.

Then Bill saw a tiny purple spark dart from a bright little mechanism that the green tendrils held. He saw a blinding flash of violet light. His consciousness was cut off abruptly.

The next he knew he was lying on his back on rocky soil. He felt considerably bruised and battered, and his right eye was swollen so that he could not open it. Struggling to a sitting position, he found his hands and feet bound by bloody manacles of unfamiliar design. Captain Brand was lying on his elbow beside him, half under the thin shade of a mesquite bush. Brand looked much torn and disheveled; blood was streaming across his face from a gash in his scalp. His hands and feet also were bound with fetters of white metal.

"What happened?" Bill called dazedly.

"Not so loud," Brand whispered. "The thing—a Martian left alive, I guess it is. Must have been somewhere out in the brush when we shot. It blew us up with an atomic bomb. Smith and Walker dead—blown to pieces."

"And the Prince?"

"I can speak for myself."

Hearing the familiar low voice, Bill turned. He saw the Prince squatted down, in the blazing sunshine, hands and feet manacled, hat off and face covered with blood and grime.

"Was it that—that green thing?" Bill asked.

"Looks like a sort of animated plant," said the Prince. "A bunch of green tentacles, that it uses for hands. Three purple eyes on green stalks. Just enough of a body to join it all together. Not like anything I ever saw. But the Martians, originating under different conditions, ought to be different."

"What is going to happen now?" Bill inquired.

"Probably it will suck our blood—as it did to the passengers of the Helicon," Brand suggested grimly.

Windsor fell silent. It was almost noon. The desert sun was very hot. The motionless air was oppressive with a dry, parching heat; and flies buzzed annoyingly about his bleeding cuts. Wrists and ankles ached under the cruel pressure of the manacles.

"Wish the thing would come back, and end the suspense," Brand muttered.

Bill reflected with satisfaction that he had no relatives to be saddened by his demise. He had no great fear of death. Newspaper work in the twenty-second century is not all commonplace monotony; your veteran reporter is pretty well inured to danger.

"Glad I haven't anyone to worry about me," he observed.

"So am I," the Prince said bitterly. "I left them all, years ago."

"But you have someone!" Bill cried. "It isn't my business to say it, but that makes no difference now. And you're a fool not to know. Paula Trainor loves you! This will kill her!"

The Prince looked up, a bitter smile visible behind the bloody grime on his thin dark face.

"Paula—in love with me! We're friends, of course. But love! I used to believe in love. I have not been always a nameless outcast of space. Once I had name, family—even wealth and position. I trusted my name and my honor to a beautiful woman. I loved her! She said she loved me—I thought she meant it. She used me for a tool. I was trustful; she was clever."

The dark eyes of the Prince burned in fierce anger.

"When she was through with me she left me to die in disgrace. I barely escaped with my life. She had robbed me of my name, wealth, position. She named me the outlaw. She made me appear a traitor to those who trusted me—then laughed at me. She laughed at me and called me a fool. I was—but I won't be again!"

"At first I was filled with anger at the whole world, at the unjust laws and the silly conventions and the cruel intolerance of men. I became the pirate of space. A pariah. Fighting against my own kind. Struggling desperately for power."

For a few moments he was moodily silent, slapping at the flies that buzzed around his bloody wounds.

"I gained power. And I learned of the dangers from Mars. First I was glad. Glad to see the race of man swept out. Parasites men seemed. Insects. Life—what is it but a kind of decay on a mote in space? Then I got a saner view, and built the City of Space, to save a few men. Then because the few seemed to have noble qualities, I resolved to try to save the world.

"But it is too late. We have lost. And I have had enough of love, enough of women, with their soft, alluring bodies, and the sweet lying voices, and the heartless scheming."

The Prince fell into black silence, motionless, heedless of the flies that swarmed about him. Presently Brand contrived, despite his manacles, to fish a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, extract one, and tossed the others to Bill, who managed to light one for the Prince. The three battered men sat in dazzling sun and blistering heat, smoking and trying to forget heat and flies and torturing manacles—and the death that loomed so near.

It was early noon when Bill heard a little rustling beyond the mesquites. In a moment the Martian appeared. A grotesque and terrifying being it was. Scores of green tentacles, slender and writhing, grew from an insignificant body. Three lidless, purple eyes, staring, alien, and malevolent, watched them alertly from foot-long green stalks that rose above the body. The creature half walked on tentacles extended below it, half dragged itself along by green appendages that reached out to grasp mesquite limbs above it. One inch-thick coil carried a curious instrument of glittering crystal and white metal—it was a strange, gleaming thing, remotely like a ray pistol. And fastened about another tentacle was a little metal ring, from which an odd-looking little bar dangled.

The thing came straight for the Prince. Bill screamed a warning. The Prince saw it, twisted himself over on the ground, tried desperately to crawl away. The thing reached out a slender tentacle, many yards long. It grasped him about the neck, drew him back.

In a moment the dreadful being was crouching in a writhing green mass above the body of the manacled man. Once he screamed piteously, then there was no sound save loud, gasping breaths. His muscles knotted as he struggled in agony against the fetters and the coils of the monster.

Bill and Captain Brand lay there, unable either to escape or to give assistance. In silent horror they watched the scene. They saw that each slender green tentacle ended in a sharp-edged suction disk. They watched the disks forcing themselves against the throat of the agonized man, tearing a way through his clothing to his body. They saw constrictions move down the rubber-like green tentacles as if they were sucking, while red drops oozed out about the edge of the disks.

"Our turn next," muttered Captain Brand.

"And after us, the world!" Bill breathed, tense with horror.

A narrow, white beam, blindingly brilliant, flashed from beyond the dull green foliage of the mesquite. It struck the crouching monster waveringly. Without a sound, it leapt, flinging itself aside from the body of the Prince. It raised its curious weapon. A tiny purple spark darted from it.

A shattering crash rang out at a little distance. There was a thin scream—a woman's scream.

Then the white ray stabbed at the monster again, and it collapsed in a twitching heap of thin green coils, upon the still body of the Prince.

A slender girl rushed out of the brush, tossed aside a ray pistol, and flung herself upon the monster, trying to drag it from the Prince. It was Paula Trainor. Her clothing was torn. Her skin was scratched and bleeding from miles of running through the desert of rocks and cactus and thorny mesquite. She was evidently exhausted. But she flung herself with desperate energy to the rescue of the injured man.

The body of the dead thing was light enough. But the sucking disks still clung to the flesh. They pulled and tore it when she tugged at them. She struggled desperately to drag them loose, by turns sobbing and laughing hysterically.

"If you can help us get loose, we might help," Bill suggested.

The girl raised a piteous face. "Oh, Mr. Bill—Captain Brand! Is he dead?"

"I think not, Miss Paula. The thing had just jumped on him. Buck up!"

"See the little bar—it looks like a sliver of aluminum—fastened to the metal ring about that coil?" Brand said. "It might be the key for these chains. End of it seems to be shaped about right. Suppose you try it?"

In nervous haste, the girl tore the little bar from its ring. With Brand's aid, she was able to unlock his fetters. The Captain lost no time in freeing Bill and removing the manacles from the unconscious Prince.

The thin, rubber-like tentacles could not be torn loose. Brand cut them with his knife. He found them tough and fibrous. Red blood flowed from them when they were severed.

Bill carried the injured man down to the shade of the cottonwoods, brought water to him in a hat from the muddy little stream below. In a few minutes he was conscious, though weak from loss of blood.

Captain Brand, after satisfying himself that Paula had killed the Martian, and that it was the only one that had survived in the wreckage of the blue globes and the metal dome, set off to cross the mountain and bring back the sunship.

When the Red Rover came into view late that evening, a beautiful slender bar of silver against the pyrotechnic gold and scarlet splendor of the desert sunset, the Prince of Space was hobbling about, supported on Bill's arm, examining the wreckage of the Martian fliers.

Paula was hovering eagerly about him, anxious to aid him. Bill noticed the pain and despair that clouded her brown eyes. She had been holding the Prince's head in her arms when he regained consciousness. Her lips had been very close to his, and bright tears were brimming in her golden eyes.

Bill had seen the Prince push her away, then thank her gruffly when he had found what she had done.

"Paula, you have done a great thing for the world," Bill had heard him say.

"It wasn't the world at all! It was for you!" the girl had cried, tearfully.

She had turned away, to hide her tears. And the Prince had said nothing more.

The Red Rover landed beside the wreckage of the Martian fliers. After a few hours spent in examining and photographing the wrecks, in taking specimens of the white alloy of which they were built, and of other substances used in the construction, they all went back on the sunship, taking the dead Martian and other objects for further study. Brand took off for the upper atmosphere.

"Captain Brand," the Prince said as they stood in the bridge-room, "since the death of poor Captain Smith this morning, I believe you are the most skillful sunship officer in my organization. Hereafter you are in command of the Red Rover, with Harris and Vincent as your officers.

"We have a huge task before us. The victory we have won is but the first hand in the game that decides the fate of Earth."

CHAPTER V

The Triton's Treasure

"I must have at least two tons of vitalium," the Prince of Space told Bill, when the newspaperman came to the bridge of the Red Rover after twenty hours in the bunk. The Prince was pale and weak from loss of blood, but seemed to suffer no other ill effects from his encounter with the Martian.

"Two tons of vitalium!" Bill exclaimed. "A small demand! I doubt if there is that much on the market, if you had all the Confederation's treasury to buy it with."

"I must have it, and at once! I am going to fit out the Red Rover for a voyage to Mars. It will take that much vitalium for the batteries."

"We are going to Mars!"

"The only hope for humanity is for us to strike first and to strike hard!"

"If the world knew of the danger, we could get help."

"That's where you come in. I told you that I should need publicity. It is your business to tell the public about things. I want you to tell humanity about the danger from Mars. Make it convincing and make it strong! Say anything you like so long as you leave the Prince of Space out of it. I have the body of the Martian that attacked me preserved in alcohol. You have that and the wreckage in the desert to substantiate your story. I will land you at Trainor's Tower in New York tonight. You will have twenty-four hours to convince the world, and raise two tons of vitalium. It has to be done!"

"A big order," Bill said doubtfully. "But I'll do my best."

The city was a bright carpet of twinkling lights when the Red Rover darted down out of a black sky, hovering for a moment over Trainor's Tower. When it flashed away, Bill was standing alone on top of the loftiest building on earth, in his pocket a sheaf of manuscript on which he had been at work for many hours, beside him a bulky package that contained the preserved body of the weird monster from Mars.

He opened the trapdoor—which was conveniently unlocked—took up the package, and clambered down a ladder into the observatory. An intent man was busy at the great telescope—which pointed toward the red planet Mars. The man looked understandingly at Bill, and nodded toward the elevator.

In half an hour Bill was exhibiting his package and his manuscript to the night editor of the Herald-Sun.

"The greatest news in the century!" he cried. "The Earth attacked by Mars! It was a Martian ship that took the Helicon. I have one of the dead creatures from Mars in this box."

The astounded editor formed a quick opinion that his star reporter had met with some terrifying experience that had unsettled his brain. He listened skeptically while Bill related a true enough account of the cruise of the Moon Patrol ships, and of the battle with the blue globe. Bill omitted any mention of the City of Space and its enigmatic ruler; but let it be assumed that the Fury had rammed the globe and that it had fallen in the desert. He ended with a wholly fictitious account of how a mysterious scientist had picked him up in a sunship, had told him of the invaders from Mars, and had sent him to collect two tons of vitalium to equip his ship for a raid on Mars. Bill had spent many hours in planning his story; he was sure that it sounded as plausible as the amazing reality of the Prince of Space and his wonderful city.

The skeptical editor was finally convinced, as much by his faith in Bill's probity as by the body of the green monster, the scraps of a strange white metal, and the photographs, which he presented as material evidence. The editor radioed to have a plane sent from El Paso, Texas, to investigate the wrecks. When it was reported that they were just as Bill had said, the Herald-Sun issued an extra, which carried Bill's full account, with photographs of the dead monster, and scientific accounts of the other evidence. There was an appeal for two tons of vitalium, to enable the unknown scientist to save the world by making a raid on Mars.

The story created an enormous sensation all over the world. A good many people believed it. The Herald-Sun actually received half a million eagles in subscriptions to buy the vitalium—a sum sufficient to purchase about eleven ounces of that precious metal.

Most of the world laughed. It was charged that Bill was insane. It was charged that the Herald-Sun was attempting to expand its circulation by a baseless canard. Worse, it was charged that Bill, perhaps in complicity with the management of the great newspaper, was making the discovery of a new sort of creature in some far corner of the world the basis for a gigantic fraud, to secure that vast amount of vitalium.

Examination proved that the wrecks in the desert had been demolished by explosion instead of by falling. A court injunction was filed against the Herald-Sun to prevent collection of the subscriptions, and Bill might have been arrested, if he had not wisely retired to Trainor's Tower.

Finally, it was charged that the pirate, the Prince of Space, was at the bottom of it—possibly the charge was suggested by the fact that the chief object of the Prince's raids had always been vitalium. A rival paper asserted that the pirate must have captured Bill and sent him back to Earth with this fraud.

Public excitement became so great that the reward for the capture of the Prince of Space, dead or alive, was raised from ten to fifteen million eagles.

Twenty-four hours later after he had been landed on Trainor's Tower, Bill was waiting there again, with bright stars above him, and the carpet of fire that was New York spread in great squares beneath him. The slim silver ship came gliding down, and hung just beside the vitrolite dome while eager hands helped him through the air-lock. Beyond, he found the Prince waiting, with a question in his eyes.

"No luck," Bill grunted hopelessly. "Nobody believed it. And the town was getting too hot for me. Lucky I had a getaway."

The Prince smiled bitterly as the newspaperman told of his attempt to enlist the aid of humanity.

"About what I expected," he said. "Men will act like men. It might be better, in the history of the cosmos, to let the Martians have this old world. They might make something better of it. But I am going to give humanity a chance—if I can. Perhaps man will develop into something better, in a million years."

"Then there is still a chance—without the vitalium?" Bill asked eagerly.

"Not without vitalium. We have to go to Mars. We must have the metal to fit our flier for the trip. But I have needed vitalium before; when I could not buy it. I took it."

"You mean—piracy!" Bill gasped.

"Am I not the Prince of Space—'notorious interplanetary outlaw' as you have termed me in your paper? And is not the good of the many more than the good of the few? May I not take a few pounds of metal from a rich corporation, to save the earth for humanity?"

"I told you to count me in," said Bill. "The idea was just a little revolutionary."

"We haven't wasted any time while you were in New York. I have means of keeping posted on the shipments of vitalium from the moon. We have found that the sunship Triton leaves the moon in about twenty hours, with three months production of the vitalium mines in the Kepler crater. It should be well over two tons."

Thirty hours later the Red Rover was drifting at rest in the lunar lane, with ray tubes dead and no light showing. Men at her telescopes scanned the heavens moonward for sight of the white repulsion rays of the Triton and her convoy.

Bill was with Captain Brand in the bridge-room. Eager light flashed in Brand's eyes as he peered through the telescopes, watched his instruments, and spoke brisk orders into the tube.

"How does it feel to be a pirate?" Bill asked, "after so many years spent hunting them down?"

Captain Brand grinned. "You know," he said, "I've wanted to be a buccaneer ever since I was about four years old. I couldn't, of course, so I took the next best thing, and hunted them. I'm not exactly grieving my heart out over what has happened. But I feel sorry for my old pals of the Moon Patrol. Somebody is going to get hurt!"

"And it may be we," said Bill. "The Triton will be convoyed by several war-fliers, and she can fight with her own rays. It looks to me like a hard nut to crack."

"I used to dream about how I would take a ship if I were the Prince of Space," said Captain Brand. "I've just been talking our course of action over with him. We've agreed on a plan."

In an hour the Prince and Dr. Trainor entered the bridge. Paula appeared in a few moments. Her face was drawn and pale; unhappiness cast a shadow in her brown eyes. Eagerly, she asked the Prince how he was feeling.

"Oh, about as well as ever, thanks," the lean young man replied in a careless voice. His dark, enigmatic eyes fell upon her face. He must have noticed her pallor and evident unhappiness. He met her eyes for a moment, then took a quick step toward her. Bill saw a great tenderness almost breaking past the bitter cynicism in those dark eyes. Then the Prince checked himself, spoke shortly:

"We are preparing for action, Paula. Perhaps you should go back to your stateroom until it is over."

The girl turned silently and moved out of the room. Bill thought she would have tottered and fallen if there had been enough gravity or acceleration to make one fall.

In a few minutes a little group of flickering lights appeared among the stars ahead, just beside the huge, crater-scarred, golden disk of the moon.

"The Triton and her convoy!" shouted the men at the telescopes.

"All men to their stations, and clear the ship for action!" Captain Brand gave the order.

"Two Moon Patrol sunships are ahead, cruising fifty miles apart," came the word from the telescope. "A hundred miles behind them is the Triton, with two more Patrol fliers twenty-five miles behind her and fifty miles apart."

Brand spoke to the Prince, who nodded. And Brand gave the order.

"Show no lights. Work the ship around with the gyroscopes until our rear battery of tubes will cover the right Patrol ship of the leading pair, and our bow tubes the other."

The whir of the electric motors came from below. The fliers swung about, hanging still in the path of the approaching Triton.

"All ready, sir," came a voice from the tube.

A few anxious minutes went by. Then the Red Rover, dark and silent, was hanging squarely between the two forward Patrol ships, about twenty-five miles from each of them.

"Fire constantly with all tubes, fore and aft, until the enemy appears to be disabled," Brand gave the order. The Prince spoke to him, and he added, "Inflict no unnecessary damage."

Dazzling white rays flashed from the tubes. Swiftly, they found the two forward sunships. The slender octagons of silver shone white under the rays. They reeled, whirled about, end over end, under the terrific pressure of atomic bombardment. In a moment they glowed with dull red incandescence, swiftly became white. A bluish haze spread about them—the discharge of the electric energy carried by the atoms, which would electrocute any man not insulated against it.

From the three other ships flaming white rays darted, searching for the Red Rover. But they had hardly found the mark when Brand ordered his rays snapped out. The two vessels he had struck were but whirling masses of incandescent wreckage—completely out of the battle, though most of the men aboard them still survived in their insulated cells.

The Prince himself spoke into the tube. "Maneuver number forty-one. Drive for the Triton."

Driven by alternate burst from front and rear motor tubes, the Red Rover started a curiously irregular course toward the treasure ship. Spinning end over end, describing irregular curves, she must have been an almost impossible target.

And twice during each spin, when her axis was in line with the Triton, all tubes were fired for an instant, striking the treasure ship with a force that reeled and staggered her, leaving her plates half-fused, twisted and broken.

Three times a ray caught the Red Rover for an instant, but her amazing maneuvers, which had evidently been long practised by her crew, carried her on a course so erratic and puzzling that the few rays that found her were soon shaken off.

Before the pirate flier reached the Triton, the treasure vessel was drifting helpless, with all rays out. The Red Rover passed by her, continuing on her dizzily whirling course until she was directly between the two remaining fliers.

"Hold her still," the Prince then shouted into the tube. "And fire all rays, fore and aft."

Blinding opalescent rays jetted viciously from the two rings of tubes. Since the Red Rover lay between the two vessels, they could not avoid firing upon each other. Her own rays, being fired in opposite directions, served to balance each other and hold her at rest, while the rays of the enemy, as well as those of the pirate that impinged upon them, tended to send them into spinning flight through space.

Blinding fluorescence obscured the vitrolite panels, and the stout walls of the Red Rover groaned beneath the pressure of the hail of atoms upon them. Swiftly they would heat, soften, collapse. Or the insulation would burn away and the electric charge electrocute her passengers.

The enemy was in a state as bad. The white beams of the pirate flier had found them earlier, and could be held upon them more efficiently. It was a contest of endurance.

Suddenly the jets of opalescence snapped off the pirate. Bill, gazing out into star-dusted space, saw the two Patrol vessels spinning in mad flight before the pressure of the rays, glowing white in incandescent twisted ruin.

A few minutes later the Red Rover was drifting beside the Triton holding the wrecked treasure-flier with electromagnetic plates. The air-lock of the pirate vessel opened to release a dozen men in metal vacuum suits, armed with ray pistols and equipped with wrecking tools and oxygen lances. The Prince was their leader.

They forced the air-lock of the Triton, and entered the wreck. In a few minutes grotesque metal-suited figures appeared again, carrying heavy leaden tubes filled with the precious vitalium.

The Red Rover was speeding into space, an hour later, under full power. The Prince of Space was in the bridge-room, with Bill, Captain Brand, Dr. Trainor, and Paula. Bill noticed that the girl seemed pathetically joyous at the Prince's safety, though he gave her scant attention.

"We have the two tons of vitalium," said the Prince. "Nearly forty-six hundred pounds, in fact. Easily enough to furnish power for the voyage to Mars. We have the metal—provided we can get away with it."

"Is there still danger?" Paula inquired nervously.

"Yes. Most of the passengers of the Triton were still alive. When I gave her captain my card, he told me that they sent a heliographic S.O.S. as soon as we attacked. Some forty or fifty fliers of the Moon Patrol will be hot on our trail."

The Red Rover flew on into space, under all her power. Presently the lookouts picked up a score of tiny flickering points of light behind them. The Moon Patrol was in hot pursuit.

"Old friends of mine," said Captain Brand. "Every one of them would give his life to see us caught. And I suppose every one of them feels now that he has a slice of that fifteen million eagles reward! The Moon Patrol never gives up and never admits defeat."

Tense, anxious hours went by while every battery was delivering its maximum current, and every motor tube was operating at its absolutely highest potential.

Paula waited on the bridge, anxiously solicitous for the Prince's health—he was still pale and weak from the adventure in the desert. Presently, evidently noticing how tired and worried she looked, he sent her to her stateroom to rest. She went, in tears.

"No chance to fight, if they run us down," said Captain Brand. "We can handle four, but not forty."

Time dragged heavily. The Red Rover flew out into space, past the moon, on such a course as would not draw pursuit toward the City of Space. Her maximum acceleration was slightly greater than that of the Moon Patrol fliers, because of the greater number and power of her motor tubes. Steadily she forged away from her pursuers.

At last the flickering lights behind could be seen no longer.

But the Red Rover continued in a straight line, at the top of her speed, for many hours, before she turned and slipped cautiously toward the secret City of Space. She reached it in safety, was let through the air-lock. Once more Bill looked out upon the amazing city upon the inner wall of a spinning cylinder. He enjoyed the remarkable experience of a walk along a street three miles in length, which brought him up in an unbroken curve, and back to where he had started.

It took a week to refit the Red Rover, in preparation for the voyage to Mars. Her motor ray tubes were rebuilt, and additional vitalium generators installed. The precious metal taken from the Triton was built into new batteries to supply power for the long voyage. Good stocks of food, water, and compressed oxygen were taken aboard, as well as weapons and scientific equipment of all variety.

"We start for Mars in thirty minutes," Captain Brand told Bill when the warning gong had called him and the others aboard.

CHAPTER VI

The Red Star of War

The Red Rover slipped out through the great air-lock of the City of Space, and put her bow toward Mars. The star of the war-god hung before her in the silver-dusted darkness of the faint constellation of Capricornus, a tiny brilliant disk of ocherous red. The Prince of Space, outlawed by the world of his birth, was hurtling out through space in a mad attempt to save that world from the horrors of Martian invasion.

The red point that was Mars hung almost above them, it seemed, almost in the center of the vitrolite dome of the bridge. "We are not heading directly for the planet," Captain Brand told Bill. "Its orbital velocity must be considered. We are moving toward the point that it will occupy in twenty days."

"We can make it in twenty days? Three million miles a day?"

"Easily, if the vitalium holds out, and if we don't collide with a meteorite. There is no limit to speed in space, certainly no practical limit. Acceleration is the important question."

"We may collide with a meteorite you say? Is there much danger?"

"A good deal. The meteorites travel in swarms which follow regular orbits about the sun. We have accurate charts of the swarms whose orbits cross those of the earth and moon. Now we are entering unexplored territory. And most of them are so small, of course, that no telescope would reveal them in time. Merely little pebbles, moving with a speed about a dozen times that of a bullet from an old-fashioned rifle."

"And what are we going to do if we live to get to Mars?"

"A big question!" Brand grinned. "We could hardly mop up a whole planet with the motor rays. Trainor has a few of his rocket torpedoes, but not enough to make much impression upon a belligerent planet. The Prince and Trainor have a laboratory rigged up down below. They are doing a lot of work. A new weapon, I understand. I don't know what will come of it."

Presently Bill found his way down the ladder to the laboratory. He found the Prince of Space and Dr. Trainor hard at work. He learned little by watching them, save that they were experimenting upon small animals, green plants, and samples of the rare vitalium. High tension electricity, electron tubes, and various rays seemed to be in use.

Noticing his interest, the Prince said, "You know that vitalium was first discovered in vitamins, in infinitesimal quantities. The metal seems to be at the basis of all life. It is the trace of vitalium in chlorophyl which enables the green leaves of plants to utilize the energy of sunlight. We are trying to determine the nature of the essential force of life—we know that the question is bound up with the radioactivity of vitalium. We have made a good deal of progress, and complete success would give us a powerful instrumentality."

Paula was working with them in the laboratory, making a capable and eager assistant—she had been her father's helper since her girlhood. Bill noticed that she seemed happy only when near the Prince, that the weight of unhappiness and trouble left her brown eyes only when she was able to help him with some task, or when her skill brought a word or glance of approval from him.

The Prince himself seemed entirely absorbed in his work; he treated the girl courteously enough, but seemed altogether impersonal toward her. To him, she seemed only to be a fellow-scientist. Yet Bill knew that the Prince was aware of the girl's feelings—and he suspected that the Prince was trying to stifle a growing reciprocal emotion of his own.

Bill spent long hours on the bridge with Captain Brand, staring out at the star-scattered midnight of space. The earth shrank quickly, until it was a tiny green disk, with the moon an almost invisible white speck beside it. Day by day, Mars grew larger. It swelled from an ocher point to a little red disk.

Often Bill scanned the spinning scarlet globe through a telescope. He could see the white polar caps, the dark equatorial regions, the black lines of the canals. And after many days, he could see the little blue circle that had been visible in the giant telescope on Trainor's Tower.

"It must be something enormous, to stand out so plainly," he said when he showed it to Captain Brand.

"I suppose so. Even now, we could see nothing with a diameter of less than a mile or so."

"If it's a ship, it must be darned big—big enough for the whole race of 'em to get aboard."

Bill was standing, a few hours later, gazing out through the vitrolite panels at the red-winged splendor of the sun, when suddenly he heard a series of terrific crashes. The ship rocked and trembled beneath him; he heard the reverberation of hammered metal, and the hiss of escaping air.

"Meteorite!" screamed Brand.

Wildly, he pointed to the vitrolite dome above. In three places the heavy crystal was shattered, a little hole drilled through it, surrounded with radiating cracks. In two other sections the heavy metal wall was dented. Through the holes, the air was hissing out. It formed a white cloud outside, and glistening frost gathered quickly on the crystal panels.

Bill felt the air suddenly drawn from his lungs. He gasped for breath. The bridge was abruptly cold. Little particles of snow danced across it.

"The air is going!" Brand gasped. "We'll suffocate!"

He touched a lever and a heavy cover fell across the ladder shaft, locked itself, making the floor an airtight bulkhead.

"That's right," Bill tried to say. "Give others—chance."

His voice had failed. A soaring came in his ears. He felt as if a malignant giant were sucking out his breath. The room grew dark, swam about him. He reeled; he was blind. A sudden chill came over his limbs—the infinite cold of space. He felt hot blood spurting from his nose, freezing on his face. Faintly he heard Brand moving, as he staggered and fell into unconsciousness.

When he looked about again, air and warmth were coming back. He saw that the shaft was still sealed, but air was hissing into the room through a valve. Captain Brand lay inert beside him on the floor. He looked up at the dome, saw that soft rubber patches had been placed over the holes, where air-pressure held them fast. The Captain had saved the ship before he fell.

In a moment the door opened. Dr. Trainor rushed in, with Prince and others behind him. They picked up the unconscious Brand and rushed him down to the infirmary. The plucky captain had been almost asphyxiated, but administration of pure oxygen restored him to consciousness. On the following day he was back on the bridge.

The Red Rover had been eighteen days out from the City of Space. The loss of air due to collision with the meteorites had brought inconveniences, but good progress had been made. It was only two more days to Mars. The forward tubes had been going many hours, to retard the ship.

"Object dead ahead!" called a lookout from his telescope.

"A small blue globe, coming directly toward us," he added, a moment later.

"Another of their ships, setting out for the earth," Brand muttered. "It will about cook our goose!"

In a few moments the Prince and Dr. Trainor had rushed up the ladder from the laboratory. The blue globe was rushing swiftly toward them; and the Red Rover was plunging forward at many thousand miles per hour.

"We can't run from it," said Brand. "It is still fifty thousand miles away, but we are going far too fast to stop in that distance. We will pass it in about five minutes."

"If we can't stop, we go ahead," the Prince said, smiling grimly.

"We might try a torpedo on 'em," suggested Dr. Trainor. He had mounted a tube to fire his rocket torpedoes from the bridge. "It will have all the speed its own motor rays can develop, plus what the ship has at present, plus the relative velocity of the globe. That might carry it through."

The Prince nodded assent.

Trainor slipped a slender, gleaming rocket into his tube, sighted it, moved the lever that set the projectile to spinning, and fired. The little white flame of the motor rays dwindled and vanished ahead of them. Quickly, Trainor fired again, and then a third time.

"Switch off the rays and darken the lights," the Prince ordered. "With combined speeds of ten thousand miles a minute, we might pass them without being seen—if they haven't sighted us already."

For long seconds they hurtled onward in tense silence. Bill was at a telescope. Against the silver and black background of space, the little blue disk of the Martian ship was growing swiftly.

Suddenly a bright purple spark appeared against the blue, grew swiftly brighter.

"An atomic bomb!" he cried. "They saw us. We are lost!"

He tensed himself, waiting for the purple flash that would mean the end. But the words were hardly out of his mouth when he saw a tiny sheet of violet flame far ahead of them. It flared up suddenly, and vanished as abruptly. The blue disk of the ship still hung before them, but the purple spark was gone. For a moment he was puzzled. Then he understood.

"The atomic bomb struck a torpedo!" he shouted. "It's exploded. And if they think it was we——"

"Perhaps they can't see us, with the rays out," Brand said.

"It is unlikely," Trainor observed, "that the bomb actually struck one of our torpedoes. More likely it was set to be detonated by the gravitational attraction of any object that passed near it."

Still watching the azure globe, Bill saw a sudden flare of orange light against it. A great burst of yellow flame. The blue ball crumpled behind the flame. The orange went out, and the blue vanished with it. Only twisted scraps of white metal were left.

"The second torpedo struck the Martian!" Bill cried.

"And you notice that the blue went out," said Dr. Trainor. "It must be merely a vibratory screen."

The Red Rover hurtled on through space, toward the crimson planet that hour by hour and minute by minute expanded before her. The blue disk was now plainly visible against the red. It was apparently a huge globe of azure, similar to the ships they had met, but at least a mile in diameter. She lay just off the red desert, near an important junction of "canals."

"Some huge machine, screened by the blue wall of vibration," Dr. Trainor suggested.

During the last two days the Prince and Dr. Trainor, and their eager assistant, Paula, had worked steadily in the laboratory, without pause for rest. Bill was with them when the Prince threw down his pencil and announced the result of his last calculation.

"The problem is solved," he said. "And its answer means both success and failure. We have mastered the secret of life. We have unlocked the mystery of the ages! A terrific force is at our command—a force great enough to sweep man to the millennium, or to wipe out a planet! But that force is useless without the apparatus to release it."

"We have the laboratory——" Trainor began.

"But we lack one essential thing. We must have a small amount of cerium, one of the rare earth metals. For the electrode, you know, inside the vitalium grid in our new vacuum tube. And there is not a gram of cerium in all our supplies."

"We can go back to the Earth——" said Trainor.

"That will mean forty days gone, before we could come back—more than forty, because we would have to stop at the City of Space to refit. And all the perils of the meteorites again. I am sure that in less than forty days the Martians will be putting the machine in that enormous blue globe to its dreadful use."

"Then we must land on Mars and find the metal!" said Captain Brand, who had been listening by the door.

"Exactly," said the Prince. "You will pick out a spot that looks deserted, at a great distance from the blue globe. Somewhere in the mountains, as far back as possible from the canals. Land there just after midnight. We will have mining and prospecting equipment ready to go to work when day comes. Almost any sort of ore ought to yield the small quantity of cerium we need."

"Very good, sir," said Brand.

A few hours later the Red Rover was sweeping around Mars, on a long curve, many thousands of miles from the surface of the red planet.

"We'll pick out the spot to land while the sun is shining on it," Captain Brand told Bill. "Then we can keep over it, as it sweeps around into the shadow, timing ourselves to land just after midnight."

"Isn't there danger that we may be seen?"

"Of course. We can only minimize it by keeping a few thousand miles above the surface as long as it is day, and landing at night, and in a deserted section."

As they drew nearer, the telescope revealed the surface of the hostile planet more distinctly. Bill peered intently into an eyepiece, scanning the red globe for signs of its malignant inhabitants.

"The canals seem to be strips of greenish vegetation, irrigated from some sort of irrigation system that brings water from the melting ice-caps," he said.

"Lowell, the old American astronomer, knew that two hundred years ago," said Captain Brand, "though some of his contemporaries claimed that they could not see the 'canals.'"

"I can make out low green trees, and metal structures. I think there are long pipes, as well as open channels, to spread the water. And I see a great dome of white metal—it must be five hundred feet across.... There are several of them in sight, mostly located where the canals intersect."

"They might be great community buildings—cities," suggested Brand. "On account of the dust-storms that so often hide the surface of the planet, it would probably be necessary to cover a city up in some way."

"And I see something moving. A little blue dot, it seems. Probably a little flier on the same order as those we have seen; but only a few feet in diameter. It seemed to be sailing from one of the white domes to another."

Brand moved to another telescope.

"Yes, I see them. Two in one place. They seem to be floating along, high and fast. And just to the right is a whole line of them, flying one behind the other. Crossing a patch of red desert."

"What's this?" Bill cried in some excitement. "Looks like animals of some kind in a pen. They look like people, almost."

"What! Let me see!"

Brand rushed over from his telescope. Bill relinquished him the instrument. "See. Just above the center of the field. Right in the edge of that cultivated strip, by what looks like a big aluminum water-pipe."

"Yes. Yes, I see something. A big stockade. And it has things in it. But not men, I think. They are gray and hairy. But they seem to walk on two legs."

"Something like apes, maybe."

"I've got it," cried Brand. "They're domestic animals! The ruling Martians are parasites. They must have something to suck blood out of. They live on these creatures!"

"Probably so," Bill admitted. "Do you suppose they will keep people penned up that way, if they conquer the world?"

"Likely." He shuddered. "No good in thinking of it. We must be selecting the place to land."

He returned to his instrument.

"I've got it," he said presently. "A low mountain, in a big sweep of red desert. About sixty degrees north of the equator. Not a canal or a white dome in a hundred miles."

Long hours went by, while the Red Rover hung above the chosen landing place, waiting for it to sweep into the shadow of night. Bill peered intently through his telescope, watching the narrow strips of vegetation across the bare stretches of orange desert. He studied the bright metal and gray masonry of irrigation works, the widely scattered, white metal domes that seemed to cover cities, the hurtling blue globes that flashed in swift flight between them. Two or three times he caught sight of a tiny, creeping green thing that he thought was one of the hideous, blood-sucking Martians. And he saw half a dozen broad metal pens, or pastures, in which the hairy gray bipeds were confined.

Shining machines were moving across the green strips of fertile land, evidently cultivating them.

The Prince, Dr. Trainor, and Paula were asleep in their staterooms. Bill retired for a short rest, came back to find the planet beneath them in darkness. The Red Rover was dropping swiftly, with Captain Brand still at the bridge.

Rapidly, the stars vanished in an expanding circle below them. Phobos and Deimos, the small moons of Mars, hurtling across the sky with different velocities shed scant light upon the barren desert below. Captain Brand eased the ship down, using the rays as little as possible, to cut down the danger of detection.

The Red Rover dropped silently to the center of a low, cliff-rimmed plateau that rose from the red, sandy desert. In the faint light of stars and hurtling moons, the ocherous waste lay flat in all directions—there are no high mountains on Mars. The air was clear, and so thin that the stars shone with hot brilliance, almost, Bill thought, as if the ship were still out in space.

Silent hours went by, as they waited for dawn. The thin white disk of the nearer moon slid down beneath the black eastern horizon, and rose again to make another hurtling flight.

Just before dawn the Prince appeared, an eager smile on his alert lean face, evidently well recovered from the long struggling in the laboratory.

"I've all the mining machinery ready," Captain Brand told him. "We can get out as soon as it's warm enough—it's a hundred and fifty below zero out there now."

"It ought to warm up right soon after sunrise—thin as this air is. You seem to have picked about the loneliest spot on the planet, all right. There's a lot of danger, though, that we may be discovered before we get the cerium."

"Funny feeling to be the first men on a new world," said Bill.

"But we're not the first," the Prince said. "I am sure that Envers landed on Mars—I think the Martian ships are based on a study of his machinery."

"Envers may have waited here in the desert for the sun to rise, just as we are doing," murmured Brand. "In fact, if he wanted to look around without being seen, he may have landed right near here. This is probably the best place on the planet to land without being detected."

CHAPTER VII

A Mine on Mars

The sun came up small and white and hot, shining from a black sky upon an endless level orange waste of rocks and sand, broken with a black swamp in the distant north. Even from the eminence of the time-worn plateau, the straight horizon seemed far nearer than on earth, due to the greater curvature of the planet's surface.

Men were gathering about the air-lock, under the direction of the Prince, assembling mining equipment.

"Shall we be able to go out without vacuum suits?" Bill asked Captain Brand.

"I think so, when it gets warm enough. The air is light—the amount of oxygen at the surface is about equal to that in the air nine miles above sea level on earth. But the pull of gravity here is only about one-third as much as it is on the earth, and less oxygen will be required to furnish energy. I think we can stand it, if we don't take too much exertion."

The rays of the oddly small sun beat fiercely through the thin air. Soon the Prince went into the air-lock, closed the inner door behind him and started the pumps. When the dial showed the pressures equalized he opened the outer door, and stepped out upon the red rocks.

All were watching him intently, through the vitrolite panels. Paula clasped her hands in nervous anxiety. Bill saw the Prince step confidently out, sniff the air as though testing it, and take a few deep breaths. Then he drew his legs beneath him and made an astounding leap, that carried him twenty feet high. He fell in a long arc, struck on his shoulder in a pile of loose red sand. He got up, gasping for air as if the effort had exhausted him, and staggered back to the air-lock. Quickly he sealed the outer door behind him, opened the valve, and raised the pressure.

"Feels funny," he said when he opened the inner door. "Like trying to breathe on top of a mountain—only more so. The jump was great fun, but rather exhausting. I imagine it would be dangerous for a fellow with a weak heart. All right to come out now. Air is still cool, but the rocks are getting hot under the sun."

He held open the door. "The guards will come first."

Six of the thirty-odd members of the crew had been detailed to act as guards, to prevent surprise. Each was to carry two rocket torpedoes—such a burden was not too much upon this planet, with its lesser gravity. They would watch from the cliffs at the edge of the little plateau upon which the sunship had landed.

Bill and four other men entered the air-lock—and Paula. The girl had insisted upon having some duty assigned to her, and this had seemed easier than the mining.

The door was closed behind them, the air pumped out until Bill gasped for breath and heard a drumming in his ears. Then the outer door was opened and they looked out upon Mars. Motion was easy, yet the slightest effort was tiring. Bill found himself panting merely from the exertion of lifting the two heavy torpedoes to his shoulders.

With Paula behind him, he stepped through the outer door. The air felt chill and thin. Loose red sand crumbled yieldingly under their feet.

They separated at the door, Bill starting toward the south end of the pleateau, Paula toward the north point, and the men going to stations along the sides.

"Just lie at the top of the cliffs and watch," the Prince had ordered. "When you have anything to report, flash with your ray pistols, in code. Signal every thirty minutes, anyhow. We will have a man watching from the bridge. Report to him anything moving. We will fire off a red signal rocket when you are to come back."

He had tried to keep Paula from going out, but the girl had insisted. At last he had agreed.

"Better to have you keeping watch than handling a pick and shovel, or pushing a barrow," he had told her. "But I hate to see you go so far off. Something might happen. If they find us, though, they will probably get us all. Don't get hurt."

Bill had seen the Prince looking anxiously at the slender, brown-eyed girl as they entered the air-lock. He had seen him move forward quickly, as though to ask her to come back—move forward, and then turn aside with a flush that became a bitterly cynical smile.

As Bill walked across the top of the barren red plateau, he looked back at the girl moving slowly in the opposite direction. He had glanced at her eyes as they left the ship. They were shadowed, heavy-lidded. In their brown depths lurked despair and tragic determination. Bill, watching her now, thought that all life had gone out of her. She seemed a dull automaton, driven only by the energy of a determined will. All hope and life and vivacity had gone from her manner. Yet she walked as if she had a stern task to do.

"I wonder——" Bill muttered. "Can she mean—suicide?"

He turned uncertainly, as if to go after her. Then, deciding that his thought was mere fancy, he trudged on across the red plateau to his station.

Behind him, he saw other parties emerging from the air-lock. The Prince and Dr. Trainor were setting up apparatus of some kind, probably, Bill thought, to take magnetic and meteorological observations. Men with prospecting hammers were scattering over all the plateau.

"Almost any sort of ferruginous rock is sure to contain the tiny amount of cerium we need," Dr. Trainor had said.

Bill reached the end of the plateau. The age-worn cliffs of red granite and burned lava fell sheer for a hundred feet, to a long slope of talus. Below the rubble of sand and boulders the flat desert stretched away, almost visibly curving to vanish beneath the near red horizon.

It was a desolate and depressing scene, this view of a dead and sun-baked planet. There was no sign of living thing, no moving object, no green of life—the canals, with their verdure, were far out of sight.

"Hard to realize there's a race of vampires across there, living in great metal domes," Bill muttered, as he threw himself flat on the rocks at the lip of the precipice, and leveled one of the heavy torpedoes before him. "But I don't blame 'em for wanting to go to a more cheerful world."

Looking behind him, he soon saw men busy with electric drills not a hundred yards from the slender silver cylinder that was the Red Rover. The earth quivered beneath him as a shot was set off, and he saw a great fountain of crushed rock thrown into the air.

Men with barrows, an hour later, were wheeling the crushed rock to gleaming electrical reducing apparatus that Dr. Trainor and the Prince were setting up beside the sunship. Evidently there had been no difficulty in finding ore that carried a satisfactory amount of cerium.

Bill continued to scan the orange-red desert below him through the powerful telescope along the rocket tube. He kept his watch before him, and at half-hour intervals sent the three short flashes with his ray pistol, which meant "All is well."

Two hours must have gone by before he saw the blue globe. It came into view low over the red rim of the desert below him, crept closer on a wavering path.

"Martian ship in view," he signalled. "A blue globe, about ten feet in diameter. Follows curious winding course, as if following something."

"Keep rocket trained upon it," came the cautiously flashed reply. "Fire if it observes us."

"Globe following animals," he flashed back. "Two grayish bipeds leaping before it. Running with marvelous agility."

He was peering through the telescope sight of the rocket tube. Keeping the cross hairs upon the little blue globe, he could still see the creatures that fled before it. They were almost like men—or erect, hairy apes. Bipeds, they were, with human-like arms, and erect heads. Covered with short gray hair or fur, they carried no weapons.

They fled from the globe at a curious leaping run, which carried them over the flat red desert with remarkable speed. They came straight for the foot of the cliff from which Bill watched, the blue globe close behind them. When one of them stumbled over a block of lava and fell sprawling headlong on the sand, the other gray creature stopped to help it. The blue globe stopped, too, hanging still twenty feet above the red sand, waited for them to rise and run desperately on again.

Bill felt a quick flood of sympathy for the gray creatures. One had stopped to help the other. That meant that they felt affection. And the globe had waited for them to run again. It seemed to be baiting them maliciously. Almost he fired the rocket. But his orders had been not to fire unless the ship were discovered.

Now they were not a mile away. Suddenly Bill perceived a tiny, light-gray object grasped close to the breast of one of the gray bipeds. Evidently it was a young one, in the arms of its mother. The other creature seemed a male. It was the mother that had fallen.

They came on toward the cliff.

They were very clearly in view, and not five hundred yards below, when the female fell again. The male stopped to aid her, and the globe poised itself above them, waited. The mother seemed unable to rise. The other creature lifted her, and she fell limply back.

As if in rage, the gray male sprang toward the blue globe, crouching.

A tiny purple spark leapt from it. A flash of violet fire enveloped him. He was flung twisted and sprawling to the ground. Burned and torn and bleeding, he drew himself to all fours, and crept on toward the blue globe.

Suddenly the sphere dropped to the ground. A round panel swung open in its side—it was turned from Bill, so that he could not see within. Green things crept out. They were creatures like the one he had seen in the Mexican desert—a cluster of slender, flexible green tentacles, with suction disks, an insignificant green body, and three malevolent purple eyes, at the ends of foot-long stalks.

There were three of the things.

The creeping male flung himself madly upon one of them. It coiled itself about him; suction disks fastened themselves against his skin. For a time he writhed and struggled, fighting in agony against the squeezing green coils. Then he was still.

One of the things grasped the little gray object in the mother's arms. She fought to shield it, to cover it with her own body. It was torn away from her, hidden in the hideously writhing green coils.

The third of the monsters flung itself upon the mother, wrapping snake-like tentacles about her, dragging her struggling body down shuddering and writhing in agony while the blood of life was sucked from it.

Bill watched, silent and trembling with horror.

"The things chased them—for fun!" he muttered fiercely. "Just a sample of what it will be on the earth—if we don't stop 'em."

Presently the green monsters left their victims—which were now mere shriveled husks. They dragged themselves back into the blue globe, which rose swiftly into the air. The round panel had closed.

From his station on the cliff, Bill watched the thing through the telescope sight of the rocket, keeping the cross hairs upon it. It came up to his own level—above it. Suddenly it paused. He was sure that the things in it had seen the Red Rover.

Quickly, he pressed a little nickeled lever. A soft whir came from the rocket tube. He pressed the red button. The torpedo leapt forward, with the white rays driving back. The empty shell was flung back in Bill's hand.

A great burst of vivid orange flame enveloped the cobalt globe. It disintegrated into a rain of white metal fragments.

"Take that, damn you!" he muttered in fierce satisfaction.

"Globe brought down successfully," he flashed. "Evidently it had sighted us. Green Martians from it had killed gray bipeds. May I inspect remains?"

"You may," permission was flashed back from the Prince. "But be absent not over half an hour."

In a moment another message came. "All lookouts be doubly alert. Globe may be searched for. Miners making good progress. We can leave by sunset. Courage!——The Prince."

Strapping the remaining rocket torpedo to his shoulders, and thrusting his ray pistol ready in his belt, Bill walked back along the brink of the precipice until he saw a comparatively easy way to the red plain below, and scrambled over the rim. Erosion of untold ages had left cracks and irregularities in the rock. Because of the slighter gravity of Mars, it was a simple feat to support his weight with the grip of his fingers on a ledge. In five minutes he had clambered down to the bank of talus. Hurriedly he scrambled down over great fallen boulders, panting and gasping for breath in the thin air.

He reached the red sand of the plain—it was worn by winds of ages into an impalpable scarlet dust, that rose in a thin, murky cloud about him, and settled in a blood-colored stain upon his perspiring limbs. The dry dust yielded beneath his feet as he made his way toward the silent gray bodies, making his progress most difficult.

Almost exhausted, he reached the gray creatures, examined them. They were far different from human beings, despite obvious similarities. Each of their "hands" had but three clawed digits; a curious, disk-like appendage took the place of the nose. In skeletal structure they were far different from homo sapiens.

Wearily Bill trudged back to the towering red cliff, red dust swirling up about him. He was oddly exhausted by his exertions, trifling as they had been. The murky red dust he inhaled was irritating to his nostrils; he choked and sneezed. Sweat ran in muddy red streams from his body, and he was suddenly very thirsty.

All the top of the red granite plateau—it was evidently the stone heart of an ancient mountain—was hidden from him. He could see nothing of the Red Rover or any of her crew. He could see no living thing.

The flat plain of red dust lay about him, curving below a near horizon. Loose dust sucked at his feet, rose about him in a suffocating saffron cloud. The sun, a little crimson globe in a blue-black sky, shone blisteringly. The sky was soberly dark, cold and hostile. In alarmed haste, he struggled toward the grim line of high, red cliffs.

Then he saw a round white object in the red sand.

Pausing to gasp for breath and to rub the sweat and red mud from his forehead, he kicked at it curiously. A sun-bleached human skull rolled out of the scarlet dust. He knew at once that it was human, not a skull of a creature like the gray things behind him on the sand.

With the unpleasant feeling that he was opening the forbidden book of some forgotten tragedy, he fell to his knees in the dust, and scooped about with his fingers. His right had closed upon a man's thigh bone. His left caught in a rotten leather belt, that pulled a human vertebra out of the dust. The belt had a tarnished silver buckle, and he looked at it with a gasp.

It bore an elaborate initial "E."

"E!" he muttered. "Envers! He got to Mars. And died here. Trying to get to the mountain, I guess. Lord! what a death! A man all alone, in the dust and the sun. A strange world. Strange monsters."

The loneliness of the red desert, the mystery of it, and its alien spirit, wrapped itself about him like a mantle of fear. He staggered to his feet, and set off at a stumbling run through the sand toward the cliff. But in a moment he paused.

"He might have left something!" he muttered.

He turned, and plodded back to where he had left the skull and the rotted belt, and dug again with his fingers. He found the rest of the skeleton, even bits of hair, clothing and human skin, preserved in the dry dust. He found an empty canteen, a rusty pocketknife, buttons, coins, and a ray pistol that was burned out.

Then his plowing fingers brought up a little black book from the dust.

It was Envers' diary.

Most of it was still legible. It is available in printed form today, and gives a detailed account of the tragic venture. The hopeful starting from earth. The dangers and discouragements of the voyage. A mutiny; half the crew killed. The thrill of landing on a new planet. The attack of the blue globes. How they took the ship, carried their prisoners to the pens, where they tried to use them to breed a new variety of domestic animals. Envers' escape, his desperate attempt to find the ship where they had landed in the desert.

Bill did not read it all then. He took time to read only that last tragic entry.

"Water all gone. See now I will never reach mountain where I landed. Probably they have moved sunship anyhow. Might have been better to have stayed in the pen. Food and water there.... But how could God create such things? So hideous, so malignant! I pray they will not use my ship to go to earth. I hoped to find and destroy it. But it is too late."

Thick red dust swirled up in Bill's face. He tried to breathe, choked and sneezed and strangled. Looking up from the yellowed pages of the dead explorer's notebook, he saw great clouds of red dust hiding the darkly blue sky in the east. It seemed almost that a colossal red-yellowed cylinder was being rolled swiftly upon him from eastward.

A dust-storm was upon him! One of the terrific dust-storms of Mars, so fierce that they are visible to astronomers across forty million miles of space.

Clutching the faded notebook, he ran across the sand again, toward the red cliffs. The wind howled behind him, overtook him and came screaming about his ears. Red dust fogged chokingly about his head. The line of cliffs before him vanished in a murky red haze. The wind blew swiftly, yet it was thin, exerting little force. The dusty air became an acrid fluid, choking, unbreathable.

Blindly, he staggered on, toward the rocks. He reached them, fought his way up the bank of talus, scrambling over gigantic blocks of lava. The base of the cliff was before him, a massive, perpendicular wall, rising out of sight in red haze. He skirted it, saw a climbable chimney, scrambled up.

At last he drew himself over the top, and lay flat. Scarlet dust-clouds swirled about him: he could not see twenty yards. He made no attempt to find the Red Rover; he knew he could not locate it in the dust.

Hours passed as he lay there, blinded, suffocating, feeling the hot misery of acrid dust and perspiration caked in a drying mud upon his skin. Thin winds screamed about the rocks, hot as a furnace-blast. He leveled his torpedo, tried to watch. But he could see only a murky wall of red, with the sun biting through it like a tiny, round blood-ruby.

The red sun had been near the zenith. Slowly it crept down, toward an unseen horizon. It alone gave him an idea of direction, and of the passage of time. Then it, too, vanished in the dust.

Suddenly the wind was still. The dust settled slowly. In half an hour the red sun came into view again, just above the red western horizon. Objects about the mile-long plateau began to take shape. The Red Rover still lay where she had been, in the center. Men were still busily at work at the mining machinery—they had struggled on through the storm.

"All lookouts signal reports," the Prince flashed from the ship.

"Found Envers' body and brought his diary," Bill flashed when it came his turn.

"Now preparing to depart," came from the Prince. "Getting apparatus aboard. Have the required cerium. Return signal will be fired soon."

Bill watched the dusty sky, over whose formerly dark-blue face the storm had drawn a yellowish haze. In a few minutes he saw a blue globe. Then another, and a third. They were far toward the southeast, drifting high and fast through the saffron haze. It seemed that they were searching out the route over which the globe that he had brought down must have come.

"Three globe-ships in sight," he signalled. "Approaching us."

Some of the other lookouts had evidently seen them, for he saw the flicker of other ray pistols across the plateau.

Without preamble, the red signal rocket was fired. Bill heard the report of it—sharp and thin in the rare atmosphere. He saw the livid scarlet flare.

He got to his feet, shouldered the heavy rocket tube, and ran stumbling back to the Red Rover. He saw other men running; saw men struggling to get the mining machinery back on the ship.

Looking back, he saw the three blue globes swimming swiftly nearer. Then he saw others, a full score of them. They were far off, tiny circles of blue in the saffron sky. They seemed to be rapidly flying toward the Red Rover.

He looked expectantly northward, toward the end of the plateau to which Paula had gone. He saw nothing of her. She was not returning in answer to the signal rocket.

He was utterly exhausted when he reached the sunship, panting, gasping for the thin air. The others were all like himself, caked with dried red mud, gasping asthmatically from exertion and excitement. Men were struggling to get pieces of heavy machinery aboard the flier—vitalium power generators that had been used to heat the furnaces, and even a motor ray tube that had been borrowed from the ship's power plant for emergency use in the improvised smelter.

The Prince and Dr. Trainor were laboring furiously over an odd piece of apparatus. On the red sand beside the silver sunship, they had set up a tripod on which was mounted a curious glistening device. There were lenses, prisms, condensers, mirrors. The core of it seemed to be a strange vacuum tube—which had an electrode of cerium, surrounded with a queer vitalium grid. A tiny filament was glowing in it; and the induction coil which powered the tube, fed by vitalium batteries, was buzzing incessantly.

"Better get aboard, and off!" Bill cried. "No use to lose our lives, our chance to save the world—just for a little mining machinery."

The Prince looked up in a moment, leaving the queer little device to Dr. Trainor. "Look at the Martian ships!" he cried, sweeping out an arm. "Must be thirty in sight, swarming up like flies. We couldn't get away. And against those purple atomic bombs, the torpedoes wouldn't have a chance. Besides, we have some of the ship's machinery out here. Some generators, and a ray tube."

Bill looked up, saw the swarming blue globes, circling above them in the saffron sky, some of them not a mile above. He shrugged hopelessly, then looked anxiously off to the north again, scanning the red plateau.

"Paula! What's become of her?" he demanded.

"Paula? Is she gone?" The Prince turned from the tripod, looked around suddenly. "Paula! What could have happened to her?"

"A broken heart has happened to her," Bill told him.

"You think—you think——" stammered the Prince. There was sudden alarm in his dark eyes, and a great tender longing. His bitterly cynical smile was gone.

"Bill, she can't be gone!" he cried, almost in agony.

"You know she was on lookout duty at the north end of the plateau. She hasn't come back."

"I've got to find her!"

"What is it to you? I thought you didn't care!" Bill was stern.

"I thought I didn't, except as a friend. But I was wrong. If she's gone, Bill—it will kill me!"

The Prince spun about with abrupt decision.

"Get everything aboard, and fit the ship to take off, as soon as possible," he ordered. "Dr. Trainor is in command. Give him any help he needs. Brand, test everything when the tube is replaced; keep the ship ready to fly." He turned swiftly to Trainor, who still worked deftly over the glittering little machine on the tripod. "Doc, you can operate that by yourself, as well as if I were here. Do your best—for mankind! I'm going to find your daughter."

Trainor nodded in silent assent, his fingers busy.

The Prince, sticking a ray pistol in his belt, set off at a desperate run toward the north end of the plateau. After a moment's hesitation, Bill staggered along behind him, still carrying the rocket torpedo strapped to his back.

It was only half a mile to the end of the plateau. In a few minutes the Prince was there. Bill staggered up just as he was reading a few scrawled words on a scrap of paper that he had found fastened to a boulder where Paula had been stationed.

"To the Prince of Space," it ran. "I can't go on. You must know that I love you—desperately. It was maddening to be with you, to know that you don't care. I know the story of your life, know that you can never care for me. The red dust is blowing now, and I am going down in the desert to die. Please don't look for me—it will do no good. Pardon me for writing this, but I wanted you to know—why I am going. Because I love you. Paula."

CHAPTER VIII

The Vitomaton

"I love Paula!" cried the Prince. "It happened all at once—when you said she was gone. Like a burst of light. Yet it must have been growing for weeks. It was getting so I couldn't work in the lab, unless she was there. God! It must have been hard for her. I was fighting it; I tried to hide what I was beginning to feel, tried to treat her as if she were a man. Now—she's gone!"

Bill looked back to the Red Rover, half a mile behind them. She lay still, burnished silver cylinder on the red sand. He could see Trainor beside her, still working over the curious little device on the tripod. All the others had gone aboard. And a score of blue globe-ships, like little sapphire moons, were circling a few thousand feet above, drifting around and around, with a slow gliding motion, like buzzards circling over their carrion-prey.

The Prince had buried his face in his hands, standing in an attitude of utter dejection.

Bill turned, looked over the red flat sand of the Martian desert. Far below, leading toward the near horizon, he saw a winding line of foot-prints, half obliterated by the recent dust-storm. Far away they vanished below the blue-black sky.

"Her tracks," he said, pointing.

"Tracks!" the Prince looked up, eager, hopeful determination flashing in his dark eyes. "Then we can follow! It may not be too late!"

He ran toward the edge of the cliff.

Bill clutched his sleeve. "Wait! Think what you're doing, man! We're fighting to save the world. You can't run off that way! Anyhow, the sun is low. It is getting cool already. In two minutes after the sun goes down it will be cold as the devil! You'll die in the desert!"

The Prince tugged away. "Hang the world! If you knew the way I feel about Paula—Lord, what a fool I've been! To drive her to this!"

Agony was written on his dark face; he bit his thin lip until blood oozed out and mingled indistinguishably with the red grime on his face. "Anyhow, the vitomaton is finished. Trainor can use it as well as I. I've got to find Paula—or die trying."

He started toward the brink of the precipice again. After the hesitation of a moment, Bill started after him. The Prince turned suddenly.

"What the devil are you doing here?"

"Well," said Bill, "the Red Rover is not a very attractive haven of refuge, with all those Martian ships flying around it. And I have come to think a good deal of Miss Paula. I'd like to help you find her."

"Don't come," said the Prince. "Probably it is death—"

"I'm not exactly an infant. I've been in tight places before, I've even an idea of what it would be like to die at night in this desert—I found the bones of a man in the dust today. But I want to go."

The Prince grasped Bill's hand. For a moment a tender smile of friendship came over the drawn mask of mingled despair and determination upon his lean face.

Presently the two of them found an inclining ledge that ran down the face of the red granite cliff, and scrambled along to the flat plain of acrid dust below. In desperate haste they plodded gasping along, following the scant traces of Paula's foot-prints that the storm had left. A hazy red cloud of dust rose about them, stinging their nostrils. They strangled and gasped for breath in the thin, dusty air. Sweaty grime covered them with a red crust.

For a mile they followed the trail. Then Paula had left the sand for a bare ledge of age-worn volcanic rock. The wind had erased what traces she might have left here. They skirted the edge of the ledge, but no prints were visible in the sand. The small red eye of the sun was just above the ocherous western rim of the planet. Their perspiring bodies shivered under the first chill of the frozen Martian night.

"It's no use," Bill muttered, sitting down on a block of time-worn granite, and wiping the red mud from his face. "She's probably been gone for hours. No chance."

"I've got to find her!" the Prince cried, his lean, red-stained face tense with determination. "I'll circle about a little, and see if I can't pick up the trail."

Bill sat on the rock. He looked back at the low dark rim of cliffs, a mile behind, grim and forbidding against the somber, indigo sky. The crimson, melancholy splendor of the Martian sunset was fading in the west.

The silver sunship was out of sight behind the cliffs. But he could see the little blue globes, like spinning moons of sapphire, circling watchfully above it. They were lower now, some of them not a thousand feet above the hidden sunship.

Abruptly, one of them was enveloped in a vivid flare of orange light. Its blue gleam flickering out, and it fell in fragments of twisted white metal. Bill knew that it had been struck with a rocket torpedo.

The reply was quick and terrible. Slender, dazzling shafts of incandescent whiteness stabbed down toward the ship, each of them driving before it a tiny bright spark of purple fire, coruscating, iridescent.

They were the atomic bombs, Bill knew. A dozen of them must have been fired, from as many ships. In a few seconds he heard the reports of their explosions—in the thin, still air, they were mere sharp cracks, like pistol reports. They exploded below the line of his vision. No more torpedoes were fired from the unseen sunship. Bill could see nothing of it; but he was sure that it had been destroyed.

He heard the Prince's shout, thin and high in the rare atmosphere. It came from a hundred yards beyond him.

"I've found the trail."

Bill got up, trudged across to follow him. The Prince waited, impatiently, but gasping for breath. Just half of the red disk of the sun was visible in the indigo sky above the straight horizon, and a chill breeze blew upon them.

"I guess that ends the chance for the world!" Bill gasped.

"I suppose so. Some fool must have shot that torpedo off, contrary to orders. The vitomaton might have saved us, if Trainor had had a chance to use it."

They plodded on through the dust, straining their eyes to follow the half-obliterated trail in the fading light. It grew colder very swiftly, for Mars has no such thick blanket atmosphere to hold the heat of day as has the earth.

Twilight was short. Splendid wings of somber crimson flame hung for a moment in the west. A brief golden glow shone where it had been. Then the sky was dark, and the million stars were standing out in cold, motionless majesty—scintillantly bright, unfeeling watchers of the drama in the desert.

Bill felt tingling cold envelope his limbs. The sweat and mud upon him seemed freezing. He saw the white glitter of frost appear suddenly upon his garments, even upon the red dust. The thin air he breathed seemed to freeze his lungs. He trembled. His skin became a stiff, numb, painful garment, hindering his movements. The Prince staggered on ahead of him, a vague dark shadow in the night, crying out at intervals in a queer, strained voice.

Bill stopped, looked back, shivering and miserable. "No use to go on," he muttered. "No use." He stood still, vainly flapping his numb arms against his sides. A vivid picture came to him—a naked, staring, sun-bleached skull, lying in the red dust. "Bones in the dust," he muttered. "Bones in the dust. Envers' bones. And Paula's. The Prince's. Mine."

He saw something that made him stare, oblivious of the cold.

The red cliff had become a low dark line, below the star-studded sky. The score of little cobalt moons were still drifting around and around, in endless circles, watching, waiting. They were bright among the stars.

A little green cloud came up into view, above the dark rim of the cliff. A little spinning wisp of greenish vapor. A tiny sphere of swirling radiance. It shone with the clear lucent green of spring, of all verdure, of life itself. It spun, and it shone with live green light.

With inconceivable speed, it darted upward. It struck one of the blue globes. A sparkling mist of dancing emerald atoms flowed over the azure sphere, dissolved it, melted it away.

Bill rubbed his eyes. Where the sapphire ship had been was now only a swirling mass of green mist, a cloud of twinkling emerald particles, shining with a supernal viridescent radiance that somehow suggested life.

Abruptly as the first tiny wisp of green luminescence had appeared, this whirling cloud exploded. It burst into scores of tiny globes of sparkling, vibrant atoms. The green cloud had eaten and grown. Now it was reproducing itself like a living thing that feeds and grows and sends off spores.

And each of the little blobs of viridity flew to an azure sphere. It seemed to Bill as if the blue ships drew them—or as if the green globules of swirling mist were alive, seeking food.

In an instant, each swirling spiral of emerald mist had struck a blue globe. Vibrant green haze spread over every sphere. And the spheres melted, faded, vanished in clouds of swirling viridescent vapor.

It all happened very suddenly. It was hardly a second, Bill thought, after the first of the swirling green blobs had appeared, before the last of the Martian fliers had become a mass of incandescent mist. Then, suddenly as they had come, the green spirals vanished. They were blotted out.

The stars shone cold and brilliant, in many-colored splendor, above the dark line of the cliffs. The Martian ships were gone.

"The vitomaton!" Bill muttered, "The Prince said something about the vitomaton. A new weapon, using the force of life. And the green was like a living thing, consuming the spheres!"

Suddenly he felt the bitter cold again. He moved, and his garments were stiff with frost. The cold had numbed his limbs—most of the pain had gone. He felt a curious lightness, an odd sense of relief, of freedom—and a delicious, alarming desire for sleep. But leaden pain of cold still lurked underneath, dull, throbbing.

"Move! Move!" he muttered through cold-stiffened lips. "Move! Keep warm!"

He stumbled across the dust in the direction the Prince had taken. The cold tugged at him. His breath froze in swirls of ice. With all his will he fought the deadly desire for sleep.

He had not gone far when he came upon a dark shape in the night. It was the Prince, carrying Paula in his arms.

"I found her lying on the sand," he gasped to Bill. "She was awake. She was glad—forgave me—happy now."

The Prince was exhausted, struggling through the sand, burdened with the girl in his arms.

"Why go on?" Bill forced the words through his freezing face. "Never make it. They shot atomic bombs at Red Rover. Then something happened to them. Green light."

"The vitomaton!" gasped the Prince. "Vortex of spinning, disintegrated atoms. Controlled by wireless power. Alive! Consumes all matter! Disintegrates it into atomic nothingness!"

He staggered on toward the dark line of cliffs, clasping the inert form of the girl to his body.

"But Paula! I love her. I must carry her to the ship. It is my fault. We must get to the ship."

Bill struggled along beside him. "Too far!" he muttered. "Miles, in the night. In the cold. We'll never——"

He stopped, with a thin, rasping cry.

Before him, above the narrow black line of the cliffs, a slender bar of luminescent silver had shot up into view. It was the slim, tapering cylinder of the Red Rover, with her twelve rear motor rays driving white and dazzling against the mountain she was leaving. The sunship, unharmed, driving upward into space!

"My God!" Bill screamed. "Leaving us!" He staggered forward, a pitiful, trembling figure, encased in stiff, frost-covered garments. He waved his arms, shouted. It was vain, almost ludicrous.

The Prince had stopped, still holding Paula in his arms.

"They think—Martians got us!" he called in a queer voice. "Stop them! Fire torpedo—at boulder. They will see!"

Bill heard the gasping voice. He unfastened the heavy tube that he still carried on his shoulder, leveled it before him. With numb, trembling fingers, he tried to move the levers. His fingers seemed frozen; they would not move. Tears burst from his eyes, freezing on his cheeks. He stood holding the heavy tube in his arms, sobbing like a baby.

Above them, the slender white cylinder of the Red Rover was driving out into star-gemmed space, dazzling opalescent rays shooting back at the dark mountain behind her.

"They go," Bill babbled. "They think we are dead. Have not time to wait. Go to fight for world."

He collapsed in a trembling heap upon the loose, frosty sand.

The Prince had suddenly laid Paula on the ground, was beside him.

"Lift the rocket," he gasped. "Aim. I will fire."

Bill raised the heavy tube mechanically, sighted through the telescope. His trembling was so violent that he could hardly hold it upon the rock. The Prince tried with his fingers to move the lever, in vain. Then he bent, pressed his chin against it. It slipped, cut a red gash in his skin. Again he tried, and the whir of the motor responded. He got his chin upon the little red button, pressed it. The empty shell drove back, fell from Bill's numbed hands and clattered on the sand.

The torpedo struck with a burst of orange light.

The Prince picked up Paula again, clasped her chilled body to him. Bill watched the Red Rover. Suddenly he voiced a glad, incoherent cry. The white rays that drove her upward were snapped out. The slim silver ship swung about, came down on a long swift glide.

In a moment, it seemed, she swept over them, with a searchlight sweeping the red sand. The white beam found the three. Quickly the ship dropped beside them. Grotesque figures in vacuum suits leapt from the air-lock.

In a few seconds they were aboard, in warmth and light. Hot, moist air hissed into the lock about them, and they could breathe easily again. The sizzling of the air through the valves was the last impression of which Bill was conscious, until he found himself waking up in a comfortable bed, feeling warm and very hungry. Captain Brand was standing with his blue eyes peering through the door.

"Just looked in to see you as I was going on duty, Bill," he said. "Doctor Trainor says you're all right now. The Prince and Paula are too. You were all rather chilled, but nothing was seriously frozen. Lucky you shot off the rocket. We had given up hope for you—didn't dare stay.

"Funny change has come over the Prince. He's been up a good while, sitting by Paula's bed. How's that for the misogynist—the hermit outlaw of space? Well, come on up to the bridge when you've had some breakfast. The battle with Mars is going to be fought out in the next few hours. Ought to be something interesting to see."

Having delivered his broadside of information so fast that the sleepy Bill could hardly absorb it, the gruff old space-captain withdrew his head, and went on.

An hour later Bill entered the bridge-room.

Gazing through the vitrolite panels, he saw the familiar aspect of interplanetary space—hard, brilliant points of many-colored light scintillating in a silver-dusted void of utter blackness. The flaming, red-winged sun was small and far distant. Earth was a huge green star, glowing with indescribably beautiful liquid emerald brilliance; the moon a silver speck beside it.

The grim red disk of Mars filled a great space in the heavens. Bill looked for a little blue dot that had been visible upon the red planet for so long—the tiny azure circle that he had first seen from the telescope in Trainor's Tower. He found the spot where it should be, on the upper limb of the planet. But it was gone.

"The thing has left Mars," Captain Brand told him. "It has set out on its mission of doom to Earth!"

"What is it?"

"It is armored with one of their blue vibratory screens. What hellish contrivances of war it has in it, and what demoniac millions of Martians, no one knows. It is enormous, more than a mile in diameter."

"Can we do anything?"

"I hardly see how we can do anything. But we can try. Trainor and the Prince are coming with their vitomaton."

"Say, didn't they shoot their atomic bombs at the ship last night?" Bill asked. "It was out of sight, but I imagined they had wrecked it."

"One of the lookouts who was late getting back brought down one of their globes with a rocket. They fired a lot of the purple bombs to scare us. But I think they meant to take us alive. In the interest of their science, I suppose. And Dr. Trainor got the vitomaton ready before they had done anything."

Bill was peering out into the star-strewn ebon gulf. Captain Brand pointed. He saw a tiny blue globe, swimming among the stars.

"There's the infernal thing! Carrying its cargo of horror to our earth!"

In a few moments Dr. Trainor, the Prince, and Paula came one by one up the ladder to the bridge. Trainor carried the tripod; the Prince brought a little black case which contained the strange vacuum tube with the cerium electrode, and its various accessories; Paula had a little calculating machine and a book of mathematical tables.

Trainor and the Prince set up the tripod in the center of the room, and mounted the little black case upon it. The apparatus looked not very different from a small camera. Working with cool, brisk efficiency, Paula began operating the calculating machine, taking numbers from the book, and calling out the results to the Prince, who was setting numerous small dials on the apparatus.

Dr. Trainor peered through a compact little telescope which was evidently an auxiliary part of the apparatus, training the machine on the tiny blue disk that was the messenger of doom from Mars. From time to time he called out numbers which seemed to go into Paula's calculations.

Looking curiously at Paula and the Prince, Bill could see no sign of an understanding between them. Both seemed absorbed in the problem before them. They were impersonal as any two collaborating scientists.

At last Dr. Trainor raised his eyes from the little telescope, and the Prince paused, with his fingers on a tiny switch. The induction coil, in the circuit of a powerful vitalium generator, was buzzing monotonously, while purple fire leapt between its terminals. Paula was still efficiently busy over the little calculating machine, pressing its keys while the motors whirred inside it.

"We're all ready," Trainor announced, "as soon as Paula finishes the integration." He turned to Bill and Captain Brand, who were eying the apparatus with intense interest. "If you will look inside this electron tube, when the Prince closes the switch, you will see a tiny green spark come into being. Just at the focus of the rays from the cerium electrode, inside the vitalium helix grid.

"That green spark is a living thing!"

"It has in it the vital essence. It can consume matter—feed itself. It can grow. It can divide, reproduce itself. It responds to stimuli—it obeys the signals we send from this directional beam transmitter." He tapped an insignificant little drum.

"And it ceases to be, when we cut off the power.

"It is a living thing, that eats. And it is more destructive than anything else that eats, for it destroys the atoms that it takes into itself. It resolves them into pure vibratory energy, into free protons and electrons."

Paula called out another number, in her soft, husky voice. The Prince swiftly set a last dial, pressed a tiny lever. Bill, peering through the thin walls of a little electron tube, saw a filament light, saw the thin cerium disk grow incandescent, apparently under cathode bombardment. Then he saw a tiny green spark come into being, in a fine helix of gleaming vitalium wire. For a little time it hung there, swinging back and forth a little, growing slowly.

Deliberately, one by one, the Prince depressed keys on a black panel behind the tube. The little green spark wavered. Suddenly it shot forward, out through the wall of the tube. It swam uncertainly through the air in the room, growing until it was large as a marble. The Prince flicked down another key, and it darted out through a vitrolite panel, towards the blue globe from Mars.

It had cut a little round hole in the transparent crystal, a hole the size of a man's finger. The matter in it had vanished utterly. And the little viridescent cloud of curdled light that hung outside had grown again. It was as large as a man's fist—a tiny, whirling spiral of vibrant emerald particles.

Air hissed through the little hole, forming a frozen, misty cloud outside. Captain Brand promptly produced a little disk of soft rubber, placed it against the opening. Air-pressure held it tight, sealing the orifice.

The Prince pressed another key, the little swirling green sphere was whisked away—it vanished. The Prince stood intent, fingers on the banks of keys, eyes on red pointers that spun dizzily on tiny dials. Another key clicked down suddenly. He moved a dial, and looked expectantly out through the vitrolite panel.

Bill saw the green film run suddenly over the tiny blue globe floating among the stars. The azure sphere seemed to melt away, to dissolve into sparkling green radiance. In a moment, where the great blue ship had been, was only a spinning spiral of glistening viridescence.

"Look at Mars!" cried the Prince. "This is a challenge. If they want peace, they shall have it. If they want war, they shall feel the power of the vitomaton!"

Bill turned dazedly to look at the broad disk of the red planet. It was not relatively very far away. He could see the glistening white spot that was the north polar cap, the vast ocherous deserts, the dark equatorial markings, the green-black lines of the canals. For all the grimness of its somber, crimson color, it was very brilliant against the darkness of the spangled void.

An amazing change came swiftly over Mars.

A bluish tinge flowed over orange-red deserts. A thin blue mist seemed to have come suddenly into the atmosphere of the planet. It darkened, became abruptly solid. A wall of blue hid the red world. Mars became a colossal globe. Her surface was as real, as smooth and unbroken, as that of the ship they had just destroyed.

Mars had become a sphere of polished sapphire.

"A wall of vibration, I suppose," said the Prince. "What a science to condemn to destruction!"

Huge globes of purple fire—violet spheres large as the ship they had just destroyed—driven on mighty rays, leapt out from a score of points on the smooth azure armor that covered a world. With incredible speed, they converged toward the Red Rover.

"Atomic bombs with a vengeance!" cried the Prince. "One of those would throw the earth out of its orbit, into the sun." He turned briskly to Paula. "Quick now! Integrations for the planet!"

She sprang to the calculating machine; slim fingers flew over the keys. Trainor swung his apparatus toward the smooth azure ball that Mars had become, peered through his telescope, called out a series of numbers to Paula. Quickly she finished, gave her results to the Prince.

He bent over the banks of keys again.

Bill watched the enormous blue globe of Mars in fascinated horror, followed the huge, luminescent red-purple atomic bombs, that were hurtling out toward them, driven on broad white rays.

"An amazing amount of power in those atomic bombs," Dr. Trainor commented, his mild eyes bright with scientific enthusiasm. "I doubt that space itself is strong enough to hold up under their explosion. If they hit us, I imagine it will break down the continuum, blow us out of the universe altogether, out of space and time!"

Bill was looking at the whirling green spiral that hung where the Martian flier had been. He saw it move suddenly, dart across the star-dusted darkness of space. It plunged straight for the blue ball of Mars, struck it. A viridescent fog ran quickly over the enormous azure globe.

Mars melted away.

The planet dissolved in a huge, madly spinning cloud of brilliant green mist that shone with an odd light—with a light of life! A world faded into a nebulous spiral of green. Mars became a spinning cloud of dust as if of malachite.

A tiny lever flicked over, under the Prince's fingers. And the green light went out.

Where Mars had been was nothing! The stars shone through, hot and clear. A machine no larger than a camera had destroyed a world. Bill was dazed, staggered.

Solemnly, almost sadly, the Prince moved a slender, tanned hand across his brow. "A terrible thing," he said slowly. "It is a terrible thing to destroy a world. A world that had been eons in the making, and that might have changed the history of the cosmos.... But they voted for war. We had no choice."

He shook his head suddenly, and smiled. "It's all over. The great mission of my life—completed. Doctor, I want you to pack the vitomaton very carefully, and lock it up in our best safe, and try to forget the combination. A great invention. But I hope we never need to use it again."

Then the Prince of Space did a thing that was amazing to most of his associates as the destruction of Mars had been. He walked quickly to Paula Trainor, and put his arms around her. He slowly tilted up her elfin face, where the golden eyes were laughing now, with a great, tender light of gladness shining in them. He bent, and kissed her warm red lips, with a hungry eagerness that was almost boyish.

A happy smile was dancing in his eyes when he looked up at the astounded Captain Brand and the others.

"Allow me," he said, "to present the Princess of Space!"

Some months later, when Bill was landed on Trainor's Tower, on a visit from his new home in the City of Space, he found that the destruction of Mars had created an enormous sensation. Astronomers were manfully inventing fantastic hypotheses to explain why the red planet had first turned blue, then green, and finally vanished utterly. The sunships of the Moon Patrol were still hunting merrily for the Prince of Space. Since the loss of the Triton's treasure, the reward for his capture had been increased to twenty-five million eagles.

The End

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The Prince of Space

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