United States or United Kingdom ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Bullet projectors and heat ray cylinders. And we had several eavesdropping microphones which we planned to use whenever occasion offered. Only twenty-eight hours of this eventful voyage had passed. The Planetara was some six million miles from the Earth; it blazed behind us, a tremendous giant. The body of Anita was being made ready for burial. George Prince was still in his stateroom.
A moment when, beyond the thought of the nearby brigand or the possibility of an eavesdropping ray trained now upon my cubby a moment while Anita and I held each other, and whispered those things which could mean nothing to the world, but which were all the world to us! Then it was she whose wits brought us back from the shining fairyland of our love, into the sinister reality of the Planetara.
"Grantline thinks we should return to the Planetara. Might find some of them alive." Grantline touched me. "It's only human " "Yes," I said. We went back. Some ten of us a line of grotesque figures bounding with slow, easy strides over the jagged, rock-strewn plain. Our lights danced before us. The Planetara came at last into view. My ship. Again that pang swept me as I saw her.
Our ship, the space-flyer, Planetara, whose home port was Greater New York, carried mail and passenger traffic to and from both Venus and Mars. Of astronomical necessity, our flights were irregular. The spring of 2070, with both planets close to the Earth, we were making two complete round trips. We had just arrived in Greater New York, one May evening, from Grebhar, Venus Free State.
With only five hours in port here, we were departing the same night at the zero hour for Ferrok-Shahn, capital of the Martian Union. We were no sooner at the landing stage than I found a code flash summoning Dan Dean and me to Divisional Detective Headquarters. Dan "Snap" Dean was one of my closest friends. He was electron-radio operator of the Planetara.
The vein had now been exhausted; but the treasure was here enough to supply every need on his Earth! Nothing was left but to wait for the Planetara. The men were talking of that now. "She ought to be well midway from Ferrok-Shahn by now. When do you figure she'll be back here and signal us?" "Twenty days. Give her another five now to Mars, and five in port. That's ten.
I whispered into the audiphone, "It's coming over the crater." Her hand pressed my arm in answer. I recalled that when, from the Planetara, Miko had forced Snap to signal this brigand band on Mars, Miko's only information as to the whereabouts of the Grantline camp was that it lay between Archimedes and the Apennines. The brigands now were following that information. A tense interval passed.
The brigand ship, a hundred feet away, loomed dark and silent, a lifeless hulk, already empty of air, drained in the mad blast outward. Like the wreck of the Planetara a dead, useless, pulseless hulk already. We four stood together, triumphant. The battle was over. The brigands were worsted, almost the last man of them dead or dying.
"Let's watch from here a moment," I whispered. She nodded, standing with her hand on my arm. I felt that we were very small, here in the midst of these seven foot Martian men. I was all in white, the costume used in the warm interior of Grantline's camp. Bareheaded, white silk Planetara uniform jacket, broad belt and tight-laced trousers.
How skilled at mathematics were these brigands? Miko, Coniston, Hahn could I fool them? If I could learn Grantline's location on the Moon, and keep the Planetara away from it. A pretended error of charting. Time lost and perhaps Snap could find an opportunity to signal Earth, get help. Miko answered my question as bluntly as I asked it. "I don't know where Grantline is located.
Word Of The Day