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Updated: May 1, 2025
My gaze was down on the spider incline, up which, over the bend of the ship's sleek, silvery body, the passengers and their friends were coming in little groups. The upper deck was already jammed with them. The Planetara, as flyers go, was not a large vessel. Cylindrical of body, forty feet maximum beam, and two hundred and seventy-five feet in length.
It seemed to startle Rankin and George Prince as much as it did me. Both exclaimed: "No!" "No? Why not? Everyone is at his post!" Prince repeated, "No!" And Rankin, "But can we trust them? The stewards the crew?" "Eight of them are our own men! You didn't know that, Rankin? They've been aboard the Planetara for several voyages.
Its current weakened the lights with the drain upon the distributors, and cooled the room with a sudden deadly chill as the Erentz insulating system slowed down. The duty man looked frightened. "You'll bulge out our walls, Commander. The internal pressure " "We'll chance it." They picked up the image of the Planetara.
But we were not foolish enough to leave Greater New York on this voyage without our own apparatus. My brother and Coniston and Prince all of us snipped crates of freight consigned to Ferrok-Shahn; and Rankin had special baggage marked 'theatrical apparatus." I understood it now. These brigands had boarded the Planetara with their own Moon equipment, disguised as freight and personal baggage.
"Gregg Haljan and Daniel Dean." The guard stood aside. "Come in." I own that my heart was unduly thumping as we entered. The door dropped behind us. It was a small blue-lit apartment a steel-lined room like a vault. Colonel Halsey sat at his desk. And the big, heavy-set, florid Captain Carter our commander on the Planetara was here. That surprised us: we had not seen him leave the ship.
Grantline's party? Snap gripped me. "Grantline! We're safe, Gregg! Safe!" He took his bulb light from his helmet; we stood in a group while he waved it. A semaphore signal. "Grantline?" And the answer came, "Yes. You, Dean?" Their personal code. No doubt of this it was Grantline, who had seen the Planetara fall and had come to help us. I stood then with my hand holding Anita.
We could not think why we should be wanted. It was the darkness of mid-evening when we left the Planetara for Halsey's office. It was not a long trip. We went on the upper monorail, descending into the subterranean city at Park Circle 30. We had never been to Halsey's office before. Now we found it to be a gloomy, vaultlike place in one of the deepest corridors. The door lifted.
With agile leaps, it came mounting at me! Another brigand! Miko? No, it was not large enough to be Miko. I was still confused. I thought of Hahn. But that was absurd: Hahn was in the wreck of the Planetara. One of the stewards then.... The figure came up the staircase recklessly, to assail me. I took a step backward, bracing myself to receive this new antagonist.
Had seized his ray cylinder and struck him down, and been herself knocked unconscious by his dying lunge, which also had broken the tubes and wrecked the Planetara. And Venza, unconscious, had been lying here with the mechanism of her cloak still operating, so that we did not see her when we came and found why Hahn did not answer my signals. "It's here, Gregg."
But it would be eight days or more before in distant Ferrok-Shahn the nonarrival of the Planetara would cause any real comment. No one was searching for us no one was worried over us. No wonder the crafty Miko was willing to take his chances out here in the Lunar wilds! His ship, his reinforcements, his weapons were coming rapidly! And we were helpless. Almost unarmed. Marooned here on the Moon!
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