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Franck took advantage of it and eased up the motors." We wondered if Miko knew that. Doubtless he did, for the heat-ray was not used again. Then came a zed-ray. I stood at the window, watching it, faint sheen of beam in the dimness; it crept with sinister deliberation along our front wall, clung momentarily to our shielded windows, and pried with its revealing glow into Snap's workshop.
I stared, but I had to shield my eyes against the dazzling actinic glare, and I could see nothing. Was Miko making a zed-ray photograph of our interiors? We had no way of knowing. He was testing his short range projectors now. With my eyes again accustomed to the normal Earthlight in the valley, I could see the stabs of electronic beams, the Martian paralyzing rays and heat beams.
There was something up there in the sky! The Zed-ray met resistance; we could see the sparks, and hear the snap of them coming like a roar from the microphone above the drumming. Met the resistance and conquered it; gradually the snapping roar died away. "Jac! I see something! Something there don't you see it?"
We made a brave show of activity in our workshop with abandoned ore carts which were stored there. We got them out, started to recondition them. It seemed to fool Miko. His zed-ray clung to the workshop, watching us. And at the distant port we gathered the platforms, shields, helmets, bombs, and a few hand projectors. There were six platforms three of us upon each.
Our encampment was in a turmoil of confusion chaos, out of which very soon order came. The skeleton figures in the air I saw now that there were nearer two hundred than one hundred were perhaps two thousand feet away, and at an altitude of about the cliff-ledge where Elza and I were sitting. They swept forward, bathed in the Zed-ray with all our other search-beams darkened to give it full sway.
A luminous blur became visible in the nearer sky moving blobs of silver luminosity in the mud-brown light of the Zed-ray. A hundred or more moving silver blobs. They were taking form. The silvery phosphorescent look faded, became grey-white. Took definite shape. Waving arms and legs! Bones bereft of flesh. Human skeletons! Limbs waving rhythmically. Bony arms, with fingers clutching metal weapons.
Oh, if only I had taken warning! We finished our connecting. The dull gray point of zed-ray gleamed through the prisms to mingle with the moonlight entering the main lens. I stood with the shutter trip. "The same interval, Snap?" "Yes." Beside me, I was aware of a faint reflection of the zed-ray a gray cathedral shaft crossing the room and falling upon the opposite wall.
In ten days the other brigand ship, adequately manned and armed, would be here. Snap helped me connect the zed-ray. He did not dare even to whisper to me, with Moa hovering always so close. And for all Miko's sardonic smiling, we knew that he would tolerate nothing from us now. He was fully armed and so was Moa. I recall that several times Snap endeavored to touch me significantly.
The searchbeam presently vanished. It was replaced immediately by a zed-ray, which darted at once to our treasure sheds and clung. That stung Grantline into his first action. We flung our own zed-ray down across the valley. It reached the brigand ship and the blurred interior of the cabins. "Try the searchbeam, Franck." The zed-ray went off.
Whether Miko's instruments showed him how badly damaged our front wall was, we never knew. But I think that he realized. His searchbeam clung to it, and his zed-ray pried into our interiors. The brigand ship was active now. We were desperate; we used our telescope freely for observation. Miko's ore carts and mining apparatus were unloaded on the rocks.
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