 THE PIGME PLANET by Jack Williamson. Nothing ever happens to me. Larry Manahan grumbled under his breath, sitting behind his desk at the advertising agency which employed his services in return for the consideration of fifty a week. All the adventure I know is what I see in the movies or read about in magazines—what I wouldn't give for a slice of real life. Unconsciously, he tensed the muscles of his six feet of lean, hard body. His crisp, flame-colored hair seemed to bristle, his blue eyes blazed. He clenched a brown hammer of a fist. Larry felt himself an energetic red-blooded square peg, badly afflicted with the urge for adventure, miserably wedged in a round hole. It is one of the misfortunes of our civilization that a young man who, for example, might have been an excellent pirate a couple of centuries ago, must be kept chained to a desk. And that seemed to be Larry's fate. Things happened to other people, he muttered. Why couldn't an adventure come to me? He sat staring wistfully at a picture of a majestic mountain landscape, soon to be used in the advertising of a railway company whose publicity was handled by his agency, when the jangle of the telephone roused him with a start. Oh, Larry—came a breathless, quivering voice. Then, with a click, the connection was broken. The voice had been feminine and had carried a familiar ring. Larry tried to place it as he listened to the receiver and attempted to get the broken connection restored. Your party hung up and won't answer, the operator informed him. He replaced the receiver on the hook, still seeking to follow the thin thread of memory given him by the familiar note in that eager, excited voice. If only the girl had spoken a few more words. Then it came to him. Agnes Stirling, he exclaimed aloud. Agnes Stirling was a slender, elfish, dark-haired girl. Lovely he had thought her on the occasions of their few brief meetings. Larry knew her as the secretary and laboratory assistant of Dr. Travis Whitting, a retired college professor known for his work on the structure of the atom. Larry had called at the home laboratory of the Savant months before to check certain statistics to be used for advertising purposes and had met the girl there. Only a few times since had he seen her. Now she had called him in a voice that fairly trembled with excitement and, he thought, dread. And she had been interrupted before she had time to give him any message. For a few seconds Larry stared at the telephone. Then he rose abruptly to his feet, crammed his hat on his head and started for the door. The way to find adventures to go after it, he murmured, and this is the invitation. It was not many minutes later that he sprang out of a taxi at the front of the building in which Dr. Travis Whitting made his home and maintained a private experimental laboratory. It was a two-story stucco house, rather out of date, set well back from the sidewalk with a scrap of lawn and a few straggling shrubs before it. The door was closed, the windows curtained blankly, the place seemed deserted and forbidding. Larry ran up the uneven brick walk to the door and rang the bell. Impatiently he waited a few moments. No sound came from within. He felt something ominous, fateful about the silent mystery that seemed to shroud the old house. For the first time it occurred to him that Agnes might be in physical danger as a result of some unconscious experiment on the part of Dr. Whitting. Instinctively his hand sought the doorknob. To his surprise the door was unlocked. It swung open before him. For a moment he stared, hesitating into the dark hall revealed beyond. Then, driven by the thought that Agnes might be in danger, he advanced impulsively. The several doors opening into the hall were closed. The one at the back he knew gave admittance to the laboratory. Impelled by some vague premonition he hastened toward it down the long hall and threw it open. As he stepped inside the room his foot slipped on a spot of something red. Recovering his balance with difficulty he peered about. Bending down Larry briefly examined the red spot on which he had slipped. It was a pool of fresh blood which had not yet darkened. Lying beside it, crimson splashed, was a revolver. As he picked up the weapon he cried out in astonishment. Something had happened to the gun. The trigger guard was torn from it and the cylinder crushed as if in some resistless grasp. The stock was twisted and the barrel bent almost into a circle. The revolver had been crumpled by some terrific force. As a soft clay model of it might have been broken by the pressure of a man's hand. Crimson shades of Caesar he muttered and dropped the crushed weapon to the floor again. His eyes swept the silent laboratory. It was a huge room, taking up all the rear part of the house from the first floor to the roof. Gray daylight streamed through a skylight twenty feet overhead. The ends of the vast room were cluttered with electrical and chemical apparatus, but Larry's eye was caught at once by a strange and complex device which loomed across from him in the center of the room. Two pillars of intense light, a ray of crimson flame and another of deeply violent radiance beat straight down from a complicated array of enormous, oddly shaped electron tubes of mirrors and lenses and prisms, of coils and whirling discs which reached almost to the roof. Light bright, a yard in diameter and almost a yard apart, the strange columns of light were sharp edged as two transparent cylinders filled with liquid light of ruby and of amethyst. Each ray poured down upon a circular platform of glass or polished crystal. Hanging between those motionless cylinders of red and violet light was a strange looking greenish globe. A round ball, nearly a yard in diameter, hung between the rays almost touching them. Its surface was oddly splotched with darker and lighter areas. It was spinning steadily at a low rate of speed. Larry did not see what held it up. It seemed hanging free several feet above the crystal platforms. Reluctantly, he withdrew his eyes from the mysterious sphere and looked about the room once more. No, the laboratory was vacant of human occupants. No one was hidden among the benches that were cluttered with beakers and test tubes and stills or among the dynamos and transformers in the other end of the room. The confusion of questions beat through Larry's brain. What danger could be haunting this quiet laboratory? Was this the blood of Agnes Sterling or the scientist who employed her that was now clotting on the floor? What terrific force had crumpled up the revolver? What had become of Agnes and Dr. Whitting and of whatever had attacked them? Had Agnes called him after the attack or before? Despite himself, his attention was drawn back to the little globe spinning so regularly, floating in the air between the pillars of red and violet flame, floating alone like a little world in space without a visible support. It might be held up by magnetic attraction, he thought. A tiny planet! His mind quickened at the idea and he have forgot the weird mystery gathering about him. He stepped nearer the sphere. It was curiously like a miniature world. The irregular bluish areas would be seas, the green and brown spaces land. In some parts the surface appeared mystically obscured, perhaps by masses of clouds. Larry saw an odd looking lamp set perhaps ten feet behind the slowly spinning floating ball, throwing upon it a brilliant ray of vividly blue light. Half the strange sphere was brilliantly illuminated by it. The rest was in comparative darkness. That blue lamp it came to Larry lit the sphere as the sun lights the earth. Nonsense, he muttered. It's impossible! Aroused by the seeming wonder of it, he was drawn nearer the ball. It spun rather slowly, Larry noted, and each rotation consumed several seconds. He could distinguish green patches that might be forests and thin silvery lines that looked like rivers and broad red-brown areas that must be deserts and the broad blue stretches that suggested oceans. A toy world, he cried, a laboratory planet! What an experiment! Then his eyes looking up caught the glistening polished lens of a powerful magnifying glass which hung by a black ribbon from a hook on one of the heavy steel beams which supported the huge mass of silently wearing apparatus. Eagerly, he unfastened the magnifier. Holding it before his eyes, he bent toward the strange sphere, spinning steadily in the air. Suffering sheets of Caesar, he ejaculated. Beneath the lens, a world was racing. He could see masses of vividly green forest, vast expanses of bear-cracked, ochrous desert, wastes of smooth blue ocean. Then he was gazing at a city. Larry could not be sure that he had seen it correctly. It had slipped very swiftly beneath his lens. But he had a momentary impression of tiny fantastic buildings clustered in an elf-like city. A pygmy planet spinning in the laboratory like a world in the Gulf of Space. What could it mean? Could it be connected with the strange call from Agnes with the blood on the floor, with the strange and ominous silence that shrouded the deserted room? Oh, Larry! A clear, familiar voice rang suddenly from the door. You came! Startled, Larry leaped back from the tiny whirling globe and turned to the door. A girl had come silently into the room. It was Agnes sterling, her dark hair was tangled, her small face was flushed, and her brown eyes were wide with fear. In a white hand which shook a little, she carried a small gold-plated automatic pistol. She ran nervously across the wide floor to Larry with relief dawning in her eyes. I'm so glad you came, she gassed, panting with excitement. I started to call you on the phone, but then I was afraid it would kill you if you came. Please be careful, it may come back any minute. You better go away, it just took Dr. Whitting. Wait a minute, Larry put in, just one thing at a time. Let's get this straight to begin with. What is it that might kill me and that got the doctor? It's terrible, she gassed, trembling. A monster! You must go away before it comes back. Larry drew a tall stool from beside one of the crowded tables and placed it beside her. Don't get excited, he urged. I'm sure everything will be all right. Just sit down and tell me about it. The whole story. Just what is going on here and what happened to Dr. Whitting? He helped her upon the stool. She looked up at him gratefully and began to speak in a rapid voice. You see that little planet? The monster came from that and carried the doctor back there. And I know it will soon be back for another victim. For sacrifice! She had pointed across the great room toward the strange little globe which hung between the pillars of red and violet light. Please go slow, Larry broke in. You're too fast for me. Are you trying to tell me that that spinning ball is really a planet? Agnes seemed a little more composed though she was still flushed and breathing rapidly. Her small hand still gripped the bright automatic. Yes, it is a planet, the pygmy planet Dr. Whitting called it. He said it was the great experiment of the century. We began with the planet young and hot and watched it until it is now almost as old as Mars. We watched the change and development of life upon it and the rise and decay of a strange civilization. Until now its people are strange things with human brains and mechanical bodies worshipping a rusty machine like a god. Go slow, Larry pleaded again. I don't see, did the Dr. Bill create that planet himself? Yes, it began with his work on atomic structure. He discovered that certain frequencies of the X-ray, so powerful that they are almost akin to the cosmic ray, have the power of altering electronic orbits. Every atom you know is a sort of solar system with electrons revolving about a proton. And these rays would cause the electrons to fall into incredibly smaller orbits, causing vast reduction in the size of the atoms and in the size of any object which the atoms formed. They would cause anything, living or dead, to shrink to inconceivably microscopic dimensions, or restore it to its former size depending upon the exact wavelength used. And the time passes far more swiftly for the tiny objects, probably because the electrons move faster in their smaller orbits. That is what suggested to Dr. Whitting that he would be able to watch the entire life of a planet in the laboratory. And so at first we experimented merely with solitary specimens or colonies of animals. But on the pygmy planet we have watched the life of a world, the whole panorama of evolution. It seems too wonderful, Larry muttered. Could Dr. Whitting actually decrease his size and become a dwarf? No trick at all, Agnes assured him. All you have to do is stand in the violet beam to shrink and move over to the red one when you want to grow. I have been several times with Dr. Whitting to the pygmy planet. Bin? Larry stopped, breathless with astonishment. See the little airplane? Agnes said, pointing under the table. Larry gasped. Beneath the table stood a toy airplane. The spread of its glistening perfect wings was hardly three feet. A wonderful, delicate toy, accurate in every detail of propeller, motor and landing gear of brace and rudder and aileron. Then he realized that it was no toy at all but a faithful miniature of a commercial plane, a complete tiny copy of one of the latest single motor cabin monoplane models. It looks just like it would fly, he said. A friend of mine has a big one just like it, taught me to fly it last summer vacation. This is the very image of it. It will fly, Agnes assured him, now composed enough to smile at his amazement. I have been with the doctor to the pygmy planet in it. You stand in the violet ray until you're about three inches high, she explained, and then get into the plane. Then you fly up into the violet ray at the point where it touches the planet and remain there while you grow smaller. When you are the right size, all you have to do is drop to the surface and land. To come away, you rise into the red ray and stay in it till you grow to a proper size when you come down and land. You—you've actually done that, he gasped? It sounds like a fairy story. Yes, I've done it, she assured him. Then she shuddered apprehensively. And the things—the machine monsters Dr. Whitting called them—have learned to do it too. One of them came down the red ray and attacked him. The doctor had a gun, but what could he do against one of those? She shivered. It carried him back up the violet beam just a few minutes ago. I started to phone you, then I was afraid you would be hurt. Me? Hurt? Larry burst out? What about you here alone? It was my business. Dr. Whitting told me there might be danger when he hired me. And now? What can we do? Larry demanded. I don't know, she said slowly. I'm afraid one of the monsters will be back after a new victim. We could smash the apparatus, but it is too wonderful to be destroyed, and besides Dr. Whitting may have escaped, he may be alive there in the deserts. We might fly up in the little plane, Larry proposed doubtfully. I think I could pilot it if you want. The girl's body stiffened. Her brown eyes widened with sudden dread, and her small face went pale. She slipped quickly from the stool, drawing in her breath with a short gasp. The hand that gripped the automatic trembled a little. What's the matter, Larry cried? I thought, she gasped. I think I see something in the ray. The machine monster is coming back. Her lips tightened. She lifted the little automatic and began to shoot into the pillar of crimson fire beside the tiny spinning globe. Larry watched tensely, saw a curious bird-like something fluttering about in the red ray, swiftly growing larger. Deliberately and pausing to aim carefully for each shot, the girl emptied the little gun at the figure. Her body was rigid, her small face was firmly set, though she was breathing very fast. A curious numbness had come over Larry. His only physical sensations were the quick hammering of his heart and a parching dryness in his throat. Terror stiffened him. Though he would not have admitted it, he was paralyzed with fear. The glittering thing that fluttered about in the crimson ray was not an easy target. When the gun was empty it seemed still unharmed and its wings had increased to a span of a foot. Too late, Agnes gasped. Why didn't we do something? Trembling, horror-stricken, she shrank towards Larry. He was staring at the thing in the pillar of scarlet light. It had dropped to the crystal disc upon which the red ray fell from the huge glowing tube above. It stood there motionless except for the swift increase in size. Larry gazed at it, lost in fear and wonder. It was like nothing he had ever seen. What was it that Agnes had said of machine monsters of human brains and mechanical bodies? His brain reeled. He strained his eyes to distinguish the monstrosity more clearly. It was veiled in crimson flame. He could not see it distinctly. But suddenly, when it was as tall as himself, it sprang out into the room toward Larry and the shuddering girl. Just off the crystal disc beyond the scarlet pillar of fire, it paused for long seconds, seeming to regard them with malevolent eyes. For the first time, Larry could see it plainly. Its body, or its central part, was a tube of transparent crystal, an upright cylinder rounded at upper and lower ends. It was nearly a foot in diameter and four feet long. It seemed filled with a luminous purple liquid. About the cylinder were three bands of greenish glistening metal. Attached to the lower band were four jointed legs of the same bright green metal upon which the strange things stood. Set in the middle band were two glittering polished lenses which seemed to serve his eyes, and Larry felt that they were gazing at him with malevolent menace. Behind the eyes two wings sprang from the green band, ingenious folding wings of thin plates and bars of green metal, and from the upper band sprang four slender glistening whip-like tentacles, metallic and brilliantly green, two yards in length. They writhed with strange life. It seemed a long time to Larry that the things stood, motionless, seeming to stare evilly at them with eye-like lenses. Then, lurching forward a little, it moved toward them upon legs of green metal, and now Larry saw another amazing thing about it. Floating in the brilliant violet liquid that filled the crystal tube was a grey mass wrinkled and corrugated. This was divided by deep clefs into right and left hemispheres, which in turn were separated into larger upper and smaller lower segments. White filaments ran through the violet liquid from its base toward the three rings or bands of green metal that encircled the cylinder. In an instant Larry realized that the grey mass was a human brain, the larger upper part of the cerebrum, the smaller mass at the back of the cerebellum, and the white filaments were nerves by means of which this brain controlled its astounding mechanical body, a brain in a machine. The violet liquid it came to Larry in his trance of wonder must take the place of blood, feeding the brain cells, absorbing waste, an eternal mind within a machine free from the ills and weaknesses of the body, and devoid too of any pity, of any tender feelings, a cold and selfish mind without emotion, unless it might worship itself or its mechanical body. It was this monster that had spilt the pool of blood drying on the floor near the door, and it was these glistening green snake-like tentacles that had crumpled the revolver into a broken mass of steel. Abruptly the machine monster darted forward, running swiftly upon its four legs of green metal. Slender tentacles reached out toward the shuddering girl at Larry's shoulder. Run! Agnes gasped to him quickly. It will kill you! The girl tried to push him back. As she touched him, Larry recovered from his days of wondering fear. Agnes was in frightful danger and facing it with quiet courage. He must find a weapon. Wildly he looked about him. His eyes fell upon the tall, heavy wooden stool upon which Agnes had been sitting. Get back, he shouted to her. He snatched up the stool and swinging it over his head, sprang toward the machine a violet-filled crystal and glittering green metal. Stop! Agnes screamed in a terrified voice. You can't— She had run before him. He seized her arm and swung her back behind him. Then he advanced warily toward the machine monster, which had paused and seemed to be regarding him with sinister intentness through its glistening crystal eye lenses. With all his strength, Larry struck at the crystal cylinder, swinging the stool like an axe. A slender metallic green tentacle whipped out, tore the stool from his hands and scented crashing across the room to splinter into fragments on the opposite wall. Larry sent off his balance staggered toward the glittering machine. As he stumbled against the transparent tube that contained the brain, he clenched his fist to strike futilely at it. A snake-like metal tentacle wrapped itself about him. He was hurled to the floor to sprawl grotesquely among broken apparatus. His head came against the leg of a bench. For a few moments he was dazed, but it seemed only a few seconds to him before he had staggered to his feet, rubbing his bruised head. Anxiously he peered about the room. The machine monster and Agnes were gone. He stumbled back to the mass of apparatus in the center of the huge laboratory. Intently he gazed into the upright pillar of crimson flame. Nothing was visible there. Now the other, he gasped, the violet is the way they went. He turned to the companion ray of violet radiance that beat straight down onto the opposite side of the tiny whirling planet, and in that motionless torrent of chill violet flame he saw them, tight already and swiftly dwindling. With green wings outspread the machine monster was beating swiftly upward through the pillar of purple-blue flame and close against the crystal tube that seemed its brain was Agnes, held fast by the whip-like tentacles of glistening green metal. Larry moved to spring after them into the torrent of violet light, but sudden caution restrained him. I'd shrink too, he muttered, and then where would I be? I'd be standing on the glass platform, I guess, and the thing flying off over my head. He gazed at the rapidly dwindling forms of Agnes sterling and her amazing abductor. As it grew smaller the machine monster flew higher into the violet beam and the violet was opposite the tiny spinning planet. The distance between the red and the violet rays was just slightly more than the diameter of the pygmy world. The sphere hung between them, one side of it a fraction of an inch from the red, the other as near the violet. Opposite the elfin planet the monster ceased to climb. It hung there in the violet ray and inch from the surface of the little world. And still it swiftly dwindled. It was no larger than a fly and Larry could barely distinguish the form of the girl helpless in the green tentacles. Soon she and the monster became a mere greenish speck. Suddenly they were gone. For a little time he stood watching the point where they had vanished, watching the red and the violet rays that poured straight down upon the crystal discs, watching the tiny green-blue planet spinning so steadily between the bright rays. Abruptly he recovered from his fascination of wonder. What did she say? He muttered something about the monsters carrying off people to sacrifice to a rusty machine that they worship as a god. It took her for that? He clenched his fists. His lips became a straight line of determination. Then I guess we'd try a voyage in the little plane. A slim chance, maybe, but decidedly better than none. He returned to the table, dropped to his knees, inspected the tiny airplane. It was a venture, delicately beautiful. Its slim, small wings were bright as silver foil. Carefully he opened the door and peered into the diminutive cabin. Two minute rifles, several Liliputian pistols, and boxes of ammunition to match lay on the rear seat of the plane. So we are prepared for war, he remarked, grinning in satisfaction. And the next trick, I suppose, is to get shrunk to fit the plane. About three inches, she said. Lord, it's a queer thing to think about. He got to his feet, walked back to the machine in the center of the room with its twin pillars of red and violet flame and the tiny world floating between them. He started to step into the violet ray, then hesitated, shivering involuntarily like a swimmer about to dive into icy cold water. Turning back to one of the benches, he picked up a wooden funnel rack and tossed it to the crystal disk beneath the violet ray. Slowly it decreased in size until it had vanished from sight. Safe, I suppose, he muttered, but how do I know when I'm small enough? After a moment he picked up a glass bottle which measured about three inches in height, set it on the floor beside the crystal disk. I dive out when I get to be the size of the bottle, he murmured. With that he leaped into the violet beam. He felt no unusual sensation except one of pleasant tingling warmth as if the direct rays of the sun were bearing down upon him. For a moment he feared that his size was not being affected. Then he noticed not that he appeared to become smaller but that the laboratory seemed to be growing immensely larger. The walls seemed to race away from him. The green-blue sphere of the tiny planet which he proposed to visit expanded and drew away above his head. Abruptly fearful, alarmed at the hugeness of the room, he turned to look at the bottle he had placed to serve as a standard of size. It had grown with everything else until it seemed to be about three feet high and it was swiftly expanding. It reached to the level of his shoulder and higher. He ran to the edge of the crystal disk which now seemed a floor many yards across and leaped from its edge. It was a dozen steps to where he had left the bottle and it was as tall as himself. He started across the floor of the laboratory toward the table under which the toy plane stood. The incredible immensity of his surroundings brought him strangely. The walls of the room seemed like distant cyclopean cliffs. The roof was like a sky. Table legs towered up like enormous columns. It seemed a hundred yards across the strangely rough floor to the plane. As he drew near it, it gave him huge satisfaction to see that it was of normal size, correctly proportioned to his own dimensions. Great luck, he muttered, that I can fly. He paused as he reached the cabin's open door to wonder at the astounding fact that a little while ago he had opened that door with a hand larger than his entire body was now. I guess this is my day of wonders, he muttered. Allah knows I had to wait long enough for it. First he examined the weapons in the cabin. There were two heavy sporting rifles and two 45-automatics. There were also two smaller automatics which he supposed had been intended for Agnes' use and there was abundant ammunition. Then he inspected the plane. It looked to be an excellent condition in every way. The gasoline and oil tanks were full. He set about starting the motor using the plane's inertia starter which was driven by an electric motor. Soon the engine coughed, sputtered and gave rise to a roaring rhythmic note that Larry found musical. When the motor was warm he opened the throttle and taxied out from beneath the colossal table and across the laboratory floor he heard the titanic mechanism in the center of the room. The disc of crystal was set almost flush with the floor, its edge beveled. The plane rolled easily upon it and out into the cyclopean pillar of violent flame. Once more Larry felt the sensation that everything about him except the plane itself was expanding inconceivably in size. Soon the laboratory's walls and roof were lost in hazy blue distance. He could distinguish only the broad, bright field formed by the surface of the crystal disc with the floor stretching away beyond it like a vast plane and above the green-blue sphere of the tiny planet bright on one side and dark on the other so that it looked like a half-moon immensely far off. As he waited he noticed a curious little dial in the lower corner of the instrument board which he had not seen at first. One end of its graduated scale was marked Earth Normal, the other Pygmy Planet Normal. A tiny black needle was creeping slowly across the scale toward Pygmy Planet Normal. That's how we tell what size we are without having to look at a bottle, he muttered. When the area of the crystal platform appeared to be about half a square mile he decided that he would now have sufficient space to spiral up the violet ray toward the planet. If he waited too long to start the distance would become impossibly great. He gave the little plane the gun. The motor thundered a throbbing song. The ship rolled smoothly forward over the polished surface, gained flying speed and took the air without a shock. Feels good to hold the stick again, Larry murmured, making small circles to keep within the upright pillar of violet radiance he climbed steadily and as rapidly as possible keeping his eyes upon the brilliant half-moon of the Pygmy Planet. The strangest flight in the annals of aviation. He was flying toward a goal that a few minutes before he could have touched. Toward a goal that at the beginning of his flight there were only a few lengths of his plane away and his size dwindled so rapidly as he flew that the planet seemed to swell and draw away from him. As Larry and the plane grew smaller the relative size of the violet ray increased so there was no longer much danger of flying out of it. It seemed that he flew through a world of violet flame. He met a curious problem in time. It is evident that time passes faster for a small animal than for a large one but nerve currents require a shorter time in transit and all thought and action is consequently speeded up. It took a hundred foot dinosaur nearly a second to know that his tail had been pinched. A fly can get underway in time to escape a descending swatter. The Pygmy Planet rotated in a few seconds of Earth time. One of its inhabitants might have lived, aged and died in the duration of a single day in our larger world. So Larry found that time seemed to pass more rapidly or rather that the time of the world he had left appeared to move more slowly as he had ventured into smallness. He had been flying it seemed to him nearly an hour when he reached the level of the planet's equator. Now it seemed a vast world filling half the visible universe. He flew toward it steadily until he knew by the fading before him of the violet flame which now seemed to fill all space that he was near the edge of the ray. And as he flew he watched the little scale in which the black needle was now nearing the line marked Pygmy Planet Normal. Circling slowly, keeping always on the level of the planet's equator and near the edge of the violet ray so as to be as close as possible to his landing place when he reached the proper size, he watched the creeping black needle. Two he scanned with eager eyes the planet floating before him. Bare red deserts, narrow strips of green vegetation, shrunken blue oceans, silvery lines of rivers, passed in fascinating panorama beneath his eyes. The rate of the planet's spinning seemed continually to lessen with the changing of his own sense of time. Agnes, Larry thought of her with a curious eager pain in his heart. She was somewhere on that strange ancient world a prisoner of weird machine monsters, intended victim of a grotesque sacrificial ceremony. Could he find her in the vastness of an unfamiliar world? And having found her would there be a chance to rescue her from her hideous captors? The project seemed insane, but Larry felt a queer, unfamiliar urge which he knew would drive him on until he had discovered and saved her, or until he was dead. At last, when it seemed to Larry nearly three hours since he had begun this amazing flight, the crawling ebb and needle reached the mark Pygmy Planet Normal. He flew out of the wall of violet flame toward the planet's surface. Before, the distance between the planet and the ray's edge had seemed only the fraction of an inch. Now it appeared to be many miles. Abruptly the Pygmy Planet, which had seemed to be beside him, appeared to swing about so that it was beneath him. He knew that it was a change merely in his sensations. He was feeling the gravitation of the new world. It was pulling him toward it. He cut the throttle and settled the plane into a long glide, a glide that was to end upon the surface of a new planet. In what seemed half an hour more, Larry had made a safe landing upon the Pygmy Planet. He had come down upon a stretch of fairly smooth red sandy desert which seemed to stretch illimitably toward the rising sun which direction Larry instinctively termed east. To the west was a line of dull green, evidently the vegetation along a stream. The ochre desert was scattered with sparse clumps of reddish spiky scrub. Larry taxied the plane into one of those thickets. Finding canvas and rope in the cabin, he staked down the machine and muffled the motor. Then selecting a rifle and a heavy automatic from the weapons in the cabin and filling his pockets with extra ammunition, he left the plane and set out with brisk steps towards the green line of vegetation. I'll follow along the river, he reasoned. It may lead me somewhere and it will show the way back to the plane. I may come across something in the way of a clue. Can't go exploring by air or I'll burn up all the gas and be stranded here. To his surprise the water course proved to be an ancient canal, walled with crumbling masonry. Its channel was choked with mud and thorny thick-leaved desert shrubs of unfamiliar variety but a feeble current still flowed along it. After some reflection Larry set out along the banks of the canal. He followed it for two days. Curious straight bars of light were visible across the sky, a band of violet in the morning and one of crimson at evening. Their apparent motion was in the same direction as that of the sun. The bars of light puzzled him considerably before it occurred to him that they must be the red and violet rays. So you wait until evening and then fly up into the red ray to go home, he murmured. But I may not need that information, he added grimly. Seems to be a pretty big job to search a planet on foot for one person and I'm not going back without Agnes. In the afternoon of the second day he came within view of a city. He could discern vast imposing walls and towers of dark stone. It stood in the barren red desert far back from the green line of the old canal. Larry left the canal and started wearily across toward it. He had covered several miles of the distance before he saw that the lofty towers were falling, the magnificent walls crumbling, the city was ruined, dead, deserted. The realization brought him a great flood of despair. He had hoped to find people, friends, from whom he might get food and information about this unfamiliar planet, but the city was dead. Larry was standing there in the midst of the vast red plain between ruined city and ruined canal, tired, hungry, lonely, and hopeless. He was looking up at the white sun, trying to comfort himself with the thought that the brilliant luminary was merely a queer blue lamp that he was upon a tiny experimental world in a laboratory, but the thought brought him no relief, only confusion and a sense of incredulity. Then he saw the machine monster, a glittering winged thing of crystal in green metal, identical with the one he had encountered in the laboratory. It must already have seen him, for it was dropping swiftly toward him. Larry started to run, took a few staggering steps. Then he recalled the heavy rifle slung over his shoulder. Moving with desperate haste, he got it into his hands and raised it just as the monster dropped to the red sand a dozen yards away from him. Steadily he covered the crystal cylinder within which the thing's brain floated in luminous violet liquid. His finger tightened on the trigger, ready to send a heavy bullet crashing into it. Then he paused, swore softly, and lowered the gun. If I kill it, he murmured, I may never find Agnes, and if I let it carry me off, it may take me to where she is. He walked toward the monster across the red sand. It stood uncertainly upon green metal legs, seeming to stare at him strangely with eye-like lenses. Its wings of thin green metal plates were folded, its four green tentacles were twitching oddly. Abruptly it sprang upon him. A green tentacle seized the rifle and snatched it from him. He felt the automatic pistol and the ammunition being removed from his pockets. Then, firmly held in the flexible arms of green metal, he was lifted against the cylinder of violet liquid. The monster spread its broad emerald wings and Larry was swiftly born into the air. In a few moments the wide ruins of the ancient city were spread below with the green line of the choked canal cutting the infinite red waste of the desert beyond it. The monster flew westward. For a considerable time nothing saved Baron Ocherous Desert was in view. Then Larry's weird captor flew near a strange city, the city of green metal. The buildings were most fantastic, pyramids of green crowned with enormous glistening spheres of emerald metal, an impassable wall surrounding the city. Larry had expected the monster to drop into the city, but it carried him on and finally settled to the ground several miles beyond. The green tentacles released him as the thing landed and he sprawled beside it, dizzy after his strange flight. As Larry staggered uncertainly to his feet, he saw that the monster had released him in an open pen. It was a square area, nearly fifty yards on each side and fenced with thin posts or rods of green metal, perhaps twenty feet high, set very close together and sharply pointed at the top. They formed a barrier, apparently insurmountable. In the center of the pen was a huge and strange machine built of green metal. It looked very worn and ancient. It was covered with patches of bluish rust or corrosion. At first it looked quite strange to Larry. Then he was struck by a vaguely familiar quality about it. Looking closer he realized that it was a colossal steam hammer. Its design, of course, was unfamiliar, but in the vast corroded frame he quickly picked out a steam chest, cylinder, and the great hammer weighing many tons. He gasped when his eyes went to the anvil. A man was chained across it. A man in torn, grimy clothing fastened with fetters of green metal upon wrists and ankles so that his body was stretched beneath the massive hammer. He seemed to be unconscious. Upon his head, which was turned toward Larry, was a red and swollen bruise. The monster which had dropped Larry within the pen rose again into the air and Larry started forward trying to remember just what Agnes had told him of a machine to which the monsters sacrificed. This must be the machine—this ancient steam hammer. As he moved forward Agnes came into view. She walked around the massive base of the great machine carrying a bowl filled with a fragrant brown liquid. She stopped at sight of Larry and uttered a little cry. The bowl fell from her hands and the fragrant liquid splashed out onto the ground. Her brown eyes went wide with delighted surprise. Then a look of pain came to them. Larry! Larry! she cried. Why did you come? To get you, he answered, trying to speak as lightly as he could. And the best way I knew to find you was to let one of the monsters bring me. Cheer up! But even to himself his voice had a tone of discouragement. She smiled wainly. I don't see anything to be cheerful about. Her small face was set and a little white. Dr. Whitting is going to be smashed under the hammer of this dreadful machine whenever the steam is up. Then it's my turn and yours. That's nothing to laugh about. But we aren't smashed yet, Larry insisted. By the way, what was in that bowl? He went on, glancing down. I forgot to bring lunch, he grinned. She looked down, startled. Oh! Dr. Whitting's soup, poor fellow. I'm afraid he'll never awake to eat it. There's plenty more. Come around here. Larry picked up the bowl and led him around the base of the machine. Then she filled the bowl again with the fragrant red-brown liquid from a tall urn of green metal. Larry took the dish eagerly and gulped down the rather insipid and tasteless food. And the monsters worshiped this old steam hammer he inquired when his hunger was appeased. Yes, I think the thing is worked by steam generated by volcanic heat. Anyhow, there isn't any boiler and the steam pipe comes up out of the ground. You can see that. So it runs on without any attention, though I guess the heat is dying down since it is several days between blows of the hammer. And I guess the monsters have forgotten how they used to rule machines. They seem to have depended upon machines even giving up their own bodies for mechanical ones until the machine rules them. And when this old hammer kept pounding on through the ages using volcanic steam, I guess they got to considering it alive. They began to regard it as a sort of god and when they got the idea of giving it sacrifices it was natural enough to place the victims under the hammer. They went back to Dr. Whitting who was chained across the anvil. He was still breathing but unconscious. He had been injured in a struggle with the monsters and his body was much emaciated. Agnes explained that he had been a prisoner in the pen for many months of the time of this world, waiting his turn to die. She said that the monsters had just completed the extermination of another race upon the pygmy planet and were just turning to the greater world for victims. Larry noticed that the great hammer was slowly rising in its guides as the pressure of the steam from the planet's interior increased. In a few hours, just at sunset, it reached the top of its stroke. The air above the pen was suddenly filled with glittering swarms of the green-winged monsters sweeping slowly about in measured flight with strange order in their masses. They had to witness the sacrifice. With an explosive rush of steam, the hammer came down. The ground trembled beneath the terrific blow. The roaring of escaping steam and the crash of the impact were almost deafening. A heavy white cloud shrouded the corroded green machine. When the hammer slowly lifted, only a red smear was left. Agnes had shrunk trembling against Larry's shoulder. He had put his arms about her and was holding her almost fiercely. My turn next, she whispered, and don't try to fight them. It will only make them hurt you. I can't let them take you, Agnes. Larry cried in an agonized tone and the words seemed to leap out of themselves because I love you. You do? Agnes cried in a thin, choking voice pressing herself against him. Ever since the first time you came to the laboratory, a score of the monster forms of violet-filled crystal and gleaming green metal had dropped into the pen. They tore Agnes from Larry's arms, hurling him roughly to the ground at the bottom of the green metal fence. For some time he was unconscious. When he had staggered painfully to his feet it was night. The monsters were gone, the starless sky was black and empty. Calling out weakly and stumbling about the pen, he found Agnes. She was chained where Dr. Whitting had been. She was conscious, unharmed. For a time they talked a little, exchanging broken incoherent phrases. Then they went to sleep, lying on the anvil beneath that mighty hammer that was slowly lifting to strike another fearful blow. When the sun had risen again, Larry brought Agnes some of the brown soup from the metal urn which had been filled again. Then, when he had satisfied himself, he started clamoring up the massive frame of the hammer. If he could put it out of commission. It was a difficult task. He slipped back many times and finally had to choose another place to make the ascent. Twice he slipped and almost fell from a considerable height, but finally he reached the massive wheel of the valve which seemed to control the admission of steam into the cylinder above the hammer. If he could but close that, the steam would be confined in the chest below, and when the pressure reached a certain point something should happen. The valve was not easy to turn. It seemed fixed with the corrosion of ages. For hours Larry wrestled with it. Then he left it, realizing that he must find something to use for a hammer. A vigorous search of the pen's hard earth floor failed to reveal any stone that would do. He turned his attention to the machine and presently saw a slender projecting lever high up on the side of the vast frame which looked as if it had been weakened by corrosion. After a perilous climb, he reached the bar of green metal and swung his weight upon it. It broke and he plunged to the ground with the bar in his hands. Clearing up once more to the great valve, he hammered it until the rust that stiffened it was loosened. Then he struggled with the valve until it was closed. We'll see what happens, he muttered. Returning to the ground, he set to work to break the green metal fetters upon Agnes' wrists and ankles using the broken lever as hammer and file. For the greater part of six days he toiled at that task while the great hammer rose slowly. But the green metal seemed very hard. One arm was free at the end of the second day, the other on the fourth. He had one ankle loose on the morning of the sixth day, but as evening came on and the great hammer reached the top of its stroke, the fourth chain still defied him. Before sunset, a swarm of the monsters appeared wheeling on green wings. He was forced to leave the work hiding his improvised file. Agnes still lay across the anvil to conceal from the monsters the fact that the chains were broken. Larry sat close beside her nursing hands that were blistered and sore from his days of filing at the chains. A sudden clatter came from the huge mechanism above them and a sharp hiss of steam which became louder. It works, Larry whispered to Agnes. The old valve held and the steam can't get into the cylinder to smash us. But Allah knows what will happen when the pressure rises in that old steam chest. Darkness came. Dusk swallowed the wheeling machine monsters. One night Larry and Agnes waited silently together on the great anvil listening to the hissing of the steam from above, which was slowly becoming a shrill monotonous scream. Monotonous, always higher and shriller. The sun rose again. Still the green-winged monsters wheeled about. They came in glittering swarms, thousands of them. They came nearer the machine now and flew about it more swiftly as if excited. Then it happened. There was a roar like thunder and a colossal bellowing explosion. The air was filled suddenly with scalding steam and with screaming fragments of the bursting steam chest. In the midst of it all Larry felt a crushing blow upon the head and a blanket of darkness fell upon him. The monsters are all gone, darling. Agnes' voice reached him. As though they were very much frightened and a piece of the old hammer hit the fence and knocked a hole in it. You must go. Leave me. Leave you!" Larry groaned, struggling to sit up. Not a bit of it. He touched his head gingerly, felt a swollen bruise. Collecting a few fragments of the wrecked machine to serve as tools, he fell to work again upon Agnes' remaining chain. Already he had cut a deep groove into it. Two hours later it was broken. Carrying the metal urn of brownish liquid, they crept out through the hole in the fence which had been torn by the flying fragment of a broken casting of green metal. They left the wreck of the machine which a strange race had worshiped as a bloody god and hurried furtively into the desert of red sand. Making a wide circuit about the fantastic city of green metal which Larry had seen from the air, they struck out eastward across the desolate, uterus waste. The food in the urn eaten sparingly lasted until the end of the eighth day. On the morning of the ninth they came in view of the green line of the ancient canal. It was hours later that they staggered over its wall of crumbling masonry, clambered down into the muddy, weed-grown channel and drank thirstily of green, tepid water. Larry found his old trail beyond the canal. They followed it back. In the middle of the afternoon they stumbled up to the thicket of spiky desert growth in which Larry had hidden the plane. The machine was undamaged. Before sunset Larry had removed the steak ropes, slipped the canvas cover from the motor, turned the plane around, inspected it and examined the strip of smooth hard red sand upon which he had landed. Agnes pointed out the dim band of crimson across the sky from north to south, slowly rising toward the zenith. That's the red ray, she said. We fly into it. And a happy moment when we do, Larry rejoined. He roused the motor to life. As the bar of crimson light neared the zenith, the plane rolled forward across the sand and took off, climbing steeply. Larry anxiously watched the approach of the red band. The gravitation of the pygmy planet seemed to diminish as he gained altitude until presently he could fly vertically from it without circling at all. He set the bow toward the scarlet bar across the sky before him, and suddenly he was flying through ruby flame. His eyes went to the little scale at the corner of the instrument board. He saw the little ebony needle waiver, leave the mark designated pygmy planet normal and start toward earth normal for what seemed a long time he was wheeling down the crimson ray. A few times he looked back at Agnes in the rear seat. She had gone to sleep. Then a vast circular field was below, the crystal platform. Larry landed the plane upon it, taxied it to the center and stopped there with the motor idling. The laboratory taking shape in the blue abyss about him seemed to contract swiftly. Presently the plane covered most of the crystal disc. He taxied quickly off, stopped on the floor nearby and cut the ignition. Agnes woke. Together they clamored from the plane's cabin and walked back into the crimson ray. Once more the vast spaces of the room seemed to shrink until it looked familiar once more. The pygmy planet and the huge machine looming over them dwindled to natural size. Agnes watching a scale on the frame of the mechanism which Larry had not noticed leaped suddenly from the red ray drawing him with her. The giants she laughed. Larry drew a deep breath and looked about him. Once more he was in his own world and surveying it in his normal size. He became aware of Agnes standing close to him. He suddenly took her in his arms and kissed her. Wait a minute, she objected, slipping quickly from his arms. What are we going to do about the pygmy planet? Those monsters might come again even if you did wreck their god. And Dr. Whitting, poor fellow, but we mustn't let those monsters come back. Larry doubled up a brown fist and drove it with all his strength against the little globe that spun so steadily between the twin upright cylinders of crimson and a violet flame. His hand went deep into it and it swung from its position, hung unsteadily a moment, and then crashed to the laboratory floor. It was crushed like a ball of soft brown mud. It spattered. Now I guess they won't come back, Agnes said. A pity to spoil all Dr. Whitting's work, though. Larry was standing motionless, holding up his fist and looking at it oddly. I smashed a planet. Think of it. I smashed a planet. Just the other... Why, it was just this evening at the office. I was wishing for something to happen. End of The Pygmy Planet by Jack Williamson. Resurrection by Robert J. Shea. This is a LibriVos recording. All LibriVos recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVos.org Recording by Daniele. You're a fascinating person. The girls said, I've never met anyone like you before. Tell me your story again. The man was short and stocky, with asiatic features and a long, stringy mustache. The whole story? He asked. It would take a lifetime to tell you. He stared out the window at the yellow sun and the red sun. He still hadn't gotten used to seeing two sons. But that was minor, really, when there were so many other things he had to get used to. A robot waiter with long thin metal tips for arms and legs plighted over. When he'd first seen one of those, he thought it was a demon. He tried to smash it. They'd had trouble with him at first. They had trouble with me at first, he said. I can imagine, said the girl. How did they explain it to you? It was hard. They had to give me the whole history of medicine. It was years before I got over the nation that I was up in the everlasting blue sky, or under the earth, or something. He grinned at the girl. She was the first person he'd met since they got him a job, and gave him a home in a world uncountable like years from the one he'd been born on. When did you begin to understand? They simply told all of history to me, gluing the part about myself. Then I began to get the picture. Funny, I wound up teaching them a lot of history. I bet you know a lot. I do. The man with the asiatic fishes said modestly. Anyway, they finally got across to me that in the 22nd century they had explained the calendar to me too. I used a different one in my day. They had learned how to grow new limbs on people who had lost arms and legs. That was the first real step, said the girl. It was a long time till they got to the second step, he said. They found how to stimulate life and new growth in people who had already died. The next part is the thing I don't understand, said the girl. Well, said the man. As I get it, they found that any piece of matter that has been part of an organism retains a physical memory of the entire structure of the organism on which it was part and that they could reconstruct that structure from a part of a person. If that was all that was left of him. From there it was just a matter of pushing the process back through time. They had to teach me a whole new language to explain that one. Isn't it wonderful that intergalactic travel gives us room to expand? Said the girl. I mean now that every human being that ever lived has been brought back life and will live forever. Same problem I had, me and my people, said the man. We were prompt for space. This age has solved it a lot better than I did. But they had to give me a whole psychological overhauling before I understood that. Tell me about your past life, said the girl, staring dreamily at him. Well, 6000 years ago I was born on Gopi Desert on Earth. Said Genghis Khan, sipping his drink. End of Resurrection by Robert J. Shea. He had just finished securing to this slowly accumulated mass of iron his most recent discovery of the black mass of iron he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring mootily away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark mystery of the void. His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red. He had just finished securing to this slowly accumulated mass of iron his most recent discovery of the accumulated mass of iron his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head. Five perilous weeks he had labored to collect this rugged lump of metal, a jagged mass some 10 feet in diameter composed of hundreds of fragments that he had captured and welded together. His luck had not been good. His findings had been heart breakingly small. The spectro flash analysis had revealed that the contents of the precious metals was disappointingly minute. The meteor or asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is mined by such adventurers as that Alan for the platinum, meridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of a disrupted planet which according to Bode's law should occupy this space. On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard one treasure his mill and atomic rocket was sputtering spurts of hot flame jetting from its exhaust. A simple mechanism bolted to the first sizeable fragment he had captured. It drove the iron ball through space like a ship. Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots that could feel the vibration of the iron mass beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The magazine of urinate fuel capsules was nearly empty now, he reflected. He would soon have to turn back toward Mars. Turn back. But how could he with so a reward for his efforts? Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion Mars for urinate and supplies, and the unpaid last installment on his osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again if he returned with no more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him? He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole planetoids of rich metal. And he knew weary white-haired men who braved the perils of vacuum in absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors for hard years, who still hoped. But sometimes fortune had to smile. And then the picture came to him. A tower of white metal among the low red hills near Helion. A slim graceful tower of Argent rising in a fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a girl waiting at the silver door. A trim slender girl in white with blue eyes and hair richly brown. Thad had seen the white tower many times on his holiday tramps through the hills about Helion. He had even dares to ask if it could be bought to find that its price was an amount that he might not amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white was yet only a glorious dream. The strangeness of interplanetary space and the somber mystery of it pressed upon the limitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a tiny white disc on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings. His native earth, a bright greenish point, suspended in the dark gulf below it. Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ochre speck above the shrunken sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness, emptiness. Ebon infinity sprinkled with far cold stars. Sad was alone, utterly alone. No man was visible in all the supernal vastness of space and no work of man saved the few tools of his daring trade and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being must be tens of millions of miles away. On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now he was becoming accustomed to it. At least he no longer feared that he was going mad. Sometimes. Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his huge metal helmet. Brace up, old top, in good company when you're by yourself, as dad used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so anyhow. Look up Dan and Chuck and the rest of the crowd again at Comet's Place. What price of friendly boxing match with Mason or an evening at the Tel-Avue Theatre? Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff. Food in place of these tasteless concentrates. A hot bath instead of greasing yourself. Too dull out here. Life. He broke off. Said his jaw. No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how did he know that a wearing meteor wasn't going to flash him out before he got back? He drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of his suit into its ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside pocket and lighted it. The smoke swirled about in the helmet drawn swiftly into the air filters. Darn clever these suits, he murmured. Food, smokes, water, generator. All where you can reach them. And darned expensive, too. I'd better be looking for pay-metal. He clamored to a better position, stood peering out into space searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric fragment that might be worth capturing for its content of precious metals. For an hour he scanned the black star-strewn wolf as the sputtering rocket continued to drive him forward. There she glows, he cried suddenly and grinned. Before him was a tiny glowing fleck that moved among the unchanging stars. He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet. Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What a treasure it promised! At first sight it was impossible to determine size or distance or rate of motion. It might be ten thousand tons of rich metal, a fortune. It would more probably prove to be a tiny, stony mass not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it with the power of the diminutive millen rocket. He studied the tiny speck intently, with practiced eye as the minutes passed. An untrained eye would never have seen it at all among the flaming hosts of stars. Skillfully he judged from its apparent rate of motion and its slow increase in brilliance, its size, and distance from him. Must be a fair size, he spoke aloud at length. A hundred tons, I'll bet my helmet! But, scooting along pretty fast, stretched the little old rocket to run it down. He clamored back to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming exhaust to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead, filled the magazine again with the little pellets of urinate which were fed automatically into the combustion chamber and increased the firing rate. The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from the incandescent orifice of the exhaust. The vibration of the metal sphere increased. Thad left the sputtering rocket and went back where he could see the object before him. It was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would he be in time to capture it as it passed? Or would it hurtle by ahead of him and vanish in the limitless darkness of space before his feeble rocket could check the momentum of his ball of metal? He peered at it as it drew closer. Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery, not the dull black of meteoric iron, and it was larger, more distant than he thought at first. In form too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was no jagged mass of metal. His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were not the mass of rich metal for which he had prayed, it might be something as valuable and more interesting. He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and advanced the firing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous explosion. When he returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him, he saw that it was a ship, a tapering silver-green rocket flier. Once more, his dreams were dashed. The officers of interplanetary liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their collected masses of metal almost helpless, always underpowered, are menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship, save a heliographed warning to keep clear. But how came a rocket flier here in the perilous swarms of the meteor belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal. The lanes more frequently used between Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury were, of course, far inside the orbits of the asteroids, and the few ships returning to Jupiter's moons avoided them by crossing millions of miles above their plane. Could it be that legendary green ship said once to have mysteriously appeared sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the primitive ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after in the remote wastes of space? Absurd, of course. He dismissed the idle fancy and examined the ship still more closely. Then he saw that it was turning end over end very slowly. That meant that the gyros were stopped, that it was helpless, drifting, disabled, powerless to avoid hurling meteoric stones. Had it blundered unawares into the belt of swarms, been struck before the danger was realized? Was it a derelict with all dead upon it? Either the ship's machinery was completely wrecked, fad new, or there was no one on watch. For the controls of a modern rocket flier are so simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at the bridge can keep a vessel upon her course. It might be, he thought, that a meteorite had ripped open the hull, allowing the air to escape so quickly that the entire crew had been asphyxiated before any repairs could be made. But that seemed unlikely, since the ship must have been divided into several compartments by airtight bulkheads. Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason? The crew might have mutinied and left her in the life tubes. She might have been robbed by pirates and set adrift. But with the space lanes policed as they were, piracy and successful mutiny were rare. Fad saw that the flier's navigation lights were out. He found the heliographic signal mirror at his side, sighted it upon the ship and worked the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call. There was no response. The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he board her and take her to Mars? By law it was his duty to attempt to aid any helpless ship or at least try to save any endangered lives upon her. And the salvage award, if the ship should be deserted and he could bring her safe to port, would be half her value. No mean prize that. Half the value of a ship and cargo, more than he was apt to earn in years of mining the meteor belt. With new anxiety he measured the relative motion of the gleaming ship. It was going to pass ahead of him, and very soon. No more time for speculation. It was still uncertain whether it would come near enough so that he could get a line to it. Rapidly he unslunged from his belt the apparatus he used to capture meteors. A powerful electromagnet with a thin, strong wire fastened to it to be hurled from a helix gun. He set the drum on which the wire was wound upon the metal at his feet, fastened it with its magnetic anchor, wondering if it would stand the terrific strain when the wire tightened. Raising the helix to his shoulder, he landed upon a point well ahead of the rushing flier and stood waiting for the exact moment to press the lever. The slender spindle of the ship was only a mile away now. Bright in the sunlight, he could see no break in her polished hull, save for the dark rows of circular ports. She was not by any means completely wrecked. He read the black letters of her name. Red Dragon. The name of her home port below was in smaller letters, but in a moment he made them out. San Francisco. The ship then came from Earth, from the very city where Thad was born. The gleaming hull was near now, only a few hundred yards away. Passing. Aiming well ahead of her to allow for her motion, Thad pressed the key that hurled the magnet from the helix. It flung away from him, the wire screaming from the real behind it. Thad's massive metal swung on past the ship as he returned to the rocket and stopped its clattering explosions. He searched the tiny black speck of the magnet. It vanished from sight in the darkness of space, appeared again against the white burnished hull of the rocket ship. For a painful instant he thought he had missed. Then he saw that the magnet was fast to the side of the flyer near the stern. The line tightened. Soon the strain would come upon it as it checked the momentum of the massive iron. He set the friction break. Thad flung himself flat, grasped the wire above the reel. Even if the massive wire tore itself free, he could hold to the wire and himself reach the ship. He flung past the deserted vessel. Behind it his lump of iron swung like a pebble in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst from the burned lining of the friction break in the reel. Then the wire was all out. There was a sudden jerk. And the hard gathered sphere of metal was gone, snapped off into space. Thad glung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured arms almost drawn from their rockets. Fear flashed over his mind. What if the wire broke and left him floating helpless in space? It held, though, to his relief. He was trailing behind the ship. Eagerly he seized the handle of the reel, began to wind up the mile and a half of thin wire. Half an hour later, Thad's suited figure bumped gently against the shining hull of the rocket. He got to his feet and gazed backward into the starry gulf where his sphere of iron had long since vanished. Somebody is going to find himself a nice chunk of metal, all welded together and equipped for rocket navigation, he murmured. As for me, well, I've simply got to run this tub to Mars. He walked over the smooth refulgent hull, held to it by magnetic soles. Nowhere was it broken, though he found scars where small meteoric particles had scratched the brilliant polish. So, no meteor had wrecked the ship. What then was the matter? Soon he would know. The red dragon was not large. A hundred and thirty feet long, Thad estimated, with a beam of twenty-five feet. But her trim lines bespoke design recent and good. The double ring of black projecting rockets at the stern told of unusual speed. A pretty piece of salvage he reflected if he could land her on Mars. Half the value of such a ship, unharmed and safe in port would be a larger sum than he dared to put in his fingers, and he must take her in now that he had lost his own rocket. He found the life tubes, six of them, slender, silvery cylinders lying secure in their niches, three along each side of the flyer. None was missing. So the crew had not willingly deserted the ship. He approached the main airlock at the center of the hull behind the projecting dome of the bridge. It was closed. A glance at the dials told him there was full air pressure within it. Then last been used to enter the rocket, not leave it. Thad opened the exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the chamber of the lock. The huge door swung open in response to his hand upon the wheel, and he entered the cylindrical chamber. In a moment the door was closed behind him. Air was hissing into the lock again. He started to open the faceplate of his helmet, longing for a breath of air that did not smell of sweat and stale tobacco smoke, as that in his suit always did, despite the chemical purifiers. Then he hesitated. Perhaps some deadly gas from the combustion chambers. Thad opened the inner valve and came upon the upper deck of the vessel. A floor ran the full length of the ship, broken with hatches and companion ways that gave to the rocket room's cargo holds and quarters for crew and passengers below. There was an enclosed ladder that led to bridge and navigating rooms in the dome above. The hull formed an arched roof for it. The deck was deserted, lit only by three dim blue globes hanging from the curved roof. All seemed in order, the firefighting equipment hanging on the walls and the huge metal patches and welding equipment for repairing brakes in the hull. Everything was clean, bright with polish or new paint. And all was very still. The silence held a vague, brooding threat that frightened Thad, made him wish for a moment that he was back upon his metal. But he banished his fear and strode down the deck. Midway of it, he found a dark stain upon the clean metal. The black of long, dried blood. A few tattered scraps of cloth beside it, no more than bloody rags and a heavy meat cleaver half hidden beneath a bit of darkened fabric. Mute record of tragedy. Thad strove to read it. Had a man fought here and been killed? It must have been a struggle of peculiar violence to judge by the dark, spattered stains and the indescribable condition of the remnants of clothing. But what had he fought? Another man or some thing and what had become a victor and vanquished? He walked on down the deck. The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt pattern of quick little footsteps behind him. He turned quickly, nervously with a hand going instinctively to his welding arc which he knew would make a fairly effective weapon. It was merely a dog, a little dog, a yellow, nondescript, pathetically delighted dog with a sharp eager bark. It leaped up at Thad, pawing at his armor and licking it, standing on its hind legs and reaching toward the visor of his helmet. It was very thin as if from long starvation. Both ears were ragged and bloody and there was a long, unhealed scratch across the shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a serious wound. The bright, eager eyes were a light with light, but Thad thought he saw fear in them and even through the stiff fabric of the osprey suit he felt that the dog was trembling. Suddenly with a low wine it shrank close to his side and another sound reached Thad's ears. A cry, weird and harrowing beyond telling, a scream so thin and so high that it roughened his skin so keenly shrill that it tortured his nerves, a sound of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing than any bodily pain. When silence came again Thad was standing with his back against the wall, the welding arc in his hand. His face was cold with sweat and a queer chill pricked up and down his spine. The yellow dog grouched whimpering against his legs. Ominous threatening stillness filled the ship again, disturbed only by the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog. Trying to calm his overwrought nerves, Thad listened, strained his ears. He could hear nothing and no idea from which direction the terrifying sound had come. A strange cry, Thad knew it had been born in no human throat nor in the throat of any animal he knew. It had carried an alien note that overcame him with instinctive fear and horror. What had voiced it? Was the ship haunted by some dread entity? For many minutes Thad stood upon the deck, waiting, tensely grasping the welding tool but the nerve-shattering scream did again, nor any other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear. It leaped up at his face again with another short little bark. The air must be good. He thought if the dog could live in it. He unscrewed the faceplate of his helmet and lifted it. The air that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply, gratefully, and at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it. A curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar. The dog kept leaping up, whining. Hungry boy? Thad whispered. He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit, found a slab of concentrated food and tossed it out through the opened panel. The dog sprang upon it, wolfed it eagerly and came back to his side. Thad said it once about exploring the ship. First he ascended the ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it, studded with transparent ports. Charts and instruments were in order, and the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of the ship. Thad had no expert's knowledge of the flyer's mechanism, but he had studied interplanetary navigation to qualify for his license to carry masses of metal under rocket power through the space lanes and into planetary atmospheres. He was sure he could manage the ship if its mechanism were in good order, though he was uncertain of his ability to make any considerable repairs. To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials revealed nothing wrong. He started the gyro motors, got the great wheels to spinning and thus stopped the slow end-over-end turning of the flyer. Then he went to the rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes and set them to firing. The vessel answered readily to her helm. In a few minutes he had the red fleck of Mars over the bow. Yes, I can run her all right, he announced to the dog, which had followed him up the steps keeping close to his feet. Don't worry, old boy. We'll be eating a juicy beefsteak together in a week at Comet's Place in Helion down by the canal. Not much style, but the eats. And now we're going to do a little detective work and find out what made that disagreeable noise. And what happened to all your fellow astronauts? Better find out before it happens to us. He shut off the rockets and climbed down from the bridge again. When Thad started down the companion way to the officer's quarters in the central one of the five main ships, the dog kept close to his legs, growling, trembling, hackles lifted. Sensing the animal's terror, pitting it for the naked fear in its eyes, Thad wondered what dramas of horror it might have seen. The cabins of the navigator, calculator, chief technician and first officer were empty and forbidding with the ominous silence of the ship. They were neatly in order and the berths had been made since they were used, but there was a large blood stain, black and circular on the calculator's room. The captain's cabin held evidence of a violent struggle. The door had been broken in. Its fragments with pieces of broken furniture, books, covers from the berth and three service pistols were scattered about in indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among the frightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing, of dissimilar fabrics. The guns were empty. Attempting to reconstruct the action of the tragedy from those grim clues, he imagined that the five officers aware of some peril had gathered here, fought, and died. The dog refused to enter the room. It stood at the door, looking anxiously after him, trembling and whimpering pitifully. Several times it sniffed the air and drew back snarling. Thad thought that the unpleasant earthly odor he had noticed upon opening the faceplate of his helmet was stronger here. After a few minutes of searching through the wildly disordered room, he found his log, or its remains. Many pages had been torn from the book, and the remainder soaked with blood formed a stiff black mass. Only one legible entry did he find that on a page torn from the book which somehow had escaped destruction. Dated five months before, it gave the position of the vessel and her bearings. She was then just outside Jupiter's orbit, earthward bound, and concluded with a remark of sinister implications. Another man gone this morning. Sims, assistant technician. A fine workman. Odin swears he heard something moving on the deck. Cook thinks some of the doctor's stuffed monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous, of course, but what is one to think? Pondering the significance of those few lines, Thad climbed back to the deck. Was the ship haunted by some weird death that had seized the crew man by man mysteriously? That was the obvious implication, and if the flyer had been still outside Jupiter's orbit when those words were written, it must have been weeks before the end. Eight lurking invisible death. The scream he had heard. He descended into the forecast when came upon another such silent record of frightful carnage as he had found in the captain's cabin. Dried blood, scraps of cloth, knives, and other weapons. A fearful question was beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies of those who must have died in the ship? He dared not think the answer. Ripping the welding arc, Thad approached the after-hatch giving to the cargo-hold. Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he was determined to find the sinister menace of the ship before it found him. The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him, contributing nothing to his peace of mind. The hold proved to be dark, an indefinite black space oppressive with the terrible silence of the flyer. The air within it bore still more strongly the unpleasant fetter. Thad hesitated on the steps. The hold was not inviting, but at the thought that he must sleep unguarded while taking the flyer to Mars his resolution returned. The uncertainty, the constant fear, would be unendurable. He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He found it, as his feet touched the floor blue light flooded the hold. It was filled with monstrous things, colossal creatures such as nothing that ever lived upon the earth, like nothing known in the jungles of Venus or the deserts of Mars or anything that has been found upon Jupiter's moons. They were monsters, remotely resembling insects or crustaceans, but as large as horses or elephants. Creatures upreared upon strange limbs, armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons, frightful sawtooth snouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow and green. They leered at him with phosphorescent yellow and purple. They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light. A cold shock of horror started along Thad's spine at the sight of those incredible nightmare things. Automatically he flung up the welding tool, flicking over the lever with his thumb so that violent electric flame played about the electrode. Then he saw the crowding hideous things were motionless, that they stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were supported upon and mounted, collected specimens of some alien life. Grinning wainly and consciously of a weakness in the knees he muttered they sure will fill the museum if everybody gets the kick out of them that I did. A little too realistic I'd say. Guess these are the stuffed monstrosities mentioned in the page out of the log. No wonder the cook was afraid of them. Some of them do look hellishly alive. He started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from the normanies that seemed crouching to spring at him, motionless eyes staring. So at the end of the long space he found the treasure. Glittering in the blue light it looked unreal, incredible, a dazzling dream. He stopped among the fearful things that seemed gathered as if to guard it and stared with wide eyes through the open faceplate of his helmet. He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new, freshly smelted bars of silver white iridium of platinum of blue-white osmium. Many of them, thousands of pounds that knew. He trembled at the thought of their value, almost beyond calculation. Then he saw the coffer, lying beyond the piled gleaming ingots a huge box eight feet long made of some crystal that glittered with snowy whiteness, filled with sparkling iridescent gleams and inlaid with strange designs, apparently in vermillion enamel. With a little cry he ran toward the chest, moving awkwardly in the loose deflated fabric of the osprey suit. Beside the coffer on the floor of the hold was literally a mountain of flame-blazing gems, heaped as if they had been carelessly dumped from it, cut diamonds, incredibly gigantic monster emeralds, sapphires, rubies, and strange stones that Thad didn't recognize. And Thad gasped with horror when he looked at the designs of the vermillion inlay in the white gleaming crystal. Weird forms, shapes of creatures somewhat like gigantic spiders and more unlike them. Demonic things, wickedly fanged, jaw slavering, executed with masterly skill that made them seem living, menacing, secretly gloating. Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated almost hypnotically. Three times he approached the chest to lift the lid and find what it held and three times the unutterable horror of those crimson images thrust him back shuddering. But pictures he muttered hoarsely. A fourth time he advanced trembling and seized the lid of the coffer. Heavy, massive. It was fashioned also of glistening white crystal and inlayed in crimson with weirdly hideous figures. Great hinges of white platinum held it on the farther side. It was fastened with a simple heavy hasp of the precious metal. Hands quivering, Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted the lid. New treasure in the chest would not let him. He was prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems or priceless metal. Nor would he have been astonished at some weird creature such as one of those whose likenesses were inlayed in the crystal. But what he saw made him drop the massive lid. A woman lay in the chest, motionless, in white. In a moment he raised the lid again, examined the still form more closely. The woman had been young. The features were regular, good to look upon. The eyes were closed. The white face appeared very peaceful. Saved for the extreme cadaverous pallor there was no mark of death, with a fancy that the body might be miraculously living, sleeping. Thad thrust an arm out through the open panel of his suit and touched a slender bare white arm. It was stiff, very cold. The still pallid face was framed in fine brown hair. The fair small hands were crossed upon the breast over the simple white garment. A queer ache came into his heart. Something made him think of a white tower in the red hills near Helion, and a girl waiting in its fragrant garden of saffron and purple. A girl like this. The body lay upon a bed of blazing jewels. It appeared, that thought, as if the pile of gems upon the floor had been hastily scraped from the coffer to make room for the quiet form. He wondered how long it had lain there. It looked as if it might have been living but minutes before. His thought was broken by a sound that rang from the open hatchway on the deck above, the furious barking and yelping of the dog. Abruptly that was silent, and in its place came the uncanny and terrifying scream that Thad had heard once before on this flyer of mystery. A shriek so keen and shrill that it seemed to tear out his nerves by their roots, the voice of the haunter of the ship. When Thad came back upon the deck, the dog was still barking nervously. He saw the animal forward, almost at the bow, hackles raised, tail between its legs. It was slinking backward, barking sharply as if to call for aid. Apparently it was retreating from something between Thad and itself, but Thad, searching the dimly lit deck, could see no source of alarm. Nor could the structures upon it have shut any large object from his view. It's all right, Thad called, intending to frighten the animal, but finding his voice clearly dry. Coming on the double old man, don't worry. The dog had reached the end of the deck. It stopped yelping, but snarled and whined as if in terror. It began darting back and forth, moving exactly as if something were slowly closing in upon it, trapping it in the corner. But Thad could see nothing. Then it made a wild dash back toward Thad, darting along the wall as if to run past an unseen tree, heard quick rasping footsteps then, that were not those of the dog. And something seemed to catch the dog in mid-air as it leaped. It was hurled howling to the deck. For a moment it struggled furiously as if an invisible claw had pinned it down. Then it escaped and fled whimpering to Thad's side. He saw a new wound across its hips, three long parallel scratches from which fresh red blood was trickling. Regular scraping sounds came from the end when no moving thing was to be seen. Sounds such as might be made by the walking of feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad, something that was invisible. Terror seized him with the knowledge. He had nerved himself to face desperate men or a savage animal, but an invisible being that could creep upon him and strike unseen. It was incredible, yet he had seen the dog knock down and the bleeding wound it had received. His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For the moment he thought only blindly of escape. He knew only an overpowering desire to hide, to conceal himself from the invisible thing. Had it been possible he might have tried to leave the flyer. Beside him was one of the companion ways of midships, giving access to a compartment of the vessel that he had not explored. He turned, leaped down the steps with the terrified dog at his heels. Below he found himself in a short hall dimly lighted, several metal doors opening from it. He tried one at random. It gave. He sprang through, let the dog follow, closed and locked it. Trying to listen he leaned weakly against the door. The rushing of his breath swift and regular. The loud hammer of his thudding heart. The dog's low whines. Then, unmistakable scraping sounds outside. The scratching of claws, Thad knew. Invisible claws. He stood there, bracing the door with the weight of his body, holding Mark ready in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked and he felt a heavy pressure against the panels. But at last the scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn, at least for a time. When he had time to think, the invisibility of the thing was not so incredible. The mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were evidence that the flyer had visited some unknown planet where weird life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a planet should be inhabited by beings of human sight. Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction of the spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to visible light as human flesh is radio-lucent to hard X-rays. Quite possibly it could be seen by infrared or ultraviolet light. Evidently it was visible enough to the dog's eyes with their different range of sensitivity. Pushing the subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room into which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied by a fireman. A frail blue silk dress and more intimate items of feminine wearing apparel were hanging above the berth. Two pairs of delicate black slippers stood neatly below it. Across from him was a dressing table with a large mirror above it. Combs, pins, jars of cosmetic cluttered it. And Thad saw upon it a little leather-bound book, locked, stamped on the back, diary. He crossed the room and picked up the little book which smelled faintly of love. Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the secrets of an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but to seize any chance of learning more of this ship of mystery and her invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening. Linda Cross was the name written on the fly-leaf in a firm, clear, feminine hand. On the next page was the photograph in color of a girl—the brown-haired girl whose body Thad had discovered in the crystal coffer in the hold. The eyes he saw had been blue. He thought she looked very lovely, like the waiting girl in his old dream of the Silver Tower in the Red Hills by Helion. The diary had appeared had not been kept very devotedly. Most of the pages were blank. One of the first entries dated a year and a half before told of a party that Linda had attended in San Francisco, and of her refusal to dance with a certain man referred to as Benny, because he had been unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended. Dad said tonight that we are going off in the Dragon again, all the way to Uranus if the new fuel works as he expects. What a lark to explore a few new worlds of our own. Dad says one of Uranus' moons is as large as Mercury, and Benny won't be proposing again soon. Turning on Thad found other scattered entries, some of them dealing with the preparation for the voyage, the start from San Francisco, and a huge bunch of doors from Benny. The long months of the trip through space out past the orbit of Mars above the meteor belt across Jupiter's orbit beyond the track of Saturn, which was the farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached, and onto Uranus, where they could not land because of the unstable surface. The remainder of the entries Thad found less frequent, shorter, bearing the mark of excitement, landing upon Titania, the third and largest satellite of Uranus, unearthly Mars, sheltering strange and monstrous life, the hunting of weird creatures and mounting them for museum specimens. Then the discovery of a ruined city, whose remains indicated that it had been built by a lost race of intelligent spider-like things, the finding of a temple whose walls were of precious metals containing a crystal chest filled with wondrous gems, the smelting of the metal into convenient ingots and the transfer of the treasure to the hold. The first sinister note there entered the diary. Some of the men say we shouldn't have disturbed the temple. Think it will bring us bad luck. Rubbish of course, but one man did vanish while they were smelting the gold. Poor Mr. Tom James. I suppose he ventured away from the rest and something caught him. The few entries that followed were shorter and showed increasing nervous tension. They recorded the departure from Titania, made almost as soon as the treasure was loaded. The last was made several weeks later. A dozen men had vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of blood to hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran. Dad says I'm to stay in here today. Oh, dear. He's afraid the thing will get me, whatever it is. It's really serious. Two men taken from their births last night, and not a trace. Some of them think it's a curse on the treasure. One of them swears he saw dad's stuffed specimens moving about in the cold. Some terrible thing must have slipped aboard the flyer out of the jungle. That's what dad and the captain think. Queer they can't find it. They searched all over. Well. Musing and regretful, dad turned back for another look at the smiling girl in the photograph. What a tragedy her death had been. Reading the diary had made him like her, her balance and humor, her quiet affection for dad, the calm courage with which she seemed to have faced the lurking death that darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow. How had her body come to be in the coffer, he wondered, when all the others were gone? It had shown no marks of violence. She must have died of fear. No. Her face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that. Had she chosen easy death by some poison rather than that other dreadful fate? Had her body been put in the chest to protect it and the poison arrested decomposition? Thad was still studying the picture thoughtfully and sadly when the dog which had been silent suddenly ground again and retreated from the door toward the corner of the room. The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its claws scratching across the door again, and he heard another dreadful sound, not the long shrill scream that had so graded on his nerves before, but a short, sharp coughing or barking, a series of shrill indescribable notes that could have been made by no beast he knew. The decision to open the door cost a huge effort on Thad's will. For hours he had waited, thinking desperately, and the thing outside of the door had waited as patiently, scratching upon it from time to time, uttering those dreadful shrill coughing cries. Sooner or later he would have to face the monster. Even if he could escape from the room and avoid it for a time he would have to meet it in the end, and it might creep upon him. He slept. To be sure, the issue of the combat was extremely doubtful. The monster apparently had succeeded in killing every man upon the flyer, even though some of them had been armed. It must be large and very ferocious. But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his osprey suit. The heavy fabric made of metal wires impregnated with a tough elastic composition should afford considerable protection against the thing. The welding arc intended to fuse meteoric iron would be no mean weapon at close quarters, and the quarters would be close. If only he could find some way to make the thing visible. Paint or something of the kind would stick to its skin. His eyes searching the room caught the jar of face powder on the dressing table. Dashed that over it. It ought to stick enough to make the outline visible. So at last, holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until a time when the pressure relaxed, and he knew the monster was waiting outside. Swiftly he opened the door. Thad had partially overcome the instinctive horror that the unseen being first aroused in him, but it returned in a sickening wave when he heard the short shrill, coughing cries, hideously eager that greeted the opening of the door, and the quick rasping of naked claws upon the floor. Sounds from nothingness. He flung the powder at the sound. A form of weird horror materialized before him, still half invisible, half outlined with the white film of adhering powder, gigantic and hideous claws that seemed to reach out of empty air, the side of a huge, scaly body, a yawning, dripping jaw. For a moment Thad could see great hooked fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished as if an unseen tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it in fluids which made it invisible. That unearthly unseen shape leaped at him. He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the floor. Claws were rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit. His arm was seized crushingly in half visible jaws. Desperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated electrode was driven toward his body. He fought to keep it away. He knew that it would burn through even the insulated fabric of his suit. A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound as the tough fabric of his suit was torn and felt a thin pencil of pain drawn along his body where the claw cut his skin. Suddenly the suit was full of the earthly fetter of the monster's body, nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath and thrust upward hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood trickling from the wound. A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was carried from his hand, flung to the other side of the room, it heavy weight came upon his chest forcing the breath from his lungs. The monster stood upon his body and clawed at him. Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet encountering a great hard body. Feudally he beat and thrust with his arms against the pillar-like limb. His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick fabric. He heard it tear again along his right thigh, but he felt no pain and thought the claws had not reached the skin. It was the yellow dog that gave him a chance to recover the weapon. The animal had been running back and forth in the opposite end of the room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now with the med carriage of desperation it leaped recklessly at the monster. A mighty, dimly-seen claw caught it, hurled it back across the room. It lay still, broken, whimpering. For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from Thad's body and Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung himself across the room, snatched up the welding tool. In an instant he was upon him again, but he met it with the incandescent electrode. He was crouched in a corner now, where it could come at him from only one direction. Its claws still slashed at him ferociously, but he was able to cling to the weapon and meet each onslaught with hot metal. Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his blind, thrusting blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A terrible, choking, strangling sound came from the air and he heard the thrashing struggles of wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He prodded the thing again and again with hot electrode and it did not move. It was dead. The creature's body was so heavy that Thad had to return to the bridge and shut off the current in the gravity plates along the keel before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which he had entered the flyer and consigned it to space. Five days later Thad brought the red dragon into the atmosphere of Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard in response to his battles and docked the flyer safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard to inspect the vessel. Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in the hold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at the treasure he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of white crystal and looked once more upon the still form of the girl within it. Pity stirred him. An ache came to his throat. Linda crossed so quiet and cold and white and yet so lovely how terrible her last days of life must have been with doom shadowing the vessel and with the men vanishing mysteriously one by one. Terrible, until she had sought the security of death. Strangely Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half the incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own as the award of salvage if only the girl were still living. He felt a poignantly keen desire to hear her voice. Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. A hasty scrawl it lay beneath her head among glittering gems. This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state of suspended animation induced by the injection of fifty minimums of zero now. She is my daughter, Linda Cross and my sole heir. I treat the finders of this to have care given her and to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other claims. Sometimes she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a hundred, the purity of my drugs is uncertain and the injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time that must elapse. If this is found it will be because the lurking thing upon the ship has destroyed me and all of my men. I do not fail me," signed Levington Cross. Fad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its Martian garden of saffron and purple among the low ochre hills beside Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where the girl of his dreams had waited and set the coffer in a great vaulted chamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay to look into her pallid face and feel her cold wrist. She had a nurse in attendance and had a physician called Daly. A long Martian year went by. Looking in his mirror one day, Fad saw little wrinkles about his eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting was aging him and it might be a hundred years he remembered before Linda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence. He wondered if he should grow old and infirm while Linda lay still young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep if she might awake for long years and seeing him only a feeble old man and he knew that he would not be sorry he had waited even if he should die before she revived. On the next day the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay. He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue. Glorious. A long time she looked up at him first in fearful wonder, then with confidence and dawning understanding and at last her love. Salvage in Space by Jack Williamson