Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 Part 15

"Yes. I think so.... As I was saying, Miss Prince, you'll enjoy Mars. A strange, aggressively forward-looking people."

An oppression seemed on her. She stirred in her chair.

"Yes, they are," she said vaguely. "My brother and I know many Martians in Great-New York." She checked herself abruptly. Was she sorry she had said that? It seemed so.

Miko was coming back. He stopped this time before us.

"Your brother would see you, Anita. He sent me to bring you to his room."

The glance he shot me had a touch of insolence. I stood up, and he towered a head over me.

Anita said, "Oh yes. I'll come."

I bowed. "I will see you again, Miss Prince. I thank you for a pleasant half-hour."

The Martian led her away. Her little figure was like a child with a giant. It seemed, as they pa.s.sed the length of the deck with me staring after them, that he took her arm roughly. And that she shrank from him in fear.

And they did not go inside. As though to show me that he had merely taken her from me, he stopped at a distant deck window and stood talking to her. Once he picked her up as one would pick up a child to show it some distant object through the window.

"A little son with the strength of his father...." Her words echoed in my mind. Was Anita afraid of this Martian's wooing? Yet held to him by some power he might have over her brother? The vagrant thought struck me.

Was it that?

CHAPTER VIII

_A Scream in the Night_

We kept, on the Planetara, always the time and routine of our port of departure. The rest of that afternoon and evening were a blank of confusion to me. Anita's words; the touch of my hand upon her arm; that vast realm of what might be for us, like a glimpse of a magic land of happiness which I had seen in her eyes, and perhaps she had seen in mine--all this surged within me.

I wandered about the vessel. I was not hungry. I did not go to the dining salon for dinner. I carried Johnson food and water to his cage; and sat, with my heat-cylinder upon him, listening to his threats of what would happen when he could complain to the Line's higher officials.

But what was Johnson doing carrying a plan of the s.h.i.+p's control rooms in his pockets? And worse: How had he dared open Snap's box in the helio-room and abstract the code pa.s.s-words for this voyage? Without them we would be an outlawed vessel, subject to arrest if any patrol hailed us. Had Johnson been planning to sell those pa.s.s-words to Miko? I thought so. I tried to get the confession out of him, but could not.

I had a brief consultation with Captain Carter. He was genuinely apprehensive now. The Planetara carried no long-range guns, and very few side-arms. A half-dozen of the heat-ray hand projectors; a few old-fas.h.i.+oned weapons of explosion-rifles and automatic revolvers. And hand projectors with the new Benson curve-light. We had models of this for curved vision, so that one might see around a corner, so to speak.

And with them, we could project the heat-ray in a curve as well.

The weapons were all in Carter's chart-room, save the few we officers always carried. Carter was apprehensive, but of what he could not say.

He had not thought that our plan to stop at the Moon for treasure could affect this outward voyage. Any danger would be upon the way back, when the Planetara would be adequately guarded with long-range electronic guns, and manned with police-soldiers.

But now we were practically defenseless....

I had a moment with Venza, but she had nothing new to communicate to me.

And for half an hour I chatted with George Prince. He seemed a gay, pleasant young man. I could almost have fancied I liked him. Or was it because he was Anita's brother? He told me how he looked forward to traveling with her on Mars. No, he had never been there before, he said.

He had a measure of Anita's earnest nave personality. Or was he a very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle that he could so befool me?

"We'll talk again, Haljan. You interest me--I've enjoyed it."

He sauntered away from me, joining the saturnine Ob Hahn, with whom presently I heard him discussing religion.

The arrest of Johnson had caused considerable comment among the pa.s.sengers. A few had seen me drag him forward to the cage. The incident had been the subject of pa.s.senger discussion all afternoon. Captain Carter had posted a notice to the effect that Johnson's accounts had been found in serious error, and that Dr. Frank for this voyage would act in his stead.

It was near midnight when Snap and I closed and sealed the helio-room and started for the chart-room, where we were to meet with Captain Carter and the other officers. The pa.s.sengers had nearly all retired. A game was in progress in the smoking room, but the deck was almost deserted.

Snap and I were pa.s.sing along one of the interior corridors. The stateroom doors, with the illumined names of the pa.s.sengers, were all closed. The metal grid of the floor echoed our footsteps. Snap was in advance of me. His body suddenly rose in the air. He went like a balloon to the ceiling, struck it gently, and all in a heap came floating down and landed on the floor!

"What in the infernal!--"

He was laughing as he picked himself up. But it was a brief laugh. We knew what had happened: the artificial gravity-controls in the base of the s.h.i.+p, which by magnetic force gave us normality aboard, were being tampered with! For just this instant, this particular small section of this corridor had been cut off. The slight bulk of the Planetara, floating in s.p.a.ce, had no appreciable gravity pull on Snap's body, and the impulse of his step as he came to the unmagnetized area of the corridor had thrown him to the ceiling. The area was normal now. Snap and I tested it gingerly.

He gripped me. "That never went wrong by accident, Gregg! Someone down there--"

We rushed to the nearest descending ladder. In the deserted lower room the bank of dials stood neglected. A score of dials and switches were here, governing the magnetism of different areas of the s.h.i.+p. There should have been a night operator, but he was gone.

Then we saw him lying nearby, sprawled face down on the floor! In the silence and dim lurid glow of the fluorescent tubes, we stood holding our breaths, peering and listening. No one here.

The guard was not dead. He lay unconscious from a blow on the head. A brawny fellow. We had him revived in a few moments. A broadcast flash of the call-buzz brought Dr. Frank in haste from the chart-room.

"What's the matter?"

We pointed at the unconscious man. "Someone was here," I said hastily.

"Experimenting with the magnetic switches. Evidently unfamiliar with them--pulling one or another to test their workings and so see the reactions on the dials."

We told him what had happened to Snap in the upper corridor.

Dr. Frank revived the guard in a moment. He was no worse off for the episode, save a lump on his head, and a nasty headache.

But he had little to tell us. He had heard a step. Saw nothing--and then had been struck on the head, by some invisible a.s.sailant.

We left him nursing his head, sitting belligerent at his post. Armed now with my heat-ray cylinder which I loaned him.

"Strange doings this voyage," he told us. "All the crew knows it--all been talkin' about it. I stick it out now, but when we get back home I'm done with this star travelin'. I belong on the sea anyway. A good old freighter is all right for me."

We hurried back to the upper level. We would indeed have to plan something at this chart-room conference. This was the first tangible attack our adversaries had made.

We were on the pa.s.senger deck headed for the chart-room when all three of us stopped short, frozen with horror. Through the silent pa.s.senger quarters a scream rang out! A girl's shuddering, gasping scream. Terror in it. Horror. Or a scream of agony. In the silence of the dully vibrating s.h.i.+p it was utterly horrible. It lasted an instant--a single long scream; then was abruptly stilled.