The Complete Saga of Don Hargreaves

by Festus Pragnell

  He expected an attack by a swarm of fighting flies. A cloud of millions of them, all over the broadcasting station, would keep him very busy swishing his ray about to keep them off. Especially if they put the lights out, relying on the power of the insects to see in the dark.

  But what came were soldiers clad from head to foot in armor, armor exactly like that once worn by King Arthur’s knights, but made of glass. He knew at once that it was a special, ray-proof glass.

  Wimpolo was now broadcasting notes obviously suitable for human ears, and calling on Sommalu’s subjects to rise against the tyrant. That stopped. He watched the advance of the glass-armored giants in silence. He was ready to die because he knew he would.

  SUDDENLY, Don was snatched off his feet. So startled was he that he dropped the raybox. The snake had whisked him up in the air, to the top of the banks of machinery. Wimpolo was there too, riding on the shell on the back of the zekolo.

  They crawled along the tops of the instrument banks. In the ceiling was a very large grating. It occurred to Don that Wimpolo and the zekolo could get through it, and that perhaps, seeing how solidly the place was built here, find hiding large enough for all of them in the space between the two floors.

  The snake went first, vanishing, in its stealthy way, out of sight. The zekolo followed, Wimpolo followed, and Don came last. The Princess was very cramped, but otherwise there was room for all. However, it would have been dangerous for her or the zekolo to move about much.

  Don and the snake went on an exploring trip. A little way along they found themselves under a richly furnished bedroom. So well furnished was it that he decided it must be the bedroom of Sommalu himself. The snake seemed to smell out its enemy, who had twisted the arm of its mistress, and it heaved up the grating to glide to the top of the four-poster bed, waiting, out of sight. Don climbed up too, and hid.

  Sommalu came in. A pet snake followed him. Instantly he began to work the teleview.

  In the small sphere showed the face of an officer of the army. He looked haggard and worn.

  “Our flies have turned on our own men. Some strange music made them do it. Our army is wiped out!”

  “What is the situation in the city?” asked the King, in a weary voice.

  “Usulor’s second army is advancing rapidly. We have no force now to send against it. A revolutionary mob is advancing from our rear.”

  Sommalu was a tired and hopeless, but vindictive man. “Do nothing until I give the order, and then let the big rayguns wipe them all out together. At least I’ll finish them, if I can’t do much about Usulor. Is it quite certain that we have got his daughter in an air-tight trap under the floor?”

  “Quite certain. We can see her and the shell-back in the penetrating view-ray.”

  “Then tell the officer in charge of the gas-plant to start pumping in the poison gas. At least Usulor shall have something to remember me by.”

  The face faded out.

  Sommalu looked round to see what his pet snake was hissing at. This creature, even larger than Wimpolo’s, had spotted the other reptile on the top of the bed. The two snakes hissed at each other with a hatred equal to that of the men in charge of them.

  Sommalu barked an order. His snake raced up the end of the bed to do battle. Two giant reptiles were at once locked together, each trying to crush the other in its great coils. Their movements jerked aside the curtains. Don found himself staring straight into the eyes of the amazed Sommalu.

  “You!” said Sommalu, slowly.

  HE reached for his raybox on the table. Don gave a great spring. On no account must the angry monarch be allowed to reach that deadly box. He landed on the table, not quickly enough to pick up the box himself but in time to kick it across the room and still avoid the giant’s reaching hands.

  But on the wall was a huge pair of crossed swords, a pair of daggers beneath. Sommalu drew a sword. It was heavy and curved.

  “See if you can dodge this,” he snarled.

  Don leaped over the bed. He ducked under the table, round a chair. Sommalu, breathing heavily, realized that he stood no chance of catching the agile Earthling while the room was full of furniture. He began pushing everything against the wall with his feet, menacing Don with the sword meanwhile. The bed was too heavy for him, but he solved that problem by chopping it down with the sword.

  The battling snakes crashed to the floor. Don saw that Wimpolo’s snake had glassy eyes from the pressure of the greater reptile, but its jaws, stretching incredibly, had half engulfed the head of the other.

  “Now see if you can escape me,” Sommalu growled.

  Don managed to draw one of the two daggers out of its sheath. To him it was a fairly respectable sword. But he could not leap over Sommalu’s head without being impaled on the way.

  Sommalu lunged. Don slipped to one side. Sommalu tried a series of rapid stabs, but still Don was too quick for him.

  Quickly changing his tactics, he slashed at Don with the edge. Don jumped, leaping over the sweeping blade. A turn of the wrist, and back came the sword, aimed at the neck. Don ducked. Then the sword swept backward and forward with all the speed the giant could muster and all the sudden swerves and changes of aim that he could invent. Don ducked and leaped. He couldn’t keep this up for long without being struck.

  Don tried to slip around the giant. A great coil of the struggling snakes was in his way, and he tripped over it. He saw the broadsword, point first, plunging at him to take advantage while he was off his balance. Sommalu shouted in triumph. His eyes were wide with an insane joy.

  Don shut his eyes, expecting to feel the blade, but instead the blade stuck in the timber of the broken bed.

  Perhaps two, perhaps three seconds Sommalu required to pull out the embedded sword, but that was enough. Don, hurling himself forward, struck. The dagger bit deep into Sommalu’s vitals.

  The Martian King fell with a crash. At the same time, Don, knocked aside by an instinctive flick of his free right arm, crashed into the wall unconscious.

  When he came to the rebels were in charge of the palace. They soon rescued Wimpolo, once Don had told them where she was. She was unharmed. Her snake showed no pleasure at her return. In fact, it took no interest in anything. It had made a gigantic meal, swallowing whole a snake much larger than itself, and it was in great pain.

  USULOR installed himself in Sommalu’s palace. An autopsy on the dead King showed that he had an enormous pair of adrenal glands. They had given him an incurably fierce fighting disposition. As a result he had, by violence and treachery, risen from a lowly position to be master of a nation, using the poisonous flies he had developed.

  “Unregulated glandular abnormalities always cause trouble,” a Martian scientist said, gazing sadly at Don. Don felt uncomfortable. He was thinking of the unregulated glands of Earthmen, and the prophecy of a disastrous war between Earth and Mars.

  King Usulor asked: “But how did my second army win so easily?”

  The chief surviving general coughed.

  “We have, of course, spread the usual propaganda about our invincible army, but really we cannot understand it. Seeing what happened to the first army, we took with us flocks of trained birds to eat the flies, but even so, enough flies were bound to get through to cause havoc. Or so we thought. As a matter of fact, we lost not a ship, not a sphere, not a man. We found Sommalu’s entire army lying dead with no wounds, nothing to show what they died of.”

  “They were stung by their own flies,” said Wimpolo.

  “What?”

  “I have a very good ear for music,” explained the Princess. “When Sommalu forced me to watch the television view of the rout of Usulor’s first army, I noted the cadences of the flutes and whistles used to command the flies. As a result, when I got into the broadcasting station I was able to broadcast notes that vibrated the tiny brains of the flies. I gave them feelings of intolerable suffering and of rage. In fury, the flies poured out of the holes and stung to death the nearest men. In nearly every
case they were Sommalu’s soldiers.”

  “And how did you escape the gas?”

  “There was no gas. The soldiers to whom Sommalu sent the order to release the gas were dead, poisoned by their own flies.”

  “Ah!” said the general, with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now all that remains is the cleaning up. We must make sure that no more incipient Sommalus are growing up in this disorderly country.”

  “Yes,” said the scientist, as they went out together, “we must institute a universal register, catalog and examine—”

  That left Don and Wimpolo alone. The giantess was not looking at him. She was lying languidly on a couch, affectionately tickling the ears of her snake, which, too overfed to coil itself up, lay stretched out straight and gazed at her in mute suffering.

  An odd doubt came to Don. Was the part that he, the Earthling, had played in the suppression of the revolt properly appreciated? Wimpolo had promised him that one day he would be her consort and King of all Mars. Now she seemed to have forgotten.

  He decided it was best not to remind her. Otherwise, hearing that he had such ambitions, the scientists of Mars might start inquiring into the size of his adrenal glands, and perhaps remove one of the pair to make him properly docile and safe. He certainly didn’t want that, for how would he have got on against Sommalu if he had been docile and peace-loving?

  Shaking his head in puzzlement. Don Hargreaves went out from the presence of the heir to the throne of Mars.

  [1] Within Mars are many nations, each with its king, its nobles, its middle classes, and its working masses. The kings themselves are graded in an exact scale, up to Usulor at the very top. This system had kept Mars rigid for a hundred thousand years. In a world where there was no day, where it was always night, where there was no summer or winter, nothing ever changed. Everything remained the same, century after century.

  In all that time the only event of real importance had been the arrival of a few men from distant Earth to scratch the abandoned surface of Mars for rare metals. A few of these, among them Don Hargreaves and Professor Winterton, had found their way down into the deep tunnels where lived the inhabitants of a planet thought to be void of life. (See “Ghost of Mars” in the December, 1938 issue of Amazing Stories).

  [2] Earthmen who went to Mars and remained too long in the Krypton-laden atmosphere became forced exiles because of a change in their blood which made return impossible. This condition is similar to the “bends” which divers get if they come up out of the water too quickly. Nitrogen is dissolved into the blood under pressure, and when the pressure is removed suddenly it is given up again, forming bubbles. The Krypton on Mars behaves in the same way. Krypton is a gaseous element (also found in Earth’s atmosphere, in a minute proportion of one part in twenty million) and appears to be very similar to argon, helium, etc. Its molecules are made up of single atoms, and its atomic weight is 82.9. Krypton samples have been liquefied and even solidified. The solid melted at -169° C. and the liquid boiled at -152° C. Its critical temperature (i.e., the highest temperature at which it can be liquefied) is -62.5° C.

  [3] Due no doubt to the different structure of their brains from ours, Martians can talk and listen to each other at the same time. They do not speak, wait for a reply and then speak again. They go straight on with amazing rapidity, two or three or even four of them at the same time keeping up a continuous stream of sound.

  [4] What Princess Wimpolo says is perfectly true. Persons with large adrenal glands find their energy comes in spasms. They hale steady work, but love fighting. They are lazy and quarrelsome. Those with large thyroid glands and small adrenals work hard and patiently, but when danger comes they succumb to fear. The most ferocious of all, the tiger, has enormous adrenal glands. Cows, on the other hand, have small adrenals. A cow injected with hormones from adrenal glands, would attack as fiercely as a tiger.

  [5] In the “Ghost of Mars” (Amazing Stories, December, 1938), Don Hargreaves put down a rebellion of the miners from Earth, who had occupied the surface of Mars unaware that far beneath them lay a Martian civilization. It was due to the ingratitude of the mine owners for this feat that Don Hargreaves descended into Mars to live with the Martians, where he felt he would be more appreciated.

  “I’ll tie you in knots!” Don Hargreaves panted, heaving at the massive scaly form of Princess Wimpolo’s pet snake. The snake’s tail, arching over, took him round the middle and held him in mid-air. Uncoiling suddenly, it shot him forty feet into the air, spinning rapidly, and caught him as he fell.

  That annoyed Don. A forty foot fall was nothing to him in the gravity of Mars, provided he landed on his feet, but he hated being made to spin like a top.

  “Bad, bad!” he scolded, slapping the snake soundly under one of its ears.

  The snake was not hurt. Its scaly hide barely felt his hand, but its dignity was offended. Like a sulky child it writhed away and coiled itself up in a distant corner, almost entirely hidden by curtains and draperies.

  Don heard the Princess laughing. Her enormous left hand picked him up and placed him beside her on her couch. Don was still giddy, the enormous room spinning round him like a whirligig.

  “Look here, when are you going to marry me?” he demanded, when the room had steadied somewhat.

  For though she was ten feet tall and would have weighed on Earth something approaching half a ton, and was, furthermore, daughter and heir of the overlord of all Mars, while he was an overworked, underpaid clerk from Earth and a small one at that, the two were perfect friends.

  “Bad, bad!” she mimicked him, indulgently. “You know that gentlemen are not allowed to ask ladies questions like that on Mars.”

  “I shall never understand your Martian ways,” he said. “In my world it is the other way round.”

  “Barbarity,” she murmured, with a shiver, but added, “how quaint!”

  Don frowned. He was still unable to understand her. Several times she had told him that she loved him and promised to marry him, always in a casual manner as though it were a mere trifle. When he tried to pursue the subject she cut him short, pretending to be annoyed. Martian conventions were very strict on men, and the ways of Martian girls beyond understanding.

  “Don’t be impatient, Don,” she said. “One day you shall be my husband and the greatest in all Mars. Our Eugenics Control approves Earth-Mars unions saying that fresh blood from another planet will put new virility into our race. We need it, after our thousands of years of underground life.”

  Which Don thought was queerly coldblooded talk.

  “Then why the delay? Why can’t we be married now?”

  For a while she did not answer.

  “I’d like to,” she said at last, “but first there is much to do. I cannot think of my private feelings while the whole civilization of Mars is in danger.” Her words startled him with their unexpectedness.

  “Is it in danger, then? I don’t follow Martian news much. I don’t understand it too well. I knew you were having trouble with savage animals lately. Packs of ferocious apes, I understand, have attacked and destroyed several cities. But is it as serious as that?”

  “It is,” she said. “These apes, you see, Don, are half human. Like the snakes and the rats, they breed in the innumerable smaller caves of our world, so many of which are too small, too dangerous or too rambling to be explored. In some places they have been a terrible pest. A section of Mars many thousands of cubic miles in extent has been solely occupied by them for generations. And slowly, because of their depredations, their killings and their kidnapings, the people of Mars have had to fall back until the area occupied by the apes has increased to several times its original size. And the larger the area they occupy the faster their numbers increase.

  But lately our trouble has assumed a new and terrible form. The ape-men have suddenly become much more daring than ever before. There appear to be far more of them than anyone had ever dreamed, and they are attacking whole cities. And although we thought that the defe
nses of our cities were ample against such creatures, yet they have completely overwhelmed town after town. Sentries at gates and on city walls tell us that their deathray boxes suddenly go out of action as soon as they try to use them on the apes. Watch.”

  PRINCESS WIMPOLO twirled knobs. From a recess a blue light glowed. The television clicked into action.

  In the globe they saw a picture, three dimensional and colored, of a vast Martian cavern. What appeared to be pillars of fire shooting up out of the ground lighted the view. Actually they were carved pillars treated with the cold light that the Martians used so liberally.

  A beautiful city was before them. Manjr of the walls had fallen down. Many roofs were caved in. In the place of men shaggy caricatures of human beings, long-armed, short-legged, barrel-chested ape-men with bodies covered with blue hair, apart from red patches on cheeks and chest, roamed the neglected fields and streets. Their toes and fingers had claws and were webbed like the toes of ducks. Most of them wore odd articles of clothing, a belt, a conical helmet or a pair of shoes. And nearly all carried in one hand an iron club and in the other that most deadly of all weapons, a black box producing the nerve-stopping deathray[1] of Mars.

  Don wondered why the view was so dim. Slowly it faded until the sphere was completely dark.

  “You see, Don,” explained Wimpolo, “those beasts know enough to put the television out of action. They can use nearly all the things they find in the cities they destroy, and they leave nobody alive in them when they go. They are horribly cunning. When my father’s army, with its warplanes and battlespheres, gets to that city, all those ape-creatures will have vanished back into the caves, leaving a sacked and empty city. Bodies only will be found, bodies of old people and children. For the young adults, men and women, will have vanished. Do not ask me what has happened to them. It is one of those things one does not like to talk about.”