by Don Wilcox
“He wants more hieroglyphics,” Katherine said. “Give. He wants to be amused.”
“Amused, you think?”
“What do you think?”
Paul didn’t answer. His wits were ahead of Katherine for once. He saw a deeper meaning in Gret-O-Gret’s actions, and what he saw gave his heavy heart a thrill of hope.
“He wants to be entertained,” Katherine repeated. “He wants more pictures.”
“We’ll entertain him,” Paul said, smiling to himself at the wonderful secret that only he and Gret-O-Gret shared.
CHAPTER IX
“I never saw anything like this before,” Anna Pantella gasped. “What a ship!”
“That’s no ship, that’s a whole city, wrapped up in one package,” George said.
“It’s no city. It’s a whole planet.”
“It’s no planet. It’s just a long mountain with windows.”
“It’s no mountain,” Anna said. “It’s—”
“Stop it,” George growled. “It’s a ship. It’s a thirteen-mile ship just like you said.”
“With half-mile windows.”
“And airlocks big enough for a flock of dirigibles to float in.”
“I never saw anything like it!” Anna repeated.
“Even your brother on Venus never saw anything like it. Did you say you saw—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
George was thinking back to the curious things Anna had said while looking through the telescope during the hour before they had approached this flat surface for a landing. At the time he had believed she was imagining things. But she had declared she saw someone come out of the ship and place a box on the ground. A box a half-mile long!
This landing place did resemble a box. A box of glazed white stone, fully half a mile long and as wide as a city block. Its top surface, tilted slightly, had taken the flivver’s landing as solidly as any concrete runway.
George left the airlocks of his flivver standing open as he walked out across the smooth, plastic-like surface. Anna followed him. Her white dress faded into the white background, so that she was only a shadow of face, arms and legs in the deepening darkness.
“I brought a flashlight, Big Boy,” she said. “We could signal across to the big ship. Maybe they’d send out a reception committee.” She flashed the light on.
“Shut it off, damn it!” George snapped.
“I was just trying to be helpful.”
“Go back to the flivver and wait.”
“In the dark?”
“Certainly.”
“Can I turn on a light?”
“Hell, no. If they haven’t seen us come in, let’s keep it quiet—at least until we size them up.”
“I sized them up through the telescope,” Anna said. “They’re big. I can tell you that.” She started back toward the flivver. “I’ll turn on the little green light over the K lever.”
“Huh?” George swallowed. “Wait a minute. What do you know about the K Lever?”
“Don’t you think I’ve piloted space ships? My brother and I—”
“All right, that does it. You stay with me. Come on.”
“Thanks, Big Boy. Even if you don’t trust me—thanks. I’d be afraid to stay back there by myself.”
They walked along the edge of the white box top, peering across at the huge rectangles of cream-colored light. It was a sight to take their breath. A single immense brown shadow was moving about in the upper end of the ship. At first George thought this was some kind of lighting effect. The windows would have served ideally, George thought, as display windows for passing air traffic, and he speculated upon the possibility that some neighboring planet might have devised this space riding monster for commercial use.
But in the back of his mind was the pressing thought of the earth’s great disaster. When Anna began to talk about what a nice little fighting boat this sky monster would be, her hand quivered on his arm.
“If you’d left me sitting alone in your space ship, Big Boy, I’d have been sure that any minute they’d spot me with a light. And someone would touch a trigger, and blooey, where would I be?”
“Yeah? Where would my space flivver be?”
“Oh, sure. Don’t mind me. Just think of your flivver,” Anna taunted.
“There’s not another craft like it on this earth.”
“I could say the same thing about me,” said Anna. George was aware that she edged a bit closer.
“We’re going back,” he said. “We’d better find the Venus Express and tell them—” He stopped again fascinated by the movements of the great brown shadow occasionally visible through the nearer windows. “The strange thing is, that whole barny crate doesn’t seem to have anyone in it. I haven’t seen a soul—unless—”
“Unless what?” Anna gulped. “You mean that big shadow?”
“It has arms,” George said. A chill leaped through his spine to the top of his head. “It has arms—with hands—”
“With fingers—”
“With claws!
“With people in its claws! Look! Two people! Look! LOOK!”
“Don’t scream or I’ll knock your teeth out.”
“I’m not screaming. LOOK!!!”
“Come on, let’s get out of here.”
George jerked at her hand. Her feet must have been riveted to the floor. And his, too. He stood gazing, awe-struck. A cold paralysis seized him, head to foot.
“Look, Big Boy. He’s bending toward the window. He still has them in his fingers. There’s his head and shoulders now.”
George mumbled as if the breath had been knocked out of him. “And you call me Big Boy!”
“LOOK! HIS EYES! HIS FACE!”
Anna screamed.
CHAPTER X
They tied the rope ladder to a projection on the corner of the white box and climbed down through the darkness.
“Are you sure it reaches the ground?” Anna asked.
“If it doesn’t, you can jump.”
“You’d never catch me.”
“How right you are,” George said. He had ceased to be annoyed with himself for having let her come along. He was teasing her—harshly, perhaps, but she could take it. And it gave him a measure of relief from his nervousness. Before this night ended he meant to enter the giant’s spaceship and see a few things for himself. If he waited until morning his flivver would be seen and there was no telling what would happen.
“I hope you’re not doing this on account of anything I said,” Anna protested, stopping on the ladder to catch her breath.
“Come on, come on, you’re holding up the party.”
“I mean, I just happened to mention that if my brother was here—”
“I heard you. If he were here and he saw those giant airlocks open, he’d walk in with an atomic pistol in each hand—”
“I didn’t say anything about atomic pistols.”
“And he’d demand to know who’s trespassing and why.”
“I didn’t say that,” Anna said, giving the rope ladder a shake. “But he might, at that.”
George reached the ground. He flashed a light for Anna. She scorned the last step and dropped to the ground gracefully. She had a good athletic figure for a girl, he thought.
“Get your bearings,” he said, flashing the light around. “We might do a return trip on the run, you know.”
“I can climb a rope ladder as fast as you can,” she said, “and I can beat you in a footrace too, if it comes to that.”
“You’ve got your flashlight? Your pistol? You know how to shoot, if necessary?”
“I’ll bet I can outshoot you.”
“You can out-scream me, I’ve found that out,” George said sarcastically.
“Look, Big Boy.” Anna turned the light toward her own face. “You see those teeth? Nice teeth, aren’t they? Do you remember saying you were going to knock them out if I screamed?”
“All right, forget it.”
“And
I did scream, and you swung at me.”
“Yeah. I missed, didn’t I?”
“My brother from Venus wouldn’t have missed. He’d have knocked ‘em out. Lead on, Big Boy.”
The entrance to the mammoth space ship was high enough above the ground so that they were put to an hour’s trouble, climbing around through the dark, before they finally stumbled upon the massive gangplank arrangement that gave them a sloping ascent to their destination.
With every step, George Hurley became more acutely conscious of the seriousness of what he was undertaking. Friend or foe? He kept telling himself he mustn’t jump at conclusions. But the conviction was deepening in his mind. Here was a creature who might possess enough power to be responsible for the recent explosions around the earth.
The very realization made George dizzy. The warmth of hero visions swept over him. At this moment he might be on the verge of discovering the inner secrets of some out-of-this-world enemy—secrets that would bring him fame on every planet where the fate of the earth would make news. He shook his head to shake off the spell. Anna gave him a curious look. She stood back, when they reached the mile-high slice of light from the doorway, and allowed him to enter first.
Their footsteps were noiseless. The floor appeared to be white glass, a veritable sea of it stretching the length of the ship. “The kind of boulevard cities dream about,” Anna said. “If the airlocks had been open a little wider you could have landed your flivver in here.”
“And get it stepped on?”
“There’s a point,” Anna agreed. “Let’s make sure we don’t get stepped on, either. One false move of that giant’s left rear foot and we’re peanut butter.”
They hugged the wall and moved along the white avenue like fleas exploring the aisle of a church. The interior decoration came to their rescue, offering a long curved catwalk five feet wide and several city blocks long. It led upward, a gentle sloping path toward the window shelf many hundred feet above them.
“Made to order,” George observed.
“And could be used as a slippery-slide down in case of fire.” Anna stopped, puffing for breath, to gauge the long climb ahead. “Oh, well, maybe there’ll be hot coffee when we reach the summit.”
“It’s the ledge where he was picking up the people when we saw him through the window. You wait here. I’ll go up and take a look.”
“Me wait? Say, if I can’t climb that little ski-run, Big Boy—” but she didn’t finish, evidently preferring to save her breath for climbing.
The giant was still puttering around at the farther end of the aisle when they reached the shelf. From this vantage point they had their fill of gazing at him, although his back was still turned to them. His four stocky legs a half mile below them supported the base of his thick body. It was a compound body, tapering to narrower dimensions as it towered upward through two sets of shoulders to a rather alarming head, full and square-jawed. The light brown head, the yellow hair, the slightly shaggy arms and legs were exposed; otherwise the giant was clothed in loose-fitting brown garments adorned only with an orange sash around his vast middle.
“There’s many a circus tent in that sash alone,” Anna observed.
The massive creature was having a little trouble with his breathing, George thought. Once he touched a lever that adjusted the circulation of the air, and he glanced at the airlocks, but must have decided against closing them. He returned his attention to the immense charts and navigating instruments around him, and frequently he would put a magnifying instrument to his eye and bend down to study something on the ledge before him.
“I think he has the people down there,” George said. “Maybe he’s talking with them. Let’s go closer.”
“Maybe he’s mixing them up in a salad,” Anna said. “Let’s hold back.”
But she kept edging along the inner border of the shelf at the base of the windows for a more advantageous view, and George shared her pace.
Suddenly both of them stopped. Someone nearby had called to them. The voice struck George for a chill. He had almost forgotten there could be other human voices besides Anna Pantella’s and his own.
“Come here! Hssssst! Come here, both of you . . . I’m over here in the black tube.”
They had hardly noticed the object in passing. They turned back cautiously. The thing looked like a locomotive sized cylinder of licorice with screens wrapped over the ends. But there was a face showing dimly through the screen. Apparently, someone was in trouble.
“Have they got you in a rattrap, partner?” George asked.
“Not so loud,” said the man. His voice was thin and tense. “Let me talk with you. It’s terribly important.”
George moved close enough to touch the front of the crude prison and stood where the screen didn’t interfere with the light. The prisoner was a small man of forty, lightly whiskered, and probably half starved. His clothing, chosen for space traveling, were badly in need of a clean-press. His eyes were gaunt. The lines around his mouth twitched with nervous tension. George thought his teeth were chattering, as if from cold. George himself was perspiring jelly-beans. Anna, however, looked as cool and calm as a Sunday visitor at the zoo observing the animals.
Anna spoke pleasantly. “When does the giant eat you? Tomorrow at breakfast?”
“I wish it were that simple,” the man retorted acidly. “I have come to save the earth from destruction.”
“Save it?”
“Oh, you’ll think I’m talking nonsense at first. But listen to me. There’s a great catastrophe coming.”
“There’s a great catastrophe just been,” said Anna. “You’re too late.”
For the next few minutes the little man was George’s ideal of a perfect listener. He drank in every word about the earth’s destruction with the eagerness of a thirsty man at a well. There was no telling what he was thinking. The news obviously shocked him, still he seemed familiar with the idea. He kept nodding, as if all the destruction had happened quite according to plan—a deadly plan with which he was familiar.
“What has happened,” he said presently, “is only the beginning. The plot is going on this very minute.” He gestured toward the giant. “When they get through with this old ball—there won’t even be a smoke cloud left to mark the spot.”
“The earth?”
“If you want to call it that. It’s just a wad of minerals to them. When they break it down and make off with it, you know what will happen to the other planets.”
George commented doubtfully. He tried to imagine how fast things would happen if the solar system were suddenly thrown out of balance.
“There’d be plenty of celestial crashing, my friend,” said the man.
Anna gave a little gasp. George knew she was thinking of her brother on Venus. He touched her arm with a restraining hand. If what this man said was true, it behooved them to take as broad a view of the situation as possible.
“As you see, I’ve just come back from the outer world,” the man said. “I was a stowaway at first. You’ll have to pardon my appearance.” He glanced at his nails and touched his cheeks. “In some circles I would be recognized as a well known explorer, Garritt Glasgow.”
“Haven’t I seen you in the newsreels?” Anna asked.
“It is my sincere hope,” Glasgow went on, “that I’m still in time to save what’s left of the earth—and to warn the neighboring planets. If I can find the right man to take my message—” He was looking George over from head to foot, and his eyes glittered like a prophet’s—or a maniac’s.
“We’d better get you out of here,” George said.
The man’s eyebrows lifted. “It could be done. Still, I’m safe here for a few hours. And if I got away on foot, Gret-O-Gret—the giant—might overtake me in an hour. Until there’s a chance for me to escape by plane or space ship, I’d better stay.”
“But we have it!” George exclaimed. “My space flivver is right outside.”
“S-s-h! Not so loud!” A wonderful express
ion of eagerness showed in the tense, bird-like face. “Get me out of here quick. Here, use your atomic pistol on the screen. Cut a slit.”
Anna stopped George with her question, “What about those other two we saw the giant tossing around? Maybe there’s more to be rescued.”
“There’s no one else,” Garritt Glasgow snapped. He slipped through the opening. “Those two you saw—sad cases! Did you see how friendly the giant was? They’re in his good graces because they’re in league with him. They’ve sold out the earth, the dastardly traitors. They’ve led him here to finish the job that one of his cousins began.”
“They’re traitors to the earth?” Anna drew a sharp painful breath.
Garritt Glasgow nodded. “We’d put an end to them this minute if it weren’t for their husky friend. Don’t let them see you. Lead the way, fellow, and I’ll follow you. Here, give me one of those pistols in case of trouble. You understand that I want to go to the earth’s most important people the quickest way.”
“Not counting present company,” said Anna, “the eight passengers from Venus must be the folks you want to see.”
They raced almost noiselessly down the incline, the stranger warning them that the giant had ears on his four ankles as well as on his head. They passed through the airlocks, flashed their light on the gangplank, crossed a few yards of torn earth to the side of the box. George was still in the lead as they climbed the rope ladder and hurried to the flivver.
Inside, they closed the airlocks.
George settled in the pilot’s seat. He taxied around. Another glance at the huge ship.
“Where’d you say that big job came from?” he asked as he checked his instruments preparatory to the take-off.
Anna and the stranger took the other control cabin seats.
“From the Mogo planets,” said Glasgow.
“Mogo; Mogo!” George’s hands gave an involuntary jerk. “That’s where the Paul Keller expedition went. Did you ever hear of them?”
“I was one of them.”
“You were?” George rose, forgetting that he was about to take off. He faced Glasgow eagerly. “Then you know Judy Longworth, my girl friend?”