by Don Wilcox
George and Anna applied their sense of humor to the message. Nevertheless, they lost several nights of sleep over it. Everything seemed to strike deep and serious, now that there was only the gloom of the cavern walls about them and the unfriendly rustle of wings. Should they make any reply whatsoever to Glasgow?
In the end they decided to ignore the message, hoping he would never know they had received it. They would be safer never to get mixed up with him again in any way.
“I can still see him in the Mogo giant’s ship, imprisoned behind that screen, whining his innocent appeal to us to set him free,” Anna said. “His begging will never ring the bell with me.”
Among several prisoners the passion to escape was aroused to fever pitch shortly after Madame Zukor’s successful exodus. The wingmen accused each other of conspiring with the escapees. There were knock-down, drag-out fights for several days, and eventually the guilty wingman paid for his deed with his life.
“Green Flash knew what he was doing when he refused to conspire with us,” Anna decided. “Thank goodness, he and Purple Wings weren’t mixed up in all this.”
“They must live somewhere away from the cave,” George decided. He consulted his calendar of scratch marks on the wall. “We haven’t seen either of them for nearly two months.”
“Time, time!” Anna sighed. She looked around the walls as if wondering whether they might all be filled, eventually, with scratch-marks of days and months and years.
It took much time to accomplish anything under prison conditions. George tried to reassure himself that Madame Zukor and Poppendorf, upon escaping, had no choice other than to hike through the valley, hiding daytimes and journeying nights.
They would have to travel apart, at least until they came upon some half buried African town where they could dig some workable car or plane out of the ruins. They would not, he told himself over and over, have been able to make off with his space flivver. He was sure, because he knew where the wingmen had stored his valuables—among them the key to his ship.
Still, he could not be one hundred per cent certain—not unless some wingman would assure him his key was still there. One day when he thought his good behavior might merit a favor, he asked to see the stack of valuables they had taken from him. The answer was—no—not a simple no, but a very suspicious one.
“You lost ground on that effort, Big Boy,” Anna observed. “We’ll have to use something more subtle.”
“I wish Green Flash would come by sometime. He’d tell me.”
Green Flash, however, was no longer coming to the cave. No use wishing. The time-consuming business of devising a trick was the only thing—some strategy that would lead one of the wingmen to reveal, inadvertently, whether the key was still there.
Several weeks passed before the trick finally worked.
George quivered like a thief about to be caught red-handed. At last the desired information was revealed. The key was not there. In its place was one of Madame Zukor’s jewels. So that was that.
“She and Poppendorf are out in the cosmos somewhere, Big Boy,” Anna said, shaking her head apathetically. “Probably skimming cream off the Milky Way.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
The colony in America under Waterfield was thriving. The city—that is, the people who formed it—were coming to feel comfortable within the partially renovated ruins of a former city. Goods and equipment were available. A few transportation lines ran out to neighboring ghost cities, so that the original settlement became a sprawling, spider-shaped organism. The wingmen who had remained at their American camp began to work into the economic life. Though they continued to live in their hill camps and dress in their native fashion, they took jobs as messengers and errand boys. Those who proved themselves exceptionally reliable were engaged as mail carriers. For the first time in Venus-earth history a blended social and economic order of wings and non-wings came into being.
The new newspaper, printed on a press that had once rolled out hundreds of thousands of copies daily, boasted an initial circulation of five hundred. After the Venus Express and Mars Flivver had taken sample copies back to their respective capitols, the circulation quickly jumped to five thousand.
Then came the headline news that Anna and George were missing, and the circulation doubled and tripled.
Had anyone on any of the neighboring planets seen George and Anna? Their pictures and a description of the coppery space flivver filled newspapers from the underground cities of Mercury to the floating space station halfway to Jupiter. A honeymoon was hinted. A crack-up was feared.
Gradually the Hurley-Pantella stories slipped from page one to page two and on back to page ten. (The New Earth now boasted twelve pages.) It jumped back to page one occasionally, such as when an errant space ship, coming in from Mars, passed over the now legendary Banrab camp and looked for signs of the lost couple. There was not only no ship to be seen in the valley flat, there was no cave to be seen. The entrance, an observer reported, had avalanched over.
Time marched on. The committee worked efficiently. A public service department flooded the solar world with nerve-soothing assurances that Mogo’s man-monster, Gret-O-Gret, had never dealt any harm to any planet—rather, he was last seen chasing the mischief-maker across the universe of space. As the facts sifted down through the welter of false rumors, Paul and Katherine began to emerge as the heroes they were.
This trend in interplanetary heroes was dealt a jarring blow by the news, not head lined but loudly rumored, that Madame Zukor was visiting in Mars.
“Wasn’t she one of those who was left at Banrab?”
“I thought she fell over the cliff.”
“I distinctly remember that a wingman carried her off—with lust in his eye.”
“You are all quite mistaken. She was left standing there in the rain with her uniformed gunmen,” was Katherine Keller’s response to these rumors. “Someone may have rescued the whole outfit. She and her brother are probably basking in the sunshine of some Martian court.”
A letter reached Katherine by the next Mars Flivver. She opened it with trembling fingers, hoping it might be a word, at last, from her wandering husband.
“From Madame Zukor!” she exclaimed with bitter disappointment and dropped the letter and sank into a chair.
Mamma Mountain started to pick it up for her, but Papa Mouse was quicker. The two of them pored over it while Katherine sat, statue-like.
“She is in Mars, all right,” Mamma said. Then with a gulp, “Oh-oh, she’s coming to see you.”
Madame Zukor arrived in her own space ship—a flivver built on the lines of one well remembered copper-lined boat. This craft looked new and was coated with the deep red metal of Mercury. Her pilot, according to Papa Mouse’s passing glimpse from the cab top of a fueling truck, was a big-jawed, high-shouldered fellow who must have been the same Poppendorf—sporting a new black moustache and wearing dark glasses.
Her hand dived into her pocketbook as she whirled. She must have thought a whole squad of wingmen were closing in on her.
“Oh! You’re the bellboy?”
He delivered the message. Regaining her composure, she walked up the stairs and came along the balcony toward Katherine.
The pilot did not accompany Madame Zukor when she entered the New Earth lobby and asked the clerk for Katherine Keller.
Katherine, sitting at a writing desk on the fresh air balcony, saw her enter—a sort of walking jewelry store—and asked the winged bellboy to show her up.
He sailed down over the balcony obediently and alighted beside her. She jumped.
“I don’t know whether you remember me, Mrs. Keller,” she began. “We met under unfortunate circumstances. I am Madame Zukor—”
“The sister of Garritt Glasgow,” Katherine said.
“Yes. One can’t always help the caprices of Nature, can one? Garritt was always a problem child—grasping and domineering—”
“Maybe the trait runs in the family,” Katherine said. Th
e chill of hatred was tightening her lips. “What do you want here?”
“I have come to offer my services to the new earth. I have money and influence on Mars. Although the space ship which I once owned was stolen from me at Banrab—”
“The night you and your army walked in on our court—”
“Although my ship was stolen, I have procured another,” Madame Zukor said, ignoring Katherine’s reference to unpleasantness. “Therefore I am in an excellent position to carry on diplomatic services for you.”
“You’re a bold one, aren’t you! Don’t you know that you’ll be arrested and probably convicted for that job you attempted at Banrab?”
“I hardly think so.”
“What makes you think otherwise?”
“The way you left me at Banrab. Your new earth is not operating with much dignity, if you’ll pardon my saying so. You are on the committee, aren’t you?”
“If I were you, I’d be careful how I talked,” Katherine flashed.
“I was never given a chance to explain my Banrab actions in court or in public,” Madame Zukor said. “You may be misjudging me as badly as my evil brother caused people to misjudge Paul Keller.” Katherine wished that Paul were here now. In spite of his slow wits he might have his own ways of dealing with this brass.
“You left me at the Banrab cave to starve and die,” said Madame Zukor, and now her dark eyes were blazing fire, not shifting, like Garritt Glasgow’s, but steady and penetrating. She had taken a seat at the opposite side of the small table. “That kind of treatment doesn’t add prestige to the government of the new earth.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“See that I am appointed the new earth’s ambassador to Mars.”
“That will never happen,” said Katherine coldly. How could she be so brazen as to imagine she’d stand a chance!
“Then you may feel the ill will of Mars before you’re prepared.”
“A nice piece of blackmail, Madame Zukor,” said Katherine, rising. “If you want to clear yourself with me and with the committee of the new earth, you’ll have to do the same thing Paul wanted to do when he was in deep.”
“Meaning what?”
“You’ll have to stand trial. If you come out of it with a clean record—if you’re clever enough to squirm out of all you’ve done—all power to you! Win any government post for yourself that you can.”
“I’ll do it,” said Madame Zukor with a mysterious look of satisfaction in her smile. “And if any others of your party came back from Banrab, the same goes for them.”
Madame Zukor gave a little bow. “My friend Poppendorf is with me.”
“And Glasgow?” Katherine asked. “Still starving in the Banrab prison where he belongs, as far as I know. Very well, I’ll engage a suite and become a resident of this fair city until the courts of the new land have had their chance at me.
Katherine watched her as she swaggered toward the stairs, as confidently as if she already had the committee of the new earth in the palm of her hand.
“One question, please,” Katherine called after her.
“Yes?”
“Do you remember George Hurley and Anna Pantella?”
A slight look of uncertainty crossed her features. “Y-yes, vaguely. Why?”
“They disappeared several months ago.”
“I don’t know anything about them.”
“You haven’t heard anything of them, either at Banrab or at Mars?”
“Certainly not.”
“Or their ship?”
“Why should I know anything about their ship?” Madame Zukor was definitely annoyed.
“Very well,” said Katherine. “I’ll call for you when the committee is ready to see you.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
Paul Keller, riding the heavens with the giant Gret-O-Gret, could not remember that he had ever been away from the company of earth men so long before. The months were passing, and Gret-O-Gret was still roving back and forth through the space of the solar system.
It was not aimless roving, however. After a few weeks Paul had realized that Gret had picked up the trail he was after. Yes, Mox-O-Mox was ahead of them, steering through the skies on a zigzag course. Around Mars, up through the black space toward the earth . . . around the earth and on toward Venus . . . high over Venus and outward toward the space island that the interplanetary fliers maintained on their course to Jupiter. High over Jupiter and many times around its equator . . .
Around and around . . . back toward the earth again . . . Back to Mercury, with curious twists and turns over the line of light that divided its two hemispheres.
Gret’s boat was following automatically. A radar device enabled him to stay on the course of Mox’s strange peregrinations. He kept about the same distance behind all the time. Paul would awaken with the sensation that the ship was stopping. He would look up to see the immense form of Gret moving toward the telescopes.
“Mox can’t make up his mind where to go next,” Gret would say.
For a time Paul thought that Gret would explain to him just why he didn’t rush ahead at such opportunities and engage Mox in a battle. Paul couldn’t help wondering how the two ships would compare if they were ever to lock horns in a space fight. The nature of Gret, Paul decided, was the factor that prevented such an open attack. Gret had once clashed with Mox in a contest of fists. It was not that Gret was afraid of a fight. It was rather that he was holding off for some more adequate plan.
“I would like you and your people to know,” Gret said one time when they were watching Mox through the telescope, “that there is a difference in Mogo giants. Some have the virtues of your own leaders. Others have the criminal qualities of your Glasgows.”
So that was the answer. Paul knew that some plan was forming, and that he would have to wait until Gret saw the chance to spring it.
“Sing to me again,” Gret would say.
Such an odd way to entertain a giant. The endless hours were spent in many forms of entertainment, and Gret’s own favorite pastime was his work in chemicals. He had opened box after box of supplies and had turned the place into a laboratory of such smells and sights and sounds as Paul had never seen before. But after long hours of experimenting were over, Gret would say, “Sing to me.”
Later. “Can you sing some words in my language? Let me teach you a Mogo song!”
And Paul, smiling to himself, would sing in Mogo.
Again the ship of Mox moving through space, surveying the moons of planets and sometimes almost venturing to land, then turning away again.
“Do you think he knows we are in the same heavens with him?” Paul would ask.
Gret thought not. Through the telescope the boat of Mox was never more than a speck. Unless Mox had systematically searched the skies for a pursuer he wouldn’t have detected their presence. The only indication he gave of being aware of any other life besides his own among the family of planets was when he would ride too close to one of the inhabited surfaces and would be greeted by a spray of jet-propelled atomic bombs. The skies were on their guard against him. He wasn’t daring to try his earth blasts again.
“He might have run out of bombs,” Paul suggested. ”He didn’t do a very thorough job on Mercury.”
“He quit early on Mercury,” Gret agreed. “Nevertheless, I think he is holding off now because he is afraid. If he were out of bombs he could at least skim the planet and fire with his guns. This would give him the same pleasure of destroying ‘insects’ and damaging his newly discovered world.”
“Do you think he might, in time, see enough of our people that he would come to respect them?”
“Not Mox,” said Gret. “There is a difference in Mogo men. Mox-O-Mox will always destroy . . . Sing to me, Paul . . . Ah . . . Let me try your voice through this instrument . . . Now, the two love songs, please, in your best Mogo dialect . . . Your Mogo is improving, Paul—but you can put more feeling into it? They are love songs, you know.”
&nbs
p; I am not singing to entertain him, Paul thought, I’m practicing for something he wants me to perform. This is a part of his plan . . .
The other part of Gret’s plan had something to do with the different shades of smoke that rolled out of Gret’s tubes in his laboratory. Grey smokes, brown smokes, blue, gold, white, pink . . .
Sometimes the air would be a veritable artist’s fantasy of colors, and Paul, catching a whiff of some new product, would reel and faint away before Gret could pick him up and place him in his oxygen chest. From the ruins of his own ship, now stored among Gret’s laboratory trinkets, Paul secured his old oxygen suit. Once he got into it and fastened it securely, he was safe from the laboratory fumes, and could sleep in comfort while Gret went on experimenting to his heart’s content.
In his sleep he would mumble Mogo words. The language fascinated him, and Gret had been drilling him regularly, of late.
“Wake up, Paul!” came the giant’s light whisper. “We are moving toward the earth again.”
“You mean Mox is—”
“He’s closing in on the only planet that has no military protection toward him off. He may think of striking again. Here. Keep this instrument in front of the microphone as you talk to me. Are you in the mood to sing? . . . Sing, then, as you never sang before! Love songs, Paul . . . Then I will tell you what to do next . . .”
CHAPTER XXXX
In the Earth hotel everyone was crowding around the radio to get in on the excitement. They had called Katherine. She had been around many worlds—maybe she would know what kind of language it was, bouncing through the air-waves with such thundering volume.
“It’s Mogo language!” Katherine said. She was pale. She had been awakened out of her midnight slumbers. As always, sudden news of any sort frightened her. In all these months she had had no word of Paul. “It’s a Mogo song—it’s—it’s PAUL! PAUL!”