Stories WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY^ 6c: S ICK at heart the trembling girl shuddered at the words that delivered her to this terrible fate of the East. How could she escape from this Oriental monster into whose hands she had been given — this mysterious man of mighty power whose face none had yet seen? Here is an extraordinary situation. What was to be the fete of this beautiful girl? Who was this strange emissary whom no one really knew? To know the answer to this and the most exciting tales of Oriental adventure and mystery ever told, read on through the most thrilling, absorbing, entertaining and fascinating pages ever written. Masterpieces of Oriental Mystery 11 Superb Volumes by SAX ROHMER Written with his uncanny knowledge of things Oriental T TER.E you are offered no ordinary mystery stories. In these books the hidden secrets, mysteries and intrigues of the x x Orient fairly leap from the pages. 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If after 10 days* free examina- tion I am delighted, I will send you $1.00 promptly and $1.00 a month for only 14 W months; when you receive ray first payment you arc to send me the Gurkha Kukri without \ extra cost. Otherwise, 1 will return the set in 10 & days at your expense, the examination to cost me nothing. delight you, turn it in tea days at our ex- pense, •• . :.th . - T»r ' HAND OF ok ru OK.Fi’ FI.’ -DOPE MAKcmi Manchu manchb . ' if SWUCWBI S-WMHMEK SMOtBWtt v.n V.1.2 till V.S.+ SREEN EYES COI-OEN eAT of SCORPION WING TOti/ bast SAXRcyME* SATROEMaR StfftOHMRf. / VolS Vol.9 Vd.lO ^ ..Stott., Occupation \t: Omul Undtr u’t .. McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie,**- c£.'“ » « mm « for cash deduct s% I I I I I I I ! I I I I I 4 PUBLICATION OFFICE: 404 North Wesley Ave., Mt. Morris, 111. Published by STELLAR PUBLISHING CORPORATION H. GERNSBACK, Pres. L S. MANHEIMER, Sec’y S. GERNSBACK, Treas. TABLE OF CONTENTS VANDALS OF THE VOID By J. M. Walsh ....438 Plashing through space came the messages of the onslaught of an unknown enemy .... three planets were thrown into terror as the space guards rose to the emergency .... THE MACHINE OF DESTINY By Ulysses George Mihalakis 514 “Stay away from the place!” came the warning of the “ma- chine of destiny”. But relentless fate drove him on ... . “THE MAN FROM MARS” By P. Schuyler Miller 624 Defying his captors “The Man From Mars” made his bid for freedom .... using the strange powers of his distant world .... THE AMAZING PLANET By Clark Ashton Smith 534 Sold as chattels, they found themselves in the hands of that alien race, on a planet amazing beyond, their imaginings .... THE GREAT INVASION By Sidney Patzer 552 From across space came the great invasion . . . the earth was at bay, until a man learned the secret .... OUTCAST IN SPACE By Arthur G. Stangland 560 He ruled them with an iron hand .... but when his power failed, he made a desperate gamble with death .... OUR COVER ILLUSTRATION from Clark Ashton Smith’s thrilling story, “The Amaz- ing Planet” shows our two prisoners of the dwarfs of the amazing planet, after being shot into Space on the circular platform, being rescued by their comrades of the space voyager Alcyone. Below them is the gigantic city of the dwarfs, while above the horizon shines the orange sun. SUMMER 1931 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY— Entered S3 second-class mat- ter September 13, 1829, at the Post Office at Mount Morris, Il- linois under the act of March 3, 1879. Title registered U. S. Patent Office. Trademarks and copyrights by permission of Oernsback Publications, Inc., 98 Park Place, New York City, owner of all trademark rights. Copyright, 1931, by Gernsback Publications, Inc. Teat and illustrations of this magazine are copyrighted and must not bo reproduced without permission of WONDER 3 ’ STORIES QUARTERLY is published on the 15th day of September, December, March and June, 4 numbers per year. 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No subscriptions continued unless renewal remittance received. Change of address: Always give us old as well as new address and notify us as far in advance as possible. NG CORPORATION Publication Office, 404 N. Wesley Ave., Mt. Morris, Illinois. Editorial and General Offices, 96-98 Park Plaee, New York City London: Hacnette & Cie., 3 La Belle Sauvage, Ludgate Hill, E. C. 4 Paris: Hachette & Cie., IH Rue Reaumur Australian Agent: McGill’s Agency * 179 Elizabeth St., Melbourne H» Lt WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY 438 -NEW SCIENCE FICTION * W E present to the readers of WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY, the most complete selection of recent important science fiction. We have selected these books because they are the fore- most of their kind today. There is such a great variety, that it will satisfy any taste that any student of science fiction might have. , . . . ... _ . . . We have no catalog and ask you to be kind enough to order direct from this page. Prompt ship- ments will be made. Remit by money order or certified check. If you send cash, be sure to register it. No C.O.D.’s. Books sent prepaid in U. S. A. Add postage for foreign countries. MUKARA by Muriel Bruce, 276 pages, stiff cloth covers. Size 514 x 8- 82.50 Explorations into the unknown parts of our globe are revealing the most astonishing re- mains of ancient Civilization. On the basis of the notes of the Fawcett expedi- tion. Bruce has constructed a most thrilling story of the meeting of our civilization with one whose strangeness, mystery and power over nature will astound you. TARRANO THE CONQUEROR by Ray Cummings. 350 pages, stiff cloth covers. Size 5 x 7 Yz. $ 2.00 Price — . _ Mr. Cummings is a master of science fic- tion and in this story he achieves the summit of his power. Interplanetary war- fare rages through his dynamic pages, over continents and planets stalks the terrifying figure of Tarrano— the merciless. A story of the year 2400 A. D., but so realistic that you will live each page. THE WORLD BELOW by S. Fowler Wright. 350 pages, stiff cloth covers. Size 5 x 7%. $ 2.00 What could the man of today really do and accomplish if he were thrown into the world of 5,000,000 A. D.? What would _ he do when confronted with his own race incredi- bly aged? A richly imaginative novel, that will shake you from your seat and leave you breathless with wonder. GREEN FIRE by John Taine. 300 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 6% x 7%. $ 2.00 p r i c 0 1 - 1 . .. — ■ — • ■ Someone has been tampering with the uni- verse. This is a powerful novel— intensely realistic, yet weird and fantastic— of two rival scientists who struggle to gam con- trol of the terrible energy within the atom —one for good and one for evil. THE MAN WHO MASTERED TIME by Ray Cummings. 350 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 5 x 7%. $2.00 Price T 20.000 years into the future sped the young adventurer, athrill with the possibilities for glory and romance! But a world filled with turmoil, war, upheaval and strange hates and lusts met him. He went into an age of the unbelievable, almost the Im- possible. THE EARTH TUBE by Gawain Edwards. 300 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 5% x 7%. C4 AA Price ?A.VW The popular author of "The Rescue" and “The Return from Jupiter” achieves an- other success in this powerful novel. A tube through the earth ... an invincible army possessed of strange scientific weapons capturing South America. Mr. Edwards is a rising star on the horizon of science fiction, and in this volume he exceeds him- self. THE DAY OF THE BROWN HORDE by Richard Tooker. 300 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 5 x 7%. «ea BA Price The author, with an original conception goes back into the dim past of our earth to re-create what is unknown to us! With consummate skill he builds up the life of our primordial ancestor, prehistoric man. Mr. Tooker has achieved a triumph of the human imagination. THE PURPLE CLOUD by M. P. Shiel. 300 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 514 x 7%. BA Price The thrill and the danger of a trip to un- known portions of the globe for an enorm- ous reward . . . madness creeping on deso- late men . . . the return of one man to civilization to find he is the only living being on earth. A most astounding por- trayal of a world catastrophe. DOCTOR FOGG by Norman Matson. 165 pages, stiff cloth covers. Size 5 Yi x 7%. «£A aa Price Doctor Fogg has created a most astonishing invention, his sway extends to the further- est stars ... he has created life . . . But a world filled with greed envy . . . deadly curiosity burst down upon this harmless man to invade his life and fill his days with madness . . . MAZA OF THE MOON by Otis Adelbert Kline. 340 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 5% x 7V4. AA Price Jp^.UV The desire of all of us to find some living beings on the moon is answered in this story filled with thrills and startling ad- ventures. Across the interplanetary spaces go our heroes to unknown, breathless ex- periences ... to take part in Interplane- tary warfare . . . QUAYLE’S INVENTION by John Taine. 450 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 514 x 7%. ^ “You are a menace to civilization," said the banker to young Quayle, and left the inventor to die upon the sun-scorched is- land. But with superhuman courage Quayle struggles against pitiless nature to return to civilization. There is also the secret of his invention, that can make the young man master of the planet. Science fiction of the most extraordinary power. THE PURPLE SAPPHIRE by John Taine. 325 pages. Stiff cloth covers . BM x 7* $ 2.00 From the depths of Thibet came the strange purple sapphires, jewels of startling value and great beauty. Into the heart of this unknown land in search of fabulous wealth went two men and a girl to the most un- usual adventures that befell human beings. IN THE BEGINNING by Alan Sullivan. 306 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 5% x 7%. a** aa Price !pZ,Uv Adventures that outdo the famous “Mys- terious Island" of Jules Verne. A million years have passed over the heads of strange, bizarre creatures that our explorers find. A conflict between men of the 20th century and the Pleistocene men and wo- men who speak in clucks and do not even know fire . . . THE GREATEST ADVENTURE by John Taine. 250 pages. Stiff cloth covers. Size 514 x 714. Price A body of scientists are plunged into the most terrifying of adventures, into conflict with pitiless nature when she deems it time for a gigantic display of her power . . . truly a great adventure story. RALPH 124C 41-|- A Romance of the Year 2660 by Hugo Gernsback. 300 pages. Illustrated. Stiff cloth covers. Size 614 x 7%. aa Price ?*>UU Not since the publication of the stories of Jules Verne has there appeared such a book. Mr. Gernsback. Editor of WONDER STORIES, with a keen insight into the. progress of the world, has constructed a brilliant setting in the year 2660 for his romance. Ralph’s tremendous battle through inter- planetary space, with Its tragedy and terror, and the use of the most incredible weapons, that will some day come true, make a clas- sic of science fiction. SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS 245 GREENWICH STREET NEW YORK, N. Y. NEW SCIENCE FICTION SERIES When the Moon Fell *$«£, ■*'- ’ : ij. ,>sM ffm W ■ r f l^HESE small books, illustrated by artist Paul, aTeV 9 printed *m a good grade of paper. They contain JL brand new stories never published before in any magazine. Each book (size 6x8 In.) contains one or two stories by a well-known scientific fiction author. I— THE GIRL FROM MARS By Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer 2— THE THOUGHT PROJECTOR By David H. Keller, M.D. 3— AN ADVENTURE IN VENUS By R. Michel more 4—WHEN THE SUN WENT OUT By Leslie Stone ' 6— THE BRAIN OF THE PLANET By Lilith Lorraine 6— WHEN THE MOON FELL By Charles H. Colladay 7— THE MECHANICAL MAN By Amelia Reynolds Long The age of the robot is Just dawning and some of its infinite possibilities. Miss Long dips into it in this thrilling story. THE THOUGHT STEALER (Book 7) By Frank Bourne That it may be possible, sometime in the future, for a brilliant scientist to penetrate the minds of others and examine their thoughts, is the theme of this engrossing story. 8— THE TORCH OF RA By Jack Bradley All about us lies a tremendous amount of untouched power; in the sun, in the cosmic rays, etc. This power, if obtained and concentrated, might be put to great use. 9— THE VALLEY OF THE GREAT RAY By Pansey E. Black We know very little about the real potentialities of matter. There may be great civilizations that have found and utilized these potentialities far beyond our own conception. 10— THE ELIXIR By H. W. Higginson Brain power is often dependent on the influences of our glands. By proper stimulation of some kind, it may be possible in the future to produce great geniuses. II— THE THOUGHT TRANSLATOR By Merab Eberie Mental telepathy is becoming generally accepted a9 an accomplished fact. Some of its uses, especially by mechanical means, may be very tragic or very amusing. THE CREATION (Book II) By M. Milton Mitchell It should be possible in the future to create living beings synthetically, and when this is done, there will be some amazing results. 12— THE LIFE VAPOR By Clyde Farrar Mr. Farrar is evidently an expert in his subject. He shows how, by proper control, it may be possible to change the entire course of human life. THIRTY MILES DOWN (Book 12) By D. D. Sharp What lies far beneath the surface of the earth, still remains quite a mystery to us. Mr. Sharp has erected a rather amazing theory. MAIL COUPON NOW, _ STELLAR PUBLISHING CORP., m „ I WSQ-8, 98 Park Place, New York, N. Y. Gentlemen: I am enclosing herewith $ for which please send me prepaid books which I have marked with an X: 1 2 i r,v> fm-'M SPECIAL OFFER ALL 12 BOOKS FOR * i Vol. 2 No. 4 fci®» Quarterly SUMMER 1931 HUGO GERNSBACK, Editor-in-CMef DAVID LASSER, Managing Editor. FRANK R. PAUL, Art Director ASTRONOMY BOTANY Professor Elmer G. Campbell Dr. Clyde Fisher, Ph.D., LL.D. Transylvania College. Curator, The American Museum of Natural P wSoy cXgo. * Fer "“ IM '’ History. Professor C. E. Owens Professor William J. Luyten, Ph.D, Harvard College Observatory. ASTR0PHY8ICS Donald H. Menial, Ph.D. „ ... , Lick Observatory. University of California. ELECTRICITY Professor F. E. Austin Formerly of Dartmouth College. ENTOMOLOGY William M. Wheeler 5 . , Dean. Bussey Institution for Research In Applied Biology. Harvard University. PHYSICS AND RADIO Dr. Lee deForest, Ph.D., D.Se. museum or natural Wellesley College. Professor C. E. Owens Oregon Agricultural College. . Of, n CHEMISTRY i, rn.u. Professor Gerald Wendt ory. Dean, School of Chemistry and Physics. Pennsylvania College. MATHEMATICS Professor C. Irwin Palmer Professor A. L. Fitch Dean of Students, University of Maine. Armour Institute of Technology. PSYCHOLOGY Professor Waldo A. Titsworth, 8.M. Dr. Marjorie E. Babcock Alfred University. Acting Director, Psychological Clinic, University of Hawaii. MEDICINE ZOOLOGY Dr. David H. Keller Dr. Joseph G. Yoshloka Pennhurat State School. Yale University. — These nationally-known educators pass upon the scientific principles of all stories | . . Prophetic Fiction is the Mother of Scientific Fact . " ' RESULTS OF INTERPLANETARY PLOT CONTEST I N the Spring WONDER STORIES QUAR- TERLY, we announced the details of a new prize contest. We asked our readers to sup- ply plots for interplanetary stories in the form of a synopsis or outline. We also explained that the prize winners would be paid for their plots; while we would pay, in addition, our regular authors to write up the stories, which subsequent- ly would appear in WONDER STORIES QUAR- TERLY. The result of the con- test has been eminent- ly satisfactory, and our yr- f i , i readers are to be con- Winners of lnterpl* gratulated, because the ns announced contest was the means Wonder Stoi to bring in what we be- lieve will be most ex- 1st Prize $50.00 — Will cellent stories. Riviere, 106 E. Gods Several thousand 2nd Prize $25.00— E. manuscripts were sub- Cdlmgwood, , Ontanc mitted to the editors; 3rd Prize $15.00— Alle p if of course of sity Avenue* New Y fnterest to no°te that 4th Prize $10.00_Eve the plots submitted ® were from readers on- 5th Prize $5.00 Max . ly, for one of the con- for so doin S> no i Glasser, 1610 Umver- matter how sketchy the >rk _ plot, would spoil the ett C. Smith, 116 East story for the reader. 8SS - . „„„„ , T , For this reason, we ergovic, 3022 N. Street, must be content to an- nounce only the names nee Schwartzmann, 285 0 f the prize winners in Jlv Xvt ir t this issue. Michel, 1094 New York In the Pall QUA jj. * TERLY, we will pub- lish the first of the prize winning stories, and we are certain you will like them. In bringing this noteworthy contest to a close, we herewith wish to thank our readers for co- operating so enthusiastically. The Next Issue of WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY I Will Be on Sale jr* September 15, 1931 Vandals of the Void By J. M» Walsh VANDALS OF THE VOID 4S9 T HE message that was to change the whole course of my life came through on the Gen- eral Communicator about 10 P. M., Earth Time, while we were still within the planet’s at- mospheric envelope. The interstellar liner Cos- mos, bound from New York (Earth) to Tlanan (Mars) had lifted from the Madison Landing scarcely an hour before, and we were still mak- ing altitude when the call came through from Harran. An- other fifteen minutes or so, and we would have had the gravity screens out, accelerating on the first lap of our journey across the void. This was to have been my first interplanetary trip as a private passenger, my first care-free holiday in years. Not that the journey itself held any attraction for me, or that I was new to the outer reaches of space. On the contrary. As an official of the Inter- planetary Guard, that autocra- tic body which is responsible for the smooth running of traf- fic and the maintenance of law and order in the void between the inner planets, I had seen rather too much of them. Nevertheless I was looking forward to a holiday free from emergency calls, the long restful voyage to the Red Planet, and the hope, if time al- lowed, of a stop- over on Venus on the way home. Captain Hume — a man of Earth parentage, though he had first seen the light on Mars • — and I were old friends, and I ex- pected a heartier welcome than us- ual, since on this particular trip, I had no official sta- tus. As a rule the captains of the in- terplanetary liners look askance at us. We mean trouble for them, the endless scrutin- ising of passengers and documents and, often as not, the complete suspension, where the need jus- tifies it, of the skipper’s own functions. The Rule runs that when the emergency demands it a representative of the Guard has power in the interests of traffic to supersede the captain and take over the running of the craft. I boarded the Cosmos early in the evening while the liner was still tilting in the slips. Captain Hume was then in his cabin, that room where he worked, slept, and often ate, right through the voyage. His own particular duties would not begin until after the take-off, and in the mean- while the running was in the hands of the first and second officers. The first, a man named Gond with whom I had some slight ac- quaintance, came up to me as I crossed the gangway, and told me the skipper would be glad to see me as soon as I could make time, presumably after I got settled in my cab- in. That did not take long. To one used to the stark sim- plicity of the Guard-ship ac- commodation, the passenger cabins spelled luxury. But I did not linger, as my training had taught me how to dispose of my few belongings in the minimum of time with the min- imum of effort. I merely waited to see that the baggage stew- ard stowed my traps so that they would not cause damage i f they came adrift when we shifted our gravity screens. Then I made my way in what I judged to be the direction of Hume’s cabin. The Cosmos was a new type o f craft to me; she was the first to be commissioned o f the new giant lin- ers that were meant ultimately to ply to the outer planets, though until the entire fleet was ready she was being tried out on the home run between Earth, Mars and Venus. She em- bodied features with which I was not familiar, and in many ways her designers had departed from the standardized plan laid down by the Board of Control in the year 2001, when the first regular, space service was begun following on that disastrous business of the War of the Plan- ets. I had some difficulty in finding my way, and J. M. WALSH 1 L TAT HEN man is finally able to conquer the in- \\ terplanetary space, and land upon our * " sister planets, he will probably learn with sudden amazement how diversified the forms of life can be. Though our authors valiantly try to picture the possible forms and shapes and personalities that life can assume, there is no doubt but that nature in her overwhelming profundity far exceeds our human powers of imagination. We always picture other forms of life, if re- motely human, as thinking, as reasoning as we do. For after all, there is a human form of thought that makes us akin. But the life of another world may have a form of thought pro- cesses that would make us despair of ever under- standing it. We know too, on earth what nations have done when they found it necessary to expand their territories to more congenial climates. What then would an alien race do if it found itself forced to change its habitation or suffer extinc- tion? The answer would be that a terrific in- terplanetary cataclysm might result. Our auth- or, who is a well known English writer of absorb- ing mystery tales, gives us his view of such an interplanetary upheaval. 1 1 440 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY, once I was stopped by an officer I did not know with the intimation that this part of the ship was not free to passengers. I flashed my badge at him, however, that silver model of a Guard-ship with the letters ‘I. P. G.’ stamped across it, ask- ed to be directed to the captain’s quarters, I had the satisfaction of seeing him give way. Rather surlily he conducted me through a maze of cross- passages to a stairway, and told me that I would find what I sought at the head. I did. I came out on the observation deck, and here I was more at home, for in this part of the ship the original design had not been depart- ed from. I pressed the button on the door that would show my face in the vision-plate on the captain’s table, and waited. Almost immediately the door swung open, and Hume’s hearty voice cried, “Come in!” It was like coming into another world after the bare, bleak passage outside. A warm, cozy room, lit by suffused daylight from the store- tanks, a room picked out in restful white that somehow lulled the senses and soothed the eyes. I ran a glance around even as Hume rose from his seat and came towards me with hand out- stretched. In most respects it was like many other skip- per’s cabin, with the televox, the ground screens of the television, the dial charts, and the thou- sand and one compact gadgets necessary to an interplanetary captain’s hand at any hour of the day or night. One new feature, however, caught my eye, the book-machines racked up on the shelves. “So you’ve come along at last, Sanders, and for once other than as a trouble-maker,” Hume boomed at me. “Well, I’m glad to see you, any- how. Make yourself comfortable. I’ve noth- ing to do for thirty clicks or so. - ” He nodded at the clock above his table. I had been sub-consciously aware of the humming buzz of the seconds passing, but almost on the heels of his words came the ‘click-click-click’ of three minutes past the hour. This, too, was a new feature. We in the Guard-ships have an- other type of clock, one that measures in half- seconds, for when we travel it is at a tremendous speed, and our chronometers need to be accur- ate to the last least degree. e Disquieting News I N answer to a question of Hume’s I told him something of my plans. My knowledge of the surface of the planets was rudimentary; I had been a dozen times in Tlanan, and once to Shan- gun, the capital of Venus, but these had all been flying trips — literally — and I knew nothing of either land in the way I had come to know my own world. Hume chuckled. “Mars you’ll like,” he said. “Next to Tellus” — he meant Earth — “it’s the sweetest little planet I know, and I’ve seen some and mean to see more. But Venus — ” He gave a mock shudder. “Yet there are some who call it mild. It’s certainly beautiful, though I can’t abide the perpetual cloud-drift. I like empty skies with the hot sun pouring down.” “Others don’t,” I said. “I don’t. Perhaps too much work in the absolute zero of space has tempered my regard for the sun.” “You chill being! But all you Guards are the same. Have something as a warmer for a change.” He did not wait for my nod, but leaning over pressed a button in the wall behind him. A pan- el slid away and a tray shot out with two glasses on it filled with — pure water ! He chuckled again at my look, then took a small metal box from a drawer of his table. The box held a hundred or more tiny brown pellets, of which he selected two, dropped one in each glass, and watched the water discolour as the pair dissolved. When a stream of hissing bub- bles rose to the surface he handed me my glass. “Martian Oxcta,” he explained, though it was a thing I had never heard of. “It has all the virtues of Earth whiskey without its drawbacks. Drink up. You’ll feel no ill after-effects.” I tasted it, just the merest sip. Liking it, I swallowed the rest at a gulp, the taste was so excellent. There was exhilaration in the draught and something more. It made me feel a new man, one whom exhaustion and the ills of the flesh must infallibly pass by. In all my interplanetary experience I had never tasted the like, and I said so. “You wouldn’t. Earthmen don’t as a rule. Mars still keeps some of its own old secrets, things like this. But I happened to have been born there ; as you know my wife’s a Tlananian, and that counts, too.” He slipped the box back in the drawer, and I heard a click as the automatic look engaged. The care he took of it made me v^.der what could be some of those other secrets at which he had hinted, and what, if anything, would happen to anyone who betrayed them. The Red Planet has its odd ways, as we all know, and these Martians can be touchy fellows at the best of times. They haven’t the gentleness of the Venusians, whatever raptures one might go into over their womenfolk. It came to me suddenly, sitting there, that the situation had its illegal side. I leaned forward. “Hume,” I said. “I’m a friend of yours, you’re a friend of mine. Put it that way. This stuff of yours we’ve just drunk?” “Yes?” He cocked one eye at me. “What about it?” “Only this. I’m a Guard. They pick us for our qualities, integrity, moral, physical and ev- ery other way. Should I, knowing what you have, say nothing? There’s an Earth-law ban- ning alcohol, even on spaceships in the void.” He laughed heartily. “No fear of that, Jack. There’s not a taste or trace of alcohol in it. Giving it to you transgresses no law in the Uni- verse. Can you take my word for that?” I nodded. “I know you, Hume. I've tested your word before.” “Good.” He said no more about that, and there the matter dropped. Quite a little thing, it seemed — then. Look- ing back, I’m not so sure. That odd Martian Oxcta, it appears to me, had something to do VANDALS OF THE VOID 441 with the events that were to come. But let them speak for themselves. . . . We never felt the lift, the Cosmos rose so lightly from the slips. Insulated from all sound, as we were in the cabin, we heard none of the blare of departure either. Only, the warning glow of the red bulb above the dial chart on the opposite wall told us that New York, the whole American continent indeed, was sliding away beneath us. In the old days, not twenty years off, there was none of this gentleness in the take-off. We had not as yet learnt to control gravity with our screens ; we could only nullify it, a practice that sometimes had dire results. We sat and talked, and time went on. Soon the call would come for Hume to take over and sling the ship out of the Earth’s envelope of air, always a ticklish business. Already he had his eyes on the ship’s communicators, awaiting re- ports from the various control departments, when .... A shutter dropped in the wall, and a call came through from the communications room. Hume touched a button. The face of the operator glowed in the screen and his voice came. “Call through for Mr. Sanders,” he said. “Televox.” I ROSE to my feet, and Hume caught my eye. “I'd better leave you to it,” he mumbled. “No need,” I said. I knew it didn’t matter. He couldn’t hear what was said if I didn’t wish. I stood before the screen, my fingers on the buttons that made contact. The surface of the screen flashed the room first of all, that room in Headquarters Building I knew so well. Then the view narrowed, centering on Harran’s chair, until Harran’s face itself, lean, tanned and im- mobile in expression, completely filled the pic- ture. He gave me a twisted smile out of one corner of his mouth, that wry smile that boded grief and spoiled plans for someone. “Hallo, Jack,” his voice came; “release.” The command might have been Greek to Hume, but it carried a definite meaning to me. I released one button, that which intensifies the voice, and clapped my free hand over my ear. Hume could not have seen, even had he been looking, the flat black disk no larger than a penny that I held against my ear. Yet small as it was, its mechanism was marvellous. Even we of the Guard do not know the why of it, though what it does is plain to all. The moment I put it into position the disk functioned. Harran’s voice, which before had filled the room, faded away entirely ; the screen itself grew dark. But I could still hear him talking, a tiny voice in my ear, clear and mar- vellously distinct, though a man standing at my elbow could not hear a sound. Marvellous things, these silencer disks. Just as well their use is restricted to the Guard, and the secret of their construction kept inviolate in half a dozen heads. What Harran had to say was, if true, startling enough. Two space ships had come in that night with all communications paralyzed. In each case the trouble had occurred in open space and was preceded by a feeling of intense cold, though the heating apparatus in each ship was working perfectly. Some passengers, indeed, had suc- cumbed to the cold ; whether they could be re- vived had not yet been ascertained. All at- tempts to get in touch with landing stations had failed ; none of the communications would work, and it was not until the ships had effected a landing that they could make a report. “What is it?” I asked.“ Where do I come in?” Harran told me. It might be some as yet un- discovered property of space that had caused the trouble; it might— he thought it quite likely — be the work of some alien forces, but whatever it was I was to keep an eye lifted. Should any- thing happen on our own particular ship I could, if I deemed it necessary, take over as Guard. “Hold on,” he cut in on his own orders, “there’s something else through.” “Quickly,” I warned him. “We’re near the edge of the atmosphere now.” Once we were away from the Earth’s atmos- phere, of course, the televox would not function. Why is beyond me. He switched back just in time to save using the slower, more cumbersome power signals. “Reports through from entry ports of Venus and Mars,” Harran took up again, “state num- ber of craft overdue, and failing to answer calls. The Guards are being notified at their stations, but to be on the safe side we’re tuning in on all, who like yourself, are space-travelling. Use your own discretion, but solve your end of the mystery if you can.” “Is that all?” I asked. The screen flashed up again, and I saw him nod. ‘"That’s all,” he answered. “Good. . . He meant ‘Good-bye’, but the last word came to me only as the thin ghost of a whisper. We had passed beyond the atmosphere, and we were now out in free space. I slipped the disk back into my pocket, and looked around. The cabin was empty. At some point during my talk with Harran, Hume had been called to the control-deck. CHAPTER II Sanders Acts F EELING free of the cabin, feeling, too, a lit- tle bewildered by what had come through, I sat down to think the matter out. Some space- ships overdue; two others reporting excessive cold, though the heaters were working all right — that was all. Yet it was enough to galvanize Harran to activity, enough in his opinion to jus- tify him calling me on duty. What did it mean? What was that odd hint of alien forces? One felt disposed to say “Non- sense”. The idea did flit through my brain, only to pass. Nothing is nonsense nowadays. We cannot claim to know everything. Less than a century ago mankind sighed because there was nothing left to explore. Today we have reached beyond the world; we have discovered other worlds, of had them discover us, not quite the same, as I 442 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY, may some day relate. At least we know that we have much to learn, that there are still sec- rets to wrest from space. We have set foot on four of the nine planets, the other five are in the process of being ex- plored, and we are not without hopes that soon the Galaxy may be penetrated by our space lin- ers. Not much when one comes to think of it. Idle speculation, of course, which took me no- where. Hume, I must see and talk to. It was clearly a matter of which he should be informed, though what more he could do than I, it was hard to say. At least if I had to take over he would not be caught by surprise. I got up in search of him, and the moment I sealed the door behind me I turned the other way and went instead down to my own cabin. I don’t know why. Perhaps some impulse out of the void prompted me to do such a thing. Everything was as I had left it. My baggage was still packed. My steward would have open- ed it and stowed my things away in the ordin- ary course, had I not warned him to leave it alone. There were things in it I had no wish for anyone to see. I opened one grip and delved down to the bot- tom, and sighed with relief as I felt my hand touch the cold metal of the box I had hidden there. It was sealed and locked, but I broke the one and undid the other, and drew out the ray tube from its nest of cottonwool. It was a queer little weapon, six inches long, and no thicker than a lead pencil, but it could do deadly work up to fifty yards. I slipped the full magazine of twelve charges, things no big- ger than match heads, into the hollow butt and slid the catch over. A spare tube and the two thousand extra charges that were still in the box made me hesitate. I was about to slip them back into my luggage when once again I changed my mind. There was a little ledge over my bed. One of the supporting girders of the deck above rested on the partition separating my cabin from its neighbor, and formed an angle and a dark shelf where the light did not penetrate. I slipped my little box in there, pushed it far back so that no abrupt motion of the ship would dislodge it. It would be safe there, I felt. It was! Then I did what I would have done before had not the change of mind come to me as I left Hume’s cabin. I went in search of the man him- self. On the way up to the control-room I slip- ped my silver badge out of my pocket and fast- ened it in my coat, A warning would not hurt him. He would guess the moment he saw it, and not be altogether taken by surprise. A light metal ladder — so light a thing that had it been detached I could have carried it eas- ily in one hand — led from the promenade deck to the control deck above. The upper end of it was closed by a bar snapped into place, charged, as I knew too well from experience, with a cur- rent that would give a nasty shock to any un- authorized person who attempted to force a pas- sage. A man, one of the crew, stood guard beside it with a ray tube in hand. It was all more or less show, for not once in a hundred trips does the need arise to use it. But routine is routine, and in free space the slightest deviation in the way of running things may well cause disaster, if not death, to the whole ship’s company. The man flung the tube forward dramatically as my head appeared above the level of the deck flooring, but I noticed that his fingers were no- where near the button. The action was purely precautionary. “I want to see Captain Hume,” I said. “It’s an important matter, you may tell him. The name is Sanders.” As I spoke I kept my hand clutched over the left lapel of my coat. It looked a purely ner- vous gesture such as any man might make, but it was not. I did it of design, to hide the blaze of the badge pinned to my coat. I had no mind to broadcast my service before the appropriate mo- ment. Time enough to do that when it became necessary. T HE fellow stared doubtfully at me a mo- ment. “Stay there,” he said harshly, and bending for- ward, peered down at me. I could see him plainer now, as he could see me. A touch of the Martian in him, I thought, though I could not be sure. After all the characteristics — voice, man- ner and so on — could be acquired as some of our Earthmen have already acquired them by con- stant association with the Martians. The scrutiny no doubt satisfied him of my lack of evil intent, for he touched a button on the rail beside him, and the bar lifted, giving me passage. The pressure of the button, too, must have set a signal for Hume, for even as I reached the deck level a door opened and a face looked out. Then a finger beckoned. It was Hume himself. I saw as I drew level that he looked by no means pleased to see me. Perhaps from what had gone before he already guessed at the possibilities of disturbance behind me. “You wanted to see me?” he said, then at my look of amazement he added, “There’s a device by that rail that picked up your voice and re- layed it to me. A new gadget. This ship is full of them. But a thing like that can have its uses. What is the trouble now, Jack?” I slanted an eye toward the control room. “You’re not alone?” I said. “Something for my private ear?” he said with a frown. “Well, you can say it just as well out here. There are four pairs of ears in there, you know. What is it, man ? ” I dropped my hand from my lapel, and the flash of the badge caught his eye. His face went nearly purple at the sight. “By the Planets!” he exploded. “This is in- tolerable. No man’s command is his own these days.” “Steady,” I hushed him. “It’s not as bad as that, nor near it. I’ve no wish to supersede you. I hope it will never come to that. What I want is co-operation, and I’ll tell you why.” He cooled down at that, and I gave him the gist of my communicator message. “I don’t like it,” he said at jthe end. “There may be nothing VANDALS OF THE VOID 443 in it, on the other hand there may be a lot. What am I to do?” His tone was less aggressive, less hurt; he did not spark so much. I felt like insulating his anger a little further. “What I’d like to do, if you don’t mind,” I said mildly, “is this. Call me the moment you sight or find your instruments recording anything out of the ordinary. I’d like a chatter with any oth- er space ship we pass. And, of course, if we meet a Guards Patrol. . . .” “May the Guards fuse!” he snapped. “No, I didn’t mean that. Jack. But no skipper likes to think that at any click of the clock he may cease to be master in his own ship. .You know that.” “I know. I see your point of view. I won’t hamper or irritate you. I’d prefer even not to take command. I’ve never done it yet where I could find a skipper willing to work in conjunc- tion with me.” I held out my hand. For the moment he hesi- tated, then gripped me. “There will be no trouble between us, that I’ll warrant you,” he assured. “I’ll see you’re kept posted, and whoever it on watch will have in- structions to call you at any hour of the twenty four if anything appears.” He stopped. His eyes lingered on my badge. I read the thought in his mind, and since I could afford to be magnanimous I was. I slipped the badge into my pocket. “There’s no need,” I said, “to advertise trou- ble before it comes.” He looked relieved. “I’m having you put at my table,” he remarked. “I’ll see you there, the first meal I’m free. By the way, do you want to scan. . . .?” “The ship’s papers?” I said, and hesitated. He met me half-way. “Perhaps it would be better if you did. I’ll have the purser warned. He’s a discreet soul. You’d better confide in him. You’ll find the way easily to his office.” He walked back with me to the bar at the head of the stairs, and spoke to the man on guard. “Mr. Sanders is to be admitted whenever he wishes,” he said, and the man saluted. I fan- cied he looked at me more curiously than ever, and I wondered if he suspected my official sta- tus. Perhaps not, for it was no extraordinary thing for a captain’s friends, within limits, to be given extra privileges. Parey, the purser, was still in the throes of documentation when I appeared, but he took my intrusion in good part, and ushered me into his own private cabin off his office. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “The skipper told me about you, too. What’s it now? Some- thing broke loose?” “I hope not,” I returned. “I’m coming to you in confidence, though,” and I told him much of what I had told Hume. I thought he was a little shaken by the revela- tion, but he tried to make light of it. “You fellows are always alarmists,” he said, “particularly the shore-end.” It was odd how the old sea-jargon still lingered in speech; one would have thought the interplanetary service would have developed its own terms in the time. “The shore-end, as you call it,” I reminded him, “is staffed with men who have all grad- uated in space.” “That’s the trouble,” he grinned. “They don’t realize that conditions have changed since they came back to the atmosphere. However, here’s the passenger list, shore-compiled, so any errors aren’t mine. You’ll mark that.” I TOOK it, and the crew list, too. Nothing startling in either. An average ship’s company, an average passenger list. Earthmen prepon- derantly, the minority of Martians and Venusians about equally balanced. One name caught my eye as I ran down the list. I came back to it and paused. “Nomo Kell?” I said puzzled. “Queer name, that. It isn’t of Earth origin.” Parey smiled. “Nor Mars nor Venus, either, I’ll be bound. Like to see his prints?” He meant the duplicate identification papers and photographs that are always banded in for checking at the office when an interplanetary passage is booked. No needless precaution this, either. In the early days of space travel more than one ship was pirated because care was not taken to check the origins of the passengers. Even now with our more efficient system of con- trol the danger is by no means remote. Strictly speaking Parey had no right to offer me the documents. They are supposed to be confidential, and even had I demanded sight of them he should have surrendered them only und- er protest. But I think he realized that in my case the more I knew the less harm was likely to come to anyone. And, after all, I had opened Up the matter myself. I took the papers from his hand. The details were not illuminating. They ran to the effect that Nomo Kell was a Martian citizen, qualifica- tion, the statutory one of twenty years residence ; the spaces that should have contained his birth- place, parentage and so on were bracketed by the one word “Unknown”. “Queer,” I commented. It looked like laxity on the part of the Martian authorities. “Queerer still,” said Parey, as he handed me the photo. “Look at this and see why.” I held the thing up to the light and looked it over. The colors came out exceptionally well, and threw the man’s features into vivid relief. The scale at the side of the picture showed that he stood between seven and eight feet in height, a giant of his kind. His eyes were an odd kind of purple ; even in that color print they seemed extraordinarily alive, and — what shall I say — not so much men- acing, as holding the possibility of menace. That’s nearer to it. His skin where it showed, face, ears and hands, was an odd blotchy red that gave the suggestion of having been boiled. But the queerest thing of all about him was the shape of his head. I had never seen any- thing like it before. It was crested. A ridge of something that looked like horn started a little above his forehead, and ran back, as I found from the note, to his occiput. “Where in the Universe does such a one come from?” I asked. “Is he a freak?” Parey frowned. “Anything but that,” he 444 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY said. “Listen. I’ll tell you something. He came across on our last drift. In talk with some other passengers certain questions about Mer- cury came up. He flatly contradicted the oth- ers’ views, told them quite definitely they were wrong, let it appear that in some way he knew what he was talking about. See the sugges- tion?” “That he is a Mercurian. But that’s non- sense.” Parey looked at me owlishly. “Because we haven’t made that planet yet, eh? Too close to the Sun our scientists say, too risky. Perhaps so. It’ll be long before we can take the chance of exploring there. None the less it would be easier for Mercurians, granted here are any such, to come to us than it would be for us to go to them.” “We don’t even know it is inhabited,” I point- ed out. “We don.’t even know that it isn’t,” he coun- tered in almost my own tones. He was right there. There was just as much to be said for one point of view as for the other. The very closeness of the planet Mercury to the Sun has always made observation a matter of difficulty even in these days when stellar teles- copy is advancing by leaps and bounds. Seeing that was so, there was nothing to be gained by balancing one unproved theory against another equally unstable. Meanwhile the fact remained that Nomo Kell, being someone out of the ordinary, might well repay a little close at- tention. Not that the matter seemed likely to overlap my present duties. On the contrary it was quite distinct. Still as a Guard it was my duty to note the abnormal. I drew up a report that night before I went to bed, condensed it as much as possible, and took it to the signals room for transmission to Har- ran. The operator looked it over in a puzzled fashion. “What the blazes is this?” he asked. “Don’t you know all messages must be written in a rec- ognizable tongue?” “That doesn’t apply where I’m concerned,” I said. “Send it as it stands.” “Why?” he said, a trifle defiantly. I showed him why. He stared at my badge with a droop to his lip ; it was marvellous the ef- fect that little silver shape could have on the recalcitrant. I could see, however, that he was still curious as to the language in which the message was written. I did not tell him that it was a tongue that had ceased to be a living language on earth nearly fifteen hundred years ago. He was too young to know that it was only three-quarters of a century since it had ceased to be taught in the schools as a so-called classical language. In those seventy odd years, however, it had so completely dropped out of use and sight, even amongst cultured men, that when it became nec- essary for the Interplanetary Guard to have a means of code communication of their own it was selected as the one language least likely to be tapped. Additionally in its favor was the ease with which it could be learned. I waited until the fading of the helio glow showed the message had gone through, and the flash-back brought an acknowledgement of its receipt. Then I went off with the intention of turning in. I had been but a few hours on the Cosmos, but in that short space of time my plans had been materially altered. What further might hap- pen before we entered the Martian atmosphere was purely a matter of conjecture. As one who has always dealt with events as they transpired I preferred not to speculate. My cabin had a window opening on the prom- enade deck, and when I drew the dark slides back I found I could see across and through the quartzite windows of the hull. An odd star, wondrously bright in the absence of air, showed in the black void of space. CHAPTER III The Lunar Call 1 A WOKE to the sound of buzzing in my ears. It took me some time to realize just where I was, and what that sound could be. Then abruptly it came to me that I had overslept, and that this was the warning note of the breakfast call. How many, I wondered, would face the tables this morning. Not many, I fancied. Even in these enlight- ened days a goodly proportion of folk still suffer from a kind of space-sickness, akin, no doubt to the mal-de-mer that once used to attack travellers on Earth’s oceans. Seemingly it is quite distinct from the malady caused by rapid acceleration through the atmosphere. The tables were fairly crowded, I found, when I reached the saloon. Either our doctor was not a popular man — there was a fair sprinkling of ladies present — or else he knew his work so well that he preferred prevention to cure. Hume, heavy-eyed and with his face lined, was half-way through his meal when I appeared, but his vision was as good as though he had not spent the better part of the intervening hours on con- trol. He caught my glance as I entered and beckoned me to a vacant space beside him. I noted as I took my seat that my name had al- ready been affixed to the chair-back. Hume’s doing again, unless it was Parey’s. I ran my eye over my table companions. A Martian woman was my opposite, quite the love- liest creature I had ever seen. She could not have been more than twenty-five, and the full glow of health made her fine eyes sparkle, and her dark cheeks glow with a greater vitality than we Earth people are used to seeing on our own planet. Strange how, despite their height, these Martian girls seem so wonderful. Her name, I learnt as introductions went round, was Jansca Dirka. The man who sat a plate away was a Dirka too, but it did not transpire whether he was her father or her brother, and there was nothing out- wardly to show which he was. The way that they wear their age is, to an Earthman, another puzzling feature of the Martians. I have heard it said — how true it is I do not know — that they retain their bloom right to the very last, then VANDALS OF THE VOID 445 fade and die almost in a night. An uncomfor- table attribute. Knowing Hume’s leaning towards his wife’s folk I was not surprised to find I was the only Tellurian* at the table. I had expected more Martians if anything. Instead the remaining four were Venusians, those quaint, not unlovable people, who somehow remind one almost equally of a bird and a butterfly. Pretty they are; hardly human as we understand it, they seem. Yet. . . . but that is running ahead of my story. Father, mother and two daughters they were, the latter three very interested in everything strange and new, yet with an interest that one felt was purely evanescent. That, I am told, is the impression one always receives on first mak- ing contact with the Venusians. How far from true of the race as a whole it is may be judged from the fact that it was the Venusians who first discovered for us the practically inexhausti- ble deposits of rolgar on our moon. Rolgar, as everyone knows nowadays, is the substance — one can hardly call it a mineral — without which space-flying could not have at- tained its present ease and safety. When one looks back on the first crude rocket flyers and compares them with the small, neat, inexpensive and altogether reliable engines driven by rolgar one begins to realize what a debt we owe to its Venusian discoverer, after whom it was named. The Venusian himself was an official of the Rolgar Company, he told me, and was bound for the Archimedes Landing on the Moon with a party of Earth miners. His wife and daughter were stopping over with him. I shook my head. “No place for women,” I hazarded. He smiled. “Not such a wilderness as used to be imagined,” he answered me. “Little trou- bles to be faced due to variations of pressure and extremes of temperature, but on the whole quite a change for a short period.” His wife and daughters seemed anxious to sample the new experience, as all women, no matter what their planet, welcome a novel sen- sation. Mir Ongar himself — such was his name — had paid more than one visit to our satellite, so counted himself something of an authority on it. Hume rose from his seat in the midst of our talk, gave me a careless nod, then as he came round the back of my chair dropped a whispered word in my ear. “Control room as soon as you’re ready,” he said. The words slid so softly from the corner of his mouth that I doubt if anyone else heard them. A glance about almost assured me of this. I could have lingered there at the table merely for the sake of stealing glances at Jansca Dirka, but something more in Hume’s look than his speech made me imagine an urgency behind his parting words. Also, oddly now I come to think of it, I had a wish to see what Nomo Kell looked like in the flesh. The thought of the man in- trigued me, though I was far from suspecting him to be one to run contrariwise to the Laws of Space. The mystery it might be my lot to probe arose outside, not within the flyer. * Tellurian : a native of Tellus, the interplanetary style of the Earth. As I came out on to the promenade deck I glanced through the quartzite windows. We were veering in now towards the moon, and its disk was beginning to fill the void ahead of us; the Earth behind was dwindling, though its size was still considerable. I judged we had not yet reached the midpoint of gravity, for an odd quiver of the hull showed the propulsive power of the rolgar engines was still on. In a little they would be cut off and we could use the moon’s attraction to draw us onward until it became necessary to counteract the pull and de- celerate. U A LIGHT message for you,” said Hume as ±\, I entered. He took an envelope from the drawer and handed it to me. “I thought it bet- ter not to mention the matter at table. One never knows.” “Why,” I said, as I slit the envelope, “is there anyone on board, at our table in particular, you suspect as likely to tamper with a Guard’s pri- vate messages?” He shrugged his shoulders, “One never knows,” he said again, this time, I felt, evasive- ly. “At least I have no intention of running counter to your tribe. Nice thing for me and my family, if the Guards had me dis-rated for in- terference when I’m within a year or so of re- tiring on a pension from the Service.” Cautious, extra cautious man. Well, better that than a loose-lipped babbler. I spread the flimsy paper out in front of me, and translated as I read. In one way it was of little import, though it came over Harran’s signa- ture. It was merely an acknowledgement of my over-night report, with the added note that if in the event of a Guard’s ship being handy when anything untoward occurred I need not interrupt my holiday, but could hand over investigation to the patrol. “Formal acknowledgement of my last night’s report merely,” I said offhandedly to Hume. Better to satisfy the man’s curiosity at once than give him material on which to exercise his imag- ination. “I thought as much,” was his comment. “Though if more of these messages keep coming and going our operators will be getting head- aches. It’s a code none of them has handled be- fore.” “If they’d lived a century ago,” I said a mite incautiously, “it would have been child’s play for them to read it.” He flashed a glance at me. “A dead lan- guage,” he remarked, and said no more about it. “By the way,” I asked, not that it mattered much, but it gave him something new to think about, “these Dirkas, who are they? Of course,” I added, as I saw him hesitate, “I can get their prints from Parey.” “No need,” he answered me. “They’re friends of my wife and myself. Dirka himself — her father — is a director of the Martian Canal Com- pany. The girl is nothing. Being a Martian woman she need not work for a living.” That, from an Earth-man, was a subtle jibe at conditions on his own planet or rather the planet of his race. I passed it by, however; there was 446 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY nothing to be gained by retorting that on Earth many women preferred to work. He eyed me curiously. “Sanders, how old are you?” “To be exact, thirty-three,” I said. “Why?” “And unmarried as yet,” he went on, not ans- wering me direct. “Well, there’s time and, friend of mine, by the comet’s tail, the best X wish you is no worse luck than I had myself.” I might have thanked him for that, but I mere- ly grinned. Thoughts of love had never come to me ; even now they seemed as remote in thought as Alpha Centauri was in fact. He ran on. “I suppose you have the whole ship’s company more or less neatly taped by this,” he said. “Not much need of that,” I returned. “There’s only one person aboard this ship that I’m much interested in, and that only as a matter of cur- iosity?” “Who,” he said with a lift of the eyebrows, “is that? I had no idea we were harbouring any interesting personages— -from your point of view — this trip.” “Nomo Kell,” I said. “Have you seen or heard of him yet?” He drew his eyebrows together at that, as though the name seemed familiar, yet he could not quite place it. Briefly I described the fel- low to him. “Queer,” he remarked at the end. “A freak, monstrosity, if you will.” Still that puzzled look lingered on his face. “It strikes something in my memory, something I wish I could recall clearly,” he explained. “I can’t, though. Some legend of my wife’s people.” “Perhaps the other Martians on board. . .?” I hazarded. He shook his head. “They would not know,” he said quite definitely, but did not explain why. Another of these strange taboos, thought I, a queer secret of the planet that is still, after de- cades of contact, a world of mystery to us Earth- men who, unlike Hume, have not been accepted into the nation. A S I passed back along the promenade deck I met Nomo Kell himself for the first time in the flesh. It was well that I had been warned of his appearance. Had I come upon him sud- denly, without any such foreknowledge of what I would see, I don’t quite know how it would have affected me. Given me a high tension shock perhaps, left me gaping, doubting that my eyesight was functioning properly. Yet he was not fearsome. It was the utter unexpectedness of him that astounded. We know nowadays that the human form is not the only intelligent kind of life in the Uni- verse. Even on the three inner planets there are sharp divergences of the kind of bodies in which the man-equivalent intelligence resides. And there was no reason why I should look amazedly askance at what I saw. Yet I did. Nomo Kell’s print had scarcely done him jus- tice. Or, should you like it better, it flattered him to an extent. Leave out the flaring purple of those magnetic eyes, and the crested abnor- mality of his head — size of his body apart — and there was little to differentiate him from the ordinary planetarian. But seen now, walking within a few paces of me, I sensed something else. What it was I could not say with any exactness. A force, per- haps. A radiation. I could not tell. It was something that seized hold of me almost tangibly in a way I cannot describe at all lucidly. Imagine a swimmer finding himself struggling in a sticky liquid he had a moment ago known as water, yet feeling no fear, realizing that no harm would come to him. Imagine that, I say, and you have some idea of what came over me then. He gave me no more than one fleeting incur- ious glance, and passed by. I might have stood there staring after him but for a voice in my ear and the touch of a hand on my arm. “You find him interesting, Mr. Sanders?” I turned. It was Jansca Dirka at my elbow. I reddened. I had been caught in an act of rudeness, no light matter when one is likely to trench on touchy interplanetary conventions. “And a little more, Miss Dirka,” I said, using the Earth style of address. I have never quite accustomed myself to the long string of phrases, flowery and complimentary, with which these Martians take the place of our more direct ‘Mr.’ or ‘Miss’. “I thought you would,” she said gravely. “You have noticed his steps?” I had not. I hardly gave them a glance until she drew my attention to them. Now I saw that he walked with a peculiar mincing gait, a sort of gingerliness, as though each movement was carefully timed and measured. “He seems,” I said slowly as it dawned on me, “to be deliberately shortening his steps, walking with extra care as we would on the Moon’s sur- face.” “Exactly. The Cosmos is adjusted to Earth gravity; we travelled Martians and Venusians have become so accustomed to its variations from our own planets that our re-action is automatic. But he . . . .” she flung out her hands with a curiously expressive gesture. I caught the flash of the idea in her mind. “It looks almost,” I said, still a trifle doubtfully, “as though he was used to a larger planet than we.” “It looks like that, almost,” she mimicked, quite in my own intonation. “Which, if so, is a matter worth thinking over. I might even sug- gest it would be well not to let such an idea — or its opposite — lie dormant in the back of your mind.” With that and a tingling glance she turned and was gone, leaving me wondering. These myster- ious Martians — Hume was practically half one — with their hints and their suggestions, their puz- zles and the sly thrust of their vaunted superior knowledge ! What did she see or know that I could or did not? What indeed made her suggest anything of the sort to me ? No hint of my office, I could swear, had escaped Hume. He was too discreet for that. And the operators would not babble. There remained Parey as a possible talker, though only remotely so. I could only think mets before stepping out into the airless wilder- ness of the Moon. CHAPTER IV (The Wreck in the Void I HAVE spoken of the Moon as airless, yet that is not strictly correct. Habit, however, is a difficult thing to east aside, and one clings stub- bornly to old beliefs even in the face of the new- er facts. Row on row, they sat as still and Stiff as figures carved from wood. Dead, without a doubt. life as exists on the Moon lives mostly under- ground, or did until the advent of the Rolgar mines. To counteract the extremes of heat and cold, and secure a constant supply of air at earth pres- sure, huge buildings had been erected. Each mine is practically an enclosed city, entered through air-locks. It was on one of these air- locks that the Cosmos had come to rest ; one of her ports was jointed to a port in the air-lock, form- ing a sort of enclosed gangway, through which passengers ascended and descended. 448 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY Apart from the mechanical ingenuity that aid- ed the embarkation there was nothing of interest to see. Give me a landing in free air every time. From where I stood I could see through the quartzite side of the promenade deck above and beyond the air-lock, while I was able at the same time to run a speculative eye over the passengers leaving and arriving. Those getting off were mostly Earth miners, rough, rugged fellows, with an odd Earth official with them, and, of course, my acquaintances the Venusian family of Mir Ongar. There were not so many coming on board. Mostly Venusians. A couple of those ubiquitous planet-trotting Martians with them to add a leaven to the dish. We took on no Earth-men. When one comes to think of it, it is a curious thing that the Moon should hold least attraction for those who are closest to it. If it had not been for the Venusians and their discovery of rolgar I believe we would have been content for ever to sheer past it into space. As it is the Moon — or rather its rolgar mines — gives us the means of holding the balance of Peace in the Universe ; the sinews of interplane- tary war are to a great extent ours, and none can fight should we decide to cut off supplies. Our stay on the Moon was of short duration. An air-port inspector or two donned oxygen hel- mets and made a thorough examination of our landing gear and gravity screen apparatus be- fore passing out. As soon as that was done and our clearance had been issued, our port was sealed and disconnected from that of the air- lock. The signal was given and the lift began. Beneath us Archimedes dropped away until the black circle of its crater was no more than a shrivelled ring. Mars flared up redly ahead, though presently we shifted our course as though we meant to leave it on our left. This, how- ever, was due merely to the fact that we were in a sense circle sailing. It must not be forgotten that though we were travelling in space, so was the planet of our destination. Our course was set exactly for that point in the void, where, according to our astronomical charts, our orbit, if one can use that expression, and that of Mars would intersect. A ticklish job, you must understand, is this of space navi- gation, requiring a remarkable intricacy of cal- culation and cross-calculation. So the days passed. Once we sighted a met- eor heading, it seemed, directly for us, but our repeller ray sent it rocketing off on a new path. * * * * A finger touching me lightly on the shoulder brought me with a jerk out of the depths of sleep. I touched a button at the wall side of my bunk and the light tube above my head glow- ed brightly. I blinked. Gond, the first officer, was standing beside me. Seeing that I was awake : “Quickly, Mr. Sanders,” he said in a half- whisper. “The skipper wants you.” “What is it?” I queried. “I don’t know. Something I sighted out in the void of space. It was my control hour. I called him, he sent me to call you.” “I’m coming.” I slid out of my bunk. “I’ll be there — control room, I suppose — as soon as I can dress.” “Quickly, quickly,” he breathed again. He knew not what it was he had sighted — some wan- dering mystery of space, no doubt — but that the urgent need of my presence had been impressed on him deeply enough it was plain to see. “I won’t waste a moment,” I said. “You can go back. I’ll follow almost on your heels.” Indeed I was half-dressed before the door shut bn him. A Guard sleeps often in his clothes; when he does not he can get into them with a minimum of time. It wanted two seconds to the minute I had al- lowed myself when I slipped through the door, fastening buttons as I went. At that hour no one save the officers and crew was likely to be about ; I need not fear that half-clad I would run into any of the passengers. Hume himself awaited me, dressed only in tunic and shorts. The control room was warm enough to make up for any deficiencies of cos- tume. “What is it?” I asked the moment I stood be- side him. H E did not reply, but motioned to the screen that communicated with our look-out ‘eyes’.* The screen darkened momentarily, then flashed into light as the beam from our search- light shot out and picked up the object that had occasioned the alarm. For some seconds I was not quite sure what it was. Possibly, because it was drifting tow- ards us end on, I thought for the moment that it was a meteor. But the slowness of its ap- proach should have warned me from the start that it was not that at all. Then as we swung round and I eould see it broadside on it looked more like a space-flier. I would have felt sat- isfied it was that but for the absence of lights oh board. It was a long cigar-shaped object, tapering to a point at one end, made blunt and warty at the other by the discharge tubes that clustered there. “Can you get her name?” Hume whispered to me. I could not. But I made sundry adjustments to the scale knobs at the side of the screen and the projection of the space flier seemed suddenly to leap forward and become closer. With some little difficulty I managed at last- to pick out her name. “M-E 75 A/B,” I read from the line painted near her prow. “Mars-Earth,” Hume amplified. “Carrying A and B class traffic, passengers and freight. Um. This is your job, Sanders, I think. I won- der what’s gone dead in her?” “That’s yet to learn. How did you pick her up?” “Our locater positioned her long before we were able to see her. We — Gond, that is — thought it was another meteorite. But you see it isn’t.” He paused and looked at me. *The look-out ‘eye’ was a selective lens that had the power of pick- ing up an object in the same fashion as the human eye, and reflecting it on the screen. It is a very complicated piece of mechanism for all its small size, and the secret of its construction is closely guarded. In- dented by Lodz in 1993. VANDALS OF THE VOID .449 “Sanders,” he said abruptly. “I am in your hands. What am I to do?” “I’d like a look at her, a closer one, if I may. Can we lay alongside?” “We can board her if you wish.” “We’d better. I wish you’d give the orders.” He threw me a smile at that. This big bluff man had his weakness, and I played on it that night, partly from a sense of courtesy, partly be- cause it was policy. As long as I did not inter- fere with his command, just so long as I asked him as favors what I was entitled to order or demand, he was my grateful, warm-hearted friend. Something of his appreciation of my consideration, my care not to humiliate him be- fore his own officers, showed in his face. I left it to him to give instructions, and set my- self to watch the craft itself. We had veered a little, our speed was slackening, yet we would have to move round in a wide circle before, per- haps in another half-hour, we could come back and sheer inside beside the stranger craft. Our engines, which had for a time been silent — for in free space once a certain pace is reached impetus and freedom from friction carries us onward — took up an odd pulsation, just enough to steady us. Momentarily I lost sight of the derelict, picked her up again and again from all sorts of odd ang- les as the movable eye mounted on our prow swung round as we altered our course. Then abruptly I saw the length of the derelict looming large beside us, a black bulk that almost filled the vision screen. There came a slight jar and I realized that our attractors had caught and held her. Word came up from the port control that we were connecting and that our air-tight extension had been sealed against the derelict’s nearest port. As I turned away from the vision screen Hume caught my arm. “Can I come?” he whispered in my ear. “I’m interested. ...” > I nodded. “Certainly. I’d like a witness, and someone to check my own observations. What are her tests?” He spoke into a tube, then turned to me. “Nor- mal interior air pressure,” he reported. “Tem- perature 28 degrees Fahrenheit.” I whistled. Four degrees below freezing point. Something queer there. Either she should have dropped to absolute zero, or else maintained the normal interior temperature. What in the name of the Universe was holding her constant? I took down one of the emergency coats from a hook, a heavy furlined fabric that covered me from chin to ankle, slipped my feet into the in- sulated boots one of our helpers held towards me, and drew them thigh-high. With the coat drawn in and its bifurcations buttoned tightly round each leg I was insulated against cold. I could even feel the warmth of the heater wires in the fabric as the current from the battery fixed to the back thrilled through them. I drew on my gloves and someone clamped on my air- helmet, sealing it temperature tight on to the metal collar at the neck of my coat. Each helmet contained a radio attachment that provided means of communication with each other and with the ship if necessary. I tried mine. It buzzed, and a fraction of a sec- ond later I heard Hume’s voice burring in the receiver at my ear. Sealed against air and tem- perature variations, we could yet converse as we chose. “Ready, Sanders?” he said, and when I ans- wered in the affirmative he led the way down the direct ladder to the connecting port. T HE connecting port, really a long metal tube that could collapse in on itself telescope- fashion, had been extended to the wall of the derelict and clamped there. The door of the latter’s port had been opened mechanically, but the blasts of normally heated air the fans were sending through our craft pulsed along the con- necting tube and kept the temperature there from diminishing perceptibly. The moment we stepped through the open port of the stranger vessel, however, we sensed the change. Despite our heated emergency kit the cold air lapped round us, clutching our limbs with icy fingers. For the moment the grip of it, no less than the inky blackness of the ship’s interior, halted us. I had a feeling that the cold was not so much the absence of heat as a sentient thing in itself. Hume touched the button of the portable light at his belt and I followed suit. The white beams sprang out, filling the place with a light akin to natural daylight. There was nothing to see here, but then neith- er of us expected that there would be anything. It was up in the control departments and the living quarters that we hoped — or feared ; neith- er of us was quite sure which — to make our dis- coveries. The direct ladder that led straight to the up- per control department seemed clear and, with my place as an Interplanetary Guard to sustain, I took the lead. The trap-door was closed, but it opened at a touch, and I climbed into the com- partment, then turned to give a hand to my col- league. A moment later we stood together, star- ing round the cabin. It was nothing as modern as its equivalent on the Cosmos. From some of the devices it seemed the craft was at least ten years old. I made for the log book. Search brought it to light in a drawer of the captain’s table, and a comparison of dates showed that it had been written up to within twenty-four hours. Therefore whatever had happened to render the craft derelict had occurred within the measure of one Earth day. Both of us had naturally expected to find some trace of humanity in the control room, bodies, if not living creatures. But there was no sign of anyone and no sign of a struggle. For all we could see the men on duty might have walked out the door in as orderly a fashion as though they were going ashore. “What do you think of it?” asked Hume. His voice buzzed with a perturbed note in my ear. “I don’t know what to think,” he said. “It’s weird, uncanny. It’s. . . .” Whatever 450 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY else he was going to say he pulled himself up with a jerk. “We can’t form any definite opinion about anything until we’ve searched the ship from con- trol to keel.” “Quite so,” I agreed, but as he made a move towards the door I stayed him. “Let us read the dials before we go,” I sug- gested. He moved towards me again, and we studied the indicators. The engine dials showed an am- ple supply of fuel, and the stud had been pushed over to “Stop”. No question about that then. The engines had not run down or been brought up automatically. Human agency had been at work here. Mindful of what Harran had told me I turned to the heating machinery indicator. It showed that the apparatus was still running. Yet here we were in an atmosphere at present a few deg- rees below freezing point, whereas the thermom- eter should actually have registered something between sixty and seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Curious on this point I turned to the wall ther- mometer. The glass was shattered, the mercury had vanished. From the way in which the glass had broken it was impossible to say whether the damage was deliberate or due to excessive cold. If it was the latter the control cabin itself must at one period have endured a temperature of at least forty-four degrees beldw zero ! Hume clutched my arm convulsively. “What is it?” I asked, starting. “I thought .... I felt,” he spoke in a strain- ed voice, “as though someone .... or some- thing .... had just come in.” I swung round sharply. The door, which a moment or so before had been closed, was now open a space. Even as I stared the gap seemed to widen perceptibly. . . . (CHAPTER V The Sleepers A S a man I am no braver than the average. I know there are more things in the Universe than we have as yet managed to tabulate, forms of life, abodes of intelligence, that may appear monstrous to us, just as perhaps we appear mon- strous to them. As against this I believe — and experience has yet to prove me wrong — that everything there is must face dissolution sooner or later, that it can indeed be killed suddenly and violently, provided only that one can reach a vital spot.* My courage was oozing from the tips of my in- sulated boots as I turned towards the door, and already I was aware of an uncomfortable, prick- ly sensation about the region of my backbone. Nevertheless the fact of another’s presence gave me comfort, so, taking my ray in my free hand, I swung the door wide open with the oth- *Mr. Sanders stresses this point, probably because when the first Earth-men reached the Moon they found there in the central caverns actively inimical forms of life that it seemed almost impossible to kill. It was not until Borendeler’s invention of the ray tube in A.D. 2,000 that they were finally exterminated. It is now known, of course, that they were endowed with a natural armor that effectively protected their vital parts, though for long the legend that these lunar animals were immortal persisted on the Earth. er, and sent the beam of my lamp searching down the dark passage outside. I saw nothing. No visible entity appeared. My audiophones, which would have recorded the sound of any move- ment, however faint, remained stubbornly silent. Only a wave of cold that threatened to bite through the warmth of my emergency coat seem- ed to flow in on us like a living thing. “Nothing there,” I said in a tone meant to be reassuring. “Nothing,” Hume repeated, and I could have sworn to a faint note of relief in his voice. “I’ll tell you what. Jack,” he ran on, “it’s the uncan- niness of the place that’s giving us the creeps, that’s what it is. The sooner we pry into every nook and corner the better. We’re losing time as it is and letting our nerves get the better of us.” There was sound good sense in that. But oh ! how I wished we brought some others with us. I would have given much then to have had a couple of my own sturdy, hard-headed Guards beside me. Something of what I was thinking must have impinged on Hume’s consciousness, for: “It’s a pity we didn’t bring a man or two with us,” he grumbled in his helmet. “And have them take a risk we don’t care to face?” I countered. “Oh, well, there’s that to it,” he answered. “Let’s get ahead before we start thinking other things.” He tried to push past me, no doubt in the hope that in action he would find a spur to his own courage, but I stayed him. These space captains may rate themselves as highly as they please, but when it comes to facing the dangers of the unknown it is the Guard’s privilege to lead. I think he guessed my motive, for he flung me a whimsical smile, plain to see through the glass front of his helmet. I shut the door carefully behind us. I was more or less sure now that some unnoticed mo- tion of the vessel had sent it stealing open, but I had no mind in case I was mistaken that I should be taken unawares again. If that door should open again I would know of a certainty that there was an intelligent agency at work. As we traversed the passage to the promenade deck my mind played round what was to me the most significant feature we had so far come across, the utter emptiness of the control room. I could not imagine any officer of the Inter- planetary Service leaving his post unless there was good reason for it. And everything pointed to the supposition that the desertion, if such it could be called, had included in its scope every- one on duty. Our beams wavered down the line of the deck, fell on the chairs spread about the space, and simultaneously we stopped dead, and looked fearfully at each other. “Did you see it?” Hume whispered. “See what?” I asked, for I wanted corrobora- tion of the reliability of my own eyesight. “The people sitting in their chairs. . . . still . . . . lifeless.” So I was not dreaming. Hume had seen it too. VANDALS OF THE VOID 451 “Hume,” I said abruptly, “we haven’t thought of it before. We’ve taken certain things for granted. But there should be buttons about the wall here .... lights .... better than our own portable lamps. Perhaps after all they may be working.” He swung the beam of his own lamp round, then his mittened hand closed over a stud and drew it down. Instantly the length of the prom- enade deck sprang into light. I shuddered. Row on row of chairs, most with occupants, met our eyes. They sat as stiff and still as figures carved from wood-— dead — without a doubt. I leaned over and touched the nearest figure, a woman, on the cheek. And even through the heated thickness of my gloves her flesh struck cold. I drew back with a gasping sigh. “Hume,” I said, “this is beyond us. We must know how these people died, if they’re dead ; if not what’s wrong with them. And that’s a doc- tor’s job.” “That’s what I’m thinking,” he agreed. “I’d better call him up?” He looked to me for ap- proval. I nodded. H E adjusted his communicators to the ship’s. “That you, Gond?” I heard him say. “Good. It’s Hume speaking. Send Dr. Spence over at once. What’s he to bring? I’m sure I can’t say. Oh, yes” — I’d whispered to him — “say it may be suspended animation, or cold exposure. That’s data enough for him. And, yes, better send two men with him. The most reliable. And give them a ray tube each. They can reach us through the control room. No. Nothing yet .... of any importance.” I liked that. He was not giving anything away, forgetful, no doubt, that with the stranger ship’s lights on and the two craft riding side by side, the deck we were on would be plainly vis- ible. Thanks be, it was during the sleep hours, else we would have had eager, excited, curious, perhaps fearful passengers peering at us across the gap from the quartzite windows. I thought of that, thought, too, what might happen if some sleepless individual saw, gaped, and went off to wake his friends. “Tell Gond,” I cut in in a quick whisper, “to close his shutters on the promenade deck. Else we may be watched. What we have to do may be better done without curious onlookers.” _ He put that through, and I heard the click as he cut out. “We’d better wait,” I said in answer to Hume’s unspoken question. “More may turn on what Spence can tell us than we think.” Neverthe- less I put in some of the time of waiting by look- ing about me. It seemed that everyone had been frozen into immobility as he or she sat. The thing itself had come upon them suddenly, for there was nothing either of surprise or horror in any face. The doctor came with his attendants, stared at the still figures, made such tests as he could, then straightened up and faced us. In the white light of the vessel’s deck I could see his face show blank through the glass front of his helmet. His hand went up to make some adjustment of his audiophone before he spoke. “Frankly,” he said in answer to my question, “I can’t tell you what it is. They’ve been froz- en, that’s what it amounts to, but several of the characteristic signs are absent.” I guessed what he meant. I’d looked closely enough for the blue and purple splotches, the other signs of a man frozen to death, and had failed to find them. Frozen they were in a sense, yet perhaps turned to stone more nearly described it. A little bead of perspiration trickled from my forehead down my nose; the glass front of my helmet seemed to be clouding a little ; there was a feeling of warmth that I had not noticed before beginning to permeate my body under the emergency coat. Of a sudden the meaning of it came to me. “Hume, Spence!” I called through the audio- phone, “it’s getting warmer. Can’t you feel it, both of you?” Something akin to a blank consternation show- ed for the moment in Hume’s face, the doctor looked interested, albeit a trifle puzzled. “Don’t you see?” I ran on. “This cold’s disap- pearing. The heaters are beginning to make themselves felt. All the time they’ve been warming the air up, not perceptibly until now. But it’s a big lift from forty-four degrees below zero up to the twenty-eight it was when we came on board. That means that from the time this happened — whatever it was — until the moment we stepped aboard the heaters have raised the temperature a matter of seventy-two degrees, a tremendous lift. What’s more they’re still do- ing it. It must be getting back to normal now.” “But why,” said Hume, puzzled, “didn’t the heaters freeze out too when this happened?” He made a clumsy gesture of his mittened hand to include the figures on the chairs. The answer to that hit me almost the minute he asked the question. “Simple,” I explained. “The heater plant runs in a vacuum. External cold couldn’t affect it.” “Of course.” His voice was tingling. “I should have thought of that before.” “I didn’t until just now.” I put up my hands, clumsily, and caught at the fastenings of my hel- met. “Steady, man, what are you doing?” Hume said agitatedly. “I’m beginning to roast. Perhaps we can take our kit off now. At least I’ll be the first to try.” “But the air.” Hume’s voice was vibrant with warning. “We got a normal pressure, but there may be something in it, something inimical to life.” “I’ll take the risk,” I answered. I had seen something out of the corner of my eye, something that looked a mite uncanny. I preferred not to say what it was — yet. But it made me think that the air was safe, breathable at any rate. I fumbled at the fastenings myself, for Hume mumbled he did not want it on his conscience if anything went wrong, and in the circumstances I was not inclined to press him to help me. But I saw the doctor was following my example. 452 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY, though the two men waited to see what their skipper was doing. T HE helmet came off at last and the cool air hit my face. Cool air, not cold. The tem- perature, as I had surmised, was lifting degree by degree as the heaters struggled to overcome whatever it was had caused the cold. The air was breathable. At least I could sense no for- eign element in it, nothing to account for that abrupt drop in temperature. In a moment I had stripped my emergency coat, leaving only my boots. They did not mat- ter much. The doctor was free of his trappings by this time too. He took one gulp of the air, and looked across at me, then I saw his eyes wid- en. His glance had travelled past me to the chair at my back. I whirled round. The woman whom I had first examined was stirring, yes, vis- ibly stirring. Her bosom rose and fell, gently at first, then more rapidly as she gulped the air in. Her eyes opened .... wide. She stared about her. Her glance fell on us. One expres- sion after another chased with the rapidity of thought across her face; astonishment, incred- ulity, fear, I thought. An inarticulate cry, a sort of strangled scream, issued from her lips, and her head dropped for- ward in a faint. Spence sprang to her aid. But the little cry, almost soundless though it was, might have been some signal already agreed upon. All over the deck figures were stirring. It seemed that one surprise on another was being stacked up in front of us. Hume with his helmet off and himself half- way out of his coat uttered an exclamation. I gasped as I followed the direction he indicated. A tall man with the insignia of an Interplanetary skipper on his collar and coat-sleeves had risen languidly from a chair some distance down the deck, coming to his feet slowly, with a bewild- ered expression on his face, as though he had just been roused out of a sound sleep. His expression changed as he saw us. Sur- prise, anger at this seeming alien invasion of his vessel, seized on him. He made a quick move- ment forward, then came striding down the deck towards us. “What .... what's the meaning of this?” he demanded. Then a puzzled look came into his eyes and he passed one hand across his fore- head. “How .... how did I get here?” he said be- wilderedly. “The last I remember I was in the control room, thinking it was getting rather on the cold side, wondering if anything had gone wrong with the heaters.” I took his arm. “Captain,” I said, “there’s a mystery here. With your help we’ll solve it. We came on you, floating in free space, without lights, you .... your people stretched out ap- parently dead .... as you were just now.” “Who .... what are you? From what ship?” he asked quickly, the light of an odd fear in his eyes. I slipped my fingers in a pocket, found my badge, and extended it flat in my palm towards him. “You’re safe .... in good hands,” I said. “Whatever you have to say, you can say without fear.” For the moment he hesitated, staring away from us through the quartzite windows of his ship at the black shadow of the shuttered bulk of the Cosmos floating a few yards away. “My officers, the men who were with me. . .” he said a trifle incoherently, running his eyes down the long lines of chairs. The passengers were stirring now, coming back to life, all a little bewildered if one could judge from their expressions. The woman who had fainted had now revived, and it struck me that she was the only one of the lot who had shown any sign of fear on regaining conscious- ness. Could it be that she alone of all that' com-; pany had seen something? At least I was not minded to leave the ship until I had a chance of questioning her. “Good,” I said, “your first duty is to your officers. I think you’ll find them all there, on this deck.” I was beginning to have a glimmer of what had happened, though the precise motive behind it all eluded me. “Get them together, bring them where we can talk. All that were on duty when . . . when whatever it was happened.” I dropped my voice an octave, came a little close to him. “Captain,” I said, “don’t look round. But tell me quick, who is that woman just behind us?” He turned slowly as though looking down the run of the deck. I could have sworn his eyes did not so much touch the woman in passing, but: “A Mrs. Galon,” he whispered back. “An Earth-woman, she says, though I take leave to doubt it. Why?” “We’ll want her,” I told him. “After we’ve talked with you. But see she doesn’t move away. I’d rather she had no opportunity to speak with the others in the interval.” . “As you wish,” he said deferentially. There was magic in that little badge of mine, a magic that made me proud to belong to the Service it represented. After all we Guards may hold up schedules, and interfere in many ways, but it can never be said that we use our power for anything but good. Perhaps that is in the long run the secret of our success. “Better,” the captain shot at me in a whisper, “better get your men to tend her. Mine .... I don’t know .... Everything’s bound to be dis- organized.” I gave the cue to Hume, and he passed the word to his two men. I gathered they were to cut Mrs. Galon out a moment after we left, shep- herd her after us, and keep her waiting in the outer room until we were ready for her. As it was, while the skipper was rousing the watch on duty, the others of us unobtrusively slid between her and the rest of the passengers. I don’t think she noticed it, or if she did she gave no sign. Her interest seemed centered on Spence, perhaps because he was the first of our company with whom she had come in contact, the only one at any rate who had paid any sort of attention to her. That it had been purely VANDALS OF THE VOID 453 medical attention did not, I felt certain, matter in the least. A moment it seemed and the space ship’s cap- tain came striding back to us, behind him a little straggle of his men. “I am ready now, gentlemen,” he said, “if you will follow me.” He led the way along the deck, but it struck me in the instant’s glimpse I caught of his face as he passed that he appeared of a sudden to have grown worried and a little afraid. CHAPTER VI. A Strange Story A S we passed off the promenade deck on to the ladder leading to the control-quarters, I flung a glance back. Mrs. Galon was saunter- ing along behind us, one of our men on either side of her. She was too far away for me to see how she was taking the situation, though some- thing in the very way she moved convinced me that she was not in the least upset. Not unlikely she was feeling rather pleased in that she was the focal point of all eyes. She struck me as that type of woman. I shut her out of my mind, deliberately, know- ing that the two attendants could be relied on to do what was required. The captain of the M-E 75 pushed open the door we had so recently shut, switched on the light, and stood aside for us to enter. We went in followed by the duty man, the second in com- mand, and the captain himself. When the door was shut: “My name is James Bensen, and I am captain of the M-E 75 A/B,” he said, rattling off his de- claration. “We are homeward bound from Eng- han, Mars, to London, Earth. Crew, sixteen all told. Passengers forty three adults, two chil- dren. Cargo, Marsonite* in bulk. Here” — he flung open a drawer of his table, and drew out a steel-box — “here are my papers. You may want to frank them.” “Thanks,” I said, as I took them. He had made merely the formal declaration of identity and carrying traffic that is required of every space boat that is stopped and challenged by the Inter- planetary Guard. Before I went further I ran through his papers, found they agreed with his declaration, and scrawled my name and status in the space provided. “And now,” I went on, “I want to know some- thing of what occurred to you. But before you start your story it may help if I tell you what I iUUliU. - - I gave him in detail a sketch of all that had transpired from the moment our locators had picked up his ship drifting free until the time he regained consciousness on his own promen- ade deck. I was careful, however, not to hint that other ships had apparently suffered in the same way. , , His brow knitted as my story proceeded. It ♦Marsonite: a Martian ore which, when combined with cobalt steel, yields the alloy from which the shell of most space-fliers is made nowadays. was plain he was more perturbed and bewildered than ever. At the end : “I don’t know that I can tell you anything much at all,” he said half-apologetically. “Things were going as usual ; I was in control. My sec- ond and duty man were with me, when I fancied it was getting a bit on the cold side. The in- dicator showed, however, that the heating ma- chinery was running as usual.” “One moment,” I interrupted, “can you give me any idea of the time of this?” He stopped and did a brief calculation in his head. The pause made me realize that he was still running on Enghan (Martian) time. At last: “It would be the equivalent of about eight P. M. Earth Western time,” he said. “The pass- engers would have just finished dinner, I fancy. Yes, I’m sure of that, for I remember as I glanced at the heater dial my eyes passed over the time dial and I noted that in a few minutes it would be the hour. Where was I?” “You were feeling the cold,” I prompted. “Oh, yes. I was on the point of ordering the duty men to call up the heater control and ask what was wrong when it seemed that I sudden- ly dropped into unconsciousness. At least that’s what I think now must have happened. When I came back to understanding I was propped up in a chair on the promenade deck. That’s about all I can tell you,” he ended lamely. “Thank you,” I said formally. He looked at me a trifle anxiously. “It doesn’t help matters much further forward, does it?” “It’s hard to say ... as yet,” I told him. “Now, the others. . . .” The second and the duty man had much the same story to tell. In each case there was this sudden feeling of intense cold, a vague wonder as to what could have caused it, then the abrupt plunge into unconsciousness, and the puzzling awakening on the promenade deck. “On the face of it,” said Bensen at the end, “it looks as though we were carried from here down the deck while we were unconscious. Though,” he added thoughtfully, “I can’t see how anyone could have existed through the sort of cold that we felt.” “You did,” I pointed out. “All of you.” ' Bensen smiled. “I’m afraid I didn’t put that too well,” he said. “I should have said 'retained consciousness’ rather than ‘existed’. A cold, chilling enough to send us into a torpor for some hours should have had the same effect on any- thing. . . anybody else, I mean.” “Not necessarily,” I said. “Put it this way. Suppose the people — we’ll assume that’s what they were — who moved you came on board in emergency suits like ours, insulated against cold. They would have experiened little or no difficul- ty in doing what they did.” A light sprang up in Bensen’s eyes. “You’re assuming, of course, that the cold was an arti- ficially induced state, but it seems to me that there’s one point you’ve overlooked. Assuming you’re correct, the cause of the cold must have been introduced from outside, perhaps in the form of a gas. The biggest argument against 454 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY that however, is the fact that we are to all in- tents and purposes hermetically sealed between ports, besides being insulated against the cold of space.” “We’re dealing with facts,” I said a trifle testily, “not with theories. The fact is that some- thing happened here to lower the temperature to such a degree that everyone lost consciousness. The heaters are functioning perfectly normally, so whatever occurred was not due to any break- down on their part. “And if you want any further evidence that it was the work of an intelligent agency you have it in the fact that you and the others on duty re- covered consciousness in another part !of the ship. In plain English while you were under the influence you were taken from the control room to the promenade deck and left there.” The captain regarded me crestfallen. There was no gainsaying what I had said. Facts are facts; in this case, however incredible they might seem there was no denying their existence. “That’s true,” he admitted wryly, and looked to me for the next move. “That being so,” I went on, “the point to clear up at the start is whether the trouble originated on board or arrived from outer space. We’ve already, you see, come to the conclusion that it was the work of intelligent beings.” “You mean to say,” Bensen cut in with a light in his eyes, “that there’s a possibility that some- one on board, some passenger perhaps, was at the back of this?” “It’s not impossible,” I answered, but I spoke a moment too soon, for the gleam faded from his eyes before I had the second word out of my mouth. “No, it couldn’t have been a passenger, or in- deed anyone on this vessel,” he said reluctantly. “That’s too patently impossible.” “In what way?” I demanded. “Cold like heat has to be manufactured,” he explained. “This kind of cold at least that is not so much the absence of warmth as a definitely induced state in itself. You need apparatus and chemicals and so on.” I nodded. I saw what he was driving at. Even in the fourth decade of the twentieth century science was beginning to realize that cold was not so much the absence of heat, but a state quite as distinct and as readily induced, even though it happened to be at the other end of the temperature scale. A homely illustration of this was, as a mat- ter of fact, to be found in the old ice-making plants, or more obviously still in the whole sys- tem of artificial refrigeration. Of course Ben- sen would know this. A space-liner skipper must be a man of definite educational qualifica- tions, and periodically he has to face the exam- iners and show that he has kept abreast of the science of his calling. “And what you’re working up to, I’ve no doubt,” I said, “is that no such apparatus or chemicals could- possibly be smuggled on board. I know the examination of passengers’ baggage on embarking is pretty strict at the Earth ports, but how about the other planets?” “Mars,” Hume put in in his deep voice, “is even stricter if possible. No, my friend, you can rest assured that nothing of the sort could have got past the examiners at Enghan.” “Very good,” I said. “That’s impossible. Re- mains the other alternative, then, that some space visitors half-froze you into a state of un- consciousness, then boarded the vessel, with what object has yet to transpire.” “One moment.” It was Hume who interrupted. “Tell me why everyone was half-frozen — if you’re correct in saying that— instead of being wholly frozen, stiff and stark.” “The answer seems simple enough,” I retort- ed. “The heaters were running all the time, and once the nadir of temperature was reached they gradually managed to overcome the condition. More plainly, no one was left in the frozen state long enough for harm to ensue.” The two captains nodded almost together. “Seems feasible,” Hume agreed. “But even that’s only the beginning,” Bensen said glumly. “Admitting we’ve reasoned rightly up to this juncture, admitting further that by some means yet to be discovered space raiders made an entrance to the ship, we’ve still to settle who or what they were, and what exactly they came for.” “What of value have you on board?” “Nothing,” he told me, “other than our Mar- sonite cargo, and that as you can see from the indicators” — he pointed to the cargo dial on the wall — “still shows intact. Looks as if the whole thing was absolutely without motive.” I wondered. I would have liked to have known what, if anything, had been removed from those other space ships Harran had told me about. Of a sudden an idea swept into the forefront of my brain. “If I’m not mistaken,” I said, quickly, “we have a witness of sorts.” The others looked a question. “Mrs. Galon,” I said. “I think she knows or has seen something. Bring her in, somebody.” “Of course.” Bensen’s tone suggested that he should have thought of her before, was blaming himself not having taken her into his calcula- tions. A Strange Story H E stepped to the door and beckoned to our two men to bring the woman in. She came, glancing questioningly from one to the other of our little group; even the presence of the doctor did not seem to reassure her. I imagine that during the time of waiting she must have been turning matters over in her mind, must have been wondering and, perhaps, finding, a lengthening fear beginning to throw its shad- ow across her path. Yet she was a woman of character and de- cision. Before any of us could speak — the slow- ness was mine in all truth, for the initiative had been left to me — she lifted her head, quite regal- ly, and swept us with a glance different from that she had given us only a moment ago. This was something imperious, one could almost call it defiant. “Well, gentlemen,” she said, “what is the rea- VANDALS OF THE VOID 455 son why I have been brought here and kept un- der guard awaiting your pleasure?” Her voice had a clear note in it, rather on the musical side ; her dark eyes glowed with life. They flashed even brighter as she turned to the one man of our little group she knew. “Perhaps you, Captain Bensen, can explain it?” she said. He gave a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders, shrugged the- responsibility right off and on to us — to me, rather. “The doing is not mine, Mrs. Galon,” he said. “I’m under orders, too.” A smile flickered for an instant about the corners of his mouth, and in that moment I decided that I did not alto- gether like the man. “No?” she said with a quick, questioning lift in her voice. “Is that so?” “It is,” he said. “We are in the hands of the Gu^rd.” In such a moment onp can imagine all sorts of. things, most of them without any foundation in fact at all. I thought, however, though prob- ably I was mistaken, that a glance of under- standing passed between them. Yet this in the light of his remarks about the lady the moment I questioned her identity, could not be so. He would hardly have hinted she was not all she seemed had there been any misunderstanding, however slight, between them. “The Guard?” she repeated, and her eyes searched our stranger faces with greater curios- ity. Her voice had sounded her relief ; of its gen- uineness there was no possible doubt. “At least in the hands of one representative of it,” I said, and bowed. She looked at me with a genuine interest she had not hitherto displayed. Her irritation at her detention appeared now to have vanished entirely; indeed it had gone so quickly that I was more than half convinced it had been as- sumed from the very first. “Then. . .” she said. . . “then. . and there she stopped. “Then,” I prompted gently. She made a slight movement as though the mental resolution she must have made had its physical reaction. “Then,” she said very stead- ily, “I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t a nightmare. Only something serious, extremely serious, if the Guard is playing a part in it.” . Mystifying, too much so in fact. Getting us nowhere at that. I made an abrupt movement of impatience. “You saw something,” I said sharply. “In those few minutes on the deck in your chair before you fell asleep, something happened. What was it?” “If I said just what I saw, or rather what I fancy I saw, no one would believe me,” she said a little fearfully. “I. . .1 don’t want my sanity questioned.” “No one will doubt you,” I told her. “Listen to me, Mrs. Galon. I can tell you something that may help you. I can trust you to keep it to yourself, not breathe a word of it to the other passengers?” “Of course,” she said. "I won’t say a word to a soul.” Frankly I did not believe her. I was certain that inside an hour it would be all over the ship. Not that it mattered much, not that it could do any harm. . .now. But thinking she was being taken into my confidence, believing that she would have the sole right of retailing every word I said to whomever cared to listen, she was al- most certain to tell me without reservation every- thing she knew. “This, then,” I said slowly, “is not the only ship that has had a similar adventure. This, however, is the first ship I’ve boarded, and I’m not conversant with the exact details of what happened on the others. But from that you can rest assured that there are more things in space than we’ve yet charted, more things perhaps tha^i we’re ever likely to chart. However, it is my business to get to the bottom of this particular mystery, and if you can give me the slightest help the Service and I will forever be your debt- or.” Flowery, you will say, and so I thought, and hated myself while saying it, but something told me she was of the type to whom such phrases were meat and drink. Out of the corner of one eye I saw Hume frowning. He was a straight, blunt man who preferred the straight, blunt ways. The pity of it is that they do not always work. “Oh,” she said. “We-ell, I don’t know that there is much to tell, really. But what there is. . . .” She took a deep breath. “I was sitting in my chair on the deck just where you found me. Of a sudden I began to feel cold. I won- dered if anything had happened to the heaters. I’ve heard of such things happening, though, of course, they don’t occur nowadays. Then, I thought, perhaps I’d better go to my cabin for a wrap. should have got up at that, risen to my X feet, but, you know, I didn’t because I couldn’t. I tried. I’m sure of that. But it was as though I’d been completely paralyzed. I could not move a limb, not even a finger, only my eyes. Why they weren’t paralyzed, too, I can’t say. Then there was that feeling of in- tolerable cold and another feeling on top of it just as if I were sinking away into unconscious- ness under an anesthetic. Not actually an un- pleasant feeling at that. “I think I must have been on the verge of go- ing, for things seemed very misty before my eyes. Then the odd, startling thing happened that I’m still not sure wasn’t something I dreamt. Two figures carrying someone came down the length of the deck. The person being carried, a limp, unconscious body, must have been Captain Bensen or one of the officers. I couldn’t see the face, only the uniform. “But it was the people, things, whatever you care to call them, that were carrying the body that. . .that made me think I was dreaming. Fig- ures perhaps eight or nine feet high, higher than any Martian. Figures even isn’t right. They weren’t real, not tangible, isn’t that the phrase? They seemed just like mist. “Have you ever seen the sunlight on Earth of a hot day? You know how a beam of light seems to become visible, with little motes — WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY specks of dust, are they? — dancing in the middle of it. Well, that was just what these figures looked like, only not so clear, if you understand me. They were vaguer. Almost invisible, one might say. “But the most horrifying thing about them was that I could see clean through them. As they passed, I could see the side of the deck and the quartzite windows, and even a star or two in the black void beyond, just as if they were transpar- (Illustration by Paul ) A procession of bodies was advancing along the deck, the bodies of those officers who should have been in the control room! ent, made of glass themselves. It was horrible!” Her voice faltered to a stop. “Yes?” I said encouragingly. “And after that?” “After that? Oh, I’m sorry. Well, after that I don’t quite know what happened. Either I fainted right off or the lights went out: I don’t know which. All I can say is that everything seemed to go dark. The next I remember is see- ing you good folk round me.” fa*. 90 :- uW fa fa W$M;r '.|i // ryemml# its . . : isf m mm ; 0 ( S A f /V K- I :• IS ( M I fa A / i ✓v 'fa : fa • JlS IF fa % \ \ M V\ \ f V .#S%f ■JsMm.-.-v'-i. fa fa V n>i ’ * w V v. • / ( MS YANDALS OF THE VOID 457 CHAPTER VII. THE GUARD SHIP S HE finished and looked expectantly from one to the other, as though she fancied we would treat her tale with derision. Yet there was noth- ing in it to laugh at, nothing at all impossible or outside the realm of scientific possibility. She had told her tale better than I had expected ; she had shown a touch of the dramatic instinct, and a sense of detail. There was just one thing she seemed to have omitted. “Can you describe the figures more closely?” I asked, but she shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t. I saw only the vaguest outlines, and they, if you understand me, seemed to flicker. They weren’t quite steady.” “As though a light, a faint light, were playing on them?” I suggested. “Yes, that’s just what it looked like,” she said quickly. “How do you know?” “I don’t,” I said smiling. “I merely guessed right, as it seems.” Truth to tell all the while she had been speak- ing one idea after another had been tumbling through my mind. Something about light and its refractive qualities, something about things being made invisible through the light beams be- ing bent. I wasn’t quite sure of it, but I had a book in my luggage on the Cosmos — one of the old print books — that dealt with problems of the kind. If my guess was right the puzzle of the space-visitors’ invisibility was solved, though there still remained enough of other problems concerning them to make a man gray-headed. “That’s all right then, Mrs. Galon,” I said the next instant. “We won’t keep you any longer. Thank you very much for what you’ve told us. It will be a great help.” She smiled. “Do you really mean that?” she said challengingly. “Most certainly,” I said, and this time there could be no doubt of my sincerity. “I’d better take her disks and prints,” I said when she had gone. The radio operator who had been with us all the time and whose business it was to attend to such matters turned to the little wall machine. A compact piece of mechanism that recorded every word that had been uttered and every gesture made in the room since the moment Mrs. Galon entered. It was so cleverly hidden that I doubt if any outsider would have suspected its existence. It was more or less a development of the old sound film idea, and one not dreamt of by the general public since the so-called talking film had fallen on evil days with the advent of the televox-television machines. Nevertheless it was in pretty general use in space-ships, examining rooms and in all places where permanent re- cords of statements were required. The operator pushed a button placed in an inconspicuous part of the machine and a little panel slid back, revealing the cavity from which he took a roll of still dripping film, and three or four disks. The spoken word was recorded at the side of the film, of course, but since it was not always advisable or possible to run the film through when one wanted to consult it, the sound was also recorded on the disks rather after the style of the old gramophone records that one sees nowadays in museums. “Be careful of that film,” the operator said to me as he handed it over. “It’s not quite dry yet. Perhaps I’d better dry it out for you.” “How long will it take?” I asked. “Three to five minutes,” he answered. “I’ll have to go cannily, as I don’t want the stuff to run.” “Go ahead,” I answered. I could spare five minutes. I saw Hume shift from one foot to the other, then glance nervously at his watch. It was evi- dent he was getting impatient and wondering how much longer he was going to be held up. There is nothing these space captains like less than to have their schedule upset, and after all Hume had double grounds for irritation at the delay. This was in a sense a trial trip of the Cosmos and a good deal would depend on the time she made on the voyage. I tried to level things down as much as possible. “It amounts to this, Captain Bensen,” I said. “You’ve been boarded in mid-space, and sub- jected to a good deal of inconvenience and an- noyance. On the other hand your cargo as shown by your indicators is intact, and nothing has been touched here in this cabin. It that a fair summing up?” “More or less,” Bensen agreed. “Except that you’d better record that there’s nothing to show who our visitors were, or even that we had any at all.” “Only Mrs. Galon’s statement,” I cut in. “Barely visible entities,” he said, “things with- out form or substance.” I could have retorted that they at least had been able to carry him and his colleagues half the the length of the ship, but I did not. There was little to be gained by antagonising the man unnecessarily. Instead: “I should imagine,” I said mildly, “that it would be hard to explain what has happened in any other way.” “I think,” said Bensen with almost my own intonation, “that you will find it hard to explain matters in that way.” What more he might have said I can only guess, for at that moment there came the low whine of the locator, a shutter on the wall of the cabin dropped, and a red bulb glowed to life. The operator sprang to the television screen, connected the communicator, and with the re- ceivers to his ears took the call. The plain sur- face of the vision plate suddenly brightened, but the operator’s body screened it so that I could see only the warty tube projections on the tail- end of the ship that had signalled us. ' I moved a little nearer, and at that the opera- tor swung round. “Interplanetary Guard-Ship E. 22 calling,” he said. “Wants to know what the trouble is.” The E.22\ My own Guard-Ship! 458 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY F OR the moment no one moved in the little control room. No one, I imagine, was anx- ious to shoulder the responsibility of any move. “What shall I reply, sir? 5 ’ the operator asked abruptly. It was significant that he looked, not at me, but at his own captain. Bensen flashed me a look. “It’s for Mr. San- ders to say,” he said dryly. “We’re in his hands.” “If I may,” I said, “I’d like to answer that call.” I looked ta Bensen for permission, a need- less formality as we all knew, but it is ever my way not to ruffle a man’s dignity more than is necessary. “Go ahead,” said Bensen gruffly. To the op- erator he added, “Mr. Sanders will tell you what to reply.” I moved nearer the machine, and the man glanced up at me enquiringly, his finger on the transmitting button. “Do you mind,” I said silkily, “if I send the message myself?” He did not answer, but stepped aside with what I thought an ill grace. There is a certain close communion between these service opera- tors that leads them to resent the intrusion of an outsider, more particularly when the latter has the power to ride rough-shod over them. I could understand his resentment, mild though it was, even sympathize with it. But as the inno- cent cause of it all I had my duty to do, and that to me was paramount. I’ll swear the change-over did not occupy more than a quarter of a minute, nevertheless it was long enough for the man on the E. 22 to show impatience. Even as I fixed the ear-phones over my head the crackle-crackle of his signalled questions sounded in my ears. “Don’t be impatient,” I signalled back, as fast as I could work the button with my finger. _ Then without giving the E. 22’s people time to think up something snappy in return I changed over to the Guard-ship code. The vision screen beside me was now showing up their control room, just as ours must have been becoming visible to them. A man was standing near the operator watch- ing the screen that reflected the interior of our control room. I saw him start, peer at the sur- face of the vision plate, then a broad grin came over his fact. It was Glenn Vance, my relief. Recognition came to him almost at the moment it came to me. Curious to think that, though we were separ- ated by the gods knew how many miles, by vir- tue of the magic of the television screen we could look, as it were, into each other’s face, and see the thoughts mirrored there. Had we been with- in the atmospheric envelope of any planet we could have spoken just as readily. However, for some reason that seems to elude our . scientists the televox does not function in the void ; it will carry the voice only where there is air. I have never been able to understand why sound impulses cannot be sent across free space in the same way that our beam impulses can. There must be a reason, but I have never heard it given. Some day the difficulty may be over- come as worse difficulties have been overcome in the past; meanwhile when in space we rely for communications solely on our signal and tele- vision apparatus. In this connection there is a story of two oper- ators on two Guard-ships — brothers they were — who contrived to talk to each other without the aid of the power beam and all the cumbersome machinery of signals. Both brothers were ex- perts in the sign language of the deaf and dumb, and needed only to see each other pictured in the vision plate of the television screen to hold an intelligible conversation. As a story it is no doubt apocryphal ; nevertheless it is one of those things that deserve to be true even if they are not. But I digress. I gave Vance an outline of the situation, told him why I was here, and waited for the sugges- tion I hoped he would make. It came without hesitation. “Pity to interrupt your holiday,” the reply clicked in my ear. “I’ll take over if you wish and let you get on your way.” I signalled delighted agreement. “Coming over at once,” he signalled back. “Will clamp on to your vacant parts opposite side to the Cosmos .” The screen went blank and the crackle died in my ears. I turned to Bensen. “The E. 22 is coming over,” I told him. “She’ll connect up on your free side and her people will take over, probably escort you to the atmos- phere’s edge, if you wish.” Bensen nodded. “Good,” he said. “Anything that will get us safely and quickly to our destina- tion sounds good to me now. But you?” “I’m going back to the Cosmos as soon as I’ve handed over,” I said. “I’m no more anxious for delay than you are. Also I have Captain Hume’s feelings to consider. I’ve upset his schedule enough as it is.” “Oh, don’t worry about me,” said Hume. “We’re all in the hands of the Guard nowadays. It’s the price we pay for safety and smooth- running.” I scented an undertone of smouldering sarcasm that might yet burst into flame ; I knew that he had it in his mind to add that scarcely a voyage passed without the Guards having to hold up the ship. Of course the safety of his craft and his passengers had probably depended on the Guards’ action, but there is no use pointing out that to a potentially irritable man. Bensen, I felt, would probably sympathize with him if it came to a matter of argument, might even find a grievance for himself arising out of my super- session of his operator. I was saved from saying something that might have led to an exchange of remarks for which we would all be sorry a moment later, by the glow of the warning bulbs advising us the E. 22 was connecting and would want the port opened on signal. It came a second later, a dull buzzing that filled the room. Bensen gave the order to open the starboard port. It would have been just as easy for the E. 22’s people to have opened it by the manual locks from outside as we had done on boarding, but then they knew this was a live ship and under control, whereas we had believed her a derelict. VANDALS OF THE VOID 459 Circumstances alter cases, and after all these little niceties of courtesy are hot all empty con- ventions. Came first the clump of feet up the ladder, then the smiling face of Glenn Vance appeared. “So it’s really you, Jack, in trouble as usual,” was his greeting as he gained level flooring and came towards me. “The only trouble I’m in is that of delay,” I said a little sharply. I was not in quite the mood for bantering, anxious as all were to be on our way. “The sooner you can take over and let us be off the better we’ll be pleased.” “So?” he said agreeably. “Well, tell me what it’s all about, and you can hand over at once.” He had already had my resume over the power beam and it only needed filling in. He seemed to find the matter vastly interesting, and did not appear altogether surprised at it. At I learnt presently Harran had sent him a flash, an all- ships call, setting out the situation in outline. Thereafter we speeded things up as much as possible, and in a little less than ten minutes from the time Vance had arrived, Hume and I and our people were making our way back to the Cosmos. As I turned to go I put my hand in my pocket and drew out the compact little packet of film and disks. “You’d better take these,” I said to my col- league. “Mrs. Galon’s statement.” “Good. They’ll do as a check. Everyone, of course, will be examined again at London Land- ing. It’ll be interesting to see how close she keeps to her original statement. Well, good-bye and a good journey. I wouldn’t change with you anyway. I’m in the thick of it here, trying to unravel this mystery, while you. . . He stopped significantly. “While I,” I said, “am right out of it, leading a calm and placid existence.” “Vegetating for the duration,” he laughed. “Well, you’ll hear all about it when you get back to duty, and probably will want to kick yourself for being out of the climax of the most interest- ing investigation in years.” “Probably,” I agreed. If I — if he — had only known! We got back to the Cosmos, found her still the same silent ship, sleep-wrapped save for the duty watch; closed our port, and signalled our im- minent departure to the others. Slowly we slid away from the bulk of the M. E. 75, then as the rolgar engines began to take hold and the phosphorescent glare to 'drift from our reaction tubes we gathered speed and shot ahead. The M. E. 75 with the Guard-ship now unbuckled and hovering close by her, receded be- hind us remotely into space. CHAPTER VIII “A Martian Girl Seeking Knowledge. . . .” I SLEPT late. The buzz of the breakfast call did not wake me. I knew nothing until the steward at the door filled my cabin with the gro- tesque wailing of the sounder. I came to with a start, dimly realizing what had happened. After our adventure in mid-space and our re- turn to the Cosmos I had tumbled into bed, dog- tired. I had locked my door against intrusion, but had forgotten everything beyond that. Since I had slept beyond the normal, and not answered the breakfast call, and there was no indication in my message grid beside the door of the time I wished to be called, my steward had not unnat- urally concluded that something was wrong. As a preliminary to forcing entry he had given an emergency call on the sounder. I sprang out of bed the moment the wailing started, and made shift to open my door. Had I not done so, had I altogether ignored the noise of the sounder, the electric control that locked the cabin would have been thrown out of gear at the control board, and entrance, in the nature of an investigation, would have been made into the cabin. Oddly enough it is not at all unusual on such trips to find neurotic, depressed or nerve- strained people locking themselves in their cab- ins, and taking some form or other of euthanasia. Not very pleasant for the other passengers, for no sight in the Universe can be so weirdly de- pressing as a burial in space. . . . From this, however, you can understand how the fact of a passenger failing to answer a call spreads un- easiness, if not alarm, through the ship. I released the switch and flung open the door. My steward’s face showed relief when I appear- ed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sanders,” he said, awkwardly apologetic, “but when you didn’t appear for breakfast and there was no message in your grid, I though. . . .” “You did quite right,” I told him. “My fault entirely. I tumbled in tired last night. Never dreaming I’d over-sleep the breakfast call I left no message. I’ll be more careful next time. What’s the hour now?” “Ten a. m. Earth Western time,” he told me. “We’ll change over to Martian time at midnight tonight. We’re working up to velocity now.” That was news to me, good news in a way, for it showed our trip would be over sooner than I thought. I might have guessed it had I awoke sooner, for the fabric of the vessel quivered slightly to the soft yet steady pulse of the rolgar engines. Not often are they used in free space, save to take off or slow down. Evidently Hume had decided we had wasted enough time over the unscheduled stop last night, and was using the engines to work up to a velocity where our impetus would carry us on past the neutral point of gravity. The steward lingered. “If you like .... if you want something to eat now, I think I can manage it,” he said hesitantly. Looking out for an extra tip no doubt, the ras- cal. Well, it didn't matter much. He’d looked after me well to date, and I could do with some- thing to eat and drink. The night call on my strength — amazing how those emergency suits take it out of one — had left me famished. “Get what you can as soon as you like, and bring it here,” I told the man, and with that dis- missed him. I made ready while he was away. A certain giddiness that I did not like attacked me from time to time as I moved about. It was nothing 460 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY] much when all was said and done. Nevertheless it worried me. In some ways it was akin to space vertigo, an affliction I dreaded, for it would mean the end of my career in the Service. In all my eleven years in the Interplanetary Guard- ships I had not been troubled by it and so con- cluded I was immune. It would be a pity now if after all that time the attacks should come on.*. The trouble passed away, however, by the time my tray arrived. Probably it was no more than momentary weakness engendered by the exertion and the tenseness of the night. The fact that it left me completely, once I had made my meal, seemed to satisfy me on that point. A knock came to the door just as I was putting the finishing touches to my toilet before ventur- ing out. Thinking it was my steward coming back for the empty tray, I called, “Come in”. The door opened, but it was another steward, a man whose face I had not seen before. He had a message from Hume, it appeared. The skipper was inquiring after me. If I was up he would like a word with me, if not he wished to know how I was. A graceful gesture, I thought. “I’ll come along and see him,” I said. “Where is he? In the control-room?” In the cabin, in bed, the steward told me. That was rather a surprise. It set me wonder- ing, wondering if there were any connection be- tween my recent giddiness and Hume’s indispo- sition. Hume was sitting propped up in his bed when I entered. He looked a little grey, I imagined. He did not speak until I had closed the door and we were left alone. “Glad to see you about, Jack,” he said then. “I was beginning to wonder.’ 5 “Wonder what?” I asked. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” H E made a wry face. “I thought it was space vertigo when it came on,” he said. “I was up before the breakfast call, not much sleep nat- urally, seeing what we were at during the night. But when I tried to move about, the cabin started spinning round me.” “That’s bad. And then?” “I won’t bore you with my symptoms. I got a scare, however, began to imagine space vertigo was seizing me, saw my career snapping off short, and all that helped to make me worse, I suppose. However, the long and short of it is that Dr. Spence came down, tested my reflexes, and decided it wasn’t space vertigo after all.” “No? Listen, Hume, I had a somewhat simi- lar experience this morning myself.” I gave him details. “What do you make of that?” I asked. “What Dr. Spence thinks is that _we got out of our emergency suits too soon last night. There must have been something in the air of M. E. 75, something other than the cold, an ingredient with a slightly anesthetizing property. We’re feeling the after-kick of it now. It’s got into our sys- tems and is acting according to our various re- sistances and the length of time we were ex- *Space vertigo, a species of giddiness akin to mountain- or air sickness, that occasionally attacks interplanetary travellers While com- paratively harmless in the opening stages, if not checked immediately it exercises a disposition to suicide. posed to it. Seems that it’s something that seeps through the insulation of those emergency suits too. Spence and the two members of the crew with us merely complained of a slight lassitude ; I got the full kick of it, while you overslept this morning, and so probably gave time for the worst of it to wear off.” “That’s about the size of it, I should imagine,” I agreed. His explanation seemed quite reason- able. The one of us with least sleep and most exertion had been the one to feel the worst ef- fect. “What’s Spence ordered you to do?” I went on. “Stay in till I’m better,” Hume smiled. “I’m feeling that way already, and — if you don’t mind — we’ll have the complete cure in a moment or two. “Oxcta,” he went on. “You’ll find the box in that drawer. The lock’s a simple switch one. The white button brcTaks the circuit, the red one opens it.” I did as he told me, and drew out the little steel box I had seen my first evening on board, and handed it to him. “Now the water,” Hume said. When I handed him the glass, “I’m glad you were able to come,” he said. “I wouldn’t risk getting out for the things myself — that’s how I feel, you can see — and I’ve no mind to let others into my secrets. People blab and if the whisper got out that I drugged, I couldn’t very well con- tradict it without revealing just exactly what it was I took. And that I wouldn’t do, except to an odd one like yourself whom I trust implicitly.” “I needed that,” he said, as he swallowed the last of the draught. Then he eyed me. “I’ve been thinking of myself solely. ,You need a taste of it, too. Draw yourself a glass.” I did and mixed it under his supervision, drank the stuff, and felt immeasurably the better for it. I said so. He did not answer, merely nod- ded, and still eyed me, a trifle more thought- fully now. “Jack,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. Last night put a fancy or two into my head — came, I mean, while I’ve been lying here and thinking. Yours isn’t altogether a pleasant job, though, no doubt, it has its romantic side. Still you may get into tighter corners than I’m ever likely to. Cor- ners of the sort we were both in last night.” What was coming, I wondered, as he paused. Something momentous? “A few of these on hand” — he held out a doz- en of the Oxcta pellets to me — “might be val- uable. Only, I must ask you never to say that you have them in your possession, never indeed acknowledge that you know of their existence. I shouldn’t do any such thing; I’ve never been expressly asked not to, you understand, though I’ve always felt there’s been an implied prohibi- tion.” “In that case,” I said, not taking the pellets, “perhaps you shouldn’t offer them.” “A time may come when you’ll be glad I did. You’ve seen their effect on me ; you’ve felt it— - twice — on yourself. Here, take them. Call it humoring me, if you like.” “All right, since you’re so pressing. And af- ter all they are handy things to have about, par- VANDALS OF THE VOID 461 ticularly as they aren’t drugs in the ordinary sense.” “They aren’t. Only keep them in a metal box, steel for preference. You’ve got one you can use? No. Well, you’ll find an empty one in the same drawer. It’s Earth-made, so there’s nothing to connect it up with them.” 1 FOUND the box, and transferred to it the doz- en pellets he had given me. A lot of fuss to make about them. After all, if his assurances were to be believed, as I felt they were, they were no more than a remarkable tonic whose constituents were kept a close secret by the Mar- tian manufacturers. A little thing seemingly. Yet had it not been for those tiny pellets my life might have run on altogether different lines. A pity if it had, for I would have missed much of the fullness of things. . . . The box slid into my pocket. . . . “As far as we are concerned,” said Hume a trifle anxiously, “I take it that last night’s affair is over and done with.” We still kept to the old Earth style of dividing the day into periods of darkness and light, though here there was neither day nor night. We saw only the blackness of space with the stars and the planets doubly bright, doubly brilliant with the absence of air. The arbitrary arrangement of time was marked only by the clock. “Still it was a convenient arrangement, and we stuck to it in lieu of something better. “The Guard-ship’s taken over,” I pointed out. “That should end it as far as this voyage goes. But seeing Mars and Venus have reported more or less similar experiences, there may be enquir- ies at Tlanan when we reach there. It depends on what the Martian authorities think.” “At any rate we won’t have our schedule up- set,” Hume remarked. “I shouldn’t think so. In a day or so we’ll pass the beat of the last of the Earth Guard- ships, and the Martian ones, I’d imagine, would be more interested in speeding us towards Tlan- an for an enquiry than in hanging us up in mid- space.” “I hope so.” He did not seem so sure of that. Perhaps he knew the Martians better than I; per- haps it was merely that his imagination was con- juring up visions of unpleasant, possible delays. Which, it was hard to say. A moment’s silence, then: “Well, Jack, if you don’t mind clearing out, I’d like to get up,” he said. “I’m feeling fit to face things again, now that I know it isn’t space ver- tigo coming on. Also the Oxcta has made a new man of me. By the way, use the stuff sparing- ly. It will lose its effect if you take it too often.” “Never fear. I don’t like forming habits, good, bad or indifferent,” I told him. With that and a nod I left him. There were many things to think about. Free though I was of the necessity of probing further the particular mystery of M. E. 75 I was still inter- ested deeply. Here was a mystery doubly intri- guing. It seemed to defy solution, yet ever and again I had a queer feeling that I was very close to a revelation. I might be deluding myself — the wish father to the thought — though most pro- bably it was that I had not yet completely rid my system of the stuff that had produced that anes- thetic cold. It was not unlikely that contact with my fel- low beings might not only clear my befogged brain, but perhaps set it working along new lines. There is always a certain stimulus in companion- ship. At any rate I was more likely to puzzle uncertainly over everything if I kept to my cab- in. I made my way to the promenade deck. For some reason or other there were few about at that hour. My chair had already been mark- ed out for me, though so far I had made no use of it. Now l found it without difficulty, dropped into it and began to fill my pipe. That alone of Earth’s vices was left me for comfort. The Mar- tians and the Venusians for some queer reason regard our Tellurian habit of smoking as rather laughable, though of late some of the more ad- vanced of both planets are adopting the prac- tice. I felt drowsy. I believe I must have dozed, for next I remember was a voice in my ear, musi- cal, resonant. I opened my eyes with a start. Jansca Dirka was standing beside me, smiling. I jerked upright in my chair, and began some remark about having dropped off to sleep. The merriment died from her eyes, her face became grave of an instant. How attractive she looked, I thought; hard to decide whether I preferred her more gay or serious. Either way she was infinitely charming. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said in a voice that held just the faintest trace of her native accent. Her tendency to labor each particular syllable equal- ly would, however, have betrayed her Martian origin. “I had ho idea you were dozing,” she ran on. “I jvouldn’t have disturbed you had I known.” I drew up a vacant chair beside me. “Sit here,” I invited her. I did not quite believe her statement that she did not know I was dozing. She was not quite so foolish as all that. Patently she wanted to talk with me. Well, let her make the running. Who knew but that something of interest might yet come out in conversation. She seated herself, and half-turned towards me. “You do not mind?” she said as though asking permission for what she had yet to say. “Go ahead,” I said amusedly. “I can see you want to ask questions. What is it now?” Her eyebrows lifted a little, archly. “Nothing much, nothing of any importance. I am merely a Martian girl seeking knowledge. . . .” “In that case I’ll be happy to tell you anything I can, providing I can.” Her eyes sparked up at that. Was it, I asked myself, that she read into my last three words a .meaning other than that which appeared on the surface? If so, she showed no other sign of it. “I have been reading,” she went on gently, “delving into the ship’s library of your Earth books. Somehow I prefer them to the book- machines. They are more restful, more conven- ient to carry about. They are not noisy. One can read them and at the same time maintain privacy without the need of sound insulators.” “I’m glad you like them,” I said simply. “I, too, have a leaning towards the old print. In 462 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY many ways I like the old ideas. The book mach- ines seem to lack something. Yet we took them from you.” S HE frowned. ‘‘From Mars,” she said thoughtfully, using the Earth title for her planet. ‘‘Well, not all that comes from us is good.” She stopped abruptly, thinking perhaps as I imagine of that disastrous War of the Planets that came near wrecking the civilizations of the Inner Planets.* Abruptly she pulled herself back to the point of origin of the conversation, yet actually she had not strayed so far from it after all. ‘‘I found amongst those books an old one by an Earfh-man named Wells — ‘The War of the Worlds’,” she said slowly. “I thought at first it was an actual history, then I discovered as I read that it was what you call. . . .” She hesi- tated, looking to me to supply the elusive word. “A romance?” said I. “An imaginative romance,” she qualified. “I read on and on. Tell me was Earth like that? Did men drive animals about?” “As a picture of those times I fancy it is pretty accurate,” I said. “That is, of course, if you leave out the invasion part of it.” She shuddered. “To think that Earth-men once imagined we might assume those shapes — the things that came in the cylinders. Octopus shapes. Loathsome things.” Then quickly be- fore I could comment, she ran on. “Yet it was you Earth-people who first reached out into space, who first of all voyaged to the distant planets.” “I’ve often wondered about that,” I said. “Time and time again it has puzzled me why neither your people nor the Venusians branched out in that way.” “There were many reasons,” she told me. “You are a predatory folk, an exploring, restless race. Also you had certain things we lacked. We could fly, but we had not that urge to reach out for the stars that is your heritage.” Yet in this she was not quite accurate. Inter- planetary travel would never have become the accomplished fact it is today had it not been for the discovery of Rolgar. True, we found it on the Moon, in our own territory, so to speak, though we did not immediately realize its signi- ficance. As every student of history knows the first flights which took us no further than the Moon were made by means of a development of the Goddard Rocket; they were expensive and unreliable, and on an average one in every four met with tragedy. Even with the improvements Leyton-Browne introduced in 1975, and which enabled our space explorers to extend the radius of their travels, interstellar voyages could not have become a commercial proposition. It was only when we made contact with the Venusians and learnt from them the true value of rolgar that we began to progress at all. It' is odd to recall that to the Venusians Rolgar was practically a theoretical substance, one as rare, if not rarer, to them than radium is on ‘The War of the Planets took place in 1989. A history of this is in course of preparation. Earth. The Earth, ignorant of its value and its almost incalculable powers, possessed on our Moon a practically unlimited supply. Sad to think that it was over that too, that the first, and, we hope, the last of the interplanetary wars was fought. . . . “Do you think then” — I switched back to the immediate subject— “that there would never have been communication between us had it not been for our Earth-folk?” She looked at me then, not squarely, but with a quick glance shot from under her veiling, eye- lashes. “Do you?” she said, and for the moment I failed to realize that the question was merely rhetorical. I was about to answer when she went on, “Do you ever pause to think, perhaps wonder, Mr. Sanders, whether somewhere in the Universe there may not be others, intelligent be- ings, like us in form, immeasurably our super- iors in intellect, who may even now be reaching out to contact with us? One hears strange stor- ies.” I stared at her. What she was saying ran so close to the ideas in my own mind, paralleled so nearly my own recent experiences that I asked myself was she throwing out feelers. A Martian girl seeking knowledge. . . . Was this the par- ticular knowledge she was seeking, word of the mystery that was even then puzzling me? I LOOKED again to meet her eyes, frank this time, yet questioning, with all a child’s frank- ness. Yet with behind it all, vaguely, that baf- fling something that is symptomatic of the Mar- tian mind. And in a flash it came to me. “You know it!” I said. I might have phrased it otherwise, have said, “You’ve guessed!” But I used instinctively the one word that accurately summed up the situation. She knew, but how much she knew I had yet to learn. “I know,” she said, this Martian maiden seek- ing knowledge, and her hand dropped comfort- ingly on mine. “I know. Indeed I am aware of more about you than perhaps you think. You see, you have interested me — us. My father and I.” She did not take her hand away. . A moment later she could not even had she wished, for I had prisoned it in mine. “You know,” I said ehallengingly. “But how much, after all, do you know?” She laughed softly. “Much. Enough to startle you,” she told me. “That you are no pri- vate tourist, that you hold a high position in Earth’s Guard-ship Fleet.” “That could be guessed,” I said. “It could have been found out quite easily. I am not un- known. It is quite possible that many travellers on the space-liners should have seen me in an official capacity, and have remembered.” “That is so,” she agreed. “As you say such a discovery, though annoying, is of little or no im- portance. But do not worry. If you wish to preserve your secret it is safe with us. Save my father and I, none on this ship but those you have confided in shall know exactly who you are. But, as you say, that is a little thing, no sure test of the knowledge I boasted I possessed. VANDALS OF THE VOID 463 “But — she leaned a little closer to me, so close that I could have taken her in my arms without an effort had I wished and had I been that sort of man — “but suppose” — her voice dropped to a whisper that could be heard by none but me — “suppose I were to tell you what else I know, of the things that have worried you and threatened to upset your holiday, of — this will startle you — the events of last night, of the ship adrift in space, and the sleeping, half-frozen men you found there. Supposing I told you all this what would you say?” “That there has been a leakage somewhere,” I said promptly, “that someone has talked.” She nodded. “You could explain it so,” she agreed. “But what you could not explain by that or any other form of reason is this, a thing known to you alone, that in this pocket” — she tapped it lightly — “you have a little steel box containing twelve pellets of Martian Oxcta.” I stared at her stupefied. Only Hume knew I had those tiny pellets in that box, but even Hume did not know into which pocket I had slipped them. It had happened, more by acci- dent than design, that he had not seen. Knowing this, what else was there she might not know, strange, dark secrets, perhaps better left unrevealed? CHAPTER IX “A Friend, or Perhaps a Little More. . . I STARED at her stupefied — as I have written — while the unrecoverable seconds ticked re- morselessly away. I scarcely knew what to say or with what counter to meet this frank revela- tion. The fact that she knew something and no doubt guessed more of the mystery in which I had played my little part did not matter so much ; it was the uncanny knowledge she displayed of something trifling in itself, yet about which no one but myself should know anything, that was so disconcerting. . For the moment I fancied I had the solution of the puzzle in my grasp, that she had seen the outline of the box showing through my coat, and had deduced the rest. But I had no sooner form- ed the idea than I saw it could not be. The box itself did not show through the material of my coat; even had it done so she could not have rea- soned its nature and contents — even the exact number of pellets — so surely. No, the true ex- planation was a less obvious, more uncanny one than that. . The light in her eyes changed to something softer than a mere smile, a touch of commisera- tion, I fancied crept into it. In a way it roused me from my momentary stupor. “Tell me,” I demanded, still in the same soft whisper she herself had used, “tell me how you know all this. It’s. . . .” In my turn I halted for a word, and this time it was she who supplied the needed one. “Uncanny” she suggested, and when I nodded, “No, Mr. Sanders, it isn’t. It’s anything but that. To show you what I mean I’ll tell you something more. Wait a moment, please.” She thrust her hand through the V opening at the bosom of her dress, held her hand there und- er the shadow of the material almost as though she held something in her palm, something at which she looked and frowned a little, with a drawing together of those fine eyebrows of hers. “Face me squarely,” she commanded. “Ah, that is it. Now. Under the left lapel of your coat, where you can show it in a moment if nec- essary, is your interplanetary badge, a silver badge in the shape of a spaceship with the letters — English letters — ‘I. P. G.’ spread along its length.” “Go on,” I said with interest. So much she could have told me from memory if she had ever — as no doubt she had — seen a Guard’s badge before. She did not look up, but: “You’re still a little doubtful,” she whispered. “We-ell — . On the back of the badge is a number — 725. Beneath the number are the two letters ‘S. C.\” She could not have known without having seen my badge — which I swear she had never done — could not possibly have known that I was num- bered ‘725’ of the Interplanetary Guard, and that my rank was ‘Space Captain’. It savored of witch-craft. She went on calmly, coolly. “In your right- hand coat pocket you have an envelope, buff in color. It contains a space radio form. The message on the form is written in an Earth-lan- guage I do not know. It is not one in use, that is all I can say. But I can spell out the words to you.” She did, she spelled it through until I thought it time to call a halt, for I had no mind that Harran’s last message to me should get this sort of publication. “Please, please,” I said almost breathlessly. “Don’t go any further. I’m convinced.” She looked up mischievously at me. Her hand came out of the bosom of her dress, empty, as it had gone in. Yet I could swear that the moment she raised her eyes to meet mine I heard a slight click as of a spring being released. “And of what are you convinced?” she whis- pered. “Of the reality of what you’re saying — or do- ing,” I told her. “But it’s magic, witchcraft.” “No. No. Applied science, that’s all. You Earthlings beat us Martians in many ways. You are our masters in most things, in space-travel- ling, not the least. But here and now in one thing and another we can still teach you a little. You have seen what I can do — I, a Martian girl, and not a clever one. A little toy it is, yet how it shakes you, saps your confidence and makes you talk of magic, of witchcraft, of things no sane planetarian really believes in these enlight- ened days.” “Tell me,” I said quickly, for I thought I saw some method in her madness, “why do you do this thing? I am sure it is not merely that you want to puzzle me.” Again she bent a little nearer, again the voice sank to a low caressing whisper. “It is,” she said, “because I want to help you, because I may be able if only in my small way, to aid you a little.” “With that little toy? What is it? May I see it?” 464 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY She took my questions in order. “Yes, with that little toy, as you call it. It is worked on the principle of your X-rays, something analogous, at any rate. But it can see through anything, and strangely enough the form and substance — the color of the thing seen through — are not blurred and lost as happens with certain sub- stances viewed under your X-rays. You wish to see it? I cannot show it to you here. There may be prying eyes about, people who would not approve.” S HE flung a swift glance about the deck. No one seemed in the least interested in our talk, but then that was nothing to go by. Men — wo- men, too — can watch and listen without show- ing the slightest outward sign of interest. “Mr. Sanders, you are Earth-born. You have Conventions that are not ours; we have conven- tions that possibly you do not understand. Would you therefore think it a thing that should not have been said if I were to ask you to come down to the seclusion of my cabin where we can talk undisturbed?” My hesitation was but for the moment, only the drag of an old Earth-convention, as she had hinted, pulling at me. To hold it longer in my mind was in a way an insult to her. “No, of course not,” I said readily. “Well, leave me now,” she said. “My cabin is C-8. In ten minutes you will find me there. We had better not go together.” There was wisdom in her suggestion. With a brightly-flung word and a cheery nod for the benefit of anyone who might chance to be watch- ing, I rose to my feet, sauntered off along the deck, stopped to re-light my pipe, strolled through the saloon, moving aimlessly until I came to the notice board. There I halted to read the bulletins of news. Nothing startling from any of the three planets, no mention cer- tainly of any space-ships in trouble. It occurred to me to wonder if by any chance news on that matter were being censored. Most probably it was. The Board would not run the risk of panic if it could be avoided. So casually I made my way to the accommo- dation deck, and presently located C-8. The glow of a light tube streaming through the grille over the door told me it was in occupancy. I glanced at the name grid. “Jansca Dirka”, that was all. She then had the whole cabin space to herself. We had not a very full ship that trip. I knocked. The door opened a space. She saw me, opened it further, and without a word, beckoned me in. She closed the door behind me, snapped the switch, and closed the sound insulators. Then she turned to me with a smile. “Why,” I said, “are you doing all this, as you say, to help me?” „ . “Because,” she said, “I would be your friend. “A friend, or perhaps a little more,” I said softly, overwhelmed by that other-world intoxi- cation of her presence, that lure that was not Earth’s. I had her hands in mine as I spoke. She said nothing, did not even look at me, but I felt them drawn softly away. “We can,” she said with meaning, speak of such matters after. There are more important things to talk of now.” She turned swiftly away from me for a mo- ment. What she did or where it came from I could not saf, but when she faced me the next second in the palm of her outstretched hand there lay glistening a watch-like thing with a tiny thread-thin chain attached. “Take it,” she said. “It is yours. It will help you.” I took the thing. It was shaped like a watch, as I have said, save that back and front were made of some vitreous substance, neither glass nor quartzite. As I looked into one crystal face I could see nothing, but the girl leaned over, touched a spring I had not noticed before. I nearly let it drop, for the floor of the cabin under the crystal face seemed to vanish, and I found myself looking into the deck below, seeing ev- erything beneath me as clearly as though the floor were made of glass. She laughed softly at the amazement in my face. “It is rather startling when one sees it for the first time,” she said, “but as I’ve told you the principle underlying it is quite simple. It is merely a matter of penetrative rays. You Earth- lings have progressed somewhat on the road, with your discoveries of X-rays, gamma rays, and the rest. Perhaps some day you will discover this also for yourselves.” “It is rather astounding,” I said as soon as I recovered my composure. “You don’t know then how the principle is applied?” I asked merely from curiosity, though I real- ized the moment I had spoken that it was a ques- tion that should never have been put. Slowly, seriously she shook her head. “I do not know,” she said deliberately, “and if I did I would not tell. I am giving you this little instru- ment because I know it will help you, but not even for you would I betray the secrets of my people.” I turned on her, suddenly stricken contrite. “Of course!” I said. “You are doing a wonderful thing even in giving me this. I should not have asked you any such question. But it slipped out. Human curiosity.” She waved that aside, came a little closer, and as though afraid that even in that sound-proof cabin she might be overheard she dropped her voice to the merest thin thread of a whisper. “Keep it there,” she said, pointing. “On the inside of your buttoned jacket. Make a pocket for it there, to keep it hidden out of sight. You have only to put your hand down — you need nev- er pull it out more than is necessary — for you to see the dial face on one side or the other. Its rays will penetrate through almost any substance, but you must never, never breathe a word that will indicate you have it in your possession.” 6 6 OUR father. . . . ?” I suggested. X “He does not know,” she said quickly. “I do not want him to know. He is well-disposed towards you, friendly, as who would not be? But even he, if he knew that I was even to this extent betraying a Martian secret to one not of VANDALS OF THE VOID our race by blood or by adoption, would be harsh with me. . . Her voice trailed into silence, leaving me with the impression that she had not said all that was in her mind. “Tell me,” I said quickly, “if this were known — what would happen to you ? Anything dire ?” I imi / m tm J®igl m * ™ mm % 1 2 ^ -T- ■>' • - If m liSfl ftfpi ; iff#* n'i'.'.''* «S ■■■ if . SB fMtsIS She 'did not answer me, but the droop of her head told me all I wished to know. This Mar- tian maiden, in so many ways like an Earth girl, in so many other ways unlike, was for me taking the stars knew what risks. “Tell me, tell me," I begged. “I would not ( Illustration by Paul) The huge ship stretched out like an overfilled balloon and burst into myr- iad fragments. have anything — any gift such as this — at the price of suffering to you. Is it merely that I am an alien, because I have no Sonjhon blood in me that you would be punished?” In my eagerness, anxiety, call it what you will, I had stumbled into using the Martian word it- self, and at the sound of it she looked up, as I thought, startled. “Yes,” she said slowly, thoughtfully, “yes, it is because you have no Sonjhon blood in you that I must fear for myself.” For a space she paused, her eyes searching me, weighing me. Then .... I saw the glitter of the little knife in her hand, and I sprang forward, but she thrust me back with one hand, and for once I was not minded to use force. “Stay,” she said fiercely. “I mean no harm to you or anyone else. But I see a way.” WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY 466 Something in her eyes compelled me to wait. There was resolution in her looks, yet such that I no longer felt anxiety or fear, only a great wonder. She took the little knife, a vicious sharp thing, held it down near the point, made a tiny scratch in the fleshy part of her left arm, and waited until the red blood came. I waited, doubting what this meant, yet in a vague way feeling that I knew. Suddenly she thrust the arm towards me, and spoke commandingly. . “See,” she said, “I have drawn blood. With your lips remove it.” I must have involuntarily recoiled then. To my mind there was something barbaric about it all. “Don’t waste time,” she said sharply. “Do as I tell yoy.” She came of a long line of those bom to rule this girl; there Was something of their concen- trated magnetism in her, something, too, that was all her own. Scarcely knowing what I did, my head whirled so I obeyed her. My lips touched her warm flesh. She drew her arm away, and as I straigh- tened up, looked at me with a new light in her eyes. “You are one of us,” she said with a strange dignity and a stranger softness in her manner. “Now you can always say with truth that you are of the Sonjhon blood, for you have that blood, my blood in you.” Then it was the meaning of it all dawned on me. It was no barbaric rite, no ancient survival of blood brotherhood such as once existed amongst certain peoples on Earth; it was her way, the only way she knew, of giving me power to claim, if necessary, the rights by blood of a citizen of Mars. The deed, as much as the thought behind it, amazed me. I knew enough of her planet’s cus- toms to realize that it would hold as binding in any Martian community, but whether it had any deeper implication, of course, I could not say. Perhaps I should have felt revulsion; I do not know ; all I can say is that I did not. Our eyes met; she stepped back a pace, drew a long breath, and slid the tiny knife into a sheath at her girdle. Then: “I had better explain,” she said in studied calm tones, “the working of the — .” She used a word I did not catch, most probably it was a Martian phrase new to me. She smiled at my puzzled expression. “That little instrument I gave you,” she explained, but I noticed that she did not speak its name again, and I did not ask her, for reasons which were perhaps wise. I took the thing from my pocket— for lack of a better name I called it in my own mind ‘The Crystal Eye’, and as such it will be referred to hereafter — and handed it to her. She showed me that the spring at the top was in reality a sort of screw; it could be adjusted to suit the distance in much the same way that one adjusts binoculars. She made absolutely certain that I thoroughly understood its workings before she allowed me to return it to its hiding-place. “Tell me one thing before I go,” I said, for it was a thought that worried me. “Do all Mar- tians carry these?” She eyed me as though she fancied there might be more behind the question than actually ap- peared. “No,” she said slowly, “no. Only those of. . . . Only a favored few carry them.” I read in her eyes the meaning of that hesita- tion, could almost hear the word she had left un- said. I knew without a doubt that she had meant to say “Only those of the blood,” and had pulled herself up just in time. Well, it seemed — if suppressions and hesitations went for any- thing — that now it was a matter not to be re- ferred to between us again. It had come to this that now I must make some sort of graceful retreat. Having uttered my thanks — which she cut short, a little indig- nantly, I thought — I was looking for some ex- cuse when I chanced to look up again, and see her eyes. I saw in them, what I had never expected to see in woman’s eyes looking into mine, be she of Earth or any other planet — tears, diamond-bright, glistening like dew-drops in the morning sun. Eyes, dear eyes, whose very glance plucked the soul from me, drew me out of myself as the mag- net draws the steel. Blindly I made a step forward, fumbled, caught her in my arms, I kissed the lips that for the moment feigned resistance, then clung pas- sionately to mine. . . .1 released her, but it was not the Jansca I had caught in my arms. It was another being, glorious, ethereal, one who looked at me with something in her eyes that thrilled me to the very root and marrow of my being. “Jansca,” I said, stumblingly, haltingly, “can it really be?” “It is,” she said simply. “It is and always will be so. Nothing now, can take us from each other.” Who or what, thought I in my ignorance, was there to try such a thing? CHAPTER X. I Take Over => T HROUGHOUT most of that day the ether must have been super-heated with the mess- ages that were coming and going between worlds. And in the administrative centers of the three confederated planets wild-eyed men must have been working feverishly, preparing to deal with a menace whose actual purpose, whose identity even, had not yet become manifest. To us sealed up in our space-ship hurtling through the void to our destination nothing of this was known, and it was not until the dinner hour that night that the first repercussions of the trouble became apparent. Supremely happy in my new-found love I had taken my seat at the table, to meet the ardent glance from Jansca’s glowing eyes, and the ap- proving look from her father, whom I had al- ready seen and talked with. I noticed as a thing of little moment that Hume’s place was unoccu- pied; his hours were irregular compared with VANDALS OF THE VOID 467 ours, and I was no more surprised to find him absent than I would have been to see him pres- ent. Jansca leaned across the table and said some- thing to me. What is was I cannot say at this distance of time, some chance remark, no doubt. The first course — I remember principally be- cause I had to go without it — was in process of being served. I was about to make some light answer to Jansca’s remark, when a finger touch- ed me on the shoulder, and I heard my name spoken. I turned. It was one of the officers. “Captain Hume would like to see you at once, Mr. Sanders,” he said. There was a serious note in his voice that was not in the least encouraging. “At once?” I echoed. “Won't it do when I’ve finished dinner?” The other shook his head. “I'm afraid not. Captain Hume was insistent that I should bring you back with me, even if it meant foregoing dinner.” All this in so low a voice that it im- pinged on my ear alone. “Oh, well” — I shrugged my shoulders — “I sup- pose I'll have to go.” I faced Jansca and she leaned across to catch my words* “My dear,” I said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave my dinner untasted. I’m wanted. Apparently urgently.” “Go,” she said swiftly. “Don’t wait. I think I understand.” Her hand, reaching across the table, caught mine and give it a gentle pressure. I met her eyes. There was something in them that startled me. Agony, fear, anxiety : all some- how mixed together. A moment, and they faded to yield to a tenderness that no words can poss- ibly describe. One look flung between us, heart talking silently to heart. Then I rose to my feet and swung off behind the man who had sum- moned me. At the saloon door I caught up to him and asked the inevitable question. He did not know, he said, what was behind the call. Possibly, even had he known he would not have told me. Mystery was deepening on our ship, secrecy becoming the order of the day. Hume sat before a desk littered with papers, and he raised a grave face to meet my glance as I was ushered in. “Sit down there. Jack, opposite me,” was his greeting. Then to the officer who had conducted me, “Insulate us against all outside interference,” he said, and did not speak again until the switch clicked over and the warning lights inside the door showed that we were secure from eaves- droppers. “Man, what is it?” I cried. “What’s gone wrong now that you look so grave?” His brow furrowed into lines. “Jack,” he said earnestly, “I’d give a lot to be able to ans- wer that question of ' yours. But perhaps this may tell you something.” He pushed a message form to me. If was writ- ten in plain English and it had been sent out from New York headquarters of the Earth divi- sion of the Interplanetary Board of Control not two hours before. I stared at it, for it began with the triple call of urgency, that call we seldom get more than once in a generation. The message was a long one, covering three sheets of closely written lines, but the gist of it can be given in a sentence. It was a general call to all Space Ships to rendez- vous at the nearest Guard-ship base as quickly as possible and wait for escort before proceeding to their destinations. The message closed again with the triple urgency call. “Well, what do you make of it?” I asked. For answer he passed me another wad of sheets. The top one, I saw, was a similar mess- age, word for word with the previous one, sent this time from London. It was timed a few min- utes later. I turned to the others. One was from Shangun, the Venusian capital, and it was in that planet’s international language, of which I knew only a word here and there. The third message, also indecipherable, was, I guessed from the of- fice of despatch, in Tlananian, the language of two-thirds of the Martian peoples. “You can’t read them, of course,” Hume said, as I turned the last sheet, “but I’ve had the one from Venus translated — the Tlananian I can read myself — and you can take it from me that they’re identical with the Earth messages. Now, what do you make of them?” ttrpHERE’S no doubt about the urgency of the _L matter,” I said slowly. “The fact that the Venusian and Martian messages have been broadcast in their own tongue shows that to my mind. They couldn’t afford to waste even the time necessary to translate them into internat- ional code.” “Or meant them solely for their own ships, knowing Earth messages would reach liners like us,” Hume said with a puckering of the fore- head. “But even that isn’t answering my ques- tion. What’s behind it all?” “The thing that has been worrying me all along, and that has threatened to upset my holi- day more than once,” I frowned. “The Space-visitors — the things — people — that were responsible for the trouble on M. E. 751 Isn’t that what you mean?” “I can’t see any other explanation.” “Then — perhaps I’m wrong; I hope I am — it looks as though something has happened, some new development of which we’re not as yet cog- nisant, that menaces the safety of every space liner from the three planets that happens to be enroute at the moment. But to think of traffic proceeding under an escort of Guard-ships! It’s incredible. Such a thing has never been heard of before in the history of the Universe, not since space-travelling became an accomplished fact. But what are you going to do ? Is this the crisis your instructions cover?” “It’s hard to say. Looks to me like a matter for individual judgment, possibly. But at pre- sent, providing there are no further develop- ments I can make no move in any direction. You have already got your orders ; they come from a body that can over-ride anything I do or suggest, and I think in the circumstances you will be wise to abide by them. Not only that, but carry them out with the greatest celerity possible.” “I haven’t wasted time, Jack. I’ve changed course already.” He pointed to the dial-chart where the quivering pointer showed us edging 468 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY off at an angle from the red line that had hither- to marked our route to intercept the orbit of Mars. “Also, our locators are sounding space to pick up the nearest Guard-ship. It will prob- ably be a Martian one now, we’re so far advanced on our way.” “Whatever it is does not matter as long as it is a Guard-ship,” I said wearily. A heaviness had come over me, a weight on my heart, as that dark uncontrolled hinterland of my mind where spec- ulation dwells began to play with grisly possibili- ties. Hume shot a glance at me from under his tired and dropping lids. “Sick of it, already,” he said, and, “You’re on- ly holidaying. Don’t like the interruption to your vacation, eh? Ah, well, you’ve no responsibili- ties, no. . . “But there you’re wrong,” I cut in before he could go further. “I have responsibilities, one big one, at least, aboard this ship.” Something in my tone must have warned him, for his eyes widened. “Aboard the Cosmos'.” he exclaimed. “What . . .who is it?” “Jansea,” I said. “Jansea Dirka.” “You mean that, Jack? Is it fact or merely a hope?” “A fact accomplished. We agreed only this morning that our paths lay together. Her father knows, and has approved.” For one long second he looked at me, then across the table his hand reached out and gripped mine heartily. Only that. He spoke no word of congratulation, but his looks and his hand- clasp told me all he felt. “I understand,” he said at last. “I under- stand. Of course our safety means more to you even than perhaps it does to me.” Then, almost under his breath, “But a Dirka !” I caught the word. “Why a Dirka?” I de- manded. “What is strange in that?” “Your luck. Call it that. The Dirkas are the nearest to a race of Kings Mars has had in a thousand years. But you will learn more about that yet. . .from them. Jack, coming back to immediate urgencies, what are we to do?” “Follow instructions, that’s all that’s left us. We can’t make any other preparations, for we don’t know what we may have to face.” “Our armament. . .?” he suggested tentatively. “Oh, yes. What have you in that way?” “The two rays. . .heat and the repeller rays. The former won’t function too well in free space, I should imagine.” “Why not? It doesn’t need an atmosphere. It will go where light goes. We’ll see. . . .or rather I hope we won’t have the need to see. We ” There came a warning crackle, thrice repeated, from the sounder at his elbow. “More messages,” he said wearily. “Manners, take it. . .them.” The officer, my conductor, made the sundry adjustments that allowed the door to be opened. It was a messenger from the transmitting room — the Cosmos was big enough to have a separate one of her own — with a sealed envelope in his hand. “For Mr. Sanders,” he said. “I was told he was here.” M ANNERS passed it to me, the messenger sped away, and the insulating barrage went up again. I tore open the envelope, glanced at it. A word here and there was plain, though it was not the sort of message I could read in its entire- ty on the spur of the moment. “A sheet of paper and a pencil, Hume,” I said, fumbling. “This is an urgent one, too. I’ll have it out for you in a minute or so.” He sat silent while I turned it word for word into readable, understandable English. As I thought, it was from Harran. “Have reason to suppose,” it ran, “that con- certed attack is to be made on all space-ships. Possibly invasion of three planets projected, follows on space-ship discoveries reported in last few days. Confirm general rendezvous or- der. All Guards are to hold in readiness for immediate duty. All emergency regulations to be put into operation forthwith. No private messages to be transmitted from space-ships, or if received aboard not to be delivered to address- ees, except under direction and at discretion of Guard until further orders. Emergency regula- tions in force from moment of receipt of this message. Identical instructions relayed all Guard-ships and all Guards on space liners. (Signed) Harran — Tellus Tambard — Mars Clinigo — V enus.” I thrust the translation over to Hume. “You had better read this,” I said. “It explains the - situation far more clearly than any words of mine can do.” Slowly he read it through, and as he read his face blanched. At the end he handed it back to me. “It means,” he said simply, “that you are now in command.” “It means that,” I agreed. “But it means more, that you and I and all the rest of us must work together for the common good, the safety of our ship and passengers.” “Yet,” he said heavily, “there is so little we can do, save carry on.” I nodded. That was quite patent. We had our rendezvous to make, whether with an indi- vidual Guard-ship or a floating base depended on our luck. Apart from that we could only keep watch and guard. “Arm your men,” I said. “Serve out your ray tubes at once. Are all your officers trust- worthy?” “Every one of them. They will take their or- ders and carry them out, if that’s what you mean.” “I do, I want them paraded at once. . .here. Would you care to advise them or shall I?” “Better you, Jack. I won’t cavil at what you say or do in a time like this. You know more of what’s pending than I do, and anyway you have my authority to reinforce yours if necessary. About the operators. . . .Had they better come too?” “Oh, yes. All except the men on duty.” He called Manners to him and gave his orders. VANDALS OF THE VOID 469 and soon the emergency signals were sounding in each man’s quarters. I glanced round the room. It was certainly more spacious than most control rooms, but then the Cosmos had been built for big things. Yes, it would hold the officers without any undue crowding. It would be better to talk to them assembled here rather than out on the control deck where we could not be effec- tively insulated against listeners. One by one they came to the room, the three officers; the apprentices who were actually jun- ior officers in training; the purser, Parey; the doctor, and others. All told there was a round dozen of them in the room in the end. Hume wasted no time in preliminaries. "You’ve been called here,” he said, "because of certain matters of importance with which you should be acquainted at the earliest opportunity. What they are Mr. Sanders will explain.” He stopped and gestured towards me as much as to say, "It’s your turn now.” I saw curious eyes turn wonderingly towards me. Even Parey who knew who I was knitted his brows, though I fancy he must have guessed part of what I was going to say. But the others had no idea either of my identity or the purport of my remarks until I pinned my Guard’s badge in the lapel of my coat where it was plain for all to see. Even then I could see most of them were still frankly puzzled. I began. I had much to say, but I contrived to get it within small compass. I gave a brief sketch of the condition in which we had found M.E.75 — there was no need to enlarge on that, as it was already more or less common property amongst the after-guard — and added that simi- lar things had happened to other space ships. I insisted that as yet we did not know anything about the motive behind these visitations — one could hardly call them attacks — and certainly had no idea from which planet the vandals had come. I hinted, however, what was purely an idea, that there was a chance they hailed from somewhere in inter-galactic space. Then to round everything off I read out the message signed by The Three. I finished, and glanced round the little company. For the moment it seemed they were stunned to silence by my com- munication. “Any questions?” I asked. “Now is the time to ask them. We may not have the opportunity to ask or answer them later.” ■„ One youngster, one of the apprentices, poss- ibly fed on one of those hectic romances that have been written round the War of the Planets, spoke up. “Was that right. . .1 mean,” he stumbled, "is there anything in the suggestion in your message, Mr. Sanders, that an interplanetary invasion is projected?” “I read you what the message said,” I answer- ed. “That is merely supposition. It may be right; it may just as well be wrong. At least we can take precautions against every possible contingency without being alarmists. You un- derstand me?” “Yes, sir.” he said, but I wondered if he really did. Parey caught my eye. “Does this mean, Mr. Sanders,” he said, "that you are in absolute com- mand here?” “It means,” I said deliberately, “that I am re- sponsible to the Interplanetary Board of Control for the safety of this ship and her complement, and if anything goes wrong it is I who will be to blame. I have told you quite plainly exactly what is the state of affairs as far as I know it. More than that I cannot do. But let us have no talk of absolute or any other kind of command. “Captain Hume and I have discussed the mat- ter thoroughly between us, and we are agreed, as I want you all to be agreed, that the interests of all are the interests of each of us. Unless each man does his utmost with a right good-will we may fail to pull through. And it may hearten you in what is yet to come for you to realize that in a thousand ships all up and down the void this message is being repeated and similar scenes to this enacted. Now has anyone else anything to say before you disperse?” The first officer, Gond, took a step forward. “I have, Mr. Sanders, and I’d like to make it snappy. I think I can speak for the others. I know them all, so I believe I can take it for granted they’ll agree. It’s this. What you say goes with us, the more so as Captain Hume is backing you up. That’s a mouthful, I think.” I smiled at the quaint archaisms in his little speech, but I could not smile at his sincerity. It was too affecting for that. A murmur that rose from the little group showed, too, how well he had expressed the sentiments of all of them. “That’s that then,” I said. “Captain Hume, will you take over, please?” With a word or two relative to certain re-ar- rangements he found it necessary to make in the ship’s routine, Hume dismissed those off duty, and as the last of them disappeared he turn to me with a sigh. “There’s no doubt about their loyalty,” he said. “I’d stand hostage for any one of them. But, Jack, what do you think those chiefs of yours had in mind in censoring private messages? Are they thinking of spies aboard?” Spies? I had not thought of them in that con- nection before, but the moment Hume made the suggestion an idea hit me between the eyes. “Spies?” I repeated. “Yes, I believe that is just exactly what they do mean, but whom we should begin by suspecting here is more than I can tell.” Did he believe me? Something in the glance he shot at me implied that he did not. CHAPTER XI. The Inexplicable Incident. M Y further duties took me half an hour or so, then all precautions we could think of hav- ing been taken, I was free to go about my own small concerns. Dinner had long since been ended, and the saloon was bare and empty. Knowing the long hours the kitchen staff put in, I did not feel like giving them the extra trouble of serving me a late meal. Ordinarily I am a small eater, and anyway it would do me no harm to wait for my 470 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY, next meal till morning. But on the heels of that it occurred to me that in my pocket was some- thing that was quite a good substitute for both food and drink. I slipped down to my cabin, drew a glass of water from the faucet, and dropped an Oxcta pellet in it. I drank up the resultant mixture and felt all the better for it. But, I warned myself, it would not do to make a regular practice of this; despite what Hume had told me, that it was not habit-forming, I had no wish to put the matter to the test. Yet looking back now what seems to me the strangest thing of all is that my solicitude for others, my wish to save the serving staff from trouble, was actually the means of our salvation. It was too early to go to bed yet, I thought, and to tell the truth I was not in the mood to sleep for some hours yet to come. The greater part of the responsibility for the safety of the ship’s company devolved on me, and it must be admitted that it was no light weight. I wanted time to think things out and if possible formu- late some plan of campaign. Since I can always think better with a pipe in my mouth, I filled and lit one. It Was against the rules to smoke in one’s cabin, but as I am naturally a careful man where fire is concerned I did not give that aspect a second thought. The result of half-an-hour’s intensive thought was zero. A week’s meditation possibly would not have got me any further. When all was said and done the initiative did not lie with us, but with those invaders out of space and until we learnt a little more about them and their ob- jects I could see no use in speculating. At the same time I was inclined to discount the alarm- ist suggestion the Council of Three had made in their broadcast message, for I felt that any in- terplanetary invasion would have been preceded by something more spectacular than what had happened to date. Summed up, what did it amount to? Only this, that some strange force had paralyzed a number of space-ships and their crews; the space-ship in one case certainly. Others prob- ably had been boarded by these partly-invisible entities, but nothing had been, touched or re- moved that we could learn, no one had been harmed and no damage done. Was it possible, to borrow a phrase from one writer who one hundred and fifty years ago fore- cast something of the sort, that we were being examined in much the same impersonal fashion as a man will examine infusoria under a micro- scope? A soft yet penetrating rap sounded on my cabin door, and brought me out of my reverie. I opened the door an inch or so, and peered out. Jansca was standing there, the light of a mild perplexity and alarm in her eyes. “Oh, Jack,” she said almost breathlessly, “I’ve been looking for you and wondering. . . Then I saw your light and knocked.” “Come in,” I said. “Come in, dear. I’ve been here some time.” I shut the door and threw the insulation switch. I was getting jumpy these days, taking precau- tions that a week ago I would have laughed at. “When you left the table, your meal untouched and untasted, and did not return I feared some- thing was wrong,” she said, looking up earnest- ly into my face. “You should not,” I said gently. “Nothing was wrong with me.” “No?” Her fair brow wrinkled. “But there have been comings and goings, a certain amount of activity amongst the officers that made me think. . . .” She stopped abruptly, and looked to me to supply the end of that truncated thought. “Made you think what, Jansca?” I said en- couragingly. She put her two hands on my shoulders, and looked me straight in the eyes. Under that pene- trating scrutiny I think I must have shifted un- easily. “Dear,” she said suddenly, “tell me what is wrong, if not with you, at least with things in which you are implicated. I know that some- thing, good, bad or indifferent, is afoot.” “Jansca,” I said gravely, “sit down. I have something to tell you.” She obeyed, but flung me one quick glance of interest, as though already she had glimpsed something of what I had to tell her. “This,” I said, “is between ourselves. It must go no further than you, not even to your father. Will you promise me that?” Her face glowed. “Where you and I are con- cerned, Jack, there is no need of promises, given or taken. We are too much to each other ever to break confidence.” I nodded. That was good hearing, and I said so. “But, Jansca, what I wish to impress on you is that I am revealing to you secret matter, mess- ages that have passed and will be passing be- tween myself and the Council of Three. Perhaps strictly speaking, I should do nothing of the sort, but are you not my promised wife, are we not one in thought and hopes?” S HE smiled at that, and nestled close against me, looking up at me with her large wistful eyes. “Never, never, dear one, will you find your trust misplaced,” she breathed. “And now tell me what has happened.” Briefly I told her, omitting nothing, stressing nothing. She did not look so grave at the end as I had expected. “It but follows on what we already knew,” she said simply. “What it may portend I cannot say. It may mean trouble for our worlds, or it may be something that can be dealt with very easily, once we understand the reason behind it. But in the absence of more detailed information I believe the Council is taking the right course. But, dear one, does this mean that when we reach Tlanan, if we do in safety, that you and I will be separated for a time?” That indeed seemed to be her greatest worry. “I hope not,” I said with truth. “If things were left to me, I would marry you out of hand and make the rest of my space-voyage a honey- moon.” “A honey-moon ? ” For the moment she seem- ed puzzled, then the meaning of it dawned on her. “Of course,” she said brightly, “that is VANDALS OF THE VOID 471 your Earth-term for the period of adjustment. It is a sweet phrase. Sometimes I wish we Mar- tians were a little less practical in sentimental matters, and a little more sentimental in practical affairs. Strange that we should so reverse things. But you Earthlings, with your idealiza- tion of love, of women and what they imply, are teaching us, though” — she turned abruptly to me with eyes and cheeks glowing— “there are those of us who do not need teaching, for to us the whole-hearted gift of ourselves to our men comes as naturally as the day follows night.” “We can all teach each other something,” I told her. “We all have much to learn. Per- haps the ultimate aim is that by mixing as we do we planetarians may yet evolve a race as noble as it is good.” She smiled at that. “Too much to hope for, prophet mine. Men and women are much the same the planets over, and they will be the same strange mixtures of good and bad until the end of time.” “Well, we needn’t worry about it, as long as we’re happy in ourselves,” I remarked. My thoughts leaped off at a tangent. “Jansca, be- yond that little knife you carry in your girdle, a mere toy at that, have you any weapon of defense?” “Do I need one?” she queried. “I don’t know,” I said frankly, “but it’s just as well to be prepared. Can you use a ray tube?” “I can use anything,” she said in a tone that robbed her words of all boastfulness, “once you have shown me how.” Without more words I climbed above my bunk to the ledge where I had hidden my spare sup- plies, took down the case containing the charges and the duplicate tube. She had seen such be- fore — the ship’s guards carried them on every space-boat— but she had never held one in her hands before, and had no idea of its mechanism. But the thing was quite simple to use, and within a very few minutes she had acquired as complete a command over the weapon as though she had been handling it for years. I loaded the tube, gave her an extra clip or two of the charges, and advised her to conceal it in her dress somewhere, for the ray tube is not the sort of thing a private citizen should carry openly. “Now,” I said, as she slid it out of sight, “my mind’s at rest. At the worst you have the means at hand to defend yourself if necessary.” Her lips curved in a smile. “I wonder if it will ever be necessary,” she said softly. “I hope not.” I did not answer that, for my mind was troub- led about possibilities, and presently she spoke again. “Are you coming up on the deck for a while. Jack?” she asked. “It wants an hour or two yet of retiring time. We can sit and talk, and perhaps find pleasure in each other’s company, if not forgetfulness for the while of what hangs over us.” “Jansca, my dear,” I said chuckling, “you seem to be taking rather a pessimistic view of the situation, all of a sudden too.” “And you,” she countered, “who should be that way inclined are almost cheerful. Missing a meal seems to do you good.” As though her own words had brought back recollection she dropped her bantering tone. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she rushed on. “Of course you must be starving, and here have I been talking and keeping you from getting anything to eat. Do you think you could now?” I smiled. “I don’t know that I need food,” I told her, and I pointed to the empty glass stand- ing on the ledge beneath the faucet. For the moment she looked puzzled, then took us the glass — some of the dregs were still in it — and held it close to her nose. “Ah,” she said, “ I understand.” There came a little pause, just the merest hesitation while she was framing the thought in her mind before putting it into words. Then, “Jack, it is years since I last tasted Oxcta. Do you think tonight, seeing this is a special occasion, that a little, one sip even, would be allowed me?” “Of course,” I said without thinking, though later it occurred to me to wonder whether she could have had any foreboding of what Oxcta was to do for us that night. She declares she had not, myself I am not so sure. F IVE minutes later we made our way up deck. It was quite crowded, possibly because we were far out in space now, and the myriad stars — more than one can see on any of the inner plan- ets — set in the absolute black of the void had a singularly peaceful and soothing look. I brought Jansca’s chair and set it next to mine. Heads turned and eyes followed us, for 1 think the news of our impending mating had somehow got about on board, and interested people in us. It is worthy of record, however, that the eyes that followed us were nearly all those of Earth- lings. The Martians, as a rule, are self-con- tained enough to mind their own affairs, and the Venusians, like butterflies, never rest long any- where. Flitting and tireless they seem to be. I do not know what Jansca and I talked about. No doubt we chattered idly as lovers will. One thing is certain, we deliberately avoided all talk of the future that was likely to impinge on that dubious thing that menaced the Universe, if we were to believe the warning of the Council. A man came mincing down the deck, one seem- ingly wrapped in his own thoughts. It was the carefully selected steps that made me think it was Nomo Kell, though, for the moment, when I glanced up I did not recognize the man. He wore some quaint kind of head-gear, rather like a cap with a visor and ear-flaps, that I do not remember to have seen before, and though the ship’s heat- ers kept the temperature at normal he was muf- fled to the chin in a coat of light, shiny material. It was the first time I had noticed him dressed thus, but apparently his garments were familiar to the other passengers, for no one gave him more than a passing glance. “Nomo Kell must be feeling cold,” I remarked to Jansca. “See how he is wrapped up.” She did not answer in words, but her hand — we were very close together — tightened waming- ly on mine. Of course it was no more than coin- cidence that he should glance up at that exact 472 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY, moment and shoot a deliberately searching look towards us. It could not have been anything else that the veriest accident, for he was too far from us to have heard what I said, even if I had spoken in far louder tones. Yet Jansca’s warn- ing grip, coming at the same instant, sent a stir of uneasiness through me. What if by some species of necromancy he had been able to hear me? What, again, did it matter if he had? I dismissed the matter temporarily from my mind, and presently the man turned about, re- traced his steps and disappeared in the direction up deck from which he had originally come. But now as I watched him I fancied his steps were a little quicker, a trifle more alert, his whole attitude carrying it in a hint of impatience. I waited until he was out of sight. “Jansca,” I said, “do you really think he could have heard me?” She gave the tiniest shrug to her shoulders. “Who knows?” she said absently. “At least I thought it wise to stop you before you said more.” “But,” I objected, “there is no way he could have heard.” “Your own audiophones,” she reminded me. “That cap he wore could easily have concealed a pair.” I did not quite agree with her. The audio- phones, after all, were attuned to special re- ceivers. I had yet to learn of any invention that could pick up ordinary conversation out of the empty air without the intermediary of mechani- cal transmission. I was on the point of explaining this when of a sudden it struck me that the heaters must have developed a defect, and that some of the cold of space was trickling through our shell. The tem- perature seemed to have dropped perceptibly. Perhaps Nomo Kell with a greater sensitiveness had become aware of this before we had. “I think,” I said softly, “that our friend knew what he was about. Jansca, it strikes me it is getting cold.” She did not answer, and I turned my head to see why. Her hand, too, had suddenly gone chill in mine. I gasped. Her head had slumped down on her breast, fallen in such a way that it would have seemed the natural outcome of her nestling against me had it not been for the ici- ness of her hand. A great horror crept over me, a feeling of utter lassitude. Something within me urged me to rise to my feet, to get out of the chair and keep moving at any cost, but even the mental effort necessary to initiate such a course of action was beyond me, I did make some sort of ineffectual movement, but the only result of it was that my grip on Jansca’s cold hand loosened and it fell to her side as though weighted with lead. Through split fractions of a second — too small to measure by any accepted standard of time, though they felt like hours — the advancing tide of chill torpor crept over me, numbing my facul- ties, freezing my nerve centers. With a gasp of horror I realized what I should have realized be- fore, that we were in our turn in the grip of that mysterious force that had sent more than one space-liner floundering like a derelict about the void. And at that all things seemed to go misty be- fore me. It was as though a veil of mist had been drawn down between us and the rest of the ship, shutting me out from sound and sight and consciousness of all other life. CHAPTER XII The Space-Raiders B UT this phase must have been merely momen- tary. For a reason that became apparent later, I did not entirely lose consciousness. I must have trembled on the brink of coma for an instant, then the rising tide of life came flooding back through my veins. In some unaccountable fashion I managed to subdue the pressure of this exterior force, and a gentle glow stole over me. I felt the slight stir of movement beside me, tried to turn my head, discovered to my great surprise that now I could. I found myself look- ing into Jansca’s wide, expressive eyes. “Jansca, darling, are you all right?” I ex- claimed. “Yes,” she said quickly. “But what has gone wrong? What has happened?” “Can’t you guess?” I said. “The cold . . . . the messages I got this evening .... those space liners adrift in the void . . . .” “Oh.” There was an odd catch In her breath. Her eyes widened; her face hardened as she flung a glance about her, and saw all the others on that deck slumped down in their chairs. “The space-raiders,” she breathed. “We are in their hands. But I thought the cold. . . .” “So did I, Jansca, but for some reason we’ve managed to fight it off apparently. It’s a puz- zle.” I made a movement as though to rise, but she caught me by the arm, dragged me back, and clung fiercely to me. “What are you going to do?” she demanded. “Look about. Investigate. See what I can learn of this puzzle.” “You mustn't do anything of the sort. My dear, we’ll learn more by stopping here, remain- ing as we are, pretending to be asleep — uncon- scious — like the others. If we move round, we may blunder into something, gain nothing, lose everything. Don’t you see ? ” I nodded. There was wisdom in her sugges- tion, even though the forced inaction irked me. But she was right. Whatever we did we must not blunder. “Oh!” She caught my arm again, so tightly that I gasped. There was an odd accent of fear in the monosyllable that sent a shock through me. “What. . . .” I said. . . . “what is it?” “Look. Can’t you see it?” She pointed to the quartzite windows that gave us a view of empty space and the stars beyond. Only now it was not empty. Something that might have been a wisp of smoke, or the drift of thin rain — only that such things could not be in the airless void — seemed to be blocking the windows. Then I saw that it had blotted out the stars, that it was one with the blackness of space, so as to be invisible. VANDALS OF THE VOID 473 Had it not been that it hid the stars we would not have become aware of it. In the self-same instant we both realized what it was that we saw. It was the ship of the space raiders ! More correctly we did not see it. We could not see its shape, had no means of knowing that it was there save that it interposed between us and the stars and hid them from our vision. An idea came to me. I closed one eye. Dimly then I began to see a form, a cigar-shaped thing, the space-ship of these strange entities, resting in mid-ether, so to speak, side by side with our own vessel. No doubt its connecting port was already clamped against our port, which could be opened on the outside by the emergency man- ual machinery. Even now entrance was proba- bly being made in much the same way we had boarded the drifting M. E. 75. I opened my eye, and stared at the shape be- yond the quartzite windows with the sight of both eyes. The shape was no longer visible. It had become absorbed in the blackness of space. But I knew it was there since the myriad dia- mond-bright stars that should have met my gaze were still hidden. I was satisfied, in my own mind, however, that at last I held the clue to this mysterious quality of invisibility the raiders pos- sessed.* Jansca’s hand gripped mine tighter than ever. The same thought, I knew, was going through both our minds; the same explanation had oc- curred to me simultaneously. Now that we knew, or thought we knew, much of our apprehension had vanished. Once the nature of a danger is realized it ceases to terrify, and the way is open to combat it. “You see?” I said. “You understand what it is?” Jansca fnodded. “I know why nobody has seen them so far,” she answered, “and I can guess at the principle by which they make themselves invisible. But what I can’t yet understand. . S HE did not complete the sentence. Instead, “Hush”, she said in a fierce whisper, and slumped down in her chair, releasing my hand as she did so. I took the cue from her. No one glancing at us the next instant would have dreamt that out of all that ship’s company we two alone retained consciousness of what was going on about us. I could not see what it was that had alarmed her, and I dared not raise myself in the chair to find out. I could only wait. I did not have to wait long. But what I saw seemed for the moment so monstrous and incred- ible that I could hardly believe my eyes. A pro- cession of bodies was advancing along the deck, the bodies of those officers who should at this time of night have been in the control room. The eerie thing about it all was that the bodies were seemingly floating in the air, at a distance of three to four feet above the deck. Yet when I say floating I must stress the fact that while the extremities, heads and legs, were more or less on a level, in each case the middle part of *The precise principle underlying this problem — a question of light refraction and stereo-optics — is dealt with more fully in Chapter 13. the body sagged, dipped or drooped, whichever you care to call it. For a split second I stared, forgetting that I was supposed to be unconscious. Then quickly the meaning of it all came flooding back on me, and with it the memory of that queer tale — which I had half-disbelieved at the time — told to us by Mrs. Galon on board the M. E. 75. The unconscious figures of the officers were not floating along of their own accord ; they were being carried! Carried by those invisible enti- ties, whom, for want of a better phrase, we call- ed the space raiders. I watched. The procession came closer, drew level. At the head and shoulders of each of our men I could see now a vague misty outline, a thing that flickered uncannily in the glare from the stored-sunlight tubes that lit the deck. Neither Jansca nor I made a movement. We were too utterly unnerved to do anything save sit still and stare through lowered lids at this weird company. We saw the unconscious men depos- ited in vacant chairs, waited a moment, then came the passing in front of our eyes of those flickering' misty things. I counted. There were eight of them. I can- not be sure now, for at that exact moment Jansca made a slight movement. But it was not so much the movement itself as what it caused that mattered. She had a tiny handbag in her lap, a little thing of light and glittering metal, and as she stirred it slipped to the floor with a tinkling clatter. Foolishly she bent to pick it up before I could stop her. It was as though several columns of mist op- posite us stood still for an instant, then began to advance towards us. A chair was in the way of the oncoming entities. I know that because I saw an odd flicker behind it, then it was pushed to one side. I think I must have lost my head, that is the only explanation of what I did. I sprang to my feet, drawing my ray tube as I did so, and lev- elled it at the nearest mist-like figure. In my agitation I loosed the full charge. There came a spurt of light, and I staggered back, half-blinded. But where the mist had been a moment before there was a tumbled heap on deck, something whose outlines were rapidly thickening and taking shape. As though a body were being molded there under our eyes. Jansca must have sprung to her feet a moment after me, for almost on the heels of my discharge came another spurt of light from beside me this time, and the almost inaudible click of the ray- tube mechanism. I did not look to see what damage she had done, but tried to keep my eyes on the other mist-wraiths. They were so close to the point of absolute invisibility, however, that I found it harder than I had expected. The very vagueness of their outlines endowed them with a kind of “Will-O’-The-Wisp quality that was in itself disquieting. A moment I waited — expecting I knew not what diabolical force to be loosed on us in re- prisal. But nothing happened ; and then abrupt- ly it seemed to me the swirls of mist were van- ishing away up the deck in the direction of the control-room quarters. WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY, Ray tube in hand I started in pursuit, Jansca panting along beside me. And as I ran I flicked the button of my weapon. We did not wait to see what became of the things that fell at our feet, but kept on, for I did not know what dam- age the others might do if we did not keep them sight. The door of the control room opened and closed uncannily as we came abreast of it. It opened t - (.Illustration by Paul) That huge structure of metal, a ver- itable city of the void was visible against the background of interstellar space. •1 m •M If ■X i % mMm pm ; ' * VANDALS OF THE VOID again the very next instant and something came hissing out. What it was I could not see — eith- er because it too was invisible or else it moved too swiftly — but it passed between us and crashed against the opposite wall of the deck. A huge wet splash appeared on the Marsonite surface, as though someone had cast a bucket of water there, and the air seemed of a sudden to have turned icily chill. “We must get them,” I breathed. “Jansca, you stay here. You mustn’t take the risk.” “That’s for me to say,” she gasped with a sob in her voice. “Where you go, I go too.” There was no time to argue with her. With a feeling that we were taking our lives in our hands I dashed in through the open door of the con- trol-room, expecting every second to find another icy missile, better aimed this time, hurled at us. But nothing happened. No one opposed our pas- sage, and of the mist-wraiths there was no sign. The Two Act! T O make doubly certain we followed the des- cent down to the port against which they had linked their ship. It was very dark in the pas- sage ; for some reason the light here had failed, but we blundered on. Then, with the most sur- prising luck in the Universe, I blundered into something. What it was I could not say. It felt soft, and cold and repellent to the touch, like a dead body, save that there was a jelly-like flow of it away from under my hand. In my horror I flickered the button of my ray-tube. The catch must have slipped some- how, for I don’t think it could have given a full discharge. I heard an odd sound like a thin wail, there was a rush of cold air past me, then as something creaked under my feet I realized that we were on the edge of the passageway our 476 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY visitors had clamped against the port of the Cos- mos. I drew back abruptly, pulling Jansca with me. The planets know what would have happened had I not done so. It was purely an instinctive movement, I must say, for I hadn’t time to stop and think that the stranger ship would probably cast off at once. Yet this is much what must have happened, and had I not pulled back then another few seconds might have seen us hurled out to our deaths in space, as certainly would have happened when the connection with our port was severed. I heard a creaking almost at my feet, and blindly flashed my ray-tube in the direction from which the sound came. I know now, what I did not realize at the time, that it was the prelim- inary movement of casting off. But what I did realize the very next instant was that the air of the Cosmos was beginning to whistle off into space. I got the port closed just in time. An- other few minutes and we would have been bereft of our atmosphere. Thank Heaven the port had an automatic action from the inside and one touch of a button was sufficient to seal the Cosmos. Panting, I leaned against the port through which we and the whole ship’s company had ( nearly come to our deaths, striving to get my breathing back to normal. Jansca, who had been further back than I, had not fared so badly. No doubt that was why she was able to see initial stages of the catastrophe I had precipitated. Her cry of horror roused me. “What .... what is it?” I gasped. A quartzite window had been let into the port, and for some reason or other the slide of this had been drawn back, giving us an outlook on empty space. At the moment it framed a picture that I shall remember to my dying day. A huge space-ship, larger than anything I had ever seen, was slowly taking form before my eyes. It was a glistening monster that would have made six of the Cosmos, the latest product of the interplanetary genius though she was. But the most appalling part of what we saw was that the stranger vessel seemed as though she were break- ing in halves. A great gap showed in the quar- ter nearest to us, a red-rimmed outline, that spread as we watched. To this day I am not quite sure just exactly what had occurred, though I feel that that last flicker of my ray tube must have set my opponent afire instead of killing him out- right. How or why the blaze spread, I cannot say; the only thing of which I really can be certain is that they must have had a store of explosives of unknown potency on board. For, even as we watched, the huge ship stretched out like an over- filled balloon, and burst into a myriad fragments that whirled and glowed, that faded and passed at last in flickering extinction out into the un- charted depths of space. The Cosmos bounced like a kicked football, and the vibrations of that explosion, soundless though they were, reached out and buffeted us a thou- sand miles or more out of our course. Jansca and I were thrown against each other, and drop- ped battered, bruised and breathless on the dark floor of the passage. I climbed to my feet, spoke to her. Fumbling for her hand I found it, and helped her upright. For the moment we both gasped in the thin, rare- fied air. It was that which reminded me how narrowly we had escaped a terrible death. Ordinarily the moment the connecting tube of the stranger vessel had broken away from our open port, every scrap of air in the Cosmos should have rushed out into the vacuum of space, hurl- ing us before it like straws in a gale. But no such thing happened. Beyond the whistle and sizzle of escaping air nothing had happened. True, I had jumped at once and pressed the button that sealed the port, but ordinarily even that would not have saved us. The actual explanation was that the Cosmos was divided into a series of small, practically, air-tight compartments that could be sealed in- stantly and automatically. The abrupt with- drawal of the air in the particular compartment in which we were had by the alteration of pres- sure at once sealed the other parts of the ship against leakage, and saved our lives. Now that the port had been closed, however, valves had come into operation that allowed more air to seep gradually back into the empty compart- ment. It was the realization of this that made me go cannily. The little air left in the passage where we were was thin enough in all conscience and its effect on us was momentarily becoming more pronounced. I felt dizzy and something was wrong apparently with both my lungs and heart. Jansca, used to a greater degree to a thinner atmosphere, was not so distressed. Nevertheless the sooner we got back to a normal pressure the better for us both. I DID not waste words and air in telling her what I wanted, but drew her back to the cen- ter of the ship. She came staggering, as I most certainly did myself, until a few yards brought us up against the valved door that had fallen into place behind our backs. Though the lights were off here, there should be a switch somewhere. After some ineffectual fumbling I found it, and a tube overhead glowed brightly enough to show me the mechanism that opened the door. I turned the graduated scale, letting the air fill in by degrees, for too sudden an alteration of pressure might have done us im- mense harm. Gradually our lungs filled out, our hearts ceased racing and our distress vanished. We could open the door now and pass on without any bad results. The rest of the way, too, was lighted. Jansca still clung to me. Now that the worst was over the reaction had come, and it wats hard to recognize her as the daring Amazon who had taken a stand beside me and driven the strange invaders from our ship. I made at once for the control room, for I had no idea how the vessel was drifting, and until I saw the charts and dials there was no way of determining how fa!r off our course we were. It took a few minutes’ intricate calculation before I learned what I wished to know. That done it was a simple matter to correct the error, and VANDALS OF THE VOID 477 bring the Cosmos back to the space-lane she had been following. Locking the gears so that we could not slew off again I turned away to find Jansca regarding me. “Well, my dear,” she said, “is it all right now? I didn’t care to interrupt you before by speaking. I know how important it is for us to get back at once on our course.” “I think everything’s right as far as this end of it is concerned,” I told her, “but there’s still quite a lot for us to do.” I took her in my arms and kissed her. “That,” I said, “is for the help you’ve given me. Come on now, my dear, better not waste more time. I’m not sure, you see, whether we killed or mere- ly paralyzed those folk we dropped, so keep your ray tube handy in case of trouble.” I think she must have forgotten till that mo- ment that, dead or alive, there were still some of the space-raiders left on board. She started at my words and her face paled. Our fears were groundless, however. None of the raiders was left alive. Jansca and I, by some species of lucky accident, had killed all those we struck. There were seven of them, scattered at intervals along the route from the control floor to the spot on the promenade deck where we had first encountered them. Whatever the process they used to render themselves invisible, its ef- fects evidently were neutralized by the discharge from our ray-tubes, for the bodies themselves were now quite plain to be seen. We did not linger to examine them, however. More pressing matters awaited our attention, and when we got Hume and his assistants revived, then would be time enough to satisfy our very natural curiosity. Either we had not been treated to as big a dose of the anesthetic cold as the M. E. 75, or else something had happened to neutralize it very quickly, for there were signs, as we made our way down the deck, that some of the company were already stirring. Hume, as a matter of fact, had slid down from the chair on which they placed him — not too carefully it appeared— -and was lolling on the decking in a sitting position with his back resting against the chair. I caught him by the shoulder and shook him. He opened his eyes, blinked stupidly, then lurch- ed sideways as though he were going off into a faint. I caught him. “Steady on,” I said. “Here, wake up!” And I shook him again. This time he opened his eyes to their full, stared from Jansca to me in a puzzled fashion. “Ah, Sanders,” he said slowly, “what's wrong?” “Look here, Hume,” I said desperately, “pull yourself together as quick as you can. Some- thing has gone wrong, terribly wrong, but I can’t tell you while you’re in that state. Make an effort, man.” He held out his hand to me, and with an effort I hauled him to his feet. He stood there an in- stant swaying, then with what must have been a powerful effort of will he got himself under control. “Go on, Jack,” he said urgently. “I think I’m all right now. I’m coming round at any rate. What has happened? The last I can remember is doing something in the control-room, and now I come to and find myself out here. It’s not — ?” He did not finish the sentence, but a flicker of alarm passed across his face. I guessed what he had left unsaid. “Those space-visitors we were warned against,” I said. “Yes, we had a raid from them, though this time there’s been casualties.” “Casualties? Gods! Any of us killed?” “No. The raiders. Jansca and I. ...” I stopped, finishing with an expressive gesture. “But how” — his brow wrinkled — “how in the stars did you escape ? Why weren’t you sent off into a coma too?” “I don’t know, not rightly. I’ve my own ideas, but they can wait for explanation until later. Meanwhile. ... Do you feel better now?” “Much.” He brushed a hand across his brow and involuntarily squared his shoulders. “This stuff seems to wear off quickly, once one opens one’s eyes. Head a bit dizzy still, but I think I can carry on. But, Jack, the ship!” “I’ve set her on her course. The automatic control will carry on.” “But a meteorite. ... If we should strike one.” “I think the locator and the repeller ray will deal with it before that happens. Still for the time being we’ll have to take our chance. I would suggest, however, that we lessen the pos- sibility of danger by waking up the rest of your fellows.” He made a movement as though to go off and do it at once. I caught his sleeve. “Stay,” I said. “Jansca will attend to that. You and I have other things to do. We’ve killed some of the space-raiders. Their bodies. . . .” “Yes?” he said quickly. “. . . . Had better be taken from here. We don’t want curious passengers prying around. Perhaps you and I between us can get them on to the control-deck. Then we may have the worst of it over before the bulk of the passengers are awake enough to realize what we’re doing.” He hesitated a moment, then looked around. Jansca, dear, loveable, helpful soul, had not wait- ed for me to make a direct request. The moment she had heard my suggestion she had gone sys- tematically to rouse the unconscious officers, and acquaint them with the situation. “All right.” Hume took a step forward. “Your suggestion is a good one. The less we alarm anyone the better.” T HE details of our task can well be spared, but it was over and done with and our space-visit- ors removed to the control-deck in less time than we had anticipated. Jansca, too, had done her work well. When, at last, we paused for breath and looked about us, it was to find that the of- ficers had trickled back to their places, looking sick and bewildered. The mechanical side of the running of the ship was being taken up again where it had been incontinently dropped. The passengers, too, were stirring, all aware that something bizarre had occurred while they were unconscious. Each tried to fit his or her own impression in with those of their neighbors 478 WONDER STORIES QUARTERLY in the vain hope of forming some intelligible de- sign from the whole. The guard-bar at the en- trance to the control deck was set, however, and a junior officer stationed there to prevent any invasion of our privacy. Curious as they might be, the passengers would have to wait their turn. The moment we began to take up running again I gave Hume an outline of what had trans- pired. I could see that he was not quite sure whether to be most impressed by our luck — he called it daring — in clearing the ship between us, or puzzled because the general coma seemed to have passed us by. It was pretty plain to me now why we had not been left unaffected, but the reason of it was something that I did not want to advertise unduly. I fancied he would agree with me when he knew. “And now,” I said, “perhaps it would be as well to have a look at our bag.” Thus unfeelingly I spoke of the dead space- visitors, yet in a way I could feel no contact of humanity with them. That they were not or- dinary interstellar bandits I felt convinced al- ready ; they were alien beings with whom my ex- perience had nothing in common. Jansca moved forward with us. I would rath- er she kept away, but she was insistent and for once I did not gainsay her. An odd sense of familiarity struck me the mo- ment I had leisure to look the dead beings over carefully. There were, I think I have noted, seven in all, and each was clad from neck to knee in a coat of some light shiny material, the head of each was covered by a cap of the same stuff with a mica-like transparency in front for the eyes. I gasped as I realized where I had seen such garments before. Jansca too, recalled, for her eyes met mine meaningly. I bent down swiftly, fumbled with the visor of the helmet. Inadvertently I must have press- ed some spring, for the visor shot back, revealing the face of the dead being. Even in death there was a certain horrible suggestion of malig- nant power about it that made me recoil invol- untarily. But in an instant I recovered myself. A cry from Hume brought me round to him. He had been examining the next being, and had managed to get the helmet clean off the head. As I turned he was standing with it in his hand, an expression of utter amazement stamped on his face. “What is it?” I cried, and Jansca and I moved a step nearer. “Look!” he said huskily, pointing. We looked. The wide staring eyes, vacant of life now, were an odd shade of purple, the pupils queerly flecked ; the skin of the face was an odd blotchy red and starting at the forehead and run- ning back to the occiput was a horn-like ridge. I nodded. “They’re all like that,” I said. “They’re all the same race, no doubt of that.” “Yes, yes,” Hume said quickly, “but this par- ticular one. . . . He’s not a stranger. I’ve seen his face before. . . .on this ship.” “I know,” I said deliberately, letting the words sink in. “And his name, in case you have for- gotten, is Nomo Kell.” CHAPTER XIII Rendezvous <