Tuesday's Serial: "Brigands of the Moon (The Book of Gregg Haljan)" by Ray Cummings (in English) IX

CHAPTER XXI - The Wreck of the Planetara

                On the Planetara, in the helio-room, Snap and I stood with Moa's weapon upon us. Miko held Anita. Triumphant. Possessive. Then as she struggled, a gentleness came to this strange Martian giant. Perhaps he really loved her. Looking back on it, I sometimes think so.

                "Anita, do not fear me." He held her away from him. "I would not harm you. I want your love." Irony came to him. "And I thought I had killed you! But it was only your brother."

                He partly turned. I was aware of how alert was his attention. He grinned. "Hold them, Moa—don't let them do anything foolish. So, Anita, you were masquerading to spy upon me? That was wrong of you." He was again ironic.

                Anita had not spoken. She held herself tensely away from Miko; she had flashed me a look—just one. What horrible mischance to have brought this catastrophe!

                The completion of Grantline's message had come unnoticed by us all.

                "Look! Grantline again!" Snap said abruptly.

                But the mirrors were steadying. We had no recording-tape apparatus; the rest of the message was lost. The mirrors pulsed and then steadied.

                No further message came. There was an interval while Miko waited. He held Anita in the hollow of his great arm.

                "Quiet, little bird. Do not fear me. I have work to do, Anita—this is our great adventure. We will be rich, you and I. All the luxuries three worlds can offer, all for us when this is over. Careful, Moa! This Haljan has no wit."

                Well could he say it! I, who had been so witless to let this come upon us! Moa's weapon prodded me. Her voice hissed at me with all the venom of a reptile enraged. "So that was your game, Gregg Haljan! And I was so graceless to admit love for you!"

                Snap murmured in my ear, "Don't move, Gregg! She's reckless."

                She heard it. She whirled on him. "We have lost George Prince, it seems. Well, we will survive without his ore knowledge. And you, Dean—and this Haljan—mark me, I will kill you both if you cause trouble!"

                Miko was gloating. "Don't kill them yet, Moa. What was it Grantline said? Near the crater of Archimedes? Ring us down, Haljan! We'll land."

                He signaled the turret. Gave Coniston the Grantline message, and audiphoned it below to Hahn. The news spread about the ship. The bandits were jubilant.

                "We'll land now, Haljan. Ring us down. Come, Anita and I will go with you to the turret."

                I found my voice. "To what destination?"

                "Near Archimedes. The Apennine side. Keep well away from the Grantline camp. We will probably sight it as we descend."

                There was no trajectory needed. We were almost over Archimedes now. I could drop us with a visible, instrumental course. My mind was whirling with a confusion of thoughts. What could we do? What could we dare attempt to do? I met Snap's gaze.

                "Ring us down, Gregg," he said quietly.

                I nodded. I pushed Moa's weapon away. "You don't need that. I obey orders."

                We went to the turret. Moa watched me and Snap, a grim, cold Amazon. She avoided looking at Anita, whom Miko helped down the ladders with a strange mixture of courtierlike grace and amused irony. Coniston gazed at Anita with falling jaw.

                "I say! Not George Prince? The girl—"

                "No time for argument now," Miko commanded. "It's the girl, masquerading as her brother. Get below, Coniston. Haljan takes us down."

                The astounded Englishman continued gazing at Anita. "I mean to say, where to on the Moon? Not to encounter Grantline at once, Miko? Our equipment is not ready."

                "Of course not. We will land well away. He won't be suspicious—we can signal him again after we land. We will have time to plan, to assemble the equipment. Get below, I told you."

                The reluctant Coniston left us. I took the controls. Miko, still holding Anita as though she were a child, sat beside me. "We will watch him, little Anita. A skilled fellow at this sort of work."

                I rang my signals for the shifting of the gravity plates. The answer should have come from below within a second or two. But it did not. Miko regarded me with his great bushy eyebrows upraised.

                "Ring again, Haljan."

                I duplicated. No answer. The silence was frightening. Ominous.

                Miko muttered, "That accursed Hahn. Ring again!"

                I sent the imperative emergency demand.

                No answer. A second or two. Then all of us in the turret were startled. Transfixed. From below came a sudden hiss. It sounded in the turret: it came from shifting-room call-grid. The hissing of the pneumatic valves of the plate-shifters in the lower control room. The valves were opening; the plates automatically shifting into neutral, and disconnecting!

                An instant of startled silence. Miko may have realized the significance of what had happened. Certainly Snap and I did. The hissing ceased. I gripped the emergency plate-shifter switch which hung over my head. Its disc was dead! The plates were dead in neutral. In the positions they were only placed while in port! And their shifting mechanisms were imperative!

                I was on my feet. "Snap! Good God, we're in neutral!"

                Miko, if he had not realized it before, was aware if it now. The Moon-disc moved visibly as the Planetara lurched. The vault of the heavens was slowly swinging.

                Miko ripped out a heavy oath. "Haljan! What is this?"

                He stood up, still holding Anita. But there was nothing that he could do in this emergency. "Haljan—what—"

                The heavens turned with a giant swoop. The Moon was over us. It swung in dizzying arc. Overhead, then back past our stern; under us, then appearing over our bow.

                The Planetara had turned over. Upending. Rotating, end over end.

                For a moment or two I think all of us in that turret stood and clung. The Moon-disc, the Earth, Sun and all the stars were swinging past our windows. So horribly dizzying. The Planetara seemed lurching and tumbling. But it was an optical effect only. I stared with grim determination at my feet. The turret seemed to steady.

                Then I looked again. That horrible swoop of all the heavens! And the Moon, as it went past, seemed expanded. We were falling! Out of control, with the Moon-gravity pulling us inexorably down!

                "That accursed Hahn—" Miko, stricken with his lack of knowledge of these controls, was wholly confused.

                A moment only had passed. My fancy that the Moon-disc was enlarged was merely the horror of my imagination. We had not fallen far enough yet for that.

                But we were falling. Unless I could do something, we would crash upon the Lunar surface.

                Anita, killed in this Planetara turret. The end of everything for us.

                Action came to me. I gasped, "Miko, you stay here! The controls are dead! You stay here—hold Anita."

                I ignored Moa's weapon which she was still clutching mechanically. Snap thrust her away.

                "Sit back! Let us alone! We're falling! Don't you understand?"

                This deadly danger, to level us all! No longer were we captors and captured. Not brigands for this moment. No thought of Grantline's treasure! Trapped humans only! Leveled by the common, instinct of self-preservation. Trapped here together, fighting for our lives.

                Miko gasped. "Can you—check us? What happened?"

                "I don't know. I'll try."

                I stood clinging. This dizzying whirl! From the audiphone grid Coniston's voice sounded.

                "I say, Haljan, something's wrong! Hahn doesn't signal."

                The look-out in the forward tower was clinging to his window. On the deck below our turret a member of the crew appeared, stood lurching for a moment, then shouted, and turned and ran, swaying, aimless. From the lower hull-corridors our grids sounded with the tramping of running steps. Panic among the crew was spreading over the ship. A chaos below decks.

                I pulled at the emergency switch again. Dead...

                But down below there was the manual controls.

                "Snap, we must get down. The signals."

                "Yes."

                Coniston's voice came like a scream from the grid. "Hahn is dead—the controls are broken! Hahn is dead!"

                We barely heard him. I shouted, "Miko—hold Anita! Come on, Snap!"

                We clung to the ladders. Snap was behind me. "Careful, Gregg! Good God!"

                This dizzying whirl. I tried not to look. The deck under me was now a blurred kaleidoscope of swinging patches of moonlight and shadow.

                We reached the deck. Ran, swaying, lurching.

                It seemed that from the turret Anita's voice followed us. "Be careful!"

                Within the ship our senses steadied. With the rotating, reeling, heavens shut out, there were only the shouts and tramping steps of the panic-stricken crew to mark that anything was amiss. That, and a pseudo-sensation of lurching caused by the pulsing of gravity—a pull when the Moon was beneath our hull to combine its force with our magnetizers; a lightening when it was overhead. A throbbing, pendulum lurch—that was all.

                We ran down to the corridor incline. A white-faced member of the crew, came running up.

                "What's happened? Haljan, what's happened?"

                "We're falling!" I gripped him. "Get below. Come on with us!"

                But he jerked away from me. "Falling?"

                A steward came running. "Falling? My God!"

                Snap swung at them. "Get ahead of us! The manual controls—our only chance—we need all you men at the compressor pumps!"

                But it was an instinct to try and get on deck, as though here below we were rats caught in a trap. The men tore away from me and ran. Their shouts of panic resounded through the dim, blue-lit corridors.

                Coniston came lurching from the control room. "I say—falling! Haljan, my God, look at him!"

                Hahn was sprawled at the gravity-plate switchboard. Sprawled, head-down. Dead. Killed by something? Or a suicide?

                I bent over him. His hands gripped the main switch. He had ripped it loose. And his left hand had reached and broken the fragile line of tubes that intensified the current of the pneumatic plate-shifters. A suicide? With his last frenzy determined to kill us all?

                Then I saw that Hahn had been killed! Not a suicide! In his hand he gripped a small segment of black fabric, a piece torn from an invisible cloak? Was it?

                The questions were swept away by the necessity for action. Snap was rigging the hand-compressors. If he could get the pressure back in the tanks...

                I swung on Coniston. "You armed?"

                "Yes." He was white-faced and confused, but not in a panic. He showed me his heat-ray cylinder. "What do you want me to do?"

                "Round up the crew. Get all you can. Bring them here to man these pumps."

                He dashed away. Snap shouted after him. "Kill them down if they argue!"

                Miko's voice sounded from the turret call grid: "Falling! Haljan, you can see it now! Check us!"

                I did not answer that. I pumped with Snap.

                Desperate moments. Or was it an hour? Coniston brought the men. He stood over them with menacing weapon.

                We had all the pumps going. The pressure rose a little in the tanks. Enough to shift a bow-plate. I tried it. The plate slowly clicked into a new combination. A gravity repulsion just in the bow-tip.

                I signaled Miko. "Have we stopped swinging?"

                "No. But slower."

                I could feel it, that lurch of the gravity. But not steady now. A limp. The tendency of our bow was to stay up.

                "More pressure, Snap."

                "Yes."

                One of the crew rebelled, tried to bolt from the room. "God, we'll crash, caught in here!"

                Coniston shot him down.

                I shifted another bow-plate. Then two in the stern. The stern-plates seemed to move more readily than the others.

                "Run all the stern-plates," Snap advised.

                I tried it. The lurching stopped. Miko called. "We're bow down. Falling!"

                But not falling free. The Moon-gravity pull upon us was more than half neutralized.

                "I'll go up, Snap, and try the engines. You don't mind staying down? Executing my signals?"

                "You idiot!" He gripped my shoulders. His eyes were gleaming, his face haggard, but his pale lips twitched with a smile.

                "Maybe it's good-by, Gregg. We'll fall—fighting."

                "Yes. Fighting. Coniston, you keep the pressure up."

                With the broken set-tubes it took nearly all the pressure to maintain the few plates I had shifted. One slipped back to neutral. Then the pumps gained on it, and it shifted again.

                I dashed up to the deck. Ah, the Moon was so close now! So horribly close! The deck shadows were still. Through the forward bow windows the Moon surface glared up at us.

                I reached the turret. The Planetara was steady. Pitched bow-down, half falling, half sliding like a rocket downward. The scarred surface of the Moon spread wide under us.

                These last horrible minutes were a blur. And there was always Anita's face. She left Miko. Faced with death, he sat clinging. Ignoring her, Moa, too, sat apart. Staring—

                And Anita crept to me. "Gregg, dear one. The end..."

                I tried the electronic engines from the stern, setting them in the reverse. The streams of their light glowed from the stern, forward along our hull, and flared down from our bow toward the Lunar surface. But no atmosphere was here to give resistance. Perhaps the electronic streams checked our fall a little. The pumps gave us pressure, just in the last minutes, to slide a few of the hull-plates. But our bow stayed down. We slid, like a spent rocket falling.

                I recall the horror of that expanding Lunar surface. The maw of Archimedes yawning. A blob. Widening to a great pit. Then I saw it was to one side. Rushing upward.

                A phantasmagoria of uprushing crags. Black and gray. Spires tinged with Earth-light.

                "Gregg, dear one—good-by."

                Her gentle arms around me. The end of everything for us. I recall murmuring, "Not falling free, Anita. Some hull-plates are set."

                My dials showed another plate shifting, checking us a little further. Good old Snap.

                I calculated the next best plate to shift. I tried it. Slid it over. Good old Snap...

                Then everything faded but the feeling of Anita's arms around me.

                "Gregg, dear one—"

                The end of everything for us...

                There was an up-rush of gray-black rock.

                An impact...

               

CHAPTER XXII - The Hiss of Death

                I opened my eyes to a dark blur of confusion. My shoulder hurt—a pain shooting through it. Something lay like a weight on me. I could not seem to move my left arm. Very queer! Then I moved it, and it hurt. I was lying twisted: I sat up. And with a rush, memory came. The crash was over. I am not dead. Anita—

                She was lying beside me. There was a little light here in this silent blur—a soft, mellow Earth-light filtering in the window. The weight on me was Anita. She lay sprawled, her head and shoulders half way across my lap.

                Not dead! Thank God, not dead! She moved. Her arms went around me, and I lifted her. The Earth-light glowed on her pale face; but her eyes opened and she faintly smiled.

                "It's past, Anita! We've struck, and we're still alive."

                I held her as though all life's turgid danger were powerless to touch us.

                But in the silence my floating senses were brought back to reality by a faint sound forcing itself upon me. A little hiss. The faintest murmuring breath like a hiss. Escaping air!

                I cast off her clinging arms. "Anita, this is madness!"

                For minutes we must have been lying there in the heaven of our embrace. But air was escaping! The Planetara's dome was broken—or cracked—and our precious air was hissing out.

                Full reality came to me at last. I was not seriously injured. I found that I could move freely. I could stand. A twisted shoulder, a limp left arm, but they were better in a moment.

                And Anita did not seem to be hurt. Blood was upon her. But not her blood.

                Beside Anita, stretched face down on the turret grid, was the giant figure of Miko. The blood lay in a small pool against his face. A widening pool.

                Moa was here. I thought her body twitched; then was still. This soundless wreckage! In the dim glow of the wrecked turret with its two motionless, broken human figures, it seemed as though Anita and I were ghouls prowling. I saw that the turret had fallen over to the Planetara's deck. It lay dashed against the dome-side.

                The deck was aslant. A litter of wreckage. A broken human figure showed—one of the crew, who at the last must have come running up. The forward observation tower was down on the chart-room roof: in its metal tangle I thought I could see the legs of the tower look-out.

                So this was the end of the brigands' adventure! The Planetara's last voyage! How small and futile are human struggles! Miko's daring enterprise—so villainous, inhuman—brought all in a few moments to this silent tragedy. The Planetara had fallen thirty thousand miles. But why? What had happened to Hahn? And where was Coniston, down in this broken hull?

                And Snap. I thought suddenly of Snap.

                I clutched at my wandering wits. This inactivity was death. The escaping air hissed in my ears. Our precious air, escaping away into the vacant desolation of the Lunar emptiness. Through one of the twisted, slanting dome-windows a rocky spire was visible. The Planetara lay bow-down, wedged in a jagged cradle of Lunar rock. A miracle that the hull and dome had held together.

                "Anita, we must get out of here!"

                I thought I was fully alert now. I recalled that the brigands had spoken of having partly assembled their Moon equipment. If only we could find suits and helmets!

                "We must get out," I repeated. "Get to Grantline's camp."

"Their helmets are in the forward storage room, Gregg. I saw them there."

                She was staring at the fallen Miko and Moa. She shuddered and turned away and gripped me. "In the forward storage room, by the port of the emergency lock-exit."

                If only the exit locks would operate! We must get out of here, but find Snap first. Good old Snap! Would we find him lying dead?

                We climbed from the slanting, fallen turret, over the wreckage of the littered deck. It was not difficult, a lightness was upon us. The Planetara's gravity-magnetizers were dead: this was only the light Moon-gravity pulling us.

                "Careful, Anita. Don't jump too freely."

                We leaped along the deck. The hiss of the escaping pressure was like a clanging gong of warning to tell us to hurry. The hiss of death so close!

                "Snap—" I murmured.

                "Oh, Gregg. I pray we may find him alive—!"

                "And get out. We've got to rush it. Get out and find the Grantline camp."

                But how far? Which way? I must remember to take food and water. If the helmets were equipped with admission ports. If we could find Snap. If the exit locks would work to let us out.

                With a fifteen foot leap we cleared a pile of broken deck chairs. A man lay groaning near them. I went back with a rush. Not Snap! A steward. He had been a brigand, but he was a steward to me now.

                "Get up! This is Haljan. Hurry, we must get out of here. The air is escaping!"

                But he sank back and lay still. No time to find if I could help him: there were Anita and Snap to save.

                We found a broken entrance to one of the descending passages. I flung the debris aside and cleared it. Like a giant of strength with only this Moon-gravity holding me, I raised a broken segment of the superstructure and heaved it back.

                Anita and I dropped ourselves down the sloping passage. The interior of the wrecked ship was silent and dim. An occasional passage light was still burning. The passage and all the rooms lay askew. Wreckage everywhere: but the double-dome and hull-shell had withstood the shock. Then I realized that the Erentz system was slowing down. Our heat, like our air, was escaping, radiating away, a deadly chill settling upon everything. And our walls were bulging. The silence and the deadly chill of death would soon be here in these wrecked corridors. The end of the Planetara. I wondered vaguely if the walls would explode.

                We prowled like ghouls. We did not see Coniston. Snap had been by the shifter-pumps. We found him in the oval doorway. He lay sprawled. Dead? No, he moved. He sat up before we could get to him. He seemed confused, but his senses clarified with the movement of our figures over him.

                "Gregg! Why, Anita!"

                "Snap! You're all right? We struck—the air is escaping."

                He pushed me away. He tried to stand. "I'm all right. I was up a minute ago. Gregg, it's getting cold. Where is she? I had her here—she wasn't killed. I spoke to her."

                Irrational!

                "Snap!" I held him, shook him. "Snap, old fellow!"

                He said, normally. "Easy, Gregg. I'm all right now."

                Anita gripped him. "Who, Snap?"

                "She! There she is."

                Another figure was here! On the grid-floor by the door oval. A figure partly shrouded in a broken invisible cloak and hood. An invisible cloak! I saw a white face with opened eyes regarding me. The face of a girl.

                Venza!

                I bent down. "You!"

                Anita cried, "Venza!"

                Venza here? Why—how—my thoughts swept away. Venza here, dying? Her eyes closed. But she murmured to Anita. "Where is he? I want him."

                Dying? I murmured impulsively, "Here I am, Venza dear." Gently, as one would speak with gentle sympathy to humor the dying. "Here I am, Venza."

                But it was only the confusion of the shock upon her. And it was upon us all. She pushed at Anita. "I want him." She saw me. This whimsical Venus girl! Even here as we gathered, all of us blurred by the shock, confused in the dim, wrecked ship with the chill of death coming—even here she could make a jest. Her pale lips smiled.

                "You, Gregg. I'm not hurt—I don't think I'm hurt." She managed to get herself up on one elbow. "Did you think I wanted you with my dying breath? Why, what conceit! Not you, Handsome Haljan! I was calling Snap."

                He was down to her. "We're all right, Venza. It's over. We must get out of the ship—the air is escaping."

                We gathered in the oval doorway. We fought the confusion of panic.

                "The exit port is this way."

                Or was it? I answered Snap, "Yes, I think so."

                The ship suddenly seemed a stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless. Broken lights. These slanting, wrecked corridors. With the ventilating fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarifying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks of my burning cheeks.

                We started off. Four of us, still alive in this silent ship of death. My blurred thoughts tried to cope with it all. Venza here. I recalled how she had bade me create a diversion when the women passengers were landing on the asteroid. She had carried out her purpose! In the confusion she had not gone ashore. A stowaway here. She had secured the cloak. Prowling, to try and help us, she had come upon Hahn. Had seized his ray-cylinder and struck him down, and been herself knocked unconscious by his dying lunge, which also had broken the tubes and wrecked the Planetara. And Venza, unconscious, had been lying here with the mechanism of her cloak still operating, so that we did not see her when we came and found why Hahn did not answer my signals.

                "It's here, Gregg."

                Snap and I lifted the pile of Moon equipment. We located four suits and helmets and the mechanisms to operate them.

                "More are in the chart-room," Anita said.

                But we needed no others. I robed Anita, and showed her the mechanisms.

                "Yes. I understand."

                Snap was helping Venza. We were all stiff from the cold; but within the suits and their pulsing currents, the blessed warmth came again.

                The helmets had admission ports through which food and drink could be taken. I stood with my helmet ready. Anita, Venza and Snap were bloated and grotesque beside me. We had found food and water here, assembled in portable cases which the brigands had prepared. Snap lifted them, and signed to me he was ready.

                My helmet shut out all sounds save my own breathing, my pounding heart, and the murmur of the mechanism. The blessed warmth and pure air were good.

                We reached the hull port-locks. They operated! We went through in the light of the head-lamps over our foreheads.

                I closed the locks after us. An instinct to keep the air in the ship for the other trapped humans lying there.

                We slid down the sloping side of the Planetara. We were unweighted, irrationally agile with the slight gravity. I fell a dozen feet and landed with barely a jar.

                We were out on the Lunar surface. A great sloping ramp of crags stretched down before us. Gray-black rock tinged with Earth-light. The Earth hung amid the stars in the blackness overhead like a huge section of glowing yellow ball.

                This grim, desolate, silent landscape! Beyond the ramp, fifty feet below us, a tumbled naked plain stretched away into blurred distance. But I could see mountains off there. Behind us the towering, frowning rampart-wall of Archimedes loomed against the sky.

                I had turned to look back at the Planetara. She lay broken, wedged between spires of upstanding rock. A few of her lights still gleamed. The end of the Planetara!

                The three grotesque figures of Anita, Venza and Snap had started off. Hunchback figures with the tanks mounted on their shoulders. I bounded and caught them. I touched Snap. We made audiphone contact.

                "Which way do you think?" I demanded.

                "I think this way, down the ramp. Away from Archimedes, toward the mountains. It shouldn't be too far."

                "You run with Venza. I'll hold Anita."

                He nodded. "But we must keep together, Gregg."

                We could soon run freely. Down the ramp, out over the tumbled plain. Bounding, grotesque leaping strides. The girls were more agile, more skilful. They were soon leading us. The Earth-shadows of their figures leaped beside them. The Planetara faded into the distance behind us. Archimedes stood back there. Ahead, the mountains came closer.

                An hour perhaps. I lost count of time. Occasionally we stopped to rest. Were we going toward the Grantline camp? Would they see our tiny waving headlights?

                Another interval. Then far ahead of us on the ragged plain, lights showed! Moving tiny spots of light! Headlights on helmeted figures!

                We ran, monstrously leaping. A group of figures were off there. Grantline's party? Snap gripped me.

                "Grantline! We're safe, Gregg! Safe!"

                He took his bulb-light from his helmet: we stood in a group while he waved it. A semaphore signal.

                "Grantline?"

                And the answer came. "Yes. You, Dean?"

                Their personal code. No doubt of this—it was Grantline, who had seen the Planetara fall and had come to help us.

                I stood then with my hand holding Anita. And I whispered, "It's Grantline! We're safe, Anita, my darling!"

                Death had been so close! Those horrible last minutes on the Planetara had shocked us, marked us.

                We stood trembling. And Grantline and his men came bounding up.

                A helmeted figure touched me. I saw through the helmet-pane the visage of a stern-faced, square-jawed, youngish man.

                "Grantline? Johnny Grantline?"

                "Yes," said his voice at my ear-grid. "I'm Grantline. You're Haljan? Gregg Haljan?"

                They crowded around us. Gripped us to hear our explanations.

                Brigands! It was amazing to Johnny Grantline. But the menace was over now, over as soon as Grantline had realized its existence. As though the wreck of the Planetara were foreordained by an all-wise Providence, the brigands' adventure had come to tragedy.

                We stood for a time discussing it. Then I drew apart, leaving Snap with Grantline. And Anita joined me. I held her arm so that we had audiphone contact.

                "Anita, mine."

                "Gregg, dear one."

                Murmured nothings which mean so much to lovers!

                As we stood in the fantastic gloom of the Lunar desolation, with the blessed Earth-light on us, I sent up a prayer of thankfulness. Not that a hundred millions of treasure were saved. Not that the attack upon Grantline had been averted. But only that Anita was given back to me. In moments of greatest emotion the human mind individualizes. To me, there was only Anita.

                Life is very strange! The gate to the shining garden of our love seemed swinging wide to let us in. Yet I recall that a vague fear still lay on me. A premonition?

                I felt a touch on my arm. A bloated helmet visor was thrust near my own. I saw Snap's face peering at me.

                "Grantline thinks we should return to the Planetara. Might find some of them alive."

                Grantline touched me. "It's only humanity."

                "Yes," I said.

                We went back. Some ten of us—a line of grotesque figures bounding with slow, easy strides over the jagged, rock-strewn plain. Our lights danced before us.

                The Planetara came at last into view. My ship. Again that pang swept me as I saw her. This, her last resting place. She lay here in her open tomb, shattered, broken, unbreathing. The lights on her were extinguished. The Erentz system had ceased to pulse—the heart of the dying ship, for a while beating faintly, but now at rest.

                We left the two girls with some of Grantline's men at the admission port. Snap, Grantline and I, with three others, went inside. There still seemed to be air, but not enough so that we dared remove our helmets.

                It was dark inside the wrecked ship. The corridors were black; the hull control-rooms were dimly illumined with Earth-light straggling through the windows.

                This littered tomb! Already cold and silent with death. We stumbled over a fallen figure. A member of the crew.

                Grantline straightened from examining him.

                "Dead."

                Earth-light fell on the horrible face. Puffed flesh, bloated red from the blood which had oozed from its pores in the thinning air. I looked away.

                We prowled further. Hahn lay dead in the pump-room.

                The body of Coniston should have been near here. We did not see it.

                We climbed up to the slanting littered deck. The dome had not exploded, but the air up here had almost all hissed away.

                Again Grantline touched me. "That the turret?"

                "Yes."

                No wonder he asked! The wreckage was all so formless.

                We climbed after Snap into the broken turret room. We passed the body of that steward who just at the end had appealed to me and I had left dying. The legs of the forward look-out still poked grotesquely up from the wreckage of the observatory tower where it lay smashed down against the roof of the chart-room.

                We shoved ourselves into the turret. What was this? No bodies here! The giant Miko was gone! The pool of his blood lay congealed into a frozen dark splotch on the metal grid.

                And Moa was gone! They had not been dead. Had dragged themselves out of here, fighting desperately for life. We would find them somewhere around here.

                But we did not. Nor Coniston. I recalled what Anita had said: other suits and helmets had been here in the nearby chart-room. The brigands had taken them, and food and water doubtless, and escaped from the ship, following us through the lower admission ports only a few minutes after we had gone out.

                We made careful search of the entire ship. Eight of the bodies which should have been here were missing: Miko, Moa, Coniston, and five of the steward-crew.

                We did not find them outside. They were hiding near here, no doubt, more willing to take their chances than to yield now to us. But how, in all this Lunar desolation, could we hope to locate them?

                "No use," said Grantline. "Let them go. If they want death—well, they deserve it."

                But we were saved. Then, as I stood there, realization leaped at me. Saved? Were we not indeed fatuous fools?

                In all these emotion-swept moments since we had encountered Grantline, memory of that brigand ship coming from Mars had never once occurred to Snap or me!

                I told Grantline now. His eyes through the visor stared at me blankly.

                "What!"

                I told him again. It would be here in eight days. Fully manned and armed.

                "But Haljan, we have almost no weapons! All my Comet's space was taken with mining equipment and the mechanisms for my camp. I can't signal Earth! I was depending on the Planetara!"

                It surged upon us. The brigand menace past? We were blindly congratulating ourselves on our safety! But it would be eight days or more before in distant Ferrok-Shahn the non-arrival of the Planetara would cause any real comment. No one was searching for us—no one was worried over us.

                No wonder the crafty Miko was willing to take his chances out here in the Lunar wilds! His ship, his reinforcements, his weapons were coming rapidly!

                And we were helpless. Almost unarmed. Marooned here on the Moon with our treasure!