standing upon a table.
“Fellow travelers,” King addressed them, “our course of action has been decided.
There are two hundred three of us. There will be twenty sections of ten persons, each
section being in charge of one of the officers of the Arcturus. Doctor Penfield, our
surgeon, a man whose intelligence, fairness and integrity are unquestioned, will be in
supreme command. His power and authority will be absolute, limited only by the
Callistonian Council. He will work in harmony with the engineer who is to direct the
entire project of building the new vessel. Each of you will be expected to do whatever he
can—the work you will be asked to do will be well within your power, and you will each
have ample leisure for recreation, study, and amusement, of all of which you will find
unsuspected stores in this underground community. You will each be registered and
studied by physicians, surgeons, and psychologists; and each of you will have
prescribed for him the exact diet that is necessary for his best development. You will
find this diet somewhat monotonous compared to our normal fare of natural products,
since it is wholly synthetic; but that is one of the minor drawbacks that must be endured.
Chief Pilot Breckenridge and I will not be with you. In some small and partial
recompense for what they are doing for us all, he and I are going with Captain Czuv to
Callisto, there to see whether or not we can aid them in any way in the fight against the
hexans. One last word—Doctor Penfield’s rulings will be the products of his own well-
ordered mind after consultation and agreement with the Council of this city, and will be
for the best good of all. I do not anticipate any refusal to cooperate with him. If,
however, such refusal should occur, please remember that he is a despot with absolute
power, and that anyone obstructing the program by refusing to follow his suggestions
will spend the rest of his time here in confinement and will go back to Tellus in irons, if
at all. In case Chief Pilot Breckenridge and I should not see you again we bid you
goodbye and wish you a safe voyage —but we expect to go back with you.”
Brief farewells were said and captain and pilot accompanied Czuv to one of the
little street-cars. Out of the building it dashed and down the crowded but noiseless
thoroughfare to the portal. Signal lights flashed briefly there and they did not stop, but
tore on through the portal and on into the tunnel, with ever increasing speed.
“Don’t have to transfer to a big car, then?” asked Breckenridge.
“No,” King made answer. “Small cars can travel these tubes as well as the large
ones, and on much less power. In the city the wheels touch the rails lightly, not for
support, but to make contacts through which traffic signals are sent and received. In the
tunnels the wheels do not touch at all, as signaling is unnecessary—the tunnels being
used infrequently and by but one vehicle at a time. No trolleys, tracks, or wires are
visible, you notice. Everything is hidden from any possible visiray of the hexans.”
“How about their power?”
“I don’t understand it very well—hardly at all, in fact.”
“It is quite simple.” To the surprise of both Terrestrials, Czuv was speaking
English, but with a strong and very peculiar accent; slighting all the vowels and
accenting heavily the consonant sounds. “The car no longer requires my attention, so I
am now free to converse. You are surprised at my knowing your language ? You will
speak mine after a few more applications of the thought exchanger. I am speaking with
a vile accent, of course, but that is merely because my vocal organs are not
accustomed to making vowel sounds. Our power is obtained by the combustion of
gases in highly efficient turbines. It is transmitted and used as direct current, our
generators and motors being so constructed that they can produce no etheric
disturbances capable of penetrating the shielding walls of our city. The city was built
close to deposits of coal, oil, and gas of sufficient amount to support our life for
thousands of years; for from these deposits come power, food, clothing, and all the
other necessities and luxuries of our lives. Strong fans draw air from various extinct
craters, force it through ventilating ducts into every room and recess of the city, and
exhaust it into the shaft of a quiescent volcano, in whose gaseous outflow any trace of
our activities is of course imperceptible. For obvious reasons no rockets nor combustion
motors are used in the city proper.”
Thus Captain Czuv explained to the Terrestrials his own mode of life, and
received from them in turn full information concerning Earthly life, activity, and science.
Long they talked, and it was almost time to slow down for the journey’s end when the
Callistonian brought the conversation back to their immediate concerns.
“My lieutenant and I were upon a mission of some importance, but it is more
important to take you to Callisto, for there may be many things in which you can help us.
Not in atomic energy, as we do not have any elements above bismuth. Nor in rays—we
know all the vibrations you have mentioned, and several others. The enemy, however,
is supreme in that field, and until our scientists have succeeded in developing ray-
screens, such as are used by the hexans, it would be suicidal to use rays at all. Such
screens necessitate the projection of pure, yet dirigible, forces—you do not have them
upon your planet?”
“No, and so far as I know such screens are also unknown upon Mars and Venus,
with whose inhabitants we are friendly.”
“The inhabitants of all the planets should be friendly; the solar system should be
linked together in intercourse for common advancement. But that is not to be. The
hexans will eventually triumph here, and a Jovian system peopled by hexans will have
no intercourse with any human civilization save that of internecine war. We of Callisto
have only one hope—or is it really a hope? In the South Polar country of Jupiter there
dwells a race of beings implacably hostile to the hexans. They seem to invade the
country of the hexans frequently, even though they are apparently repulsed ,each time.
Our emissaries to the South Polar country, however, have never returned—those
beings, whatever they are, if not actively inimical, certainly are not friendly toward us.”
“You know nothing of their nature?”
“Nothing, since our electrical instruments are not sufficiently sensitive to give us
more than a general idea of what is transpiring there, and in that eternal fog vision is
practically useless. We know, however, that they are far advanced in science, and we
are thankful indeed that none of their frightful flying fortresses have been launched
against us. They apparently are not interested in the satellites, and it is no doubt due to
their unintentional assistance that we have survived as long as we have.”
In the cavern at last, the three men boarded the Callistonian space-plane and
were shot up the crater’s shaft. The voyage to Callisto was uneventful, even
uninteresting save at its termination. The Bzarvk, coated every inch as it was with a dull,
dead black, completely absorptive outer coating, entered the thin layer of Callisto’s
atmosphere in darkest night, with all rockets dead, with not a light showing, and with no
apparatus of any kind functioning. Utterly invisible and undetectable she dove
downward, and not until she was well below the crater’s rim did the forward rockets
burst into furious life. Then the Terrestrials understood another reason for the immense
depth of those shafts other than that of protection from the detectors of the enemy— all
that distance was necessary to overcome the velocity of their free fall without employing
a negative acceleration greater than the frail Callistonian bodies could endure. From the
cavern at the foot of the shaft a regulation tunnel extended to the Callistonian city of
Zbardk. Portal and city were very like Wruszk, upon distant Europa, and soon the
Terrestrial captain and pilot were in conference with the Council of Callisto.
* * * * *
Months of Earthly time dragged slowly past, months during which King and
Breckenridge studied intensively the offensive and defensive systems of Callisto without
finding any particular in which they could improve them to any considerable degree.
Captain Czuv and his warplane still survived, and it was while the Callistonian
commander was visiting his Terrestrial guests that King voiced the discontent that had
long affected both men.
“We’re both tired of doing nothing, Czuv. We have been of little real benefit, and
we have decided that your ideas of us are all wrong. We are convinced that our
personal horse-power can be of vastly more use to you than our brain-power, which