feet above Brandon’s own six-feet-two, Alcantro and Fedanzo in turn engulfed his
comparatively tiny hand in a thick-shelled paw and lifted briefly the inner lids of
quadruply-shielded eyes. For the Martian skin is not like ours. It is of incredible
thickness; dry, pliable, rubbery, and utterly without sensation: heavily lined with fat and
filled throughout its volume with tiny air-cells which make it an almost perfect non-
conductor of heat and which prevents absolutely the evaporation of the precious
moisture of the body. For the same reasons their huge and cat-like eyes are never
exposed, but look through sealed, clear windows of membrane, over which may be
drawn at will one or all of four pairs of lids—lids transparent, insensible, non-freezeable,
air-spaced insulators. Even the air they exhale carries from their bodies a minimum of
the all-important heat and moisture, for the passages of their nostrils do not lead directly
to the lungs, as do ours. They are merely the intakes for a tortuous system of tubes
comprising a veritable heat-exchanger, so that the air finally expelled is in almost
perfect equilibrium with the incoming supply in temperature and in moisture content. A
grayish tan in color, naked and hairless—though now, out of deference to Terrestrial
conventions, wearing light robes of silk— indifferent alike to any extreme of heat or cold,
light or darkness: such were the two forbidding beings who arose to greet their
Terrestrial friends, then again reclined.
“I suppose that you have been given to drink?” West-fall made sure that they had
been tendered the highest hospitality of Mars.
“We have drunk full deeply, thanks; and it was not really necessary, for we drank
scarcely three weeks since.”
Brandon and Westfall turned then and greeted the two Venerians, as different
from the Martians as they were from the Terrestrials. Of Earthly stature, form, and
strength, yet each was encased in a space-suit stretched like a drumhead, and would
live therein or in the special Venerian rooms of the vessel as long as the journey should
endure. For the atmosphere of Venus is more than twice as dense as ours, is practically
saturated with water-vapor, carries an extremely high concentration of carbon dioxide,
and in their suits and rooms is held at a temperature of one hundred and ten degrees
Fahrenheit, The lenses of their helmets were of heavy, yellowish-red composition,
protecting their dead-white skins and red eyes from all actinic rays—for the Venerian
lives upon the bottom of an everlasting sea of fog and his thin epidermis, utterly without
pigmentation, burns and blisters as frightfully at the least exposure to actinic light as
does ours at the touch of a red-hot iron.
Out in space at last, cruising with the acceleration set at a point bearable for the
Martians, Westfall called the meeting to order and outlined the situation facing them.
Brandon then handed around folders of papers, upon which the Venerians turned the
invisible infra-red beams of the illuminators upon their helmets, thus flooding them with
the “light” to which their retinas were most responsive.
“Here’s the data,” Brandon began. “Sheet I, the equations and fundamentals of
our new cosmic-radiation drive, which renders us independent of power plants.”
“Theoretical or actual?” Pyraz Amonar asked. “We have known that you have
been studying the problem, but have heard nothing of its solution.”
“Actual,” Brandon assured him. “We have been using it for a month, and have
just about all the kinks ironed out. You four are the first, outside our own crew, to hear of
it.”
“Congratulations!” Dol Kenor and the two Martians exclaimed as one, and Kenor
went on: “An accomplishment indeed, to have concluded a research which has baffled
the best minds for so long.”
“‘Concluded’ is good,” Brandon replied. “They all helped—especially you four. But
to go on, the rest of the sheets contain the material sent in by Stevens, and various
deductions and other work based upon that material. Particular emphasis has been
placed upon the forces employed by the Jovians, as we shall call them until we find out
who or what they really are. We will discuss these forces later. For each such force we
have already calculated a screen, and we have also calculated various other forces of
our own, with which we hope to arm ourselves before we reach Ganymede. The
problems facing us are complex, since there are some nine thousand force-bands of the
order in which we are working, each differing from all the others as much as torque
differs from tension, or as much as red differs from green. Therefore we have appealed
to you for help, knowing that we could do but little alone. Alcantro and Fedanzo will
supervise the construction of the generators of the various fields from these
calculations. Dol Kenor will correlate power and electricity to and with the fields. Westfall
and I will help work out the theoretical difficulties as they arise. Pyraz Amonar, who can
devise and build a machine to perform any conceivable mechanical task, will help us all
in the many mechanical difficulties we shall certainly encounter. Discussion of any point
is now in order.”
Step by step and equation after equation the calculations and plans were gone
over, until every detail was clear in each mind. Then the men bent to their tasks; behind
them not only the extraordinarily complete facilities of that gigantic workshop which was
the Sirius, but also the full power of the detachment of police—the very cream of the
young manhood of the planet. Week after toilsome week the unremitting labor went on,
and little by little the massive cruiser of the void became endowed with an offensive and
defensive armament incredible. An armament conceived in the fertile and daring brain
of a sheer genius, guided only by the knowledge that such things were already in
existence somewhere; reduced to working theory by a precise, mathematical logician;
translated into fields of force by the greatest known experts; powered by the
indefatigable efforts of an electrical wizard; made possible by the artful mechanical
devices of the greatest inventor that three worlds had ever known! Thus it was that they
approached Ganymede ready, with blanketing screens full out save for one narrow
working band, and with a keen-eyed observer at every plate. When even the hyper-
critical Westfall was convinced that their preparations were as complete as they could
be made with the information at hand, Brandon directed a beam upon the distant
satellite and tapped off a brief message:
“stevens ganymede will arrive in about ten hours direct carrier beam toward sun
we can detect it and will follow it to wherever you are sirius.”
“ipv sirius,” came the reply, “everything here all x glad to see you thanks newton
and stevens.”
Brandon, at the controls, scanning his screens narrowly, dropped the vessel
down to within a mile or two of the point of origin of Stevens’ carrier beam without
incident; then spoke to Westfall, at his side, with a grin.
“Nice layout the kid’s got down there, Quince. ‘S too bad—don’t look like we’re
going to get any action for our money a-tall. ‘Sa damn shame, too—what’s the use of
wasting it, now that we’ve got it all made?”
“We are not done yet,” cautioned Westfall, and even as he spoke an alarm bell
burst into strident clamor—one of their far-flung detector screens was telling the world
that it had encountered a dangerous frequency. The new ultralights flared instantly
along the line automatically laid down by the detector, and upon the closely-ruled
micrometer screen of Brandon’s desk there glowed in natural color the image of a
globular space-ship, approaching them with terrific speed.
“Men all stationed, of course, Crown?”
“Stationed and ready.” Crowninshield, phones at his ears and microphone at his
lips, was staring intently into his own plate.
“Kinda think I’ll do most of it from here, but you can’t always tell. If they get inside
my guard you all know what to do.”
“All x.”
Expecting another such hollow victory as the other hexan vessel had won over
the defenseless Arcturus the small stranger flashed nearer and nearer that huge and
featureless football. Within range, she launched her flaming plane of energy, but this
time that Jovian sheet of force did not encounter unprotected and non-resisting steel.
Upon the outer ray-screen, flaming white into incandescent defense, the furious bolt
spent itself, and in the instant of the launching of that searing blade of flame Brandon
had gone into action. Switch after switch drove home, and one after another those
frightful fields of force, those products of the mightiest minds of three planets, were
hurled out against the tiny Jovian sphere. Driven as they were by the millions upon
millions of horse-power stored in the accumulators of the Sirius they formed a
coruscating spherical shell of intolerable energy all around the enemy vessel; but even
their prodigious force was held at bay by the powerful defensive screens of the smaller
space-ship. But attack the Jovian could not, every resource at her command being