radio and television engineers of two planets were fighting overdriven equipment, trying
to hold an almost impossible connection, in order that Nadia Newton’s mother and sister
might be present at her wedding, hundreds of millions of miles distant in space!
“I pronounce you man and wife. Whom God hath joined together let no man put
asunder.” The sacred old ritual ended and Captain King picked up the bride in his great
arms as though she were a baby, kissed her vigorously, and set her down in front of the
transmitter. In the midst of the joyous confusion that ensued, a tearing, rattling crash
came from the speaker and the screen went blank.
“Damnation!” lamented MacDonald from the power room. “I knew they’d blow!
There goes my whole secondary bank—eight perfectly good ten-nineteens all shot to . .
.”
” ‘Stoo bad, but it couldn’t be helped—they went in a good cause,” interrupted
Brandon. “I’ll come down and help clean up the mess.”
Leaving the bridal party, he made his way rapidly to the power room, where he
found MacDonald and the two Martians inspecting the smoking remains of what had
been the secondary bank of their powerful ultra-transmitter. Spare parts in abundance
were on hand, and it was not long until the damaged section was as good as new.
“Now to try her out,” Brandon announced. “We want to give her a good workout,
but there’s no use trying the I-P stations any more—they’re altogether too hard to
handle at this range. Czuv said something about an unknown race of monstrosities at
the south pole of Jupiter—let’s try it on them for a while.”
He flung the field of force out into space, as responsive to his will as a well-
trained horse, and guided it toward the southern limb of that gigantic world. Down and
down the projection plunged, through mile after mile of reeking, steaming fog,
impenetrable to Earthly eyes. Finally it came to rest upon the surface, hundreds of feet
deep in a lush, dank, tropical jungle, and Brandon plugged into the Venerian room.
“Kenor? We’ve got a lot of use for you, if you can come down here for a while . . .
thanks a lot.” He turned to the Martians. “Luckily, we’ve got a couple of infra-red
transformers aboard, so we won’t have to build one. You fellows might break one out
and shunt it onto this circuit while Dol Kenor is hunting up something for us to look at.
“Hi, old Infra-Eyes!” he went on, as the Venerian scientist waddled into the room
in his bulging space-suit. “We’ve got something here that’s right down your alley. Want
to see what you can see?”
“Ah, a beautiful scene!” exclaimed Dol Kenor, after one glance into the plate. “It
is indeed a relief, after all this coldness and glare, to see such a soft, warm landscape
—even though I have never expected to behold quite such a violent bit of jungle,” and
under his guidance the projection flashed over hundreds of miles of territory. To the
eyes of the Terrestrials the screen revealed only a blank, amorphous grayness, through
which at times there shot lines and masses of vague and meaningless form; but the
Venerian was very evidently seeing and enjoying many and diverse scenes.
“There, I think, is what you wish to see first,” he announced, as he finally
steadied the controls, and Brandon cut in upon the shunting screen the infra-red
transformer. This device, developed long before to render possible the use of Terrestrial
eyes in the opaque atmosphere of Venus, stepped up the fog-piercing long waves into
the frequencies of light capable of affecting the Earthly retina. Instantly th6 dull gray
blank of the shunting screen became transformed into a clear and colorful picture of the
great city of the Jovians of the South.
“Great Cat!” Brandon exclaimed. ” ‘Flying fortresses’ is right! They’re in war
formation, too, or I’m a polyp! We’ve got to watch this, Mac, all of it, and watch it close—
it’s apt to have a big bearing on what we’ll have to do, before they get done. Better we
rig up another set, and put a relay of observers on this job!”
CHAPTER 11 The Vorkcul-Hexan War
The city of the Vorkuls, was an immense seven-pointed star. At its center, directly upon
the south pole of Jupiter, rose a tremendous shaft—its cross section likewise a tapering
seven-pointed star—which housed the directing intelligences of the nation. Radiating
from the seven cardinal points of the building were short lanes leading to star-shaped
open plots, from which in turn branched out ways to other stellate areas; ways reaching,
after many such steps, to the towering inner walls of the metropolis. The outer walls, still
loftier and even more massive ramparts of sullen gray-green metal, formed a seamless,
jointless barrier against an utterly indescribable foe; a barrier whose outer faces
radiated constantly a searing, coruscating green emanation. Metal alone could not long
have barred that voracious and implacably relentless enemy, but against that lethal
green emanation even that ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back,
impotent. Writhing and crawling, loathsomely palpitant with an unspeakable exuberance
of foul and repellant vigor possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained
there, it threw its most hideously prolific growths against that radiant wall in vain.
The short, zig-zag lanes, the ways, and the seven-pointed areas were paved with
a greenish glass. This pavement was intended solely to prevent vegetable growth and
carried no traffic whatever, since few indeed of the Vorkuls have ever been earthbound
and all traffic was in the air. The principal purpose of the openings was to separate and
thus to render accessible by air the mighty buildings which, level upon level, towered
upward, with airships hovering at or anchored to doorways and entrances at every level.
Buildings, entrances, everything visible—all replicated, reiterated, repeated infinite
variations in the one theme, that of the septenate stelliform.
Color ran riot; masses varied from immense blocks of awe inspiring grandeur to
delicate tracery of sheerest gossamer ; lights flamed and flared in wide bands and in
narrow, flashing pencils—but in all, through all, over all, and dominating all was the
Seven-Pointed Star.
In and almost filling the space, at least a mile in width, between the inner and the
outer walls were huge, seven-sided structures—featureless, squat, forbidding
heptagons of dull green metal. Nothing living was to be seen in that space. Its pavement
was of solid metal and immensely thick, and that metal, as well as that of the walls, was
burned and blackened and seared as though by numberless exposures to intolerable
flame. In a lower compartment of one of these enormous heptagons Vortel Kromodeor,
First Projector Officer, rested before a gigantic and complex instrument board. He was
at ease—his huge wings folded, his sinuous length coiled comfortably in slack loops
about two horizontal bars. But at least one enormous, extensible eye was always
pointed toward the board, always was at least one nimble and bat-like ear cocked
attentively in the direction of the signal panel.
A whistling, shrieking ululation rent the air and the officer’s coils tightened as he
reared a few feet of his length upright, shooting out half a dozen tentacular arms to
various switches and controls upon his board, while throughout the great heptagon
hundreds of other Vorkuls sprang to attention at their assigned posts of duty. As the
howling wail came to a climax in a blast of sound Kromodeor threw over a lever, as did
every other projector officer in every other heptagon, and there was made plain to any
observer the reason for the burns and scars in the tortured space between the lofty
inner and outer walls of Vorkulia. For these heptagons were the monstrous flying
fortresses which Czuv had occasionally seen from afar, as they went upon some
unusual errand above the Jovian banks of mist, and which Brandon was soon to see in
his visiray screen. The seared and disfigured metal of the pavement and walls was
made so by the release of the furious blasts of energy necessary to raise those untold
thousands of tons of mass against the attraction of Jupiter, more than two and a half
times the gravity of our own world! Vast volumes of flaming energy shrieked from the
ports. Wave upon wave, flooding the heptagons, it dashed back and forth upon the
heavy metal between the walls. As more and more of the inconceivable power of those
Titanic generators was unleashed, it boiled forth in a devastating flood which, striking
the walls, rebounded and leaped vertically far above even those mighty ramparts. Even
the enormous thickness of the highly conducting metal could not absorb all the energy
of that intolerable blast, and immediately beneath the ports new seven-pointed areas of
disfigurement appeared as those terrific flying fortresses were finally wrenched from the
ground and hurled upward.
High in the air, another signal wailed up and down a peculiar scale of sound and