The Martian Cabal Part 8

"Dig your fingers into a joint and hold on," he instructed Tolto, locating a crack for himself. Then he tossed the fragment gently over the barricade of bodies.

There was the click of its fall, and a moment later things seemed to turn around. Clinging like leeches to the wall, the two men resisted the warped gravitational drag that would have flung them down upon their waiting enemies below. They seemed to be hanging in a well.

Sime had a confused impression of piled-up bodies hurtling down--down.

Thereafter everything was normal again, and they were running down the normal steps. Both had swords in their hands now, and within a hundred feet they were upon the "gravitorser" gun. It was a rather c.u.mbersome weapon, comprising a great deal of electrical apparatus, with a D-solenoid surmounting, whose object was to twist the normal lines of gravitation. It was intended for large-scale operations in the open; the few men remaining below had tried a rather risky experiment, for they might have brought the whole fortress down upon them. Now they were untangling themselves from the corpses that had flown at them as iron flies to a magnet.

Sime and Tolto struck them like a tempest. The light was good and the battle short and sweet. Tolto was slowed up a little, but was irresistible, nevertheless. There is nothing surprising about the seeming immunity of a reckless man in battle. He fights by instinct, taking short-cuts that are not as dangerous as they look because the enemy is not expecting them. So Sime and Tolto fought their way down, until there was no one able to oppose them.

Sime pressed a neuro-pistol into Tolto's hand, warned him to sweep the stairs with it, while he coursed around for some of the pellet bombs.

He found them, and two of them closed that avenue of attack with a ma.s.s of jumbled ruins.

Now they had a breathing spell. A combination of blind luck and foolhardiness had given them temporary possession of this desert outpost. That was their p.a.w.n in the game of life and death--the chance to get back and hide among the millions in the cities of the industrial belt. Certain routine precautions had to be taken. They destroyed the radio apparatus, picked a few days supply of food, threw a couple more bombs and made a search for means of transportation: for there was a desert wilderness of four or five hundred miles to be traversed.

They discovered the egg-shaped hull of an enclosed levitator car in the covered courtyard. It was distinguished by the orange and green stripes which are the Martian army standard. Like all army equipment, it was in excellent condition. The hydrogen gages showed a full supply of fuel.

"We're getting the breaks," Sime crowed to Tolto at they surfeited themselves with water before starting. He had covered his nakedness with an ill-fitting fatigue suit.

"Yeh," Tolto agreed, referring to their numerous wounds with sly humor: "lots of 'em."

Nevertheless, they felt pretty happy when the levitator screws took up their melancholy whine. The rocky valley floor dropped away, and the windowless stone walls of the fortress slid down past them. Now they were even with the top.

Through the ports they could see a group of their late adversaries on the roof, standing in strained att.i.tudes. Their immobility was explained a moment later by an electric blue spark from something in the shadow of their bodies.

Instantly Sime, who was at the controls, threw her hard-a-port, dived, looped up. The first explosion of the tiny projectile tossed them up like a monstrous wave, allowed them to drop sickeningly. The exhaust tubes poured out a dense haze as Sime sought for distance. But they were following him. He was five miles away when they finally got the range. The vessel was jarred as if it had hit a rock. One of the atomic pellets had exploded within a few feet of it. There was a dismaying lurch. Sime picked himself up from the floor and dashed to the controls.

"Everything's all right!" he shouted excitedly.

Tolto, however, was listening anxiously. There was a sharp crackling at the stern, where, in a narrow s.p.a.ce, the reaction motors provided the forward motive power. In moments of excitement he referred to himself in the third person. He did so now.

"Tolto's afraid that something's wrong! Smells hot, too!"

"Here, take the wheel!" Sime ordered. The explosions of the sh.e.l.ls were becoming less dangerous; they were getting too far away.

Sime burned his hand opening the narrow door. The paint was already blistering off it. The trouble was immediately apparent. One of the integrator chambers, in which atomic hydrogen was integrated to form atomic iron and calcium (sometimes called the Michelson effect), had sprung a leak. The heat escaping into the little room was not the comparatively negligible heat of burning hydrogen, but the cosmic energy of matter in creation. Sime slammed the door. The radiated light was so intense that it stung even his hardened skin.

Looking through the rear range-finding periscope, he saw that they were about twenty miles from the fort. They had ceased firing.

"Won't be long, Tolto," he said, taking over the controls himself again, "before our tail's going to drop off. Got to make time."

It was, in fact, about ten minutes when, without warning, their nose dropped.

"Tail's gone!" Sime announced.

Their momentum, under the destructive rate of speed they had been making, was great, and as the levitators, with independent power supply, still held them up, Sime continued to steer a course for the twin cities of Tarog. He was aided by a light breeze, and the Sun was nearing the western horizon by the time their rate of motion had become negligible.

"Might at well land," Sime decided. "Conserve fuel. If we get a favorable wind to-morrow we can go up and drift with it."

But Tolto, who had been narrowly scanning the terrain, advised continuing a little longer.

"I thought I saw a little smoke, a few miles ahead. Seems to be gone now. But we're still drifting slow."

Sime searched the indicated spot in the ground gla.s.s of the forward magnifying periscope. After a few minutes he discovered a blackened spot which might be the remains of a fire. It was surrounded by huge blocks of orange rock, the igneous rock which is the outstanding feature of the Martian desert landscape.

"Looks like he built the fire around there so n.o.body on the same level would see him," he hazarded. He set the alt.i.tude control to fifty feet. There was part of the globular skeleton of a desert hog in the fire; whoever had built it had dined most satisfyingly not long before, and as the fugitives looked their stomachs contracted painfully.

"I could eat a whole one of them myself," Tolto said wistfully.

The urge to descend here was strong upon Sime too. He realized that the fire might have been made by some dangerous criminal--a fugitive from justice; but dangerous men are no novelty to the I. F. P. On the other hand, there was a possibility that it was just some political offender, driven into the desert by persecution. Or a prospector. At any rate, he would have food, or would know where it could be procured.

They had drifted some hundreds of yards farther and the ground was getting constantly more broken, so the best time to land was as soon as possible. Slowly the little ship settled, sc.r.a.ped on a rock and arrested its slight forward motion, crunching solidly in the stony soil.

"Take a neuro, Tolto," Sime advised. "Whoever's here, if he or they are dangerous, we won't get close enough to touch 'em with a sword."

Tolto took the weapon without a word. They locked the door of the ship. Men have been marooned for neglecting that little precaution.

They walked in a spiral course, making an ever-widening circle, looking sharply from left to right. Presently they came to the remains of the fire. The ashes were hotter than the ground, proving that they had been recently made.

But nowhere was there any sign of men. They shouted, but only weird echoes answered.

The ship was now out of sight, and solitude pressed upon them. They felt an uneasy desire to get within comfortable constricting walls.

They found the ship without difficulty.

"Well, whoever it was has lammed," Sime concluded. "Tolto, you climb on top of that rock. Watch me. If you see anybody after me, let 'em have it. I'm going to see if I can scare up a desert hog somewhere."

Neither had stirred from his place, however, before they were suddenly stricken to the ground. They felt the familiar sensation of cold and suffocation--the paralysis caused by a diffused beam from a neuro-pistol. Tolto was a little slower to fall, but he only lasted a second longer. They knew that someone was taking the weapons out of their helpless hands. Then life returned.

"Get up," said a languid voice back of them, "and let's have a look at the looks of ye."

CHAPTER VII

_The Flight of a Princess_

The province of Hanlon, Prince Joro's hereditary domain, began about fifty miles west of South Tarog. It was a region of thorn forests, yielding a wood highly valued for ship-building, and the ca.n.a.l was lined with shipyards, most of which belonged to the prince. The so-called republic had been established before Joro was born, but the reigning family of Hanlon had always been richly endowed with astuteness. Deprived of their feudal holdings by a coup of state, they had won back nearly all they had lost in the fields of finance and trade. Joro was a monarchist for sentimental reasons, not for the profits that might accrue to him.

It was the purity of Joro's devotion to his ideal that made him so dangerous to all who might oppose him. Lesser men might be bribed, frightened, distracted. Not Joro: he believed that the monarchy would soothe the rumblings of internal dissension that continually disturbed the peace and tranquillity of Mars. He drove forward to that consummation with a steadfastness and singleness of purpose such as have carried other fanatics to glory or to the grave. And in addition to his zeal he carried into the struggle his exceptional ability, a knowledge of government and of people.