The Secret of the Ninth Planet Part 20

A blaze of sparks broke over his head as a blast banged across the room. The red-eyed, scrabbling figures charged, their chinless mouths opening to emit barking calls of b.e.s.t.i.a.l anger. One aimed a rodlike contrivance at him, and there was another flare of light.

The room dissolved around him in a glare of brilliant green. As he slipped helplessly to the floor, he lost consciousness.

Chapter 18. _Sacrifice on the Sacred Moon_

"Burl Denning! Can you hear me, Burl Denning?" A thin, tinny voice somewhere was calling him. But the darkness was all around, and Burl felt a great sleepiness and a desire only to sink deeper into the cottony nothing in which he seemed to be cradled.

"Burl Denning! If you can hear me, speak up!" Again the faint, scratchy voice nagged at Burl's mind. He really ought to answer. He tried to open his mouth. Something hard and cold was pressing against his back. He tossed and squirmed.

Once more the voice called, and this time he decided that he must be asleep. He struggled to open his eyes, then finally blinked them wide in an effort to adjust himself to his surroundings.

He was apparently out in the open, and it was night. The sky was dark, not black, but almost so--a deep, blue-black. There was a pale blue saucer hanging in the sky. It blotted out most of the view. Gradually, he became aware of a shiny barrier between him and that sky--he was not out of doors. Something like a gla.s.s dome seemed to be overhead.

Burl raised his head. There was no one in sight. He felt dizzy and confused. He lifted a hand to his brow, and felt the cold gla.s.s of his s.p.a.ce helmet. He was still wearing his s.p.a.ce suit then. The voice--it must be in his helmet phone.

"h.e.l.lo," he ventured weakly. "Who's calling?"

Quickly the faint voice replied, growing stronger. "Burl, are you all right? Where are you?"

Burl looked around. He was sitting on the floor of an isolated enclosure with a transparent dome. There were no walls, just the rounded dome like a fishbowl turned upside down on him. The flooring beneath his feet was plastic.

"I'm all right, I think," said Burl. "Is that you, Russ? Sounds a little like you, but you must be far away."

"Yes, it's me, Russell Clyde," confirmed the voice. "You're coming in weak, too. Where are you?"

Burl described his surroundings. There was a silence for a moment, then Russ's voice again. "I kind of suspected it, but what you say confirms it. We must be on the only planet we haven't visited ... or rather, not on it, but near it. I mean Neptune. I knew from the gravity I wasn't on Pluto any more. Judging from our weight, and your description of the bluish planet in the sky, we must be on Triton, Neptune's bigger moon."

Burl found that his dizziness was disappearing. "I feel light," he commented, as he got to his feet. "Should Neptune look sort of like Ura.n.u.s, only more bluish in color?" he asked.

"That's it," said Russ. "Neptune is pretty much of a twin for Ura.n.u.s, only it's denser, a little bit smaller, and perhaps more substantial than the other giant worlds in our system. It should have a second moon, smaller and way out."

Burl walked around the little enclosed s.p.a.ce. "I guess I'm a prisoner here," he said. "This dome is on the surface. Most of the area is just a sort of rocky plain with patches of liquid gases, but there are a couple of big buildings nearby. Funny sort of structures--they have fancy tops with symbols on them that look like the phases of the moon."

"I think I'm inside one of those buildings," Russ guessed. "I'm in a big hall with a lot of exhibits in gla.s.s cases. And they've got the strangest creatures I've ever seen in them. There are lunar markings here, too--they remind me of the ones we saw on Pluto. You know what I suspect?"

Burl paced around, regaining his senses as he walked. It was obvious that, after he'd been knocked out by the Plutonians, he had been taken by them to this moon of Neptune. For what purpose?

Russ continued to murmur his thoughts, his voice ringing tinnily in Burl's earphones. "I think that Triton was originally Pluto's moon. When Pluto wandered into the solar system, it crossed Neptune's...o...b..t and was held. Its moon came closer to Neptune and was captured completely. But Pluto, having a greater ma.s.s, didn't stick. It established an eccentric orbit of its own which took it far out from Neptune for hundreds of years at a stretch and brought it back only rarely. Pluto lost its moon.

And that moon was the spiritual home of the Sun-tappers' religion."

Burl glanced across the landscape. There were some funny things growing nearby. They looked a little like thin, gla.s.sy trees with big, blue coconuts on top.

"What happened to you and Haines after we got separated?" he asked, still talking through his helmet phone.

"I don't know what happened to Haines," said Russ. "I hope he got away.

But they trapped me. I was taken aboard one of their dumbbell ships, and brought here. The trip took days. I guess you were unconscious for all that time. If it's any comfort to you, the Pluto building was destroyed.

Our atomic bomb went off. I saw the flare from a window in the ship. I think this moon is the last stronghold of the Sun-tappers, and I think it is our final objective."

The strange crystalline vegetation seemed to be moving closer to Burl.

He watched it carefully. It _was_ moving! There were living beings out there!

They glided oddly over the ground, and he saw that their bases were a ma.s.s of crystalline fringes, moving feelers which crawled over the surface bearing the upper structures with them. They had thin, trunklike bodies with two long, pencil-like branches that were used as arms. And the coconut objects were heads!

They circled the dome now, and Burl could see that each round blue k.n.o.b had a central black spot that apparently served as an eye. There was no sign of nostrils or mouth. Burl stared at the creatures in wonder.

The beings were clearly gesturing to him, trying to signal with their odd arms. He waved back, wondering how he could establish communication.

As he did so, he described the creatures to Russ.

Russ's voice was excited. "Say! I think I've figured out what sort of place I'm in. This is a museum of galactic life! Each of these gla.s.s cases contains a specimen of the highest form of life of its particular world. In one of the cases, opposite me, there's one of the Martian creatures--a big, antlike fellow. He's standing there, looking perfectly alive, but absolutely motionless. Next to him is something else that looks like an intelligent form. It's sort of a man, covered with short red hair. Around its waist it's got a belt, and there are pouches on it, and something like a short sword. It must be a humanoid type from some world out among the stars. Some of the others look like intelligent forms, too, because they are wearing clothing.

"I think that collecting these specimens and setting them up here is part of the religion of the Sun-tappers."

While Russ was talking, Burl thought of a way he might communicate with the stick-men. He wanted to draw a diagram of the solar system on the floor of his enclosure. He gestured futilely with his hand, but there was nothing with which to make a marking. The stick-men outside watched his hand, then one of them reached around to something hanging across its back and withdrew a thin tablet and a wedge of red. Holding the tablet up so that Burl could see, the creature quickly sketched a recognizable map of the Sun and its planets!

Burl realized then that he was dealing with highly intelligent beings--no savages, these, but the products of a high civilization. He indicated the third world as his own. The stick-man drew back as if surprised, then pointed upward.

They came from Neptune!

During the next few hours, a most curious three-way discussion went on--Burl signaling to the Neptunians outside and describing his discoveries to Russ over the phone of his s.p.a.ce suit; Russ suggesting answers to some of the more difficult diagrams. It was a curious experience. Gradually, by means of simple drawings and gestures, and even charadelike playlets acted out by the weird vegetable-crystal beings, there emerged the general story of the Neptunians and the invaders from Pluto.

On Neptune there had been a great civilization covering the entire world, a hard surface lying deep beneath its thick methane atmosphere.

There were forests and there were animals and intelligent beings. They did not breathe, but absorbed both their food and liquid gas through rootlike feelers on which they stood and moved.

Then one day, about thirty years ago, they had been invaded by creatures that came in dumbbell-shaped s.p.a.ceships, and which had destroyed their cities, and attempted to conquer the planet. They learned that these ships had come from Triton, the strange new moon that Neptune had acquired about a thousand years earlier, and from the new planet, Pluto, their astronomers had observed at that time.

For thirty years the Neptunians had fought against the invaders. For a while they almost succeeded, but then something new had developed. Their world grew hotter. Great structures had been erected on the poles, the areas first conquered by the Plutonians and still held by them. From these spots, vast amounts of heat surged over the planet and changed it.

Heat meant death and doom to every living frigi-plasmic thing on Neptune. Desperately, they increased their warfare, but the heat sapped their strength, destroying them, until now they knew it was but a matter of time before the Neptunians, beast and vegetable alike, would vanish totally.

"So that's it," breathed Burl. "That's where the Sun-tap energy is going. The Plutonians want Neptune because it's near their old moon, and they have to warm it up to live on it. Of course! And Neptune's too far from the Sun to explode when it novas, it will just get comfortable for the Plutonians!"

The Neptunians continued their strange tale. They had built a crude s.p.a.ceship and manned it with a suicide battalion of the most desperate warriors of their race. They had journeyed to Triton in hopes of seizing it and destroying the foe from there. The stick-men had attacked and had been beaten back.

Now there were only a few dozen of them left--the last soldiers of their invasion and ignored by the enemy. And here they were, explaining this to Burl whom they recognized as an ally.

Russ's voice suddenly broke into Burl's thoughts, "There's some sort of ceremony beginning here. There's a procession of Plutonians dressed in golden robes marching down the center of the hall, carrying staffs with moon pictures on them.... They're chanting in unison, though it sounds like barking. Can you hear it?"

Burl could. It sounded faintly in his earphones like the noises in a dog pound.

"Now they're circling around. They're opening one of the cases. The gla.s.s slides back.... Say! The exhibits aren't dead. I see something moving.... It's a man!"

Russ's voice stopped suddenly. Faintly, Burl could hear the barking and then Russ's terrified voice. "It is a man, Burl. He's dark-skinned and wearing white cotton pants and a homespun shirt. He looks like an Indian, maybe a South American Indian. When they lifted the gla.s.s, he just walked out and stood as if he were all mixed up. Then he got scared and started to run."

The voice was silent a moment. "They grabbed him, Burl. They _sacrificed_ him! And now they're coming for me."