CHAPTER I

Ten Million Eagles Reward!

"Space Flier Found Drifting with Two Hundred Dead! Notorious Interplanetary Pirate--Prince of Space--Believed to Have Committed Ghastly Outrage!"

Mr. William Windsor, a hard-headed, grim-visaged newspaperman of forty, stood nonchalantly on the moving walk that swept him briskly down Fifth Avenue. He smiled with pardonable pride as he listened to the raucous magnetic speakers shouting out the phrases that drew excited mobs to the robot vending machines which sold the yet-damp news strips of printed shorthand. Bill had written the account of the outrage; he had risked his life in a mad flight upon a hurtling sunship to get his concise story to New York in time to beat his competitors. Discovering the inmost details of whatever was puzzling or important or exciting in this day of 2131, regardless of risk to life or limb, and elucidating those details to the ten million avid readers of the great daily newspaper, _The Herald-Sun_, was the prime passion of Bill's life.

Incidentally, the reader might be warned at this point that Bill is not, properly speaking, a character in this narrative; he is only an observer. The real hero is that amazing person who has chosen to call himself "The Prince of Space." This history is drawn from Bill's diary, which he kept conscientiously, expecting to write a book of the great adventure.

Bill stepped off the moving sidewalk by the corner vending machine, dropped a coin in the slot, and received a copy of the damp shorthand strip delivered fresh from the presses by magnetic tube. He read his story, standing in a busy street that rustled quietly with the whir of moving walks and the barely audible drone of the thousands of electrically driven heliocars which spun smoothly along on rubber-tired wheels, or easily lifted themselves to skimming flight upon whirling helicopters.

Heliographic advices from the Moon Patrol flier _Avenger_ state that the sunship _Helicon_ was found today, at 16:19, Universal Time, drifting two thousand miles off the lunar lane. The locks were open, air had escaped, all on board were frozen and dead. Casualties include Captain Stormburg, the crew of 71 officers and men, and 132 passengers, of whom 41 were women. The _Helicon_ was bound to Los Angeles from the lunarium health resorts at Tycho on the Moon. It is stated that the bodies were barbarously torn and mutilated, as if the most frightful excesses had been perpetrated upon them. The cargo of the sunship had been looted. The most serious loss is some thousands of tubes of the new radioactive metal, vitalium, said to have been worth nearly a million eagles.

A crew was put aboard the _Helicon_ from the _Avenger_, her valves were closed, and she will be brought under her own motor tubes to the interplanetary base at Miami, Florida, where a more complete official examination will be made. No attempt has been made to identify the bodies of the dead. The passenger list is printed below.

Military officials are inclined to place blame for the outrage upon the notorious interplanetary outlaw, who calls himself "The Prince of Space." On several occasions the "Prince" has robbed sunships of cargoes of vitalium, though he has never before committed so atrocious a deed as the murder of scores of innocent passengers. It is stated that the engraved calling card, which the "Prince" is said always to present to the captain of a captured sunship, was not found on the wreck.

Further details will be given the public as soon as it is possible to obtain them.

The rewards offered for the "Prince of Space," taken dead or alive, have been materially increased since the outrage. The total offered by the International Confederation, Interplanetary Transport, Lunar Mining Corporation, Sunship Corporation, Vitalium Power Company, and various other societies, corporations, newspapers, and individuals, is now ten million eagles.

"Ten million eagles!" Bill exclaimed. "That would mean a private heliocar, and a long, long vacation in the South Seas!"

He snorted, folded up the little sheet and thrust it into his green silk tunic, as he sprang nimbly upon the moving sidewalk.

"What chance have I to see the Prince of Space?"

About him, the slender spires of widely spaced buildings rose two hundred stories into a blue sky free from dust or smoke. The white sun glinted upon thousands of darting heliocars, driven by silent electricity. He threw back his head, gazed longingly up at an amazing structure that rose beside him--at a building that was the architectural wonder of the twenty-second century.

* * * * *

Begun in 2125, Trainor's Tower had been finished hardly a year. A slender white finger of aluminum and steel alloy, it rose twelve thousand feet above the canyons of the metropolis. Architects had laughed, six years ago, when Dr. Trainor, who had been an obscure western college professor, had returned from a vacation trip to the moon and announced his plans for a tower high enough to carry an astronomical observatory giving mountain conditions. A building five times as high as any in existence! It was folly, they said. And certain skeptics inquired how an impecunious professor would get funds to put it up. The world had been mildly astonished when the work began. It was astounded when it was known that the slender tower had safely reached its full height of nearly two and a half miles. A beautiful thing it was, in its slim strength--girder-work of glistening white metal near the ground, and but a slender white cylinder for the upper thousands of feet of its amazing height.

The world developed a hungry curiosity about the persons who had the privilege of ascending in a swift elevator to the queer, many-storied cylindrical building atop the astounding tower. Bill had spent many hours in the little waiting room before the locked door of the elevator shaft--bribes to the guard had been a heavy drain upon a generous expense account. But not even bribery had won him into the sacred elevator.

He had given his paper something, however, of the persons who passed sometimes through the waiting room. There was Dr. Trainor, of course, a mild, bald man, with kindly blue eyes and a slow, patient smile. And Paula, his vivaciously beautiful daughter, a slim, small girl, with amazingly expressive eyes. She had been with her father on the voyage to the moon. Scores of others had passed through; they ranged from janitors and caretakers to some of the world's most distinguished astronomers and solar engineers--but they were uniformly reticent about what went on in Trainor's Tower.

And there was Mr. Cain--"The mysterious Mr. Cain," as Bill had termed him. He had seen him twice, a slender man, tall and wiry, lean of face, with dark, quizzical eyes. The reporter had been able to learn nothing about him--and what Bill could not unearth was a very deep secret. It seemed that sometimes Cain was about Trainor's Tower and that more often he was not. It was rumored that he had advanced funds for building it and for carrying on the astronomical research for which it was evidently intended.

Impelled by habit, Bill sprang off the moving walk as he glided past Trainor's Tower. He was standing, watching the impassive guard, when a man came past into the street. The man was Mr. Cain, with a slight smile upon the thin, dark face that was handsome in a stern, masculine sort of way. Bill started, pricked up his ears, so to speak, and resolved not to let this mysterious young man out of sight until he knew something about him.

To Bill's vast astonishment, Mr. Cain advanced toward him, with a quick, decisive step, and a speculative gleam lurking humorously in his dark eyes. He spoke without preamble.

"I believe you are Mr. William Windsor, a leading representative of the _Herald-Sun_."

"True. And you are Mr. Cain--the mysterious Mr. Cain!"

The tall young man smiled pleasantly.

"Yes. In fact, I think the 'mysterious' is due to you. But Mr. Windsor----"

"Just call me Bill."

"----I believe that you are desirous of admission to the Tower."

"I've done my best to get in."

"I am going to offer you the facts you want about it, provided you will publish them only with my permission."

"Thanks!" Bill agreed. "You can trust me."

"I have a reason. Trainor's Tower was built for a purpose. That purpose is going to require some publicity very shortly. You are better able to supply that publicity than any other man in the world."

"I can do it--provided----"

"I am sure that our cause is one that will enlist your enthusiastic support. You will be asked to do nothing dishonorable."

Mr. Cain took a thin white card from his pocket, scrawled rapidly upon it, and handed it to Bill, who read the words, "Admit bearer. Cain."

"Present that at the elevator, at eight tonight. Ask to be taken to Dr. Trainor."

Mr. Cain walked rapidly away, with his lithe, springy step, leaving Bill standing, looking at the card, rather astounded.

At eight that night, a surprised guard let Bill into the waiting room. The elevator attendant looked at the card.

"Yes. Dr. Trainor is up in the observatory."

The car shot up, carrying Bill on the longest vertical trip on earth. It was minutes before the lights on the many floors of the cylindrical building atop the tower were flashing past them. The elevator stopped. The door swung open, and Bill stepped out beneath the crystal dome of an astronomical observatory.

He was on the very top of Trainor's Tower.

The hot stars shone, hard and clear, through a metal-ribbed dome of polished vitrolite. Through the lower panels of the transparent wall, Bill could see the city spread below him--a mosaic of fine points of light, scattered with the colored winking eyes of electric signs; it was so far below that it seemed a city in miniature.

Slanting through the crystal dome was the huge black barrel of a telescope, with ponderous equatorial mounting. Electric motors whirred silently in its mechanism, and little lights winked about it. A man was seated at the eyepiece--he was Dr. Trainor, Bill saw--he was dwarfed by the huge size of the instrument.

There was no other person in the room, no other instrument of importance. The massive bulk of the telescope dominated it.

Trainor rose and came to meet Bill. A friendly smile spread over his placid face. Blue eyes twinkled with mild kindliness. The subdued light in the room glistened on the bald dome of his head.

"Mr. Windsor, of the _Herald-Sun_, I suppose?" Bill nodded, and produced a notebook. "I am very glad you came. I have something interesting to show you. Something on the planet Mars."

"What----"

"No. No questions, please. They can wait until you see Mr. Cain again."

Reluctantly, Bill closed his notebook. Trainor seated himself at the telescope, and Bill waited while he peered into the tube, and pressed buttons and moved bright levers. Motors whirred, and the great barrel swung about.

"Now look," Trainor commanded.

Bill took the seat, and peered into the eyepiece. He saw a little circle of a curious luminous blue-blackness, with a smaller disk of light hanging in it, slightly swaying. The disk was an ocherous red, with darker splotches and brilliantly white polar markings.

"That is Mars--as the ordinary astronomer sees it," Trainor said. "Now I will change eyepieces, and you will see it as no man has ever seen it except through this telescope."

Rapidly he adjusted the great instrument, and Bill looked again.

The red disk had expanded enormously, with great increase of detail. It had become a huge red globe, with low mountains and irregularities of surface plainly visible. The prismatic polar caps stood out with glaring whiteness. Dark, green-gray patches, splotched burned orange deserts, and thin, green-black lines--the controversial "canals" of Mars--ran straight across the planet, from white caps toward the darker equatorial zone, intersecting at little round greenish dots.

"Look carefully," Trainor said. "What do you see in the edge of the upper right quadrant, near the center of the disk and just above the equator?"

Bill peered, saw a tiny round dot of blue--it was very small, but sharply edged, perfectly round, bright against the dull red of the planet.

"I see a little blue spot."

"I'm afraid you see the death-sentence of humanity!"

* * * * *

Ordinarily Bill might have snorted--newspapermen are apt to become exceedingly skeptical. But there was something in the gravity of Trainor's words, and in the strangeness of what he had seen through the giant telescope in the tower observatory, that made him pause.

"There's been a lot of fiction," Bill finally remarked, "in the last couple of hundred years. Wells' old book, 'The War of the Worlds,' for example. General theory seems to be that the Martians are drying up and want to steal water. But I never really----"

"I don't know what the motive may be," Trainor said. "But we know that Mars has intelligent life--the canals are proof of that. And we have excellent reason to believe that that life knows of us, and intends us no good. You remember the Envers Expedition?"

"Yes. In 2099. Envers was a fool who thought that if a sunship could go to the moon, it might go to Mars just as well. He must have been struck by meteorites."

"There is no reason why Envers might not have reached Mars in 2100," said Trainor. "The heliographic dispatches continued until he was well over half way. There was no trouble then. We have very good reason to think that he landed, that his return was prevented by intelligent beings on Mars. We know that they are using what they learned from his captured sunship to launch an interplanetary expedition of their own!"

"And that blue spot has something to do with it?"

"We think so. But I have authority to tell you nothing more. As the situation advances, we will have need for newspaper publicity. We want you to take charge of that. Mr. Cain, of course, is in supreme charge. You will remember your word to await his permission to publish anything."

Trainor turned again to the telescope.

With a little clatter, the elevator stopped again at the entrance door of the observatory. A slender girl ran from it across to the man at the telescope.

"My daughter Paula, Mr. Windsor," said Trainor.

Paula Trainor was an exquisite being. Her large eyes glowed with a peculiar shade of changing brown. Black hair was shingled close to her shapely head. Her face was small, elfinly beautiful, the skin almost transparent. But it was the eyes that were remarkable. In their lustrous depths sparkled mingled essence of childish innocence, intuitive, age-old wisdom, and quick intelligence--intellect that was not coldly reasonable, but effervescent, flashing to instinctively correct conclusions. It was an oddly baffling face, revealing only the mood of the moment. One could not look at it and say that its owner was good or bad, indulgent or stern, gentle or hard. It could be, if she willed, the perfect mirror of the moment's thought--but the deep stream of her character flowed unrevealed behind it.

Bill looked at her keenly, noted all that, engraved the girl in the notebook of his memory. But in her he saw only an interesting feature story.

"Dad's been telling you about the threatened invasion from Mars, eh?" she inquired in a low, husky voice, liquid and delicious. "The most thrilling thing, isn't it? Aren't we lucky to know about it, and to be in the fight against it!--instead of going on like all the rest of the world, not dreaming there is danger?"

Bill agreed with her.

"Think of it! We may even go to Mars, to fight 'em on their own ground!"

"Remember, Paula," Trainor cautioned. "Don't tell Mr. Windsor too much."

"All right, Dad."

Again the little clatter of the elevator. Mr. Cain had come into the observatory, a tall, slender young man, with a quizzical smile, and eyes dark and almost as enigmatic as Paula's.

Bill, watching the vivacious girl, saw her smile at Cain. He saw her quick flush, her unconscious tremor. He guessed that she had some deep feeling for the man. But he seemed unaware of it. He merely nodded to the girl, glanced at Dr. Trainor, and spoke briskly to Bill.

"Excuse me, Mr. Win--er, Bill, but I wish to see Dr. Trainor alone. We will communicate with you when it seems necessary. In the meanwhile, I trust you to forget what you have seen here tonight, and what the Doctor has told you. Good evening."

Bill, of necessity, stepped upon the elevator. Five minutes later he left Trainor's Tower. Glancing up from the vividly bright, bustling street, with its moving ways and darting heliocars, he instinctively expected to see the starry heavens that had been in view from the observatory.

But a heavy cloud, like a canopy of yellow silk in the light that shone upon it from the city, hung a mile above. The upper thousands of feet of the slender tower were out of sight above the clouds.

After breakfast next morning Bill bought a shorthand news strip from a robot purveyor. In amazement and some consternation he read:

PRINCE OF SPACE RAIDS TRAINOR'S TOWER

Last night, hidden by the clouds that hung above the city, the daring interplanetary outlaw, the self-styled Prince of Space, suspected of the _Helicon_ outrage, raided Trainor's Tower. Dr. Trainor, his daughter Paula, and a certain Mr. Cain are thought to have been abducted, since they are reported to be missing this morning.

It is thought that the raiding ship drew herself against the Tower, and used her repulsion rays to cut through the walls. Openings sufficiently large to admit the body of a man were found this morning in the metal outer wall, it is said.

There can be no doubt that the raider was the "Prince of Space" since a card engraved with that title was left upon a table. This is the first time the pirate has been known to make a raid on the surface of the earth--or so near it as the top of Trainor's Tower.

Considerable alarm is being felt as a result of this and the _Helicon_ outrage of yesterday. Stimulated by the reward of ten million eagles, energetic efforts will be made on the part of the Moon Patrol to run down this notorious character.