CHAPTER II

Bloodhounds of Space

Two days later Bill jumped from a landing heliocar, presented his credentials as special correspondent, and was admitted to the Lakehurst base of the Moon Patrol. Nine slender sunships lay at the side of the wide, high-fenced field, just in front of their sheds. In the brilliant morning sunlight they scintillated like nine huge octagonal ingots of polished silver.

These war-fliers of the Moon Patrol were eight-sided, about twenty feet in diameter and a hundred long. Built of steel and the new aluminum bronzes, with broad vision panels of heavy vitrolite, each carried sixteen huge positive ray tubes. These mammoth vacuum tubes, operated at enormous voltages from vitalium batteries, were little different in principle from the "canal ray" apparatus of some centuries before. Their "positive rays," or streams of atoms which had lost one or more electrons, served to drive the sunship by reaction--by the well-known principle of the rocket motor.

And the sixteen tubes mounted in twin rings about each vessel served equally well as weapons. When focused on a point, the impact-pressure of their rays equaled that of the projectile from an ancient cannon. Metal in the positive ray is heated to fusion, living matter carbonized and burned away. And the positive charge carried by the ray is sufficient to electrocute any living being in contact with it.

This Moon Patrol fleet of nine sunships was setting out in pursuit of the Prince of Space, the interplanetary buccaneer who had abducted Paula Trainor and her father, and the enigmatic Mr. Cain. Bill was going aboard as special correspondent for the _Herald-Sun_.

On the night before the _Helicon_, the sunship which had been attacked in space, had been docked at Miami by the rescue crew put aboard from the _Avenger_. The world had been thrown into a frenzy by the report of the men who had examined the two hundred dead on board.

"Blood sucked from _Helicon_ victims!" the loud speakers were croaking. "Mystery of lost sunship upsets world! Medical examination of the two hundred corpses found on the wrecked space flier show that the blood had been drawn from the bodies, apparently through curious circular wounds about the throat and trunk. Every victim bore scores of these inexplicable scars. Medical men will not attempt to explain how the wounds might have been made.

"In a more superstitious age, it might be feared that the Prince of Space is not man at all, but a weird vampire out of the void. And, in fact, it has been seriously suggested that, since the wounds observed could have been made by no animal known on earth, the fiend may be a different form of life, from another planet."

Bill found Captain Brand, leader of the expedition, just going on board the slender, silver _Fury_, flagship of the fleet of nine war-fliers. He had sailed before with this bluff, hard-fighting guardsman of the space lanes; he was given a hearty welcome.

"Hunting down the Prince is a good-sized undertaking, from all appearances," Bill observed.

"Rather," big, red-faced Captain Brand agreed. "We have been after him seven or eight times in the past few years--but I think his ship has never been seen. He must have captured a dozen commercial sunships."

"You know, I rather admire the Prince--" Bill said, "or did until that _Helicon_ affair. But the way those passengers were treated is simply unspeakable. Blood sucked out!"

"It is hard to believe that the Prince is responsible for that. He has never needlessly murdered anyone before--for all the supplies and money and millions worth of vitalium he has taken. And he has always left his engraved card--except on the _Helicon_.

"But anyhow, we blow him to eternity on sight!"

The air-lock was open before them, and they walked through, and made their way along the ladder (now horizontal, since the ship lay on her side) to the bridge in the bow. Bill looked alertly around the odd little room, with its vitrolite dome and glistening instruments, while Captain Brand flashed signals to the rest of the fleet for sealing the locks and tuning the motor ray generators.

A red rocket flared from the _Fury_. White lances of flame darted from the down-turned vacuum tubes. As one, the nine ships lifted themselves from the level field. Deliberately they upturned from horizontal to vertical positions. Upward they flashed through the air, with slender white rays of light shooting back from the eight rear tubes of each.

Bill, standing beneath the crystal dome, felt the turning of the ship. He felt the pressure of his feet against the floor, caused by acceleration, and sat down in a convenient padded chair. He watched the earth become a great bowl, with sapphire sea on the one hand and green-brown land and diminishing, smokeless city on the other. He watched the hazy blue sky become deepest azure, then black, with a million still stars bursting out in pure colors of yellow and red and blue. He looked down again, and saw the earth become convex, an enormous bright globe, mistily visible through haze or air and cloud.

Swiftly the globe drew away. And a tiny ball of silver, half black, half rimmed with blinding flame, sharply marked with innumerable round craters, swam into view beyond the misty edge of the globe--it was the moon.

Beyond them flamed the sun--a ball of blinding light, winged with a crimson sheet of fire--hurling quivering lances of white heat through the vitrolite panels. Blinding it was to look upon it, unless one wore heavily tinted goggles.

Before them hung the abysmal blackness of space, with the canopy of cold hard stars blazing as tiny scintillant points of light, at an infinite distance away. The Galaxy was a broad belt of silvery radiance about them, set with ten thousand many-colored jewels of fire. Somewhere in the vastness of that void they sought a daring man, who laughed at society, and called himself the Prince of Space.

The nine ships spread out, a thousand miles apart. Flickering heliographs--swinging mirrors that reflected the light of the sun--kept them in communication with bluff Captain Brand, while many men at telescopes scanned the black, star-studded sweep of space for the pirate of the void.

Days went by, measured only by chronometer, for the winged, white sun burned ceaselessly. The earth had shrunk to a little ball of luminous green, bright on the sunward side, splotched with the dazzling white of cloud patches and polar caps.

Sometimes the black vitalium wings were spread, to catch the energy of the sun. The sunship draws its name from the fact that it is driven by solar power. It utilizes the remarkable properties of the rare radioactive metal, vitalium, which is believed to be the very basis of life, since it was first discovered to exist in minute traces in those complex substances so necessary to all life, the vitamins. Large deposits were discovered at Kepler and elsewhere on the moon during the twenty-first century. Under the sun's rays vitalium undergoes a change to triatomic form, storing up the vast energy of sunlight. The vitalium plates from the sunshine are built into batteries with alternate sheets of copper, from which the solar energy may be drawn in the form of electric current. As the battery discharges, the vitalium reverts to its stabler allotropic form, and may be used again and again. The Vitalium Power Company's plants in Arizona, Chili, Australia, the Sahara, and the Gobi now furnish most of the earth's power. The sunship, recharging its vitalium batteries in space, can cruise indefinitely.

* * * * *

It was on the fifth day out from Lakehurst. The _Fury_, with her sister ships spread out some thousands of miles to right and left, was cruising at five thousand miles per hour, at heliocentric elevation 93.243546, ecliptic declination 7°, 18' 46" north, right ascension XIX hours, 20 min., 31 sec. The earth was a little green globe beside her, and the moon a thin silver crescent beyond.

"Object ahead!" called a lookout in the domed pilot-house of the _Fury_, turning from his telescope to where Captain Brand and Bill stood smoking, comfortably held to the floor by the ship's acceleration. "In Scorpio, about five degrees above Antares. Distance fifteen thousand miles. It seems to be round and blue."

"The Prince, at last!" Brand chuckled, an eager grin on his square chinned face, light of battle flashing in his blue eyes.

He gave orders that set the heliographic mirrors flickering signals for all nine of the Moon Patrol fliers to converge about the strange object, in a great crescent. The black fins that carried the charging vitalium plates were drawn in, and the full power of the motor ray tubes thrown on, to drive ahead each slender silver flier at the limit of her acceleration.

Four telescopes from the _Fury_ were turned upon the strange object. Captain Brand and Bill took turns peering through one of them. When Bill looked, he saw the infinite black gulf of space, silvered with star-dust of distant nebulae. Hanging in the blackness was an azure sphere, gleaming bright as a great globe cut from turquoise. Bill was reminded of a similar blue globe he had seen--when he had stood at the enormous telescope on Trainor's Tower, and watched a little blue circle against the red deserts of Mars.

Brand took two or three observations, figured swiftly.

"It's moving," he said. "About fourteen thousand miles per hour. Funny! It is moving directly toward the earth, almost from the direction of the planet Mars. I wonder----" He seized the pencil, figured again. "Queer. That thing seems headed for the earth, from a point on the orbit of Mars, where that planet was about forty days ago. Do you suppose the Martians are paying us a visit?"

"Then it's not the Prince of Space?"

"I don't know. Its direction might be just a coincidence. And the Prince might be a Martian, for all I know. Anyhow, we're going to find what that blue globe is!"

Two hours later the nine sunships were drawn up in the form of a great half circle, closing swiftly on the blue globe, which had been calculated to be about one hundred feet in diameter. The sunships were nearly a thousand miles from the globe, and scattered along a curved line two thousand miles in length. Captain Brand gave orders for eight forward tubes on each flier to be made ready for use as weapons. From his own ship he flashed a heliographic signal.

"The _Fury_, of the Moon Patrol, demands that you show ship's papers, identification tags for all passengers, and submit to search for contraband."

The message was three times repeated, but no reply came from the azure globe. It continued on its course. The slender white sunships came plunging swiftly toward it, until the crescent they formed was not two hundred miles between the points, the blue globe not a hundred miles from the war-fliers.

Then Bill, with his eye at a telescope, saw a little spark of purple light appear beside the blue globe. A tiny, bright point of violet-red fire, with a white line running from it, back to the center of the sphere. The purple spark grew, the white line lengthened. Abruptly, the newspaperman realized that the purple was an object hurtling toward him with incredible speed.

* * * * *

Even as the realization burst upon him, the spark became visible as a little red-blue sphere, brightly luminous. A white beam shone behind it, seemed to push it with ever-increasing velocity. The purple globe shot past, vanished. The white ray snapped out.

"A weapon!" he exclaimed.

"A weapon and a warning!" said Brand, still peering through another eyepiece. "And we reply!"

"Heliograph!" he shouted into a speaking tube. "Each ship will open with one forward tube, operating one second twelve times per minute. Increase power of rear tubes to compensate repulsion."

White shields flickered. Blindingly brilliant rays, straight bars of dazzling opalescence, burst intermittently from each of the nine ships, striking across a hundred miles of space to batter the blue globe with a hail of charged atoms.

Again a purple spark appeared from the sapphire globe, with a beam of white fire behind it. A tiny purple globe, hurtling at an inconceivable velocity before a lance of white flame. It reached out, with a certain deliberation, yet too quickly for a man to do more than see it.

It struck a sunship, at one tip of the crescent formation.

A dazzling flash of violet flame burst out. The tiny globe seemed to explode into a huge flare of red-blue light. And where the slim, eight-sided ship had been was a crushed and twisted mass of metal.

"A solid projectile!" Brand cried. "And driven on the positive ray! Our experts have tried it, but the ray always exploded the shell. And that was some explosion! I don't know what--unless atomic energy!"

The eight sunships that remained were closing swiftly upon the blue globe. The dazzling white rays flashed intermittently from them. They struck the blue globe squarely--the fighting crews of the Moon Patrol are trained until their rays are directed with deadly accuracy. The azure sphere, unharmed, shone with bright radiance--it seemed that a thin mist of glittering blue particles was gathering about it, like a dust of powdered sapphires.

Another purple spark leapt from the turquoise globe.

In the time that it took a man's eyes to move from globe to slim, glistening sunship, the white ray had driven the purple spark across the distance. Another vivid flash of violet light. And another sunship became a hurtling mass of twisted wreckage.

"We are seven!" Brand quoted grimly.

"Heliograph!" he shouted into the mouthpiece. "Fire all forward tubes one second twenty times a minute. Increase rear power to maximum."

White rays burst from the seven darting sunships, flashing off and on. That sapphire globe grew bright, with a strange luminosity. The thin mist of sparkling blue particles seemed to grow more dense about it.

"Our rays don't seem to be doing any good," Brand muttered, puzzled. "The blue about that globe must be some sort of vibratory screen."

Another purple spark, with the narrow white line of fire behind it, swept across to the flier from the opposite horn of the crescent, burst into a sheet of blinding red-violet light. Another ship was a twisted mass of metal.

"Seven no longer!" Brand called grimly to Bill.

"Looks as if the Prince has got us beaten!" the reporter cried.

"Not while a ship can fight!" exclaimed the Captain. "This is the Moon Patrol!"

Another tiny purple globe traced its line of light across the black, star-misted sky. Another sunship crumpled in a violet flash.

"They're picking 'em off the ends," Bill observed. "We're in the middle, so I guess we're last."

"Then," said Captain Brand, "we've got time to ram 'em."

"Control!" he shouted into the speaking tube. "Cut off forward tubes and make all speed for the enemy. Heliograph! Fight to the end! I am going to ram them!"

Another red-blue spark moved with its quick deliberation. A purple flash left another ship in twisted ruin.

Bill took his eye from the telescope. The blue globe, bright under the rays, with the sapphire mist sparkling about it, was only twenty miles away. He could see it with his naked eye, drifting swiftly among the familiar stars of Scorpio.

It grew larger very swiftly.

With the quickness of thought, the purple sparks moved out alternately to right and to left. They never missed. Each one exploded in purple flame, crushed a sunship.

"Three fliers left," Bill counted, eyes on the growing blue globe before them. "Two left. Good-by, Brand." He grasped the bluff Captain's hand. "One left. Will we have time?"

He looked forward. The blue globe, with the dancing, sparkling haze of sapphire swirling about it, was swiftly expanding.

"The last one! Our turn now!"

He saw a tiny fleck of purple light dart out of the expanding azure sphere that they had hoped to ram. Then red-violet flame seemed to envelope him. He felt the floor of the bridge tremble beneath his feet. He heard the beginning of a shivering crash like that of shattering glass. Then the world was mercifully dark and still.