CHAPTER VI

The Red Star of War

The _Red Rover_ slipped out through the great air-lock of the City of Space, and put her bow toward Mars. The star of the war-god hung before her in the silver-dusted darkness of the faint constellation of Capricornus, a tiny brilliant disk of ocherous red. The Prince of Space, outlawed by the world of his birth, was hurtling out through space in a mad attempt to save that world from the horrors of Martian invasion.

The red point that was Mars hung almost above them, it seemed, almost in the center of the vitrolite dome of the bridge. "We are not heading directly for the planet," Captain Brand told Bill. "Its orbital velocity must be considered. We are moving toward the point that it will occupy in twenty days."

"We can make it in twenty days? Three million miles a day?"

"Easily, if the vitalium holds out, and if we don't collide with a meteorite. There is no limit to speed in space, certainly no practical limit. Acceleration is the important question."

"We may collide with a meteorite you say? Is there much danger?"

"A good deal. The meteorites travel in swarms which follow regular orbits about the sun. We have accurate charts of the swarms whose orbits cross those of the earth and moon. Now we are entering unexplored territory. And most of them are so small, of course, that no telescope would reveal them in time. Merely little pebbles, moving with a speed about a dozen times that of a bullet from an old-fashioned rifle."

"And what are we going to do if we live to get to Mars?"

"A big question!" Brand grinned. "We could hardly mop up a whole planet with the motor rays. Trainor has a few of his rocket torpedoes, but not enough to make much impression upon a belligerent planet. The Prince and Trainor have a laboratory rigged up down below. They are doing a lot of work. A new weapon, I understand. I don't know what will come of it."

Presently Bill found his way down the ladder to the laboratory. He found the Prince of Space and Dr. Trainor hard at work. He learned little by watching them, save that they were experimenting upon small animals, green plants, and samples of the rare vitalium. High tension electricity, electron tubes, and various rays seemed to be in use.

Noticing his interest, the Prince said, "You know that vitalium was first discovered in vitamins, in infinitesimal quantities. The metal seems to be at the basis of all life. It is the trace of vitalium in chlorophyl which enables the green leaves of plants to utilize the energy of sunlight. We are trying to determine the nature of the essential force of life--we know that the question is bound up with the radioactivity of vitalium. We have made a good deal of progress, and complete success would give us a powerful instrumentality."

Paula was working with them in the laboratory, making a capable and eager assistant--she had been her father's helper since her girlhood. Bill noticed that she seemed happy only when near the Prince, that the weight of unhappiness and trouble left her brown eyes only when she was able to help him with some task, or when her skill brought a word or glance of approval from him.

The Prince himself seemed entirely absorbed in his work; he treated the girl courteously enough, but seemed altogether impersonal toward her. To him, she seemed only to be a fellow-scientist. Yet Bill knew that the Prince was aware of the girl's feelings--and he suspected that the Prince was trying to stifle a growing reciprocal emotion of his own.

Bill spent long hours on the bridge with Captain Brand, staring out at the star-scattered midnight of space. The earth shrank quickly, until it was a tiny green disk, with the moon an almost invisible white speck beside it. Day by day, Mars grew larger. It swelled from an ocher point to a little red disk.

Often Bill scanned the spinning scarlet globe through a telescope. He could see the white polar caps, the dark equatorial regions, the black lines of the canals. And after many days, he could see the little blue circle that had been visible in the giant telescope on Trainor's Tower.

"It must be something enormous, to stand out so plainly," he said when he showed it to Captain Brand.

"I suppose so. Even now, we could see nothing with a diameter of less than a mile or so."

"If it's a ship, it must be darned big--big enough for the whole race of 'em to get aboard."

Bill was standing, a few hours later, gazing out through the vitrolite panels at the red-winged splendor of the sun, when suddenly he heard a series of terrific crashes. The ship rocked and trembled beneath him; he heard the reverberation of hammered metal, and the hiss of escaping air.

"Meteorite!" screamed Brand.

Wildly, he pointed to the vitrolite dome above. In three places the heavy crystal was shattered, a little hole drilled through it, surrounded with radiating cracks. In two other sections the heavy metal wall was dented. Through the holes, the air was hissing out. It formed a white cloud outside, and glistening frost gathered quickly on the crystal panels.

Bill felt the air suddenly drawn from his lungs. He gasped for breath. The bridge was abruptly cold. Little particles of snow danced across it.

"The air is going!" Brand gasped. "We'll suffocate!"

He touched a lever and a heavy cover fell across the ladder shaft, locked itself, making the floor an airtight bulkhead.

"That's right," Bill tried to say. "Give others--chance."

His voice had failed. A soaring came in his ears. He felt as if a malignant giant were sucking out his breath. The room grew dark, swam about him. He reeled; he was blind. A sudden chill came over his limbs--the infinite cold of space. He felt hot blood spurting from his nose, freezing on his face. Faintly he heard Brand moving, as he staggered and fell into unconsciousness.

* * * * *

When he looked about again, air and warmth were coming back. He saw that the shaft was still sealed, but air was hissing into the room through a valve. Captain Brand lay inert beside him on the floor. He looked up at the dome, saw that soft rubber patches had been placed over the holes, where air-pressure held them fast. The Captain had saved the ship before he fell.

In a moment the door opened. Dr. Trainor rushed in, with Prince and others behind him. They picked up the unconscious Brand and rushed him down to the infirmary. The plucky captain had been almost asphyxiated, but administration of pure oxygen restored him to consciousness. On the following day he was back on the bridge.

The _Red Rover_ had been eighteen days out from the City of Space. The loss of air due to collision with the meteorites had brought inconveniences, but good progress had been made. It was only two more days to Mars. The forward tubes had been going many hours, to retard the ship.

"Object dead ahead!" called a lookout from his telescope.

"A small blue globe, coming directly toward us," he added, a moment later.

"Another of their ships, setting out for the earth," Brand muttered. "It will about cook our goose!"

In a few moments the Prince and Dr. Trainor had rushed up the ladder from the laboratory. The blue globe was rushing swiftly toward them; and the _Red Rover_ was plunging forward at many thousand miles per hour.

"We can't run from it," said Brand. "It is still fifty thousand miles away, but we are going far too fast to stop in that distance. We will pass it in about five minutes."

"If we can't stop, we go ahead," the Prince said, smiling grimly.

"We might try a torpedo on 'em," suggested Dr. Trainor. He had mounted a tube to fire his rocket torpedoes from the bridge. "It will have all the speed its own motor rays can develop, _plus_ what the ship has at present, _plus_ the relative velocity of the globe. That might carry it through."

The Prince nodded assent.

Trainor slipped a slender, gleaming rocket into his tube, sighted it, moved the lever that set the projectile to spinning, and fired. The little white flame of the motor rays dwindled and vanished ahead of them. Quickly, Trainor fired again, and then a third time.

"Switch off the rays and darken the lights," the Prince ordered. "With combined speeds of ten thousand miles a minute, we might pass them without being seen--if they haven't sighted us already."

For long seconds they hurtled onward in tense silence. Bill was at a telescope. Against the silver and black background of space, the little blue disk of the Martian ship was growing swiftly.

Suddenly a bright purple spark appeared against the blue, grew swiftly brighter.

"An atomic bomb!" he cried. "They saw us. We are lost!"

He tensed himself, waiting for the purple flash that would mean the end. But the words were hardly out of his mouth when he saw a tiny sheet of violet flame far ahead of them. It flared up suddenly, and vanished as abruptly. The blue disk of the ship still hung before them, but the purple spark was gone. For a moment he was puzzled. Then he understood.

"The atomic bomb struck a torpedo!" he shouted. "It's exploded. And if they think it was we----"

"Perhaps they can't see us, with the rays out," Brand said.

"It is unlikely," Trainor observed, "that the bomb actually struck one of our torpedoes. More likely it was set to be detonated by the gravitational attraction of any object that passed near it."

Still watching the azure globe, Bill saw a sudden flare of orange light against it. A great burst of yellow flame. The blue ball crumpled behind the flame. The orange went out, and the blue vanished with it. Only twisted scraps of white metal were left.

"The second torpedo struck the Martian!" Bill cried.

"And you notice that the blue went out," said Dr. Trainor. "It must be merely a vibratory screen."

The _Red Rover_ hurtled on through space, toward the crimson planet that hour by hour and minute by minute expanded before her. The blue disk was now plainly visible against the red. It was apparently a huge globe of azure, similar to the ships they had met, but at least a mile in diameter. She lay just off the red desert, near an important junction of "canals."

"Some huge machine, screened by the blue wall of vibration," Dr. Trainor suggested.

During the last two days the Prince and Dr. Trainor, and their eager assistant, Paula, had worked steadily in the laboratory, without pause for rest. Bill was with them when the Prince threw down his pencil and announced the result of his last calculation.

"The problem is solved," he said. "And its answer means both success and failure. We have mastered the secret of life. We have unlocked the mystery of the ages! A terrific force is at our command--a force great enough to sweep man to the millennium, or to wipe out a planet! But that force is useless without the apparatus to release it."

"We have the laboratory----" Trainor began.

"But we lack one essential thing. We must have a small amount of cerium, one of the rare earth metals. For the electrode, you know, inside the vitalium grid in our new vacuum tube. And there is not a gram of cerium in all our supplies."

"We can go back to the Earth----" said Trainor.

"That will mean forty days gone, before we could come back--more than forty, because we would have to stop at the City of Space to refit. And all the perils of the meteorites again. I am sure that in less than forty days the Martians will be putting the machine in that enormous blue globe to its dreadful use."

"Then we must land on Mars and find the metal!" said Captain Brand, who had been listening by the door.

"Exactly," said the Prince. "You will pick out a spot that looks deserted, at a great distance from the blue globe. Somewhere in the mountains, as far back as possible from the canals. Land there just after midnight. We will have mining and prospecting equipment ready to go to work when day comes. Almost any sort of ore ought to yield the small quantity of cerium we need."

"Very good, sir," said Brand.

* * * * *

A few hours later the _Red Rover_ was sweeping around Mars, on a long curve, many thousands of miles from the surface of the red planet.

"We'll pick out the spot to land while the sun is shining on it," Captain Brand told Bill. "Then we can keep over it, as it sweeps around into the shadow, timing ourselves to land just after midnight."

"Isn't there danger that we may be seen?"

"Of course. We can only minimize it by keeping a few thousand miles above the surface as long as it is day, and landing at night, and in a deserted section."

As they drew nearer, the telescope revealed the surface of the hostile planet more distinctly. Bill peered intently into an eyepiece, scanning the red globe for signs of its malignant inhabitants.

"The canals seem to be strips of greenish vegetation, irrigated from some sort of irrigation system that brings water from the melting ice-caps," he said.

"Lowell, the old American astronomer, knew that two hundred years ago," said Captain Brand, "though some of his contemporaries claimed that they could not see the 'canals.'"

"I can make out low green trees, and metal structures. I think there are long pipes, as well as open channels, to spread the water. And I see a great dome of white metal--it must be five hundred feet across.... There are several of them in sight, mostly located where the canals intersect."

"They might be great community buildings--cities," suggested Brand. "On account of the dust-storms that so often hide the surface of the planet, it would probably be necessary to cover a city up in some way."

"And I see something moving. A little blue dot, it seems. Probably a little flier on the same order as those we have seen; but only a few feet in diameter. It seemed to be sailing from one of the white domes to another."

Brand moved to another telescope.

"Yes, I see them. Two in one place. They seem to be floating along, high and fast. And just to the right is a whole line of them, flying one behind the other. Crossing a patch of red desert."

"What's this?" Bill cried in some excitement. "Looks like animals of some kind in a pen. They look like people, almost."

"What! Let me see!"

Brand rushed over from his telescope. Bill relinquished him the instrument. "See. Just above the center of the field. Right in the edge of that cultivated strip, by what looks like a big aluminum water-pipe."

"Yes. Yes, I see something. A big stockade. And it has things in it. But not men, I think. They are gray and hairy. But they seem to walk on two legs."

"Something like apes, maybe."

"I've got it," cried Brand. "They're domestic animals! The ruling Martians are parasites. They must have something to suck blood out of. They live on these creatures!"

"Probably so," Bill admitted. "Do you suppose they will keep people penned up that way, if they conquer the world?"

"Likely." He shuddered. "No good in thinking of it. We must be selecting the place to land."

He returned to his instrument.

"I've got it," he said presently. "A low mountain, in a big sweep of red desert. About sixty degrees north of the equator. Not a canal or a white dome in a hundred miles."

Long hours went by, while the _Red Rover_ hung above the chosen landing place, waiting for it to sweep into the shadow of night. Bill peered intently through his telescope, watching the narrow strips of vegetation across the bare stretches of orange desert. He studied the bright metal and gray masonry of irrigation works, the widely scattered, white metal domes that seemed to cover cities, the hurtling blue globes that flashed in swift flight between them. Two or three times he caught sight of a tiny, creeping green thing that he thought was one of the hideous, blood-sucking Martians. And he saw half a dozen broad metal pens, or pastures, in which the hairy gray bipeds were confined.

Shining machines were moving across the green strips of fertile land, evidently cultivating them.

The Prince, Dr. Trainor, and Paula were asleep in their staterooms. Bill retired for a short rest, came back to find the planet beneath them in darkness. The _Red Rover_ was dropping swiftly, with Captain Brand still at the bridge.

Rapidly, the stars vanished in an expanding circle below them. Phobos and Deimos, the small moons of Mars, hurtling across the sky with different velocities shed scant light upon the barren desert below. Captain Brand eased the ship down, using the rays as little as possible, to cut down the danger of detection.

The _Red Rover_ dropped silently to the center of a low, cliff-rimmed plateau that rose from the red, sandy desert. In the faint light of stars and hurtling moons, the ocherous waste lay flat in all directions--there are no high mountains on Mars. The air was clear, and so thin that the stars shone with hot brilliance, almost, Bill thought, as if the ship were still out in space.

Silent hours went by, as they waited for dawn. The thin white disk of the nearer moon slid down beneath the black eastern horizon, and rose again to make another hurtling flight.

Just before dawn the Prince appeared, an eager smile on his alert lean face, evidently well recovered from the long struggling in the laboratory.

"I've all the mining machinery ready," Captain Brand told him. "We can get out as soon as it's warm enough--it's a hundred and fifty below zero out there now."

"It ought to warm up right soon after sunrise--thin as this air is. You seem to have picked about the loneliest spot on the planet, all right. There's a lot of danger, though, that we may be discovered before we get the cerium."

"Funny feeling to be the first men on a new world," said Bill.

"But we're not the first," the Prince said. "I am sure that Envers landed on Mars--I think the Martian ships are based on a study of his machinery."

"Envers may have waited here in the desert for the sun to rise, just as we are doing," murmured Brand. "In fact, if he wanted to look around without being seen, he may have landed right near here. This is probably the best place on the planet to land without being detected."