CHAPTER VIII

The Vitomaton

"I love Paula!" cried the Prince. "It happened all at once--when you said she was gone. Like a burst of light. Yet it must have been growing for weeks. It was getting so I couldn't work in the lab, unless she was there. God! It must have been hard for her. I was fighting it; I tried to hide what I was beginning to feel, tried to treat her as if she were a man. Now--she's gone!"

Bill looked back to the _Red Rover_, half a mile behind them. She lay still, burnished silver cylinder on the red sand. He could see Trainor beside her, still working over the curious little device on the tripod. All the others had gone aboard. And a score of blue globe-ships, like little sapphire moons, were circling a few thousand feet above, drifting around and around, with a slow gliding motion, like buzzards circling over their carrion-prey.

The Prince had buried his face in his hands, standing in an attitude of utter dejection.

Bill turned, looked over the red flat sand of the Martian desert. Far below, leading toward the near horizon, he saw a winding line of foot-prints, half obliterated by the recent dust-storm. Far away they vanished below the blue-black sky.

"Her tracks," he said, pointing.

"Tracks!" the Prince looked up, eager, hopeful determination flashing in his dark eyes. "Then we can follow! It may not be too late!"

He ran toward the edge of the cliff.

Bill clutched his sleeve. "Wait! Think what you're doing, man! We're fighting to save the world. You can't run off that way! Anyhow, the sun is low. It is getting cool already. In two minutes after the sun goes down it will be cold as the devil! You'll die in the desert!"

The Prince tugged away. "Hang the world! If you knew the way I feel about Paula--Lord, what a fool I've been! To drive her to this!"

Agony was written on his dark face; he bit his thin lip until blood oozed out and mingled indistinguishably with the red grime on his face. "Anyhow, the _vitomaton_ is finished. Trainor can use it as well as I. I've got to find Paula--or die trying."

He started toward the brink of the precipice again. After the hesitation of a moment, Bill started after him. The Prince turned suddenly.

"What the devil are you doing here?"

"Well," said Bill, "the _Red Rover_ is not a very attractive haven of refuge, with all those Martian ships flying around it. And I have come to think a good deal of Miss Paula. I'd like to help you find her."

"Don't come," said the Prince. "Probably it is death--"

"I'm not exactly an infant. I've been in tight places before, I've even an idea of what it would be like to die at night in this desert--I found the bones of a man in the dust today. But I want to go."

The Prince grasped Bill's hand. For a moment a tender smile of friendship came over the drawn mask of mingled despair and determination upon his lean face.

Presently the two of them found an inclining ledge that ran down the face of the red granite cliff, and scrambled along to the flat plain of acrid dust below. In desperate haste they plodded gasping along, following the scant traces of Paula's foot-prints that the storm had left. A hazy red cloud of dust rose about them, stinging their nostrils. They strangled and gasped for breath in the thin, dusty air. Sweaty grime covered them with a red crust.

For a mile they followed the trail. Then Paula had left the sand for a bare ledge of age-worn volcanic rock. The wind had erased what traces she might have left here. They skirted the edge of the ledge, but no prints were visible in the sand. The small red eye of the sun was just above the ocherous western rim of the planet. Their perspiring bodies shivered under the first chill of the frozen Martian night.

"It's no use," Bill muttered, sitting down on a block of time-worn granite, and wiping the red mud from his face. "She's probably been gone for hours. No chance."

"I've got to find her!" the Prince cried, his lean, red-stained face tense with determination. "I'll circle about a little, and see if I can't pick up the trail."

Bill sat on the rock. He looked back at the low dark rim of cliffs, a mile behind, grim and forbidding against the somber, indigo sky. The crimson, melancholy splendor of the Martian sunset was fading in the west.

The silver sunship was out of sight behind the cliffs. But he could see the little blue globes, like spinning moons of sapphire, circling watchfully above it. They were lower now, some of them not a thousand feet above the hidden sunship.

Abruptly, one of them was enveloped in a vivid flare of orange light. Its blue gleam flickering out, and it fell in fragments of twisted white metal. Bill knew that it had been struck with a rocket torpedo.

The reply was quick and terrible. Slender, dazzling shafts of incandescent whiteness stabbed down toward the ship, each of them driving before it a tiny bright spark of purple fire, coruscating, iridescent.

They were the atomic bombs, Bill knew. A dozen of them must have been fired, from as many ships. In a few seconds he heard the reports of their explosions--in the thin, still air, they were mere sharp cracks, like pistol reports. They exploded below the line of his vision. No more torpedoes were fired from the unseen sunship. Bill could see nothing of it; but he was sure that it had been destroyed.

He heard the Prince's shout, thin and high in the rare atmosphere. It came from a hundred yards beyond him.

"I've found the trail."

Bill got up, trudged across to follow him. The Prince waited, impatiently, but gasping for breath. Just half of the red disk of the sun was visible in the indigo sky above the straight horizon, and a chill breeze blew upon them.

"I guess that ends the chance for the world!" Bill gasped.

"I suppose so. Some fool must have shot that torpedo off, contrary to orders. The _vitomaton_ might have saved us, if Trainor had had a chance to use it."

They plodded on through the dust, straining their eyes to follow the half-obliterated trail in the fading light. It grew colder very swiftly, for Mars has no such thick blanket atmosphere to hold the heat of day as has the earth.

Twilight was short. Splendid wings of somber crimson flame hung for a moment in the west. A brief golden glow shone where it had been. Then the sky was dark, and the million stars were standing out in cold, motionless majesty--scintillantly bright, unfeeling watchers of the drama in the desert.

Bill felt tingling cold envelope his limbs. The sweat and mud upon him seemed freezing. He saw the white glitter of frost appear suddenly upon his garments, even upon the red dust. The thin air he breathed seemed to freeze his lungs. He trembled. His skin became a stiff, numb, painful garment, hindering his movements. The Prince staggered on ahead of him, a vague dark shadow in the night, crying out at intervals in a queer, strained voice.

* * * * *

Bill stopped, looked back, shivering and miserable. "No use to go on," he muttered. "No use." He stood still, vainly flapping his numb arms against his sides. A vivid picture came to him--a naked, staring, sun-bleached skull, lying in the red dust. "Bones in the dust," he muttered. "Bones in the dust. Envers' bones. And Paula's. The Prince's. Mine."

He saw something that made him stare, oblivious of the cold.

The red cliff had become a low dark line, below the star-studded sky. The score of little cobalt moons were still drifting around and around, in endless circles, watching, waiting. They were bright among the stars.

A little green cloud came up into view, above the dark rim of the cliff. A little spinning wisp of greenish vapor. A tiny sphere of swirling radiance. It shone with the clear lucent green of spring, of all verdure, of life itself. It spun, and it shone with live green light.

With inconceivable speed, it darted upward. It struck one of the blue globes. A sparkling mist of dancing emerald atoms flowed over the azure sphere, dissolved it, melted it away.

Bill rubbed his eyes. Where the sapphire ship had been was now only a swirling mass of green mist, a cloud of twinkling emerald particles, shining with a supernal viridescent radiance that somehow suggested _life_.

Abruptly as the first tiny wisp of green luminescence had appeared, this whirling cloud exploded. It burst into scores of tiny globes of sparkling, vibrant atoms. The green cloud had eaten and grown. Now it was reproducing itself like a living thing that feeds and grows and sends off spores.

And each of the little blobs of viridity flew to an azure sphere. It seemed to Bill as if the blue ships drew them--or as if the green globules of swirling mist were _alive_, seeking food.

In an instant, each swirling spiral of emerald mist had struck a blue globe. Vibrant green haze spread over every sphere. And the spheres melted, faded, vanished in clouds of swirling viridescent vapor.

It all happened very suddenly. It was hardly a second, Bill thought, after the first of the swirling green blobs had appeared, before the last of the Martian fliers had become a mass of incandescent mist. Then, suddenly as they had come, the green spirals vanished. They were blotted out.

The stars shone cold and brilliant, in many-colored splendor, above the dark line of the cliffs. The Martian ships were gone.

"The _vitomaton_!" Bill muttered, "The Prince said something about the _vitomaton_. A new weapon, using the force of life. And the green was like a living thing, consuming the spheres!"

Suddenly he felt the bitter cold again. He moved, and his garments were stiff with frost. The cold had numbed his limbs--most of the pain had gone. He felt a curious lightness, an odd sense of relief, of freedom--and a delicious, alarming desire for sleep. But leaden pain of cold still lurked underneath, dull, throbbing.

"Move! Move!" he muttered through cold-stiffened lips. "Move! Keep warm!"

He stumbled across the dust in the direction the Prince had taken. The cold tugged at him. His breath froze in swirls of ice. With all his will he fought the deadly desire for sleep.

He had not gone far when he came upon a dark shape in the night. It was the Prince, carrying Paula in his arms.

"I found her lying on the sand," he gasped to Bill. "She was awake. She was glad--forgave me--happy now."

The Prince was exhausted, struggling through the sand, burdened with the girl in his arms.

"Why go on?" Bill forced the words through his freezing face. "Never make it. They shot atomic bombs at _Red Rover_. Then something happened to them. Green light."

"The _vitomaton_!" gasped the Prince. "Vortex of spinning, disintegrated atoms. Controlled by wireless power. Alive! Consumes all matter! Disintegrates it into atomic nothingness!"

He staggered on toward the dark line of cliffs, clasping the inert form of the girl to his body.

"But Paula! I love her. I must carry her to the ship. It is my fault. We must get to the ship."

* * * * *

Bill struggled along beside him. "Too far!" he muttered. "Miles, in the night. In the cold. We'll never----"

He stopped, with a thin, rasping cry.

Before him, above the narrow black line of the cliffs, a slender bar of luminescent silver had shot up into view. It was the slim, tapering cylinder of the _Red Rover_, with her twelve rear motor rays driving white and dazzling against the mountain she was leaving. The sunship, unharmed, driving upward into space!

"My God!" Bill screamed. "Leaving us!" He staggered forward, a pitiful, trembling figure, encased in stiff, frost-covered garments. He waved his arms, shouted. It was vain, almost ludicrous.

The Prince had stopped, still holding Paula in his arms.

"They think--Martians got us!" he called in a queer voice. "Stop them! Fire torpedo--at boulder. They will see!"

Bill heard the gasping voice. He unfastened the heavy tube that he still carried on his shoulder, leveled it before him. With numb, trembling fingers, he tried to move the levers. His fingers seemed frozen; they would not move. Tears burst from his eyes, freezing on his cheeks. He stood holding the heavy tube in his arms, sobbing like a baby.

Above them, the slender white cylinder of the _Red Rover_ was driving out into star-gemmed space, dazzling opalescent rays shooting back at the dark mountain behind her.

"They go," Bill babbled. "They think we are dead. Have not time to wait. Go to fight for world."

He collapsed in a trembling heap upon the loose, frosty sand.

The Prince had suddenly laid Paula on the ground, was beside him.

"Lift the rocket," he gasped. "Aim. I will fire."

Bill raised the heavy tube mechanically, sighted through the telescope. His trembling was so violent that he could hardly hold it upon the rock. The Prince tried with his fingers to move the lever, in vain. Then he bent, pressed his chin against it. It slipped, cut a red gash in his skin. Again he tried, and the whir of the motor responded. He got his chin upon the little red button, pressed it. The empty shell drove back, fell from Bill's numbed hands and clattered on the sand.

The torpedo struck with a burst of orange light.

The Prince picked up Paula again, clasped her chilled body to him. Bill watched the _Red Rover_. Suddenly he voiced a glad, incoherent cry. The white rays that drove her upward were snapped out. The slim silver ship swung about, came down on a long swift glide.

In a moment, it seemed, she swept over them, with a searchlight sweeping the red sand. The white beam found the three. Quickly the ship dropped beside them. Grotesque figures in vacuum suits leapt from the air-lock.

In a few seconds they were aboard, in warmth and light. Hot, moist air hissed into the lock about them, and they could breathe easily again. The sizzling of the air through the valves was the last impression of which Bill was conscious, until he found himself waking up in a comfortable bed, feeling warm and very hungry. Captain Brand was standing with his blue eyes peering through the door.

"Just looked in to see you as I was going on duty, Bill," he said. "Doctor Trainor says you're all right now. The Prince and Paula are too. You were all rather chilled, but nothing was seriously frozen. Lucky you shot off the rocket. We had given up hope for you--didn't dare stay.

"Funny change has come over the Prince. He's been up a good while, sitting by Paula's bed. How's that for the misogynist--the hermit outlaw of space? Well, come on up to the bridge when you've had some breakfast. The battle with Mars is going to be fought out in the next few hours. Ought to be something interesting to see."

Having delivered his broadside of information so fast that the sleepy Bill could hardly absorb it, the gruff old space-captain withdrew his head, and went on.

An hour later Bill entered the bridge-room.

Gazing through the vitrolite panels, he saw the familiar aspect of interplanetary space--hard, brilliant points of many-colored light scintillating in a silver-dusted void of utter blackness. The flaming, red-winged sun was small and far distant. Earth was a huge green star, glowing with indescribably beautiful liquid emerald brilliance; the moon a silver speck beside it.

The grim red disk of Mars filled a great space in the heavens. Bill looked for a little blue dot that had been visible upon the red planet for so long--the tiny azure circle that he had first seen from the telescope in Trainor's Tower. He found the spot where it should be, on the upper limb of the planet. But it was gone.

"The thing has left Mars," Captain Brand told him. "It has set out on its mission of doom to Earth!"

"What is it?"

"It is armored with one of their blue vibratory screens. What hellish contrivances of war it has in it, and what demoniac millions of Martians, no one knows. It is enormous, more than a mile in diameter."

"Can we do anything?"

"I hardly see how we can do anything. But we can try. Trainor and the Prince are coming with their _vitomaton_."

"Say, didn't they shoot their atomic bombs at the ship last night?" Bill asked. "It was out of sight, but I imagined they had wrecked it."

"One of the lookouts who was late getting back brought down one of their globes with a rocket. They fired a lot of the purple bombs to scare us. But I think they meant to take us alive. In the interest of their science, I suppose. And Dr. Trainor got the _vitomaton_ ready before they had done anything."

Bill was peering out into the star-strewn ebon gulf. Captain Brand pointed. He saw a tiny blue globe, swimming among the stars.

"There's the infernal thing! Carrying its cargo of horror to our earth!"

In a few moments Dr. Trainor, the Prince, and Paula came one by one up the ladder to the bridge. Trainor carried the tripod; the Prince brought a little black case which contained the strange vacuum tube with the cerium electrode, and its various accessories; Paula had a little calculating machine and a book of mathematical tables.

Trainor and the Prince set up the tripod in the center of the room, and mounted the little black case upon it. The apparatus looked not very different from a small camera. Working with cool, brisk efficiency, Paula began operating the calculating machine, taking numbers from the book, and calling out the results to the Prince, who was setting numerous small dials on the apparatus.

Dr. Trainor peered through a compact little telescope which was evidently an auxiliary part of the apparatus, training the machine on the tiny blue disk that was the messenger of doom from Mars. From time to time he called out numbers which seemed to go into Paula's calculations.

Looking curiously at Paula and the Prince, Bill could see no sign of an understanding between them. Both seemed absorbed in the problem before them. They were impersonal as any two collaborating scientists.

At last Dr. Trainor raised his eyes from the little telescope, and the Prince paused, with his fingers on a tiny switch. The induction coil, in the circuit of a powerful vitalium generator, was buzzing monotonously, while purple fire leapt between its terminals. Paula was still efficiently busy over the little calculating machine, pressing its keys while the motors whirred inside it.

* * * * *

"We're all ready," Trainor announced, "as soon as Paula finishes the integration." He turned to Bill and Captain Brand, who were eying the apparatus with intense interest. "If you will look inside this electron tube, when the Prince closes the switch, you will see a tiny green spark come into being. Just at the focus of the rays from the cerium electrode, inside the vitalium helix grid.

"That green spark is a living thing!"

"It has in it the vital essence. It can consume matter--feed itself. It can grow. It can divide, reproduce itself. It responds to stimuli--it obeys the signals we send from this directional beam transmitter." He tapped an insignificant little drum.

"And it ceases to be, when we cut off the power.

"It is a living thing, that eats. And it is more destructive than anything else that eats, for it destroys the atoms that it takes into itself. It resolves them into pure vibratory energy, into free protons and electrons."

Paula called out another number, in her soft, husky voice. The Prince swiftly set a last dial, pressed a tiny lever. Bill, peering through the thin walls of a little electron tube, saw a filament light, saw the thin cerium disk grow incandescent, apparently under cathode bombardment. Then he saw a tiny green spark come into being, in a fine helix of gleaming vitalium wire. For a little time it hung there, swinging back and forth a little, growing slowly.

Deliberately, one by one, the Prince depressed keys on a black panel behind the tube. The little green spark wavered. Suddenly it shot forward, out through the wall of the tube. It swam uncertainly through the air in the room, growing until it was large as a marble. The Prince flicked down another key, and it darted out through a vitrolite panel, towards the blue globe from Mars.

It had cut a little round hole in the transparent crystal, a hole the size of a man's finger. The matter in it had vanished utterly. And the little viridescent cloud of curdled light that hung outside had grown again. It was as large as a man's fist--a tiny, whirling spiral of vibrant emerald particles.

Air hissed through the little hole, forming a frozen, misty cloud outside. Captain Brand promptly produced a little disk of soft rubber, placed it against the opening. Air-pressure held it tight, sealing the orifice.

The Prince pressed another key, the little swirling green sphere was whisked away--it vanished. The Prince stood intent, fingers on the banks of keys, eyes on red pointers that spun dizzily on tiny dials. Another key clicked down suddenly. He moved a dial, and looked expectantly out through the vitrolite panel.

Bill saw the green film run suddenly over the tiny blue globe floating among the stars. The azure sphere seemed to melt away, to dissolve into sparkling green radiance. In a moment, where the great blue ship had been, was only a spinning spiral of glistening viridescence.

"Look at Mars!" cried the Prince. "This is a challenge. If they want peace, they shall have it. If they want war, they shall feel the power of the _vitomaton_!"

Bill turned dazedly to look at the broad disk of the red planet. It was not relatively very far away. He could see the glistening white spot that was the north polar cap, the vast ocherous deserts, the dark equatorial markings, the green-black lines of the canals. For all the grimness of its somber, crimson color, it was very brilliant against the darkness of the spangled void.

An amazing change came swiftly over Mars.

A bluish tinge flowed over orange-red deserts. A thin blue mist seemed to have come suddenly into the atmosphere of the planet. It darkened, became abruptly solid. A wall of blue hid the red world. Mars became a colossal globe. Her surface was as real, as smooth and unbroken, as that of the ship they had just destroyed.

Mars had become a sphere of polished sapphire.

"A wall of vibration, I suppose," said the Prince. "What a science to condemn to destruction!"

Huge globes of purple fire--violet spheres large as the ship they had just destroyed--driven on mighty rays, leapt out from a score of points on the smooth azure armor that covered a world. With incredible speed, they converged toward the _Red Rover_.

"Atomic bombs with a vengeance!" cried the Prince. "One of those would throw the earth out of its orbit, into the sun." He turned briskly to Paula. "Quick now! Integrations for the planet!"

She sprang to the calculating machine; slim fingers flew over the keys. Trainor swung his apparatus toward the smooth azure ball that Mars had become, peered through his telescope, called out a series of numbers to Paula. Quickly she finished, gave her results to the Prince.

He bent over the banks of keys again.

Bill watched the enormous blue globe of Mars in fascinated horror, followed the huge, luminescent red-purple atomic bombs, that were hurtling out toward them, driven on broad white rays.

"An amazing amount of power in those atomic bombs," Dr. Trainor commented, his mild eyes bright with scientific enthusiasm. "I doubt that space itself is strong enough to hold up under their explosion. If they hit us, I imagine it will break down the continuum, blow us out of the universe altogether, out of space and time!"

Bill was looking at the whirling green spiral that hung where the Martian flier had been. He saw it move suddenly, dart across the star-dusted darkness of space. It plunged straight for the blue ball of Mars, struck it. A viridescent fog ran quickly over the enormous azure globe.

Mars melted away.

The planet dissolved in a huge, madly spinning cloud of brilliant green mist that shone with an odd light--with a light of _life_! A world faded into a nebulous spiral of green. Mars became a spinning cloud of dust as if of malachite.

A tiny lever flicked over, under the Prince's fingers. And the green light went out.

Where Mars had been was nothing! The stars shone through, hot and clear. A machine no larger than a camera had destroyed a world. Bill was dazed, staggered.

Solemnly, almost sadly, the Prince moved a slender, tanned hand across his brow. "A terrible thing," he said slowly. "It is a terrible thing to destroy a world. A world that had been eons in the making, and that might have changed the history of the cosmos.... But they voted for war. We had no choice."

He shook his head suddenly, and smiled. "It's all over. The great mission of my life--completed. Doctor, I want you to pack the _vitomaton_ very carefully, and lock it up in our best safe, and try to forget the combination. A great invention. But I hope we never need to use it again."

Then the Prince of Space did a thing that was amazing to most of his associates as the destruction of Mars had been. He walked quickly to Paula Trainor, and put his arms around her. He slowly tilted up her elfin face, where the golden eyes were laughing now, with a great, tender light of gladness shining in them. He bent, and kissed her warm red lips, with a hungry eagerness that was almost boyish.

A happy smile was dancing in his eyes when he looked up at the astounded Captain Brand and the others.

"Allow me," he said, "to present the Princess of Space!"

Some months later, when Bill was landed on Trainor's Tower, on a visit from his new home in the City of Space, he found that the destruction of Mars had created an enormous sensation. Astronomers were manfully inventing fantastic hypotheses to explain why the red planet had first turned blue, then green, and finally vanished utterly. The sunships of the Moon Patrol were still hunting merrily for the Prince of Space. Since the loss of the _Triton's_ treasure, the reward for his capture had been increased to twenty-five million eagles.

The End