Part 33 (2/2)

There were supplies of clothing in the s.h.i.+p--jackets, knee-length trousers, silken blouses, boots, and even snug-fitting, fas.h.i.+onable caps. Very unlike the ragged wanderers of the mountainous wastes were the three who stood safely to windward of a spouting fumerole.

Mud, coughed hoa.r.s.ely from a hot throat, and green, billowing gas!--there was nothing now to show that here was the scene of a companion's last moments. With heads bared to the steady breeze that had been their undoing, they stood silent for long minutes.

Behind them, at a still safer distance, where no chance flicker of a fire-G.o.d's finger might strike him down as it had the white man, a black figure danced absurdly from foot to foot and indulged in unexpected gyrations of joy.

For did not Towahg hold in one hand a most marvelous weapon of s.h.i.+ning, keen-edged metal, with a blade that was longer than his two hands? What member of the tribe had ever seen such an indescribably glorious thing?

And, lacking the words even to propound that question, Towahg spun himself in still tighter spirals of ecstasy.

Then there was the ax! Not made of stone but fas.h.i.+oned from the same metal! And besides this a magic thing for which as yet there was not even a name! It made flas.h.i.+ng reflections in the sun; and if one held it just so, and moved one's head before it, it showed a quite remarkably attractive face of a man who was more than half ape--though Towahg had never yet been able to catch that man beyond the magic that the white men called ”mirror.”

He was still enthralled in his grotesque posturing when Diane looked down from the floating s.h.i.+p.

”He'll be the Lord Chief Voodoo Man for the whole tribe,” she said, and, for the first time since they had stood at the fumerole, she managed to smile. ”And now,” she asked, ”are we off? What comes next?”

Chet's hand was on a metal ball in a crudely constructed cage of metal bars. He looked at Harkness, and, at the other's almost imperceptible nod, he moved the ball forward and up.

”We're off!” Harkness agreed. ”Off for Earth--home! And it will look good to us all. We will take up things where we left them when we were interrupted: there's no Schwartzmann to fear now. We can show our s.h.i.+p to the world--revolutionize all lines of transportation; and we can plan--”

He failed to finish the sentence. To his reaching vision there were, perhaps, more potentialities than he could compa.s.s in words.

And Chet Bullard, fingering the triple star on his blouse--the insignia that had gone with him through all his hopes and despairs--looked out into s.p.a.ce and smiled.

Behind him a brilliant world went slowly dark; it became, after long watching, a violet ring--then that was gone; the Dark Moon was lost in the folds of enshrouding night. Ahead was an infinity of black s.p.a.ce where only the distant stars struck sparks of fire in the dark. And still he smiled, as if, looking into the unplumbed depths, he, too, made plans. But he moved the little ball within his hand and swung the bow sights to bear upon a glorious globe--a brilliant, welcome beacon.

”Home it is!” he stated. ”We're on our way!”

But there was needed the rising roar from astern that his words might have meaning; it thundered sonorously its resounding hum in a crescendo of power that brooked no denial, that threw them out and onward through the velvet dark.

The End.

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