Part 17 (2/2)

The head and face were most of all a personal mocking of mankind.

Wide, upstanding, listening ears were upon the sides of the head, one on the forehead and one on the back. The face was mobile, with tiny brown scales small as a fish. A nose orifice, with two protruding brown eyes above it was set outward on stems, and an upended slit of a mouth. There was an eye in the back of the head.

Probably, over eons of upward development from what was perhaps an original single type, these two specialized forms had developed. The ”Masters,” as they were known upon Wandl, neglected the body for the brain, and the ”Workers,” the reverse. There was no separate individual for the female. As is the case with primitive organisms, they were all bi-s.e.xual, the parent dying in the reproduction of offspring.

Of necessity I have been forced into digression. But at the time, Snap and I clung together, whispering, as a group of workers pushed us down a descending incline. Snap, back there in Greater New York when Molo's contact light had burst into existence, had fallen, half unconscious.

They picked him up. Molo was going to kill him, but the girls persuaded him to take Snap with them.

”Anita and Venza pretended never to have seen me before,” Snap whispered to me now. ”You take the same line.”

”If we get with them.”

”We will.”

It was weird, this landing upon Wandl. We had left the vessel's side-port and were descending what seemed a narrow, hundred-foot landing incline. We were outdoors, and it was night. Shafts of colored radiance flashed around us. The s.h.i.+p was poised on a disc-like platform, with skeleton legs. It seemed a hundred feet or more down to the ground level from where the colored lights were darting up.

Overhead was a cloudless, purple-red sky of blurred, reddish stars. No doubt the curious atmosphere of Wandl gave the sky and stars this abnormal look.

Later, what a multiplicity of obscure wonders we were to glimpse upon Wandl! The slowing rotation of the Earth caused climatic changes there, volcanic and tidal disturbances, but Wandl rotated and stopped at will. Undoubtedly she was equipped to withstand the shock. Her internal fires could not break into eruption; she had very little fluid surface. And the nature of her atmosphere was such that it was not easily disturbed into storms. Only if there was laxity in the handling of the planet's motion would a storm come.

But now, questions pounded at me. Earth, Venus and Mars were to be towed into interstellar s.p.a.ce; all life on our worlds would perish in the cold of that stellar journey. Yet Wandl had made that journey. Was her atmosphere inherently such that it did not transmit rays of heat?

Snap and I had been pushed down the incline with half a dozen figures in advance of us. Without difficulty we could have leapt down that hundred feet, unaided. Figures were leaping into mid-air from several pressure-ports of the s.h.i.+p. They did not fall, but floated, drifted down. I saw one of the insect-like workers drop with motionless outstretched arms. Others came mounting up, using their arms and legs with sweeping strokes, as though swimming. It was like being under water.

It was a strange, weird scene, the vessel wavering above us; the flas.h.i.+ng lights; waving beams of radiance. A fantastic structure nearby reared itself several hundred feet with lights on top and outlining its many lateral balconies one above the other. The air was full of the leaping, swimming insect-like figures. The brains, the masters, were not in evidence; then I saw one of them being carried, and others, floating down like distended falling balloons, to be caught by the workers in small nets and thus saved from jarring contact.

Snap was suddenly whispering: ”That fellow back of us is our guard. I can feel his ray. Some form of attraction; it's pulling at me.”

Snap was a little behind me. I turned and saw the faint radiance of a narrow light-beam upon him. It came from an instrument in an upper shoulder hand of the insect figure following us, no doubt the reverse form of the same ray which had been used to thrust the wrecked _Cometara_ toward the Moon.

We reached the bottom. I saw now that the group of workers in advance of us were carrying metal cubes, seemingly of considerable weight; they also had to use the incline.

We stood presently on a smooth ground surface. We had not seen Anita and Venza, nor Molo and his sister. The insect figure who was our guard came forward. ”You stand here. Molo comes.”

”Where is he?” I demanded. ”I want to see him.” I stopped myself quickly; I had very nearly mentioned the girls. ”And talk with him.”

”He comes soon.”

”I'm hungry.” I gestured to my stomach. ”Food. You know what that is?”

The brown scaly face contorted for a smile, a ghastly grimace. ”Yes.

You shall have food and drink.”

It seemed that the hollow voice came not from the neck but from the sh.e.l.l-like, bulging chest. He stood aside, with the globular weapon of the ray in a pincer hand.

We waited, standing gingerly together, wavering with our slight weight. A wind would have blown us away, but there was no wind.

Instead, there was a heavy, sultry air, warm as a mid-summer Earth night, warmer even than the Neo-time of Venus.

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