Part 3 (2/2)
He saw a new wound across its hips. Three long, parallel scratches, from which fresh red blood was trickling.
Regular sc.r.a.ping sounds came from the end of the deck, where no moving thing was to be seen--sounds such as might be made by the walking of feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad.
Something that was _invisible_!
Terror seized him, with the knowledge. He had nerved himself to face desperate men, or a savage animal. But an invisible being, that could creep upon him and strike unseen! It was incredible ... yet he had seen the dog knocked down, and the bleeding wound it had received.
His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For the moment he thought only blindly, of escape. He knew only an overpowering desire to hide, to conceal himself from the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he might have tried to leave the flier.
Beside him was one of the companionways amids.h.i.+ps, giving access to a compartment of the vessel that he had not explored. He turned, leaped down the steps, with the terrified dog at his heels.
Below, he found himself in a short hall, dimly lighted. Several metal doors opened from it. He tried one at random. It gave. He sprang through, let the dog follow, closed and locked it.
Trying to listen, he leaned weakly against the door. The rus.h.i.+ng of his breath, swift and regular. The loud hammer of his thudding heart.
The dog's low whines. Then--unmistakable sc.r.a.ping sounds, outside.
The scratching of claws, Thad knew. Invisible claws!
He stood there, bracing the door with the weight of his body, holding the welding arc ready in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked, and he felt a heavy pressure against the panels. But at last the scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn, at least for a time.
When he had time to think, the invisibility of the thing was not so incredible. The mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were evidence that the flier had visited some unknown planet, where weird life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a planet should be inhabited by beings invisible to human sight.
Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction of the spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to visible light, as human flesh is radiolucent to hard X-rays. Quite possibly it could be seen by infra-red or ultra-violet light--evidently it was visible enough to the dog's eyes, with their different range of sensitivity.
Pus.h.i.+ng the subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room into which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied by a woman. A frail blue silk dress and more intimate items of feminine wearing apparel were hanging above the berth. Two pairs of delicate black slippers stood neatly below it.
Across from him was a dressing table, with a large mirror above it.
Combs, pins, jars of cosmetic cluttered it. And Thad saw upon it a little leather-bound book, locked, stamped on the back ”Diary.”
He crossed the room and picked up the little book, which smelled faintly of jasmine. Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the secrets of an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but to seize any chance of learning more of this s.h.i.+p of mystery and her invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.
Linda Cross was the name written on the fly-leaf, in a firm, clear feminine hand. On the next page was the photograph, in color, of a girl, the brown-haired girl whose body Thad had discovered in the crystal coffer in the hold. Her eyes, he saw, had been blue. He thought she looked very lovely--like the waiting girl in his old dream of the silver tower in the red hills by Helion.
The diary, it appeared, had not been kept very devotedly. Most of the pages were blank.
One of the first entries, dated a year and a half before, told of a party that Linda had attended in San Francisco, and of her refusal to dance with a certain man, referred to as ”Benny,” because he had been unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended:
”Dad said to-night that we're going off in the _Dragon_ again. All the way to Ura.n.u.s, if the new fuel works as he expects. What a lark, to explore a few new worlds of our own! Dad says one of Ura.n.u.s' moons is as large as Mercury.
And Benny won't be proposing again soon!”
Turning on, Thad found other scattered entries, some of them dealing with the preparation for the voyage, the start from San Francisco--and a huge bunch of flowers from ”Benny,” the long months of the trip through s.p.a.ce, out past the orbit of Mars, above the meteor belt, across Jupiter's...o...b..t, beyond the track of Saturn, which was the farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached, and on to Ura.n.u.s, where they could not land because of the unstable surface.
The remainder of the entries Thad found less frequent, shorter, bearing the mark of excitement: landing upon t.i.tania, the third and largest satellite of Ura.n.u.s; unearthly forests, sheltering strange and monstrous life; the hunting of weird creatures, and mounting them for museum specimens.
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