Part 35 (1/2)

Life is very strange! The gate to the s.h.i.+ning garden of our love seemed swinging wide to let us in. Yet I recall that a vague fear still lay on me. A premonition?

I felt a touch on my arm. A bloated helmet visor was thrust near my own. I saw Snap's face peering at me.

”Grantline thinks we should return to the _Planetara_. Might find some of them alive.”

Grantline touched me. ”It's only human--”

”Yes,” I said.

We went back. Some ten of us--a line of grotesque figures bounding with slow, easy strides over the jagged, rock-strewn plain. Our lights danced before us.

The _Planetara_ came at last into view. My s.h.i.+p. Again that pang swept me as I saw her. This, her last resting place. She lay here, in her open tomb, shattered, broken, unbreathing. The lights on her were extinguished. The Erentz system had ceased to pulse--the heart of the dying s.h.i.+p, for a while beating faintly, but now at rest.

We left the two girls with some of Grantline's men at the admission port. Snap, Grantline and I, with three others, went inside. There still seemed to be air, but not enough so that we dared remove our helmets.

It was dark inside the wrecked s.h.i.+p. The corridors were black. The hull control rooms were dimly with Earthlight straggling through the windows.

This littered tomb. Cold and silent with death. We stumbled over a fallen figure. A member of the crew. Grantline straightened from examining it.

”Dead,” he said.

Earthlight fell on the horrible face. Puffed flesh, bloated red from the blood which had oozed from its pores in the thinning air. I looked away.

We prowled further. Hahn lay dead in the pump room. The body of Coniston should have been near here. We did not see it. We climbed up to the slanting, littered deck. The air up here had all almost hissed away.

Again Grantline touched me. ”That the turret?”

No wonder he asked me! The wreckage was all so formless.

”Yes.”

We climbed after Snap into the broken turret room. We pa.s.sed the body of that steward who just at the end had appealed to me and I had left dying. The legs of the forward lookout still poked grotesquely up from the wreckage of the observatory tower where it lay smashed down against the roof of the chart room.

We shoved ourselves into the turret. What was this? No bodies here!

The giant Miko was gone! The pool of blood lay congealed into a frozen dark splotch on the metal grid.

And Moa was gone! They had not been dead. Had dragged themselves out of here, fighting desperately for life. We would find them somewhere around here.

But we did not. Nor Coniston. I recalled what Anita had said: other suits and helmets had been here in the nearby chart room. The brigands had taken them, and food and water doubtless, and escaped from the s.h.i.+p, following us through the lower admission ports only a few minutes after we were gone.

We made careful search of the entire s.h.i.+p. Eight of the bodies which should have been here were missing: Miko, Moa, Coniston and five of the crew.

We did not find them outside. They were hiding near here, no doubt, more willing to take their chances than to yield to us now. But how, in all this Lunar desolation, could we hope to locate them?

”No use,” said Grantline. ”Let them go. If they want death, well, they deserve it.”

But we were saved. Then, as I stood there, realization leaped at me.

Saved? Were we not indeed fatuous fools?