They sent this ship to help crush the Green Hall, and restore the Empire.
In return, we agreed to load the ship with iron.
“Iron is cheap. We may do it.
But I rather think we’ll wipe them out, after we have AKKA, and the Purple Hall is safely in power again.
They’re not too pleasant to have about.
Worse than you might imagine.
Those insane men—yes, John, I’m sure we should destroy them, after we get the secret weapon.
“The girl must have told you about AKKA, John?”
“She did!
And I thought—I trusted you, Eric!”
“So she suspects, already!
Then we must get the chains on her, before she has a chance to use AKKA.
But I suppose Vors and Kimplen have her safe, by now.”
“You… traitor!” whispered John Star.
“Of course, John.
We’re taking her away.
I suppose we’ll have to kill her, after she’s told us about her little secret gadget.
Too bad she’s such a luscious beauty.”
John Star stood paralyzed with unbelieving shock, and Eric Ulnar smiled.
“I’m a traitor, John—by your definition.
But you’re something worse.
You are a fool, John.
I brought you along because I had to have a fourth man, to complete the guard. And because my uncle insisted that you must have a chance hi life.
He appears to have an exaggerated idea of your ability.”
A sudden, high-pitched, girlish giggle burst from Eric Ulnar.
“You’ve been a fool, John.
If you want to know how big a fool, just look up above you.”
And the handsome golden head made a mocking little bow.
John Star had kept his eyes on the other, expecting some ruse to distract him.
Glancing warily upward now, he saw his danger.
Some fifty feet above him swung a sort of gondola, a car of bright black metal suspended on cables from a great, jointed boom that reached out of the flier’s confusion of titanic ebon mechanisms.
Inside it, he glimpsed—something!
Beyond the black sides of the gondola he could not see it clearly.
But the little he did see made the short hair rise on his neck.
It sent up his spine the cold, electric tingle of involuntary horror.
His breath was checked, his heart pounding, his whole body tense and quivering.
The merest glimpse of the thing set off all his danger-instincts— the very presence of it roused primeval horror.
Yet, in the shadows of the queer black car, he could see little enough.
A bulging, glistening surface, translucently greenish, wet, slimy, palpitating with sluggish life—the body surface of something gross and vast and utterly strange.
Staring malignly from behind the shielding plates, he met—an eye!
Long, ovoid, shining.
A well of cold purple flame, veiled with ancient wisdom, baleful with pure evil.
And that was all.
That bulging, torpidly heaving green surface.
And that monstrous eye.
He could see no more.
But that was enough to set off in him every reaction of primal fear.
Fear held him frozen.
It stopped his breath and squeezed his heart.
It poured the choking dust of terror down his throat.