It washed his rigid limbs with icy sweat.
He broke free at last and threw up his weapon.
But the half-seen thing in the gondola struck first.
Reddish vapor puffed from the side of the swinging car.
Something brushed his shoulder, a mere cold breath.
And then a red avalanche of unendurable pain hurled him to the sand.
Black oblivion brought mercy.
When consciousness came back, he contrived to sit up.
He was miserably sick, his body trembling and wet with perspiration, his arm and shoulder still paralyzed and aflame with scarlet agony.
Dizzy, still half-blinded, he looked anxiously about.
Eric Ulnar had vanished, and at first he couldn’t find that black gondola.
But the Cyclopean ship still loomed monstrous against the greenish Martian sky.
He searched its maze of vanes and struts and levers, until at last he saw the swinging car.
That titanic boom had reached out, over the fort.
The car was just rising above the red walls when he found it.
Swiftly the cables were drawn in.
The mile-long lever telescoped itself, and the gondola was swallowed through a huge valve in that black, spherical hull.
It must have picked up Eric Ulnar, he thought, and then swung over the fort to take aboard Vors and Kimplen, with Aladoree.
The girl, he realized, heart utterly sick, was already taken inside the enemy machine.
Very soon it rose.
Cataracts of green flame thundered from cavernous jets.
Endless ebon wings tilted and spread to catch the tenuous air of Mars.
The ground trembled under him as those vast black skids lifted their burden from the yellow desert.
A monstrous, evil bird, the black machine lifted obliquely across the greenish sky, into the violet zenith.
The noise of it beat about him, mauled him with raging seas of sound.
A furnace-hot wind whipped up curtains of yellow sand, dried his sweat, stung his eyes and burned his skin.
He watched it shrink to a grotesque black insect.
The green flame faded; the thunder died.
It dwindled, grew dun with distance, at last was lost.
He lay in the sand, ill, agonized, and bitter with self-reproach.
It was late afternoon before he could rise, still weak and faint.
His shoulder and upper arm, he found, were strangely burned, as if some mordant fluid had been squirted on them.
The skin was stiff, lifeless, covered with hard, greenish scales.
The corpse of Captain Otan had been marked like that.
And the eye of that greenish, heaving monster in the black gondola—it was like the nightmare eye that had stared through his window!
Yes, something from the ship had killed Otan.
Driven by a faint spark of irrational hope, he staggered back up the hill to the old fort, to search the inhabited section.
It was silent, utterly deserted.
Aladoree was really gone, and AKKA lost.
Ala-doree, so freshly lovely, was in the hands of Eric Ulnar and those monstrous beings from the dark planet of Barnard’s Star.
Only black self-accusation remained to haunt him.
Admiration of his famous kinsman had blinded him too long.
A misplaced sense of a Legionnaire’s duty had driven him to actual treason.
However unwittingly, he had helped betray the Green Hall and the Legion.
5 The “Purple Dream”
“Ah, lad, it’s time you thought of us!” wheezed Giles Habibula plaintively from the gloom behind the bar of the old prison.
“Here we’ve been, life knows how long, locked up in the cold and dark of a mortal tomb!
My old bones will ache with this wicked damp, lad.
“Ah, but I’m famishing, lad. Faint with mortal hunger.
How could you leave us so long, lad, without a blessed bite to eat?