Retreating chin and irresolute mouth betrayed the man’s fatal weakness.
“John Ulnar, I believe you are a relative of mine.”
“I believe I am, sir,” said John Star, concealing the stab of disappointment that pierced even through his admiration.
He stood at attention, while the arrogant eyes of Eric Ulnar boldly scanned his lean body, hard and capable from the five grinding years of Academy training. “You are under some obligation, I believe, to Adam Ulnar?” “I am, sir. I am an orphan. It was the Commander of the Legion who got me the Academy appointment. But for that, I might never have been able to enter the Legion.”
“Adam Ulnar is my uncle.
He had me select you for the duty ahead.
I hope you will serve me loyally.”
“Of course, sir.
Aside from the obligation, you are my superior in the Legion.”
Eric Ulnar smiled; for a moment his face was almost attractive, in spite of its weakness and its pride.
“I’m sure we shall get on,” he said.
“But I may require services of you as a kinsman that I couldn’t ask of you as my subordinate in the Legion.”
John Star wondered what such services might be.
He could not hide the fact that Eric Ulnar was not all he had hoped of the heroic explorer of space.
Something about him roused a vague distrust, though the man had been his idol.
“You’re ready to start for our post?”
“Of course.”
“We shall go aboard the cruiser, then, at once.”
“We’re leaving the Earth?”
“You’ll serve yourself best, John,” Eric Ulnar said with an air of cutting superiority, “by obeying orders and asking no questions.”
An elevator lifted them to the glittering confusion of the landing stage on the green glass tower.
The Scorpion was waiting for them there, a swift new space cruiser, taperingly cylindrical, a bare hundred feet long, all silver-white save for black projecting rockets.
Two Legionnaires met them at the air-lock, and came with them aboard.
Vors, lean, stringy, rat-faced; Kimplen, tall, haggard-eyed, wolfish.
Both years older than John Star, both, he soon learned, veterans of the interstellar expedition—among the few who had escaped that mysterious malady—they displayed for his inexperience a patronizing contempt that annoyed him.
It was strange, he thought, that men of their type should have been chosen to guard the infinitely precious AKKA.
He would not, he thought, care to trust either of them with the price of a meal.
The Scorpion was provisioned, fueled, her crew of ten aboard and at their posts.
Her air-lock quickly sealed, her multiple rockets vomiting blue flame, she flashed through the atmosphere into the freedom of the void.
A thousand miles off, safe in the frozen, star-domed vacuum of space, the pilot cut out the rockets.
At an order from Eric Ulnar, he set the cruiser’s nose for the far red spark of Mars and started the geodyne generators.
Quietly humming, their powerful fields reacting against, altering, the curvature of space itself, the geodynes—more technically, electro-magnetic geodesic deflectors—drove the Scorpion across the hundred million miles to Mars, with an acceleration and a final velocity that science had once declared impossible.
Forgetting his uneasy mistrust of Vors and Kimplen, John Star enjoyed the voyage.
The eternal miracles of space fascinated him through long hours.
Ebon sky; frozen pinpoints of stars, many-colored, motionless; silver clouds of nebulae; the supernal Sun, blue, winged with red coronal fire.
Three meals were served in the narrow galley.
After twenty hours, the geodynes—too powerful for safe maneuver in the close vicinity of a planet—were stopped.
The Scorpion fell, checked by rocket blasts, toward the night side of the planet Mars.
Standing by the navigator, Eric Ulnar gave him directions from some private memorandum.
About the whole proceeding was an air of mystery, of secret haste, of daring unknown dangers, that mightily intrigued John Star.
Yet he had the sense of something irregular; he was troubled by a little haunting fear that all was not as it ought to be. On a stony Martian desert they landed, far, apparently, from any city or inhabited, fertile “canal.”
Low, dark hills loomed near in the starlight.
John Star, with Eric Ulnar and rat-faced Vors and wolfish Kimplen, disembarked; beside them was lowered their meager baggage and a little pile of freight.
Four Legionnaires came up presently through the darkness, the part of the guard, John Star understood, that they had come to relieve.
The four went aboard, after their leader had exchanged some documents with Eric Ulnar; the valve clanged behind them.
Blue flames jetted from the rockets; the Scorpion roared away, a dwindling blue comet, soon lost amid the blazing Martian stars.
John Star and the others waited in the desert for daylight.
The Sun burst up suddenly, shrunken and blue, after the briefest yellow dawn, flooding the red landscape abruptly with harsh radiance.
Under violet zenith and lemon-green horizons, the ancient planet lay weirdly and grimly desolate.
Lonely wastes of ocher drift-sand, rippled with low crescent dunes.