“Did any of the others———”
The wheezing voice fell.
“Yes, lad. The precious lass———”
“Aladoree?”
Pain throbbed in John Star’s hoarse cry.
“Ah, yes. All the rest of us escaped; we all used this solution.
But the dear lass caught it when you did, lad, in that fearful Belt of Peril —the shock of that radiation seemed to bring it on.”
“How is she, Giles?”
“I don’t know, lad.”
He shook his head.
“The evil green is all cleared from her precious skin. But still she is not herself.
She lies, as you lay, in a dead trance we can’t wake her from.
She was mortal weak and weary, you know, lad, when it took her.
“Ah, lad, it’s bad. Mortal bad.
If she doesn’t wake she cannot build the blessed weapon.
And all our trouble has been in vain.
Ah, it’s a wicked time!
I like the lass, lad.
Dear life knows I’d hate to see her die!”
“I—I—” whispered John Star, through his agony of apprehension and despair.
“I—like her, too, Giles.”
And he sobbed.
John Star was able to return to the bridge by the time they entered the outskirts of the System, passing Pluto and Neptune.
All the familiar planets, they saw in the tele-periscope, had turned a dreadful red.
Even Earth was a dull spark of sinister crimson.
“Red,” breathed Jay Kalam, his lifeless tone edged with horror.
“The air of every planet is full of the red gas.
I’m afraid we’re too late, John.”
“Even if we aren’t,” John Star whispered bitterly,
“Aladoree is Still no better.”
“We’ll land on Earth, anyhow. Find a piece of iron.
And wait.
Perhaps she’ll wake—before the last man is dead.”
“Perhaps.
Though her pulse, Giles says———” He broke off, and muttered fiercely: “But she can’t die, Jay! She can’t!”
They were slipping past the Moon, five days later, toward Earth.
Aladoree still lay unconscious, her strong heart and her breath grown desperately slow.
Her frail body, weakened by exhaustion, by captivity and torture, by months of exposure to the red gas, was fighting desperately for life itself.
The others watched her, kept her warm.
They bathed her lax body in the neutralizing solution, helped her swallow a little broth or water when she could.
They could do no more.
The Moon was a red world of menace.
John Star scanned it through a tele-periscope. Naked since before the birth of Man, its rugged mountains were shrouded now in deadly crimson gas; the new human cities were mounds of lifeless ruin.
On a bare plateau of lava, he saw the Medusae’s fortress!
Unearthly citadel!
A replica of the black metropolis on their own doomed planet.
Tremendous walls and towers of that black, enduring alloy, bristling with fantastic black machines—the instruments of a science that had survived through uncounted ages, had conquered many worlds.
“The hordes of them are waiting there,” said Jay Kalam somberly.
“Manufacturing the red gas.
Bombarding the planets with shells of it.