And their invasion fleet is stationed there.
If they discover...
His voice fell.
He had seen the same thing that shocked John Star with horror.
A flaring burst of cold green flame above a black landing stage.
A black flier rising, following them toward Earth!
“Perhaps they have already.
But we may have time to land ahead of them, and look for a piece of iron.”
“But Aladoree is still in that dreadful trance,” John Star muttered.
“Unless she wakes, to build AKKA, we have no weapon.”
On they plunged, toward the red murky Earth, fearfully watching the black spider-ship crossing after them from the newly crimson Moon.
28 The Green Beast
Into the atmosphere of Earth, red-hazed with poison now, the Purple Dream dropped, over western North America, to land at last by the Green Hall, on the brown mesa beneath the mile-high, rugged San-dias.
John Star volunteered to leave the cruiser, to look for iron.
There had been none aboard when the ship came back into their possession.
Space-craft are non-magnetic, since magnetic fields interfere with the operation of the geodyne; and the Medusae, refitting the vessel, had removed the few bits of precious iron and steel from the instruments.
“Carry this,” Jay Kalam told him, and gave him his old thorn dagger.
“And be cautious if you meet men.
They may be mad, dangerous… And hurry.
We must get iron, and slip away, somewhere, before«the black ship comes.
We must hide, and wait for Aladoree to wake.”
Dropping outside the air-lock, John Star paused to stare in horror at what remained of the System’s proud and splendid capitol.
The sky was clouded with a scarlet murk, through which the mid-afternoon sun burned with a blood-red, evil light.
Bare mesas and cragged mountains were turned strange and grim and incredibly desolate under the dreadful illumination.
The Green Hall had been destroyed by a great shell from the Moon.
On the edge of the grounds, where once had been wide, inviting lawns, a ragged crater yawned, rimmed with torn, raw rock.
Beyond the pit the building lay in colossal ruin, a mountain of shattered em-erald glass, from which protruded skeletal arms of twisted, rusting steel.
A moment he waited, horror-struck.
Then, remembering the urgent need of haste, he plunged forward through a rank growth of weeds, through the bare skeletons of trees that the liquid gas must have killed, across dead lawns piled with rocks flung from the crater and shattered fragments of green glass.
Curious, he soon had cause to reflect, how hard it is to find even a nail when it must be had.
He found assorted metal objects: a bronze lamp-stand, a little figurine of cast lead, the charred, twisted aluminum frame of a wrecked air-sled.
Even a great steel girder flung from the building, many times too heavy to carry.
He hurried on, desperately searching the devastated grounds for any fragment of iron small enough to move, with an occasional anxious glance at the lurid sky.
If the Medusae had seen them, if the black ship was coming to attack them———
He stumbled around a great heap of broken green glass, and came face to face with green horror.
It had been a man.
A gigantic man.
It must have survived through the days of terror by sheer brute strength.
Nearly seven feet tall, its body half naked, half clad in the ragged, filthy fragments of a Legion uniform—the uniform of the Green Hall Guards.
Its skin was a mass of bleeding sores, scabbed and crusted horribly with hard green flakes.
Red-rimmed eyes, green-clouded, hideous, stared from the horror of its face, half sightless. Its lips were gone.
With naked fangs it was gnawing avidly at a fresh red bone that John Star knew, shud-deringly, from its shape, to be a human humerus.
Sight of this man-beast, crouching, gnawing, snarling, sickened him with pitying horror.
For it meant far more than one man’s fate.
It epitomized the doom of all humanity, under invasion by an older and more able race—a wise, efficient race, now proved by the crucial test better fitted to survive.
Involuntarily he had cried out at sight of that green, doomed beast.
Then, realizing the danger, he tried to slip away.
But it had already become aware of him.
It made a curious, half-vocal, questioning sound—hoarse and flat and queer, for its vocal cords were evidently too far decayed for articulation.
The red-rimmed, clouded eyes peered hideously, and found him.