The cruiser was unarmed; the weapons on the black flier could annihilate it in an instant.
Wondering dimly, as he ran, he saw a little group appear on the lowered valve of the air-lock, and hurry down the accommodation ladder. Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula, he recognized them, carrying the inert figure of Aladoree.
The valve closed above them; and Adam Ulnar had not appeared.
They ran away from the cruiser; evidently it was about to take off with Adam Ulnar at the controls.
But why?
Still running grimly on, John Star remembered his old doubt.
Had his famous kinsman turned again?
Had he put the others off to go back to the Medusae?
John Star could scarcely believe that.
Adam Ulnar had seemed sincere.
But———
Then the Purple Dream moved.
It plunged forward in the fastest take-off he had ever witnessed.
It leaped away so swiftly that his eyes lost it.
They caught it again, flashing toward the spider-flier, its hull already incandescent.
Even as he realized that it was driven, not by the comparatively feeble rockets, but by the terrific power of the geodynes, it struck the round black belly of the enemy craft with a burst of blinding light.
Flaming, the black invader fell with a curious deliberation out of the red sky.
It struck the barren slopes of the Sandias, rolled down them, still looking queerly like a black and monstrous spider in the slow agony of death.
John Star’s old, haunting doubt was gone.
“You are the last Ulnar,” Jay Kalam greeted him with a solemn new respect, when he came up to the lonely little group on the edge of the mesa.
“Adam Ulnar said he was trying to pay a debt. And he told me to tell you, John, that he hoped you would be happy in the Purple Hall.”
John Star dropped on his knees by the limp, white-faced girl on the ground, whispered anxiously:
“Aladoree!
How is she?”
“Ah, me, lad,” dolefully wheezed Giles Habibula, fixing a pillow under her head, “she seems no better.
No better!
It’s the same evil trance she’s been in for mortal weeks.
She may never wake.
Ah, the poor lass———”
He flung a tear out of his fishy eye.
They tried to make her comfortable, under a little shelter made from the branches of a shattered tree.
They found rude clubs to defend her if the green beasts should find them.
Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula went to search for food and water; they returned in the dun and lurid sunset, empty-handed.
“Mortal me!” wailed Giles Habibula.
“Here we are lost in a fearful desert, all death and dead ruin, without food or drink for ourselves or the lass!
Ah, me!
And frightful, mewing creatures are roving all about us, hunting for mortal human food.
Ah, it’s a wicked tune!”
The Moon came up in the scarlet dusk, a huge and blood-red globe, above the rugged ramparts of the dark Sandias.
And they saw, against its pocked and sinister face, a little cluster of tiny black specks, creeping about, growing, expanding.
A little swarm of black insects that became steadily and ominously larger.
“A fleet coming down from the Moon,” whispered Jay Kalam.
“Since that one ship did not return… A whole fleet of their spider-ships, coming to make sure we are destroyed.
They’ll be here in an hour.”
29 AKKA—and After
“She must wake,” whispered John Star.
“Or she never will!”
“I’m afraid so,” agreed Jay Kalam.
“I imagine they’ll destroy the very mesa, with those atomic suns.
To be sure we trouble them no more… But there’s no way—”