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Title: The Star-Master

Author: Ray Cummings

Illustrator: Frank R. Paul

Release date: May 18, 2020 [eBook #62170]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STAR-MASTER ***

THE STAR-MASTER

By RAY CUMMINGS

Docile, decadent Venus was easy

pickings for that twenty-first century

Hitler's dream of cosmic empire.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Planet Stories Summer 1942.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

My name is Arthur Frane. You who read this story now, of course are familiar with momentous events into which I was unexpectedly plunged—momentous for all mankind.

I write this narrative now to add the true details to what you have all read and heard blared by the newscasters around the world. I have been extolled as a hero although I did nothing except try to keep from getting killed.

I was twenty-six years old last summer, in June of 2003, when fate so strangely brought Venta and me together. My family is wealthy, as you have heard. Do not envy me for that. An income of ten thousand decimars, however nice it may seem in theory, is in reality no advantage to a young man of twenty-six. I am a big blond fellow whom the newscasters have been pleased to call Viking-like and handsome as a god. I'm much obliged. But whatever truth there is in it, that too has been a disadvantage.

The weird events began in July, last summer, when with Jim Gregg I went hunting in that Adirondac forest. Jim and I were in Government College together. I left to spend my income and become a dawdler—the disadvantage of money; and Jim joined the Crime Prevention Bureau of the New York Shadow Squad. We got a one-day hunting permit. Jim took his official crime-tracker equipment, with an extra flash-gun for me; we flew to the Adirondac mountain slope which our permit named and hopefully set out on foot to try our luck.

But we had no luck. A few birds, which even the minimum pencil-ray flash had all but burned to a crisp, were all we had bagged. Evening came, with twilight settling so that the forest glades were deepening into purple. And then suddenly it seemed that we heard a rustling in the underbrush—a rustling which ought to be a deer.

We crouched in a thicket, waiting. The sound stopped. "Let's try the listener," I whispered.

Jim got out his little eavesdropping gadget. But he had no time to connect it. The rustling began again. It was obviously up a short slope no more than a hundred feet from us—some wild animal which seemed now to be retreating.

"I'll take a chance," I muttered. "If that's a deer, we'll lose it if I can't drill it now."

We knew it could not be a human, since our permit for today barred anyone else from the twenty square miles of Government preserve allotted to us. I fired at the sound, with my violet pencil-flash eating through the underbrush at the top of the slope.

There was a startled, weird outcry; and from the summit of the little rise a shape broke cover. A girl! She came bursting from a thicket no more than three feet to the side of the swath my flash had burned, and for a second or two she stood poised on a rock with the open evening sky a background above and behind her. A slim shape of bare legs and arms with a brief drape from shoulders to her thighs. The starlight and fading daylight gleamed on her bronzed skin as though she were a metal statue.

"Well—I say—" Jim muttered.

Thoughts are instant things. There was in my mind the vague idea that here, by some wild circumstances, was a girl in a fancy-dress party costume or something of the kind. But the thought, and Jim's muttered words of astonishment, were in another second stricken away. She paused for that instant on the rock, and then she leaped. Amazing, incredible leap! It carried her in a flat arc some ten or fifteen feet above the ground and twenty feet away, where light as a faun she landed on the toes of her bare feet. Nearer to us now; and seeing us, perhaps for the first time, she stood and stared.

I could see the silvery streaks running through the black hair that framed her face. It was a queerly beautiful face, apparently devoid of normal cosmetic-make-up. Negroid? Oriental? In that second I had the thought that it was neither—nor anything else that I could name. A girl with a mysterious wild beauty which stirred my pulses.

"Well—good Lord—" Jim muttered again. He too was staring, with a hand in his shock of bristling red hair, and I can imagine the look of numbed astonishment on his freckled, pug-nosed face. "Good Lord, how did she jump like that?"

I heard myself stammering, "You—up there—what in the devil—"

Like a terrified fugitive the girl abruptly swept a look behind her; and then she leaped again, and landed almost beside us.

"You—you—Oh you mus' help me! There was a flash that tried to kill me—"

English! With weird, indescribable intonation, she gasped the English words.

"I—shot at you," I stammered. "Sorry—we thought you were an animal. No human is allowed here today but us."

Somehow it seemed futile, incongruous that I should try to explain anything rational to a girl so weird as this.

But she smiled. "Oh—I thought—I thought—"

"Someone is after you?" Jim said quickly.

"Yes. I thought—but I guess not now. Oh you are good Earthmen—not like Curtmann. I escaped, and I have come long long a way from my poor terrified people."

I saw Jim glance at me significantly. We both had the same thought, of course. A girl demented; with painted skin and fancy dress—trappings of insanity; and she had escaped from some asylum?

But those leaps were far beyond the power of any trained athlete!

"What's your name?" I murmured.

"Venta. I was a prisoner—and now I have to tell someone of importance here on Earth. I did escape when I was brought here by Curtmann." She babbled it out, breathless, terrified. "I did not know what to do, he is so bad to my people—to the Midge—to all of us. And I—I do not love him. I am afraid of him. In Shan he rules—and my family now are all in the great Forest City. And Curtmann will capture that too."

Blankly Jim and I exchanged glances. And suddenly with a muttered oath, Jim gasped,

"My God, Art! Look at that—thing! There—behind you!"

I whirled. But whatever he had seen, or thought he saw, was gone.

"Behind me? What?"

"Why—why—" Jim could only gasp. The girl was staring at us blankly. Jim was stupified into incoherency. "Why—why—a little thing—it ran—" And then he raised his left wrist with another muttered gasp.

"What in the devil?" I demanded. "Are you crazy too?"

"Electro-eavesdropper on us! Look—" An eavesdropper detector was on his wrist, connected with his watch. Part of his S.S. equipment and he always wore it. The underplate was glowing now, its warmth against his flesh attracting his attention.

An eavesdropper being used against us! I knew it was illegal for anyone but a Federal Man to have one; but criminals had them, and most of the other S.S. devices and weapons, of course. Some criminal was near here, listening to us now!

"Someone not far away!" Jim gasped. "Look at that dial!"

His little detector-needle was swaying violently, in the range of one to two hundred feet. Then it swung back to normal as the ray evidently was shut off.

I snatched out my flash-gun. Jim and I crouched with the numbed, terrified girl between us.

"Oh—" she muttered. "They have come, and they will kill us."

"There it is again!" Jim's hand gripped my arm. "My God—that little thing!"

The purple shadows of night were deepening in the forest now. But in the gloom I saw it. On the bole of a tree no more than six or eight feet from us a tiny figure stood peering at us. The glistening, brown-bronze figure of a man; a broad-shouldered, stocky little figure no more than a foot high! I had an instant glimpse of a powerfully-muscled body, a tiny hairless round head, then the creature leaped to the ground, recovered its balance and ran. In another second it was lost in the gloom.

The girl too, had seen it. "A Midge! Here? Why—then Curtmann's men are here, too!"

She stopped abruptly. From the leafy darkness something hurtled into a tree beside us. There was the faint tinkling of fragile glass, then a sickening sweet smell assailed us, and sticky liquid splattered on us.

"Anesthesia-bomb!" Jim gasped. "Get away from here—grab the girl!"

My head was reeling, with senses fading so that the dim scene was blurring around me. Jim and I dragged the girl through the thickets. Then came a shot at us, the sizzling flash just missing us, shriveling the foliage over our heads. Jim's shot answered it. I saw a skulking figure by a nearby tree, and fired quickly. My shot caught him full; he went down.

In front of me, Jim had dropped prone into the brush. His voice warned: "They're here. Get down."

We had no chance to fight them off. I drilled a shape that appeared in front of me; but another pounced on my shoulders as I crouched. Blurred by the drug, I squirmed, reached up and grabbed him by the throat. But another man was on us. Jim's shot sounded again; and then as I fought, I saw several dark shapes leaping on him. His panting oaths mingled with the girl's scream.

In the melee glass hit my face, breaking with the sticky drug oozing out on me. A man's fist followed it, with a crack that made my head burst into roaring light before I drifted off into an abyss of nothingness....

II

I came to with the sound of distant throbbing in my ears. It seemed that I was lying on a metal grid-floor; and as I stirred, a familiar voice sounded.

"Thank the Lord, you're coming out of it at last."

It was Jim, here on the floor with me, bending anxiously over me in a luminous darkness. His pug-nosed face grinned down at me.

"I sure thought you might never come back, Art. You been a day, sleeping off that damned drug."

Dizzily I tried to sit up as he held me. "What—what happened? Where the devil are we?" Then I remembered the fight. "Venta—" I murmured.

"She's all right. I've seen her, and talked with her."

I could see that Jim and I were alone in a small, triangular metal apartment. A closed door was to one side. And to the other, there was a round bull's-eye window. It was black out there, with bright white points of stars. The thrumming was a faint distant electronic throb, off in this strange interior.

I could feel my strength rapidly coming back. I sat up, shoving Jim away. "I'm all right now. Where are we?"

He grinned wryly. "Hold your breath for a shock. We're out in Space, plenty far. I guess, by now, we're on our way to Venus!"

Out in Space! How often, like everyone else in our modern world of science, I had envisaged it, and wondered why it had never been made possible.

"On the way to Venus?"

"So they tell me, an' Lord knows I wouldn't doubt it. If you don't believe me, come take a look."

With his arm around me, I staggered dizzily to the bull's-eye porte. It was an amazing scene! The Heavens everywhere were a black vault, strewn with myriad white gems of the blazing worlds. Filling one whole side, the familiar Earth hung motionless. It was mottled with clouds, beneath which the configurations of the oceans and continents were plainly visible.

I stared, awed, wordless; and then, still weak and dizzy with the cold sweat of the drug chilling me, I was glad enough to sit down on the couch, with Jim beside me.

"Who's got us?" I asked presently.

"A fellow named Curtmann and his band. A dozen or more of them here on board. I've talked with one of them—they're all Earthmen—this ship was built on Earth. Would you believe it? A damned scientist from mid-Europe built it secretly. He never told the world about it, but gathered a bunch of crooks and beat it off."

"Not so fast," I murmured. "Don't get incoherent."

I tried to sort it out as he breathlessly told me what he had learned. Some eight or ten years ago, among the captive people of mid-Europe under police domination of the Anglo-American Federation, a fellow named Karl Curtmann had built this hundred foot cylindrical space-flyer. The same old urge for world conquest. But this fellow Curtmann had known that on Earth he had no chance. This was not 1915, nor 1939. And so he had gathered others like himself; all English-speaking, since their racial language had been banned by the Federation before they were born, and with his ship and his men, they had adventured into Space.

"Seems they landed on Venus," Jim was saying. "It was a fertile field for a world-conqueror, by what I hear! Peaceful, simple people, with these Earth cutthroats jumping on them. They used a bunch of our Shadow Squad weapons, which was enough and plenty."

Once established there as a conqueror, Curtmann had gone back to Earth on several trips, for supplies and more weapons and men.

"I guess there are several hundred of 'em on Venus now," Jim went on. "Built themselves a little city, and made slaves out of the Venus-people. You can imagine what this style Earthman would do when he's a conqueror with nothing to challenge him! And the Venus-people are on the down-grade. Dying out, except for the Midges."

"Midges?"

"They're the little people of Venus. They serve. They believe that all Earth men are gods, or something." Jim shrugged. "Don't ask me. We'll find out soon enough."

The Midge! I remembered that little bronze man-figure which had peered at us.

"And Venta?" I prompted.

"Her father—No, I guess it's her grandfather—he's a leader on Venus. Religious leader, or something. He and some others have escaped to a Forest City. Curtmann had Venta. Venta says he's just trying to make her love him—make her see how wonderful he is. Curtmann, the Man of Destiny—I can't wait to meet him!"

He had taken Venta on one of his forays to Earth, and she had escaped from him. "An' they got us along with her," Jim finished wryly. "Damned lucky we didn't get killed. We will yet, most probably."

A little rasp here in the darkness made us turn. A doorslide had opened; a man's heavy-featured face scowled in at us.

"At last you have recovered," he said to me. His voice was the heavy, guttural timber of a mid-European. He was a villainous-looking fellow, his slack-jowled face bluish with a week's growth of beard.

"Yes," I said. "Fortunately for me. Are you Curtmann?"

"He's Frantz," Jim put in. "He's been feeding me."

"Tell your master I want to see him," I said. "And take me to the girl, Venta."

The fellow leered. "You talk like you own the ship," he commented.

The doorslide closed. His footsteps retreated, but presently they came back. He opened the door. "The Great-Master says, bring you," he said with an ironic grin. "Come on. You can both come."

Silently we followed him down a narrow metal corridor.

"This way—" I saw our captor now as a bulky six-foot fellow clad incongruously in a crudely plaited robe of dried vegetable fibre, draped upon him like a Roman toga. He stood aside at an oval doorway; and Jim and I went into a small triangular room. Starlight filtered into it from a side bull's-eye.

Clad still in her brief garment, Venta sat on a square pad on the floor. As we entered she flung me a look, and then stared straight ahead.

"So? This is the fellow who thought he would steal my little Venta? Come in, Frane. Stand over there; I want to look you over."

Karl Curtmann. He was seated in a small, straight-backed armchair. He was a smallish, slim fellow, not over forty perhaps. A vivid blue toga encased him; sandals were on his feet. At our entrance he raised one of his bare ornamented arms with a gesture.

The costume was queerly incongruous to a modern Earthman; but upon Curtmann there was an immense dignity, a sense of the consciousness of his own greatness. More than mere conceit, it seemed to radiate from him. On his heavy, square-jawed face there was a look of amused contempt as he regarded me.

"My little Venta has asked me not to kill you," he added. His voice was soft and suave. English was his native language, taught him exclusively by Government decree. But the inherited timbre was guttural. "That is fortunate, is it not?"

"Yes," I agreed. "Very. I thank her."

His eyes twinkled; his immaculate hands with jeweled fingers, brushed his crisp blond hair. "You can also thank me. I am permitting you to join our life. You know now, of course, that I am Master of Venus? It is their good fortune. Always I shall protect them from any harm, and teach them the life that is good for them."

He was utterly sincere. His eyes were gleaming with his fervour. Man of Destiny. He believed it with the faith of a child. And now his gaze went to Venta.

"Her people—" He was still talking to me, though he stared at her. "Some of them still are misguided. Old Prytan, her grandfather, is a very wicked old man, Frane. He has fled to the Forest City. He defies my rule. I shall have to punish that Forest City."

Suddenly his face contorted; his arm shook as he pounded his fist on his chair. "I shall not tolerate it. They are all to die. Nor in the city of Shan itself will I have rebellion. I am a man of peace—there shall be no strife. And each year, from Earth, more of my men will come to mate with the Venus women. The new race. The new Empire of Curtmann. Is it not a wonderful future, Venta? I shall make you Empress."

"Yes," she murmured.

"Race of the Gods," he said. "And I—Karl Curtmann—"

He checked himself. There was a little sound of beating wings here in the dim starlit room. I turned as through the door a tiny shape came like a fluttering bird through the air. A footlong bronze man-shape. One of the Midge! Again my mind leaped back to that little figure in the Adirondac forest. It had had wings, though then I had not noticed them.

This one came and poised on the arm of Curtmann's chair. "What is it, Rahn?" he said.

The Midge's voice was tiny, but clear. "The flight-master has asked that you come now to check his calculations of our course." The English words, taught to this Midge, were quaintly intoned. The voice was gentle, humble.

Curtmann stood up. "All right. I shall go." He waved an arm at the burly Frantz who was standing silently to one side. "Our captives can remain here, Frantz."

He turned, smiled gently at Venta, and strode from the room.

As the days passed we were allowed a fair freedom of movement. A freedom to plan—what? I must confess that Jim and I had no conception of what we might do in circumstances like these.

Once Venta had whispered to me, "We shall escape from here—it can be done."

Escape from this Curtmann, join Venta's grandfather—old Prytan—out there in the Venus Forest City.... Certainly it was all that Jim and I could hope for. And then came that night when the misty lead-grey ball of Venus had grown to a monstrous disc beneath us, with the cone of its shadow blotting out the Sun as we dropped down into the heavy Venus atmosphere. There came a moment when Venta, Jim and I were alone, and from the dim corridor with a little beat of wings, Rhan, the Midge, came to join us. He was carrying an oxohydro heat-torch. Amazing little man-shape. The alumite torch was as big as himself, and heavier. His diaphanous, dragonfly wings struggled with it. Like a giant flying ant, with an ant's monstrous strength in proportion to its size. Panting, he fluttered heavily and laid it at my feet.

"You, the Great God," he said. "I serve you. Here it is."

He stood now by the torch he had brought. The muscles on his broad chest heaved under the sleek bronzed skin with his panting breath.

"For you," he added. "No one saw me. I got it for you. I did well, Seyla Venta?"

"Oh yes. Thank you, Rhan." Venta was trembling now with excitement. "When we get lower into the atmosphere, we'll go to one of the pressure-portes at the bottom of the hull. There are space suits there, if we can get to them."

"Let's close this door," Jim said quickly. "Not so loud, Venta."

We planned it, as the ship settled down through the heavy, sullen-looking Venus clouds and then burst out into the lower atmosphere with the dark surface of Venus far down beneath us. Rhan watched and reported that Curtmann and most of his men were forward by the control turret. Then Jim, Venta and I were able to get down through one of the dim corridors, down a little catwalk ladder into the lower hull. The metal pressure porte door was locked.

I stood at the bottom of the ladder. Above me the voices of Curtmann's ruffians were audible. Every moment I expected that we would be missed.

"Hurry it," I murmured.

The porte doorlock melted as Jim held the torch upon it. We slid into the porte, closed the door after us. Venta, on the voyage to Earth, had been trained by Curtmann in the use of these pressure-suits, and in a moment we stood in them, helmeted, with the air bloating the suits so that we were shapeless monsters.

I opened the outer doorslide. A little at first, and then wider. In the rarified atmosphere of Venus at this fifty mile height, the air of the little porte went out with a rush. It blew us out with it. I had a sickening sensation of falling into nothingness. Then it seemed that my head steadied. I fumbled with a hand upon the anti-gravity mechanisms by which the fall could be guided.

Above me the dark finned shape of Curtmann's space ship was drawing swiftly upward and away. Head down, with the bloated shapes of Jim and Venta beside me, we plummeted like falling meteorites through the sub-stratosphere darkness.

III

"A rainbow storm is coming," old Prytan said. "We shall have to wait until it is passed before trying to get to the broken city."

We were in the depths of an orange-blue forest of giant, spindly vegetation that rose in fantastic shapes from the soft, porous ground five hundred feet or more into the air. Pods and vines hung upon the lacery of trees. There were huge vivid flowers, redolent with a perfume exotic, cloying in the heavy humid air.

Everything, particularly at first, to me was heavy, oppressive. Venus is denser than the Earth, and the gravity is a full third heavier. It made walking, to us Earthmen, a panting labor. I felt that I weighed, not my normal hundred and eighty pounds, but almost two hundred and fifty. For us to run seemed impossible.

I had seen but little of this Forest City. It was a group of perhaps a thousand dwellings, all seemingly built of slabs of the porous forest trees, with walls and roofs of thatch. The houses nestled between the great fantastic trees. Some were like birds' nests in the branches, with vine-ladders from the ground leading up to them. The colors of the thatch were vivid blue, red and yellow.

It was a fairyland of woodland fantasy, peopled by the humans of this scattered, futile Venus-race. I had seen gaping groups of them as Venta and I pushed through them, heading for old Prytan's dwelling. Men, women and children crowded the flower-lined, crooked little city streets. They were all gaudily-dressed in toga-like fabrics made from the vivid-colored, dried vegetable fibres. A few of them had fled here from Shan where they had picked up a little English from the Earth-conquerors. But most of them babbled at me in their own weird tongue. They were a gentle people. The lack of struggle, lack of accomplishment for generations now, had stamped them with a futility. Here in the benign climate of Venus they had grown content with simple wants. Love-making, music—that was enough for them. The Midge attended their every want.

Decadence perhaps, but who shall say but what it is to be preferred to the bloody upward struggles of our own Earth's history? All that too, had been upon Venus. Far ahead of Earth in the life-cycle of its humans, there had been great scientific civilizations here. The science of war had risen into all its ghastly power and then had destroyed itself, with mankind at last coming to realize its tragic futility. There were ruins of great cities here, with the silt of centuries upon them and the forests growing lush amid their wreckage.

"You two Earthmen are not quite like Curtmann and his fellows," old Prytan said to me. His eyes twinkled beneath his shaggy white brows. His seamed old face wrinkled with a smile.

"No," I said. "We hope not."

"But your Earth still struggles, with each man wanting more than his neighbor."

We were in a room of a huge, crudely-built dwelling of thatch. A thousand Midges had woven it in a day. Venta was here; and draped on the floor at her feet was the graceful, gaudily-clad figure of a young Venusman. His name was Jahnt. He was her cousin, I understood. A handsome fellow with longish, bushy dark hair; an oval face with pointed chin, hawk nose and eyes with an almost Oriental slant. He spoke English as fluently as Venta. I don't know why I took an instant dislike to him, save that he always seemed to want to be beside Venta.

A rainbow storm was coming. I could see the premonitory signs of it. The room here was lighted with little braziers—seemingly the caged bodies of tiny insects which were luminous as fireflies. Through the oval window-openings the night outside was turgidly dark. But wind now was pattering the trees, and there were distant flares of weird opalescent lightning.

A tenseness was here in this room of old Prytan's home—and it was everywhere about the little city. Like an aura of terror it seemed to envelope us. All this day that had passed, Midges by hundreds had been flying in from Shan. And now, this evening, the big people themselves had begun coming. Fugitives. Terrified people who had escaped from Shan; rebellious, wanting to do something to rid Venus of these cruel conquerors, coming to Prytan as their leader; helplessly throwing themselves upon him, asking him what they should do. Groups of people milled in the streets, eyed the coming storm. Rebellion against the Earth-conquerors. But it was more than that. Among us all, here in this eerie opalescent room there was the feeling of impending disaster. Curtmann had returned to Shan. In a rage at the loss of Venta, he had learned that the rebellion against him was growing. Would he wait for old Prytan to organize some attack? Certainly I doubted it. And my mind swept back so that again I seemed to hear his grim words: "I shall have to punish that Forest City!"

Was Curtmann planning to strike at us now?

"... but until the storm is over we can do nothing," old Prytan was saying.

Even then, what could we do? In somber voices that seemed to echo dully through the rustic room and mingled with the weird storm-noises outside, we discussed it. One of the great broken cities of by-gone days was only some ten miles away. In it there was hidden away a cache of ancient weapons of science.

"I have kept them workable," Prytan said grimly. "And my father before me also attended them. And before him, his father. But never did we really think the horrible time would come when they should be used."

But whatever we could do, certainly must be done soon. The news from Shan every moment was more serious. Upon Curtmann's return, open disorder had broken out in the capital city. As punishment, a thousand or more of the young Venusmen of the city had been summarily killed by the diabolic flash-guns of the Earthmen. "Only our men he kills," young Jahnt put in ironically. "Why not? Our women are very beautiful. Like you, is it not so, Venta?"

I tensed at the glance with which he swept her. "I shall bring in the supper," Venta said. His gaze followed her as she rose and left us.

"I tell you all this about our hidden weapons," Prytan was saying to me in his cracked treble voice. "We can trust you, even though you are Earthmen?"

"Yes," I agreed.

"Listen," Jim put in. "These young men you've got here—well, no offense meant—on Earth we'd call them ladylike." His gaze barely touched the gaudy figure of Jahnt and then went back to Prytan. "My business, sir, on Earth is to deal with criminals. I'm pretty good in a fight. You just give me some of your weapons."

"I trust you," Prytan agreed. "Never, until tonight, has anyone but myself known about the weapons. If Curtmann knew it—"

"He won't," I said. "We'll get them tonight. We—"

I checked myself. The beat of wings sounded, and a Midge came through the window, and landed on Prytan's shoulder.

"Well, Meeta," he said, "you come with more bad news?"

A female Midge. It was the first one I had seen except at a distance. She was a fairylike little creature—a ten-inch high miniature of Venta. Her flesh was like pink-white satin, glistening in the insect-light. Her wings thrummed to balance her as she poised.

"English?" she said in her tiny voice.

"Yes," Prytan nodded. "These are good Earthmen."

Her pixie-like, tiny face turned toward me. I saw then, in those tiny glowing eyes, the leap of her instinctive adoration for my giant size. Here a new God for her to worship and serve.

"English, yes," she agreed. "Master, there have been still more killings. They kill our men now for no reason; and those of the women who are young and beautiful they have herded together into a harem."

Prytan's old body trembled with anger. "We must stop it. And Meeta, have you told the Midge to meet us in the broken city?"

"Master, yes. They will be there when the storm is passed. We cannot fly in the wind, and even now it is very strong."

I could hear it, crackling through the giant foliage outside. Then there was a monstrous flare of color as though a rainbow had burst around us.

"It gets bad," young Jahnt muttered. He went to one of the windows; then sauntered to a door-oval and disappeared.

Meeta, I understood now, was one of the leaders of the Midge. It was her brother who had aided us to escape from Curtmann's ship. I told her about it now as she perched on my hand, with her soft eyes roaming my face and her tiny lips parted with eager breath as she listened.

"Oh I am glad of that. Rahn so wants to do what is right in serving our Gods. But it is confusing, Gods here on Venus who fight with one another—"

Through the window, upon a blast of storm-wind another little figure came fluttering. Another female Midge, like Meeta. With beating wings she hovered a second and then fell to the floor at our feet.

"Mela!" old Prytan gasped. "What is it?"

The storm had tossed her against a tree. One of her wings was broken; blood was on her body. But she had struggled on to us, bringing her news.

"What is it?" old Prytan demanded.

"Curtmann comes! He and all his men—his army, coming now to attack the Forest City!"

Curtmann coming to attack us! A dozen little male Midges here on the floor of the room heard it and scurried away.

"Curtmann coming?" Prytan gasped. "Why—why we will not be ready for him."

It stunned us. Within a minute, out in the city, the news was spreading with cries of the frightened people. A panic was beginning here. That would have to be controlled.

"They've left Shan already?" I demanded of the little Midge.

"No. Perhaps not. But they are ready—the storm may hold them off."

I was on my feet. Old Prytan was trembling with the palsy of his confused terror. By what Jim and I had seen of the young men of the Forest City, there was not one who could be counted on to do anything constructive in this crisis. If the Venus-people were to have any leadership, it would have to be Jim and me.

"Send word that the women and children are to stay in their homes," I said. "There must be no panic. Have the young men come here. Storm or no storm we shall have to get to the broken city, and get those Venus-weapons."

"How far is it from here to Shan?" Jim put in.

"Twenty Earth-miles perhaps," old Prytan stammered. "If Curtmann and his men should start now—"

"Maybe they won't," I said. "The storm is still going strong."

"Where is Venta?" Prytan stared helplessly about the room. "She said she would bring us food. What use of that? We have no time to eat it now." He suddenly raised his shaking old voice. "Venta. Venta, where are you?"

There was no answer from the nearby interior door-oval through which Venta had gone. Just blank, stark silence. Horror struck at me.

Jim and I were on our feet. Jim gasped, "I'll go see." But before he could move, we heard a woman's moan, followed again by silence!

Jim broke it with an oath. I tossed little Meeta into the air with a flip of my hand as I ran toward the crude kitchen, out there beyond the dim door-oval.

Thank God, it was not Venta. On the packed loam of the floor an old serving woman lay sprawled. Her throat was a ghastly welter of crimson, and near her a Midge lay dead.

The old woman was still alive. She tried faintly to gasp in English as I bent over her.

"He—took her—Venta—"

"Who took her?"

"Jahnt—he—"

The blood choked her. But I had no interest in hearing more. Jahnt!

"Why—he's got the secret of those weapons now!" Jim gasped. "Get the idea, Art?"

The commotion had brought others. They all stood milling, helpless, frightened. Jim and I shoved them away.

"He'd probably head for the broken city," Jim said. "It's much closer to here."

"That he might do," Prytan agreed. "And where is his Midge—you people—you have seen little Ort lately?"

"Jahnt could send that Midge flying to Shanga to tell Curtmann about the weapons," I suggested.

Old Prytan could only stammer assent to the possibility. And if Curtmann and his ruffians got to that cache before we could get there, that indeed would be the end of any possibility of overcoming him.

"Where is Meeta?" I demanded. "Meeta knows the location of the broken city."

She fluttered from behind me at the sound of my voice. "Master I am here. What I can do to serve?"

"We're going after Jahnt," Jim said. "He can't have gotten far."

"But you run so heavily," old Prytan murmured. "My young men here—"

They were all standing looking frightened and confused. Jim swept them with a glance and drew me past them. It occurred to me that we might use the three spacesuits in which we had escaped from Curtmann. With their anti-gravity mechanisms and tiny rocket-streams we could propel ourselves over the forest. But we found now that they were gone.

Precious minutes were passing. We would have to go on foot. At the door we paused, appalled by the wind and a chromatic burst of glaring light. Meeta fluttered in the air beside my head, and as the wind hit her she was tossed back.

"You can't fly out into that, Meeta?"

"No, I am afraid it's not possible now. But you can carry me."

She fluttered to my shoulder, crouching with a tiny hand gripping my coat collar. With Jim beside me we plunged out into the roaring riot of the rainbow storm.

IV

"Guess we'll have to wait a bit longer," Jim murmured. "But it seems to be easing, don't you think?"

In a sheltered recess of the forest we were crouching, forced to wait for the weird storm to pass. There had been no possible chance of finding the fleeing Jahnt. We could only hope now that he would go on to the broken city. The storm seemed to be lessening but still it was a roar of wind which cracked through the spindly giant trees, often bringing down great segments of branches which it had torn loose.

A lull came at last, and through a ragged, littered forest Jim and I pushed our tortuous way. Meeta could fly now. She guided us, and with little forays hummed ahead and to the sides, seeking some signs of Jahnt and Venta. But there were none.

The storm had been a torture of delay. In my heart now I had no thought that we would be able to locate Jahnt and Venta. I could only hope that they might be in the broken city. Had Curtmann received news of the Venus weapons? My mind was upon Venta, but still I could envisage that bloodthirsty band of Earth cutthroats advancing upon the Forest City.

"I say, is it much further?" Jim demanded suddenly of Meeta. "This is tough going for us."

"Master, no. It is ahead, just down that slope."

The dim forest glade was descending into a great shallow area of deeper shadow. And presently we could see the ruins of tumbled, broken buildings lying here, half buried by the rank forest growth. In the turgid dimness, with a faint orange luminosity that seemed inherent to the great trees, it was an eerie place of colored shadows. Great buildings were everywhere around us now, weird of shape and substance, some of them still partly erect with the spindly trees growing through them.

It was a place of the ghosts of Venus' past.

"It is down in here," Meeta said, pointing.

A littered rocky depression was before us. A ruined amphitheatre, with its walls almost gone and the forest like a monstrous clump in its middle. We descended into it. The ground in places was rocky. Some natural cataclysm must have torn this ground since the original arena was built.

Then we saw the cache of weapons. It was half a demolished room in some broken structure that now was unrecognizable; an apartment partly open at the top, of some two hundred feet diameter. A little light filtered down from the lurid greenish-yellow storm-clouds high overhead.

"No one here ahead of us, Jim?" In the darkness, with Meeta perched again upon my shoulder, we stood peering and listening. There was only silence.

"Where are the weapons?" Jim demanded.

Meeta led us. "There in that little recess, Master. Many old broken boxes are filled with them."

We stood before the rock-shelves, numbed with disappointment and horror. The crumbling old metal boxes were here. But they were strewn about; broken open; empty! The weapons were gone!

"Gone!" Jim gasped. "That damned Jahnt!"

Abruptly Meeta cried, "Look! He is over there!"

With his hiding place discovered, Jahnt leaped suddenly erect from the shadows of a rocky niche. A knife was in his hand. I was nearest to him. I leaped. But I had miscalculated my abnormal heaviness. I hit the rocks a few feet short of him, stumbled, almost went down. As my arms flailed I saw him over me, his pointed face demoniac with lustful triumph, his knife stabbing at my chest.

There was a whirring of wings, and a glistening body went past my head. Meeta. The ten inches of her elfin form flapped and struck Jahnt in the face. He hit wildly at her with his left hand, went off balance, with his knife-thrust going wild; and collided against me so that I was able to fling my arms around him. Then my left hand caught his wrist, twisted and the knife fell away. We went down, locked together, rolling. And suddenly I felt the knife hit my hand. Meeta with swift agility had retrieved it and brought it to me. The lithe Jahnt, far stronger than he looked, was momentarily on top of me. I seized the knife, stabbed upward into his chest; and with a choked cry he went limp, fell forward on me.

I scrambled to my feet. Jahnt wasn't quite dead, but obviously dying. Jim and I bent over him.

"You got away with the weapons?" Jim muttered. "Or are they still around here?"

"Curtmann has them. My little Midge flew to him, and came back with some of Curtmann's men. They left just a little while ago. I—showed them how to use the weapons. You will—be defeated by Curtmann. You damned—"

Again little Meeta suddenly called us. "Here! Here is Venta!"

She was lying, bound and gagged, but unharmed in the recess of some crags nearby. Jim and I rushed to her.

The three spacesuits were with her. Jim had gone back to the dying Jahnt and he called me. Blood was gushing now from Jahnt's mouth; he was gasping, but still he was trying ironically to smile.

"I—did not tell Curtmann's men that I had Venta. Why should I be in the battle? I just thought I would stay here with Venta, and if Curtmann won, then I would join him."

"Has he started from Shan?" Jim demanded.

"Oh—yes. He and his men must be half way to the Forest City by now. I am sorry now I did not go with them."

I had a sudden thought. "Is he planning to use that spaceship of his?"

Jahnt was choking now with the blood in his throat. Then he gasped, "No—his men said they—could not handle it—so close to the ground—such a—short distance. They are on foot—in the forest—"

Venta was with us now, bending down over the dying Jahnt. His glazing eyes saw her, and he murmured, "You—if you had loved me—this would not have happened. I'm dying—you'll all die when—Curtmann uses those weapons against you. I'm—glad of that—"

His body twitched. Horribly the blood rattled in his throat, choking him; and then in another moment he was gone.

"They're half way to the Forest City," Jim muttered. "Good Lord, we've got to stop them. But how? How can we do it, Art?"

Venta was standing apart from us, with the tiny Meeta on her shoulder. They were murmuring together, and abruptly Meeta flew to me.

"She says it is right and it can be done. We Midges—serve the Gods, and surely now we know the good Gods from the evil."

An army of the Little People! Jim and I stood blankly listening while Venta told us what she and Meeta had been planning. A myriad of Midges could be rallied now. And they had human intelligence.... Only a foot high, or less. But, especially the females, they could fly with the agility of humming birds.

"And we can be armed," Meeta cried. She hummed away, came back in a moment. In her tiny hand there was a thorn. It was no more than two inches long, but to her it was a sword, stiff and sharp as a needle.

"The poisoned enta-thorn!" Venta exclaimed. "But I did not know that any of the enta-shrub was near here."

"I found it," Meeta said proudly. "There is much of it."

"What's that noise?" Jim abruptly demanded.

With my nerves taut, I stood tense. A faint thrumming was audible. We had left the cave where the weapons had been hidden, and were out in the broken amphitheatre with the ruined ancient buildings like spectres around us. Far overhead there was a little starlight, straggling faintly down. The thrumming grew louder. A tiny blurred shape came down through the darkness.... And then another—and another.

The Midges were arriving from Shan, expecting to carry the Venus-weapons from here to the Forest City. In a moment a dozen were here, then a hundred. They came in little groups, males and females, keeping separate in the flight. Like huge insects they thrummed around us, and then settled and stood awaiting our commands. Then Meeta was among them, telling what had happened and explaining that they must fight for the lives of the Forest City people.

For a moment there was awed silence; then a tiny blended chorus of voices, and little shapes humming away to get the thorns.

Jim gripped me. "By the Lord, it's our only chance! You can see that, Art."

"Yes. You and I in the spacesuits, if we can maneuver them. An army in the air—the Midges and you and I to plan their battle—direct them."

"And I shall be with you," Venta cried.

Vaguely I had thought to leave her here, or send her off to the Forest City on foot. She persuaded me at last.

"You talk of planning the battle," she cried. "But almost none of the Midges speak your language. I shall give your commands to them."

Once we had decided, a desperate haste was on us. Midges were arriving here now from the Forest City. Some of them had seen the oncoming columns of Curtmann's men, down in the forest. They were more than half way from Shan. Occasionally their Earth-flash weapons would stab into the forest ahead of them.

Within ten minutes or so we were ready. I had sent a few of the swiftest-flying Midges back to the Forest City to tell Prytan what had happened. His young men were to arm themselves as best they could, and take position. In a ring around the city, prepared to make a last stand, if we should fail. All the Midges now in the Forest City were to arm themselves with the poisoned thorns, and come to join us in the battle as fast as they could.

Then Venta, Jim and I had donned the spacesuits. No need to inflate them now; we only needed the anti-gravity mechanisms, and the rocket-streams for balancing and for lateral movement.

We rose presently into the air, up into the starlight with the ruined piles of the broken buildings and the forest dropping away beneath us. At five hundred feet we poised. In thrumming groups the Midges, more than two thousand of them now, circled around us. Then, with Jim, Venta and me leading, our bodies in the baggy spacesuits poised almost horizontal in the air and the Midges strung out in long thin lines like insects behind us, we plunged forward to the battle.

V

"There they are!" Jim called.

Five hundred feet below us the forest tree-tops were a fantastic matted mass of vivid vegetation. And suddenly, down in a glade, the line of Curtmann's men was visible. More than I had thought—there seemed a full four hundred of them. In two columns they plodded slowly forward. With them was a great wheeled cart, like a clumsy barge. Evidently Curtmann had built it in Shan. It toiled forward, with the marching men in advance of it and behind it. We could see that it was drawn by harnessed lines of Midges—hundreds of the tiny figures plodding on the ground, bending hunched as they pulled the huge creaking vehicle. The top of the cart was uncovered and a dozen men were riding in it. Groups of them were seated, around a little raised platform on which was mounted what seemed a huge projector.

"Keep the Midges high," I called to Venta who was near me. "Wait until I give the signal."

Our Midges were circling, wildly excited now that the enemy was in sight beneath them. Jim and I had discussed our tactics. In groups of about a hundred we would send the Midges plummeting down. Each would try to stab one of Curtmann's men and then come up again. The enta-poison, Venta had told us, was deadly—sure death if enough of it got into the blood-stream. But it did not act at once; five minutes or more was necessary before the victim would feel its lethal effect.

We made a great sweeping half-circle, plunging down as though to attack and leveling at above two hundred feet. As we passed over the lines of watching men and the cart, two or three bolts stabbed up, fell short. Then a man's voice roared orders to withhold the fire.

Curtmann. As we passed at the lower altitude over the cart I saw him standing on a raised platform near its front. We swept past, and up again.

"We better swoop now," Jim urged. "This is as good a place to attack as any we'll ever get."

That was obvious. The lines of men were in an open glade. A few hundred feet ahead of them, the forest was dense again. It would be far more difficult for our Midges to swoop down and attack amid the enveloping lacery of vegetation.

And Curtmann, even though probably he had not as yet the least fear of us, already was starting to advance again. The men in front were marching on. Orders were being roared at the harnessed Midges. The cart went into motion. And the Forest City certainly was no more than a few miles ahead. Curtmann's murderous band would be there in an hour or two.

But still I hesitated to give the signal.

Little Meeta hovered before me. "The Master-God will order us down now?" she pleaded. "We will serve you well."

My heart was pounding. I nodded, with a lump in my throat that choked my voice as I shouted the signal sending so many of them to die.

A designated quarter of them swooped down. From up at this height, Venta, Jim and I hovered, with the rest of the Midges in a gathered group around us. All of us staring down.

The cloud of some five hundred Midges swooped, circled, and then plummeted. For a second or two the startled Curtmann men merely seemed to stare upward. Then the Midges were upon them, fluttering into their faces, jabbing at them. The men's arms wildly failed to fend off the viciously attacking little bodies.

Some of the Midges were caught, bashed into pulp and hurled away with a single flailing blow. Some were caught in huge hands, squeezed to death and flung to the ground. The oaths of the startled men came up, mingled with the cries of the Midges, then the tiny fluttering shapes were rising again. A shot stabbed at them, its crackling bolt stabbing through a group of them. It was like a monstrous blow-torch stabbing into fluttering moths. It left a trail of wisps of light as their bodies were consumed.

The rest of them came up and joined us, panting, flopping.

"Good enough," Jim murmured. "Five minutes more and we'll see what really happened."

But I was cold inside. No more than half the Midges had come back. Two hundred or more of them gone already. And here in the air, some of them, wounded, were bravely struggling not to fall.

The men and the huge cart down in the glade had started forward again. Suddenly it was apparent that the harnessed lines of Midges on the ground were in revolt. They milled in confusion, struggling to cast off the lines that held them. We heard Curtmann roaring threats at them. And then he fired a bolt horizontally through them. It cut a ghastly swath; a burst of trailing little wisps of fire. Beside me, Venta gasped in horror; and Jim murmured,

"Fool! With what's left of those Midges that heavy cart will never move again."

The cart had stopped. Curtmann, doubtless regretting his shot of exasperation, was roaring more orders. The straggling columns of his men came toward the cart, and all of them bunched around it in a solid group, out there in the center of the open glade.

"Got them stalled," Jim said grimly. "Much better for us."

If the poison would work. But would it? At three hundred feet we were still circling in great humming sweeps while again I withheld my signal. Did I dare send the Midges down for a general attack? Every shot cut them so horribly into nothingness. Off to the side, in the direction of the Forest City, other Midges were appearing now. Little groups of them, males and females, humming toward us, joining our circling ranks. Reinforcements. In a minute or two it seemed that a new thousand were here to swell our weird little army.

"Look!" Jim suddenly cried triumphantly. "The enta-poison!"

Up to now, in these tentative exchanges, Curtmann and his men doubtless had contemptuously figured that this engagement was harassing, but certainly nothing worse. Some of his men had been stabbed by little thorns. What of it? But down there now a new confusion was apparent. One of his men on the ground beside the cart suddenly staggered and fell. Then another. In the cart a group of them called with startled questions. Two of them by the big projector abruptly slumped in their seats with their fellows bending anxiously over them.

A moment of startled confusion. A dozen stricken men. And then others. What was happening must have dawned on Curtmann. In the starlit dimness down there on the cart we saw the blob of his figure leap erect.

And then Curtmann, at last realizing the deadliness of this menace, went into action! From the cart there was a little puff, with the hissing, popping sound of it coming up to us a few seconds later. A small round blob rose toward us, went harmlessly through us and burst up in the starlight. An electrolite-flare. It glared with a lurid, prismatic splash of color in the sky, illumined brightly the tiny flying dots of our Midges.

Just that few seconds and then the great projector hurled its missile at us—a blob coming slowly up in an arc. The blob burst. It seemed as though suddenly there was an earthquake in the air-split columns of air rushing together with a deafening thunderclap. The air rocked me, hurled me sidewise; the brief roar was deafening.

"A thunder-thrower!" Venta gasped as she clung to me.

In the cataclysm of air the cloud of Midges was hurled into chaos, their bodies knocked together, whirling end over end, some of them dropping with broken wings.

Just a few seconds, and now the blue-white starlit night had been transformed into a chaos of glaring light and roaring, clapping sound. Flares were bursting everywhere; the cracking thunderclaps came one upon the other in a chaos of prismatic horror. Curtmann's hand-flashes were stabbing recklessly up through it. One of longer range burned a wide swath with the bodies of Midges bursting into a myriad pin-points of light.

In the rocking turmoil I heard Jim shouting, "Good God, we can't stay up here!"

Half our Midges already were gone! Everywhere little broken dots were drifting or falling down.

"Down!" I shouted. "Venta—Meeta—tell them! Everyone down. Don't come back up—everyone for himself, now!"

Downward plunged the weird armada.

In the roaring chaos of pyrotechnic glare what was left of our Midges swooped to the attack. With the rocket-streams at last righting my whirling body, head down I plummeted. The glare from above revealed Curtmann's men far more plainly now. Everywhere the men were staggering. In the cart some of them had fallen, but others were still erect, frantically working the projectors and stabbing with the hand heat-flashes. Our Midges were among them now, desperate fluttering little figures, stabbing at their faces. On the ground some of the staggering men were trying to get into the forest underbrush. I plummeted toward a group of them.

I hit the ground in the midst of a staggering group, with a thump that all but knocked the breath from me. Two of the men staggered at me. I was unarmed. My fist knocked one down, and I gripped the other as he half fell upon me. He was still clutching his flash-gun. I seized it, knocked him away and rose again into the roaring tumult of the air.

"Art! You got a gun? So did I."

Jim was here with me; side by side we rose. I saw the cart directly underneath me. His figure painted lurid, the desperate Curtmann was still erect. Almost the last one now. And I saw that he was struggling with a projector which had not yet been in use. A tiny figure flapped against my face. Little Meeta. She gripped my shoulder, clung, and her tiny voice gasped in my ear.

"That weapon Curtmann has—the big molecule-melter—very long-range—the Forest City."

With a burst of numbing horror I understood it. This projector would cut the forest and the ground into a leprous molten swath, out to the Forest City itself.

I plummeted down, with Meeta still clinging desperately to my neck. Curtmann saw me coming. With a wild oath he dropped the projector and fired at me with a hand-flash. It missed. There was just a second when I leveled off, heading horizontally at him. The glare was on his sweat-bathed face, contorted with his lust; but I saw a look of despairing terror there as my flash drilled him and he fell as I swooped close over him.

We rose at last, high into the starlight. So pitifully few of us, gathering in a little broken, circling group. Beneath us now there was only a lurid red-yellow fire-pit of molten bubbling rocks where the forest glade had been. Then the heavy turgid smoke and gas-fumes settled upon it like a shroud.

Almost silently we struggled back through the starlight to the Forest City. Jim and Venta and little Meeta were here with me, but our little Midges were struggling to keep aloft. Dozens of them were clustering upon Jim and Venta and me. Their tiny, gasping voices were horrible. And we were the victors! It came to me then that surely whatever has been said and written of the futility of human killing, can never adequately picture it.

I think that is all I need recount. You have all heard how we returned to Earth, and the stir that my news brought. I should have been considered a charlatan perhaps, with my wild tale. But there was the spaceship; and Jim, Venta, and little Meeta. Scientists have inspected Venta now. It was an ordeal. But mostly they have been interested in Meeta.

That is passed. There are others on Venus like Venta, and others like our little Midge. We are living now on Earth, with Jim near us. Certainly neither here, nor on Venus, do we want any turmoil.

With Jim for my friend, and the adoration of little Meeta who thinks me in very truth, a God—and the love of my dear wife—certainly I am a mortal very singularly blessed.

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