

The Three Planeteers For All

by Edmonda Hamilton

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Edmonda Hamilton

A Gender Switch Adventure

CHAPTER I

Comrades of Peril

THEY sauntered through the crowded, krypton lit street bordering the great New York spaceport, casually, as though there was not a reward on their heads. An Earthwoman, a Venusian, and a huge Mercurian, looking merely like three ordinary space-sailors in their soiled, drab jackets and trousers.

But inwardly Joan Thorn, the lean, dark-headed Earthwoman of the trio, was queerly tense. She felt the warning of that sixth sense which tells of being watched. Her brown, hard-chinned face showed nothing of what she felt, and she was smiling as though telling some joke as she spoke to her two companions.

'We're being followed," she said. "I've felt it, since we left the spaceport. I don't know who it is.'

Sua Av, the bald, bow-legged Venusian, laughed merrily as though at a jest. Her bright green eyes glistened, and there was a wide grin on her ugly, froglike face.

'The police?' she chuckled.

Gunda Welk, the huge Mercurian, growled in her throat. Her shock of yellow hair seemed to bristle on her head, her massive face and cold blue eyes hardening belligerently.

'How in hell's name would the Earth police spot us so quickly after our arrival?' she muttered.

'I don't think it's the police,' Joan Thorn said, her black eyes still smiling casually. "Stop at the next corner, and we'll see who passes us.'

At the corner gleamed a luminous red sign, "THE CLUB OF WEARY SPACEMEN.' In and out of the vibration-joint, thus benevolently named, were streaming dozens of the motley throng that jammed the blue-lit street. Reedy-looking red Martians, squat and surly Jovians, hard-bitten Earthwomen-sailors from all the eight inhabited worlds, spewed up by the great spaceport nearby. There were many naval officers and women, too—a few in the crimson of Mars, the green of Venus and blue of Mercury, but most of them in the gray uniform of the Earth Navy.

Joan Thorn and her two comrades paused on the corner as though debating whether or not to enter the vibration-joint. Inwardly, Thorn was tautly alert to everyone who passed in the shuffling throngs. Every moment, her sense of peril grew greater. She was now certain that they were being watched from close at hand.

Sua Av suddenly grinned. 'Look at that, Joan. It's a new one.'

The Venusian nodded her bald head toward the corner of the chromaloy building, which was plastered with advertisements and official notices. Among them was a bright new poster.

'WANTED—THE THREE PLANETEERS

'Reward of one million dollars offered by the Earth Police for any information leading to the arrest of the outlaws known as the Three Planeteers.'

Sua Av's green eyes gleamed with droll humor in her froglike face.

'They've raised the price on us, Joan. We ought to feel flattered.'

Gunda Welk was reading the rest of the notice in a low, rumbling voice.

'The identities and descriptions of the Three Planeteers follow: Joan Thorn, Earthwoman, twenty-eight years old, deserter from the Earth Navy—'

'That's enough,' Sua Av chuckled. 'The rest is just a long list of our heinous exploits.'

Joan Thorn took a long, green cigarette of Martian rail leaf from her pocket and scratched its tip against the wall, thus igniting it. As she puffed on it, Thorn spoke under her breath.

'Get ready, girls—here comes our shadow, if my guess is right.'

Neither the grinning, bald Venusian nor the big Mercurian changed expression. But their hands casually dropped to the side of their jackets, where atom-pistols bulged their pockets.

A woman in the gray uniform of a noncom of the Earth Navy was shouldering toward them out of the passing throng. She was a middle-aged woman with a flat, grizzled face.

'Can you spare a smoke, sailor?' she asked Thorn.

'Of course,' Joan Thorn answered calmly, and fished one of the green cigarettes from her pocket. She kept her face bent as she handed it over.

'Thanks,' muttered the woman, and was gone in the throng.

'A false alarm, after all,' grunted Gunda Welk.

'No,' clipped Thorn. 'I know that woman. She was one of my non-coms before I deserted the Navy. She knows I'm Joan Thorn, which means that she knows we're the Planeteers. She's gone for the police.'

Thorn's gaze swiveled rapidly. Then she pushed her companions toward the swinging door of the vibration-joint.

'In here!' she exclaimed. 'We can go out another door.'

Thrumming music hit Joan Thorn and her comrades in the faces as they entered the place. It was a room clogged with greenish smoke. Women at tables in the center were arguing in bull voices as they drank black Venusian wine or brown Earth whisky. In the booths around the walls, many more women sprawled, somnolent, sleepy faces relaxed under the pale violet rays of the brain-soothing happiness vibrations.'

Thorn's lean figure shouldered through the noisy, crowded tables, the bald-pated Venusian and the towering Mercurian following closely. They were half-way across the crowded place toward the back door, when there was a rush of feet through the front entrance.

Thorn twisted her head. Two women in the white uniform of the Earth Police had just burst in. With them was the grizzled non-com. The latter instantly pointed at Thorn and her two companions.

'There they are!' she yelled. 'The Three Planeteers!'

For a moment, the noisy throng in the place was petrified. Even that motley, hard-bitten crowd was frozen by the sudden declaration that there in their midst stood the three half-legendary interplanetary outlaws.

Then the foremost of the two policemen, drawing her atom pistol, yelled to Thorn.

'Stand where you are!'

Thorn's pistol was already in her hand, as was the big Mercurian's.

'The lights, Gunda!' Thorn cried.

At the same moment, Thorn shot up toward the ceiling with the quickness of a wolf's snap.

The pellets from her and the Mercurian's pistols hit the big cluster of krypton lights in the ceiling. The flare of white proton fire from the exploding pellets was followed by an abrupt extinguishing of the lights. The place was plunged into darkness, except for the faint blue glow of the 'happiness vibration'booths.

Scores of voices yelled in the darkness, and shadowy figures surged forward in a melee of reeling, clutching shapes. Some shouted for lights, others to guard the door. Everyone in the room had suddenly remembered the big reward for the capture of the Planeteers.

'This way,' chuckled Sua Av's throaty voice in the darkness. The Venusian was stolidly clearing a path through the crowd.

Women sought to hold the three in the darkness, cried out that they were escaping. Gunda Welk's huge fists thudded down in resounding blows, while Thorn struck with the heavy barrel of her atom-pistol.

Suddenly Sua Av was pulling them out of a shadowy riot, through a door. They stumbled out into an unlighted alley. As they did so, they heard the whiz and roar of rocketcars racing up to the front entrance of the Club of Weary Spacemen.

'Police,' grunted Gunda Welk. 'They'll be around here in a minute.'

'Come on!' cried Thorn, starting down the dark alley in a run. 'We're all right now if we keep clear of spy-plates.'

'Yes,' came the Venusian's chuckle as she ran beside them. 'The last place they'll look for the Planeteers is the mansion of the Chairwoman!'

* * * *

A half-hour later, the three comrades were two miles across the city from the spaceport, having threaded devious ways to avoid the omnipresent spy-plates of the police.

'Spy-plates'were televisor eyes mounted throughout the city, some openly but many more cunningly concealed, by which police headquarters could keep watch on all parts of the metropolis.

The Planeteers entered the deep shadow of tall trees that bordered extensive grounds. Through the trees glimmered the lighted windows of a magnificent metal mansion. The three comrades moved soundlessly as phantoms toward it.

The mansion was the official residence of the Chairwoman of the Earth Government. It was on a scale commensurate with the dignity of the elected executive of the planet. The huge tower that housed the Earth Government itself soared into the starlight from a great park nearby.

The Planeteers met no guards as they slipped cautiously toward the rear of the impressive mansion. There was a broad terrace here, splashed with blue-white light from a single window. Joan Thorn and her comrades stole up onto the terrace toward that window.

Thorn peered tautly into the lighted room. It was a small, paneled study. The only furniture was a big desk which lay in the blue-white pool of a krypton lamp. A gray-haired woman sat at this desk, writing.

'It's the Chairwoman,' Thorn whispered. 'And she's alone.'

'Good,' muttered Gunda Welk. 'That makes it easier!'

Thorn gently reached and pushed on the window. It was unlocked, and swung inward on soundless hinges. She stepped silently in upon the soft rug, and Sua Av and Gunda Welk followed as noiselessly.

The woman at the desk suddenly looked up. Her haggard, aging face stiffened as she beheld, ten feet from her, the three silent men—the lean, browned young Earthwoman, the bald, bow-legged Venusian, and the towering, hard-faced Mercurian.

'The Planeteers!' exclaimed the Chairwoman, rising to her feet. 'Thank God, you're here!'
CHAPTER II

Cold-World Menace

THE career of the Three Planeteers had begun four years previously, in 2952.

That year had seen the splitting of the eight independent inhabited worlds of the Solanr System into two hostile alliances. The great and powerful League of Cold Worlds had been formed by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, under a ruthless, ambitious dictator. Feeling themselves menaced, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars had formed the Inner Alliance. The Alliance had sent out many spies to gain information of the League's threatening plans, but nearly all of them had rapidly been detected and executed.

Then Joan Thorn, captain in the Earth Navy, had conceived her patriotic plan. She and two friends, Sua Av, Venusian engineer, and Gunda Welk, Mercurian adventurer, would go forth into the underworld of the system as outlaws. And as fugitives from the law, they would never be suspected of being agents of the Alliance.

The three friends had deliberately established criminal records. Thorn had deserted from the Earth Navy. Sua Av had fled after supposedly embezzling a great sum—a sum which was being secretly held in trust for its rightful owners. Gunda Welk had broken jail after a brawl on Mercury.

The three fugitive friends had foregathered, and thus had been born the three Planeteers. They had performed one daring exploit after another. Each time, their exploits seemed mere criminal raids or robberies. Yet each time, their real purpose had been the securing of information as to the purposes and plans of the hostile, threatening League of Cold Worlds.

Now, the Three Planeteers were the most famous outlaws in the system. Three lone wolves of the void, extravagantly admired by all criminals and pirates, bitterly condemned by all law-abiding women. Only one man—the Chairwoman of the Earth Government—knew that the notorious Planeteers were really undercover spies.

Now that woman, Richelle Hoskins, faced the three comrades with gladness in her eyes. Her powerful face, deeply lined by strain of responsibility, quivered with emotion.

'Thank God, you're here!' she repeated. 'It's been days since I sent out that call to you on the secret audio-wave. I was beginning to fear something had happened to you.'

'We were almost picked up by the Earth Police tonight, sir,' Joan Thorn said quietly. 'I was recognized.'

The Chairwoman hastily closed the metal shutter of the window. There was a look of deep anxiety in her haggard eyes.

'Thorn, I knew I was summoning you three into danger when I called you here. But I had to do it, for I've something to tell you which I dared not trust even to the secret wave. Something upon which the fate of the whole Inner Alliance may depend!

'But first, what can you report?' the Chairwoman asked tensely. 'The League is still preparing to attack us?'

Thorn nodded tightly. 'Yes, sir. Every dock and arsenal from Jupiter to Neptune is humming with activity. The League will have at least ten thousand cruisers ready in a few weeks, the story goes. They're working their mining bases out on Pluto at full capacity, digging fuel ores. And there's a rumor that they've planned some new and terrible agent of destruction with which they will blast our worlds into submission, after they've smashed our fleet!

'Furthermore,' Thorn added, 'the League dictator, Hasna Trask, is constantly broadcasting inflammatory speeches to her four worlds. She's stirring up their war fever to frenzy, telling them that since the worlds of the Inner Alliance refuse to cede any territory, it must be taken from them by force.'

Chairwoman Hoskins nodded somberly. 'I've heard Trask's broadcast speeches. It's that cursed power-lusting dictator who's driving the system toward war. If we'd only recognized sooner what a menace she is, we wouldn't have let the League get so far ahead of us in armaments. As it is, when their attack comes, they'll outnumber our combined navies by two to one. They'll overwhelm our fleet, unless—'

'Unless what, sir?' Thorn asked tensely.

'Unless we can use a new weapon we have,' the Chairwoman finished. 'A weapon such as the system never heard of before.'

She paced the little study for a few moments, and then turned back to the rigidly watching Planeteers.

'You've heard of Philippa Blaine, our famous Earth physicist?' she asked.

Sua Av's bald head bobbed. 'I have, sir. She disappeared, a year ago. No one knows where she is now.'

'Blaine,' said the Chairwoman, 'is in Earth's moon. For a year, she's been working in secret laboratories in the lunar caverns. She's developed a radical, revolutionary new weapon. I dare not tell even you the nature of that weapon. But it will enable us to defeat an overpowering attack of the League fleet-if we can use it!'

'If we can use it, sir?' puzzled Gunda Welk.

'Yes. For Blaine's weapon is useless, as it stands now. To operate the thing requires concentrated power of incredible volume. Atomic energy from ordinary fuels is insufficient. The only fuel that will furnish enough atomic energy to operate this thing is radite, that rare isotope of radium. To make use of Blaine's great weapon, we must have a ton of pure radite.'

'A ton of pure radite?' exclaimed Thorn incredulously. 'Why, not one of the eight worlds has more than a few pounds of the stuff! It takes thousands of tons of ore to yield an ounce!'

'There is a ton of pure radite in the system,' the Chairwoman affirmed. 'But it's not on any of the eight inhabited worlds.'

'It can't be on Pluto, surely,' protested Sua Av. 'The League mining bases there would have found it long ago.

'It's farther than Pluto,' the Chairwoman said.

Joan Thorn stared. 'You mean, it's on Erebus?'

The Chairwoman nodded slowly. 'Yes, it's on Erebus, the tenth and outermost planet, that mysterious, unexplored world that swings out there in space a billion miles beyond even Pluto's orbit.'

'How can anyone know the radite's there?' Gunda Welk demanded unbelievingly. 'Why, no one knows what's on Erebus! Not one of the expeditions that sailed for that planet ever came back. For centuries, no one has even tried to explore that mystery world!'

'Years ago,' the Chairwoman said 'astronomers detected the presence of a mass of pure radite on Erebus, through their spectroscopes. Supervaluable as radite is, no one has tried to go after it, for all know it's suicide to try to visit Erebus.'

The Chairwoman's lined face quivered.

'But now we've got to have that radite! It alone will operate Blaine's new secret weapon. It alone will enable us to resist the League's attack, and preserve the liberty of these four inner worlds.'

She looked at the three comrades solemnly. 'We have sent five big secret expeditions to Erebus during the last year, in desperate hope of getting, the radite. Not one ship, not one woman, not one message has ever come back from them. The sinister mystery there swallowed them up, as it has swallowed all who tried to visit Erebus.

'Now I am calling on you Planeteers. If anybody in the system can reach Erebus and bring back the radite, you can. The chances are a thousand to one you'll perish there as mysterious air hives—all other would-be explorers of that world. But that thousandth chance that you might succeed and bring back the radite, is the last chance of the Alliance worlds to preserve their liberty—'

'We'll go, lady, of course!' Gunda Welk exclaimed instantly. 'Hell, whatever's on Erebus, it can't stop us!'

Sua-Av scratched her baldhead. 'I wonder what is really there? Anyway, if human women can bring that radite back—'

'Wait a minute!' Thorn exclaimed, her lean brown face suddenly eager. She turned to the Chairwoman. 'You said nobody had ever landed on Erebus and returned, sir. But one woman did land there and come back. Martina Cain, the great space pirate of, a generation ago.'

The Chairwoman nodded. 'Yes, I remember the story now. Cain is supposed to have made for Erebus alone in a lifeboat when her ship was gunned to a wreck outside Pluto's orbit. They say she spent two weeks there and returned safely, the only woman ever to do so.'

'Martina Cain,' Thorn pointed out tensely, 'must have discovered the secret of how to land safely on Erebus. If we knew that secret, we could land there safely and lift the radite!'

'But Cain has been dead for years,' the Chairwoman reminded. 'And she never told anyone what was on Erebus, they say.'

'She told one person the secret of Erebus, if what I've heard in the underworld is true,' Joan Thorn persisted. 'Her son, Lann Cain.'

The Chairwoman stared. 'Lann Cain, the boy who's leader of the space pirates out in the Zone? The boy they call the pirate prince?'

'That's right.' Thorn said tautly. 'They say that Martina Cain, his mother, before she died told his the secret of how to visit Erebus safely, so he could take refuge there if ever he had to. She's never told anyone the secret. But he knows it!'

Sua Av's green eyes glistened. 'If we could get that secret from Lann Cain—'

'That's my idea!' Thorn exclaimed. 'If we three go straight to Erebus to get the radite, the chances are a thousand to one as you say that we'll simply meet the same mysterious fate as all other explorers, and never come back. Our lives don't matter, of course, but the Alliance wouldn't get that precious radite.

'Our only real chance, as I see it, is to make first for the Zone, and get this boy Lann Cain's knowledge of Erebus, by trickery or force. With that knowledge, we can go on to Erebus and have a fighting chance of winning through and bringing back the radite.'

A flame of eager hope leaped into the haggard eyes of the Earth Government executive.

'It's the best plan yet, Thorn! But dare you enter the Zone and seek out this pirate boy? Those corsairs are ferociously hostile and suspicious of all strangers.'

'You forget, sir,' flashed Joan Thorn, 'that we are the Three Planeteers!'

'Yes,' rumbled Gunda Welk, cold blue eyes gleaming. 'We have a reputation of our own among the outlaws of the system, sir.'

Sua Av grinned.

'I always did have a hidden longing to be a pirate.'

'Thorn, you give me new hope!' declared the Chairwoman. 'If you can do this, in the little time left us—'

'Listen!' commanded Gunda Welk suddenly.

Through the locked door and metal-shuttered window of the study penetrated a rising tumult, the roar of rocket-cars racing up to the mansion. Then came a rush of running feet through it, and a loud knock on the door.

'Ms. Hoskins!' called a secretary anxiously to the Chairwoman through the door. 'The police are here! They say the Three Planeteers are in the city tonight, and were glimpsed by spy-plates heading toward this mansion. They want to make sure you're safe.'

'The cursed Earth Police!' flared Gunda Welk in a hoarse whisper. 'We overlooked some of their spy-plates.'

Thom's eyes were black pinpoints, her brown face taut. She knew the Mercurian was right, that they had been glimpsed by some of the hidden visiplates planted cunningly throughout the metropolis for the benefit of the police.

'I'm all right, Ames!' called the Chairwoman to her secretary. 'Tell the police not to bother me.'

But in the next moment came a loud cry from a police officer outside the shuttered windows.

'The Planeteers are in there with the Chairwoman!' the woman shouted. 'Their tracks lead to the window-they must be making her say she's all right!'

'Break down the door!' roared another officer's voice. 'Quick, before they kill the Chairwoman!'

A resounding battering began against the locked door and another banging at the metal shutter that closed the window.

The Chairwoman looked helplessly at Thorn. 'I'll have to tell them the truth, that you Planeteers are really my agents, or they'll haul you off to prison,'

'No!' said Joan Thorn fiercely. 'Once the secret that we're Alliance agents gets out, it would spread swiftly over the whole system. Our chance of getting the secret of Erebus from that pirate boy would be wrecked—our whole plan ruined.'

'But you can't escape from here the Chairwoman exclaimed. 'They're at both window and door!'

'We can escape,' Thorn said swiftly. 'But we've got to make it look as though we came here for a criminal purpose. Otherwise, people will ask why the Planeteers came to the Chairwoman's mansion, and it will be guessed that we're really your agents after all.'

Thorn drew a roll of flexible metal cord from her pocket, and sprang toward the Chairwoman.

'Forgive me for this, sir,' she cried.

The bewildered Chairwoman did not resist as Thorn bound her arms and legs tightly. Then the young Earthwoman straightened.

'Tell them we tried to kidnap you, sir,' she said swiftly to the Chairwoman. 'That we meant to hold you for ransom.'

Gunda Welk stood ready now to open the window shutter. And Sua Av had taken a little metal sphere from her pocket.

'You're right-the light-bomb is our best chance,' Thorn clipped. 'Throw it when Gunda opens the window.'

Gunda Welk suddenly flung open the shutter. Before the police hammering outside it could enter, the bald Venusian flung out the tiny sphere. The Planeteers clapped their hands in front of their eyes. The sphere burst out on the terrace amid the pressing group of police. A terrific glare of blazing white light exploded from the bomb. A tiny charge of atoms inside it had been suddenly broken down, not into energy, but into pure radiation in the frequency of light. The awful glare of radiation instantly paralyzed the optic nerves of the unprepared police, temporarily blinding them.

The glare died swiftly. Thorn and her two comrades were already plunging out through the blinded women.

'This way!' Thorn cried.

'They're escaping!' yelled a blinded officer.

The Planeteers plunged around the corner of the huge mansion, toward the long, low rocket-cars parked in front.

Sua Av jumped into one, whose power-chamber was throbbing. As the others leaped in after her, the bald Venusian yanked back the throttle. The car rabbited out through the dark grounds with a rising roar from the rocket-tubes at its rear.

'Straight for the spaceport!' Thorn yelled.

'Hold tight!' called Sua Av, with a throaty laugh. 'I always did want to let one of these things out!'

A whizz and roar, a spuming flash of fire—that was the stolen rocketcar as it shot through the streets. Its speed was suicidal, but streets were almost empty at this late hour.

Now the spaceport was close ahead. Thorn could see the soaring tower of the starter, flashing varicolored landing signals to a huge freighter that was sinking ponderously down out of the stars with all its blasts braking.

The audio speaker in the car broke into frantic voice. 'All police! The Planeteers have stolen a police rocket-car and are making for the spaceport, after making an attempt to kidnap the Chairwoman! Shoot on sight!'

'Look ahead!' yelled Gunda Welk.

Women in white uniforms were running across the spaceport toward them, between the great docks and the big freighters and liners that rested like huge torpedoes on the tarmac.

'They're too late!' the Venusian chuckled. 'Here's our ship.'

Before them loomed the three-man scout cruiser that had brought them to Earth, a long, torpedo-slim craft of gleaming inertrum, on its nose the number N-77. The thick-clustered tubes at its stern told of immense powers of acceleration and speed.

Joan Thorn and her comrades tumbled into the little ship, as atom-pistols coughed, and shells exploded in white proton-fire around them. Sua Av spun the heavy, round door shut while Thorn and the Mercurian leaped into the control-room in the nose.

Thorn's hands flashed amid the bewildering array of controls, and the power-chambers in the stern began a soft, rising roar of atomic energy.

Thorn jammed down two firing keys. With thunderous blast, white fire burst from the keel tubes of the cruiser. It lurched upward, riding its columns of proton-flame, then shooting obliquely up across the spaceport as Thorn cut in all the stern tubes.

She was flung back, deep into the cushioned pilot chair, her entrails seeming crushed by the terrific acceleration. The shadowed convexity of Earth fell away appallingly beneath them, as the sharp clang of the friction-alarm told of walls being dangerously overheated by the too-rapid rush through the air. Then the roar of air outside the walls died rapidly away. They were out in space.

'We're clear!' shouted Sua Av, stumbling into the control-room, her grin twisted by pain of shock.

'Clear, yes—but every Earth cruiser in space will be after us now for trying to kidnap the Chairwoman!' Thorn rapped. 'We've got to reach the Zone before they catch us!'
CHAPTER III

Into the Zone

'Oh, the gloom of outer space,

Where the tailless cornets race,

And the sun's a star that almost disappears

When our rockets' steady roar.

Sings the good old song owe more,

We're outward bound again, oh, Planeteers!'

SUAL AV'S throaty bass reverberated through the little control-room of the cruiser, in which she sat with Gunda Welk. It rose above the soft hissing of the rocket-tubes.

'Curse me if I can see anything to make up songs about,' growled the big Mercurian.

'You have no poetry in your soul, Gunda,' retorted the little Venusian with a grin. 'A poetic genius like myself doesn't make up her songs—they come to her out of the great ether.'

'They sound uncommonly like the bellowing of a Jovian marsh-calf when they do force themselves out,' said Gunda Welk dourly. 'Besides, you'll wake up Joan.'

'I'm awake,' came a voice behind them, and they turned.

Thorn came into the control-room, rubbing her eyes. Then she peered tautly through the broad window that framed a magnificent vista of black space and stars.

'What about the cruisers on our tail?' she asked quickly.

The big Mercurian shrugged. 'They're hanging on—we've heard their audio calls. And they've called up every Alliance cruiser in this part of the system. We've stirred up a hornets' nest this time, Joan!'

Joan Thorn cut in the switch of the audio. From the speaker came a weird jumble of meaningless sound. All naval calls were always 'scrambled'to prevent eavesdropping; only an official unscrambler could translate them.

There was such an unscrambler in this little ship. Thorn had built it, out of her own naval experience. She hastily snapped it on, and the incoherent jumble of sounds from the speaker at once became a crisp, understandable voice.

'-our auras, which shows that present course of the fugitives is straight toward the Zone. Undoubtedly they're hoping to hide out there. It is imperative that we cut them off before they enter the Zone. Flagship Gull, signing off.'

'The Gull!' Thorn exclaimed, her brown face strange for a moment. 'I know that ship. It was old Commander Leigh speaking. She commands the Alliance patrol squadrons out here.'

Her thoughts swept her back into memory for a moment. She had, only four years before, commanded a cruiser of the Earth Navy that helped patrol this very sector of space, out here beyond the orbit of Mars, against a surprise League attack.

'They've guessed that we're making for the Zone,' Thorn went on. 'It's where all outlaws head for when things get too hot for them.'

'The whole system is too hot for us right now,' observed Sua Av. 'You should have heard the audio news bulletins going back and forth while you were sleeping. Three Planeteers try to kidnap Earth Chairwoman! Notorious outlaws foiled in daring attempt.' The system's ringing with it!'

'It'll ring with the news if we're gunned out of space by those cruisers converging on us,' grunted Gunda Welk sourly. 'Do you think we can slip through them, Joan?'

'I think so,' Thorn clipped. 'We've got to keep straight on. Turkoon, the asteroid that's the pirates' main base, lies in the part of the Zone almost directly ahead.'

Thorn stared with narrowed eyes through the broad window, into the magnificent star-flecked vault.

The little ship of the Planeteers was roaring out through the void at top speed, millions of miles outside the orbit of Mars. The bright, small disk of the sun was dead astern, its rays hiding the gray blob of Earth, away from which they had been fleeing for so many long hours.

Ahead of them, the void was thick with bright stars. Brilliant among them gleamed the big yellow topaz of Saturn, and beyond, and to the left, the fainter green sparks of Uranus and Neptune. Pluto was somewhere farther away, off to the right. And Erebus, their mysterious, ultimate goal, lay invisible still farther off—the dark, enigmatic outpost of the solar system.

Directly ahead of the racing little ship, only a few million miles away, extended a wide band of countless tiny specks of light, stretching parallel with the equator of the system. That broad band of light-specks was the Zone, the great asteroidal belt whirling between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Thorn gazed tautly into the Zone. That mighty wilderness of countless planetoids and meteor-swarms, which all ordinary shipping avoided by running above or below, was the No Woman's Land of the Solanr System. In it the space pirates had long had their lairs, from which they still sallied forth to levy ton on the interplanetary shipping. Countless naval expeditions had tried to clean the place out, and had been baffled by the shifting swarms of meteors and tiny planets which made it impossible to conduct organized operations in there without prohibitive losses.

Joan Thorn's brown hands clenched. In there, in the Zone, at the pirates' asteroid base, was the boy who alone in the system, held the secret of mysterious Erebus, the secret that would make possible the securing of the precious radite from that far, dark planet. Somehow, that boy's secret must be secured.

'Calling flagship Gull!' suddenly boomed a deep voice from the audio speaker. 'Cruiser Tharine, reporting. Our aura shows the Planeteers' ship four hundred thousand miles from us, eighteen degrees counter-sunwise.'

'Orders to Tharine,' rapped back Commander Leigh's hard voice swiftly. 'Close in before they slip past you into the Zone. Calling cruiser Rantal!'

'Rantal speaking!' came a quick voice.

'Chanage your course to eighty-six degrees sunwise,' hammered the Commander. 'You and the Tharine can catch the Planeteers between you if you put on all speed.'

Sua Av scratched her bald head and looked at Thorn. 'They're converging on us from two sides, Joan.'

'Damn them!' growled the huge Mercurian angrily. 'If they only knew that we Planeteers are risking our necks for the sake of the Alliance—'

'But they don't know. To them, we're outlaws who must be either captured or gunned,' Joan Thorn clipped. 'We've got to outrun those two cruisers! Turn the injectors on full, Gunda.'

The Mercurian quickly obeyed. Thorn leaned toward the bank of firing-keys, her eyes on the power gauges.

All modern space ships were propelled by the atomic disintegration of copper or a similar metal. The powdered metal's atoms were broken down by terrific electric voltages, in power chambers of heavy inertrum. Only inertrum, that artificial metal whose atoms were synthetically 'crystallized,' could stand the awful strain.

Much of the atomic energy generated in the chambers had to be fed back into them as electric voltage, to continue the process. But there was enough surplus to eject streams of protons at high speed from the inertrum rocket-tubes, propelling the ship.

Joan Thorn cut in all stern tubes. The little ship jerked forward with the deafening roar of the blast.

'Check the aura-chart,' she ordered Sua Av. 'See if we're losing those cruisers.'

The Venusian snapped on their ship's aura. The 'aura'was a field of electromagnetic vibrations radiated for a million miles in all directions by a projector in the ship. The vibrations were reflected back by any object within that radius of space, and automatically plotted and recorded on the aura-chart.

The chart was a sphere of pale light, poised above the window. At the center of the luminous sphere was a black dot representing their ship. Off to right and left of the black dot moved two red sparks, cutting in obliquely toward them as all advanced.

'They're close—no more than a quarter of a million miles,' reported Sua Av.

'The Zone isn't much farther than that ahead,' Thorn declared.

'But there's a big meteor swarm in the Zone directly ahead of us!' Gunda Welk exclaimed. 'We can't run into that!'

In the fore of the aura-chart sphere glimmered a cloud of very tiny crimson flecks, whirling, seething. It was the edge of a great cloud of meteors at the lip of the Zone, stretching across a million miles of space in front of their fleeing little ship.

Thorn could see the swarm in black space ahead. Not the myriad meteors themselves, but a constant winking and flashing of tiny flares, where meteors in the whirling storm of stone struck and fused every few minutes.

'Rantal reporting!' rapped the audio speaker. 'Planeteers are now keeping their lead on us, and running straight on toward the Zone.'

'Keep after them!' ordered the Commander's grim voice. 'Swarm six-sixty-two is just ahead of them and they won't dare enter that. We'll have them boxed.'

'You heard, girls,' said Joan Thorn tightly. 'There's just one thing to do—run the swarm.'

'Let his go!' grinned Sua Av. 'It takes more than a few meteors to stop the Planeteers.'

'One thing sure,' said Gunda grimly. 'If we do run it safely, we'll lose those cruisers. They won't dare follow.'

Joan Thorn knew the peril into which their little ship was roaring. The chance of their winning through that vast, whirling stone-storm was less than one in two.

But the naval cruisers would not follow them in there, she was sure. And if she could run the swarm, she would be well inside the Zone and could turn and run counter-sunwise toward the asteroid Turkoon without fear of further pursuit.

'Here goes!' Sua Av breathed, as the aura-chart showed their ship approaching the edge of the great swarm.

The chart showed the two converging cruisers making a frantic effort to head them off. But it was too late. Already, in the chart, the Planeteers' ship was entering the swarm.

Thorn looked forth tensely through the window. The aura was useless, now that they were actually in the swarm. Her only chance now was in the quickness of her eyes and hands.

Space outside the window still looked empty, for the density of even the densest meteor swarm is not high. But Thorn could glimpse all around them the quick red glows, quickly fading and re-appearing, of meteors colliding and fusing.

A jagged black oblong mass turning over slowly, expanded with lightning speed in front of her. Her hand smashed a starboard-tube firing key, and the little ship lurched wildly aside from the oncoming monster.

A moment later, two smaller black masses passed some distance on the right, revolving around each other. Then there was a rattle, as of hail, as tiny particles struck the ship walls.

Scree-e-e! The tiny scream of air escaping through a pierced wall reached their ears with startling suddenness.

'Hull punctured!' rasped Thorn, without turning.

'I'll get it!' panted Sua Av, grabbing up the electro-fusing kit and darting toward the tiny hole in the wall.

'Better get our space-suits on,' Thorn continued rapidly without turning her head. 'We may get holed again.'

Gunda Welk hastily hauled in the suits from a cabinet amidships. The Mercurian took over for a moment while Thorn struggled into the suit and glassite helmet, and then Thorn went back to her tense watch while her two comrades donned their suits.

A soundless flash of red light burgeoned on the left in space, faded, and then blazed up again and veered toward the ship as a third meteor struck the two that had just collided.

Thorn frantically swung the ship upward. The fusing, swiftly-cooling mass passed close underneath.

Another mass of bullet-like particles struck the racing ship. Air screeched out through new holes, and the airgauge on the panel started flashing a warning red light as pressure diminished. Sua Av was working hastily with the fusing kit to close the new hull-punctures.

Thorn glimpsed a peculiar gleaming meteor directly ahead, coming dead on at the ship. She had plenty of time to curve the ship aside. But as she did so—

'Above you!' yelled Gunda Welk wildly.

Thorn looked up, just glimpsed the huge, ponderous mass thundering down on the ship from above-a tiny planetoid, black and jagged and massive, spinning on its axis as it bore noiselessly down on them.

Thorn's hand on the keys blasted the ship to starboard with the speed of light. But she knew, even as she acted, that she was too late. She could not quite get clear.

There came a grinding shock, a scream of riven metal. She and Gunda Welk were thrown crazily together at a side of the control-room. Her head rang inside her helmet.

She scrambled up, clutching a stanchion. There was a dead, unusual silence. She looked back into the stern of the ship, past Sua Av, who was scrambling unsteadily to their side.

''We're wrecked!' Thorn exclaimed, her heart plummeting.

The little planetoid had crumpled up the whole stern half of the ship like cardboard. The air inside it was gone. The crumpled little craft was drifting silently in space, revolving slowly around the jagged planetoid that had been its Nemesis.

'Hell!' swore Gunda Welk, her voice coming to the other two in their helmets through the short-range audio with which all space-suits were equipped. 'We were almost through, too!'

'What do we do now?' Sua Ay asked, her green eyes perplexedly staring through the glassite of her helmet.

Thorn shrugged heavily. 'I don't know. I was a fool to try to run the swarm. But it looked like our best chance.'

'It was,' said the big Mercurian loyally. 'Even though we didn't quite make it.'

'We've got to get out of here somehow to Turkoon, that pirate asteroid,' Thorn said. 'We can't just cling to this wreck until the oxygen in our suit tanks gives out.'

She examined the audio and other instruments. All wrecked by the shock. 'I suppose we're lucky to escape with our lives. But we've merely postponed death if we can't get away from here.'

Sua Av peered out through the cracked window, into the black abyss in which they were floating. The Venusian stiffened as she glimpsed something beyond the jagged, spinning planetoid about which their wreck was revolving.

'Joan, a ship is running up along the edge of the swarm!' she exclaimed. 'I can see its lights!'

Thorn and the Mercurian leaped to the window. They stared at the little blob of light, coming slowly closer.

'If it's one of those cruisers that pursued us, we're done for,' said Gunda Welk tautly.

'It's not!' cried Thorn suddenly. 'It's a pirate ship!'
CHAPTER IV

Pirate Prince

THEY saw the distant ship coast the edge of the vast meteor swarm for some minutes and then come to a halt in space, with a prolonged flash of its bow rocket-tubes halting it.

A moment later a cracked, shrill voice sounded from the little audiospeakers inside their helmets.

'Ahoy, Planeteers! Are any of you alive in that wreck?'

Thorn answered instantly. 'We're all alive—Joan Thorn speaking.'

'I figgered it'd take more than, a meteor-swarm to finish you three,' retorted the cracked voice, chuckling.

'Who's speaking? What ship is that?' Thorn demanded.

'Cautious, ain't ye?' said the shrill voice, with a cackle of mirth. 'I don't blame you' seeing how you girls was chased. But you needn't worry-this ain't no naval cruiser. We're Companions of Space. Want to come aboard?'

'Companions of Space? Pirates, eh?' Thorn said. 'Yes, we'll come aboard.'

'Figgered you would,' cackled the other. 'We'll stand by, and you can come across with your impellers.'

Thorn switched off her suit-audio and spoke to her two companions, clutching their arms to conduct her voice to them.

'Cut your audios and listen,' she said tautly. 'These pirates may plan some kind of treachery, but I don't think so. This looks like our chance to get to their base at Turkoon. But if we get there, don't mention Erebus or the radite, whatever you do,

'We understand,' Gunda Welk muttered.

They each got a torch-like metal impeller from a locker, and then wrenched open the door amidships. Bracing her feet' against its edge, Joan Thorn leaped out into the abyss.

She shot floatingly away from the wreck. As her momentum faded and she began to float back toward the wreck, Thorn switched on the impeller in her hand. The blast from it kicked her space-suited figure on through space.

Sua Av and the big Mercurian were following closely. The three progressed thus, with frequent flashes from their impellers thrusting them on toward the distant waiting pirate ship.

Bright stars gleamed like millions of watching eyes all around Thorn. She glimpsed the ominous red flash of colliding meteors, nearby. She had to turn constantly to make sure that they were moving toward the waiting craft. Soon they were very close to it, moving faster, now that its slight gravitational field drew them.

Thorn eyed the long, grim ship that floated here in space just outside the edge of the vast swarm. She judged that it had once been a Neptunian or Uranian naval cruiser-the design one adapted to great distances, and ominous muzzles of atom-guns peering forth along its sides spoke of heavy armament.

The Planeteers bumped the side of the vessel. They scrambled along it and into the waiting open air-lock.

* * * *

A minute later they were inside, unscrewing their helmets and gazing about a lighted metal chamber. A half-dozen armed women were here, and one of them came forward to the three.

'So you're the famous Three Planeteers, eh?' she asked in the same cracked, quavering voice they had previously heard.

The speaker was an old, snow-haired Martian, her thin figure stooped, her red face incredibly wrinkled with age, her faded, rheumy eyes peering at them shortsightedly. She wore two atom-pistols in her belt, and was chewing rial leaf whose green juice she spat occasionally into a floor receptacle.

'Curse me if it doesn't do me good to look at you,' quavered the oldster, her oath making astounding contrast with her cracked voice and senile appearance. 'Aye, it warms my heart to look at women the like of which I was myself, in the old days.'

'Who are you?' Thorn asked steadily. 'How did you happen along to pick us up?'

'As for who I am, the name is Stilicha Keene. Ever hear of it?' the old pirate answered shrilly.

'Stilicha Keene?' repeated Sua Av incredulously. 'The notorious pirate of forty years ago?)

'The same,' answered the old Martian complacently. 'Aye, long before you Planeteers was ever born, I was one of the leaders of the Companions of Space, back in the days when there were women in space and not the kind of milksops I have to give orders to now.'

'You still haven't told us how you happened to be near to pick us up,' Thorn reminded.

Stilicha Keene turned her rheumy eyes on the young earthman. She chuckled as she spat rial juice.

'Sharp and curious, ain't ye? Well, I'd expect it of you. I was the same at your age, smart and quick and bold. But you were asking how we happened along. Well, this is the Venture, and we've been to Jupiter on a little errand for Prince Lann. Coming back, we heard the audio-calls of them cruisers chasing you Planeteers.

'We heard them give up the chase after you ducked into that meteor swarm. So I gave order to lay a course near the swarm, hoping we might meet you-and then we sighted your wreck. It looks like you'll have to go on to Turkoon with us now.'

The old pirate continued admiringly, 'I've heard a lot of you lasses and the fine things you've done. The time you raided the governor's office at Titan and stole all that platinum, and the time you three alone held up that big Martian liner and robbed all the passengers of their valuables.'

The old pirate could not know, Thorn thought grimly, that that raid on Titan had been really to secure League naval secrets and the platinum a mere blind, or that the hold-up of the Martian liner had had as its real objective the securing of a valuable new atom-gun drawing among the effects of a Jovian engineer.

'So when we get to Turkoon,' old Stilicha Keene was continuing eagerly, 'maybe you Planeteers would think of joining up with us Companions, eh? It would be good to have some real women with us again, women such as I used to rocket with when I was young.'

Joan Thorn's pulses leaped at the offer. But she kept her excitement hidden, and frowned a little.

'The Three Planeteers join an outfit led by a boy?' she returned a little disdainfully.,

'You wait till you meet this boy,' the old Martian told her. 'You'll find he's a real leader, is Lann Cain.'

'We'll talk of it when we get to Turkoon,' Thorn told her. 'Anyway, we're damned grateful to you for picking us up.'

'Aye, you bit off a little more than even you could chew, didn't you, on Earth?' cackled the hoary old sinner. 'It warmed my heart to think of it. Kidnapping the Chairwoman of Earth! Only the Planeteers would have thought of trying that!'

Old Stilicha Keene led the way up through the dusky corridors and catwalks of the ship. The Planeteers shouldered past members of the crew who stared admiringly at them.

These pirates were a motley aggregation from every planet in the system—Martians, Saturnians and Uranians, wicked-looking Earthwomen, fighters all, from the look of them.

Thorn and her comrades emerged after old Stilicha Keene into the broad, glassite-fronted control-room. A surly Jovian stood at the firingkeys, and a nervous, green-faced, hollow-eyed Saturnian at the bank of instruments on the right.

'Get going to Turkoon, Barbo,' ordered the pirate commander.

With roar of stern-tubes pouring forth proton-fire, the heavy cruiser shot forward in space.

Joan Thorn looked through the broad glassite windows. The Venture was moving counter-sunwise into the very heart of the Zone. Space ahead seemed thick with whirling clouds of light-specks that were meteor swarms, and steady bright sparks that were booming planetoids.

'How the devil do you navigate this damned jungle, anyway?' Gunda Welk asked the old Martian.

Stilicha Keene's wrinkled face grinned. 'That's easy. We've got a little projector of vibrations planted on every big asteroid and in all swarms—each projector emitting a wave of a different frequency. We pick up the signals, and they show us just how far and in what direction each swarm and asteroid is, so we can avoid them. just like the lighthouses on the Earth seas, centuries ago.'

She added with cunning satisfaction, 'The signals don't help naval cruisers or other ships navigate the Zone, because they don't know the frequency-code and can't tell what's meant by the signals they hear. They've lost so many cruisers trying to get in here that they gave it up as a bad job.'

The ship forged on through the wilderness of the Zone, constantly detouring to avoid the many perils to navigation that abounded here. It coasted along vast swarms, cut sharply upward to evade' planetoids, slipped close past a small tailless comet that glimmered like a little white ghost sun.

Then Joan Thorn made out a small green speck in the blackness, toward which the Venture was now heading directly. It widened rapidly into a green disk. Her black eyes narrowed.

'That's Turkoon, isn't it?'

'Aye, that's old Turkoon,' quavered Stilicha Keene. 'The sweetest, safest, snuggest little harbor in the whole system. Good air and good water, and ringed round with all those swarms and asteroids that keep the prying naval cruisers away. A paradise for us gentlewomen of the void. Aye, there it lies, like a pretty emerald in space, just as it lay when I first saw it long ago.

'It's seen a plenty, has old Turkoon. It's seen the bloody days of the old wild corsairs, with the scarred ship's roaring in to it, loaded with ores and jewels and silks and men. It's seen the days of Martina Cain, a generation ago, when full a thousand ships of the Companions put forth to space at one time. It's seen them all come and go—all the great, brave gentlewomen of the void, has old Turkoon.'

'And now,' Thorn said ironically, 'it sees the Companions led by a boy.'

'Aye, girl,' shrilled the old pirate, 'it sees a boy leading us now. But he's Martina Cain's daughter—as deadly dangerous as ever his sire was. Aye, and as great a leader.'

* * * *

The Venture roared closer to the green asteroid and then dropped rapidly toward it, air whistling outside its walls.

'I didn't think an asteroid this small could have an atmosphere,' commented Sua Av, peering downward.

''It must have unusual mass for its size—probably a core of neutronium or other super-heavy elements,' Thorn guessed. 'Otherwise, the escape of its air molecules would be inevitable, and it wouldn't be able to hold an atmosphere.'

'Let's hope that nothing holds us here, once we get what we're after,' muttered Gunda Welk.

Thorn was taut with the same thought. Down in this hell's nest of pirates was a boy with a secret that would save four worlds from conquest—if they could get it from him.

Turkoon widened beneath them, a little world blanketed by thick green fern-jungles. Directly underneath was a raw brown oval, a big clearing that had been blasted from the jungle. At one end of it gleamed the straggling chromaloy buildings of a town of considerable size, while parked ships covered the rest of the field.

The Venture landed with a roar of brake-blasts and a bumping jar beside the scores of parked ships. The door ports were rapidly unscrewed, and warm, heavy air hit the Planeteers' faces as they followed old Stilicha Keene out of the ship.

'We'll go right up to the Council House. Martina Cain's house, it was, and Lann lives there now,' the old pirate told the three. Her rheumy eyes glistened. 'I want to see the faces of some of these young milksop captains when they learn that I've brought in the Three Planeteers!'

They went with Stilicha Keene across the field and through the main street of the straggling pirate town.

Turkoon Town sprawled, unkempt and somnolent, in the pale wash of light from the shrunken, setting sun. The looming dark green wall of the jungle was only rods from the outermost metal cabins.

Solemn, green and dark towered the fifty-foot jungle all around. Colossal ferns crowded each other, the space between their huge trunks choked with underbrush. Here and there in the tangle, blindly writhed 'crawler vines,' parasitic fungoid creepers that wandered with their peculiar power of self-locomotion, searching for a host. Through the upper jungle and out over the town drifted 'floating flowers,' white blooms that drank sunlight and water vapor from the air, and never touched ground after they budded free.

Thorn and her two comrades were eyed without interest by the motley population of the town—a population as varied in origin as the pirate crew they had already met. The women were from every inhabited world in the system. And there were also many men here—hot-eyed red Martian girls, languid white Venusian men, tall, awkward green girls from Saturn, brazen-faced Earth girls. All were clad in incongruously rich tunics and jewels-pirate loot.

Children, hybrids of a half dozen different peoples, fought and chased each other along the dusty brown street. And there was an astounding variety of animals from all planets, some chained, others running free. Solemn-eyed, furry Martian vardaks, green Venusian swamp pups, a big, hopping uniped from Io, and many others-all of them brought home here by the far-ranging pirate crews.

The crew of the Venture was stumping into town behind them, caning loudly to let all know they had returned. But by now, Stilicha Keene had brought the Planeteers to the long, low chromaloy building that faced the end of the main street.

The snow-haired old pirate painfully climbed the steps, and led them into a big, low-ceilinged, dusky room.

A small group of women stood in it, all wearing atom pistols.

'Where's Lann?' demanded the old pirate as this little group turned toward her.

'We're waiting for him. He'll be out in a moment,' answered a squat, scarred-faced Jovian who was one of the group. 'So you finally got back, Stilicha!'

'Yes, I'm back,' shrilled the ancient Martian. 'And a cursed strange thing it is that old Stilicha Keene has to go out on reconnaissance while you younger women rest your bones.'

The old pirate spat real juice viciously out the open door and then turned to Thorn and her two comrades.

'Boy, I hate to admit it, but these are the captains of the Companions now,' she told Thorn. 'Aye, these; the worthless lot who call themselves pirates in these degenerate days. Yon ox of a Jovian is Brun Abo. The pretty fellow beside her is Kinne Queen, and the fat hog yonder is Jen Cheerly, the latest to join our ranks.'

Thorn's black eyes swept the pirate leaders. The woman beside the Jovian, the woman called Kinne Queen, was an Earthwoman, middle-aged, with a very handsome face and brooding eyes.

Jen Cheerly, the third pirate captain, was a Uranian of incredible obesity. Her fat, puffy body seemed about to burst her jacket, and her pale-green, rotund face was featureless except for two bright, pig-like little eyes.

The obese Uranian stared at Thorn and her two comrades with those little eyes, and then spoke in an incongruously high and squeaky voice to old Stilicha Keene.

'Where did you pick up these three?' she asked. 'And why did you bring them here?'

Stilicha Keene cackled, her rheumy eyes glistening.

'You'll find out who they are in a minute, Jen,' she shrilled. 'It's going to be a surprise for you, and all you other louts who call yourselves pirates.'

A door in the rear of the room suddenly opened, and a boy in white silk jacket and trousers entered the room.

'You're back, Stilicha?' he exclaimed eagerly as he saw the old Martian. 'What did you learn at Jupiter?'

Thorn's gaze riveted on the boy. She heard a low whisper from Sua Av behind her.

'So that's Lann Cain,' whispered the Venusian.

Lann Cain's eyes looked past the old Martian into Thorn's face. She felt the impact of his challenging stare as though it were a tangible shock.

The pirate boy was a slender, imperious figure in his silk garments. His proud, graceful form seemed somehow vibrant with force. The bronze-gold hair that hung to his shoulders was like a casque of dull gold flame around his face, catching the glints of sunlight in its strands.

His face was white, dynamic, with hardness in the straight red mouth and in the stubborn set of his small chin. His dark blue eyes, as they stared into Thorn's face, were growing slowly darker, as though storm were gathering in them, tiny lightnings seeming to flash in their depths.

Thorn was momentarily bewildered, badly startled. She had expected some blowsy, barbaric, aging boy, whom she could, without difficulty, trick out of the secret she wanted. But this boy was as beautiful-and as dangerous-looking-as a sword blade.
CHAPTER V

Secret Enemy

IN the queerly tense silence Thorn stared at Lann Cain. Then the silence was suddenly broken by the shuffling entrance of a grotesque, four-legged creature that had followed the pirate boy into the room. It stared at Thorn with blazing green eyes.

'It's a space dog, Joan!' exclaimed Sua Av wonderingly. 'You've heard of them.'

'I've heard of them,' Thorn muttered. 'But this is the first one I've ever seen.'

The space dog stood three feet high at the shoulder. Its body was of dusty, mineraline gray flesh that had an inorganic look. Its four legs ended in heavy digging paws, and its mouth was furnished with great grindingtusks. It had no nostrils, for the creature was not an air-breathing animal.

It was, in fact, one of a unique species. The early explorers who first visited the asteroid Ceres had been amazed to find these creatures living on that airless little world. They were the product of an evolution working without atmosphere, creatures able to assimilate the inorganic elements they dug from the ground, and consume them by a chemical process other than oxidization. They had dim telepathic powers by which their rudimentary minds communed.

'Ool will not hurt you,' said Lann Cain crisply to Thorn.

He glanced at the blazing-eyed creature, and it lay down at his feet as it received his telepathic command.

'Stilicha, you brought these three women here?' the boy asked the old Martian. 'Who are they?'

'Yes, who are they?' squeaked Jen Cheerly, the obese, beady-eyed Uranian. 'What's all the mystery about them?'

Stilicha Keene's rheumy eyes glistened, and her wrinkled face quivered with excitement as she answered.

'Why, they're just three lasses I picked off a wreck coming back, and fetched along to Turkoon,' she quavered. The old woman paused to enjoy her coming triumph, then added, 'Maybe you've heard of these three girls. They're called the Three Planeteers.'

'The Three Planeteers!'

Brun Abo, the squat Jovian, uttered that startled cry. She and everyone else in the room stared at Joan Thorn and Sua Av and Gunda Welk in rigidly frozen amazement.

The beady eyes of Jen Cheerly, the fat Uranian, were wide with astonishment. Kinne Queen, the Earthwoman, stiffened. And Lann Cain's dark blue eyes narrowed incredulously as he stared at Thorn's dark face.

'It's them, all right,' muttered the Jovian in a moment. 'I've seen their pictures on reward notices.'

'Those pictures on the notices were poor likenesses,' said Sua Av, a grin on her froglike face. 'They hardly did me justice, as you can see for yourselves.'

'What do you Planeteers want here, if you are the Planeteers?' demanded Jen Cheerly suspiciously.

Gunda Welk stiffened at the fat green pirate's question.

'We're not in the custom of asking anybody's leave for our coming and goings, Uranian!' she flared.

'Not even the Planeteers can talk to me like that!' squeaked Jen Cheerly furiously, her hand dropping to her side.

'Draw that atom-pistol, and I'll shove it down your fat throat,' warned the towering Mercurian ominously.

'Quiet, Gunda,' snapped Joan Thorn. 'I'll do the talking.'

'Let them fight!' urged old Stilicha Keene with quavering eagerness, a ghoulish avidity in her rheumy eyes as she leaned forward. 'There's nothing to warm the blood like the sight of two good women in a stand-up fight.'

'There'll be no fighting here!' flared Lann Cain. 'You all know my rules! If any of you doesn't like them she can get out of Turkoon and out of the Zone!'

The boy's voice cracked like a silver whip, and his dark blue eyes were stormy now with little lightnings. The space dog, Ool, had sprung to her feet, her great green eyes blazing.

Thorn sensed the electric force in this boy which had kept his the acknowledged leader of the wild Companions of Space. The others in the room were stricken to sullen silence by it.

Lann's stormy eyes swung back to Thorn.

'Jen's question was a fair one, Joan Thorn,' he declared. 'What are you Planeteers doing here? You' never came into the Zone before—you always worked by yourselves.'

Thorn shrugged. 'We didn't come here by choice. Perhaps you heard of the trouble we got into at Earth?'

'We heard of your attempt to kidnap the Chairwoman there,' Lann nodded curtly. 'Go on.'

'We bungled the job and had to run for it with half the Earth Navy on our tail,' Thorn continued coolly. 'We tried to lose them in a swarm and got wrecked. The old Martian there picked us up and brought us here to Turkoon. It's not a place we'd have picked voluntarily.' Lann stiffened, and asked dangerously, 'You don't think much then of we Companions and our ways?'

'Not much,' Thorn answered coolly. 'I've no doubt your followers are good fighters, but they look like rather an undisciplined rabble.'

Thorn was playing her part to the hilt. She knew well that for the famous Planeteers to seem too friendly on first acquaintance, too eager to join the pirates, would quickly arouse suspicion.

'But, girl, I was hoping that you three would join' up with us!' quavered old Stilicha Keene dismayedly.

'The Planeteers work alone,' Thorn declared frowningly. Then she appeared to hesitate, and added, 'It's true that we're stranded here now without a ship—'

Sua Av instantly played up to her. 'Yes, Joan, we need a ship and equipment. Maybe we could work with these people for a while, and take a new cruiser as our share of loot.'

'You haven't been asked to join the Companions yet,' flared Lann Cain. 'You Planeteers are just three women here. I could order you gunned down and it would be done.'

Joan Thorn looked at his steadily with cool black eyes. 'Would you do that?'

'No, I wouldn't,' he admitted after a moment. 'Turkoon is a refuge for every outlaw who comes into the Zone, as long as she obeys my rules. And I don't countenance killing here.'

Thorn smiled. 'After all, we Planeteers are in no position to be choosers. We need a ship. We'll join up with you for a while, if you're agreeable, and take a ship as our share of spoil, and then be on our way. What do you say?'

Lann frowned in thought, his anger gone. 'We do need captains,' he murmured.

'And where will you find better ones than the Planeteers?' cried old Stilicha Keene with shrill eagerness. 'Take them in, lass—it's heaven sent them here to help us in the big new foray we've planned.'

'We can pull that job without their help,' squeaked Jen Cheerly, her pig-like eyes malignant. 'What do we need with the Planeteers?'

Brun Abo, the squat Jovian, nodded sullen agreement. But Kinne Queen, the handsome Earthwoman, turned on the obese Uranian.

'After all, Jen,' said Kinne Queen silkily, 'you yourself are still a newcomer in our midst. We don't need advice from you on this.'

'No brawling!' Lann ordered imperiously. He continued, 'Joan Thorn, I'm taking you three into the Companions. But understand one thing. When we blast off Turkoon, everyone is under my command, even the Planeteers.'

Thorn frowned, though inwardly her heart was pounding with elation.

'We're not used to being under orders of anyone,' she declared.

'Take it or leave it!' Lann flashed. 'There can only be one leader when ships go into action.'

Thorn finally shrugged. 'Well, as I said, we're not in a position to be choosers. We follow your orders in space.'

'That's settled, then,' Lann said curtly. His slender figure swung round to Stilicha Keene. 'Now what about your reconnaissance, Stilicha? Did you find out anything at Jupiter about those scheduled freighters?'

The old Martian nodded her white head vigorously. 'Sure did. We slipped in to Jupiter without bein' spotted, and landed secretly in that big marsh near Vosek. Me and one of my girls went into the city in disguise and hung around the docks. We saw rich cargo bein' loaded in them freighters—thirty of 'em. We waited till they took off, a bunch of tankers with 'em. They're blasting along without any naval convoy. I figger them to cross under the Zone tomorrow, on their way to Saturn.'

'Didn't I tell you they'd sail without convoy?' squeaked Jen Cheerly, the obese Uranian's eyes glistening. 'Wasn't my tip right? This'll be a rich haul, and without even a fight.'

Lann Cain turned to Thorn and her two comrades and explained crisply.

'Jen just joined us two weeks ago. She came with her ship from Jupiter, where she had a secret base on one of the outer moons. She brought advance notice of these rich Jovian freighters scheduled to transit across the inner orbits of the system to reach Saturn which is now approaching opposition.

'They're without convoy,' the pirate boy continued rapidly, 'because the League of Cold Worlds is concentrating all its cruisers at Saturn right now, preparing for the great attack they're going to make on the Alliance. I sent Stilicha to check their sailing and make sure they had rich cargo. We'll surprise them tomorrow when they pass under the Zone.'

'Yes, and fine loot there'll be to divide,' squeaked the obese Uranian gloatingly. 'We'll gun them to a wreck, and gut them of every scrap of spoil, and leave not a woman alive on them to take the tale to Saturn.'

'No!' exclaimed Lann hotly. 'No massacre! I told you my rules when you joined us, Jen. The Companions willfully spill no blood as long as I lead them!'

'My rule has always been to leave nobody alive to testify against me in a space-court,' grumbled the fat Uranian shrilly. 'This tenderheartedness—'

'It isn't just tenderheartedness; it's good strategy!' flashed Lann Cain, his blue eyes determined. 'When freighter-men know they're going to be massacred if they surrender, they fight to the last woman. But when they know that only their cargo will be taken, and their lives spared, they surrender a lot more quickly. Further, the hunt against us is never so bitter. It was my mother's rule to take no life, and it's mine, and it's paid returns to the Companions.'

'That it has!' declared Brun Abo, the Jovian, 'It's saved us many a bitter fight-and possibly extermination.'

The boy looked around them as she gave him orders.

'Our chief spatial navigator will check their course against Saturn's and ours. We'll blast off tomorrow dawn, with forty ships. That'll give us time enough to be waiting in the Zone, and when the Jovian freighters pass underneath, we'll swoop down on them.'

'What about Gunda and Sua Av and me?' Joan Thorn asked him. 'We have no ship, remember.'

'You'll be furnished one, and a crew to go with it,' Lann answered crisply. 'From what I've heard of you Planeteers, you'll be able to handle your part.'

He ran his hand a little tiredly through his mop of dull-gold hair.

'That's all, women. See that your ships and women are ready to blast off at dawn. And not too much drinking tonight!'

As the pirate captains started to troop out, the boy added to the old Martian, 'Stilicha, find a cabin for the Planeteers.'

Thorn was starting out with her two comrades after the old pirate, when Lann's voice halted her.

'Wait, Joan Thorn. There's something I want to ask you.'

Thorn turned, surprised. The boy was looking at her with a queerly thoughtful expression in his blue eyes, his small hand idly patting the space dog that had risen beside him.

'You were in the Earth Navy before you became an outlaw, weren't you?' he asked her.

Thorn nodded. 'Until I deserted,' she admitted curtly.

Lann pointed up to a picture on the wall, a portrait of a hard-faced, middle-aged woman with piercing eyes.

'My mother, Martina Cain, was officer in the Earth Navy, too, before she became an outlaw,' he said slowly. 'Do they ever speak of my mother on Earth? What do they say of her?'

Thorn told his the truth. 'They speak of her only as notorious pirate. Few remember she was ever a naval woman.'

'But she was, and one of their best officers,' Lann said bitterly. 'It was the jealousy of other officers over her promotions that formed a cabal which had her dishonorably discharge . That was the reward of Earth for all the service she'd given her native planet.'

'You don't think much of Earth, eh?' Thorn said curiously. 'Yet, after all, it's really your native world.'

'The Zone is my world—I was born here. I hate Earth for what it did to my father!' the boy flashed. 'I'll be glad to see the League smash the inner worlds, for though I hate the League and its dictator, I've an even greater hate for Earth!'

Thorn felt a faint hope she had cherished until now, die within her. She had hoped that the pirate boy might be induced to save Earth from conquest by telling her the secret of Erebus. But she saw how futile had been that slight hope. This boy had only bitter hatred for the world he deemed to have wronged his mother.

'Your mothers was an extraordinary woman,' Thorn mused, looking up at the portrait. 'A great fighter and organizer, a wonderful navigator. They say that she even visited Erebus, the tenth world, though I suppose that's just a baseless legend.'

'It's the truth!' Lann declared proudly. 'My mothers was on Erebus two weeks, and came back safely—the only woman in the whole history of the Solanr System that ever did so.'

Joan Thorn stared incredulously. 'How did she do it? How did she avoid whatever peril there has swallowed so many women?—'

'I can't tell you that,' the boy A said slowly. 'I've never told anybody what my mother told me about Erebus.'

'Then,' Thorn said wonderingly, 'you're the only person in the whole system who knows anything about that mystery world? The only person who knows how it might be visited safely?'

The boy nodded slowly. A queer expression, one of somber, haunting memory, had come into his vital blue eyes.

'Yes, I'm the only one who knows the secret of Erebus,' he admitted. 'And nobody will ever learn it from me. I have reasons for keeping silence about that world!'

He trembled slightly. Thorn, watching his tautly, felt a queer chill as of a cold, alien breath in the room.

'But I do not know why I am talking of Erebus,' he said impatiently. 'I am tired. I shall see you tomorrow at dawn, before our ships blast off.'

Thus dismissed, Thorn left the Council House and walked slowly, deep in thought, down the street of Turkoon Town. The sun was setting, and from the little crimson disk a flood of pale red light uncannily illuminated the dark, surrounding fern jungle, the raw field and parked ships, and the straggling metal town.

She found the metal cabin assigned them. Gunda Welk and Sua Av sprang up eagerly as she entered.

'We've made it so far, Joan!' exclaimed the bald Venusian excitedly. 'We're in with the pirates now, at least. Did you find out anything about Erebus from the boy?'

Thorn shook her head. 'He won't talk about Erebus—she seems almost afraid to. I didn't dare press questions.'

'We can't wait forever to get the secret out of him,' rumbled Gunda Welk warningly. 'Even when we get it, it'll take a lot of time to get out to Erebus and lift the radite, remember.'

'I know,' Thorn muttered. 'But well ruin all our chances if we're too rash now.'

She fished in her pocket for a rial cigarette.

'It's possible,' she said, 'that whatever his mother told him about Erebus—'

Thorn stopped speaking. Her face froze as she pulled out the thing she had felt in her pocket. It was a tiny metal sphere, only a half-inch in diameter, With a minute aperture in it.

'An Ear,' exclaimed Sua Av appalledly.

Thorn dropped the thing like a poisonous snake and ground it under her heel. Her dark face was grim as she looked down at the shattered fragments of the Ear.

The thing was a super-compact and super-sensitive audio transmitter. It picked up all sound in its immediate vicinity and broadcast it electro-magnetically, for a short range. Both police and criminals of the system used Ears for eavesdropping at a distance.

'Someone slipped it into my pocket in the Council House!' Thorn rapped. 'See if there are any more.'

But a swift search of their clothing and of the cabin disclosed no more Ears.

'Whoever put that Ear in my pocket suspects us!' Thorn said grimly. 'And whoever it is knows now from our talk that we came here after the secret of Erebus, that we're after the radite!

'Thank heaven,' she added tightly, 'that we didn't give away the fact that we want the radite for Earth, that we're Earth agents.'

'This is bad, Joan,' said Sua Av, her ugly face sober. 'Who do you think suspects us? Lann Cain himself?'

'If it were he, or someone loyal to him,' rumbled Gunda Welk, 'he'd have sent women here to seize us by now!'

'Gunda's right—it can't be Lann,' muttered Thorn. 'Someone here is playing a deep game of her own. And whoever it is doesn't like us, and knows now just what we're here for.'

'Joan, our hidden enemy will have a fine chance to gun us tomorrow in the confusion of this attack on the Jovian freighters,' warned Sua Av.

Thorn's brown face hardened. 'I know. But we have to keep right on playing our part here, until we get the secret. We've got to take our part in the foray, and keep looking out for trouble.'
CHAPTER VI

The Trap

FORTY pirate ships throbbed steadily through the wilderness of the Zone. Their course through the jungle of swarms and debris was sunwise. The six basic directions in space navigation are sunwise and counter-sunwise—that is, in the same direction as the rotation of the sun or in an opposite direction; sunward and outward—that is, toward or away from the sun; and up or down, from the equatorial plane of the Solanr System as plotted by the fixed stars.

The pirate fleet moved in a close formation of short columns. In the lead was Lann Cain's silvery cruiser, the Lightning. The ship that had been given the Planeteers to command, the Cauphul, was close behind him. On one side of them sailed old Stilicha Keene's cruiser, and on the other the ship of Jen Cheerly, which was marked on the bows with an ominous, painted black skull.

Joan Thorn stared through the glassite window of the control-room, as they throbbed on. In the pilot's chair beside her sat Sua Av.

'I don't like this raid,' the Venusian was saying, her ugly face troubled. 'An attack on peaceful freighters is out of our line, Joan.'

'Nobody on those freighters will be killed,' Thorn reassured her. 'You heard Lann's orders. And we've got to help rob those ships, to keep up the part we're playing here. We've got to do anything until we get that secret out of the boy. And they are not Alliance craft.'

'I still can't see how we can get it from him,' muttered Sua Av, her green eyes thoughtful. 'We can't use force, when he's surrounded by hundreds of his women all the time. He doesn't look the kind who can be tricked. And from what' you said, he'll never tell it to you of his own free will.'

'We'll find a way,' Thorn declared tightly. 'But I wish I knew who planted that Ear on me, and what her game is.'

Thorn watched the wilderness of meteor swarms, cross-orbiting planetoids, and occasional stray comets past which they sailed. There was no need for navigating by the wave-code, with Lann's cruiser leading the way.

Finally the silvery torpedo-shape of the Lightning slowed down and stopped. At once all the other pirate ships responded with a blast of fire from their bow tubes, braking themselves.

Thorn looked out. They were lying low in the Zone, close by a meteor swarm whose myriad masses of stone showed very near their ships in the aura-chart. They had reached the point under which the Jovian freighters would soon pass, when they detoured downward under the Zone as all ordinary shipping did.

Thorn spoke into the interphone connecting the ship's divisions.

'Gunda, are you cleared for action down there?'

Gunda Welk's rumbling voice came through the instrument from the gun-decks where the mighty Mercurian had taken command.

'All ready! Every woman's at her post.'

'On space-suits, everybody,' Thorn ordered sharply. 'Then stand by.'

It was customary before an action in space for all the crew of a ship to don their suits, so that in case their hull was torn open they could continue to work and fight the ship until there was time to make repairs.

Thorn and Sua Av put on their own suits and helmets. Then they waited in silence, their ship floating beside the others. Lann Cain had strictly forbidden use of the audio between ships until the attack opened, lest the freighters be given the alarm.

Thorn peered through the eyepiece of the telescope built into the wall between the broad windows. She could see no sign of the freighters sunward, and her eyes tired.

A little later, Sua Av gripped her arm and pointed ahead at Lann's ship.

'The signal, Joan! They're coming!'

Lann's silvery cruiser had emitted three short flashes of fire from its bow and stern tubes, the agreed signal.

Thorn peered again through the scope. Now she saw the coming freighters, far down and sunward. They were coming straight on, and would pass the Zone directly underneath the pirates.

There were thirty big freighters, and lagging after them came forty tankers of the type used for transporting liquefied gases, broad-beamed and very dumpy ships, Thorn's keen eyes searched space for sign of a naval convoy, but found none.

'Those are the dumpiest tankers I've ever seen,' she muttered. 'It's a wonder that freighters running without convoy would take such old tubs along to hold their speed down.'

Sua Av shrugged. 'The League worlds are pressing every old ship they've got into service, in their preparation for war. Anyway,' she grinned, 'these pirates aren't going to bother the tankers.'

The merchantmen came steadily on, and now the freighters that led were directly underneath the part of the Zone in which the pirate fleet hovered. Thorn knew the aura-charts of the freighters would show the pirate ships only as part of the great meteor swarm they were lying near. That was why Lann had chosen the position.

Thorn's nerves tensed as the Jovian freighters came directly underneath, a little flock of gleaming specks swimming on through black space toward distant Saturn, the slow tankers still lagging behind. Sua Av was leaning tensely over her bank of keys, and there was no sound in the ship except the throb of its power chambers.

Abruptly from the audio-speaker flared Lann Cain's silver voice.

'Attack! Dive on them!'

Forty pirate ships streamed blasting white fire from their stern tubes, forty grim torpedo-like shapes roared down through the spatial vault toward the thirty hapless freighters.

As they swooped, the forty corsair craft split into five divisions of eight ships each. The eight led by the flashing cruiser of the Three Planeteers headed toward the sunwise end of the freighters. Jen Cheerly and her division headed for the counter-sunwise end. Kinne Queen for the sunward and Brun Abo for the outward sides. Lann Cain himself, with Stilicha Keene's ship and six others, cometed down below the merchantmen.

Joan Thorn saw that the swift maneuver had succeeded. The freighters were 'boxed'—hemmed in on every side except the upward one, which was closed by the dreaded Zone. The pirates had not included the worthless, lagging tankers in their trap, and those dumpy ships were still coming bewilderedly on.

The freighters, as the corsairs swooped down around them, milled confusedly with blasts from their bow-tubes braking them, seeking to find a way out of the trap. The few atom-guns with which they were armed spat shells frantically, that exploded in blinding flares of atomic energy.

'Ahoy, freighters'' rang Lann's silvery voice from the audio. 'Cease firing or we'll gun you out of space! Surrender and nobody will be harmed!'

'How do we know you'll keep your promise?' came the hoarse, fear-laden voice of the freight squadron commander.

'This is Lann Cain speaking!' answered the boy's voice instantly. 'I keep my promises.'

A moment's silence. The scattered fire from the trapped freighters suddenly stopped.

The freight commander's answer came. 'You've the reputation of not killing. We'll surrender.'

Sua Av, her green eyes gleaming with excitement through her helmet, glanced swiftly at Joan Thorn.

'The boy's policy of mercy does pay dividends, Joan,' she muttered.

'Stand by to board the freighters!' crackled Lann's voice to his pirate followers. 'Two ships in each division stand off to keep watch. Hurry, women!'

Like sharks eager for prey, thirty of the forty pirate cruisers one to each victim, dashed in at the helpless freighters. The lead-ship of each division, with one other, stood by ready to turn its guns on any freighter that might resist the boarding.

Thorn's cruiser, the Cauphul, was one of those that stood off to keep watch. She saw the pirate ships already hooking onto the freighters by means of the magnetic grapples they shot forth. The grapple-lines were winched in swiftly, the pirate and merchant ships were drawn close together, and the flexible metal catwalks run swiftly out between them by the corsairs. Then the space-suited pirate horde was pouring across the short, swaying catwalks, hammering at the doors of the freighters until they opened.

Back across the precarious catwalks staggered the helmeted pirates, laden with bales and cases, sacks of valuable minerals, bars of rare metals, crates of silks and wines and foods.

'Why can't we be in on this?' demanded Sua Av, twitching with excitement. 'There's no fun to lying off here watching the others.'

'It's Lann's orders,' reminded Joan Thorn. 'And we Planeteers agreed to take his orders when we were in space.'

Thorn looked sunward, and frowned. 'Why the devil haven't those tankers run for it? The fools are blundering right on.'

The forty tubby tankers that had been laboriously trailing the freighters in space were coming stupidly on the scene of the hold-up, as though unable to realize what was happening. They were now quite close.

Thorn's brain suddenly sounded an alarm, as she stared at the oncoming tankers. Her eyes, trained by long naval experience, saw something queer about the lines of those dumpy ships, something—

She leaped to the audio. 'Lann, those tankers are disguised naval cruisers!' she yelled. 'They're—'

Her warning was too late. At the very moment Thorn shouted, the forty 'tankers'were unmasking.

Their bulging sides suddenly fell away. Those sides had been only a skin of thin metal plates. Their disappearance exposed the ships, not as tankers, but as sleek, grim-lined naval cruisers with batteries of heavy atomguns all along their sides, and with the four interlaced circles of the League of Cold Worlds on their bows.

Instantly the unmasked League cruisers shot forward. Their rocket-tubes burst fire, and from their batteries hailed a storm of deadly shells that burst in blinding lightning-flares among the startled pirate ships.

* * * *

The trap had been perfectly sprung. The League cruisers, lagging behind in the guise of slow tankers, had waited until the pirate ships were hooked onto the freighters by grapples and catwalks, their crews engaged in looting. Then they had thrown off their disguise and leaped in on the Companions' ships.

'Cut away!' cried Lann Cain's voice from the audio. 'It's a trap! Cut loose and break for the Zone!'

Thorn saw his silvery cruiser leap forward to engage the rushing League battleships, to try to hold them back while the pirates engaged in looting could cut away from the freighters.

Loyally, old Stilicha Keene's long black cruiser, and four or five others dashed forward with the pirate boy's silver ship. And Thorn's cruiser was one of those that followed him, for Thorn had yelled the order to Sua Av.

Blinding, dazzling flares of bursting atom-shells from the League cruisers seared space around Thorn's ship, Sua Av was following Lann's lead right into the forefront of the formidable League battle-squadron.

'Drive in to cover Lann's ship!' Thorn cried to the Venusian. 'If they get him, everything's ruined for us!'

She yelled into the interphone. 'Let go with all batteries to starboard, Gunda!'

The Cauphul shook to the roar of its straining rocket-tubes and the thudding thunder of its atom-guns going off as Sua Av flung the ship in beside Lann's silvery cruiser.

The very madness of the wild counter-attack of the little handful of pirate ships, as they dashed fiercely at the League cruisers, seemed momentarily to disconcert the latter. Precious moments were gained in which the main body of the pirate fleet was hastily cutting away from the freighters they had grappled.

Thorn was wild with anxiety for Lann Cain. If anything happened to the boy, if the mysterious secret of Erebus died with her—

The League cruisers had not concentrated any fire upon his silver ship yet. They were pouring shells upon the other pirate craft, including Thorn's, but Lann's had escaped fire even though he had his batteries streaming shells forth.

Thorn was thrown from her feet as a salvo of blinding bursts rocked the Cauphul. She heard the scream of escaping air below, the slam of automatic doors as she staggered up.

'They've got Lann's ship!' Sua Av shouted hoarsely. 'Look!'

Thorn's heart plummeted as she saw through the fight. A League cruiser had got its magnetic grapples onto Lann Cain's silver ship, and was drawing it closer. It had grappled his craft by its keel, so that he was unable to use his guns.

'They've got my ship, Companions!' stabbed the pirate boy's voice, clear and unafraid, from the audio. 'You can't save me—break for the Zone while you have the chance!'

'If we don't do as he says,' cried Sua Av tensely, 'we'll be gunned to a wreck. But if we leave her—'

'We can't leave him!' Joan Thorn exclaimed fiercely. 'Our plan for the Alliance depends on him!'
CHAPTER VII

Shadow of the League

JOAN THORN'S ship rocked wildly as another shell struck it. The shells of all atom-guns contained a charge of powdered metal whose atoms had been brought to a critical point of instability. When an electric charge stored in the shell was released, either by impact or a timer, it detonated the unstable atoms into a destroying flare of atomic energy. These deadly shells were fired from guns and pistols by the push of an electroisolenoid built into the barrel.

Red lights flashing on and off in the panel in front of her warned Thorn that already a half dozen compartments of the Cauphul had been holed and had lost their air. Down below, Gunda Welk was still keeping her crew batteries going, pouring shell out on the encircling League cruisers, but at any moment a hit on their rocket-tubes or power-chambers might disable them entirely.

Thorn's mind was crazy with worry for the fate of Lann Cain. The League cruiser that had hooked its magnetic grapples on the keel of his ship was still winching his helpless craft closer. The capture or killing of the pirate boy meant the collapse of her great plan, and the probable ruin of the four inner worlds.

'We've got to free Lann's ship!' she cried to Sua Av over the thudding of guns. 'There's only one way—drive our ship between his and the one that's hooked her—break the grapple-lines!'

Sua Av's green eyes widened startledly inside her glassite helmet. Then the bald Venusian laughed recklessly.

'All right—here goes, Joan! Hold tight!' !

'Cease firing!' Thorn yelled into the interphone to Gunda Welk at the same moment.

Sua Av's fingers smashed down on firing keys. The Cauphul jumped forward in space, a raving torrent of energy streaming from his stern tubes.

The Venusian drove the ship straight toward the two craft ahead, the League cruiser and the Lightning. The half-dozen grapple-lines had been now so far drawn in that there was not enough room for a third ship to pass between the two.

But Sua Av steered the hurtling Cauphul between the two, anyway. Space around them seemed blazing with continuous flares of bursting atom-shells.

Crash! The grinding shock that flung Thorn to the floor of the control-room seemed to her the end of everything. The Cauphul, rushing in between the Lightning and the League cruiser grappling it, sideswiped both ships with stunning force.

Thorn tried, to clutch a stanchion and pull herself up, as the control-room rocked wildly around her. She heard the triumphant shout of the bald Venusian clinging to the controlpanel.

'We're through, Joan! We did it!'

Thorn's ship had crashed in between the other two, forcing its way through and breaking the grapple-lines.

'Blast away, Lann!' yelled Thorn into the audio. 'You're clear now!'

Like a streak of light, the silvery cruiser of the pirate boy shot upward. And with it cometed the battered Cauphul, and old Stilicha Keene's black ship. The other pirate craft that had tried to help Lann counterattack the League cruisers had been riddled to helpless wrecks by the heavy fire of the enemy.

But the main body of the pirate fleet had had time to cut away from their prey during the few minutes of the furious fight below. They were shooting out like startled hawks of space, joining Lann Cain's cruiser and the other two as they sped upward.

'Up to the Zone!' pealed the boy's voice from the audio.

Rising together as they soared through space, the pirate ships streaked upward through the vault. Hot after them raced the League cruisers, which now outnumbered the pirates.

'What in the devil's name's going on?' roared Gunda Welk's voice. 'That crash strained our sides! It looks down here as though the ship will crumple any minute.'

'If we can get into the Zone, we can lose those cruisers,' Sua Av was muttering. 'If he'll just keep going until then!'

Thorn could hear the Cauphul groaning and creaking beneath the fierce thrust of his blazing rocket-tubes. The hull of the ship, weakened by shell-fire and badly strained by the side-swiping collision, threatened to crumple up without notice.

The pirate ships could not match the heavily armed League cruisers in fire-power. But one thing the ships of the Companions of Space did have, and that was speed. They were drawing slowly away from the hotly pursuing cruisers as they rushed upward.

It was a wild yet thrilling scene to Joan Thorn's eyes! The black vault of abysmal space around them tapestried with countless blazing stars, the blinding flares of atom-shells bursting like exploding lightning, the raving flame of proton-fire from pursued and pursuing ships, and the vast, vague cloud of light-flecks of the Zone stretching above.

They were thundering up into the Zone now, Lann Cain's silver ship leading, curving sharply to avoid the meteor-swarm directly above. But the League cruisers were pursuing them into the vast wilderness of debris.

'Scatter!' came the boy's sharp order from the audio. 'We'll rendezvous at Turkoon!'

'That finishes us, Joan,' said Sua Av bitterly. 'We don't know the wave code. We can't navigate this damned jungle.'

But hard on the heels of her words came a quick call from the boy.

'Planeteers! Keep your ship with mine!'

The pirate ships scattered in all directions, like a frightened flock of wild fowl. Darting away through the swarms and planetoids, navigating by means of the coded wave-signals from the projectors on every swarm and asteroid, they melted away.

The League fleet could not hope to pursue all those diverging ships through the wilderness of debris in which they were perfectly at home. But a dozen League cruisers followed purposefully after Lann's silver ship and the Planeteers' crippled craft as they raced away through the Zone in a counter-sunwise direction.

'Damn them, they must have recognized Lann's ship and they're determined to catch him!' Sua Av exclaimed.

Gunda Welk's towering spacesuited figure came thrusting hastily into the control-room.

'Joan, the compartment walls are cracking down there!' exclaimed the Mercurian. 'If they—'

A thunderous explosion from below interrupted her words. Instantly, the Cauphul's acceleration decreased, the roar of its rocket-tubes sharply diminished.

'One power-chamber has exploded!' yelled an engineer's voice from the interphone.

'We're sunk!' the big Mercurian cried.

'No, Lann's coming around!' Joan Thorn exclaimed.

They had been rushing close to the coast of a far-flung swarm, with the pirate boy's silver ship just ahead, the League cruisers a fair distance behind, when the explosion had occurred. Now the silvery Lightning was darting back around to their side.

'I'm standing by to take you on!' Lann cried from the audio-speaker. 'Hurry!'

'Break open the portside door to abandon ship!' Thorn yelled into the interphone. 'Cut the tubes, Sua, and, come on!'

The Planeteers hastened down out of the control-room through the wrecked ship. The motley crew of the Cauphul, all in suits and helmets like the three comrades, had got the round door on the portside open. There was no air now in the whole ship, and its walls and beams were sagging and cracking ominously as it floated on in space under inertia.

Up to the side of the Cauphul drove the Lightning. There was no time to hook on with magnetic grapples or run out catwalks, for the League cruisers were coming up along the edge of the great meteor swarm in hot pursuit. The Lightning's starboard door was open, the silvery ship keeping even with the wreck only a few yards away.

'Jump for it!' Thorn yelled to her crew. 'Hurry!'

Across the gap between ships shot space-suited figures like human projectiles, leaping toward the big open door of the Lightning. Those who missed the door grabbed lines that had been flung out, and were hauled in like floundering fish.

There was a thundering crash of metal as a whole section of the Cauphul's stern collapsed. The wreck sagged drunkenly in space, and the League cruisers were racing closer.

'This is getting a little too hot for even the Planeteers!' laughed Sua Av as she leaped.

Gunda Welk followed, and Joan Thorn jumped last. She felt herself hurtle floatingly across the gap toward the open door of the Lightning, infinity below and above her. Then she hit the edge of the door and a hand grasped her arm and pulled her in.

Instantly the Lightning sprang forward with renewed acceleration as its stern tubes blasted. The door was ground shut.

Thorn and her two comrades climbed to the control-room. When she entered it, a glance showed her that they were now pulling steadily away from their pursuers.

Lann Cain, his slender figure bulky in space-suit and helmet, was leaning beside the Jovian pilot at the firingkeys. He was listening intently to the constant buzzing from the section of the panel that received the navigation wave-signals.

'Turn ninety degrees outward, and fifteen degrees upward, Rimil!' exclaimed the boy. 'That'll take us between swarms where they won't follow for long.'

The Lightning curved sharply, shot between the two vast clouds of dangerous debris.

Looking back through the rear window of the bulging control-room, Thorn saw two of the pursuing League cruisers glow red and fall out of line. They had been meteor-struck. Trying to cut across after their quarry without aid of the wave-code navigation signals, they had blundered into the edge of one swarm.

The other League ships slackened speed, and tried to grope their way ahead. But the Lightning, dashing on at full speed and then changing course abruptly to cut up across a 'family'of whirling, planetoids, soon lost them from sight.

'Off suits. We're safe from them now!' Lann called into the interphone.

Thorn and her two comrades divested themselves with relief of their suits and helmets, as the boy did likewise.

Lann turned toward the Planeteers. The boy's bronze-gold hair was tossed in disorder, his face flushed, his dark blue eyes blazing with excitement. There was something vital and dynamic about him, and there was a throbbing, eager emotion in his eyes as he faced Thorn, impulsively holding out his hand.

'You Planeteers saved me down there!' he exclaimed. 'If you hadn't rammed in between ships and broken those grapple-lines—'

Joan Thorn felt a queer sense of shame as his warm little hand grasped hers. If he knew her real reason for taking such desperate chances to save him, she thought—But it was for four great worlds.

'I'll never forget this, Joan Thorn,' Lann was saying earnestly.

'I'll never forget it, either,' growled Gunda Welk, rubbing a bruised shoulder. 'When we wedged, between the two ships it nearly threw me right through a wall of the gun-deck.'

Sua Av grinned ruefully. 'I'm not so sure I want to be a raid pirate, if this kind of thing happens often.'

'It was a cunning trap set for us Companions by the League navies,' declared Lann. 'They even actually loaded those freighters with rich cargo, knowing we'd have spies watching who would report that, and that we'd make an attack when we heard. And they had those cruisers disguised as tankers, ready to gun us as soon as we were busy looting the freighters.'

His blue eyes flashed. 'But we escaped their trap! We didn't lose more than four of our ships, and we've got a good portion of the freighters' cargoes—the cargoes that were to be the bait of the trap!'

'If old Stilicha Keene watched those freighters and tankers sail from Jupiter why didn't she suspect their game?' Thorn asked his keenly. 'A close look at the tankers would have showed her that they were disguised cruisers.'

Lann looked troubled. 'I can't understand why Stilicha didn't see that.' He added loyally, 'But it can't be any fault of hers. And, anyway, we, got out safely.'

'If that League cruiser that grappled onto you had gunned you, it would have been the end of you,' Joan Thorn told him. 'I can't understand why they didn't when they had you helpless.'

'Neither can I,' Lann confessed. 'They must have wanted to capture me, and take me to be tried and executed as a lesson to the whole system. If so, they overreached themselves!'

He turned to the Jovian pilot, and ordered, 'Straight to Turkoon, now. There's no danger of more pursuit.'

As the Lightning throbbed on through the Zone, homing toward the jungle asteroid like all the other scattered pirate ships, Joan Thorn drew her two comrades unobtrusively back down into the privacy of the narrow corridor below the control-room.

'There was something damned queer about that trap the League set!' Thorn declared. 'Their whole object seemed to be to capture this ship—to capture Lann—and they took good care not to fire once at his craft, lest they kill him.'

Sua Av stared, perplexed. 'But why would the League set such an elaborate trap as that to capture him?'

'Why did we come here to seek out the boy?' Thorn countered meaningly. 'Because he has a secret that we want.'

Gunda Welk started. 'You mean that the League may be after the secret of Erebus, too? That the League may be trying—'

'Trying to get that radite on Erebus, the same as we are?' Thorn finished. She frowned. 'It's possible. Remember, we heard that the League planned some frightful new agent of destruction to use on the Alliance worlds, to beat them into submission after they smash our fleet. Maybe the radite has something to do with that!'

Sua Av's green eyes widened. 'Then it might be a League agent who put that Ear in your pocket yesterday, who is working from inside the pirates as we are and helped plan this trap? But who is it? Brun Abo, or Jen Cheerly, or old Stilicha, maybe?'

'Whichever it is, if a League agent is after the boy's secret, we've got to beat her to it!' burst Gunda. ''But how?'

'He'll never tell me the secret, I'm sure of that, even though he feels grateful to me now,' Thorn said, frowning. 'But he may have written down what his mother told him about Erebus. He may have the secret among his papers.'

Sua Av's ugly face stiffened. 'You mean to search his papers? Joan, it's too dangerous! If these pirates caught you—'

'I've got to take the chance,' Thorn rapped. 'With the League working against us, there's no time to lose now!'
CHAPTER VIII

Out of the Past

'From Mercury to Pluto,

From Saturn back to mars,

We'll fight and sail and blaze our trail in crimson through the stars.

We'll cram our holds with plunder

From every world and moon,

And thunder back on the homeward track

To feast at old Turkoon!'

THAT song that was roaring now from hundreds of, lusty throats had been the traditional song of the space pirates for centuries. Every corner of the Solanr System had shivered at the sound of it at one time or another. It echoed now in a fierce, swinging chant through the night at Turkoon Town,

The pirates and their men were feasting at rude tables and benches around a huge fire of dry fern-logs that blazed in the center of the street. The tables groaned with enormous masses of food, huge haunches of Jovian marsh-steers, rosy canal-fruit from Mars, sticky confections looted from Neptunian ships. And there were platoons of bottles and bulging casks from every world in the system. Strong drink was going down with the food as the Companions celebrated their partially successful foray.

Above the firelit feasters stretched the night sky of the Zone, the most wonderful in the system, a black canopy gaudy with thousands of blazing stars, with the yellow topaz of Saturn and the far green emeralds of Uranus and Neptune blazing high. Comets moved like mysterious, white ghosts through the jungled heavens, and constantly meteors flashed and ran across the black sky-span.

At one of the tables sat Lann Cain, his smooth hair gleaming like dull gold in the firelight, his hand absently patting the neck of the great gray beast crouched beneath her—Ool, the space dog.

Joan Thorn sat beside him, her dark face inscrutable and her black eyes watchful. Sua Av was feasting heartily farther down the table, joking and laughing with the other pirate captains, while Gunda Welk ate in brooding silence.

'They are like children, the Companions,' the boy said to Thorn over the din of voices and clatter of bottles. 'Already they have forgotten that they nearly met death in that trap today, in their rejoicing over the loot we got.'

Thorn shrugged. 'I can't say that I blame them. An outlaw has to take her fun when she can—he never knows whether she'll see the next day or not.'

Lann's blue eyes, dark in the ruddy firelight, studied Thorn's lean face thoughtfully.

'But you Planeteers are not like most outlaws, Joan Thorn,' he said. 'There is something different about you—something purposeful, I don't know what.'

Thorn sensed faint danger, but she smiled as she fingered a goblet of wonderful pink Martian glass.

'The only real purpose we Planeteers have is to hunt excitement, I guess,' she told him. 'We've done a lot of damn fool things, without much reason.'

'Thorn, why do you not stay here with me, with the Companions?' Lann asked, impulsively grasping her hand. His blue eyes eager on hers, he added earnestly, 'I have great plans, and with you Planeteers helping—'

He was interrupted by a sudden uproar in a fierce voice along the table. Thorn jumped up.

Old Stilicha Keene was standing, her rheumy eyes glaring with rage, her thin, bony hands trembling with passion as she faced the obese green Uranian, Jen Cheerly.

'Say that again,' shrilled the old pirate to the Uranian, 'and I'll blow your lying head off your pig's body!'

Jen Cheerly's small eyes glittered with hate as she rose to face the enraged old Martian.

'I do say it again!' squeaked the obese Uranian. 'I say it was your fault that we nearly got trapped by those League cruisers today! You said you spied out the freighters and tankers before they blasted from Jupiter. If you did, you would have been sure to see those tankers were disguised battle-cruisers. So you didn't do it. Or you knew about the trap, and led us right into it!'

Old Stilicha seemed to suffocate with her own passion. Her bony figure was quivering, her wrinkled face livid.

'You're accusing me of treachery!' she shrilled. 'Me, Stilicha Keene, that's rocketed with the Companions for fifty years! By space, Uranian, no woman can—'

The old pirate's clawlike hand was darting toward the atom-pistol at her belt. Jen Cheerly's fat hand flew toward her own weapon.

But Lann Cain sprang in between them. His eyes were flaming with wrath.

'If you draw, I'll blast you both down'he flared. 'You know our rule—no quarreling among ourselves!'

'But, lad, you heard what she accused me of!' shrilled the old pirate, outraged. 'I tell you, when I saw those tankers as they sailed from Jupiter, they were tankers, nothing else.'

'Isn't it likely that real tankers did sail with the freighters,' Joan Thorn said quietly, 'to deceive any spies who might be watching them take off, and that the tankers were replaced by the disguised battle-cruisers at some secret rendezvous in space?'

Kinne Queen, the handsome middle-aged Earthwoman captain, nodded quickly. 'That must be the explanation.'

'That may be so,' grumbled Jen Cheerly in her squeaky voice, 'but I still say there was something queer about it. We should have got all the cargoes of those freighters, instead of just part of them.'

Stilicha Keene stiffened again, but Lann hastily intervened to calm the old pirate.

'You've forgotten to initiate the Planeteers into the Companions, Stilicha,' he reminded. 'The Eight Goblets!'

The old woman's face slowly cleared, and she turned around to Thorn and Sua Av and Gunda Welk.

'That's right,' she cackled. 'You girls ain't real pirates till you've drunk the Eight Goblets. Eli, Companions?'

A roaring shout of laughter rose from the fierce-faced corsairs and their men gathered at the firelit tables.

'Yes, the Goblets! The Eight Goblets for the Planeteers!'

'What the devil is this?' growled Gunda Welk suspiciously. 'If they try any of their tricks on me—'

Under cover of the roar of laughing voices, Thorn spoke in a rapid, low voice to her two comrades, as they three stood close together behind the tables. They were momentarily unwatched, for all the mirthfully shouting pirates were watching old Stilicha as she supervised the preparations for the coming ceremony.

'I'm going to try my plan of searching Lann's papers tonight!' Thorn told her comrades swiftly. 'If he ever wrote down what his mother told him about Erebus, he'd surely still have it.'

'Joan, it'll be deadly dangerous!' warned Gunda Welk in a taut undertone. 'Remember, someone here knows what we're after.'

'Yes, whoever put that Ear in your Pocket must be watching us all the time,' muttered Sua Av.

'I'll never have a better chance than tonight, with everyone present at the feast,' Thorn whispered. 'You two stick here—it would awake suspicion if all three of us left.'

She stopped whispering abruptly as the roar of laughing voices began to lessen. Old Stilicha had held up a hand to quiet the pirate throng.

'Planeteers,' she shrilled to the three comrades, 'you've got a great name in the system, and you showed today you deserve it, for you saved our Lann from that trap when no one else could have done it. We're proud and glad to welcome you three among us. Eh, Companions?'

'Yes!' roared back the pirate feasters with one voice. Lann was sitting again, smiling at Thorn's puzzled face.

'But before you can really be of the Companions,' the old pirate continued in her shrill, cracked voice, you've got to drink the Eight Goblets, in proper order-to show that as a true Companion you defy the governments and navies of all the eight inhabited worlds!'

Three grinning pirates advanced, each carrying a tray on which rested eight small glass goblets filled with various colored liquors.

Sua Av's green eyes widened. 'Are we expected to—'

Stilicha Keene cackled. 'Yes, lasses. You're expected to drink defiance to the eight worlds as we call them off.'

Thorn and her two comrades took the little goblets first handed them. They were brimming with colorless rock-liquor, the fiery distillate that is the favorite drink of Mercury.

Stilicha, grinning, raised her bony hand. And from the firelit feasters crashed a mirthful shout.

'Mercury''

The Planeteers tossed off the burning liquor. It seared Thorn's throat, but Gunda Welk smacked her lips.

'Venus!' crashed the shout an instant later.

Down went the little goblets of heady black Venusian swamp-grape wine. And the pirate horde, without giving the Planeteers time to catch breath, called out planet after planet.

A goblet of tingling brown Earth whisky; another of suave, smooth desert-flower cordial from Mars; and a bumper of raw, potent marsh-apple brandy from Jupiter followed each other.

Thorn gasped for air, but neither she nor her comrades hesitated. A goblet of musty-tasting wine from the fungus-fruits of Saturn; another of sour, strong Uranian beer; and finally a last goblet of sweet, cloying Neptunian sacra liqueur.

Thorn's head was spinning as she smashed the last of the eight goblets on the ground. Sua Av was staggering, and even Gunda Welk looked unsteady. Old Stilicha slapped Thorn's back.

'You're true Companions of Space now, Planeteers,' cackled the old pirate, and approving roars went up from the crowd.

Every pirate there knew it was the Planeteers who had saved their idolized boy leader in the fight that day. The heartiness of their lusty welcome was unmistakable.

Thorn fought to keep the liquor from overcoming her, as she went back to her seat beside Lann. Her senses were hazed—he was only dimly aware that now wild music was thrumming from stringed instruments somewhere, and that two white-limbed Venusian girls were swaying in a languorous dance near the blazing fire.

Gradually, Thorn felt her senses clear. But she took care to appear still fogged. Now was the time for her attempt!

'I need some air after the Eight Goblets,' she told Lann, keeping her voice thick. 'I'm going for a walk.'

To her discomfiture, Lann rose from his place and took her arm. 'I'll walk with you, Joan Thorn,' he smiled.

Thorn could not reject him, though inwardly she chafed. They moved away from the firelit feast, the space dog Ool padding silently beside the boy. None of the crowd seemed to notice them leaving, for now a lithe red Martian boy was twisting in a furious desert dance, to the roaring applause of the Companions.

The roar of shouts and laughter and crashing glass behind them faded away as they walked a little down the dark, silent and dusty street of Turkoon Town. The blazing sky above them seemed alive with the long, shining trails of flashing meteors.

Thorn looked down at the boy's gold head. His starlit white face seemed softer now, with a queer yearning in it as he gazed along the dark street. It all seemed strangely dreamlike to the Earthwoman—he and the pirate boy and the green-eyed, padding space dog walking together under the meteor-blazoned night sky.

Lann Cain looked up at her and asked the question that he had already voiced earlier that evening.

'Why don't you Planeteers stay here with us,' Joan Thorn? With you to help, my plans could—'

'Your plans?' she repeated, interrupting. 'What do you mean, Lann?'

He stopped and looked up at her. 'Do you think that being leader of the pirates is all I want? No, that is only a means to an end. I have a dream, the same dream my mother had—a dream of making the Zone a place of orderly life and happy cities, instead of just a wild, lawless jungle.'

His words came with an eager rush. 'There are hundreds of asteroids in the Zone that are habitable, or could be made habitable. A whole new world, that could be independent and self-sufficient, and could be a refuge for oppressed people from all parts of the system, people fleeing from tyranny and injustice.'

Lann's voice throbbed with earnestness. 'My mother worked with that dream in mind, organized the scattered bands of pirates and made them temper their bloodthirsty ways. I've worked toward that goal, too. And now, when the League of Colorsis about to attack the Inner Alliance, the chance is, coming to make that dream come true. For with interplanetary war going on, we could organize our new world in' the Zone without interference. And millions of people may want a safe refuge.'

Thorn was impressed by the boy's sincerity and breadth of ambition.

'But, Lann, are all the eight worlds as bad as you seem to think?' she said slowly. 'It's true the four worlds of the League are crushed under the fanatical tyranny of Hasna Trask, their dictator, but what about Earth and the other three inner worlds? They have no tyranny or oppression.'

'They have black injustice that is as bad as tyranny,' answered Lann, his starlit face hardening. 'Look at what they did to my father!'

Thorn saw that she could not change his bitter obsession on that subject. She shook her head.

'Perhaps you're right,' she said. And she added thoughtfully, 'I was wondering why a boy like you was content to live as leader of these wild pirates. But I understand, now that you've told me of your scheme.'

'And you'll help me make that dream come true, Joan Thorn? You Planeteers will, stay?' Lann asked eagerly. He added earnestly, 'You're the first one I've ever told of my plan.'

Thorn was touched. 'I'll have to talk to Sua Av and Gunda Welk before I can promise to stay,' she evaded.

She put her hand to her head, and winced. 'I'm not feeling so good yet, after those Eight Goblets. I think I'll pass up the rest of the feast, and sleep it off.'

'You're not ill?' Lann asked anxiously. 'If you are—'

He was gazing up at her, his dark eyes wide with worry in his starlit face, his hand on her shoulder.

Thorn felt a sudden strong impulse to kiss him. She mastered herself, but she suspected that her feelings had shown in her face, for Lann's expression changed.

'I-I must go back to the feast,' he said, with an unaccustomed shyness. 'If I am not there, they will be quarreling. I will see you in the morning.'

She watched his move back down the dark street toward the firelit feast, the space dog silently accompanying him. Then Thorn turned and walked with assumed unsteadiness to her cabin. But instead of entering the cabin, she slipped. around it, and then hastened along the back of the street toward the Council House.

The long, low metal building was dark and silent. Thorn listened outside a back door, then pushed stealthily inside. The dull red ray of her pocket fluoric flash-lamp lighted her through store-rooms and a kitchen. The place was deserted.

She found Lann's bedroom quickly. It was a bare chamber with a chromaloy cot and breast, and a rack of atom-pistols on the wall. There was a closet, to which Thorn went first. In it hung a dozen suits of the mannish silk jackets and trousers the pirate boy always wore. But in the back of the closet, Thorn found a single gaily-flowered flowing tunic-dress of the type worn by Earth men to social functions.

A queer wave of tenderness swept her as she touched the gay, flowered dress. It was obviously unworn. She could picture Lann taking it secretly from pirate loot, trying it on—

'Hell, am I going soft on the boy?' Joan Thorn muttered to herself. 'I'm wasting time!'

She searched through the big breast. In it she found a flat viridiurn box that was packed with papers.

Thorn's pulses raced as she hastily started scanning the papers by her little ray of dull red light. The first she unfolded was a parchment document, discolored with age. It was a captain's commission in the Earth Navy, dated over forty years before, made out to Martina Cain. Across it was stamped 'CANCELLED.'

Most of the other papers were old letters of Lann's mother. They told nothing. Then Thorn muttered an exclamation as she took out of the box a thick log-book, bound in marsh-calf skin, and filled with the square, precise writing of Martina Cain.

Swiftly Thorn riffled the maids until she found the year she was looking for. With taut eagerness she read the entries.

9-27. (Off Pluto.) It looks as though our raid on the Pluto mining bases with a single ship was too daring. We are being hotly pursued by Neptunian cruisers, and can hear the audio-calls of others.

9-28. Fear net is closing in on us. Space alive with audio calls.

9-29. I, Martina Cain, am sole survivor of my ship's company. We were trapped and attacked at 7:Z2, sun-time, by eight Neptunian cruisers. We got two, but the rest gunned us till our power-chambers exploded and tore our ship apart. I was flung clear, and found one of our lifeboats that also had been thrown clear. Got away in it unnoticed. But am far outside Pluto's orbit, where they had chased us. Dare not go back to Pluto, and have not half enough fuel to take me to Saturn, the next nearest world sunward.

I am taking a desperate chance-am heading outward, toward Erebus. I know no one has ever yet visited that world and returned, but my last chance is to get fuel-ores there, for it is far nearer than Saturn. I greatly fear that I shall never get back to the Zone to see my little boy and my husband again.

Thorn turned to the next entry, her pulse pounding with excitement. But the next entry was dated weeks later.

12-7. Back to the Zone again, thank God, I shall never go beyond Pluto's orbit again.

Thorn desperately ran through the following pages. But there was no mention whatever in them of Erebus.

Why had not Martina Cain made one entry about her visit to Erebus? What was there on that far, dark, mysterious planet that Cain had so carefully kept secret?

''Raise your hands, Joan Thorn!'

Thorn turned, appalled. Lights had flashed on in the little room. Standing in the doorway were two women.

They were Jen Cheerly, the fat Uranian, and the Earthwoman, Kinne Queen. They were covering her with atom-pistols, and their faces were deadly.
CHAPTER IX

Imprisoned Planeteers

THORN rose slowly to her feet, keeping her hands raised. A wrong movement, she knew, would mean instant death. Inwardly she was bitterly reproaching herself for letting herself be surprised.

'So, Planeteer,' said Kinne Queen in a deadly low tone, 'you and your comrades seem to be traitors. Less than an hour after you've been initiated into the Companions, we find you here rifling Lann's secrets.'

'Didn't I tell you, Kinne?' squeaked Jen Cheerly, the fat Uranian's little eyes glittering with beady triumph. 'Didn't I tell you this Thorn was up to something when she slipped away from the. feast, and that we ought to follow her?'

'Take her atom-pistol, Jen,' ordered Kinne Queen without removing her eyes from Thorn. 'Then go and get Lann and the others-and make sure you get the other two Planeteers!'

Jen Cheerly lifted the weapon from Thorn's belt, and then the obese Uranian waddled hastily out of the room. Thorn stood, her hands still raised, facing the other Earthwoman.

Kinne King's middle-aged, handsome face was dark with loathing, and there was a deadly expression in her brooding eyes as she watched the Planeteer.

'King, listen to me!' Joan Thorn said desperately. 'You're an Earthwoman, and I—'

'Be silent!' Kinne Queen hissed, her eyes narrowing to pinpoints. 'I'll blast you where you stand, traitor.'

In heavy silence, Thorn waited. She knew there was not the slightest chance for her to make a break under the muzzle of the other's weapon. To do so would be merely to commit suicide without gaining anything.

Presently there was a rapid tramp of many feet, an excited babel of voices entering the Council House. Into the lighted rooms came Lann Cain, and with him were old Stilicha, Brun Abe, the Jovian captain, and the waddling, gloating green-faced Uranian, Jen Cheerly.

With them came four pirates who held atom-pistols against the backs of Gunda Welk and Sua Av. Gunda's clothing was torn, her temple bleeding from a wound, her cold blue eyes like icy flames. Sua Av's ugly face was taut and watchful.

'They'd never have got us, Joan,' rumbled the big Mercurian as they entered, 'if they hadn't jumped us from behind.'

'It's all my fault,' Thorn said bitterly.

Lann Cain was looking at Thorn. The boy's face was white and stunned, his blue eyes wide and unbelieving. Then as his gaze swung from Thorn's face to the rifled papers on the floor, his expression changed to one of flaming wrath.

'It's true, then,' he whispered throbbingly to Thorn. 'You are a traitor to the Companions,, a paltry thief trying to steal my secrets. And I know. what you were after!' he flared. 'The secret of Erebus. Because I wouldn't tell it to you, you slipped in here, trying to steal it.'

'Lann, listen—' Thorn began with desperate earnestness.

Lann cut her off with a stinging slap across the face. The space dog Ool jumped forward, great eyes blazing.

'All the time you were listening to my plans, pretending sympathy, you were only thinking of how you could get that secret from me!' flamed Lann. 'I wouldn't tell it to you, because I didn't want you or anybody else to go to that terrible world. I almost wish now that I'd told you, that I'd let you go blundering out to Erebus to meet the horrible fate you'd meet there!'

'What are we waiting for? Why don't we blast these dogs down now?' demanded Brun Abo, the scarred-faced Jovian.

A fierce growl of approval of the suggestion went up from the other pirate captains. Even old Stilicha Keene was looking at Thorn and her two comrades with accusation in her face.

'Boy, I never thought you Planeteers would do a thing like this,' said the old pirate dismally.

Thorn was thinking with desperate rapidity. Should she tell Lann the truth, that they Planeteers were, agents of Earth who only sought the Erebus secret to get the radite that would save the Alliance?

She saw that it would gain nothing to tell. It would make no difference to the boy, who was so bitter against Earth he would do nothing to help that world. And it would give away the great secret that the Alliance had a weapon with which it might be able to resist the League attack.

'Lann, listen to me,' Thorn said rapidly. 'I'm not denying that we Planeteers came here seeking the secret of Erebus. We have a vital reason for wanting it, and when you wouldn't tell it, I had to try to steal it. I admit all that.

'But I want to warn you that there's someone else here, someone right here in this room now, if I'm right, who means to get that secret and use it to take millions of lives. You can save all those lives by giving us the secret and letting us go!'

'You pile one lie on another!' blazed Lann. 'You try to cover your own guilt by accusing innocent women!'

'Let's take them out and blast them down now!' cried Brun Abo,

'It's the penalty for treachery among the Companions,' old Stilicha said miserably. 'I guess we got to do it.'

Lann Cain paled a little. He shook his head.

'No, we'll not kill them now,' he said. 'Put them in the brig until morning.'

'And why shouldn't we kill them now?' demanded Brun Abo of him. 'Is it possible you've a tenderness for this Thorn?'

The boy turned on the Jovian, as though stung,

'I've only hate for such treacherous liars!' he flared. 'But we're going to execute them, not murder them. In the morning is soon enough.'

Surprisingly, Jen Cheerly supported him.

'Lann's right,' the Uranian squeaked and the boy glanced gratefully at her.

Thorn tried to speak again, but Brun Abo snarled an order, and the four pirates covering the Planeteers forced the three comrades to march out of the Council House into the night.

The brig, as the pirates called their prison, was a small, square, metal structure behind the main street of Turkoon Town. It had but one room, into whose dark interior they were rudely thrust. The heavy metal door slammed, and the wave-lock clicked.

'Make the best of your time till morning, Planeteers,' rasped Brun Abo as she and her women left.

'Joan, they didn't leave any guards outside,' said Sua Av quickly in the darkness. 'Maybe we can get out.'

They rapidly inspected their prison. But Thorn found that there was no chance whatever of escape from it.

The building was wholly constructed of inertrum, most intractable of metals. The two tiny, barred windows were mere loopholes, and the wave-lock of the door could only be operated by the secret frequencies of its wave-key applied from the outside.

'There's no getting out of here,' grunted Gunda Welk. 'Damn that fat Jen Cheerly! It was she who suspected you were up to something, Joan, and followed you with Kinne King—'

'Either Cheerly or Brun Abo must be the League spy here!' Sua Av declared tensely. 'And it looks to me as though Cheerly is the woman. She only joined the pirates recently, and it was she who tipped them off about the Jovian freighters, the League trap that, nearly succeeded in capturing Lann.'

'What the devil are we going to do?' demanded the big Mercurian. 'We can't break out of this place and we're due to be blasted at dawn.'

'There's only one chance left us,' Thorn rapped. 'When they take us out in the morning, we'll make a break and try to seize Lann. I don't think the pirates would take a chance of hurting his by firing at us then. We might get away with him.'

Gunda Welk's rumbling voice came slowly, 'But the boy might get hurt in the fight, Joan. I thought you were sort of in love with him.'

'Yes,' added Sua Av. 'and it looked to me as though he was beginning to feel the same way about you.'

'Are you two space-struck to say such things?' Thorn demanded fiercely. 'Me, in love with that wild pirate boy?'

Then her voice wavered a little. 'Even if I did love him, I'd have to forget it. For we have to get that secret out of his somehow, if the Alliance is to have a chance. That is bigger and more important than everybody in the entire zone.'

'All right, we'll try it,' rumbled Gunda Welk. 'It looks like our last bet.'

* * * *

Presently Gunda Welk and Sua Av were sleeping on the floor calmly oblivious to whatever fate the dawn might bring.

But Joan Thorn could not sleep. Restlessly, she paced the darkness of the little metal room. In her mind queerly persisted the image of Lann's white, stunned face and accusing eyes. She tried to drive that reproachful face from her thoughts and couldn't.

White mists from the jungles had seeped into Turkoon Town as the night advanced, a cold fog that nipped the bones.

A little wind moaned through the dark, sleeping pirate stronghold, and at intervals came raucous calls of weird life teeming in the fern-forest.

Thorn heard a ship blasting off from the distant field, the thudding thunder of its tubes rapidly dying away. She wondered broodingly if ever she and her two comrades would see space again.

Or was the coming dawn to end forever the career of the Planeteers?

Hours dragged past, and finally a faint dawn light began to illumine the swirling gray mists outside. Suddenly through the fog came a wild, distant cry. It was echoed in a minute by raw shouts in other voices.

Thorn leaped to the little window, but could see nothing through the mists. She heard her comrades scrambling up,

'What's happened?' exclaimed Sua Av, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

'I don't know!' Thorn cried. 'But something's wrong.'

She could hear a babel of raging shouts and calls crackling like flame through Turkoon Town, waking everyone. And women were running through the clearing mists toward the field of ships.

'Stilicha!' yelled Thorn through the window as she glimpsed the old Martian pirate running painfully along the street.

The old woman hesitated, then hobbled quickly over to the window of the little prison. She was buckling on her atom-pistols with trembling hands, and her wrinkled face was wild.

'What's happened?' Thorn demanded tensely.

'Lann—she's been kidnapped!' hissed the old Martian. 'Jen Cheerly did it some time last night.'

'Lann kidnapped?' Thorn yelled wildly, her brown face suddenly haggard. 'How do you know Cheerly did?'

'This morning one of our women found our guards at the ship-field lying murdered!' babbled the raging old woman. 'And one of Cheerly's Uranian crew, too, fatally wounded and left for dead. The Uranian boasted about what Cheerly had done, before she died.

'She said that Cheerly was not any pirate at all, like she pretended, but a League spy—the head of Hasna Trask's secret service! She said Cheerly had planned the trap that nearly captured Lann in the attack on them freighters, and that when that failed, Cheerly had used another plan to kidnap Lann last night. She used you in her plan, Joan Thorn!'

'Cheerly used me to kidnap Lann?' Thorn gasped. 'My God, woman, what are you talking about?'

'Lann's soft on you,' spat old Stilicha. 'He didn't want to see you blasted this morning, and Cheerly knew it. So, according to that dying Uranian, Cheerly told Lann that she'd help you Planeteers escape if he released you. She got Lann to start secretly with her to this brig to let you out, and once she had his alone like that, she and her women grabbed him. They blasted down the field-guards and took his in her ship. She's taking his to Saturn!'

The raging old pirate turned from the window. 'We're going to follow Cheerly's ship. And God help that Uranian when we catch up with her!'

'Stilicha, wait—' Thorn cried wildly, but the old pirate was already hobbling urgently away in the mists.,

A few moments later came the thunderous roar of many ships taking off in the distance. As it died away, Thorn turned to her comrades, her face stricken.

'He was going to help us escape,' she said in a slow, choked voice. 'Even after I'd tried to steal his secret, he was going to help us get away. And because of that, he's in the hands of Hasna Trask's spymaster now!'

Her eyes were wild. 'Think of what Trask and that fat fiend Cheerly will do to his to wring the secret out of him! And all because of me. He'd never have been kidnapped if he hadn't tried to help me!'

'It's not your fault, Joan,' rumbled Gunda Welk, her hard face showing her emotion. 'Cheerly would have found one way or another to get hold of him, even if we'd never come here.'

'And Stilicha and Kinne Queen and all the rest of those pirates are trailing her now,' Sua Av added quickly. 'They'll catch her and bring the boy back all right.'

'I hope to heaven they do,' muttered the big Mercurian. 'For if they fail, and Cheerly gets that boy to Saturn, it means that the League, and not the Alliance, will get that radite from Erebus.'

Thorn started violently. For the moment, in her first wild concern for Lann's safety, she had forgotten the larger issue.

'The last hope of the Alliance is gone if that happens!' she exclaimed. Her fists clenched convulsively. 'And we're locked up here! Isn't there something we can do?'

'Nothing but wait,' answered Gunda heavily.

* * * *

The long hours of that day were a torture infinitely prolonged to Joan Thorn. Pacing the little room, peering tensely from the window, she waited in terrible suspense.

They were not brought any food or water. They had been completely forgotten for the time being in the greater catastrophe. They could see the street of Turkoon Town thronged with excited pirate men and women who had been left behind by the hasty expedition that had thundered forth in chase of Jen Cheerly.

Night came, and more hours dragged past. Then from the distance came the thudding thunder of many ships landing.

'They're back!' Thorn cried tautly. 'But did they rescue Lann?'

'We'll soon know,' muttered Sua Av.

They heard the pirate crews and captains trooping back into town, heard a loud uproar of voices. They waited tensely.

Then a thin, snow-haired figure approached their window in the starlight. It was old Stilicha, Keene, moving slowly.

'Did you bring Lann back?' Thorn cried.

The old woman's cracked voice was unsteady and choking with emotion as, she answered.

'No, we didn't.' Her accents became shrill and wild. 'We were only a few hours behind Cheerly's ship. We could see it in our 'scopes and were sure to overtake her. And then she was joined by a force of fifty League cruisers, as an escort.

'She must have had secret arrangements with them cruisers to be waiting for her, damn her!' Stilicha continued. 'We only had twenty ships. I wanted to keep after them anyway, and fight it out, but Brun Abo and the rest said it would be suicide.'

Stilicha's old voice broke. 'I guess they were right, maybe. Getting ourselves all killed wouldn't have saved Lann. Nothing can save his now—and I don't want to live any more, with the lad gone.'

Tremulous tears were glistening on the old Martian's starlit face. She wiped them with a quivering hand.

Thorn felt a cold, ghastly shock from what she had heard. Blind emotion surged in her. And then the instinct to fight back, to persevere, rose to dominate her.

'Are you going to give up Lann for dead?' she demanded fiercely of the old woman outside. 'Are you just going weep like a man for him, or are you going to do something?'

'What can I do?' Stilicha quavered. 'I'd give my life for the lad, but there's nobody can save his now. She's in Hasna Trask's dungeons on Saturn, by now, and a thousand women couldn't get him out of there.'

'A thousand women. Might not, but three women could!' Thorn flashed fiercely. 'We three—we Planeteers!'

Stilicha stared hopelessly. 'How could even you Planeteers hope to snatch his from the claws of Hasna Trask?'

'We've done things as seemingly impossible as that in the past, haven't we?' Thorn demanded. 'Give us the chance, Stilicha, and we'll get him out of there or die trying!'

The old Martian's eyes widened. 'If anybody could do it, you Planeteers could,' she muttered. She stared doubtfully at Thorn's starlit face. 'But you Planeteers are only after the secret Lann knows, the same as Cheerly.'

'We want that secret, yes,' Thorn said tensely. 'But the only way we can hope to get it is by rescuing Lann! Can't you see that? I'm hoping that if we save him, he'll tell us the secret. But whether he does or not, he'll have been saved, and that's all that you care for!'

And as Stilicha still hesitated, Thorn hissed a grim reminder.

'Think what Cheerly will do to Lann to wring the secret from him! Hasna Trask isn't above torture!'

The old woman's figure quivered at that.

'He'll never tell them,' she muttered, 'even though they kill him. I know Lann.'

Then the old pirate stiffened with decision, and she spoke rapidly to the tensely waiting three.

'I'm going to take the chance you Planeteers can save him. It looks like the only chance the lad has got. I'm going to release you, and we'll head out in my ship for Saturn, before Brun Abo and the rest find out what I've done.'

'Will the crew of your ship follow you?' Thorn asked quickly, her pulses pounding with excitement and hope.

'Hell, they'd sail straight into the sun if I laid the course!' exclaimed the old pirate. Her cracked voice throbbed with eagerness as she continued. 'I'll have to steal the wave key of this brig from the Council House to let you out. And I'll pass a whisper to my crew to gather in the Venture at once.'

The old Martian hastened away through the starlight. Joan Thorn swung round to her comrades.

'It's a fighting chance we've got now, at least!' she exclaimed.

'A pretty slim one,' said Gunda Welk somberly. 'How in hell's name are we to get that boy away from Saturn in the teeth of all the League forces? An army couldn't do it.'

'We'll have to do what an army couldn't, then,' Thorn said grimly. 'There must be some way.'

Presently they glimpsed Stilicha Keene hastening back to their prison. At the old Martian's heels followed a great, gray shape with blazing green eyes, Lann's space dog, Ool.

Stilicha turned the wave-key's beam on the lock. The frequencies actuated the delicate mechanism, and the door opened.

'I had a time stealing the wave-key!' panted the old woman as Thorn and her comrades emerged. 'Brun Abo and the rest are up in the Council House. As soon as they remember you three, they'll be here to have you executed.'

'Why did you bring the space dog?' Gunda asked.

'I didn't bring her—he followed me,' Stilicha said. 'She's been wild since Lann was kidnapped, and I think she senses we're going after him. The critters are a little telepathic, you know.'

'Let her come along. We don't want to arouse any commotion,' Thorn said swiftly. 'Is your crew waiting at the ship?'

'All ready, by now,' the old pirate replied. 'Follow me. We'll have to slip out to the field without being seen.'

She led the Planeteers through the starlight, close against the towering, dark wall of fern-jungle that encircled Turkoon Town. By that circuitous route they reached the field where the massed pirate ships lay glinting under the meteor-blazoned sky, The big space dog padded beside them as they approached the Venture.

They climbed hastily into the long black ship, the animal following them. Stilicha's motley crew were waiting. The doors were already grinding shut as the Planeteers followed the old pirate up to the control-room.

A few moments later, with a thunderous blast of fire, the Venture shot skyward on its desperate mission.
CHAPTER X.

Under Saturn's Rings

A harp-string tenseness gripped the four women in the Venture's control-room as they peered ahead into space.

'So far, so good,' muttered old Stilicha Keene, leaning forward over the bank of firing-keys to gaze with faded eyes. 'We're past the outer League patrols. Now if we can only slip through the inner.'

'We're in their zone now,' Joan Thorn warned tautly. 'See anything in the 'scope, Gunda?'

'Not yet,' the big Mercurian rumbled without taking her eyes from the eyepiece.

The Venture moved steadily on through the void, its rockets cut down to a low, soft purr. The aura-chart was dead. They were running blind so their own aura would not cut the aura of any vigilant patrol cruiser and give them away unnecessarily.

Saturn bulked colossal in the star-gemmed vault ahead, an enormous, yellowish sphere encircled by its immense, sweeping white rings. Even from this distance of a few million miles, the mighty rings looked quite solid. The thin black gap between the two outermost rings, Cassini's division, stood out sharp and clear. It was hard to realize that those great, solid seeming white bands were really vast swarms of tiny satellites circling the planet.

Out beyond even the huge rings marched the planet's nine brilliant moons. Titan was a bright little disk far on the other side of the spinning monster world. Tethys and Rhea shone to the left. And Iapetus, a bright white moon almost as large as Mercury, lay close ahead on the right.

'The Saturnian Navy has a big outer base on Iapetus,' warned Thorn. 'It'll be alive with cruisers now that the navies of all four League planets are concentrated here.'

'I know, but we got to run close to Iapetus if we're going to slip around to the night side of Saturn,' quavered the old Martian pirate.

'Keep at least two million miles out, to clear the auras of the base,' Thorn told her.

The Venture purred on, and the big white moon began to march slowly past on their right. The Planeteers and the old pirate were silent and strained.

Sua Av scratched her head irritably. 'Curse me if I can get used to this wig,' she muttered.

The Venusian's appearance was curiously changed. Her bald pate had been covered by a wig of short, coarse black hair, and her face and skin had been stained pale green. Joan Thorn and Gunda Welk were similarly transformed. Their faces too were now a livid green, and the Mercurian's bristling yellow hair was dyed black.

The people of Saturn, and also of Uranus and Neptune, had acquired their peculiar green complexion during the past thousand years. Their worlds, like all the others in the system, had first been colonized by pioneering Earthwomen in the 21st century, though a few centuries later all those seven colonized worlds had seceded from Earth and become independent planets. In the generations since the first colonization, environment had gradually changed the original Earth stock.

The women of Jupiter had grown into a squat, great-boned race, because of the dragging gravitation of their world. The women of Mars had acquired their red skin because of the predominance of certain metallic elements in their air and food. And similarly, the women of Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, because of a lack of certain elements on their worlds, had acquired their characteristic jaundiced green complexion.

Thorn and her two comrades had realized that disguise was vitally necessary for their daring venture on Saturn. So, during the days that the Venture had hurtled at top speed toward the far ringed world, the Planeteers had worked to make themselves look as much as possible like Saturnians.

Now the Venture was well past, Iapetus, and swinging around to the night side of Saturn in a great parabola.

'Shall we pass under the rings?' asked the old Martian pirate, turning from, the firing-keys.

Thorn nodded. 'It'll keep us in shadow by going under them. Better cling close beneath them'

Saturn filled all space before them now, looming colossal in the firmament with the tilted plane of its outer gigantic ring shadowing above them as their ship shot through it. The ring, more than thirty thousand miles in width, was brightly sunlit on its upper side because of the tilt of its plane, but here beneath it they were in shadow.

Space above them was now roofed as far as the eye could stretch by the white, gleaming, concentric rings. At this close distance they could clearly see the millions of separate satellites that made up the rings, vast circular swarms of tiny planetoids endlessly whirling. Then they were in past the rings, and only six thousand miles from the nighted surface of Saturn.

Stilicha Keene pointed a bony finger toward a misty glow of lights that lay slightly north of the equator.

'Them's the lights of Saturnopolis,' the old pirate declared.

'Run westward,' Joan Thorn ordered. 'The fungus forests are in that direction, and if we three are to pose as slith-hunters, that's where we need to land.'

The first Planeteer watched with emotion as the distant lights of Saturnopolis slid away to the left. Down there in the great capital city of Saturn, somewhere, was Lann Cain. He would likely be imprisoned in the citadel of Hasna Trask, dictator of the League—the big fortress-palace that was the very storm center of the gathering menace threatening the four inner worlds.

Thorn had had the boy in her mind every hour of the long flight out to Saturn. Again and again she had envisioned his eager white face as he had stood with her under the meteor-blazing night sky of Turkoon, telling her his dreams for the future. He had become much more to' her, she realized deeply, than just the pirate boy who held the secret she must obtain.

The lights of Saturnopolis disappeared as the Venture throbbed westward through the night. They glimpsed the lights of another, smaller city far to the north. Then Stilicha sent the ship in a long, descending glide toward the far-stretching black wilderness that now lay beneath.

Air whistled thinly outside the walls. The ship dropped into thin mists. Then through the mists the surface rushed up toward them—a vast and endless forest of grotesque, towering growth, dimly lit by the radiance of three moons and the majestic arc of the ring.

With a prolonged flash from the keel tubes and a soft, bumping jar, the Venture landed. They were in silent darkness.

'Here's the fungus forest you wanted to be landed in,' said Stilicha doubtfully. 'It's a long way from here to Saturnopolis, though.'

'We'll get there,' Thorn told her grimly. 'It would be inviting capture to land too near the capital. By landing here and working our way toward Saturnopolis as slith-hunters, we'll be much less likely to be suspected by the secret police.'

* * * *

Gunda Welk and Sua Av were gathering the atom-guns and other equipment they were to take with them. The Planeteers had already changed into jackets and boots of soft Jovian leather.

'You're sure you understand where you're to wait for us with the Venture?' Thorn asked the old pirate.

Stilicha's white head bobbed. 'Out in the ring, in Cassini's division just at the west limb of the planet-shadow. We'll lie there in the ship till you come. But how will you get out there?'

'If we get Lann out safely,' Thorn clipped, 'we'll steal a small ship somehow and get there.'

They went down to the ship door. It had been opened and the frigid, misty air of Saturn, faintly tainted with ammonia, was pouring into the ship. The motley crew was silently watching as the Planeteers prepared to disembark. And Ool, the big gray space dog, pressed against Thorn's legs and looked up at her with great green eyes that held an almost human expression of anxiety.

'Ool wants to go with you,' said Stilicha. 'She senses you're going after Lann.'

'We daren't take her—it'd arouse too much attention for poor slith-hunters to own such a rare beast. You hold her, Stilicha,' Thorn said.

'Won't you change your mind and let me go along with you?' asked the old Martian pleadingly.

'We've argued that out,' Thorn reminded her. 'One of us four has got to keep the ship waiting at the rendezvous in the ring, and that's the way in which you can best help us.'

Stilicha, holding the space dog's neck, reached up to grip Thorn's hand with bony fingers. Her cracked voice quavered.

'Good luck, boy—and God grant you bring the lad out safely.'

The door ground shut. With a resounding reverberation of blazing keel-tubes, the Venture blasted off.

The Planeteers stood silent in the frigid misty darkness, watching the ship disappear into the sky.

'So we're on our own now,' rumbled Gunda Welk. 'And all we have to do is make our way into Saturnopolis through ten thousand secret police who are watching for spies, break into Hasna Trask's citadel that even Saturnians don't dare go near, and steal away the dictator's most important prisoner right from under her nose. It's almost too easy!'

'I hate to see you grow sarcastic, Gunda,' said Sua Av worriedly. 'It's the mark of a small mind.'

The Venusian dodged, chuckling, as the towering Mercurian aimed a bear-like blow at her.

'Be quiet!' snapped Joan Thorn tautly. 'I hear someone or something.'

The other two Planeteers were instantly silent, all three gripping their heavy atom-guns and listening intently.

The great fungus forest that covered much of Saturn stretched about them in the cold mist, illuminated by the combined ring-light and moonlight. All around the little clearing in which they stood towered the enormous fungi, huge gray growths in the form of bulbous spheres, drawing their sustenance by parasitism from the thick mat of spongy mosses underfoot.

Nothing appeared stirring except a few 'diggers'—furry little beasts with flat, spade-like noses, whose red eyes fearfully watched from tunnel-mouths nearby. The only sounds were the occasional zooming drone of pinkly luminous 'fire bats'winging through the towering fungi, and the long, distant ululation of a pack of 'climbers.'

The sky over the Planeteers' heads was weirdly magnificent—dominated by the colossal arc of the rings that spanned the heavens just south of the zenith like a huge, shining, white rainbow. Out beyond the rings shone the bright shield of Titan, sinking rapidly toward the horizon while Tethys and Rhea rose like twin jewels among the stars.

'I don't hear anything,' muttered Sua Av finally. 'But the noise of the ship landing may have attracted—'

'Joan, look out!' yelled Gunda Welk suddenly. 'A slith!'

One of the smaller bulbous gray fungi of the forest had suddenly begun to move. It came toward them with rocket-speed, a charge almost faster than the eye could follow.

Thorn knew it was slith as she flung her atom-gun to her shoulder. That creature alone could so perfectly mimic the gray fungi by means of its protective coloration,

Thorn glimpsed the charging thing over the sights of her weapon for an instant, a bulbous. oily gray monster ten feet high, its dumpy, shapeless body running with incredible swiftness on thick little legs, the two cold, bright eyes in the front of its faceless body flaming as its white-fanged mouth gaped unbelievably wide.

She fired and missed. Her shell exploded blindingly just behind the charging slith. Gunda fired an instant later, and her atom-shell hit the creature's side. When the flare of the shell vanished, they saw the great gray mass lying unstirring only a dozen feet from them.

'We let that thing catch us napping!' Thorn said harshly. 'We should have remembered this forest is alive with sliths.'

'You're right about that!' yelled Sua Av. 'There's another of them!'

The Venusian's gun fairly leaped to her shoulder. But instead of firing,, she stared stupefiedly.

'Devils of space, look at it! The thing's coming apart!'

The second slith that Sua Av had glimpsed was a hundred yards away among the fungi. It was an even bigger creature than the first, and its treat gray mass was grotesquely different in shape, consisting of a large mass with the cold, bright eyes and wide, lipless mouth, and a smaller attached mass with eyes and mouth also.

The smaller mass was detaching itself from the main body of the creature. Soft gray flesh stretched and snapped. And instead of one slith, there stood two, a large one and a little one. A moment later, both of them charged toward the Planeteers.

The shells of three atom-guns exploded together around the onrushing monsters. Both lay dead when the flares died.

'Am I seeing things or did that creature really divide into two?' demanded the Venusian.

'Planetary zoology must be a closed book to you,' Gunda Welk told her dourly. 'If you knew any, you'd know that the aboriginal animal life of Saturn is asexual, and propagates by fission.'

'Come on, we'll get the teeth out of these carcasses,' Thorn said. 'It's lucky we've killed a few, for slith hunters going back to town without any teeth might arouse suspicion.'

They advanced to the torn dead bodies, feeling with this first locomotion the powerful drag of Saturnian gravitation. Only the fact that that gravitation was partly neutralized by the centrifugal force of the planet's rapid spin made it tolerable to women. The space-trained muscles of the Planeteers quickly began to adjust themselves to the greater load, though they felt very slow and heavy.

With their keen knives of Earth steelite they hacked and slashed at the repulsive bodies of the sliths, digging the huge white fangs out. Those teeth, the hardest and most perdurable organic substance in the system, were in high demand on all worlds for carving into jewelry and for certain industrial processes. The system wide demand for them was responsible for the fact that slith-hunting was a profession on this world.

Dawn was rapidly filtering through the mists about them. The brief five hour night of Saturn was ending.

'Curse these cold fogs!' muttered Sua Av, her teeth chattering as she worked. 'I wouldn't trade one hot, steamy swamp of Venus for all these outer worlds.'

'If you liked that mud-puddle native world of yours so much, why did you leave it?' demanded Gunda.

They had the last of the teeth out, and were putting them into the pouches at their belts, when Thorn suddenly sprang to her feet, gripping her heavy atom-gun.

'Stand by, girls, and don't show any excitement,' she said in a low, rapid voice.

Through the chill, dawn-lit mists of the fungus forest toward the three comrades were coming a dozen green-faced Saturnians, all heavily armed.
CHAPTER XI

Secret Police

JOAN THORN perceived that the approaching Saturnians were slith-hunters. They were a rough-looking crew, wearing stained leather and carrying heavy atom-guns. In their lead was a hulking woman of middle age who hailed the Planeteers in a bull voice.

'What luck, friends?' she called jovially. 'I see you've got a few sliths, at least.'

'A few is right,' Joan Thorn answered ruefully. 'We've been roaming the fungi for days, and these are the first teeth we've got.'

Thorn was careful to speak with the heavy Saturnian accent. The language of all the system's peoples is the same, since all are descended from the original colonizing Earth stock. But each world has developed its characteristic accent.

Sua Av and Gunda Welk had risen to their feet. They stood, casually wiping the gray blood of the slain sliths from their leather jackets as the Saturnians came up.

'I'm Kribe,' announced the hulking leader of the newcomers in her bull voice. 'I thought I knew all the hunters in these parts, but you lasses are new.'

Thorn nodded. 'We came down here from Karies, figuring the hunting might be better here. Instead, it's worse.'

Kribe nodded her big head in emphatic agreement. 'Aye, it's getting so a hunter can't make a living in these parts,' she boomed. 'Too near Saturnopolis, I guess.'

She slapped a bulging pouch at her belt. 'Anyway, we've made a fair haul of teeth and we're on our way back to Saturnopolis. Wanta lift in our rocket-plane?'

Joan Thorn's pulses leaped at the offer. Here was a quick way to get into the Saturnian capital in company that would nullify, suspicion. But she frowned doubtfully, and looked questioningly at the other two Planeteers beside her.

'What about it?' she asked them. 'Shall we pull out of these forests with what few teeth we have?'

'I say yes,' growled Gunda Welk disgustedly, in Saturnian accents. 'This section isn't as good hunting as where we came from.'

Sua Av nodded her agreement. 'I want to see a few lights and get a few drinks, after two weeks like we've had.'

'Ho, ho!' guffawed the hulking Kribe. 'Don't be so down-hearted about your bad luck, lasses. It'll change soon, sure.'

The disguised Planeteers trudged through the towering fungi with their new-found friends. Thorn and her two comrades had to exert all their strength to keep from showing the dragging, leaden effect of the Saturnian gravitation upon them.

The wan, sickly day of Saturn had come. The little, far-off disk of the sun was rising rapidly to cast its thin, feeble rays upon the looming gray fungi and spongy gray mosses. Across the dusky sky, the incredible arc of the rings soared stupendously. The usual cold morning rain was dripping from the mists by the time they reached the rocket-plane.

Kribe's vehicle proved an ancient, battered one whose glassite windows were cracked and whose inertrum power-chamber had been strained, and crudely reinforced with chromaloy bands.

As they piled into the tubular body, Thorn hoped fervently that that power-chamber would not choose to let go at this particular time.

Kribe started the antique machine, and it lurched crazily up from the fungus forest into the rainy mists. The Saturnian turned to Thorn with a large, ostentatious air.

'I suppose you're wondering where a slith-hunter got money enough to buy a fine rocket-plane like this,' she boomed to Thorn over the irregular roar of defective tubes. 'The fact is that me and my girls here own it together.'

'It's a fine machine,' Thorn said admiringly. 'I always hoped to own one. But times are hard for a hunter.'

'Aye, and getting harder,' growled the hulking Saturnian. 'Since this war-scare cut off all trade with the inner worlds, the price of teeth has gone down almost to nothing. When the war really starts, our market will be gone altogether.'

A youthful Saturnian behind them spoke up, her face flushed with patriotic ardor.

'You forget, Kribe, that once we have conquered the Inner Alliance and have access to the rich resources of those worlds, we'll all be prosperous. The Chairwoman has said so, hasn't she? And the Chairwoman is always right.'

'Oh, sure, the Chairwoman is always right,' hastily boomed Kribe, with a doubtful glance at the Planeteers.

It was the slogan of the four League worlds, Thorn knew, the formula that Hasna Trask, the dictator, had impressed almost hypnotically upon her followers. Everyone in the rocketplane, to show her patriotism, hastened to repeat it.

'The Chairwoman is always right,' they chorused together, the Planeteers joining in.

Sua Av choked over a sneeze that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle, and Thorn shot the disguised Venusian a furious glance.

Thorn guessed after a little while that they were approaching Saturnopolis. The city was not yet visible through the misty rain, but below them now lay vast cultivated groves of the queer fungus-fruits developed on this world. Many workers could be seen down there, toiling and plodding through the cold, dripping rain.

Saturnopolis came into sight, low on the distant horizon ahead. Underneath the dusky daylight sky, framed by the colossal shining arch of the rings, the metropolis showed as a great mass of low black structures. A square, terraced black fortress rose near the center of the city, vague and distant in the mists.

Joan Thorn's hands clenched as she glimpsed, miles north of the capital, the huge expanse of an enormous spaceport. She could make out rows of hundreds on hundreds of battle cruisers parked there, and others landing or taking off. That hive of swarming activity, she knew, was the main base at which most of the ships of the League navies were gathering for the coming attack on the Alliance.

Kribe had followed Thorn's intent gaze. The booming voice of the hunter startled the disguised young Earthwoman.

'They say any rocket-plane that flies within five miles of that spaceport is gunned down,' Kribe declared. 'I always give the place a wide berth.'

Thorn nodded. For the moment, as she stared at the gathering armada that was intended to carry conquest and destruction to the inner worlds, she could not trust herself to speak.

'Here we are,' boomed Kribe a few minutes later. She added proudly, 'It didn't take long in this machine, did it?'

Their rocket-plane was gliding down over the flat, black roofs of the city. They poised in the rainy mist, edged into a descent-level, and presently came down on a parking-roof.

Kribe turned genially to Thorn and her comrades as the party of slith hunters emerged from the battered machine.

'You three lasses come along with us to Mother Bombey's place,' she boomed. 'It's our favorite drinking spot here.'

'Sorry, we can't,' Thorn told her. 'We're out of money, and these few teeth we have won't bring more than enough to pay our way back to Karies.'

'Who said you would need money?' demanded Kribe indignantly. 'I'm paying for everything, lasses. I know what it is to come back from a hard trip with only a handful of teeth.'

Thorn thought rapidly. She had a plan for seeking Lann, but could not try it until night came. The Planeteers would be safer if they stayed off the streets in the meantime.

'All right, we're your women if you're paying,' she told Kribe with a grin, as they descended to the street.

Saturnopolis looked a dreary place in the sickly daylight beneath the falling rain. The cold mists that fogged its streets were bone-chilling. Through the streets roared rocketcars, and the pedestrian-walks were crowded with the Saturnian populace, and with hordes of officers and women of the four League navies. The four circle emblem of the League was showing everywhere, and it was clearly evident that Hasna Trask had whipped the people to war-fever.

Far away, across the city, there rose from the ruck of low, black cement buildings the huge, terraced square pile that dominated everything. It had been built two centuries before, as the seat of the Saturnian government. Now, Thorn knew, it was the guarded citadel in which the ruthless dictator of the League of Cold Worlds lived and worked and wove her plans of conquest.

Sua Av and Gunda Welk pressed close beside Thorn as the noisy hunters pushed through the crowded streets.

The Mercurian, glancing at the distant, frowning pile, spoke guardedly in deep undertones.

'The boy will be in that fortress, Joan. And I still don't see how we can, hope even to get in there.'

'We'll get in,' Thorn muttered with grim determination. 'I've been here before, and I have a plan.'

'It'll have to be damned good to get us past the net of secret police around that place,' whispered Gunda. Thorn's eyes clung with fierce intensity to the looming, mist-vague fortress. Somewhere behind those forbidding walls was the pirate boy who was the focus of all her thoughts. What tortures were Hasna Trask and her fat spymaster using upon his to make his reveal the secret of Erebus?

'Here we are!' boomed Kribe, stopping in a dingy cross-street. She pushed through a door, the others following.

Thorn perceived that Mother Bornbey's was a shabby rendezvous, with a drinking-counter, tables, and a few 'happiness vibration'booths. Krypton lamps lit the place, a few 'glowers'dispelled the chill, and it was more than crowded with rough slith hunters.

'Welcome, Kribe!' roared a dozen voices. 'What luck this time?'

'Fair, girls, fair,' answered the hulking hunter complacently. She turned. 'Meet some lasses from up in Karies.'

She pointed to the disguised Planeteers, introducing them to the crowd by the false names that Thorn had given her.

A hard-faced, ample-figured old Saturnian hag reached over the drinking-counter with an outstretched hand.

'Pass over the guns, Kribe,' he, ordered harshly.

'This is Mother Bombey,' Kribe told Thorn with a grin. 'He makes us check our guns when we come in, so that our little arguments won't wreck the place.'

Thorn made no objection to handing over the heavy atom-guns, for she and Sua Av and Gunda Welk retained their atom pistols inside their jackets.

'Drinks or vibrations for everybody!' ordered Kribe, slapping down a platinum coin with a lordly gesture.

Thorn ordered fungus wine, which she knew was the Saturnian favorite. Sua Av and Gunda Welk followed her lead.

'Here's better times and plenty teeth for every hunter!' proposed Kribe, quaffing the pale liquor.

Joan Thorn could not help liking the hulking hunter. She sensed that here was a representative of the real population of the League worlds, hardworking, fundamentally decent people all, when not whipped up to war fever by an ambitious dictator's inflammatory lies.

* * * *

Two hours went past in the crowded, noisy place. Thorn had been forced to swallow more of the musty, powerful fungus wine than she wanted, and she was glad when night fell outside, for Kribe was a little drunk and was giving her a candid opinion of the political situation. And a thin faced Saturnian nearly seemed to be listening.

'The Chairwoman keeps saying we've got to arm to the teeth and take territory from the inner worlds because we're poor,' Kribe declared. 'But it seems to me we're poor because we spend everything on this big fleet of battle-cruisers we've built.'

'Shut up, Kribe;'Thorn warned anxiously. 'That kind of talk will get you into trouble.'

Kribe winked at her. 'It's all right, lass. I know you feel the same way. I saw your partner choke off a laugh on our way here, when we said, 'The Chairwoman is always right.''

Thorn knew the peril of such talk, and determined the time had come for the Planeteers to get started, since it was already full night outside. Sua Av and Gunda rose quickly at her nod.

'We've got to be on our way, Kribe,' Thorn told the big hunter. 'Thanks a lot for what you've done for us.'

She and her two comrades started for the door. But the thin-faced Saturnian she had noticed barred their way.

'Stand where you are!' snapped this individual. 'You three and that hunter are under arrest—authority of the SP.'

As she spoke, the thin-faced Saturnian turned back her jacket to show a viridiurn badge with the dreaded emblem.

'Secret police!' gasped Kribe, her face livid.

The whole place was frozen with terror, every woman staring silently, for throughout the four worlds of the League, the secret police of Hasna Trask was a name to inspire fright.

The SP woman was drawing a pocketaudio from her jacket. So sure was she of the power of her organization's name that she had not troubled to draw a weapon.

'You'll get a year in the mines of Pluto for your subversive talk,' she told Thorn and the others with thin-lipped satisfaction. Then she spoke into the little audio. 'Forty-three-twelve calling headquarters. Send—' Thorn's fist crashed on her jaw, at that moment. The SP woman went down in a crumpled heap, and a cry of fear and horror went up from the crowd in the place.

'Come on, Kribe!' yelled Thorn, grabbing the dazed hunter's arm. She rushed out into the street, Sua Av and the Mercurian at her heels.

The four of them plunged down the dark, dingy little thoroughfare, hearing an excited roar of voices from behind. The streets were far less crowded now, and the mists had cleared a little with the stopping of the rain. The stupendous bow of the rings blazed white overhead, and Titan was rising.

'Good God, we're all in for it now!' gasped Kribe as they stopped a few blocks away. 'You hit an SP woman!'

'We'll take care of ourselves,' Thorn rapped. 'You'd better get back out into your fungus forests and stay there till this blows over.'

Kribe grasped at the suggestion eagerly. She gripped Thorn's hand a moment in her huge paw.

'Thanks for pulling me out of there, lass,' she said fervently, and then hastened away.

Thorn started with her two comrades in a run through the darker cross-streets, heading toward the huge pile of the distant citadel that frowned black against the stars.

'This is fine. This makes things perfect!' Gunda Welk was growling as they ran. 'Now we've got all the secret police in Saturnopolis looking for us. That's all we needed.'

'Shut up and keep running,' Thorn panted. 'We've got to get into the citadel before the SP net picks us up.'

'Get into the citadel?' cried the Mercurian. 'Are you still crazy enough to think we can?'

'You talk too much, Gunda,' laughed Sua Av breathlessly. 'Save your wind-you'll need it.'

They were all gasping from the strain of their efforts against the greater gravitation when Joan Thorn halted at the corner of two dark streets of warehouses, a mile from the citadel.

Thorn looked swiftly around to make sure they were unobserved, then stooped and tugged at something in the cement paving. It was a chromaloy metal plate that came loose to reveal a dark, yawning cavity below.

'Quick, down with you!' she ordered.

Bewilderedly, the Venusian and Mercurian dropped down through the aperture. Thorn followed, quickly replacing the plate above them.

They were in dank, absolute darkness, bitterly cold. But Thorn got out her fluoric flash-lamp and its little red beam showed they stood in a big cement tube at whose bottom ran a stream of icy water.

'This is one of the city's drains,' Thorn said rapidly. 'They have to have a whole network of them, to run off the water from these perpetual rains. I learned about them when I first visited Saturn with an official Earth mission, years ago before Hasna Trask came to power.

'There are drains beneath the citadel that open out into these main ones,' Thorn continued tautly. 'That's our way into the palace!'

'Up the drains?' Sua Av said startledly. 'Why, I never thought of any way as simple as that.'

It's too simple,' rasped Gunda Welk. 'Do you think these people are so dumb that they won't have planted some kind of death-trap to keep intruders from entering the citadel thus?'

Thorn's jaw hardened. 'We'll have to take that chance. Lann's in there, and this is our only way in to him.'

She started along the great drain, the red beam lighting their way. The cold, dank air and the icy water they splashed through were freezing. Shadowy things scuttled away ahead of the Planeteers, as they pushed on through the gloomy tunnels toward the guarded stronghold of the dictator.
CHAPTER XII

Citadel of Fear

JOAN THORN paused. They had been following the huge drain for half an hour, and had now reached a point where a smaller drain-tube opened into it from the right.

'This must be one of the citadel drains,' Thorn muttered, flashing her red beam up it. 'Come on, we'll soon find out.'

'We'd better not stay down in this maze of pipes too long,' warned Sua Av. 'The rains will start again when dawn comes, and these tubes will be full of rushing water.'

Joan Thorn was clambering into the smaller side drain. It was so small that she had to go forward in it on hands and knees. It sloped very gently upward, and its floor was damp.

She led the way, the little red beam of her fluoric lamp lighting her forward. Sua Av followed her closely, and the big Mercurian brought up the rear.

Thorn guessed that by now they must be passing under the wall of the great fortress. Her hopes were running high. So far, they had met no barrier.

Then suddenly, Thorn met the barrier. And she almost died before she realized it.

The little tubular fluoric lamp she held outstretched in front of her suddenly flared red hot, its chromaloy case starting instantly to melt. Thorn recoiled with a smothered exclamation of pain and surprise, dropping the redhot thing. They were plunged into absolute darkness,

'What is it?' exclaimed Sua Av anxiously.

'I don't know. Something ahead melted my lamp before I could draw back,' Thorn answered, her voice wiretaut in the darkness. 'Pass me your lamp, Sua. We've run into some devilish trap!'

The Venusian passed her lamp forward. Thorn, without venturing any farther forward, snicked on the beam.

The red ray quivered up the gently sloping black cement tube. Thorn stared tensely. There was nothing ahead—nothing except a row of small holes across the curved floor of the drain, and a similar row of holes in the roof exactly above.

'I can't see anything,' said Sua Av. 'Your lamp must have burned out accidentally.'

'Wait,' said Thorn tensely.

She tore a bit of cloth from her jacket, and cautiously pushed it forward until it was over one of the row of holes. Instantly the cloth burst into flame and vanished in fine ashes.

Joan Thorn felt cold sweat stand out on her brow. She knew now the invisible death she had nearly, blundered into.

'There's a web of heat-beams here across the drain,' she said hoarsely. 'A little trap fixed up by Hasna Trask's guards for anyone who might try to enter the citadel this way.'

The nature of the diabolical trap was clear. Buried somewhere near the cement drain was a generator of heat beams—those 'focused'rays of radiant heat which were produced in a mirrored inertrum chamber by transformation of atomic energy into vibratory force in the proper octaves. Such beams had an effective range of only a few feet, but were deadly within that distance.

'The beams are projected through three holes in the floor and disappear through the holes in the roof of the drain, to be dissipated above,' Thorn said. 'It's a fiendishly clever idea. Anyone crawling up this drain would never see anything until she blundered into those beams that would sear through. and kill her instantly.'

'Hell, we can't pass this until we find some way to shut off these beams!' swore Gunda Welk from behind.

Thorn frowned tensely. 'We can't get at the generator of them,' she muttered. 'That must be located outside the drain. It would take lots of tools and time to dig down to it.'

'Inertrum is proof against high heat,' Sua Av said hopefully. 'If we had some inertrum plugs to stop those holes the beams come up through—'

'That's fine,' rasped Gunda angrily. 'Now all we have to do is to go back out in the city, order a nephew set of inertrum plugs, and come back here with them. The secret police out there wouldn't think of bothering us while we're doing all that.'

'Shut up, Gunda,' Thorn said. 'I've an idea which might work.'

She fumbled in the pouch that was still attached to her belt. Out of it, she drew the gleaming white slith teeth they had taken from the monsters they had slain in the fungus forest. There were a dozen of the teeth, long, conical fangs an inch across at the root.

'These slith teeth might do the trick,' Thorn muttered. 'They're one of the hardest and most perdurable substances in the system, remember—almost as hard as inertrum. If we plugged the heat-beam apertures with these—'

'They couldn't last more than a few seconds before the beams burned them out!' Sua Av exclaimed.

'A few seconds ought to be enough for us to get past,' Thorn retorted. She hesitated, then added, 'The last woman will run the most danger. We'll back down to the main drain, and I'll, take the rear position.'

'You'll not!' Gunda Welk declared. 'Hell's name, do you want to play around in these slimy pipes all night? Go ahead and put the teeth in those holes, and let's got on—if it works,'

'All right,' Thorn said grimly. 'When I give the word, jump after me as fast as you can, and don't knock any of the teeth out of the holes!'

Thorn rapidly prepared for their precarious stratagem. There were six holes around the perimeter of the drain from which the deadly, invisible beams emerged. She took the six most regularly-shaped of her slith-teeth, and laid them in readiness.

Then with the end of her lamp, Thorn swiftly pushed the teeth into place. As each big white tooth was shoved forward, it became a conical plug to close the beam-aperture. By the time the sixth tooth was tamped into place, the first one was already charring and smelling.

'Come on!' Thorn cried, and plunged forward in a scrambling leap through the teeth-plugged circle of holes.

Sua Av followed instantly, the Venusian's wigged head butting into Thorn's back. A moment later, Gunda Welk caromed into the Venusian from behind with battering force.

'Jackyet's on fire!' gasped the Mercurian, beating at her side. A smell of scorched cloth filled the dank air.

There was a frantic squirming in the cramped tunnel as the other two Planeteers tried to help Gunda beat out her smoldering jacket. She and Sua Av soon had it extinguished.

'Are you hurt, Gunda?' Thorn asked anxiously.

'No, just my side scorched a little,' panted the Mercurian. 'One of those teeth burned clear out just as I jumped. It's lucky it was one slith instead of in the middle!'

Thorn glanced back past them. The slith-teeth with which she had plugged the apertures had vanished. Even that super-hard substance had been charred away in a few seconds by the beams.

'Let's get on,' growled the Mercurian in a moment. 'These damned drains aren't exactly a pleasure resort.'

Again Thorn started forward on hands and knees, lighting the way with her red beam. She moved with extreme caution, alert to detect the presence of another invisible, deadly web.

But they met no more such barriers. Presently they reached a place where the drain forked into five smaller tubes.

'Which one?' whispered Sua Av to her.

'We'll each take one, trace it and come back and meet here,' Thorn muttered. 'One of them ought to lead to the dungeons.'

Thorn crawled into the right drain tube. It was so small she had to inch forward by creeping. It slanted upward also.

Blue light finally glimmered ahead. Thorn extinguished her lamp and stealthily crawled on. She came to the end of the drain, which was closed by inertrum bars set in the cement, over her head.

Cautiously she peered upward. The grating over hers was set in the cement paving of a large court surrounded on all sides by the dark, towering mass of the citadel. Krypton lamps cast a blue glow on spaceships parked in the court, three swift-lined small cruisers. Two armed guards paced to and fro beside them.

'Hasna Trask's personal spacecruisers,' Thorn muttered to herself.

She backed down to the fork where the drains diverged. Gunda Welk and Sua Av were just emerging there also.

'The dungeons are up there at the end of that pipe!' Sua Av whispered excitedly, pointing to the second drain.

'Come on, then,' Thorn said swiftly.

She led the way, all three of them crawling up the narrow pipe the Venusian had explored. Its opening, also, was barred by inertrum bars set in the cement.

Thorn peered up through the bars into a short blue-lit corridor, along whose walls were the inertrum doors of cells. Almost all of the cells seemed unoccupied, their doors half-open. No prisoner stayed long in Hasna Trask's dreaded private dungeon!

'It's Trask's dungeon, all right,' Thorn whispered. 'And no guards in sight. Go back down the pipe a little.'

The other two Planeteers obeyed, all three backing down the tube a little way. Thorn drew her pistol, sighted carefully at the grating above, and pulled the trigger.

The little atom-shell exploded in a small, brilliant flare of atomic energy, with a thudding reverberation. The flare burned away a mass of cement at one side of the grating, completely exposing the ends of the imbedded inertrum bars.

Thorn clambered eagerly up to the grating at once. At the same moment she heard a cry of alarm from up in the corridor. Two Saturnian guards came rushing out of one of the cells, dropping a flask of fungus wine they had been secretly drinking, and drawing their atom-pistols. The thud of the atom-shell had roused them.

They saw Thorn's head below the grating and fired at her instantly. Their shells struck the floor in front of the grating and a flare of blinding light and scorching heat hit Thorn's face. She fired her own atom-pistol, triggering quickly. More flares of energy burst brilliantly beside the two Saturnian guards, down the corridor.

The two green-faced soldiers crumpled and lay still, in a scorched and lifeless heap. Thorn waited, her face wild in the pale blue light, gripping her weapon. But the swift thudding of the shells was not followed by any further alarm.

'Those must be the only guards on duty. inside the dungeon,' Thom panted, tearing away the freed inertrum bars with quivering hands.

The Planeteers scrambled hastily up out of the drain into the short single corridor of the dungeon.

'Listen! I hear someone!' Sua Av exclaimed.

Then the other two comrades heard. It was a voice from the farther end of the corridor, a distant, monotonous, strangely metallic voice speaking on and on.

'Erebus—won't think of Erebus—think of anything but Erebus—won't think of Erebus—'

Thorn started wildly. 'Erebus? That must be Lann talking! Come on!'

'It didn't sound like a human voice,' Gunda muttered, as she and the Venusian raced after Thorn.

They leaped over the scorched bodies of the dead Saturnians, and on down the corridor. The voice came from the last cell in the passage. Now they heard it more clearly, and it was not a human voice. It spoke in cold, metallic, inflectionless tones, on and on without stopping.

'I mustn't think of Erebus—mustn't think of the secret! Keep my mind on something else—'

Thorn reached the door of that last cell. She peered through the little grating in the inertrum door. And her brown face froze, her eyes widened wildly, at what she saw.

'Good God, it's Lann!' she whispered hoarsely. 'They've got a psychophone attached to him!'

The cell into which Thorn wildly gazed was a windowless cubicle, lit by a single krypton lamp in the ceiling. Under the uncanny blue glow, in a metal chair to which his arms and legs were tightly strapped, sat Lann Cain. The boy's slender little figure was sagging in his bonds, his eyes were closed, his white face infinitely weary and exhausted. It was not Lann who was speaking, but the complex machine that was attached to his head.

Tiny, needlelike incisions had been made in the base of Lann's skull. From them, two thin black wires ran upward to the mechanism suspended above him, a compact complexity of transformers and vacuum tubes, upon which was mounted an audio-speaker.

The metallic, monotonous voice came from that audio-speaker. It was still speaking steadily on, and everything it said was being taken down upon the moving tape of a recorder whose microphone hung in front of the speaker.

'Think of something else,' the metallic voice came from the speaker as the Planeteers listened. 'Think of the Zone—of Stilicha—of my father—'

'A psychophone!' repeated Sua Av, wide-eyed. 'So that's how Trask is trying to get the secret of Erebus from Lann!'

Thorn too was thunderstruck by the ingenuity of the means being used to secure the boy's secret knowledge.

The psychophone was a mechanism that made thought audible. Once it was connected to a subject's nerve centers, every conscious thought in that subject's brain was translated into mechanical speech by the machine and spoken aloud. That was accomplished by transmitting the tiny electrical neural currents of the subject's thought-impulses into a complex scanner, in which the particular vibration of each thought actuated the nearest word or phrase that expressed that thought, in the phono-recorded vocabulary of the thing.

The machine was the recent and little-known invention of a Venusian psychologist. It was a far-advanced adaptation of the ancient encephalograph, the device used by Earth scientists as far back as the third decade of the twentieth century to record thought as a varying electrical vibration.

Lann Cain was sitting silent, his eyes closed, but every thought that passed through his mind was being remorselessly translated and spoken aloud by the mechanism above his head, and taken down by the recorder so that it could be studied later at leisure. He could not possibly keep from thinking, and whatever he thought, the psychophone spoke forth.

'M-my mother,' the mechanical voice was speaking on as Thorn and her comrades peered incredulously .' Wish my mother were alive. She would get me out of here. She would—'

'Lann!' Thorn whispered tensely into the cell.

The boy opened his eyes. Their blue depths were wells of utter weariness and hopelessness as he stared at Thorn's face through the grating in the door.

His face hardened in bitter hatred as he looked at her. He said nothing, but the psychophone's mechanical voice spoke his thoughts.

'Saturnian—hate all Saturnians, now. Green faces peering at me—trying to make me think of Erebus—'

Thorn, for a moment stunned by his bitter reaction, suddenly understood. She and her comrades the green stain on their faces, were still disguised as Saturnians.

'Lann, it's I, Joan Thorn!' she said hoarsely. 'It's the Planeteers!'

Lann stared unbelievingly. Then as he recognized her features, his tired eyes lit with incredulous joy.

'Joan Thorn?' he whispered. That was all that came from his lips.. But from the psychophone overhead, there sounded his thoughts in that metallic voice.

'Joan Thorn, I love you! I love you!'
CHAPTER XIII

Dictator of Worlds

THE boy's white face flushed crimson, as the machine over him head blared forth his secret thoughts. Then he raised his gold head and looked at Thorn with brave steadiness.

'I would not have told you, Joan Thorn.' he whispered. 'But since the psychophone has spoken it, I must admit it—I do love you.'

Thorn's green-stained face worried, and in the rush of her mingled emotions, it was a moment before she could speak,

'Lann, I love you, too,' she said unsteadily. 'I have, since that night of the feast at Turkoon.'

'You do?' he whispered, incredulous, wondering joy dawning in his eyes. 'You do, Joan Thorn?'

There was a long moment in which Lann's shining blue eyes clung to hers, as she stared through the door-grating. And in that moment, the psychophone attached to the boy was speaking metallically on, stiltedly trying to voice his rush of joyous emotions.

Sua Av stirred restlessly beside Thorn. She and Gunda Welk had listened in silence until now.

'Joan, we'd better not be lingering here,' the Venusian cautioned.

'Yes, this is no place for love talk,' rumbled Gunda. 'God help us if Cheerly catches us here before we get Lann out!'

'Cheerly!' The psychophone spoke the boy's blazing thought as he heard the name. 'I hate that traitor!'

'Lann, what have Cheerly and Hasna Trask done to you?' Thorn exclaimed, her face hardening. 'Have they harmed you.'

'Since they brought me here they've had this attached to me,' Lann said bitterly. 'All these days I've sat here trying not to think of the secret of Erebus that they want. And I've known that sooner or later I'd slip and think of it.'

Each time Lann spoke, the psychophone was metallically speaking also, voicing the thought behind his words.

'They mustn't get that secret!' he cried. 'On the way here I learned by overhearing Cheerly's talk, why they want it. There's a mass of radite on Erebus, and that's what they're after. They plan to use that radite against the Alliance in their coming attack. They intend to make atomic bombs of the radite!'

'Radite bombs?' exclaimed Thorn, her face blanching under its stain. 'Good God, one atom bomb charged with that super-powerful stuff would destroy a whole Metropolis!'

'Then that is the terrible new agent of destruction we heard the League was planning!' hissed Gunda Welk. 'That is why Hasna Trask is delaying her attack on the Alliance until she gets the radite from Erebus!' Lann exclaimed. 'She wants to follow up her expected naval victory by a terrific bombing that will break all the inner world's resistance. That's why I'd rather die then give them the secret of Erebus!'

The boy looked at Joan Thorn through the grating with pleading earnestness in his worn white face.

'Joan, I told you I hated Earth for what it had done to my mother, that its fate didn't concern me. But when I heard what Trask plans to do to Earth and the other Alliance planets, I realized Earth is still my native world, that I couldn't let that happen.

'And it's your native world, too, Joan. Even though you Planeteers are outlaws, you're bound to the inner worlds by blood and birth. Just as I am. We mustn't let Trask's plan succeed!'

Now was the moment to explain. 'Lann, we Planeteers are not really outlaws at all!' Thorn said eagerly. 'We're secret agents of the Alliance, and we're after that radite on Erebus because it can save the Alliance from defeat when the League attacks.'

'Then I'll tell you the secret of Erebus!' the boy cried joyfully. 'If it means saving the Alliance worlds from conquest, as you say—'

'Hush, Lann! Don't think of it now! Wait!'

Sua Av had been searching the bodies of the two slain guards. The Venusian hastened back now to Thorn's side.

'Joan, there's no wave-key on those guards,' she reported anxiously. 'How are we going to get Lann out?'

'We'll have to break through this cell-door somehow!' Thorn exclaimed urgently.

'Break through an inertrum door?' said Gunda Welk incredulously.

A quick examination of the door justified the big Mercurian's doubt. The heavy inertrum of the door would resist even their atom-pistols. And the wave-lock was wholly invulnerable.

'We've got to get him out somehow!' Thorn cried.

'Joan, listen to me,' said Lann quickly. 'You can't get me out. But you Planeteers can get away, by the way you came. I'll tell you the secret of Erebus, the way to land on that world safely, and you three can get the radite.

'But we can't leave you here, Lann!' Thorn cried desperately. 'Just when you and I have found each other—'

'You must!' he declared, his blue eyes bright with purpose. 'What is my safety against that of all the inner Worlds?'

'She's right, Joan,' said Sua Av in a low, strained voice. 'God knows I hate to go and leave his here. But remember, we promised the Earth Chairwoman we'd do anything to get that radite.'

'We've got to do it, yes,' muttered Gunda, her huge fists clenched. 'But we'll come back, and if they've harmed her—'

Joan Thorn faced crucial decision, her mind torn by conflicting emotions. Her heart throbbed with desperate anxiety for Lann. Yet clear before her came the weary face of the Earth Chairwoman, telling her the Alliance's last hope was in the Planeteers.

'We'll do it,' Thorn said hoarsely. She could not say more. She could only stare haggardly into Lann's eyes.

'Then listen to the secret of Erebus that my mother told me, Joan!' the boy cried. 'It's doom, hideous and ghastly doom, to land anywhere on Erebus except—'

'Listen!' Sua Av cried suddenly. 'Someone is coming!'

From beyond the locked door at the end of the short corridor came a sound of voices and approaching footsteps.

'It must be the captain of guards on her inspection!' exclaimed Lann fearfully.

'No time to get back to that drain!' Thorn rapped. 'Quick, into one of these cells! Drag those bodies in, too!'

In an instant, she and the Venusian and Mercurian had seized the scorched bodies of the two dead guards and had dragged them into an empty cell across the corridor from Lann's cell. As they swung shut the door of their hiding place, the door at the end of the corridor opened, and women entered the prison.

Joan Thorn, peering through the grating in the door of the hiding place, stiffened in every muscle as she saw the women. One of them was a tall Saturnian captain of guards. Anothers was an obese, waddling figure with a puffy green face and pig-like little eyes—Jen Cheerly.

But it was the third woman of the group, the one who strode in front, upon whom Thorn's eyes riveted. This woman was a middle-aged Saturnian of tall stature, with a bony, nervous green face and very deep, dark eyes that stared gloomily straight ahead.

'Hasna Trask!' murmured Sua Av in Thorn's ear, her faint whisper surcharged with excitement.

Hasna Trask, self-appointed Leader of the League of Cold Worlds, absolute dictator of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune! Thorn's pulse pounded at sight of that bony, nervous face.

'Why are no guards on duty here as I ordered?' Jink Cheerly was asking the captain of guards in her squeaky voice.

'I did station two here, sir,' replied the officer, worriedly, to the fat spymaster. 'They must have sneaked out for some reason. I'll have them court-martialed for it.'

'I should have put my own, Secret Police here instead of depending on you,' said Cheerly in vicious anger. 'You've failed in your duty, Captain.'

'No woman must fail in her duty now!' declared Hasna Trask in her harsh, high, fanatical voice. 'In this great hour when we approach our fated destiny, every woman in the League worlds must give her all for the tremendous and glorious work that faces us!' Hasna Trask spoke as though she were exhorting a crowd a thousands, her voice incongruously declamatory. Her gloomy eyes flashed with a deep fire, her tall, bony figure rigid.

Joan Thorn felt a chill as she heard. The voice and face of Trask were those of a madman, a woman utterly convinced of the rightness of her actions and the wickedness of her enemies.

The captain hurried ahead to the door of Lann's cell and was turning the invisible beam of a wave-key on its lock. Trask and the fat Uranian spymaster halted and waited.

'Joan, we can gun down Trask from here!' Sua Av whispered excitedly, tensely fingering her atom-pistol.

'No. Killing Trask now wouldn't stop the League, for there are a hundred of her underlings ready to take her place,' Thorn muttered tautly. 'Wait, I have a better plan.'

The door of Lann's cell clicked open. Watching through the grating, the Planeteers saw the dictator stride into the boy's prison-room, followed by Jen Cheerly and the captain.

'-almost morning. Days and nights are so short on Saturn,' the psychophone was speaking forth Lann's thoughts.

Thorn understood. Lann was trying to avoid giving away the presence of the Planeteers, by thinking of other things.

Hasna Trask surveyed the boy bound in the chair, her gloomy eyes meeting his defiant blue ones.

'Are you ready yet to tell us what we want to know, boy?' she demanded harshly.

Lann made no vocal answer. But the psychophone spoke his thoughts.

'I'll never tell them! Never!'

Trask's nervous face twitched violently and she seemed seized by a raging passion. She flung her arms out widely.

'Everything is against me in my great task. Everything!' she cried with theatrical self-pity. 'But I shall persevere and conquer in spite of everything! The system shall see!'

'Perhaps the boy has given away the secret to the psychophone by now, sir,' Jen Cheerly suggested hastily. 'Shall I examine the record?'

Trask nodded curtly. The fat spymaster reached up and touched a switch of the recorder. Instantly from it, began speaking the recorded thoughts of Lann, as spoken by the psychophone in the preceding hours and phonographically recorded on the tape.

Joan Thorn soundlessly opened the door behind which she and her comrades were hidden, and whispered tautly to them,

'Come on, but don't shoot Trask, yet!'

Hasna Trask and Cheerly were so intently listening to the record that they did not see the armed Planeteers appear silently at the open door of the cell. But the captain saw, and uttered a startled cry. Trask and the fat spymaster spun around.

'Hands high!' Joan Thorn rapped, her atom-pistol leveled. 'Quick, or we'll blast you down!'

Stupefiedly, the three women in the cell raised their hands. Hasna Trask's bony face went livid with rage.

'You dare turn weapons upon me!' she choked to the disguised Planeteers. 'Upon me, your Leader!'

But Cheerly's pig eyes suddenly widened as the fat spymaster's gaze searched Thorn's green-stained face.

'These aren't women of ours, sir!' she cried to the dictator. 'I know them—they're the Three Planeteers!'

'The Planeteers!' exclaimed Trask. Her deep eyes blazed. 'The outlaws whose brazen robberies have made us so much trouble in the past, who have stolen so many of our secrets—'

Thorn interrupted in a hard, cold voice. 'Take their guns, Sua Av. Gunda, release Lann. Careful with those nerve connections.'

In a moment the boy was freed, and the Venusian had the weapons of Cheerly and the captain. Trask had been unarmed.

'We're going out of here with this boy,' Thorn told the Saturnians icily. 'We're going to that court nearby where the space-cruisers are parked. You three are going to lead us there, by the shortest and least-used route. If we are challenged by anybody, or if there is any alarm, your leader here will die first.'

The captain gasped with horror at the threat, and Cheerly's pig eyes narrowed. But Trask's bony face was unmoved.

'You cannot kill me,' the dictator told Thorn harshly. 'Destiny has reserved me for a great work.'

'My trigger-finger can change destiny pretty quick, Saturnian!' warned Gunda Welk, her voice throbbing with hate.

Thorn motioned to the door at the end of the corridor.

'Get going, and remember my warning! Lann, keep beside me.'

They started, Hasna Trask and Cheerly and the captain moving with hands upraised, the Planeteers following with weapons leveled. Lann staggered, his limbs numbed by long confinement in his bonds, the back of his head aching. Thorn helped his along tenderly with her free arm.

They passed thus through the door at the end of the corridor, out of the dungeon into the dusky, diverging corridors that ran in a labyrinth here beneath the great citadel. No one was in sight in these passages as they went forward. Thorn's hopes soared.

If they could get away with Lann to where old Stilicha's ship waited out in the rings, they would soon be racing toward Erebus! And with Lann's secret knowledge to help them—

They were passing a dark cross-corridor at this moment. And Sua Av suddenly whirled around to face it.

'Look out—a trap!' she yelled wildly.

'They've got a damper!' shouted Gunda Welk, leveling her atom-pistol swiftly to fire.

Too late! The Mercurian's atom-pistol only clicked futilely. Thorn pulled trigger, but her weapon too was dead.

A score of Saturnian guards had been lying in wait in that shadowy cross-passage! And one of them held a cylindrical damper pointed toward them—an electrical mechanism that generated a short-range beam of vibratory force which damped or neutralized the electric propulsion-currents of any atom-gun's barrel solenoid, rendering it useless. The damper's beam covered the Planeteer's guns.

The Saturnian soldiers poured out of the cross-passage onto the Planeteers. Thorn clubbed her useless gun and tried to get at Hasna Trask, but went down under a smothering mass of green-faced women. She heard Lann scream as she fought fiercely.

The one-sided fight ended. Thorn was jerked to her feet by four Saturnians who gripped her. Sua Av and Lann were similarly held. Gunda Welk lay unconscious on the floor.

'We shall now find out why these Planeteers came here and who they are working for!' Hasna Trask declared.

'But they dared threaten you, sir!' protested the tall captain. 'They deserve instant execution for that crime.'

'The indignity to me is nothing, declared the dictator fanatically. 'I am thinking only of the great cause we all serve.

'You Planeteers are not as cunning as I thought,' Jen Cheerly told Thorn tauntingly, 'or you'd have guessed that there would be a spyplate outside the entrance to the dungeon.'

Thorn's heart sank. So that was how they had been detected—by a hidden spy-plate outside the dungeon entrance, by which a distant officer could keep watch over all who entered or left the prison. The spy-plate watcher had seen them forcing the dictator and the other two ahead of them, and had summoned guards with a damper to nullify the Planeteers' weapons and make sure they had no chance to harm the Leader when they were captured.

Thorn's wild hopes had crashed in utter ruin. She could not face Lann. She felt with bitter self-reproach that she had failed him, and that she had failed the Alliance.
CHAPTER XIV

Under the Psychophones

A METALLIC voice was speaking.

'-distance from the sun to Mercury is thirty-six million miles. To Venus it is sixty-seven million miles—'

The psychophone suspended over Joan Thorn's head droned on in its monotonous metallic voice, speaking her thoughts.

She sat in one of the blue-lit cells, bound by broad leather straps into a chair. Sua Av and Gunda Welk sat nearby, similarly bound. And they too had psychophones attached by thin black wires to tiny incisions in the back of their skulls.

'-distance to Earth is ninety-three million miles. Earth—doomed now and my fault. They'll never get that radite that would—no, don't think of that! Distance to Mars, a hundred and forty-one million miles! To Jupiter—'

Thorn was desperately trying to keep her mind upon abstract things and figures. For two days and nights she and her comrades had sat bound here like this. Time had become meaningless, and it seemed to her that be had sat here thus forever, trying to think of anything except what Hasna Trask wanted to know.

Trask had ordered psychophones attached to the captured Planeteers. For Trask knew now that the Planeteers were secret agents of the Alliance, and that they were after the Erebus radite. The dictator had learned that from Lann's psychophone record, which had transcribed the information when Thorn had told it to his through the door of his cell.

'So that is why the Planeteers have seemed to blunder into so many of our secrets in these last few years!' Trask had exclaimed. 'It wasn't blundering, but deliberate purpose.'

'If they were out to get that radite for the Alliance, that must mean that the Alliance has some plan of using the radite against us!' Jen Cheerly had pointed out shrewdly.

'Why did the Alliance send you to get the radite?' Trask had demanded of the Planeteers.

Thorn and Gunda and Sua Av had remained silent. And the tall, bony dictator had been seized by one of her rages.

'You refuse to tell? Then you shall sit with psychophones attached to you until your thoughts disclose why the Alliance wants that radite!

'See to it, Cheerly,' the dictator had ordered the fat spymaster. 'And put the boy back under the psychophone again and keep his there until he yields the secret of Erebus.'

Thorn had seen Lann dragged back into his cell, before she and her comrades were placed in another cell. The tiny incisions in their skulls had been rapidly made, and the little electrodes of three psychophones inserted. And they had sat here ever since, the remorseless mechanisms speaking and recording all their conscious thoughts.

Joan Thorn's mind hovered on the brink of absolute despair. It was Lann she was thinking of. The boy, she knew, could not withstand the awful strain of this diabolical mental inquisition much longer. He would surely soon give way under the strain and let his mind wander to the secret that their captors wanted.

'-if he does, it's the end of everything,' the psychophone above spoke Thorn's thoughts. 'He mustn't—'

Then, discovering that she had let her mind stray from abstract things, Thorn fiercely forced her thoughts back to safe subjects. She made herself concentrate on interplanetary history.

'The first space-flight was made by Roberta Roth in nineteen-ninety-six. Roth visited Venus and Mars, and in two thousand and one made a second flight to Jupiter and Saturn, but crashed upon her return to Earth and lived only two days. After her death her chief aide, Clyme Nison, visited Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, but Clyme Nison never returned from an attempt she made to visit Erebus—

'Keep your mind off Erebus! If you think of Erebus, you'll think of the radite and the Alliance weapon—keep thinking of interplanetary history! First permanent colonies established on Mars and Venus by two thousand and eighty-five. By twenty-one-fifty all the planets from Mercury to Neptune had been colonized. The first independence movements started in twenty-four-seventy, and by two centuries later, all the colonized planets had become independent worlds.'

As Thorn desperately strove to keep her mind concentrated on interplanetary history, her two comrades were using similar stratagems to keep from revealing any information.

She could hear the psychophone attached to Sua Av blaring forth the bald Venusian's thoughts. '-and then there was that fat boy on Callisto—what the devil was his name?' Sua Av was thinking. 'Can't remember his name, but I do remember that he was plenty big. Callisto's gravitation was so weak that he seemed light as a feather, but if I'd held his on my knee on any other world, he'd have flattened me! And then that tiger-cat of a Martian boy I met when I was engineer at the Syrtis chromium mines. Tried to knife me one night—'

Sua Av was obviously thinking of all the girls she had ever known, to occupy her thoughts safely. But Gunda Welk's psychophone was pouring forth a much different stream of thoughts.

The big Mercurian, ever since their incarceration under the psychophones, had occupied herself in thinking of what she would do to Hasna Trask if the opportunity ever offered.

'-glue her eyelids open and stake her out on the hot side of Mercury to look at the sun a while. No, she'd die too quick that way! It'd be better to take her skin off with that acid the Jovian tanners use, and then—'

The cell was like a bedlam to Joan Thorn's dazed mind. The three psychophones blaring metallically and without pause had become a torment to her ears.

She felt that she could not stand this much longer. And she understood now the full horror of the days that Lann had spent under the relentless instrument. And Lann was again being tortured by the psychophone!

On and on the hours dragged. The blue-lit cell swam about Thorn, and she closed her eyes tightly. Yet still the remorseless machine blared her thoughts, repeating interplanetary history, chemical formulae, mathematical tables—anything that would keep her mind on safely abstract subjects.

Thorn had cudgeled her mind for a means of escape. But there seemed none. She and her comrades were bound into their metal chairs by the broad leather straps. The door of their cell was secured by one of the invulnerable wave-locks. And two guards—two of Cheerly's Secret Police this time—stood on constant duty out in the dungeon corridor.

Thorn dozed finally. It was her only escape from the torment of the blaring psychophone. Yet she could sleep for but a brief period at a time, and she was dully unsurprised when she awakened a little later.

* * * *

She went rigid in her bonds. She had been awakened by the entrance of Jen Cheerly into their cell.

The Uranian spymaster's puffy green face showed suppressed excitement. Her little eyes were gleaming triumphantly.

'You Planeteers may as well give up and tell why the Alliance wants the radite, now,' she said exultantly.

Thorn made no vocal answer, but her raging thoughts blared from the psychophone.

'If I could just close my hands on that fat throat—just once—'

The psychophones of Sua Av and Gunda were voicing similar thoughts as they gazed with blazing eyes at Cheerly.

The fat Uranian sneered. 'It's too bad you lasses still feel that way. For the Alliance will never get the radite now, anyway. The League is going to get it. Lann Cain has just given up the secret of Erebus at last!'

'That's a lie!' Joan Thorn shouted. 'A trap to make us talk!'

'It's the truth.' Cheerly taunted triumphantly. 'Did you think the boy could go on forever without thinking of the secret? The more he tried not to think of it, the more his mind turned toward it. You'll find out the same thing will happen to you.'

There was such visible triumph and excitement in the Uranian's fat face that Thorn felt a pang of fear.

At that moment there was a clang of opening doors, and a tramp of feet. Hasna Trask strode into the cell, her bony face and deep eyes ablaze with excitement.

'You reported that the boy has finally told what he knows about Erebus, Cheerly?' the dictator exclaimed.

'Yes, sir,' answered the obese spymaster triumphantly. 'His mental control finally weakened, and he thought of what his mother had told him. The psychophone put it all into the record.

'With what he told to guide us, we can land safely on Erebus and get the radite, sir!' the Uranian continued exultantly. 'We wouldn't have had a chance without his secret. For it seems that there's only one spot on Erebus where women can land without meeting a ghastly fate.'

Hasna Trask's pale green, bony face twitched with visible emotion. The dictator's gloomy eyes flashed.

'You'll sail at once for Erebus and get the radite!' she ordered Cheerly. 'A naval cruiser is waiting in the court now. As soon as you get the radite and start back with it, flash word to me by audio. When I get your message, I'll order our fleets to blast sunward at once for the attack on the Alliance.'

Her fists clenched. 'Then at last our day will have come! Even while our fleets are crushing the Alliance navies, we will be making that radite into bombs that will break the resistance of the inner worlds utterly.'

'I'll take the boy and a psychophone with me to Erebus, sir,' Cheerly said shrewdly. 'He may know a little more about Erebus than his conscious thoughts have revealed. If that is so, I'll get it out of him.'

Trask, recalled from her oratorical flight, nodded her head indifferently.

'Take him, then. But make all speed to Erebus and back. Remember, the mightiest armada in the system's history will be waiting for your message as a signal for it to sail sunward!'

Joan Thorn had listened in gathering horror. This was the end of all hope, surely! Cheerly would get the radite and there would be no chance for the Alliance ever to operate Philippa Blaine's great secret weapon in the lunar caverns—' Philippa Blaine's great secret weapon in the lunar caverns,' the psychophone attached to Thorn was blaring.

Too late, Thorn suppressed her thoughts! In her momentary horror, she had let her thoughts stray, and the psychophone over her head had been speaking them.

'Did you hear that, sir?' cried Jen Cheerly to the dictator. 'A secret weapon of the Alliance, built by the physicist Philippa Blaine in the caverns of Earth's moon! That's why the Alliance wanted the radite—to operate that weapon!'

Hasna Trask's eyes snapped. The dictator strode to where Thorn sat cursing her own loss of mental control that gave the secret away.

'What is the weapon that the Alliance has hidden in the lunar caves?' she demanded of Thorn. 'Speak, Earthwoman!'

Thorn remained rigidly silent. With a violent burst of anger, the dictator struck her across the face.

'We've got to find out what that secret Alliance weapon is!' Trask snapped to her spymaster. 'There's just a chance they might be able to operate it without the radite.'

'She'll give it away to the psychophone, in time,' Cheerly assured her mistress. 'She can't help but give it away—the psychophone pulls out all their secrets, sooner or later.'

'You're wrong this time,' Joan Thorn said bitterly. 'I don't know the nature of the Alliance weapon. None of us know it—and I'm damned glad now we don't!'

'She's lying, of course,' Jen Cheerly said calmly. 'But she'll have to think the truth, sooner or later.'

'We'll keep these Planeteers; under the psychophones until they do tell what that weapon is,' Trask declared harshly. 'Meanwhile, don't delay, Cheerly. Get started now for Erebus!'

Joan Thorn writhed as Lann was brought out of his cell by two of Cheerly's women, and carried down the corridor. She could just glimpse his white, worn face through the grating in the door, and heard his despairing, sobbing cry.

'Joan, I gave up the secret to them. I couldn't keep from thinking of it longer! And now they're taking me with them to Erebus. Everything is lost, and it's all my fault!'

'Lann, it's not your fault!' Thorn cried hoarsely. 'Lann,'

But he was gone. For a moment Jen Cheerly's fat, green face grinned in at them through the grating. Her eyes were sinister and hateful.

'Goodbye, Planeteers,' the Uranian squeaked mockingly. 'Wish me a pleasant voyage to Erebus—for by the time I get back with the radite, you three will be dead!'
CHAPTER XV

Through the Tempest

STORM raged over nighted Saturnopolis. Dazzling sheets of weird light seared across the sky, and thunder bawled hoarsely like a hubbub of giants. Torrents of rain and of big hailstones battered the dark metropolis. This was one of the periodic 'satellite storms'which occur whenever three or more of the ringed planet's moons are in conjunction, exerting their combined gravitational pull to set up tidal disturbances in the deep atmosphere.

The great citadel of the dictator loomed vague and black in the tempest, its windows shining with blue light. Even night and storm could not lessen the intense activity that was going on in this nerve-center of the League of Cold Worlds, as Hasna Trask and her lieutenants drew up their final plans for the greatest, conquest in history.

Deep down in the dungeon below the citadel, the roar of the raging storm was muted to a deep, continuous rumbling. And down here in the blue-lit cell, Joan Thorn was working feverishly.

She was hitching her chair across the floor, an inch at a time, by throwing her body forward in her leather bonds. Slowly, she was edging toward the chairs of her two sleeping comrades.

'Got to make it tonight or never!' Thorn's psychophone was droning. 'They'll read my plan from the record when they next take and examine it. We've got to make it before then—' Thorn's face was haggard, her eyes burning with a febrile light. Her brain had conceived a desperate hope of escape.

Days and nights had passed since Jen Cheerly had sailed for Erebus, with Lann Cain her prisoner. How many days and nights, Thorn could not estimate exactly. Time had become a blur to her as she and her comrades sat bound here beneath the psychophones.

Thorn had felt her mind cracking from strain as the hours and days dragged She had almost felt that if she had known what Trask wanted to know, the nature of the Alliance's secret weapon, she would have told it. She had been glad then they did not know it.

Most agonizing of all in those blurred hours had been the thought of Cheerly, on her way to far Erebus with Lann. The Uranian would come back with the radite. But she would not bring Lann back, once all his possible usefulness was ended!

Tonight, an hour before, Trask's women had removed from the Planeteers' psychophones the spools of tape which contained the record of their thoughts for the last day and night. New spools had been inserted and the women had left. It had been then that Thorn's feverish mind had suddenly conceived her crazy plan of escape.

As she thought of the plan, the psychophone had spoken it and the recorder had transcribed it. And so Thorn knew that she must put the plan into effect before the record was examined again, or her plan would be read from the record and forestalled:

Thorn, convulsively rocking her chair forward, prayed inwardly that the rumble of the storm would keep the two guards out in the corridor from hearing. She inched on, her chair moving slowly, the thin black wires that connected her skull to the psychophone above, slowly lengthening out. Finally Thorn had got her chair close to those in which Gunda Welk and Sua Av were sleeping exhaustedly.

'Gunda!' Thorn whispered fiercely. 'Wake up!'

'The big Mercurian slowly opened bleared, red-rimmed eyes. Sua Av also awoke, yawning. Their psychophones started droning their awakening thoughts.

'Gunda, I want you to tip your chair over to bring your head down on my chair,' Thorn whispered. 'Then maybe you can chew through one of these leather straps that bind my arms.'

'What good would that do?' said Gunda with dull hopelessness, 'Even if we all three got free of our bonds, we couldn't get out of this cell—not with the door bolted by a wave-lock.'

'I've an idea that might get us out!' Thorn said feverishly. 'It's a chance—our only one!'

'Try it, Gunda!' urged Sua Av,' wide awake now.

With no hope in her face, Gunda Welk obeyed. She rocked back and forth in her chair until it tipped forward, her head coming down against Thorn's lap. Hitching painfully sidewise, the big Mercurian got her teeth into one of Thorn's leather arm-straps.

They heard her jaws working as she bit into the tough Jovian leather. Their psychophones continued to drone on, uttering their varying thoughts. But the rumble of the raging storm above was loud enough to keep the guards in the corridor from hearing.

Thorn felt the strap Gunda was chewing weaken. She tensed her arm in a fierce effort. The strap broke!

Quickly, Thorn unbuckled the other straps that held her. She tipped Gunda's chair back to normal position. Then she reached around and with numbed fingers found the tiny, needle-like electrode at the back of her skull, and gently pulled it out. She felt her scalp close over the minute incision. Her psychophone went silent.

Thorn got to her feet. She staggered, her numbed limbs buckling under her at first. Then she steadied, and unbuckled the straps that held Sua Av and the Mercurian to their chairs.

'Don't disconnect your psychophones yet!' she warned them. 'If the guards outside happened to notice that all our psychophones were dead, they'd suspect something at once.'

'Now what?' Sua Av whispered. 'How can we get out of this cell without a wave-key to operate the lock?'

'Yes, what's your idea?' Gunda asked hoarsely.

'It came to me as I watched them changing spools in the psychophones tonight,' Thorn muttered. 'I shut my mind off it till after they'd gone, so they wouldn't hear.'

She was taking down from its mounting the psychophone that for so many days had blared her thoughts. With quivering fingers, she began dissembling the intricate little machine. Tubes and coils and condensers came from it, as she rapidly took it apart.

'There are enough parts here,' she muttered feverishly. 'If I can just remember enough of my tech-school training.'

Thorn began putting certain parts of the mechanism back together again, in a totally different hook-up. The tiny atomic generator that furnished power, the transformers and rectifiers—and then she worked long upon rewiring an 'alternator,' connecting it electrically to a mistress modulator tube.

An hour passed, and another. The hubbub of storm was even louder from above. The droning of the other two Planeteers' psychophones was almost inaudible through the roar.

Thorn finally straightened, holding the compact rebuilt mechanism in trembling hands. Her face was dripping.

,' Now for it!' she whispered shakily to the other two Planeteers. She advanced with the little machine to the locked door.

'You've rebuilt the psychophone parts into a wave-projector?' Sua Av whispered, staring. 'To use as a wave-key?'

'It won't work,' Gunda muttered. 'It may project waves, but you don't know the secret frequency that will operate this lock. It might be any one of countless possible frequencies.'

But Thorn only nodded.

'I thought of that!' she said hoarsely. 'I built an automatic modulator into the thing. It will start projecting waves of frequency down in the sixteenth octave, and run up to the forty-fifth, by steps of twenty vibrations each. You know all wave-locks are keyed in those octaves, for above them you get heat radiations.'

'It might work,' Sua Av agreed. 'Most locks have an error-margin of ten vibrations per second, so your automatic step-ups ought to overlap all frequencies in those octaves.'

Thorn was already at the door. She held the end of her little makeshift projector against the inertrum door just inside the wave-lock. She was counting on the high power of her vibrations to penetrate the inertrum from inside, and reach the lock.

The little projector hummed as she touched its switch. Invisible waves were shooting from it into the lock, changing frequency by 20-vibration jumps each fraction of a second.

In a moment came a click from the wave-lock! The bolt had drawn back, as the right frequency released the lock.

'By heaven, it worked!' Gunda Welk exclaimed hoarsely, her eyes lighting with wild hope now.

Thorn peered tautly out through the door-grating. The two SP guards on duty were standing a few yards down the corridor, evidently discussing the storm that roared above.

Gunda and Sua Av now removed the needlelike electrodes of the psychophones from the tiny incisions, at the back of their skulls. They staggered stiffly from the chairs to Thorn's side, as she gently opened the unlocked door.

One of the SP women, seeing the cell door open from the corner of her eye, yelled and reached for her atom-pistol.

'Get them!' Thorn shouted hoarsely, lunging out.

The charging Planeteers reached the two Saturnians before they could level the weapons they had drawn. Thorn grabbed the atom-pistol of one of the green women, and twisted fiercely.

The Saturnian suddenly let go of the gun and jumped back, clawing a pocket-audio from her jacket. She shouted wildly into the little instrument.

'Dungeon-guards calling for help! The prisoners are—'

Thorn brought the atom-pistol down on the woman's head, and she sank with a groan. Gunda and Sua Av had already knocked out the other guard, and the Mercurian had her gun.

'That call will bring guards down here at once!' Thorn cried. 'Quick—the drain by which we got in here! It's our one chance now to get to the space-ship court!'

They ran down the short dungeon corridor to the place where the drain opened. The inertrum bars had been reset in new cement to repair the drain-grating, Thorn saw instantly.

She leveled her gun and triggered rapidly. The bursting flares of blinding energy burned away the new cement, again freeing the inertrum bars. As Gunda Welk bent and tore loose the bars, Thorn heard over the roar of the storm a rush of running feet.

'They're coming!' she cried, and leaped headfirst down into the narrow tube. The others followed her.

Thorn writhed down the cramped pipe with frantic haste, ahead of the Mercurian and Venusian. She heard distant yells as soldiers burst into the dungeon which they had just quit.

In a moment Thorn emerged head first into the place where the five citadel drains converged into one big tube. Water was rushing down here, flowing down through three of the pipes that drained courts open to the raging storm.

'This is the drain that leads up to the space-ship court!' she cried, scrambling into the right-hand pipe.

As she crawled at the head of her comrades up this different pipe, icy floods of water from above smashed unceasingly into her face. The drain was almost full of down rushing water. Blinded, gasping, she fought upward through the tube until she glimpsed the grating above, outlined against terrific red lightning flares.

Thorn drew her gun and fired up at the grating through the rushing water. The whizzing flare of bursting atom-shells above was almost drowned by another appalling burst of scarlet lightning, accompanied by a tremendous shock of thunder.

She pushed on upward through the streaming water. Her hands found the bars of this grating, loose where their ends had been exposed by burning away of the cement. With a convulsive effort, Thorn pushed the bars upward and scrambled up into the court.

The full fury of the tremendous Saturnian storm beat upon her in this open court. Rattling showers of big hailstones crackled like musketry, torrents of icy rain smashing down upon her from the black sky. Gunda and Sua Av were scrambling up out of the drain to her side.

Blinding red. lightning arced across the heavens in awful, burning splendor, and showed Thorn two small space-cruisers parked near the center of the court. It also showed her that a troop of guards was running hastily out from the other side of the court.

'They've guessed we'd make for these ships. Come on before they cut us off!' she yelled hoarsely to her comrades.

They plunged forward. The crimson lightning died, and in the succeeding thick blackness, the whole citadel rocked wildly about them to the deafening shock of thunder.

The Planeteers collided with a wet metal wall in the darkness. The side of one of the ships! Then another fizzing flare of fiery lightning showed Thorn the ship door, a few feet away.

She pushed the unsealed door inward, and fell rather than jumped inside. As the other two Planeteers leaped in after her, through the bellowing thunder came a shout of voices.

Atom-shells flicked into the inertrum wall of the ship and exploded in bright little bomb-bursts of light. The guards running across the court toward them were shooting.

'Seal the door, Gunda!' Thorn yelled wildly. 'I'll take his up!'

She pitched forward in darkness toward the control-room, Sua Av at her heels. She heard the door grinding shut as she pawed frantically for the controls, standardized in all ships.

More atom-shells flared outside. By their glare, Thorn found the injector lever and pulled it frantically. The power-chamber of the little ship burst into a roar,

The panel-lights sprang on as Sua Av found the switch, Thorn leaping to the firing-keys. Her fingers flashed down.

With a nerve-shattering roar of all keel tubes blasting, the little cruiser shot almost vertically upward, rising on spuming fire-jets out of the big court at the heart of the citadel.

Thorn cut in all stern tubes, and the little ship screamed up on a steep slant through the raging storm. Rocked by buffeting bursts of thunder, lit by the dancing flares of red lightning, it roared up across storm-swept Saturnopolis with dizzying speed.

Sua Av had the oxygenators throbbing by now. Gunda Welk came staggering into the control-room, fighting the terrific acceleration pressure. Up through the storm they climbed till they were above the tempest, the roar of air outside now fading away.

* * * *

Sua Av uttered an exultant cry as they burst out of mists into open space, with the colossal, gleaming arc of the rings spanning the star thick black firmament ahead.

'Clear space again!' she cried.

'They'll call an alarm to all their bases on the outer moons!' Thorn exclaimed. 'If Stilicha isn't waiting at the rendezvous—'

Everything depended now, all three knew, on reaching the rendezvous in the rings where old Stilicha Keene had agreed to wait with the Venture, in Cassini's division at the west limb of the planet-shadow.

The colossal yellow bulk of Saturn was behind them, the mighty bow of the rings now close ahead. Thorn was heading toward the segment of the rings obscured by the shadow of the planet. Their little ship raced above the innermost, thinnest ring, roaring at top speed low over the vast circular swarm of whirling planetoids.

Soon ahead yawned Cassini's division, the gap of clear space between the two great outermost rings. As Thorn sent their craft flying down into the gap at the point where the west limb of the planet-shadow lay across it, she flipped the audio-switch.

'Stilicha, the Planeteers calling!' she spoke into the instrument. 'We're being chased. Where are you?'

In a moment, there came a shrill, excited reply.

'Coming, girl! We've got you in our aura. Stand by and get your suits on, and we'll take you aboard!'

A few moments later the long, grim-lined Venture drove up from the gap between rings, and hovered beside the Planeteers' little ship. The air-lock of the pirate craft was open.

Then a brief interval saw the Planeteers inside that air-lock, tearing off the space-suits they had worn as they jumped the gap between ships. And the Venture was roaring on through space with all the power of its great tubes, away from Saturn.

'I thought you girls were dead sure!' Stilicha Keene was babbling wildly to the Planeteers. 'It's been days we've waited here. But where's Lann? You didn't leave the lad behind?'

The old pirate's wrinkled red face and rheumy eyes were tense as her cracked voice shrilled the question. And Ool, the space dog, looked up at Thorn with pleading eyes.

'Cheerly has Lann,' Thorn said hoarsely. 'She sailed in a navel cruiser for Erebus, days ago. She has Lann's secret now, but she took his along in case he knew more than he'd told.'

'Erebus?' Old Stilicha's wrinkled face became ghastly. 'God in heaven, if she's taken the lad there...'

'We've got to follow them, Stilicha!' Thorn cried. 'For if Cheerly gets what she wants on Erebus, she'll come back, but she'll never bring Lann back.'

The old woman's faded eyes blazed. 'We'll follow to Erebus, yes! I'd follow the lad to hell itself!'

They climbed hastily to the control-room, where Stilicha seized the controls from the Jovian pilot on duty there.

'Calling Titan and Iapetus bases!' a Saturnian voice was yelling from the audio-speaker excitedly. 'All cruisers out in net-patrol. The Planeteers are loose and breaking for space!'

'They can't catch us now!' Gunda cried fiercely.

The Venture was already roaring out to the orbit of Titan. Stilicha had changed course, and the huge, ringed bulk of Saturn and the small, bright sun lay dead astern. They were heading out toward the farthest limit of the system, toward the Solanr System's last home of mystery.

Black reaction and apprehension were cold in Joan Thorn's heart as she looked haggardly ahead. Could they hope to overtake Cheerly's ship when it had such a start? And. if they did not, and so did not have Lann's secret knowledge to guide them, what would be their fate when they reached mysterious Erebus?
CHAPTER XVI

Forbidden World

THE FRONTIER of the Solanr System! A vast and gloomy darkness, a region of eternal night remote by six billion trackless miles from the far, bright star of the sun. A cold and awful immensity of space beyond which stretches only the shoreless sea of the interstellar void.

Yet even out into these far, dark spaces reached the invisible grip of the sun, to hold the outermost of its planetary children. Out here in eternal silence and darkness, far from the flaming orb that gave it birth, solemnly moved the dim world of Erebus on its slow, stupendous patrol.

A ship was moving out through the colossal dark toward the last planet. It was moving at tremendous speed under inertia, yet it seemed merely to be crawling through the vast emptiness as it held its course toward the dim, slowly enlarging sphere of Erebus.

Joan Thorn peered fixedly from the window of the control-room at the mysterious world ahead. It was like a little ghost-world, shining in the dark vault with a feeble blue light.

'It must have an extraordinarily high albedo to reflect so much sunlight at this distance,' Thorn muttered.

'Yes, it's cursed queer,' Sua Av agreed, frowning intently.

Beside the Planeteers, who had discarded their Saturnian disguises, old Stilicha Keene peered forward, a haunting apprehension in her faded eyes. The space dog crouched at her feet.

Gunda Welk was at the eyepiece of the 'scope, staring toward dim Erebus. The towering Mercurian turned to Thorn.

'Cheerly's ship isn't in sight, Joan,' she rumbled. 'She must already have landed on Erebus.'

Thorn's brown face contorted in agonized emotion.

'We should have overtaken her!' she cried, her voice raw and self-accusing. 'If we'd put on a little more speed—'

'But girl, the Venture's been at top speed in all the long days since we left Saturn!' Stilicha quivered. 'It's been like a nightstallion voyage, with the power-chambers throbbing to the limit, and my crew getting more scared each day, and us sailin' on toward God knows what on that world ahead!'

It had, indeed, seemed like a strange dream to all of them as their craft had, for days, crept out into the trackless, forbidding immensities. Stilicha's pirate crew had whispered fearfully, only the hope of rescuing their idolized boy leader keeping them from mutinying. An alien chill gripped all except Joan Thorn.

Thorn had become more and more feverishly anxious each day, as she thought of Jen Cheerly speeding on with Lann to seize the precious radite—the radite whose taking would signal Lann's death and the launching of Trask's attack on the Alliance!

'Shall I try the spectro-telescope?' Gunda was asking. 'We're near enough to Erebus for it to detect the radite.'

Thorn nodded quickly. 'The radite should show up clearly. I'll check our aura again for Cheerly's ship.'

Thorn snapped on the aura. But something was wrong. The aurachart did not come on. The device was dead.

'What the devil?' Sua Av muttered astonishedly. 'Something must be jamming the ether to kill our aura like that.'

'All our other instruments are dead, too!' burst out Stilicha, looking up worriedly from the panel. 'The gravitometers and space-sextants and even the audio!'

'Is it some trick of Cheerly's?' Sua Av cried.

'It couldn't be—he wouldn't have power enough to jam the ether like this,' Thorn declared.

Gunda Welk swung around from her instrument, her massive face puzzled.

'Joan, there's something wrong with this spectro-telescope, too,' she said. 'I adjusted its limits to the field of radioactive elements, but all of Erebus still shows up in it.'

Old Stilicha looked anxiously from the faintly shining blue ghost-world ahead, to the puzzled Planeteers.

'We'll soon be close to Erebus,' the old pirate said. 'What are we going to do? Land and hunt for Lann on foot?'

There was lurking terror in her faded eyes as she made the proposition, yet she kept her shrill voice steady.

'We dare not just sail in and land,' Thorn muttered. 'It might mean the end of us, right there.'

Her face worked. 'Yet we daren't lose time either! If Lann had only been able to tell us the secret.'

'Joan, remember what Cheerly told Trask in. our cell on Saturn, after she'd got the secret from Lann!' Sua Av said eagerly. 'That she'd learned from Lann that there was only one spot on Erebus where women could land without meeting a ghastly fate!'

'One spot, but where is it?' Gunda demanded. 'There's no use of our hunting for that spot, for we wouldn't know it if we saw it.'

'Yes, we would know it!' Thorn cried suddenly. 'Cheerly's ship would have landed in that one safe spot. If we can find where Cheerly has landed here, we can land safely beside her!'

She swung around to Stilicha Keene. 'We'll reduce speed and circle around Erebus looking for Cheerly's ship. Don't go lower than a hundred miles above the surface.'

Unutterable tension gripped the Planeteers and the old pirate as the Venture swept in closer toward the mysterious planet from which only one woman in all history had returned. Erebus slowly expanded ahead, a small world hardly larger than Mercury. At last the ship dropped to within a hundred miles of its surface.

It was a strangely luminous planetscape they looked down upon, a world shimmering everywhere with the dusky blue radiance they had noticed from afar. They had thought that faint luminescence a trick of reflected sunlight, but they saw now that it was somehow inherent in this world. Through that dusky blue haze they looked down upon a weirdly forbidding landscape.

Low, jagged, barren mountains rose like fangs bared at the dark, star-studded sky. Beyond their rocky slopes stretched dim deserts, wide blank wastes upon which moved little whirls of dust. And all this dreary landscape of eternal twilight was wrapped in the uncanny faint blue radiance.

'It's queer, the way it all shines,' muttered Sua Av. 'But I can't see anything dangerous down there.'

'There's something dangerous there—terribly so,' Thorn said tautly. 'If there weren't, this world wouldn't have swallowed up so many hundreds of explorers in the last nine centuries!'

'There's air of some kind down there, anyway,' old Stilicha quavered. 'See them there whirling dust-devils?'

'But there can't be an atmosphere here!' Gunda declared. 'That would mean that Erebus is comparatively warm, and what would keep it warm at this distance from the sun?'

'Everything about this world is wrong, somehow,' Thorn muttered. 'The way it shines, its warmth and atmosphere, the way our instruments went dead when we neared it.'

* * * *

The Venture was now moving on an even keel a hundred miles above the surface of the ghostly blue planet. Stilicha handled the controls as they moved at reduced speed around the equator of the mystery world. Gunda Welk swept the terrain beneath with the 'scope as they sped along.

The cruel, barren mountains swept back and disappeared in the glowing blue haze behind them. They moved on above the endless wastes of faintly shining desert.

'Thought I saw something shiny moving down there,' Gunda exclaimed in a moment. 'My eyes must be playing me trick!'

'Cheerly's ship is what we want to find,' Thorn rapped. 'It's somewhere here. She hasn't had time to lift the radite and leave, considering how fast we followed her.'

Within a few hours, they had completely circumnavigated the equator of the little mystery world. They had seen nothing but the deathly deserts and mountains, wrapped in. the unchanging, shimmering blue haze.

'Run north and circle the planet again midway between the equator and the pole,' Thorn ordered Stilicha.

'It's kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack, hunting one ship on a whole world,' Stilicha muttered.

'This world isn't big. We'll sweep every mile of it if necessary,' Joan Thorn declared.

Soon they were again circling Erebus, midway between the equator and the northern pole. Before they had gone far, Gunda pointed to a black speck on the northern desert horizon.

'Something odd about that black mountain yonder!' she reported from the 'scope eyepiece. 'It has none of the shining haze over it—the only place I've seen here that hasn't.'

'Steer toward it, but keep high,' Joan Thorn told the old pirate.

'We'll take a look.'

The black speck on the horizon expanded rapidly as the ship rocketed north. It grew into a big black mountain that loomed in solitary majesty out of a wide expanse of the haze-wrapped desert. brooding beneath the star-flecked dark sky.

It was a mountain almost perfectly dome-shaped, the regularity of its outline startling. It was two miles across at the base and a mile in height. It stood out bold and black because none of the shining blue haze hovered over it.

'Queer, the symmetrical shape of that mountain,' Sua Av muttered. 'Is it possible that it is—'

''There's a ship parked on that mountain!' Gunda Welk yelled suddenly in high excitement,

Thorn leaped to the 'scope eyepiece. The huge, frowning black mass of the domed mountain jumped into close view. Upon the curved, rough eastern side of the great mass, near the top, rested a long, torpedo-like metal shape.

'It's Cheerly's cruiser!' Thorn exclaimed. 'If they landed on that black mountain, it must be the one spot on Erebus where it's safe to land. We're going to land there and seize her ship!'

She swung, her pulses hammering. 'Veer off, Stilicha, and run back toward the mountain from the west at a mile altitude. Cheerly can't have seen us yet. We'll land on the west side of the mountain and take her by surprise!'

The old pirate swung the Venture in a wide detour, and soon they were rocketing low toward the mountain from the west, hidden by the domed mass from the ship parked on the other side. Expertly, the old Martian brought the ship down to a landing on the rough, curved western side of the great mass.

As the blasting roar of the rockets died, Sua Av turned from the instrument she had been manipulating.

'The atmosphere checks as air, but loaded with elements I can't identify without analysis,' she reported.

'We'll play safe and wear our spacesuits,' Thorn declared. 'Come on!'

They hastened down into the midcompartment of the ship. Stilicha's motley pirate crew were waiting there, all of them looking a little scared by the fact that they had actually landed upon the surface of Erebus.

'We're going over the top of this mountain to find and capture Cheerly's ship, Thom rapped to them. 'On suits, everybody! And bring all the dampers we have. There's to be no using of atom-guns unless absolutely necessary, for we don't want to hurt Lann.'

Five minutes later, the big door port of the Venture ground open. Out through the air-lock moved the company of forty women, all in suits and helmets, with Joan Thorn in the lead.

Thorn noted that they stepped out onto a rough jagged surface of black metal. The whole mountain, it seemed, was of black metal, pocked here and there with deposits of glistening ores. The top of the dome-shaped mass loomed starkly against the dusky, starry sky.

Thorn could not repress a tautening of her nerves. This was Erebus, the forbidden world that had claimed so many explorers' lives since nine centuries ago. From the curving side of the mountain on which the Venture lay, she could look out westward across the barren deserts, wrapped in mysterious, shimmering blue radiance.

The little party was armed with several of the cylindrical dampers that could put atom-guns out of commission, and with atom-pistols belted outside their space-suits. They started up the side of the metal mountain, trudging against a gravitation that was surprisingly strong for so small a world. The Planeteers and old Stilicha led, and beside them ran the space dog, Ool, her green eyes blazing as though she sensed they were on the same world as Lann Cain.

They reached the top of the domed mountain, and Thorn crouched down with her comrades to reconnoiter. Cheerly' s ship, a long, many-gunned Saturnian naval cruiser with the name Gargol on its bows, lay only a few hundred yards down the curved rough metal slope. They could see a few women in space-suits outside the ship, digging glistening ores from the deposits that packed the metal mountain,

Sua Av's voice reached Thorn by conduction, as the Planeteers crouched with the old pirate and the space dog.

'They're digging fuel-ores for the return trip,' the Venusian muttered. 'They can't have sighted our ship.'

Thorn nodded her glassite helmet tensely. 'Here we go,' she said, rising to her feet and signaling the pirates behind them. 'Whatever you do, be careful you don't injure Lann!'

The space-suited attackers swept down the rough curve of the mountain in a silent run toward the Saturnian ship. They were half-way to it before one of the diggers there glimpsed them,

Instantly, the woman fired her atom-pistol at them. The little shell struck a woman behind Thorn, a pirate who fell as the blinding flare of energy enveloped her. Thorn swung the damper she carried toward the Saturnian who had fired, and killed her weapon. 'Quick, women!' Thorn yelled, then remembered that their audios were off, and signaled with her arm.

The little pirate band swept fiercely down the metal slope. Out of the ship, Saturnians in space-suits were pouring and leveling atom-pistols. The dampers carried by Thorn and several of her women deadened many of the weapons, but atom-shells from others flared blindingly among the pirates and felled a half dozen women,

Then Thorn and her followers reached the Saturnians. It became a fierce fight at close quarters, shells of atom-pistols flaring and women falling, under the solemn stars of the darkly . The space dog leaped and tore horribly with her great teeth and talons among the enemy. Thorn swung her heavy cylindrical damper as a great club as she and Gunda and Sua Av fought forward.

The Saturnians, appalled by the fierceness of the pirate attack, scrambled back through the air-lock of the ship.

'After them!' Thorn cried, waving her arm in a fierce forward gesture. 'Don't let them get away with the ship.'

Gunda flung the damper she carried, and it jammed the air-lock door. Then Thorn's women were pushing into the ship.

In ten minutes, the fight inside the ship was ended, Taken by surprise, unprepared for an attack, the Saturnian crew had not been able to withstand the rush of Thorn's followers.

A dozen of the Saturnians lying dead, the survivors stood with hands raised in surrender. As soon as the air-lock door was closed and the oxygenerators functioning, Thorn ripped off her helmet and ordered the massed prisoners to take off their helmets also.

As each sullen green Saturnian face emerged to view, Thorn's pulse pounded. But when all the prisoners were unhelmeted, she felt a shock of bitter disappointment. Neither Jen Cheerly nor Lann were in the ship!

'Where's Cheerly and the boy?' she demanded fiercely of the crestfallen Saturnian cruiser captain.

'Cheerly left here yesterday, taking two women and the pirate boy,' answered the captain sullenly. 'They went toward those mountains westward.'

'Cheerly had located the radite there?' Sua Av cried eagerly. The Saturnian nodded sulkily.

'Yes, after we landed our ship here, Cheerly worked with our spectroscopes until she ascertained that the deposit of radite lay somewhere in, those mountains. She took the boy with her because she, believed he knows exactly where it is, though he said he didn't.'

'Then all we have to do is to wait till Cheerly comes back here with the radite, and grab her!' Gunda exclaimed.

'No, we can't do that!' Thorn cried. 'Cheerly would bring back the radite, but she wouldn't bring back Lann! We've got to go after her!'

'In our ship?' old Stilicha asked eagerly.

Thorn shook her head. 'We daren't. This is the one safe place on Erebus where a ship can land, remember. We'll have to follow on foot, in our space-suits.'

She saw a quick gleam of satisfaction in the sullen eyes of the Saturnian captain. And Thorn's face tightened.

'You will come along with us,' she told the green-faced captain suspiciously.

The Saturnian went livid. 'I won't go!' she gasped, all secret satisfaction gone at once, 'I won't!'

Thorn seized her by the throat. 'Why not?' she harked 'What are you afraid of? What is it that makes you glad at the idea of us going on foot to those mountains?'

The Saturnian was silent, helpless rage and fear contending in her face.

'Tell, or I'll make you walk out there by yourself!' Thorn menaced. The threat crumpled the captain's spirit.

'I'll tell!' she gasped. 'It means a hideous doom if you venture off this mountain without protection. For all the matter of those deserts and mountains out there, all the matter of Erebus except this single metal mountain, is radioactive matter.

'Erebus is a radioactive world. That's the secret the pirate boy knew, that no one else guessed. A ship that landed anywhere except on this mountain would instantly itself become radioactive by induced radioactivity from the soil on which it landed. The same fate would befall an unprotected woman who stepped off this mountain. This metal mountain is the only non-radioactive matter on the whole planet!'
CHAPTER XVII

In the Shining Waste

A RADIOACTIVE world! A world, every atom of which was throbbing with natural or induced radioactivity, constantly emitting streams of deadly radiation, changing slowly and spontaneously through the long ages into different elements farther down the atomic scale! This, then, was the secret of Erebus!

The thing was so stupefying that the Planeteers and old Stilicha and her pirates were silent, stunned. Every woman there looked wildly at her neighbor, bewildered by the incredible assertion the Saturnian captain made.

'It's impossible!' Joan Thorn burst, finally. Her eyes were almost dazed in expression. 'A whole world of radioactive matter—it can't be true!'

'It is true!' cried the Saturnian captain fearfully. 'The boy knew it all the time. His mother, that old space pirate, Martina Cain, discovered it when she came here a generation ago. If she hadn't landed on this mountain, she'd have met the same doom as everyone else who has come here, her ship and her body riddled by the terrific radiation the moment she landed.'

'But why in the devil's name should this metal mountain alone on the whole planet remain non-radioactive?' cried Gunda Welk, her massive face incredulous. 'It doesn't make sense.'

'I think I understand that,' Sua Av said keenly, her green eyes gleaming. 'I took a good look at the black metal of this mountain as we climbed up over it. It's a solid mass of asterium.'

'Asterium?' Thorn echoed. 'That queer element they've found in meteors from outer space?'

Sua Av's bald head bobbed eagerly. 'Yes, the element whose discovery forced them to revise the periodic table—the most inert element ever discovered. It's completely resistant to radioactive action, they found.' '

'But asterium was supposed to be an element foreign to our solar system, one formed somehow in far-off giant stars!' cried Gunda. 'How the devil would there happen to she a solid mountain of the stuff here on Erebus?'

'This mountain of asterium was not always native to Erebus, if my guess is right,' retorted the Venusian. 'This mountain came here from outer space. It's a gigantic meteorite of almost solid asterium that fell here on Erebus in some past age.'

'By heaven, I believe Sua's right!' Gunda exclaimed excitedly. 'That would explain the peculiar domed shape of the mountain. It's roughly spherical, but half of it is buried.'

Old Stilicha Keene had listened, only half-understanding. Now she ventured an anxious question to Thorn.

'If it's doom to step off this mountain as that there Saturnian says, then how could Cheerly and her women and Lann dare to leave here on foot to search for the radite?'

'If my guess is right, they had some sort of protection against the radioactive emanations out there,' Thorn clipped. She turned to the Saturnian officer. 'What about it?'

The green-faced captain nodded nervously. 'You've guessed it. We were here two days, before Cheerly figured out a way to protect them when they left the mountain. She figured that since the asterium of this mountain is proof against the radioactive emanations out there, she would melt some of the asterium and coat their space-suits with it to make them ray-proof. That's what she did, and it worked all right.'

The first Planeteer looked grim. 'It'll work for us, too, then!' Joan Thorn declared. 'We'll proof three space-suits for ourselves at once, and go after Cheerly and Lann. We've got to overtake them before they find that radite—for Cheerly will do away with Lann as soon as she has the stuff!'

'But, girl, can't I go with you Planeteers?' old Stilicha pleaded.

'You're needed to stay here and see that these prisoners don't break loose,' Thorn told her. 'Take some women back over to the Venture now, and bring it over and park it beside this cruiser. We've got to work rapidly to overtake Cheerly.'

Soon the Venture had been brought over the mountain, and settled down beside the Gargol, the Saturnian cruiser. The prisoners were locked in a compartment of their own ship, and a guard set over them.

'You needn't be afraid of us following you out there,' the Saturnian captain told Thorn, with a shiver. 'There's none of us would dream of going out in those deadly deserts, among God knows what kind of shining demons that roam there.'

'Shining demons?' Sua Av asked the green woman. 'What are you talking about?'

'We've seen them, from atop the mountain here,' the Saturnian answered with a shudder. 'Glowing, unearthly creatures of some kind far out on the blue haze. I don't know what they are.'

'You must have seen some dustwhirls, that's all,' Thorn clipped. 'Come on, Sua!'

The Planeteers set to work with urgent haste, helped by a party of Stilicha's women. They found the atomic furnace which Jen Cheerly had set up to melt some asterium was still in place. They had it going in a few minutes.

Wearing their space-suits constantly, the Planeteers and their helpers soon melted down a mass of the solid asterium into liquid state. Then three of their flexible metal space-suits were dipped into the molten black asterium.

The glassite helmets, immune to all heat and cold, were also coated with the black element. Before it hardened on the helmets, Thorn scraped two spots thin, making them semi-transparent for vision.

'It means dim visions but I dare not remove it completely from the eye plates of the helmets,' she muttered. 'Anything more would be dangerous, in the hell of radiation that must rage out there.'

The asterium coating on the suits and helmets hardened rapidly. When it was cool, they took the ray-proofed suits into the Venture., and put them on in place of the ones they wore.

'Hell, it's as stiff as a suit of armor,' muttered Gunda Welk, as she moved in her new suit.

'And these eyeholes can scarcely be seen through,' complained Sua Av as she donned the helmet.

'Will you two stop chattering and hurry?' Joan Thorn demanded violently.

Her two comrades stared at her. And Thorn realized that she had shouted at them.

'Sorry,' she said hoarsely, 'but I'm half out of my head, thinking of Lann out there with Cheerly.' ,

'We understand,' Sua Av nodded. But we'll find them, sure, before anything happens to Lann. And we're sure of the radite now, if all goes well.'

'It isn't only getting the radite that's on my mind,' Gunda said. Her face was deeply troubled, as she added slowly, 'Even if we get the radite back safely to Earth to use in Philippa Blaine's secret weapon, how do we know that weapon will really save the Alliance from the League attack? What kind of weapon can hope to defeat ten thousand armed cruisers?'

Joan Thorn felt a chill of foreboding at the big Mercurian's words. Thorn, too, all this time, had been haunted by the very possibility that Gunda had put into words.

'Suppose Blaine's invention fails, after all?' Gunda continued. 'Suppose it's sound in theory, but impractical in fact. We don't know a thing about the nature of it, remember!'

'I've thought of that, too,' Sua Av muttered worriedly. 'Blaine has the name of one of the greatest physicists in the system. Yet what could she invent that would sweep ten thousand cruisers out of space?'

'Blaine must have something tremendous,' Thorn insisted desperately. 'The Chairwoman has faith in her weapon. We've got to have faith, too,, and get the radite that will operate the thing. And we won't get it by delaying here!'

The Planeteers emerged from the Venture, wearing the black, asterium-coated suits and helmets. Stilicha Keene came hastily toward them, holding to the collar of the space dog Ool. The beast reared up against Thorn, its green eyes pleading.

'Ool senses Lann somewhere on this world,' Stilicha said. 'Are you going to take her with you?'

'We can't. Her unprotected body, non-organic though it is, would be affected by the radiation out there,' Thorn said. She grasped the spacesuited old Martian's hand. 'Keep a close watch ever the prisoners, Stilicha. We'll come back with Lann and the radite—or we won't come back at all.'

'Good luck to ye,' Stilicha said.

The Planeteers started down the western curved slope of the huge, black meteorite-mountain. Soon they reached the base of the mountain, and stood for a moment, looking out awedly across the uncanny world into which they were to venture.

Under the dark, starry sky stretched the forbidding deserts of Erebus, dim wastes whose every grain of sand throbbed with a faint blue radiance that gathered in drifting azure haze. The shining blue mists swirled and pulsated slowly, wrapping the whole dusky landscape before them, veiling the mountains westward.

They knew that when they stepped out on that blowing waste, into those shining mists, they would be stepping into a hell of radiation streaming ceaselessly from the radioactive mass of the planet—a torrent of alpha particles and of beta rays and of hard gamma radiation as withering as super X-rays.

Determinedly, Joan Thorn strode forward. The other two Planeteers followed. Their feet sinking slightly into the glowing sand, they trudged westward.

'They felt no change. But when Thorn tried to use her suit-audio, there came from it only a shattering roar. She linked hands with her comrades, speaking to them by conduction of sound.

'The radiation kills our audios completely,' she said. 'It's what deadened all our instruments as we approached Erebus.'

Sua Av nodded her black-helmeted head vigorously. 'The gamma. radiation alone from this mass would do that.'

'How in hell's name does this whole world come to be radioactive?' Gunda muttered. 'If it was thrown off the sun in a tidal disturbance like the other planets, it should consist of the same kind of matter.'

'I believe Erebus is the product of an older and deeper disturbance than that which produced the other planets,' Sua AV said keenly. 'A disturbance so deep that it hurled out a mass of the heavier radioactive elements at the sun's heart, which formed a huge radioactive core for this world when it hardened.'

'But there must have been some non-radioactive elements here originally, even so,' objected Gunda.

'Yes, but they would inevitably be made radioactive also by the radiation from the core,' Sua Av replied. 'You know, the familiar phenomenon of induced radioactivity, which was discovered by the old Earth scientists way back in the first third of the twentieth century. The phenomenon by which a sheet of aluminum or some other normally non-radioactive element will become itself radioactive if subjected to radiation from radioactive elements.'

'That must be what has happened,' Thorn agreed. 'And any ship that landed here would instantly also become radioactive in every particle, from the same cause.'

They trudged on. Weird journey across a blue-hazed planet beneath the eternally nighted sky! On over the desert, crunching the feebly glowing sands beneath their feet, constantly aware that the failure of the asterium coating on their spacesuits would mean death.

They steered by the stars, for the black metal mountain had dropped from sight behind them. Infinitely strange it seemed, on thim outermost world so far from the sun, to look up into the dusky sky and see there the familiar, glittering constellations!

Then they glimpsed the western mountains in the distance ahead, looming low, dark and barren-looking through the drifting blue mists. The Planeteers held toward those dreary peaks.

'I see someone ahead!' exclaimed Sua AV suddenly,, stopping, 'Someone coming toward us.'

'It must be Cheerly coming back'' cried Gunda, her hand darting to the asterium-coated atom-pistol belted outside her spacesuit.

Thorn's heart went cold with fear. If Cheerly was coming back with the radite, it meant Lann was already dead.

'No!' Sua AV cried, stupefied. 'It's not Cheerly and her women. Look, it's something shining!'

'Good God, can there be any truth in what those Saturnians told of having seen shining demons out here?' Thorn exclaimed hoarsely.

For the two creatures moving toward them through the blue mists were unbelievable! They were man-formed creatures, but they were glowing with soft blue light!

The two shining things came on, straight toward the Planeteers. And they stopped a few yards away from the three comrades. They wore no space-suits or protection of any kind.

'God!' came Sua Av's thick-voiced exclamation. 'They're men—shining men—radioactive women!'

Thorn's brain reeled at the sight. She felt as though she was looking at some weird mirage born of the shining mists.

The two women before her were human in every respect. They wore the tattered remnants of leather clothing such as space-sailors had worn in the past. One of them was tall, rangy of body. The others was smaller, with Martian features.

But both of the two women were glowing. Every atom of their bodies and of their clothing shone with faint radiance. These women were living human beings whose bodies had become as radioactive in every particle as all else on this world!
CHAPTER XVIII

Damned Souls of Erebus

THORN could not believe her eyes. The sight of women, living women, whose bodies were composed of radioactive matter that glowed with its own spontaneous energy, was, brain-shattering. She and her comrades stood rigid, staring at the two glowing women.

The radioactive women returned their gaze with weirdly glowing eyes. And now Thorn saw that in their shining faces was a tragic sadness and deep despair. The radiant countenance of the taller woman, the strong, thin face that seemed vaguely familiar to Thorn, was a shining mask of haunting horror.

'They're women like ourselves—but women made radioactive by the terrific radiation here!' Sua Av exclaimed hoarsely. 'Induced, radioactivity, working somehow, upon living beings!'

The Venusian's words carried by vibration of her helmet through the hazy air to the two glowing women. For the taller, the one whose face seemed vaguely familiar, answered.

'You are right,' she said slowly, in a deep, strangely husked voice. 'We are women like yourselves, who came to this hellish world in the past. And it made us into what you see.'

'How is it possible for you to live, when your body has been changed into radioactive matter?' Thorn asked wildly. 'It has never been dreamed that there could be radioactive life!'

'Life,' said the tall glowing woman heavily, 'is dependent upon energy. Your bodies draw energy from their chemical processes. But my body needs now, no. chemical consumption of air and food to give it energy, for every atom of it now flames with the energy which itself radiates. Nothing can halt that spontaneous flow of energy from the atoms of my body. It will go on for ages until every atom has completely lost its energy and has been transmuted into elements lower in the atomic scale. I cannot die, until then.'

A sound of bitter laughter tore from her lips as her glowing eyes held the three horror-stricken Planeteers.

'I cannot die, do you hear? Though I were to cut my own limbs off, though I were to hack my body, it would still live, for each atom of each fragment would still emit ceaseless energy. My brain—my consciousness—would still remain living! And even if my brain were cut to bits, each bit of it would retain the flame of my life and consciousness.'

'God!' muttered Gunda Welk thickly. 'Then this is what has befallen all the explorers of the past who came here to Erebus!'

The tall radioactive woman nodded her glowing head somberly.

'Aye, it has befallen hundreds of others who came here, as it did me. I did not dream of the nature of this devil world when I came here. How could I? I thought the shining hazes a mere phosphorescence. I landed my ship, and at once my ship crumbled as certain of its metallic elements were swiftly disintegrated by the radiation. And then the radiation quickly changed my body—into this.

'And I have dwelt here ever since, as you see me now. A travesty of life, a mockery of a human being living on and on, unable to die, unable even to kill myself!'

'How long?' Thorn asked hoarsely. 'How long have you two lived thus on this world?'

At this the tall radioactive woman pointed to her companion. 'This is Chana Gray, who came from Mars to explore Erebus five centuries ago—'

'Five centuries ago!' Thorn cried dazedly. 'You mean that she's been living here, in that horrible state, for five hundred years?'

'The thing's not possible'exclaimed Gunda Welk thickly.

The taller radioactive woman answered heavily. 'She has been living thus five centuries, yes. I was here when she came. For I have dwelt, as you see me now on, Erebus for nine centuries. I landed on this devil world in two thousand and six.'

'That can't be!' objected Joan Thorn. 'Why, in two thousand and six interplanetary travel was only a few years old! The only women who had made space-flights by that date were Roberta Roth herself, the first of them all, and her lieutenant, Clyme Nison.'

Thorn's voice broke off as she stared in shaken horror and recognition into the glowing face of the tall radioactive woman.

'God above!' Thorn choked. 'Your face! I thought it was familiar from pictures. You—Clyme—'

'I am Clyme Nison, yes,' answered the tall glowing woman dully.

A spell held the Planeteers, a trance of stupefaction and awe, as they stared at the woman before them. A woman whose name had been famous in the system's history for nine hundred years, whose name stood second only to that of Roberta Roth in the great roll of the space-pioneers.

'Clyme Nison!' said Gunda hoarsely, unbelievingly. 'The woman who helped Roberta Roth build the first space-ship of all, the woman who was first of all women to visit Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, and who—'

'-and who wanted to be the first woman to visit Erebus, also,' Nison finished heavily, 'And who has remained here ever since, in living death, the most horrible of dooms.'

The Planeteers could not speak. They could only stare at the glowing woman in stricken awe.

To them, as to all who sailed space, this woman ranked almost as a demigod. She and the immortal Roberta Roth had statues in their honor on every inhabited planet. And now they had found her on this far mystery world, not really living, yet not dead!

'So long—so long ago it was that I came here,' Clyme Nison was saying in her heavy voice, her shining eyes staring tragically into the haunted past. 'So long, since I left Earth on that fatal outward voyage that brought me to this doom.

'And yet there are times when all the long centuries of long death here seem but a moment, when it seems that it was only yesterday that I sailed with such high hopes. When it seems only yesterday that I toiled with Roberta to build that first ship of hers, and watched her roar out into space to glory.'

'You say there are others like you two on this world?' Joan Thorn asked unsteadily.

Nison nodded heavily. 'Aye, there are several hundred of us radioactive women wearily roaming this hellish world. All of them women who have come here in past centuries' and have been trapped, as I was trapped, by the deadly radiation. You are the first women I have ever seen come here and escape the doom that seized us.'

'We landed on that black meteorite mountain of asterium,' Thorn told her. 'And we ray-proofed our suits with the metal.'

'Ask her about the radite, Joan,' muttered Sua Av tensely. Jerkily, Thorn told the two glowing women what had brought them to Erebus. There was a brooding silence before Clyme Nison spoke.

'And you say that this radite will save the inner planets from dreadful conquest, if you can take it back?' she asked.

'We hope it will,' Thorn answered tensely. 'If Blaine's secret weapon is effective—'

'I do not see,' said the glowing woman slowly, 'what weapon or invention could ever defeat such a fleet as you say the outer planets have gathered.'

The old doubt and fear that Thorn had felt increasingly as the days went by, tautened her voice as she answered.

'We don't know either how Blaine can hope to do that, what the nature of her mysterious weapon is,' Thorn admitted. 'Yet, that secret of her is the one last possible chance to prevent the conquest of the Alliance.'

She voiced a desperate appeal to Nison. 'Earth is your native world, as Mars is that of your companion. It's to prevent the wreck and ruin of those two worlds, and of Venus and Mercury too, that we're asking you to help us find the radite.'

'I will help you,' Clyme Nison said slowly, her tragic radiant face heavy with thought. 'Though the Earth you serve cannot be the Earth of nine centuries ago from which I came, yet it is still Earth.'

Her glowing companion, the little Martian, Chana Gray, slowly nodded her head, and spoke to the Planeteers for the first time.

'Aye,' she said huskily. 'And I remember the Mars of five centuries ago—the pleasant desert cities, the sun shining on the polar snows. I would not want the hordes of the outer planets to devastate that.'

'You know where the radite lies?' Thorn asked Nison eagerly.

The glowing space-pioneer inclined her bead.

She turned and pointed westward through the swirling blue haze.

'In the mountains yonder, a lump of it lies. But it will be dangerous to try to take it,' she explained. 'The terrific emanations that stream from that mass of radite are more penetrating than any other. To the bodies of us radioactive women who wearily wander immortally over this planet, those powerful emanations of the radite are stimulating, as sunlight is to you. There are always some of us radioactive women gathered about that radite, basking in the grateful radiation from it.

'And all these poor creatures like myself will resist your taking the radite. For to bask in its emanations is almost the only pleasure they have in this terrible mockery of existence. Yet, with the safety of Earth and the inner worlds at stake, I will help you attempt to take the radite.'

Nison turned heavily, and she and her radiant companion looked back at the Planeteers.

After a moment, she spoke to Thorn. 'Follow us,' Nison's voice reached them. 'We will lead you to the radite.'

As they started on westward across the shining desert, forging through the luminous blue haze beneath the dark, star-studded sky. An unearthly party—the three Planeteers in their grotesque black ray-proof space-suits, led by the two glowing radioactive women.

'It's like a nightstallion'Gunda's voice reached Thorn, the Mercurian gripping her arm as they trudged along. 'This hellish world, haunted by these pitiful ghosts of women.'

'No wonder Martina Cain wouldn't tell anyone about what she'd seen here, when she got back,' muttered Sua Av.

* * * *

They forged on for hours, ever west across the dim desert. The Planeteers followed closely behind their glowing guides, but the three comrades were beginning to tire from the weight of their asterium-coated space-suits, while the two radioactive women showed no sign of fatigue.

'Damn the gravitation of this world!' Gunda gritted. 'It's as strong as Earth's, and it shouldn't be half that strong on a little planet like this.'

'The huge radioactive core of this world gives it its unusual mass,' Sua Av declared. 'And the radiation from it is responsible for the warmth that permits a gaseous atmosphere here,'

Thorn's heart quickened as she saw beyond their radiant guides, a low, barren dark range of mountains looming up through the haze.

'We're getting there!' Thorn cried eagerly.

Clyme Nison and her radioactive Martian comrade led them on through a pass between two peaks. The mountains towered a few thousand feet on either side, somber, bare rock slopes faintly luminous with the emanations throbbing from their radioactive atoms.

On into the tumbled peaks, through valleys thick with the shining blue haze, over long ridges, Nison led the way. For the space-pioneer who had wandered this dreary world for nine long centuries seemed to know each square yard of its surface.

They entered a deep chasm, a gloomy gorge with precipitous shining walls and a floor strewn with fallen masses of radiant rock. Along this the two radioactive women led the way. The shimmering sand of the chasm floor was deeply marked by a path, that had been trodden by many women coming and going in past times.

To the Planeteers, this gorge was an awesome and uncanny place. The great shining boulders through which the path wound, the feebly radiant cliffs that towered on either side, the strip of starry black sky far overhead, all combined to depress the spirit by their alien, forbidding atmosphere.

Through the blue, shimmering hazes that floated thick in the chasm, Clyme Nison and her companion led the way. At last Nison turned.

'The radite lies in a niche in the side of the cliff, just ahead,' she said heavily to the Planeteers. 'We must be careful now, for there are almost sure to be some of my poor fellow sufferers near it, bathing in its rays.'

'I hope not,' Gunda Welk muttered. 'If these radioactive women can't be killed, they'd be tough customers.'

They moved on, Nison and the glowing Martian leading, going more slowly and cautiously now.

As they rounded a turn in the crooked chasm, they saw ahead a place where the sand had been beaten down by many feet, over a long time. There was a small natural niche in the chasm wall there-but there was no radite in it.

'The radite's gone!' cried Clyme Nison in amazement, staring unbelievingly at the empty niche in the rock.

'Gone?' exclaimed Joan Thorn. Her heart sank with despair. 'Then Cheerly has been here ahead of us. She's taken the radite, and—'

'Listen!' Sua Av cried, turning her helmeted head sharply. 'Hear that?'

'They heard, then. A dim uproar of raging voices from farther along the chasm, punctuated every few moments by the rumbling thunder and crash of great rocks falling.

'What can it be?' Nison wondered, her radiant face perplexed.

'I have an idea what it is!' Thorn cried. 'Come on!'

They pressed on along the gloomy gorge. In a few minutes they had rounded another turn in it, and stopped short, petrified by the astounding scene ahead.

A few hundred feet ahead in the chasm was gathered a mob of dozens of glowing women. Radioactive women like Nison and the Martian, garbed in ragged remnants of clothing that showed they were of every time in the last nine centuries, of every world. Glowing women who had come to Erebus in past centuries and had been trapped here, transmitted into radioactive beings!

This crowd of glowing women was wildly seeking to storm a narrow ledge that jutted from the chasm wall a dozen feet up from the floor. With shrill, raging cries, the radioactive mob would scramble up to win the ledge, but would be repelled by the rocks rolled down upon them by the defenders.

The defenders of the ledge were three women clad in asterium-coated space-suits like those of the Planeteers. Behind them was another figure in a coated space-suit, but with arms bound together. And also on the ledge was a rude sledge of black asterium, upon which was tied a small mass of something that had been carefully wrapped in thick sheets of asterium.

'It's Cheerly and her women, and the bound figure is Lann!' Thorn exclaimed hoarsely. 'And that mass on the sledge—'

'Must be the radite!' Gunda Welk cried. 'Cheerly got the stuff from the niche, but the radioactive women caught her taking it!'
CHAPTER XIX

Cheerly's Cunning

THE SCENE was one out of nightstallion. The gloomy chasm of shimmering blue haze, the shining cliff upon a ledge of which the three spacesuited women desperately defended themselves, and the insanely shouting, raging mob of weirdly glowing radioactive women who attacked them.

Joan Thorn, her heart hammering at having come within actual sight of both Lann Cain and the precious raw radite, leaped forward. But the upraised warning hand of Clyme Nison stopped her.

'No!' said the glowing woman. 'That raging crowd of doomed ones would tear you to pieces if you tried to make your way through them. For very many of my fellow-sufferers on this world are crazed, made mad by our horrible existence.'

'We've got to get Lann and the radite out of there quickly!' Thorn cried. 'Cheerly and her women can't hold that mob off much longer!'

Cheerly and her two women were plainly being hard pressed. Only by snatching up shining rocks that lay strewn on the narrow ledge, and dashing them down at their attackers, could they keep the radioactive women from winning up to them,

'You run out of rocks soon and that'll be the end of them!' Sua Av exclaimed.

'Why the devil don't they use their atom-pistols?' Gunda demanded.

'They would be useless against such women as myself,' Clyme Nison declared sadly. 'I know a way to get onto that ledge farther back along the chasm. Follow me!'

The Planeteers raced back along the chasm after Nison and her companion. The glowing women swerved and started climbing up a narrow crack in the shimmering cliff.

Thorn and her comrades struggled to follow. By tremendous effort, they hoisted their heavy figures up after the two glowing women. They found themselves on a precariously narrow shelf of the rock wall.

Nison and the glowing Martian led the way now back along the chasm to the battle, following this narrow shelf. There were places where it was hardly a yard wide. But in a few minutes, they had followed it to a point where it connected with the ledge upon which Cheerly and her women were defending themselves.

Cheerly turned, appalled, as the Planeteers and their two glowing guides appeared. The Uranian, unrecognizable in her shapeless spacesuit and coated helmet, made herself known by the cry that vibrated from her as she saw them.

'Have you come from the ship to help?' Cheerly cried, not recognizing the Planeteers. 'How did you get here with those two glowing devils?'

'We came after you, Cheerly,' Thorn cried throbbingly. The Uranian shrank back as she heard Thorn's voice.

'The Planeteers!' she exclaimed wildly.

Lann stumbled forward, unrecognizable in his ray-proofed suit, but his silver voice wildly glad from inside it.

'Joan! Joan Thorn!' he cried. 'I knew you would follow somehow.'

Thorn, gripping his tightly for a moment, saw beyond his the little asterium sledge, and the mass upon it which was wrapped in the sheets of asterium Cheerly had prepared and brought. That mass was no more than four feet in diameter each way, and a corner of it that protruded through the hastily wrapped sheets showed that it was a huge chunk of dense matter blazing with intolerable white brilliance.

There was the radite, at last! The isotope that was the rarest element in existence, the block of blazing matter that contained locked within it incalculable power that might sway the future of the whole system!

'I knew you would escape from Saturn and come after us,' Lann was sobbing wildly. 'But I feared—'

'Joan, here they come!' Gunda Welk yelled wildly.

The radioactive mob below were scrambling up to the attack again. And this time, as though enraged by the appearance of the newcomers with two of their own glowing kind, the maddened mob of radiant women came with ferocious determination.

There was no time for Thorn to deal Cheerly the fate she deserved, no time for anything. The first of the glowing women was already scrambling onto the ledge!

Gunda fired her atom-pistol at them viciously. But the flare of blinding energy did not harm the glowing women. The emanations from their radioactive bodies simply repelled that energy.

'Use rocks!' Thorn yelled, stooping and picking up a chunk of shimmering stone and hurling it.

It knocked one of the glowing women off the ledge. But others were scrambling onto it. It became a wild battle to hold the ledge against them.

Clyme Nison and Chana Gray, the glowing Martian, fought by the side of the Planeteers and Cheerly's women. They seized glowing attackers and hurled them down. But still others gained the ledge, and it became a crazy hand-to-hand melee.

Thorn, struggling in the insane grip of one of the glowing women, saw others tear the helmet off one of Cheerly's followers. As the terrific radiation omnipresent on this planet struck the luckless Saturnian's unprotected face, she screamed like a hurt animal. And almost instantly, her face and body began to glow with that ghastly blue emanation.

The Planeteers fought with their metal-clad fists. Gunda Welk's great arms swept a clear circle around her, the big Mercurian roaring. Sua Av pulled off a glowing attacker who had leaped on Thorn's back and was trying to wrench away her helmet.

For minutes the crazy struggle went on. A fight with maddened lost souls on a planet of the damned! But with Nison and the Martian helping, the Planeteers forced, the radiant women back off the ledge. They gathered below, howling with fury.

Thorn turned quickly. Lann was stumbling to his feet from the back of the ledge.

'Joan, Cheerly's gone!' he cried. 'While you were fighting, she and her remaining woman slipped away along the ledge with the sledge of radite! They struck me down—'

Thorn whirled, wild with rage and apprehension. The cunning Uranian, seizing the opportunity when the Planeteers were engaged in the wild melee, had with her remaining follower stolen away with the radite. They could, be seen now in the distance, hurrying along the shelf by which the Planeteers had come to the ledge.

'After them!' Thorn cried.

They rushed back along the shelf, Nison and Chana Gray following joining in pursuit of the two fugitives. Rapidly they gained on the two fugitives who were encumbered with the sledge.

They saw Cheerly and her follower round a narrow place in the shelf ahead. As they rushed after them, atomic shells burst ahead and a mass of the shimmering cliff was dislodged by the flare of energy and fell in an avalanche across the shelf. It blocked the narrow way completely, halting the Planeteers.

'Cheerly used their pistols to cause that rock-fall!' Sua Av cried furiously.

'Down to the floor of the chasm! We'll follow that way and beat them back to the ship!' Thorn shouted.

'We can't!' the Venusian cried. 'Look, that mob has followed us!'

The maddened crowd of radioactive women below, seeing the Planeteers' party moving away along the narrow ledge, had followed along the floor of the chasm. They were gathered now below, preparing to climb up in furious attack once more.

'We're trapped!' Gunda Welk yelled. 'We can't go further along the ledge and we can't go down through that crazy mob!'

Already the crazed radioactive women were climbing up to the ledge. Lann uttered a hopeless cry.

Thorn swept his behind her, and she and her comrades and their two glowing friends sprang to repel the assault of the shining horde. With rocks, with their fists, with their clubbed atom-pistols, they beat back their insensate attackers.

But again and again the radioactive women came up at them. Time was dragging past. Thorn felt as though she were struggling in an endless nightstallion of horror and despair.

The radioactive attackers had limbs broken, bodies crushed in many places—yet still they came on. The flame of strange energy and life that throbbed in every atom of their bodies could not be extinguished or dimmed by any bodily harm.

As the glowing women below gathered for another charge up the rock wall,

Clyme Nison spoke to the exhausted, staggering Planeteers.

'I may be able to turn them,' said the space-pioneer. 'It is a chance to stop Cheerly..'

Thorn saw Nison step to the edge of the ledge and speak to the radioactive horde gathering again below. 'There is no use in attacking us any longer!' Nison cried to them. 'We do not have the radite. Those who took it from the niche have fled with it, and are escaping!'

A chorus of insanely raging yells answered her, as the half-crazy horde started forward to climb again to the attack. But a huge Jovian among the glowing horde held back her companions.

'Clyme Nison speaks truth!' she shouted. 'See, the radite is gone from the ledge and so are some of the women. We must scatter and search for the thieves!'

'Scatter and search!' went up the husky, furious shout from the radioactive mob.

They began to split up, starting along the chasm in both directions, searching carefully for Cheerly and the radite,

'By heaven, Nison, your idea worked!' panted Joan Thorn. 'Quick, now—we've got to get back to the meteorite-mountain. That's where Cheerly will have headed with the radite.'

'There's nothing for us to fear, since Stilicha and her women hold Cheerly's ship and crew prisoner,' Sua Av gasped.

'Cheerly must know something has happened to her ship,' Thorn retorted. 'That Uranian is a devil for cleverness.'

Thorn helped Lann as they scrambled down the rook wall, to the floor of the chasm.

And as they started at a trot back eastward, she half-supported, half-carried the staggering boy.

* * * *

Their two radioactive allies, Nison and the Martian, led the way out of the barren mountains. They saw none of the glowing horde, which had split in all directions to search furiously for the takers of the radite.

Lann, suffering from exhaustion and nervous reaction, could hardly walk. Yet he trudged valiantly with the last of his strength as they hastened over the dim desert.

'Joan, if we get the radite away from Cheerly now, will it be in time to save the Alliance?' he panted.

'Yes. Hasna Trask will not launch her attack until she hears from Cheerly that the radite has been secured,' Thorn told him. 'If we get the stuff back to Earth's moon, and if Philippa Blaine's weapon really works!'

She stopped, that goading doubt torturing her mind, that chilling, unvoiced fear that Blaine's mysterious invention might prove a failure.

The huge black top of the domed meteorite-mountain loomed slowly out of the shimmering blue mists, bulking darkly against the starry sky. They pressed toward its base, and were starting to climb up its rough asterium side, when a sound reached their ears. The roar of a ship's rockets tubes!

'Look!' Sua Av yelled frantically, pointing upward. 'The Gargol.'

The Saturnian cruiser was blasting off, rising from where it had been parked beside the Venture, with a reverberating roar of tubes. It shot up at dizzying speed, and disappeared in the dark

'God, Cheerly has got away in it, somehow,' Gunda cried hoarsely.

They scrambled frantically on up the mountain, driven by overmastering fear. When they came to where the Venture lay, they stopped, aghast.

A fight had taken place here. A half-dozen space-suited pirates lay in a scorched, dead heap. Other women in suits were running out from the Venture.

Out of that little crowd sprang a gray beast with blazing green eyes, that limped on a scorched leg as it bounded frantically toward Lann and nuzzled against him. After the space dog came Stilicha Keene, her wrinkled face recognizable through her glassite helmet.

'You brought the lad back!' she cried, joy lighting her faded eyes. Then as her face fell on the glowing forms of Clyme Nison and Chana Ora she gasped, 'But who—'

'What happened here? Who was in the Gargol when it took off?' Thorn cried fiercely.

'Cheerly—and that there radite!' groaned the old pirate. 'She fooled us, neat. She and her woman came up here a half-hour ago, dragging the radite on their sledge. They were wearing suits like yours, ray-proofed and with even the helmets coated, so we couldn't see their faces plain enough. And Cheerly imitated your voice so that I thought she was you, Joan Thorn!

'She said that she and Sua Av had brought the radite back, and that Gunda was following with Lann. We never suspected her, she imitated your voice so well, and we couldn't even recognize her fat figure in that shapeless suit. She took the radite into the Gargol, saying we'd use the Saturnian ship to return to Earth in. She even went into the Venture for a few minutes, I suppose to see if you'd any papers or secrets worth stealing.'

She fell silent.

'Go on, woman!' Thorn cried. 'How did she get away with the Gargol, when you had its crew under guard?'

'She did it easy,' groaned the old woman. 'She and her woman, posing as you and Sua Av, went into the Gargol. We didn't follow, never suspecting. And Cheerly and her woman blasted down our guards in there, set free her Saturnian crew, and took off, with a blast of their guns that killed six of our women!'

'And now she's on her way back to Saturn with the radite!' Gunda cried. 'We've got to catch her!'

'We'll catch her. The Venture can overhaul her!' Thorn cried. 'Into the ship, all of you! We're blasting off!'

They tumbled into the Venture, leaving the two radioactive women standing staring. Inside the craft, its doors closed, the Planeteers and Lann and Stilicha climbed to the control-room. The old pirate yelled urgently into the interphone.

'Power chambers on!' she ordered.

They heard the clash of the injectors below, and then the rising roar of the power chambers.

A terrific explosion shook the ship next moment. They were all thrown from their feet, and heard cries of pain and terror from below.

'Good God, something's let go!' Gunda yelled,

Thorn led as they hastily climbed down to the stern compartment that housed the four big power-chambers.

The compartment was a wreck. The power-chambers had exploded with frightful force, killing three pirate engineers.

'That damned Cheerly must have done this when she came into the Venture!' a wounded, staggering engineer gasped. 'The power-chamber safety was jammed—deliberately jammed!'

'Cheerly's won again, curse her!' Gunda yelled wildly. 'It'll take us days to rebuild these power-chambers, if we can do it at all. And by that time she'll be half-way back to Saturn!'
CHAPTER XX

At Uranus' Orbit

THE cruel stars above Erebus looked down upon a scene of strange activity. Out of the dimly shining deserts of that terrible world, out of the shimmering blue hazes that perpetually wrapped its surface, rose the huge black bulk of a rounded metal mountain. And on the top of that mountain, space-suited women who staggered from days of frantic labor were now nearing the end of their toil,

The Venture was being made ready for blast-off. New power-chambers had been built into the ship in the days that had passed. Lacking in inertrum with which to build the new chambers, Joan Thorn had used the metal of the mountain, the black asterium which was fully as strong as inertrum itself. With atomic furnaces and atomic welding-torches, the Planeteers and Stilicha's pirates had labored almost unceasingly to construct the new chambers. Lann Cain's order had been enough to make the pirates obey Thorn utterly.

Thorn had been torn with almost unbearable apprehension in these days of terrible toil. Each day, each hour, meant that Jen Cheerly was millions of miles farther toward Saturn with the radite. No one of them all, except Thorn herself, believed there was the slightest chance to overtake the spymaster now,

Gunda Welk and Sua Av, reeling with fatigue, stumbled up to where Thorn was superintending the last preparations.

'All ready, as far as I can see,' Gunda said hoarsely.

Stilicha Keene and Lann came up anxiously as she spoke.

'Boy, are ye crazy to think that you can overtake the Gargol when it's got days' start of us?' averred Stilicha.

'We'll overtake them,' Thorn said fiercely. 'We've got to!'

'But to do it, we'd have to travel three times as fast as any spaceship ever traveled before!' Stilicha exclaimed.

'That's what we're going to do!' Thorn clipped.

They stared at her, as though they believed her mind had been strained by the days of superhuman toil and anxiety.

'We're going to use radioactive matter for fuel in our power-chambers!' Thorn explained. 'It will yield several times as much power as ordinary metallic fuel. We can get up to a speed no ship has ever attained before!'

'But no one's ever dared use radioactive fuel before,' Lann whispered, stunned. 'It would crumble any power-chamber it was used in.'

'You forget we've got asterium power-chambers in the Venture now!'

Thorn cried. 'And asterium is proof against radioactivity. The daring originality of Thorn's plan burst upon the others, taking their breath away.

'By heaven, it may work!' Gunda exclaimed excitedly. 'If the power doesn't make our rocket-tubes back-blast.'

'We'll have to take that chance;'Joan Thorn said harshly. She turned. 'Here come Clyme Nison and Chana Gray now. They volunteered to bring the radioactive fuel we'll need.'

The two glowing figures of the radioactive women were coming up onto the top of the metal mountain, dragging after them the asterium sledge. Upon the sledge, in a rudely forged asterium box, was a great mass of shining mineral.

Thorn's quick orders superintended the pirate engineers as they carried the asterium box of minerals into the Venture, and prepared it for use, then Thorn turned to the two radiant radioactive women.

'We're ready to start,' she told Clyme Nison haggardly. 'We want you to come back with us, to Earth,'

Nison shook her shining head, sadly. 'That cannot be. We would be death to you. The radiation from our bodies would slay you, in time, and would disintegrate your ship.'

'But you can't stay here, wandering this hellish world forever!' Thorn cried. 'You, one of the greatest of women in the system's history, you whom Earth would welcome with joy.'

Clyme Nison's haunted, shining eyes looked past them, far away into tragic memory.

'To Earth I am dead, now,' she said slowly. 'And the Earth I knew nine centuries ago, is dead, too. It must remain that way. But one thing you can do for us.'

'Anything you mean!' Thorn exclaimed.

'You can give us poor damned souls upon this world, us radioactive women, the boon of real death,' Nison said.

'If scientists of Earth came here with the needed mechanisms, they could end the game of unhuman life within us by using forces to transmute the radioactive atoms of our bodies into pure energy, dissipating our atomic structure, our life and consciousness, forever. That is the greatest gift you could give us—the peace of death.'

Thorn felt a hard lump in her throat. It was moments before she could answer,

'It shall be done,' she choked. 'A party of scientists will be sent here to do what you ask.'

She turned toward the awe-stricken group behind her who were staring in deep silence at the tragic, glowing women.

'We must start,' Thorn said unsteadily. 'Into the ship!'

Inside the Venture, the Planeteers climbed again with Lann and Stilicha to the control-room, while the door was ground shut. They removed their space-suits, and then Stilicha nervously gave the order into the interphone.

'Power-chambers on!'

All stiffened, as from below came the soft, rising roar of the chambers, growing rapidly to a thunderous throbbing that shook the whole fabric of the cruiser. The radioactive fuel, being broken down in the power chambers, was yielding such unprecedented torrents of energy as to threaten a new explosion.

'Blast off!' Thorn told the old pirate.

Stilicha's thin hands descended on the firing-keys. With a raving roar of released titanic energy, a spuming plume of fire from their rocket-tubes, the Venture shot skyward.

Up from the domed metal mountain, up from the shimmering blue hazes of Erebus, the cruiser arrowed; picking up speed with appalling acceleration. Air screamed briefly outside, then faded away.

Night black space, starred with the bright yellow speck of the far-distant sun, lay ahead. Rocketing faster and faster, shuddering and creaking to the thrust of its tubes, the Venture flashed on,

Sua Av was hanging tensely over the instrument panel, and the Venusian's green eyes flashed at she turned.

'Instruments are operating again!' she reported. 'But our audio was permanently wrecked by the radiation of Erebus.'

'Lay a course straight for Saturn,' Thorn ordered Stilicha. 'Cheerly will be making straight for that world, and we'll be following her directly.'

Gunda Welk grunted.

'And if we catch up to her,' she gritted, 'I've got plans for what I'll do to that Uranian.'

'Shall I cut some of the tubes now?' the old pirate asked nervously. 'We're shaking now like we're fit to come apart.'

'No! Leave all stern tubes on for utmost acceleration!' Thorn rapped, her haggard, worn, brown face stiff with desperate determination. 'We'll either wreck this ship by back-blasting, or we'll overtake Cheerly—one of the two!'

Lann came silently to Thorn's side, looked up at her with a deep anxiety in his blue eyes.

'Joan, you must sleep a little,' he begged. 'For days you've been toiling and worrying. You'll collapse unless you rest.'

'Rest? How can I rest when the radite we've come through hell to get is millions of miles ahead of us!' Thorn said rawly.

* * * *

As the next hours passed, the rocket-tubes of the Venture continued to roar unceasingly, the ship quivering and creaking sickeningly. Their speed was mounting to momentous heights—already they were traveling faster than the fastest ship in the system's history.

And still the stern tubes roared, the Venture's velocity accelerated. Erebus faded to a dim speck behind them, vanished. The sun-star was brighter and bigger ahead, and the yellow spark of Saturn was largening dead, ahead.

Time passed, slow, tense hours that dragged into a full day, and then another. The exhausted Planeteers and pirates took turns sleeping and watching. They could not know how fast they were traveling now—the instruments were not calibrated for such tremendous velocity—but knew their speed must be an appalling one.

They neared the orbit of Uranus, and by now Saturn presented a perceptible disk ahead. Thorn haggardly watched the little glowing sphere of the aura-chart.

'Cheerly's ship can't be far ahead of us now,' she estimated. 'The highest speed the Gargol could attain would bring it about this far by now.'

Lann stood with his gold head by her shoulder, watching as tensely as she.

'There, Joan!' he cried in a moment, pointing.

In the fore of the aura-chart a red speck had appeared, a ship a million miles ahead of the Venture.

'That's the Gargol—it must be!' Thorn cried. 'Cut the stern tubes, Gunda!'

Gunda Welk, standing turn at the firing-keys, obeyed instantly. But the aura-chart showed they were still rushing after their quarry with such speed that they would flash past it. Thorn ordered the bow-tubes fired for the purpose of slowing them down.

As the ship rocked and quivered to the blasting brake-thrust of the tubes, Sua Av came up into the control-room, sleepily rubbing her eyes. Old Stilicha's anxious face was behind her.

'We'll come up to Cheerly soon,' Thorn rapped. 'That means a fight. She'll never give up that radite willingly.'

'The Gargol has heavier batteries than we do, and a bigger crew,' reminded Stilicha Keene.

'But we can outmaneuver them!' Lann said. He cried into the interphone to the pirate crew, 'On suits and prepare for action, women!'

'Go down and take command of our batteries, Gunda,' Thorn ordered. 'I'll take the controls. Suits on, everyone!'

In a few moments Thorn, in her space-suit now like the others, was poised over the firing-keys. Sua Av tautly watched the aura-chart, while Lann and old Stilicha peered ahead.

'We're close,' muttered the Venusian, her eyes on the chart.

'There's the Gargol!' Lann cried suddenly, pointing ahead through the glassite window. 'And they've spotted us!'

Thorn saw the Saturnian cruiser in the black, starry vault ahead-a long torpedo-like shape pluming white fire from its rocket-tubes as it put on all possible speed to escape. Jen Cheerly obviously had no desire to risk battle.

But the Venture, imbued with its unprecedented potential speed, swiftly came up on the tail of the naval cruiser. Now atom-shells began to burst in blinding flares near Thorn's ship as the Gargol cut loose with its stern guns.

'I'm going to run up under their keel!' Thorn called into the inter-phone. 'Try to score a hit on their stern tubes, Gunda!'

The Gargol veered around suddenly ahead, to bring its broadside batteries into play. The heavily-gunned cruiser loosed a brief hail of shells in the direction of the Venture.

But the pirate ship shot clear like lightning as Thorn smashed down a key. Swiftly, it veered after the Saturnian ship, seeking to run beneath its keel.

The Gargol rolled, to keep presenting its guns toward its enemy. For a brief moment the two ships rushed side by side through space, their rocket-tubes flaming and their guns pouring shell at each other.

Whizzing white flares of energy burst around the Venture, and it rocked wildly as it was hit. Red lights flashed on the panel before Thorn, warning that two keel compartments had been holed.

But Gunda's pirates were not idle. They were concentrating all their fire upon the Gargol's stern, hoping to wreck its tubes and completely disable the cruiser. The Saturnian ship volleyed upward through space in a sharp veering turn to escape that fire.

'We didn't get 'em!' Stilicha muttered. 'But they'll get us if we come too close quarters again. Their guns and inertrum armor are too heavy for us!'

'We're closing in again!' Thorn exclaimed, her black eyes blazing now. She called down to Gunda, 'Stand ready! And get those stern-tubes!'

Like two fighting hawks of space, locked in a death combat out here in the lonely immensity of starry space, the two ships maneuvered. Then again, using her superior speed, Thorn drove the Venture in close against the Saturnian ship.

Guns of the Gargol vomited shell that blinded Thorn as they broke around the Venture. She clung with wild recklessness to the side of the enemy, as Gunda's batteries let go.

'They're hit!' Lann cried, his blue eyes blazing with electric excitement.

The Gargol's clustered stern rocket-tubes had, been struck by a salvo of atom-shells that had blasted the tubes into a fused, horribly twisted mass of inertrum.

They saw the Saturnian cruiser rock wildly as the fused rocket-tubes backblasted. An instant later, they saw a vastly greater explosion rip out the whole stern wall of the Gargol, blowing mangled women and twisted metal into space.

'Their tubes back-blasted into the power-chambers, and the chambers themselves let go!' cried Sua Av, momentarily aghast. 'It must have killed almost everyone aboard!'

'We're going aboard the wreck!' Joan Thorn exclaimed. 'Take over, Stilicha, and run us alongside.'

The old pirate brought the Venture quickly alongside the silent, drifting wreck. Magnetic grapples hooked on, and then the Planeteers and Lann and a dozen pirates donned space-suits and clambered through the great hole that had been torn in the stern of the Saturnian ship.

The interior of the Gargol was a scene of utter devastation. The terrific violence of the explosion had bent solid inertrum like tin, had slain most of the crew outright. A few space-suited Saturnians who had survived dazedly raised their hands in token of surrender.

'The radite? Where is it''Thorn demanded fiercely of them.

'In the lower bow-compartment,' answered the stunned, shaking women.

The Planeteers pushed through the wreck toward that compartment. They burst into it, and Thorn sprang forward with a cry.

The asterium-wrapped mass of radite was in this metal chamber. But toward the precious element was crawling Jen Cheerly, her body badly crushed inside her space-suit, but with a heavy atom-gun in her hand. The Uranian, fatally injured by the explosion, was making a dying attempt to destroy the radite.

Thorn tore the gun from her hand. Cheerly looked up, her face livid graygreen inside her glassite helmet, her small eyes glistening with undying hatred.

'You've not won, Planeteers!' she choked. 'You're too late. I notified the Leader days ago by audio that I had the radite, and the League fleet rocketed then to conquer the Alliance! Already they're driving the Alliance navies sunward!

'And what is more,' she gloated in a dying whisper, 'Hasna Trask herself and a picked strong force have landed on Earth's moon and seized Philippa Blaine and her weapon! The radite is useless to you now!'

A last flicker of life throbbed in Cheerly's little eyes, a last gleam of triumph.

'I was always too clever for you Planeteers!' she choked. And then her broken body relaxed as death came.

Thorn looked up at the others, her brown face grave inside her helmet. 'If what she said is true—'

'I'll find out with the Gargol's audio!' Sua Av cried, and sprang toward the control-room.

When the Venusian came back, her face was pale, her green eyes stricken. She spoke unsteadily.

'It's true, Joan! I heard the audiocalls. The Alliance navies have retreated sunward past the orbit of Venus, attacked by the League's tremendous fleet. The inner worlds are in wild panic, and Hasna Trask is directing the League operations from the advanced base she's established on Earth's moon!'

Thorn's body sagged inside her space-suit. For the first time, ultimate despair claimed her.

'Then this radite that might have saved the Alliance is useless,' she said hoarsely. 'With Trask holding the moon—Blaine's weapon in her possession—the Alliance is doomed!'
CHAPTER XXI

The Fight on the Moon

LANA CAIN gripped Thorn's arm. The pirate boy's blue eyes blazed with compelling force into hers.

'No, Joan!' he exclaimed. 'There's still a chance. We can attack Trask's force on the moon and recapture Blaine's weapon. We can give Blaine a chance to operate it!'

'Recapture the moon?' Thorn echoed deadly. She laughed bitterly. 'With the few dozen of us, with this one ship, against the strong force Hasna Trask has there?'

'We can get a force strong enough to take the moon!' Lann cried.

'Where?' she asked dully. 'Every ship of the Alliance navies is inside Venus' orbit, retreating from the League fleet.'

'We can get a force at Turkoon!' the pirate boy flared. 'The Companions of Space—my pirates! There's enough of them to capture the moon, if they'll follow me!'

Thorn's dead, hopeless eyes lit with a faint spark of desperate hope. She gripped Lann's shoulders.

'It could be done!' she cried hoarsely. 'But will they follow you in such an attack, Lann?'

'I'm afraid they won't, lad,' Stilicha said apprehensively. 'To the Companions, the war between the League and the Alliance doesn't mean anything.'

'I think I can get them to follow me,' Lann insisted with desperate determination. 'It's the last chance for the Alliance, Joan!'

'We'll take it!' Thorn cried. 'Quick, get the radite into the Venture! Every minute counts now!'

With urgent haste, the precious radite was transferred to the pirate ship. Also the few dazed survivors in the Saturnian cruiser were brought along as prisoners by Thorn and her party. In a few moments it had been done, and Thorn ordered Stilicha to start.

'Top speed toward the Zone, Stilicha!' she cried. 'Everything may depend on how soon we reach Turkoon.'

Like a shooting star, the Venture swept sunward as it again built up to phenomenal speed. For hour after hour it raced toward the Zone, while the Planeteers and Lann took turns relieving the old pirate at the controls.

Thorn's state of mind was chaotic, hope alternating with despair. The knowledge that the long-menaced attack of the League had finally been launched, that the Alliance navies were desperately retreating from the overpowering armada of the outer planets, was a goading agony.

Stilicha was again at the firing-keys when the Venture at last swept into the Zone. Speed had necessarily been reduced, and Thorn chafed at the delay as the old pirate navigated through the wilderness of great meteor-swarms and planetoids.

Then Turkoon appeared, a pale green speck in the distance, largening rapidly. Down through the atmosphere of the pirate asteroid swept the ship, toward the field of parked ships that adjoined the straggling metal patch of Turkoon Town.

When they landed, Lann and the old pirate and the Planeteers were first outside the Venture. A crowd of hundreds of pirates and their men was approaching hastily from the town.

Thorn recognized Brun Abo, the scarred-faced Jovian pirate captain, and Kinne Queen, the handsome Earthwoman. They, and all the mass of hundreds of Companions, uttered shouts of joy as they recognized Lann.

'You're back, Lann! We thought you dead for sure!' shouted Brun Abo joyfully. Then the Jovian's face stiffened and her hand darted to her pistol as she recognized Thorn and Sua Av and Gunda. 'The Planeteers!'

'The Planeteers and Stilicha were the ones who rescued me!' Lann's silver voice rang out.

He faced the joyfully shouting mob of pirates gathered in the pale sunshine on the field. His white face was determined, as he spoke to them in quick, ringing words.

'Companions, you know of the attack the League is making upon the Alliance,' he began.

'Aye!' roared a pirate in the throng. 'We've heard on the audio. The latest word is that the League fleet has pushed the Alliance navies inside Mercury's orbit, and are trying to trap them and bring them to battle!'

'We can save the Alliance from defeat, Companions!' Lann cried, his blue eyes flashing. 'On Earth's moon is a great weapon that can defeat the League, if it could be used. But Hasna Trask and a strong force hold the moon. That weapon can't be used unless we pirates storm the moon, and recapture it!'

There was a dead silence. The pirates looked at each other. Then a tall Martian broke the silence.

'Why should we do that, Lann?' she demanded. 'Whether the League or the Alliance wins means nothing to us. Now, while this war is going on, is our chance to raid all commerce.'

'Does it mean nothing to you that the world of your birth is about to be conquered and enslaved by a tyrant?' Lann asked passionately. 'You, Kinne—you are an Earthwoman, will you let Earth be ground under Trask's heel? Both of you were born on the inner worlds. You may be outlaws and pirates now, but surely you have some patriotism left?

'And you, Brun Abo,' he continued scorchingly to the Jovian, 'you fled from Jupiter and became an outlaw to escape Trask's tyranny. So did nearly all you other outer-planet women. Now is your chance to strike back at the dictator who enslaved the outer worlds, and now is trying to enslave the inner ones also!'

'That's all very well, Lann,' grumbled Brun Abo. 'But I still don't see why we should fight for the Alliance.'

'Aye,' called a Venusian pirate. 'Let's do any fighting we do for ourselves.'

'You will be fighting for yourselves!' Lann flared. 'You'll be fighting to establish in the Zone the new, independent world I've dreamed so long of establishing here.'

Lann went on to tell them of his cherished dream of making an independent world of the Zone, that might be a refuge to all the oppressed of the system, in the future.

'That's what you'll be fighting for!' he finished fierily. 'For if Hasna Trask wins and dominates the whole system, that dream can never be realized. But if the Alliance wins, they'll help us establish our world here, from gratitude!'

The Companions' eyes were shining now as they listened. Lann's plan, revealed to them for the first time, had fired them with excited enthusiasm.

'We follow you then, Lann!' they yelled.

'Ah, now you're talking like true Companions,' cackled old Stilicha Keene.

'All ships prepare to blast off with full crews!' Lann's voice rang. 'We'll need every woman. Trask must have a heavy force of cruisers and women on the moon.'

'Ho, we'll show the cursed tyrant how the Companions of Space fight!' boomed Brun Abo.

Kinne King's eyes were burning.

'It will be good to strike a blow for old Earth,' she muttered, as she hurried off.

The jungle-surrounded field became a scene of intense, shouting activity as the hundred ships of the Companions were hastily prepared. Lann had ordered a new audio hastily installed in the Venture to replace its damaged one. He and the Planeteers listened to the storm of messages vibrating through the system, carrying word of the League's continued pursuit of the Alliance fleet,

'There's so little time!' Thorn murmured hoarsely. 'And, even if we can recapture the moon, if Blaine's invention fails—'

Stilicha burst into the control-room. 'All ships ready to start, lad.' she cried.

'Take over, Stilicha,' he ordered, and then spoke ringingly into the audio.

'Our course is straight sunward out of the Zone, then directly toward Earth's moon at top speed. Blast off!'

With a roar of tubes, the Venture leaped up from the field. And as it cometed up through the atmosphere of Turkoon, the five-score pirate cruisers were rising like a flock of falcons behind it, following its lead.

'Keep down our speed to the top speed of the others!' Lann told the old pirate.

Out through the Zone, a hundred strong, throbbed the grim formation of pirate ships, streaming in short columns after the Venture, that led the way through the swarms and whirling planetoids. Quickly they emerged from the Zone, and headed toward the bright, shining planet and smaller satellite that were Earth and its moon.

Thorn stared feverishly toward their goal, as the pirate fleet picked up speed in empty space. Somewhere there in the barren moon was Trask, and somewhere there, too, was the mysterious mechanism that might, or might not, decide the destiny of worlds.

Gunda Welk and Sua Av peered forth with her. The Planeteers, all three, sensed that they were approaching a showdown in their long struggle against the League dictator.

Lann watched from beside old Stilicha, the space dog, Ool, pressing anxiously against his side.

'Trask is sure to have a heavy force there with her on the moon,' he murmured. 'If we don't manage to break through—'

'We will!' Thorn exclaimed. 'You've set these pirates of yours on fire with that plan to establish the Zone as a new world. They feel now that they're fighting for their world, too.'

* * * *

Rocket-tubes spouting white fire from straining power-chambers, the pirate force swept on for hour after hour. At last they had crossed Mars' orbit and were thundering on at hazardous speed toward Earth and its satellite.

Earth largened ahead. Upon the great, gray, cloudy sphere, Thorn could glimpse the outlines of the familiar continents, the white sheen of the polar snows. And the moon was expanding, too—lifeless, gleaming white sphere, all its earthward face in full sunlight.

'Cut to landing-speed!' Lann cried into the audio, and the velocity of the pirate ships began to lessen.

Sua Av, from the 'scope eyepiece, shouted to Joan Thorn, who was now holding the controls of the Venture.

'League cruisers are pouring up out of Copernicus crater—at least a hundred and fifty of them!'

'Then Copernicus must be where Philippa Blaine's laboratories are, where Trask is now!' Gunda yelled.

'We'll hit those cruisers before they can form up for battle!' Thorn cried. 'On suits, everybody! Give the order, Lann!'

As the pirate boy shouted the order into the audio, the pirate ships grouped swiftly together into a phalanx of which the Venture was the apex. And as they drove straight down toward the lunar surface, the crews struggled hastily into their suits.

Thorn, at the controls, saw the sunlit surface of the moon rushing up toward them, an airless, white desert plain, with Copernicus crater almost directly underneath, the vast white blankness of the Mare Imbrium northward, and the towering Appenines northwestward.

Out of the circular crater of Copernicus, a fifty-mile plain surrounded by a ring of stupendous peaks, League cruisers were swarming up like startled hornets from their nest. But before they could gain altitude or fall into battle formation, the phalanx of pirate ships crashed down among them.

It was a whirling chaos of battle then for minutes, a raging dogfight of League and pirate ships low across the surface of the moon. Atom-shells clogged space with blinding flares, fatally hit ships went whirling down out of control to crash on the lunar desert, other ships collided in midspace and tumbled in a single twisted mass of wreckage.

But the Companions of Space maintained their formation. The pirates were fighting with traditional ferocity, pouring shells from every gun, increasing the disorganization of the League ships. Unable to form up, broken into scattered groups of ships that rapidly fell prey to the concentrated fire of the pirates, Trask's squadron was losing two ships to the pirates' one.

When but a score of the League ships survived, those survivors turned and fled back toward Copernicus. At once, Thorn swung the Venture around in the same direction.

'After them!' she shouted. 'Now's our chance!'

More than sixty pirate ships had survived that terrific battle above the moon. They raced after the Venture, toward Copernicus.

Thorn glimpsed the League cruisers landing in the great crater, their crews pouring forth in space-suits, retreating across the crater to where a great glassite window glistened in its floor.

Down into the crater swept the Companions' ships, landing near the deserted League cruisers. The Planeteers and old Stilicha and Lann raced down to the door of their ship, the excited pirate crew gathering to follow them out. 'Lann, you can't go with us!' Thorn cried.

The boy's eyes flashed inside his glassite helmet.

'I go!' he flared. 'I've led the Companions to battle before, and I'm leading them now!'

The door opened, and they poured out onto the surface of the moon, onto the floor of the giant crater. Out of all the other ships, the space-suited pirates were pouring in hundreds.

'Follow, women!' Lann's voice rang from his suit-audio. 'See, they run before us!'

The League sailors were retreating still toward that big glassite window set in the floor of the crater. They were firing back at the pirates with their atom-guns as they retreated.

The Planeteers and Lann and Stilicha led the pirate rush forward. And beside the boy bounded the blazing-eyed space dog. Ool was in her native element upon the airless surface of the moon!

Thorn saw that the League women were retreating into the entrance of a big airlock set in the crater floor beside the great window. An airlock that she knew must give entrance into the lunar cavern beneath that held Blaine's laboratory.

With a fierce rush, the pirates swept on. Women among them fell by dozens from the bursting shells of the enemy's guns. But they were firing back as they charged, using their atom-pistols with deadly effect as they ran. Old Stilicha was shooting with two weapons, her faded eyes burning inside her glassite helmet with fierce battle-light. 'They've jammed the airlock!' Thorn yelled. 'At them!'

The retreating League soldiers could not all pass through the airlock quickly enough. Down among those who were congested at its entrance swept Thorn and her wild followers.

The League women, hopelessly outnumbered, refused to surrender. Only when all lay dead could Thorn and her party advance through the door of the airlock, which led downward.

They poured into it, forcing open the inner door. Air whistled out past them, and from the blue-lit depths below atom-shells whizzed up at them. But they pressed savagely on, down the ramp below the airlock, down into the vast and gloomy lunar cavern.
CHAPTER XXII

Blaine's Weapon

THE cavern into which the Planeteers and their companions had fought their way was of huge dimensions, a thousand feet across and two hundred in height. It was illuminated by krypton lamps and by the flood of brilliant sunlight that poured in through the big glassite window in the rocky ceiling.

At the center of the cavern, under that window, loomed a colossal and unfamiliar mechanism. It was a great, gleaming chromaloy sphere, supported by girders above a massed complexity of power-chambers and generators. Everything else in the cavern was dwarfed by that towering, gleaming globe.

The space-suited League soldiers, both those who had retreated from outside and those in the cavern who had hastily donned their suits, were firing savagely at their attackers.

Thorn tried to keep Lann behind her as she advanced with Gunda and Sua Av at the head of the pirates, her atom-pistol hot in her gloved hand from firing.

'Gun them all down!' old Stilicha's shrill voice was crying from her suit audio.

'Joan, look—they're destroying the machine, over there!' Sua Av yelled, wildly pointing.

Thorn glimpsed where the Venusian pointed, far on the other side of the colossal mechanism. A little group of space-suited women there were firing into Blaine's huge machine with their atom-pistols, endeavoring to destroy its generators.

'Forward!' Thorn shouted. 'We've got to stop them.'

They rushed forward. And ahead of them bounded the space dog, Ool, great-fanged jaws yawning wide!

Reckless of their own lives, maddened with apprehension, the Planeteers shot their way forward through the disorganized mob of League defenders.

With Lann Cain now close behind them, they forced through to the other side of the gigantic machine.

Thorn recognized the tall, spacesuited figure of the leader of the little group who were trying to destroy the mechanism. The face inside that glassite helmet was the bony green face and insanely raging eyes of Hasna Trask.

'Throw down those guns!' 'Thorn yelled through her suit-audio. 'Surrender!'

'I'll surrender this way!' Trask's crazed, harsh voice came back.

The dictator shot at Thorn in the same instant. The little shell flicked past Thorn and exploded behind her—and Lann Cain sank to the floor as the blinding flare touched his side.

Wild with rage, Thorn raised her gun to fire. But Ool was ahead of her. The big space dog, eyes terrible as it saw its master fall, arced through space in a leap straight at Trask.

The huge jaws closed upon the throat of the dictator's space-suit and tore. The other League women beside Trask shrunk back appalled, raising their hands in surrender.

The battle in the cavern behind the Planeteers was over. The remaining League defenders, seeing their Leader fall, raised their hands in surrender also, dropping their weapons.

Thorn was bending frantically over the fallen pirate boy.

'Lann!' she cried.

'I'm ... not much hurt,' the boy stammered, stumbling up with her help. 'The side of my suit is scorched. I threw myself aside to avoid the shell, and that's why I fell.'

He sprang unsteadily forward, and gripped Ool's collar to pull her off the prostrate dictator. But it was too late. The space dog's great tusks had ripped through Hasna Trask's suit and torn her throat.

Trask looked up at them with pale eyes curiously drained of emotion.

'I ... would have ruled the system for its own good,' she murmured. 'I would have—' She sighed, and was still.

So a dictator died...

* * * *

Thorn straightened, shaken. The airlock doors had been closed and oxy-generators were throbbing. And old Stilicha, her helmet off and face still flaming with battle-light, came forcing through the excited pirate throng with another woman.

'Found this fellow prisoned in a separate chamber,' the old pirate shrilled. 'She says he's—'

'Philippa Blaine!' Sua Av shouted.

Blaine, greatest of Earth physicists, the woman who had built the mysterious mechanism that towered over them!

She was a thin, frail-looking little woman, with disheveled gray hair and wide eyes frantic with anxiety.

'Trask made me a prisoner when her force captured the moon!' she babbled. 'She tried to make me tell her what my machine is, how it's operated—'

'Blaine, we've brought you the radite that will operate this thing!' Joan Thorn cried. 'But even now the Alliance navies are being cornered inside Mercury by the League fleet. Can you save them with this thing?'

Blaine's eyes flashed. 'You've brought the radite? But some of my generators have been damaged!'

The little physicist sprang forward, bending with wild anxiety over the fused generators that had been wrecked by Trask and her women in those last moments.

'Can you repair them in time?' Thorn asked with feverish tensity.

'I can try,' Blaine rasped. 'I have spare generators in my supply cavern, but it will take time to install them.'

'For God's sake, hurry!' Thorn begged. 'Gunda, take some women and bring in the radite from the Venture!'

Pirates under Thorn's direction hastened to carry in the spare generators from the supply cavern adjoining. Blaine began the task of installing them, the little physicist working alone, none of the hundreds of others in the cavern able to assist her.

Thorn looked up haggardly through the great window in the ceiling, at the blazing sun. Somewhere there in the burning reaches of space near the flaming orb, the combined navies of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars were seeking to elude the League armada bent on their destruction.

Sua Av came running up to where Thorn stood rigidly with Lann.

'Joan, I got a flash from Blaine's audio just now!' the Venusian panted. 'The League fleet has divided into two forces and is boxing our navies five million miles off Mercury!'

'Can't you hurry, Blaine?' Thorn begged the little scientist desperately.

'I'm ... almost through,' panted the physicist. She was gasping from exhaustion, as she made her last connections.

'This thing won't save our navies. It can't save them!' groaned Gunda Welk. 'How can a machine here inside the moon affect a space-battle sixty million miles away?'

'Ready ... now,' gasped Philippa Blaine. 'Bring me that radite!'

The Planeteers hauled forward the asterium-wrapped mass of radite. With tongs Blaine tore away the protective asterium sheets. The unveiled radite blazed with dazzling white radiance, like a solid chunk of the sun.

Blaine rolled it into the injector-hopper of her power-chambers, with the tongs. She slammed down the lid, and then stumbled toward the huge switchboard set in the cavern wall.

'Stand back, all of you!' she panted.

Her trembling hands moved rapidly among the switches and relays of the panel. And the power-chambers below the gleaming sphere began to throb with mounting energy.

Louder and louder throbbed the massive chambers as the radite was disintegrated inside them to produce such concentrated power as had never before been produced in one place. And now the proton-turbines of the great generators were droning loud, adding to the deafening throb of the chambers.

Blaine watched her gauges with feverish eyes, while the Planeteers and their companions stood rigid, watching

'Almost voltage enough,' Blaine murmured hoarsely. 'Almost—now!'

She closed another switch. And then—

* * * *

Blackness! An utter darkness that enveloped them in a split-second of time, a rayless obscurity such as none of them had ever experienced before.

Thorn looked up bewilderedly, toward where the sun should be blazing down through the ceiling-window. But there was no sunlight now—no light of any kind—nothing but blackness.

'Blaine, what's gone wrong?' she cried hoarsely. 'This darkness—'

'Nothing has gone wrong!' shrilled Philippa Blaine's thin voice triumphantly. 'My neutralizer, my great invention, has succeeded! I knew it would if I had power enough!'

'You mean that it's this machine that has killed all the light here in the cavern?' Joan Thorn cried.

'It's done more than that!' Blaine exclaimed. 'It's killed all light everywhere! I've blacked out the whole Solanr System!'

A babel of cries of terror rose from the throng in the cavern, above the thunderous throb and drone of the great machine.

'Killed all light in the solar system?' Thorn gasped. 'Impossible!'

'The neutralizer has done it, I tell you!' Blaine shrilled exultantly.

'It broadcasts a damping wave that neutralizes and kills all vibrations in the electromagnetic spectrum from three to eight ten-thousandths of a millimeter in wave-length. That includes the whole range of visible light, and the terrific power of this radite-powered generator casts its vibrations out over a radius of eight billion miles, embracing the whole Solanr System.

'There is not one ray of light now in the whole system, on any world, anywhere-neither sunlight or starlight nor artificial light of any kind. Every world and every mile of space in the system has been plunged into utter darkness. And it will remain in darkness as long as the neutralizer is kept on!'

The stupefied Thorn felt Blaine shove something into her hand. It was a small pair of eye-lenses.

'Put those on!' Blaine's voice came in the darkness.

Joan Thorn put the lenses over her eyes. She cried out in amazement, She could see, through the lenses, by a dusky red light that seemed to permeate everything. The sun blazed crimson and weird in the heavens above the glassite window.

Sua Av and Gunda, and Lann and old Stilicha were also staring wildly up through the lenses the little physicist had given them. Blaine herself wore the lenses on her eyes.

'You are seeing by light normally invisible to your retinas, light above the wave-length of ordinary light,' Blaine told them. 'The so-called infra-red vibrations, which are unaffected by my neutralizer, and which are made visible to your eyes by these fluorescent lenses.'

'But what good will blacking out the whole solar system do the Alliance navies?' Gunda Welk cried. 'The League fleet won't be able to see or maneuver, but neither will our ships!'

'The Alliance ships will be able to see!' Blaine retorted. 'Each Alliance cruiser has been furnished with a supply of these fluorescent lenses, during the last year. They were given secretly to each cruiser's captain, without telling her anything except she was to use them in case of sudden darkness in space. They'll use them now, there off Mercury, and—'

'And they'll be able to see and to overpower the blinded League ships without a struggle!' Saul Av shouted.

Joan Thorn's heart bounded with wild, newborn hope. She clutched Lann feverishly to her side.

'If it works!' she prayed. 'If it only works!'

They gathered around Blaine's audio. Out of it, as the physicist turned it on, came panic-stricken calls from worlds plunged into absolute darkness, from blinded populations.

The whole system was seething in a turmoil of mad fear. Crowds stumbling blindly through the darkness of lightless streets were screaming that the end of the universe had come. Others were wailing that they had been suddenly stricken with blindness.

An hour passed. The intensity of the group around the audio increased. Appalling news of hysterical panic was growing.

'This can't go on!' Lann exclaimed shakenly. 'It's destroying all civilization in the system—'

'Listen!' Thorn cried suddenly.

Out of the audio came a hoarse, familiar voice—the voice of Richelle Hoskins, Chairwoman of Earth.

'Blaine! Philippa Blaine!' she was calling. 'This is the Chairwoman! We've won! Commander Leigh has just audioed me that her Alliance forces off Mercury have captured the whole League armada! Every League ship, its women utterly blinded, was forced to surrender under threat of being destroyed by our own cruisers.

'And I've called authorities on the outer planets. They've agreed to declare the war ended, to terminate Trask's rule and set up popular government again, and to dissolve the League of Cold Worlds into four independent planets again!'

'Trask herself is dead!' Joan Thorn called back into the instrument.

'You Planeteers are safe?' cried the Chairwoman's voice. It throbbed with emotion as she added, 'I knew you would bring the radite in time, Thorn. I knew you would!'

'Shall I turn off the neutralizer now?' Philippa Blaine asked, and the answer came back swiftly.

'Yes! Give the system light again, Blaine!'

The little physicist leaped to her control-panel. Her switches clicked. The droning of the generators and the throbbing thunder of the power-chambers died.

And suddenly light blazed about them! Not the dusky red infra-red rays by which they had been seeing through the lenses, but brilliant, blessed sunlight pouring through the window in the ceiling.

'We've won!' Sua Av was shouting, her ugly face wild with joy., 'The Alliance safe now—the menace of the League gone forever!'

'And that machine did it. That thing in front of us did it!' whispered Gunda Welk, incredulously staring.

Lann's blue eyes were shining as he looked up at Thorn.

'It means the realization of my dream and my mother's dream, Joan. A new independent world built up in the Zone. You'll help me build it?' She held his close, tears standing in her eyes, unable to speak for the moment in the flood of her emotions.

Then they all stared amazedly at Philippa Blaine, who had crumpled down beneath her switch-panel with her face buried in her hands. The little physicist looked up shakenly at them.

'I hope I never have to use the neutralizer to black out the system again!' she said hoarsely. 'I felt when it was on that I was trespassing against the command of the One who said, 'Let there be light!''
CHAPTER XXIII

Epilogue

From Mercury to Pluto,

From Saturn back to Mars—

LUSTILY the old song of the Companions of Space was roaring from hundreds of throats, resounding across the huge sunlit spaceport of great New York, Lann's pirate followers, after being feasted and honored for weeks on Earth, were trooping out to their ships to follow their leader back to the Zone. And that roaring chorus that always before had inspired dread was now greeted by a tremendous cheer from the vast throng gathered around the spaceport.

At the edge of the spaceport stood a little group—the Planeteers, Lann, old Stilicha Keene, and the big space dog that pressed close to its master. Facing them were Richelle Hoskins, Chairwoman of Earth, little Philippa Blaine, and grim-faced Commander Leigh. Drawn up to one side were solid ranks of gray-uniformed women of the Earth Navy, an honor-guard of many thousands.

'I don't know what to say to you Planeteers,' the Chairwoman told them unsteadily. 'You know what you've done, the whole system knows, and will never forget. But I wish you'd stay here.'

Joan Thorn smiled, her arm around the slender waist of the pirate boy.

'We're going to be needed out there in the Zone, sir,' she answered. 'It's not going to be so easy to bring law and order to those wild asteroids, even though you've caused all eight plants to recognize the Zone as a ninth independent world.'

'Curse me if I like this idea of me sidin' with law and order after all these years,' grumbled old Stilicha, her wrinkled face dismayed. 'All I know is piracy, and—'

'You'll like it, Stilicha,' Lann told her fondly. 'We'll need a strong space-police to cover the whole Zone, and it will take plenty of force to subdue some of the outlaw asteroids.'

'Plenty of fighting, ye say?' echoed the old Martian. She spat rial juice thoughtfully. 'Well, maybe at that it might—'

'Every world in the system will have only friendship for the Zone,' the Chairwoman told them earnestly. 'Now that the League is gone forever, and popular government restored on the outer planets, I hope and pray that interplanetary war is over forever.'

'And the scientific expedition to Erebus?' Joan Thorn asked.

'It rockets off next week,' the Chairwoman said, a deep sadness in her eyes. 'It carries sufficient cyclotron equipment to bring dissolution and peaceful death to the doomed ones of Erebus.'

A hush fell upon them all. And then the Chairwoman, her fine face working with emotion, shook their hands in farewell.

Lann started to move away, but Thorn checked him.

'I've a wedding present for you, Lann,' she said diffidently. 'I had the Chairwoman re-open the old case of your mother's dismissal from the Earth Navy. The investigation was impartial, and showed that in fact Martina Cain was unjustly cashiered from the navy because of the conspiracy of a jealous cabal.'

Lann's eyes widened startledly, and clung to Thorn's.

'Joan, you mean—'

'Listen!' she said.

Commander Leigh had turned and was loudly reading a paper to the solid gray ranks of naval officers and women.

'Order of the Earth Naval Staff, June fourteenth, Twenty-nine-fifty-six: Martina Cain, deceased, is hereby posthumously returned to full rank of captain in the Earth Navy, and her name is ordered inscribed at Headquarters on the roll of officers who have served with honor.'

Lann was crying. 'My mother's name, where she always longed for it to be.'

The sixty pirate ships were waiting. They moved out to the Venture, and Stilicha climbed inside. But they were all surprised when Gunda Welk drew back from the door.

'I'm not going with you, Joan,' the big Mercurian rumbled. 'I didn't know how to tell you all before, but this is good-by.'

Thorn was startled. 'Gunda, you're not going to separate from us now? Not after you and Sua Av and I have been so long together?'

'What's the matter that you want to break us three up now, Gunda?' Sua Av asked, her ugly face distressed.

Gunda avoided their eyes. She stared off into space with brooding cold blue eyes, her massive countenance queer.

'You're getting married and that changes things,' she told Thorn. 'It can't help but change things.'

Her voice deepened. 'There were three comrades from different worlds, and they raised a racket from Mercury to Erebus in their time—three Planeteers who did some things that the system won't soon forget. But one of them got married, and that was the end of the Planeteers.'

She shrugged heavily. 'But I suppose we had to split up some time. Just because three fellows go through hell together with a grin doesn't mean that they have to stay together afterward. I'm wishing you good luck, Joan, and you, Sua.'

Lann stepped forward, and looked up with steady searching blue eyes into the Mercurian's massive, brooding face.

'Gunda, when we fought together and spaced together, I did my part, didn't I?' he asked quietly.

'Of course!' she rumbled. 'I'd fight the woman who says you're not the staunchest, bravest boy in the system.'

'Then Joan and I marrying isn't going to break up the Planeteers,' he told her. 'It's going to give you another comrade, that's all. And all four of us together, won't be too many for the work of making a civilized world out of the Zone.'

Gunda stared at Lann, and slowly her craggy face relaxed. She looked from his to Joan Thorn.

'Four of us together? And plenty of trouble ahead? Then I stick!'

She turned toward Sua Av, and shoved the grinning Venusian toward, the door of the ship.

'What the devil are you hanging back for?' she rumbled. 'Don't you know that we're needed out in the Zone—we Four Planeteers!'

THE END

Coming Soon

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn

The Saturn Mistress – Tara Loughead

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Valley of the Flame – Henrietta Kuttner

Also by Jekkara Press

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn

01. Blood Demons of Titan - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17303

The warriors Bulays and Ghaavn hunt demons and their master through the dim and dusty streets of Barnes, on Titan. Can they stop him before he completes a devastating ritual?

02. Death Queen of Neptune - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17548

Bulays and Ghaavn are called in to investigate why a frontier base on Neptune has gone silent. Ice monsters and an ancient, beautiful evil await.

03. She Devils of Europa - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17662

One of the richest women in the Solar System asks Bulays and Ghaavn for help in stopping a series of thefts. There is a mystery to solve at the most expensive resort in existence, The Europa. Larceny, magic and dancing await, in an all expenses paid evening.

04. Shadow Emperor of Phobos: The Martian Moon War Part 1 - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17952

Bulays and Ghaavn try and stop a underworld shooting war. First they must get past a Martian Shadowcat, employ surprising combat techniques, and try and reason with Ghaavn's criminal mentor.

05. Desert Empress of Deimos: The Martian Moon War Part 2 - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18087

Bulays and Ghaavn are caught in the middle of a crime family war. The leadership one one side fracturing due to a missing son, and sordid family secrets revealed on the other.

06. Heart Breakers of Hyperion - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18328

Aliens from outer space are stealing parts of our women. And all of our men. Bulays and Ghaavn

have to go undercover in the notorious brothel Madame Khan's to stop it. With Emar, the Death Queen of Neptune as their Mistress!

07. The Gebriahl Setup – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18462

Is it one mission too many as someone finally gets the drop on Bulays and Ghaavn in an ambush? Plus, what happens when the Death Queen of Neptune goes to a wedding?

08. Vampire Masters of Mercury - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18618

Someone is killing the Thermpires of the Twilight Belt, on Mercury. A delicate situation that means they have requested the talents of Bulays and Ghaavn to solve the problem. And where is her cousin, Bulayd?

09. Miranda Blaze: [The Karshi Imperative Part 1] – Tara Loughead

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18926

A squadron of Karshi singleships make an exploratory strike near Uranus. Bulays and Ghaavn are on the ground, and so, it seems, is one of Ghaavn's old friends. And speaking of old, the Death Queen of Neptune has relatives?

10. Wolf Woman of Luna – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19004

Ghaavn asks Hannah Kang out – to go werewolf hunting with Bulays on the Moon, just out from Zevon City. Can the relationship between a man's man and a woman's woman work, when one is a secret agent superhero, and one a vampire? Plus, Wing meets a new friend.

11. Amazon Arena of Mars – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19125

A dangerous old friend stalks out of Bulays' past, as she finds herself back-to-back with Erica Joan Stark in the gladiator arena of the Slave Pits of Valkis!

12. Zombie Mafia of Tavros – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19140

The best gunwoman in the Solar System comes looking for Ghaavn, to settle an old slight. The only man with a chance to beat her is another of Ghaavn's enemies. The only problem is that he is also dead.

13. Skathi-Tooth The Karshi Imperative Part 2] – Tara Loughead : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19277

Ministry intelligence suggests a Karshi raiding party has an interest in an ancient object on Skathi, a small moon of Saturn. Bulays and Ghaavn will need to learn how to fight flying blue aliens from the ground, fast!

14. Rent-Boys of Jove – Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19440

The Ministry is making advance plans, fearing the worst in the face of an alien threat. This means making a deal with the top crime organisation in the system. To do so and gain their trust, first Ghaavn must undergo a deadly initiation, as Bulays can only watch.

15. I, Lysithea [The Karshi Imperative Part 3] – Tara Loughead : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19662>

Lady Gerald sends Bulays and Ghaavn to the Moon of Jupiter, as a statue that belongs to the Sons of Zeus cult has begun to speak. It talks of the future, and blue aliens from outer space.

16. A Taste For Death Queens [The Karshi Imperative Part 4] – Tara Loughead : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19668>

The Death Queen of Neptune and the Head of the Ministry know the danger is growing. The Secret Defenders of the Solar System need both help and a bond if they are going to prevail against an unknown alien threat. The High House Htapele can provide this, with a five-way royal ritual of blood and sex.

17. Devil Fighters of Titan – Tara Loughead : <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19994>

Bulays finds out that there really are shapeshifters from another universe eating frozen heads. With beautiful demon fighters from another dimension tracking them down to kill them. However, there are far more dangerous things than demons stalking in the Titan moonlight.

18. The Impossible Venusian [The Karshi Imperative Part 5] – Tara Loughead : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20191>

Bulays and Ghaavn take Wing and her friend Jacqui the werewolf girl to the Space Circus. For the Space Family Alynbard, the Topless Aerialist Trio of Titan, it is a good thing they did as Karshi assassins are on the prowl.

19. Slave Ship of Space – Tara Loughead : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20448>

Gerald's political enemy asks for help, a request she can't refuse. The Senator's party girl nieceis missing, and she wants her back. Bulays and Ghaavn are undercover again, but this time they are the masters, and the Omega Twins Zed and Zee are the slaves. They'll need all of their talents and an old acquaintance to get out of this one alive.

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Devil In Iron, Respawned Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17775

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. A resurrected demon menaces Conyn on an island fortress, along with other monsters.

The Pool of the Black One, Reswum Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17773

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.

Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17969

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn encounters deity impersonation, tries for treasure, boys and ape monster fighting.

Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18035

Conyn survives the slaughter of her pirate colleagues and finds a man to fire her blood. Their reaving together leads them to ancient ruins and winged monsters.

Red Nails, Polished Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18096

Conyn finally catches Valerian of the Red Brotherhood, and the pair end up fighting for their lives against a sorcerous death cult in an ancient city.

Beyond the Black River AgainConyn the Barbarian] by Roberta E. Howard : [http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18137

Conyn signs up as a scout in Pictish territory, and gets involved with his partner in a border war against the wizard Zogara Sag and her cult of followers.

Scarlet Citadel Retaken [Conyn the Barbarian] by Roberta E. Howard : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19901>

Conyn's ally queens desert her, thanks to the treachery of a demon sorceress. Brought before them in chains, she is soon to be fed to a giant serpent.

Solomyn Kane Relentless (Solomyn Kane) - Roberta E. Howard : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18677

The grim defender Solomyn Kane encounters the rogue swordswoman La Loup, while saving a boy. Then again in darkest Africa, where witchcraft, giant women and monstrous apes await.

The Bull Dog Breed Retrained (Sailor Stef Costigyn) – Roberta E. Howard : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20525>

Stef is not too popular with the Old Woman of the Sea Boy, so she goes ashore and takes her also in trouble bulldog Mika with her. When a Frenchwoman sinks the boot into Mika, well, a woman who doesn't stick up for her dog is the lowest of the low. Stef and Frances have to settle this with five ounce boxing gloves.

Worms of the Earth Reburied (Bryn Mark Morn) – Roberta E. Howard : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20538>

Bryn Mak Morn, under an alias, is forced to watch one of her countrywomen crucified. The Roman consul taunts her during the execution, and barbarian Pict queen Bryn swears dark revenge, enough to horrify her fellows. She seeks a Door into the underworld, so she can make Titia Sulla suffer, by the arts of R'lyeh and the Ring of Dagon.

Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18143

Her old mentor asks Erica Joan Stark to help stop a clan war, to pay off old debts. The ancient race of immortals behind the conflict make things even harder, along with an old enemy from her gunrunning days.

Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) \- Lee Brackett : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18145

Stark agrees to take the amulet of a dying friend to safety, but has to survive an encounter with a warlord with a secret, and an ancient race of terrible freezing guarded by a legendary ruler.

Enchantress of Venus Dispelled (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18655

Stark must cross the Seas of Venus to find a missing friend. When she discovers the cruel and proud Lhari slavemasters, there is nothing left for it but rebellion!

The Dragon-Queen of Venus Rescaled – Lee Brackett

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19574

Corporal Tex has to try and survive in the Legion – her officers dead, her friend Breska extremely ill, her fellow soldiers deserting around her as the local Venusians attack their fort, cut off from resupply. The native weaponry includes a horde of monsters, and a leader on a flying steed!

The Beast Jewel of Mars Reshone – Lee Brackett : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19884>

Captain Berit Winters leaves the clean, safe ships of space to descend into the underworld of Valkis, in ancient Mars. Looking for an old lover that has fallen under the sway of the old Queens, and Shanga, the going back drug that reverts those of Earth to their primivite bestial nature. Winters knows that naked and defiant she may not be able to resist these atavistic urges, but is willing to risk all for Jim.

The Vanishing Venusians Reseen – Lee Brackett : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20099>

Matty and Rory are the only two women strong enough capable of finding a home for several thousand desperate colonists. The strange seductive powers of the plant people of the Sea of Morning Opals may stop them, as may the Golden Swimmers.

The Blue Behemoth – Lee Brackett : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20281>

Jix is the manager of a fleabitten low rent space circus for Beccie Shannon. They are broke, so when someone offers them cash they have to take it, or starve. One rampaging Venusian swamp monster, and all hell breaks loose – can carny talents save them?

The Tree of Life Revisited (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18157

Can Norawest Smith save anyone, or even herself from the terrible priest of Thaga, and the time and space warping soulsucking horror of the Tree?

Song In A Minor Key Retuned (Norawest Smith) \- Cathan L. Moore : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18155

Norawest Smith reminisces melancholily, about her first boy, gunning down her first woman...

A Princess of Mars Rethroned (Joan Carter) – Edna Rice Burroughs : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18663

When Virginian Captain Joan Carter is strangely transported to the red planet, Mars, she must learn a new way of life, and a new way to love, with Dejar Thoris, Prince of Helium. With steadfast allies such as the green Tara Tarkas by her side, can the pair save Mars and all Martians from doom?

The Gods of Mars Revoked (Joan Carter) – Edna Rice Burroughs : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18667

Joan Carter is back on Mars, and Mars badly needs her. As do Dejar Thoris, who is missing. Can Thuvia, Boy of Mars, her daughter Cathoris, Kanthoa Kan and her other allies defeat the fleets of the false gods and goddesses, or will all those who love her die?

Warlord of Mars Embattled (Joan Carter) – Edna Rice Burroughs : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18672

Joan Carter of Mars has secrets to uncover in the Temple of the Sun – holding a revolving prison that can only be entered once a year - if she is to have any hope of rescuing three Princes of Mars, from the fantastic ancient Martian North.

Tarzan of the Apes Reswung (Tarzyn) – Edna Rice Burroughs :

Joan Clayton and husband end up stranded in Africa, unable to survive. Their young daughter is taken in by a band of smarter apes. Raised to adulthood by her beast family, she becomes Tarzyn the Apewoman, one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known. Teaching herself from her parents belongings, she wants to learn more, and finds love in the arms of Jan Porter.

The Valor of Cappea Verra Recapped (Cappea Verra) - Poula Anderson : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/18274

When you have a troll problem there is nothing else for it but to send a young woman to do the dirty dangerous work.

Sargasso of Lost Starships Rehidden – Poula Anderson : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19367

Captain Basille Donovan is drinking and bar-brawling away her days, her military defeated. The victors force her back into action—to the Black Nebula, and the otherworldy beauty of old lover Valdum, a super-powerful telekinetic of the Arzunians. A bloody conflict of humans versus psi-wielding chaotic alien terrors!

The Virgin of Valkarion Reheld – Poula Anderson : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19651>

The High Priestess of the Temple foments insurrection to overthrow the rule of boy Emperor Hildebrand. Hunted, he meets Alfrid of Aslak, an outland barbarian. She fires his heart, this heathen warrior out of ancient prophecy. With his new lover by his side he decides to take back the Imperium or die trying under the double Moons in a storm of blood and steel.

Witch of the Demon Seas Resailed – Poula Anderson : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19659>

Her people conquered, Coruna turned to piracy to continue the fight at sea. However, her luck has run out. Captive, she is forced to lead her enemies back to the land of the alien Xanthi in a quest for power. Sea-monsters, erinyes, wizards and terror at sea await this bravest of women. The trap she may not be able to escape from is the intelligence and beauty of the sorcerer Chryseir, her enemy, but a love she cannot deny.

Honorable Enemies [Dominique Flyndy] – Poula Anderson : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20337>

Captain Dominique Flyndry, super Agent of the Terran Empire has met her worst nightstallion. An opposing spy that is a telepath. The bird woman Aycharaya can read her mind and know her every move! Even worse, she likes the woman after she saves Flyndry from a dragon!

Tiger by the Tail Pull [Dominique Flyndy] – Poula Anderson : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20346>

Captain Dominique Flyndry is on a one woman mission. Her underworld intelligence gathering led to one drink too many, and she finds herself kidnapped in the clutches of a barbarian space princess. The problem for the barbarians is that they do not know what they have in their clutches, as Flyndry starts her manipulations to prevent a Galactic War with the Terran Empire.

The Dark World Relit – Henrietta Kuttner : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20332>

Edwina Bond of Earth and Ganelyn of the Coven – two different women, or are they? When they change places in the Dark World, a long conflict has a wildcard introduced. Mutants, science and sorcery erupt in the struggle for the sacrifice at Caer Lyr.

The Rebel of Valkyr Returned – Alfreda Coppel : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19606>

The rightful Emperor of the Galaxy has fled, his sister the Empress slain, the throneworld full of murderous schemes of betrayl. The evil Ivane plots with a usurper and a warlock. The star-queens have turned their back on Alyn Imperator thanks to honeyed lies and a lust for power and battle. Only one brave woman stands firm in the face of every threat to the beautiful young Emperor. Kiera, the Warlord of Valkyr!

Bride of the Dark One Rewed – Florent Verbell Brown : <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19817>

Desperate women like Ransome find themselves at the end of the Galaxy in a dive drinking bad wine and worse whiskey and watching the exotic erotic allure of the dancing men. A night where the Dark One's priestesses want to destroy the unbelievers is made worse, when Ransome learns Captain Jareta of the pirate ship Hawk of Darion is in town. There is bad blood between these two women and former shipmates.

Black Priestess of Varda Dominant – Erika Fennel : <https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/19973>

Eldyn and her venal ex-lover Marion are taken through a gateway to another world, another dimension – ruled by the evil, but oh so seductive Krasno Syn. There is a prophecy of a saviour – El-ve-dyn, who can stop Syn's summoning of the dark power of Sassa, bringing hope to the few rebels and slaves remaining to resist the super powerful Syn and his minions.

The Misplaced Battleship Lure [Staynless Steel Rat] – Harley Harrison : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20286>

Slyppery Jem de Gryz has been digging in the archives as punishment in the Special Corps. She has found a sting, she believes. To prevent the end of a presidential career, they set a golden trap for an egomanical thief. But who is actually conning who when you can smell a big staynless steel rat?

The Sea-Witch Rewaved – Nickita Dyalhis : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20354>

An elderly professor finds a man washed up on the beach near her home. Perfectly fine, and extremely beautiful: golden-haired and sapphire eyed. A Norse legend come to life, and bewitching as she takes him home to live with her. He isn't the only element out of his time in this supernatural story of past betrayal and blood.

Wolves of Darkness Rerun – Jackie Williamson : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20640>

A woman returns home to visit her mother, only to find she is deeply involved in strange, macabre science. A dark pack haunts her old home town, running in the snow—and with them, the boy she used to love.

The Three Planeteers For All – Edmonda Hamilton : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20730>

Undercover and on the run, hunted by their own organisation, the Three Planeteers. With half the Solar System in the grip of a tyrannical dictator, can three brave women retrieve the genius woman they need to break his grip? To do so, it seems they need a D'Artagnan: Lann Cain, the boy they call the Pirate Prince!

Stand Alone

Undead Dining - Tara Loughead : http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17171

A very short horror story about a very different restaurant.

Corporate Responsibility – Tara Loughead : <http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/20636>

A very short science fiction story about getting someone to take the top job, when it means that they could literally be for the chop.

