Part 2

Jimmy didn't know what she was driving at, but what she said was true. Refraction-rot, the multiple infra-red light radiations from the scarlet sands of the desert played hob with all kinds of construction work. _Pxar_ alone had the resiliency and the hardness to withstand the terrible disintegration processes of the shifting sands. And there was very little _pxar_ left.

The voice continued:

"Jimmy, I can't tell you everything yet. But I can tell you this. By joining forces with me, you will be working toward the recovery of your father's lost secret and the identification of the man who murdered him.

"Tonight at midnight you will enter the offices of Phobos Enterprises and take from their vault the paper-wrapped box on the third shelf. Good luck, Nebula."

* * * * *

Phil Hanley, reporter of the _Globe_, let himself into his apartment, strode straight to the liquor cabinet and took a stiff drink. Then he sat down before a table and spread an array of objects before him.

They were a curious collection: A polished _falpa_ button of the type affected by members of the _superiors_ class; two panelled cards, each with the design of the Constellation Orion, two rather blurred photographs of finger prints, and a notebook.

These findings were the results of Hanley's activities during the night. Still obsessed with his plan to get a signed interview with the Nebula, he had reasoned, logically enough, that the only way to do so was to learn first the cracksman's identity.

The button first. It was elliptical in shape and bore that curious triangular emblem so hated by the poorer classes. Hanley had found it on the office floor of the Crater City Trust Company. He realized, however, that any number of _superiors_ might have business with that establishment and that the button's presence there meant nothing.

In rotation he examined the two panelled cards and the fingerprint photographs. He brought a powerful atolight down and studied them with the aid of a _proberglass_.

At the end of five minutes a low whistle of amazement came to his lips. He pushed glass and light away and brought forward the discovery he had deliberately reserved for the last. The notebook.

There was no reason to believe it the property of the Nebula. The Nebula didn't go around dropping private journals for inquisitive reporters to find. Hanley had discovered it half hidden in the gutter before the entrance of the Crater City Museum where the night watchman had been murdered.

The notebook contained but a single page of writing. In heavy penmanship the words read:

_The figurines are pure pxar. The breakdown analysis will prove that, I am sure. But whether the figurines will serve their intended purpose is a question that can be answered only by experiment. If my decipherment of the Chronicles is correct, I must have thousands of them, and to obtain them it will be necessary to locate the Tombs. Does the marking Ka Ce 54 W bear any significance?_

Phil Hanley read those words twice, then leaned back, frowning. Presently he roused himself, strode to a wall cabinet and took down a book labeled, _Ancient Mars--the Webley Theories of the Early Life_.

He carried the book back to the table, but before he could open it, steps sounded along the outer corridor leading to his door. A moment later the door banged open, and a figure crossed the threshold.

Hanley had but a split instant to utter a gasp of astonished recognition. Then he saw the heat gun leveled directly at him, and with a twisting leap, he lunged for the connecting door of the adjoining room.

* * * * *

Jimmy Starr was panting when he reached his room. The clock on the mantel showed five A.M., and since midnight he had been living with double interest his role as a fugitive.

Without realizing why, he had obeyed to the letter the instructions of the voice on the visiphone. That single suggestion that his efforts might lead him to the murderer of his father had spurred him on. He had entered Phobos Enterprises, taken the package described. But getting away this time had been a terrible ordeal.

The I.P. men were on the alert. All Crater City patrols were in readiness. The impenetration walls were down everywhere, checkerboarding the metropolis into five hundred separate and distinct guarded areas.

Three times he had missed capture by a scant margin. He had crawled sixty feet through an exhaust _zordite_ tube when any second the motors leading to it might have seared his body to a crisp with their discharges. With an I.P. man close on his heels, he had swung over a dizzy canyon of space and catwalked across a sustaining bar from one building to another. And it seemed now he could still hear that cry that rose up to him on the building roof from the street below:

"_Death to the Nebula!_"

On the table the package for which he had risked so much lay open. Jimmy scowled down upon its contents: three Thro-Pahl figurines, gray in color, eighteen inches in height, each the likeness of an armor-clad Martian of the first dynasty. To an art collector they were undoubtedly wondrous artifacts, but to Jimmy they meant nothing.

The visiphone bell sounded. Heart pounding, Jimmy touched the stud and heard again that voice.

"_Good morning, Nebula. We made it this time. I'm so glad._"

He stared into the blank screen silently. What did she look like, the owner of that haunting voice? Was she dark or fair? Was she...? "Who are you?" he said huskily.

"There isn't time for that now, Jimmy. Tell me, have you examined the figurines?"

He had the vision plate turned on, and he nodded in reply.

"Look at them again. Look at their composition. It's not the carving I'm--we're--interested in. It's their structure. Don't you see, Jimmy? It's _pxar_."

He didn't see, and he waited for her to continue.

"_Pxar_--the same material that the engineers need for their construction work for the canal locks, the only material that will withstand the radiations of the Red Desert sands.

"Those figurines are old, Jimmy. They were carved during the days of the First Dynasty when the original canal locks were built. Today there's practically none left. Yet without _pxar_ the canal project is doomed to failure.

"Now pick up one of the figurines and examine its base. Do you see that tiny three-cornered prong that projects from it? Like a root, a stunted root reaching out for nourishment."

* * * * *

The girl's voice became breathless. "Jimmy, that was your father's secret. He spent the last days of his life deciphering the _Lost Chronicles_, and for years it has been my work too. You see, chemical analysis has proved that under certain conditions _pxar_ will grow and reproduce its own kind. The early Martians knew this, and they also knew that the time would come when there would be no more of it available. So they designed those figurines to be superimposed on the bodies of living Martians. The root-claw would then reach down, embed itself in the flesh and suck out the vital life."

"I--I don't understand," Jimmy said slowly.

"Let me put it this way. If the base of one of those figurines is fastened to the body of a Martian, the root will adhere to that body, and the figurine will become a living parasite, growing and developing in size, until amoeba-like, it will divide into two.

"Jimmy, there's a monstrous plot brewing here on Mars. Your father discovered that secret and realized it was so deadly he meant to lock it away forever in the files of the Interplanetary Council. But before he could do that, he was murdered and the incomplete cyphers stolen. Those cyphers have now been worked out. Someone has made plans to sell an enormous quantity of _pxar_ to the development company that's building the canal locks. They're going to create that _pxar_ by feeding those figurines and thousands like them off the bodies of unsuspecting Martians."

"But how?" Jimmy interjected.

"I don't know how. Not yet, though I've been piecing the threads of this puzzle together for weeks now. It wasn't until five days ago that I was able to decipher completely the code of the _Chronicles_. I did know that your father was working on the cypher, too, because he and I frequented the same libraries, but it was only by accident that I discovered that that cypher was the reason behind his murder.

"Once started, the _pxar_ plot will be a plague, a Martian black death. Once started, those figurines will multiply and grow. And here's the damnable part of it, Jimmy. After a certain number of the figurines have been given life, they will also acquire self mobility. Do you understand? It means that they will spread, advance from the body of one Martian to another of their own accord. That's the black revelation of the _Chronicles_--_the fact that this plague happened on this planet once before, was responsible for the complete extinction of the first dynasty Martians_."

He turned the gray figurine over and over in his hands. There was a glitter in his eyes now, a glitter of excitement. Things were falling into place in his brain like pieces of a puzzle.

"Examine those images," the girl's voice suddenly ordered. "Do you see any mark on them at all?"

One by one he studied every inch of their surfaces. Abruptly his eyes caught a tiny series of even scratches along the thigh of one of the figurines.

"Ka Ce 54 W," he read slowly.

For a moment silence answered him. Then the voice uttered a low gasp. "It's the first section of the third cypher," she said. "It means ... wait a minute ... it means that the Tombs are in the Dur-Par section of the desert. Jimmy, we've got to go there."

"The Tombs?" he repeated.

"Yes, according to the _Chronicles_, a secret store of thousands of those parasitical figurines is hidden somewhere out in the Red Desert. The first dynasty Martians, you see, prepared for the emergency which they knew was inevitable, the disappearance of _pxar_ from this planet. That was before they knew of the images' plague properties.

"We've got a race on our hands, Jimmy. Even now the man who first stole the figurines may be heading directly for the Tombs."

Jimmy Starr took out a cheroot, lit it mechanically. Then he voiced a single question. "You must have a personal interest in this matter. What is it?"

She had the answer for that too. "My brother," she said, "is one of the technical officials for the canal-locks project. A murder charge was framed on him, and he was given the alternative of being 'exposed' to the I.P. men or agreeing to accept all the _pxar_ an unidentified source could supply with no questions asked. He has agreed.

"I ... I love my brother, but this has gone beyond personalities now. This is plague, wholesale murder; all Mars is at stake."

Jimmy Starr made an instant decision. "Where will I meet you?" he said.

She considered. Then, "You'll find instructions at the Canal Grand entrance. Good luck, Jimmy."

* * * * *

Half an hour later Jimmy climbed out of a tube-cage and emerged onto a deserted square at the outskirts of Crater City. Before him, dim in the overhead light, a sign read:

THE CANALS POSITIVELY NO TRESPASSING ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK

Before the sign stood a small kiosk with dusty bulletins tacked upon it. Jimmy waited impatiently, pacing to and fro. Then his eye caught sight of a small envelope protruding from a crevice on the kiosk wall. It bore no name or address, but upon its surface was the design of the Constellation Orion.

Inside, a scrap of paper bore the written words: "_Canal Grand--south. Way Station X. I'll meet you there._"

He pursed his lips. What kind of a game was this? Unseen speakers on the visiphone. Mysterious messages directing him into the unknown. It smacked of a twentieth century thriller.

All his inherent sense of danger warned him to turn back. In answer, that haunting voice rang again in his ears: "_Good luck, Jimmy._"

He turned to the stair well and began to descend. Darkness was here, and he could feel the thick red dust under his shoes as he went down. Fifty-seven ... fifty-eight ... first ... second ... third level. Not until he reached the bottom and stood before the massive door leading into the canal did he switch on his electric torch. Then he stared.

The door yawned open. Twenty feet beyond, drawn up at the near wall of the great ditch, was a tracto-car. And before that car there were three men preparing to board.

Jimmy stared as he recognized the foremost of the three. Hamilton Garth! The Trust Company official stood there calmly in the glare of the torch, waiting for him to approach.

"What the devil are you doing here?" Garth demanded.

It was a tight question, but fortunately Garth was so absorbed in his own plans and movements that he did not wait for an answer. "Sloan and Barker," he said shortly, waving his hand toward his two companions. "I.P. men. We're trailing the Nebula."

"But I thought nothing was stolen from your office," Jimmy said slowly. "You said...."

Garth scowled. "Money, tangibles, no. But prestige, tremendously. Do you realize, sir, what it will mean when the public learns that a cheap cracksman can walk into my vault as if it had a revolving door? I've offered fifty thousand _plantoles_ for the arrest of the Nebula, and I'm going to set an example by being the first to start on his trail."

"I see." Jimmy studied him in thoughtful silence. "And his trail starts here?"

"In the canal, yes. We received an unsigned tip half an hour ago that the Nebula was heading south down Canal Grand. You're coming with us, of course."

As the tracto-car rocketed dizzily down the huge ditch, Jimmy hunkered down in the tonneau seat and let his thoughts run wild. This tip Garth had spoken of.... Could it be that she...?

He forced his eyes toward the way ahead, deliberately guiding his mind into other channels. It wasn't the first time he had been in the canals, but it was the first time he had penetrated this far. The powerful triple-beam atolight cut a swath of radiance ahead like a chalkmark on a blackboard. Revealed in its glare were the mountainous-high walls of red stone on either side, the red floor between, hard packed, smooth as a pavement. Dimly in the reflected glow he could see the serrated lines high up near the top of the near wall, the marks of the ancient water levels, and at intervals he could see the crumbling ruins of a counting depot.

What glory, what pomp and circumstance this mighty ditch had seen. Gilded canopied barges of the first and second dynasty kings, military floats, ore and shipping rafts, all drifting in an endless procession across the arid wastes of the Red Desert. Army transports loaded with armored troops advancing and retreating, converging through the labyrinthian network of subsidiary canals to battle the capital itself.

And today the wonders of the past were on the verge of being repeated. Engineers were struggling frantically to overcome the one problem that so far had baffled them--the finding of a supply of _pxar_ sufficient to rebuild the locks.

Ahead a lone Kiloto swooped out of the darkness into the span of light, whirled frantically and missed the onrushing car by inches.

Presently a low rubble of masonry loomed before them. Hamilton Garth tapped the I.P. man driver on the shoulder. "Way station," he said. "Pull in there. We'll look for clues."

It was a forlorn spot. A few _pxar_ columns stood sentinel-like at the entrance. A roofless plaisance stretched beyond. Here and there were the remnants of crude hydro-dovolic mechanism chambers. Hamilton Garth made a thorough examination of the place with his torch. The search was fruitless, of course, and he stood up with a scowl.

"I suggest we split up and look around outside," he said. "Sloan, you take the east side; Barker, take the right, and I'll go straight down the canals for a ways. Mr. Starr, you'd better stay here, if you don't mind."

It suited Jimmy. This was the place where he was scheduled to meet Andromeda, and the sooner he could be alone, the better. Even now he was tingling with excitement at the thought of unveiling the owner of that hidden voice.

* * * * *

The two I.P. men and Garth shuffled off into the sand. Silence and the loneliness of the Martian night closed in on Jimmy. He crossed to a block of stone and slumped down on it wearily. From far off somewhere the banshee scream of a prowler shattered the stillness. It died away, came again, and then merged eerily into the wail of an Enzo-cat, the two-headed carrion-eater of the desert. And then suddenly a voice behind him said, "Don't look now, Jimmy, but a friend of yours is here."

He wheeled and brought up the electric torch as simultaneously a hand grasped his.

"Not here, Jimmy. No light, please. Come, there's not a moment to lose."

A slender figure was partly visible in the gloom. A faint scent of Martian _trofero_ touched his nostrils.

Before he could protest further he found himself guided out of the Way Station and out into the sand. Presently a small two-seater tracto-car rose up before them. There was no sign of Garth or the two I.P. men. The girl leaped in, touched a stud, and the car trembled with life. Two seconds later they were boring into the darkness.

"Can I look now?" Jimmy demanded.

She laughed. "If you like."

He switched on the torch. A young dark-haired girl with clear brown eyes and lovely features smiled back at him. She was beautiful.

He settled deeper in the seat. "Garth and the two I.P. men. Why didn't they come back?"

She didn't reply to that. Savagely with a sudden frantic twist of the wheel she maneuvered the tracto-car on a tangent toward the east bank of the canal. Even as she did, a man-high ribbon of white irridescence shot toward them. It was a spear-headed ellipse of blinding light with a whipping comet-like tail.

"Refraction-protract," she cried. Under her skillful guidance the car turned left, then right, to miss the oncoming beam by inches. The girl uttered a sigh of relief. "That was too close for comfort," she said. "Those refraction-protracts are disintegrating light rays stored up by the Red Desert sands and released by sudden changes in temperature. We'll have to watch ourselves."

They drove on in silence. Questions were surging through Jimmy's brain, but he said nothing, waiting for the girl to explain.

"Would it surprise you very much if I told you the man behind all this is Hamilton Garth?"

He went slowly rigid. "Garth? But he--"

"Told you he was trailing the Nebula. That was a neat way to divert suspicion from himself. You see, Garth, although a member of the _superiors_ class, has been having financial trouble with both of his companies lately, Crater City Trust, and Phobos Enterprises. Some of his investments went wrong; in particular, an expedition he financed to Pluto was never heard from again. He needed funds desperately and _pxar_ was his answer.

"How he learned that your father's work in deciphering the _Chronicles_ was connected with this strange material, we probably shall never know. The important thing is he did find out and immediately took steps to acquire them. But even after he had them it was necessary to complete the cypher before he could learn the secret. Garth must have found a passage in some work other than the _Chronicles_ that led him to suspect vaguely the nature of the final revelation."

Jimmy nodded slowly. "I see," he said. "And after Garth has located the supply of figurines, he intends to launch them on their parasitical work and sell the supply of _pxar_ he thus accumulates to the engineers. But neither the Martians nor the engineers would consent to such a diabolical plan."

The girl smiled grimly and touched a stud on the dash, increasing the speed of the car. "Garth took care of that, too," she explained. "He planned to advertise all over Mars a sanitarium devoted to the cure of every conceivable kind of ill. It was to be located in the mountains beyond the Red Desert Country. Once a patient was admitted, his doom was sealed.

"It was Garth, of course, who broke into the Crater City Museum, stole the three Thro-Pahl figurines and killed the night-watchman. Previously he had designed a fake Nebula signature card, and he left this behind at the scene of the crime. He's a member of the _superiors_ class, you must remember, and his hatred for the man who was making a mockery of that class was intense."

* * * * *

Dawn came up slowly, a reddish haze at first, then a brilliant glare that turned the canal into a glittering avenue of crimson reflections. They roared east along a canal that steadily grew narrower.

Presently, far ahead, a depression became visible in the side wall. Up this depression a nature-formed ramp led to the upper level.

"This is the end of the line," the girl said. She gave a short laugh. "Do you realize, Mr. Starr, you haven't even asked me my name?"

He colored, stammered something.

"It's Linda," she said, "Linda Hall. Come. Up this way."

The climb was hard, grueling work, and when at length they reached the summit, man and girl were panting from the exertion. But here Jimmy looked upon a scene of utter desolation. As far as the eye could reach stretched a vast plain. No cairn, no monolithic pile of rocks broke the bleak monotony.

Linda, however, moved forward with a quick step. She had a small metal box with needle dials in her hand now, and she consulted it at intervals. For a quarter of a mile they plodded across the flat. Then Jimmy saw that the needles on the dials were fluttering wildly.

"Stand here," she told him.

She moved off on a tangent, walking carefully, studying the ground. He watched her figure grow smaller and smaller. Abruptly she halted and waved to him frantically. He hurried to her side.

She stood at the brink of a deep cleft in the plain floor. Rectangular in shape, it seemed to bore down and down into measureless depths. Jimmy felt his heart skip a beat. A flight of ladder-like stairs descended into the well, and lying prone at the top of those stairs was a man.

A deep searing burn ran from his temple down the left side of his face, about which blood had caked and hardened. Jimmy knelt and fumbled for a pulse. A faint flutter touched his fingers. He whipped a flask from his pocket and brought it to the man's lips.

He moaned, opened his eyes weakly and rose up on one elbow.

"Who are you?" Jimmy demanded.

At first his words were unintelligible. Then the haze which clouded his eyes cleared somewhat.

"Name's Hanley," he said weakly. "Phil Hanley. Represent the _Martian Globe_. Hamilton Garth's down there. We've got to stop him."

Hanley struggled with short jerky sentences. "Garth blasted me with a heat gun. Tried to do it once before in my own apartment, but I managed to get away from him. This time he thought he'd done for me. He's after the figurines. _By the blazing eternal! Are you the Nebula?_"

* * * * *

Six hundred and thirty-nine steps led to the bottom of the shaft. In places the rock had crumbled so badly the greatest care had to be taken, or a misstep would have meant plunging into the abyss. Curiously, no sand seemed to have drifted here; the air was dry and clear.

Hanley, still unsteady from the burn he had received, examined the hieroglyphics on the stone walls with puzzled eyes.

"This place must have been discovered before," he said. "It isn't possible that this shaft could have remained here all these years without someone stumbling upon it."