Tarrano the Conqueror

"Sit down." Tarrano motioned us to feather hassocks and stretched himself indolently upon our pillowed divan. With an elbow and hand supporting his head he regarded us with his...

Dr. Brende was dead. We knew it in the moment that followed our sudden assault and capture. Elza knelt there sobbing. Then she stood up, her tears checked; and on her face a loo...

I found myself in the air; with my men around me we hovered. Then Georg's command from the instrument room sounded in my ears. I gave the signal; and flying wedge-shaped, we hur...

I must recount now what Elza later told me, going back to those moments when Elza sat upon the balcony watching Tarrano and the Red Woman. The significance of what had been tran...

I must revert now to that time in the gardens of Maida's palace at the Great City when we stood upon its roof-top, threatened below by that mob of _slaans_. Georg stood with the...

The Venus girl fairly hissed the words. Her eyes were dilated; her white hair hung in a tumbling, wavy mass over her shoulders. She stood tense--a frail, girlish figure in a sho...

It must have been nearly nine o'clock when a personal message came for me. Not through the ordinary open airways, but in the National Length, and coded. It came to my desk by of...

I come now to recount events at which I was not present, and the details of which I did not learn until later. Fronted by Tarrano, in those few seconds of confusion, Georg made...

His gesture dismissed his subordinate; Argo backed from the room. From a disc, an announcer was detailing dispatches. Tarrano frowned slightly. He advanced to us as we three sto...

From the garden where Tarrano was talking with Elza, the Mars man Wolfgar led us to the tower in which we were to be imprisoned. Quite evidently it had been placed in readiness...

I must revert now to those moments in the tower room when Tarrano dissolved the isolation barrage which Wolfgar had thrown around us. Georg escaped, as I have recounted. Tarrano...

They all looked at me in surprise. When one is close to danger, sometimes one recognizes it least; with Ahla in this household for over a year now, they could not imagine her an...

That _Tarrano_ should thus defy the Earth, when by every law of rational circumstance the move seemed to spell only his own disaster, was characteristic of the man. He stood the...

The Water Festival! As our barge rounded a bend in the canal, under the archways of dangling colored lights, the festival spread before us. Involuntarily I stood up to gaze. The...

In Washington during those next few days, events of the Earth, Venus and Mars swirled and raged around Georg as though he were engulfed in the Iguazu or Niagara. Passive himself...

I realize that I am, by nature, not overly observant; and in those moments, when I stood out there beside the pool, I think I came most forcibly to appreciate how little I habit...

Georg and Maida were very busy in Industriana; and now Elza and I were admitted to their activities--Elza and I, with our new-found love and happiness neglected for the greater...

I was standing fairly close to the President of the Anglo-Saxon Republic when the first of the new murders was committed. The President fell almost at my feet. I was quite certa...

Elza opened her eyes, struggling to confused wakefulness. The white walls of her sleeping room in Tarrano's palace of the City of Ice were stained with the dim red radiance of h...

We did not locate the source of the bomb, and no others rose to assail us. The mountain defiles, so far as our lights could illuminate them, seemed deserted. We passed over the...

Wolfgar was not dead; but when we picked him up it was obvious that he was dying. The violet beam vanished as his body struck it--vanished with a hiss and splutter, and a puff o...

"So?" Tarrano eyed us, evidently in no hurry to speak further, seemingly amused at our confusion. Had he heard much of what the two women had said? All of it, or most of it, dou...

Alone, unnoticed, they had departed from the City of Ice on a small flying platform similar to the one they had used before. The night had passed; day, with a new warmth to the...

We landed on a stage at the summit of one of the nearer hillsides. Our coming--unheralded since we had carried no sending instruments--created a furor. The workers rested to wat...

We stood there at the casement of the palace, gazing with a growing terror at the visible evidence of the tragedy which threatened. A black cloud off there in the distance, spre...

That day following the burial of Wolfgar, there was nothing of importance occurred. No news from the Earth could get in. I felt that the Earth might be planning an attack. Proba...

I must take you back now to the Water Festival and the events in the Great City which followed it. _Slaans_ in murderous frenzy were plunging through the throng of erstwhile rev...

To Elza, approaching with Tarrano on the tiny flying platform the City of Ice, the place seemed truly like a child's dream of Fairyland. The rude snow huts of the Arctic of our...

After a trip uneventful--save that to me, taking it for the first time, it was an experience never to be forgotten in a lifetime--we landed at the Great City of Venus. We had se...

Little Wolfgar was gone. It seemed at first very strange, unreal. It lay a shadow of grief upon our spirits, for many hours a deeper shadow than all those grave events impending...

We were not greatly harmed by this surprise attack; the power house was superficially damaged, but soon repaired. That night--I call it that though the constant weak daylight ma...

It must have been two days later when at last we were rescued by the _Rhaal_ patrol and taken to Industriana. Back there in the forest I had suddenly remembered that the mate to...

Stricken with surprise and awe, Elza and I sat there motionless. Our encampment was in a turmoil of confusion--chaos, out of which very soon order came. The skeleton figures in...

I did not harm this Tara, though I was sorely tempted to; and after a moment we quieted her. She was crying and laughing by turns; but when we seated her on the divan she contro...

I stood frozen with horror; but as my brain cleared--awake at last to full rationality and consciousness--beneath the horror came a surging joy of the knowledge that at last Elz...

The isolation barrage which Wolfgar had flung around us was dissolving. Someone--something--was in the room, breaking down the barrage, struggling to get at us. We stood huddled...

Our spies had informed us that of recent weeks there had arisen about the City of Ice a huge wall behind which Tarrano would make his stand. It was our plan to approach within r...