Part 2
The first part of the trip back toward Titan was quite uneventful, though the work and vigilance involved in bringing a huge, clumsy, and far under-manned ship along a perilous, short-cut route through the region of the asteroids, was even more gruelling than the journey in the scout flier had been. Luckily, most of the machinery was automatic, needing almost no attention to keep it functioning.
But Ron Leiccsen knew what kind of trouble lay ahead. So did Anna Charles. By now many more silvery ships must have gone out from Callisto toward Saturn and Titan to reinforce the conquering hordes already there.
"We'll make it, all right, Ron," Anna declared vehemently, showing almost her first signs of friendship toward her companion. "We'll make it because we've got to!"
Her small, red lips jutted out petulantly. She was coaxing herself into a mood of optimism with defiance alone. She was being optimistic only by wanting to be.
"_Maybe_ we'll make it!" Ron Leiccsen answered doubtfully. "If our luck is right, and if we work out a good enough plan!"
"Why, what do you mean?" she snapped back at him, angry again because of his usual dark thinking, which seemed to laugh at hope.
"Just what I say," he returned brutally, feeling that he might have tried to keep the grim facts from her, if she'd been less reckless by nature. But she was no fragile clinging vine. Bleak, skeletal truth might help to balance her judgment of what was wise and what was not.
"I guess you're right," Anna Charles murmured at last, her sagging shoulders showing suddenly how very tired she was, and how little. "Those Callistan ships are almost certain to spot us, as we approach Titan. They can recognize a black Earth-craft from millions of miles off, through their telescopes. They'll try to get us, of course, and unless we find some way to trick them, we'll never win through the blockade alive!"
Ron patted Anna's arm, and grinned reassuringly. She was not reckless now, though she betrayed no hint of real fear.
Suddenly Ron wanted very much to kiss Anna Charles; but he didn't do it. "We'll think hard, pal," he said quietly, almost apologetically, "and maybe we'll find a way to reach Titan, yet!"
Thinking--with the sharp, steady stars gleaming ahead. Thinking--with Saturn and his beady moors growing, getting closer, out of the distance of space. Danger, coming nearer and nearer. Ron Leiccsen's head ached with fatigue, with mental strain, with somber doubts. There was no way to hide this huge, black Earth-freighter from keen Callistan eyes. No way at all! And yet he had to keep trying. Struggling to build a scheme to run the blockade and elude the mathematical accuracy of the long-range atom guns which the Callistans used in space fighting. The _Barbarian_ was unarmed, and against such guns, within any range less than two hundred miles, it wouldn't have a chance.
There was still no time to investigate the freighter's unknown cargo. To do so would have involved the unbolting of massive doors, hasped and sealed for the voyage, so that there would be no danger that the load would shift, throwing the ship off balance, and disturbing its flight. A couple of hours' work would be required to unscrew those bolts, and replace them again, for safety. And there might be other unknown dangers, too.
Ron decided to put the question of the cargo's value as a weapon out of his mind. Arne Reynaud's mysterious idea, in which he still felt scant confidence, would either fail or succeed--that is, if they got through to Titan. And there was no use seeking an easily possible unhappy disillusionment, now. Not when the cargo was the only hope of Titan Colony! He and Anna were pledged to deliver it, and to scatter it over and around Leiccsenland. That was their part of the job. If they accomplished the job, without any hoped-for result against the men of Achar--well--he couldn't help that.
They were only a million miles from Saturn, when danger finally became visible. Anna, at the lookout telescope, gave the warning, her lips atremble.
"I see them," she said. "Bright silvery dots against space. Callistan ships, maybe fifty of them, ahead and to port about a million and a quarter miles. They're coming this way, rapidly."
"They must have spotted us already, then," Ron stated with a slow, surly nod. "Even a black ship reflects enough sunlight to be seen easily from a long way off, through a telescope."
He moved the guide-levers, heading the ship to the right of Saturn's colossal, whirling bulk. Titan was to the left of the planet now, and far out.
After all his thinking, Ron had only one pathetic shadow of an idea to use against the enemy. By going to the right of Saturn, instead of to the left, he was avoiding the direct route to Titan, cherishing the forlorn hope that such action might confuse the Acharians a little, and perhaps enable the _Barbarian_ to circle the gigantic gaseous world, and somehow reach Titan from the other side.
The engines of the freighter were throbbing and vibrating hideously, feeding every ounce of power they could produce, to the gravity plates, that hurled their propelling beams of reversed force, astern. Speed! Speed! Ron's fingernails bit savagely into his palms, as he guided the old freighter on, as fast as he could make her go.
"The Callistan ships are trying to close in ahead of us," Anna announced from the telescope.
"I guess they see, then, what I'm trying to do," Ron commented bitterly. "And they're twenty-percent more speedy than we are."
He didn't change his course. To do so would have been useless. He just kept driving the old merchantman on, determined to make it as good a race as possible.
* * * * *
Saturn bulked more and more huge in the ship's observation bay. Ron's course took him straight to the edge of those vast, arcing circular paths of cosmic dust and pebbles, known as the Rings. Seen from the _Barbarian's_ angle of approach, the planet's northern hemisphere was upward.
There, just beyond the stupendous natural miracle of the Rings, thousands of miles across, Ron piloted his craft along, in a parallel curve around Saturn. Anna and he had gotten this far, at least, ahead of their enemies; but what good did that do?
Scarcely half a mile in front of the freighter, a terrific explosion blazed soundlessly in the voidal vacuum. Then another and another. A little nearer each time. The Acharian fleet was firing explosive atomic shells at its prey. In greater and greater numbers, as each second passed, and with better and better accuracy, as sighting instruments and ballistics calculating machines improved the aim.
There was no way for Ron and Anna to return the fire. In spite of her war-like name, the old merchantman carried no weapons. She had been sent out from Earth on her strange errand too hastily to be fitted with guns. But even had she been a battleship, her position would have been hopeless against the odds of fifty to one!
Once the _Barbarian's_ hull rung and shivered like a vast, deep-throated bell, as an exploding projectile barely grazed her flanks. It was a matter of moments, now, before a direct and final hit would be made. The atomic missiles the Callistans were using, were different in their action from the silent, metal-melting darts employed in the rifles of the terrestrial colonists of Titan. But they were no less effective, in their more sudden release of atomic power, because of that!
Young Leiccsen found himself looking into Anna Charles' brave, misty eyes. The pale, flooding glow of Saturn, and its sinister Rings, reflecting the sunlight, streamed through the broad observation bay of the control turret, and touched her hair, making it give back soft, golden glints.
"Ron," she said quietly, "I guess this is the end of the trail. But I wouldn't like to let it be those devils from Callisto who kill us. I'd rather choose the way to die. Maybe you would, too. There's another road out of this life, Ronnie. A grander one. You're so bitter, sometimes. But I think you're like me, in a few things. Shall we go--that other way? It's so close, so easy, so swift. Look...."
She was pointing through the observation bay, straight into that awesome flood of reflected sunshine. Not at Saturn itself, whirling like a giant, streaked orb that filled almost half the spacial sky. But at the Rings.
No words could ever have described that incredible spectacle--perhaps the greatest natural wonder in all explored space! A tremendous, sweeping path, circling in a perfect plane, like a highway of the gods. Misty at the edges, with scattered, cosmic dust. So near, now, belting monster Saturn. So calm, so grand, so unutterably beautiful. But deadly.
"A trillion-trillion little moons," Anna said softly, all traces of any resentment she may have felt for Ron Leiccsen gone now. "Or many more, even, than a trillion-trillion. Hurtling around Saturn in a sort of stream at a velocity of many miles per second. Most of them dust, as fine as powder. Steer the _Barbarian_ into the Rings, Ronnie. Instantly those countless, tiny meteors will riddle our ship--and us."
For just a second Ron Leiccsen stared at that awful, dazing spectacle. It made his throat ache with awe. There was a fascination about the Rings, something unholy that beckoned suicide. But then Ron laughed, as though he was part of that miracle--a man about to use the tools of the deities for his own purposes. Two things he remembered, especially. That the _Barbarian_ was moving very fast. And that it was to the right of Saturn, considering the northern hemisphere as upward.
"Thanks, Anna," he said cryptically, as more projectiles from the rapidly nearing Callistan ships blazed close to them. "Hold tight to your stanchion, because here goes! And don't blame me if you're surprised at what happens!"
For a moment he adjusted the velocity dials carefully. The _Barbarian_ slowed a little, then swerved, nosing at a gradual slant toward the glory of Saturn's Rings. No inferno could have held a magnificence like this! A stupendous, murky, curving ribbon, like an inconceivable circle-saw, rotating at meteoric speed! So, certain death seemed to hurtle closer. A matter of mere instants, now....
In a second, the plunge was completed. Within the _Barbarian's_ hull, a dazing din roared suddenly. Partly like a magnified hailstorm, beating on a sheet-metal roof. Myriads of dust-grains, and tiny pebbles of meteoric iron and rock, were colliding with the freighter's hull. It seemed impossible that any ordinary meteor-armor could turn aside such an avalanche. Even Ron Leiccsen wondered that they were still alive, and that their bodies, and the steel shell of their ship were still unriddled, before he remembered why.
The murk of cosmic powder swallowed them, until the Callistan battle-craft, and the stars themselves, were lost to view. Ahead, through the observation bay, only a yellowish, foggy light showed--sunshine penetrating deep into the hurtling substance of the Rings. Uncountable billions of minute particles, whirling in eternal moon-paths around the gigantic if tenuous mass of Saturn.
"They can't shoot at us now," Anna shouted, straining her voice so that it might be heard above the hail-like clamor, and the gigantic hissing, soughing sound--like blowing sand--that dinned within the vessel. "They can't even see to shoot at us, through all this dust! And even if they dared follow us, they couldn't find us! But how can it be, Ron? All these meteors are traveling at planetary velocities--maybe twenty or thirty miles a second! Small as most of them are, they should still tear through the steel armor of the _Barbarian_, as though it was butter! How is it that we're still alive?"
Ron was conscious of the bigness of the question, and yet the simplicity of the answer now.
"Nothing to it!" he shouted back. "We approached Saturn from the right. It rotates in the same direction as does the Earth--to the right, if you consider that down lies toward the southern hemisphere, and that up, of course, lies toward the northern. So do the Rings. With but one exception, the direction of rotation is the same everywhere, for all the bodies in the solar system. And now space ships equal and exceed the velocities of planets and meteors. The _Barbarian_ was moving at many miles per second, too, paralleling the Rings, and going the same way. I adjusted our velocity a little, so that the difference between it, and that of the Rings, is very small. Relativity, Anna. And now that we've plunged into Saturn's cosmic belts, the difference in speed gives the meteors only enough relative momentum to make a lot of noise, when they strike our ship. They can't puncture us."
* * * * *
Anna Charles gasped as she realized the easy truth. "Then we can go all around Saturn hidden in the Rings!" she burst out enthusiastically. "Even though we can't see much, we can fly blind with our instruments. But--" and her hopeful expression became faintly worried again--"we've got to emerge into free, clear space sometime! To cross out to Titan! And there the Callistan ships will spot us. They'll have plenty of time to blow us up!"
Ron Leiccsen chuckled under his breath. It was funny to hear reckless, daring Anna Charles talk like this now, while he, the cautious, careful planner, felt a wave of contrasting optimism. Maybe they'd both learned something from each other.
"Wait and see, Anna!" he yelled back. "You might be surprised again! Remember, I'm a machinist!" On his lips was a taunting smile of confidence.
Hours later, having circled Saturn, they dipped out of the Rings. But as the murk that had concealed them cleared, and the voidal stars showed bright again, they found a group of Callistan battle-craft not much more than a hundred miles away, their burnished hulls gleaming silvery in the faint sunshine.
"Ron!" Anna quavered, with a nervous catch in her voice. "We'll never make it, now! They'll surely destroy us!"
Young Leiccsen gripped the controls, and put on full speed. His face was grim, but that crooked smile was there again, tracing a line in his left cheek.
"That, Anna," he said, "remains to be seen."
Through her telescope, the girl continued to watch the enemy vessels, gleaming like silver arrows against the hard blackness of space. It was impossible that the keen-eyed lookouts aboard those warships did not see the black Earth-craft. And yet they approached no nearer. Their atom guns did not fire. The _Barbarian_ was continuing on out toward Titan, quite unmolested.
Anna Charles' beautiful face was alight with puzzled wonder again. "Maybe I'm dumb, Ron," she murmured. "Just like I was last time. But I still don't understand why the Acharians neglect such a splendid chance to finish us."
Ron pointed toward a heavily glazed side-port in the control-turret. "Look out there," he suggested. "Back at our own hull."
Half rising from the pilot-seat, he was looking, too. They couldn't see much of their ship's flanks from the little window, but what they could see of its great, spreading guide-fins was plenty.
Those guide-fins had been deeply black, once. Now they were almost as bright and shiny as a polished mirror.
"When we were in the Rings," Ron explained, "all those fine meteors pounding against the _Barbarian_ rubbed off every last speck of her black lacquer, and gave the metal underneath a swell polish, besides! I knew that it had to happen, of course. It was just a very ancient machinist's trick, with a new, cosmic wrinkle. In effect, this old tub of ours was just sand-blasted, Anna."
"Why, certainly!" the girl exclaimed in pleased startlement. "I should have guessed it, too! The _Barbarian_ is bright silver now, instead of black! From a distance the Callistans think it's one of their own silvery ships! And so, naturally, they don't bother us!"
"Uhuh," Ron chuckled. "So far, so good! Now maybe we can concentrate on delivering our mysterious cargo, as per Arne Reynaud's instructions. It's all up to him, now! We're going to find out whether he was crazy, or, to put it mildly, truly clever!"
* * * * *
Disguised as it was, the _Barbarian_ reached Titan's far upper atmosphere without trouble. Evidence of fighting could be seen, many miles beneath. Puffs of explosions in the weak sunshine. Silver ships flying, spreading final destruction over the richest farm country in the solar system--richest because of those scattered sun-ray towers and their secondary, plant-stimulating radiations, and the fact that Bart Mallory, the inventor, permitted the patent rights to be used only for the Leiccsenland Colony.
A few of those towers were shattered, now; but most of them still shed their sunlike brilliance. The Callistans needed them, if conquest was completed, to maintain the warm climate and the fertility of the farms. So, in general, they had avoided their destruction. And when, as now, the sun itself shone during the day, it was useless for the Earthians to shut off the globes for blackout protection.
"Our people are still battling!" Anna said happily. "For weeks, with all radio-communication blocked off by the Callistan static-barrage, we didn't even know that, for sure! But it's a good sign!"
"Maybe," Ron commented with a shrug. "Anyhow we're here high up in the atmosphere. Arne Reynaud said 'Scatter the cargo.' That should be easy to do from this position. So, here's how!"
He pulled a lever which had been an enigma to Anna and to himself through all their return voyage from Mars. It was the lever which opened the discharge-vent of the _Barbarian's_ hold.
Peering wonderingly from the side-ports of the control-room, the man and the girl saw what was coming out of that discharge-vent, and settling gradually toward Leiccsenland, and the surrounding hills, far beneath.
A brownish cloud--like chaff--that was all. It swirled astern like a streamer, in that high, frigid altitude. It scattered, so that it dissolved from view. Spreading, sinking downward.
"Not very impressive, is it?" Anna asked anxiously. It was plain that she was doubting Arne Reynaud's mysterious weapon more and more. Just chaff. What could it ever do against the Acharians, armed to the teeth, hardy, and prepared for all violence?
"Not very impressive," Ron agreed with a cynical shrug.
But he kept guiding the freighter around and around at that vast altitude until the discharge-spout had ceased to trail brown, chaffy dust. The hold was empty. The job, at least, was accomplished, now, according to exact specifications.
Not two minutes after it was completed, a shell exploded before the prow of the old freighter--a signal to halt. Many burnished Callistan war-craft were approaching.
As Ron cut the power in the propelling gravity plates astern, he looked at Anna. "Well," he drawled, "I guess this is where we stop being free Earthians."
The girl nodded, biting her lip.
Ron switched on the short-wave radio, which, over a limited distance, could function, in spite of the static barrage. Over it came harsh Callistan tones:
"You are blockade runner, perhaps. It is old trick--making ship shiny, like ours. But from very close, we recognize Earthly shape of your hull. Terrestrial resistance on Titan almost finished. Please land outside Leiccsendale."
With so many weapons trained on the unarmed _Barbarian_, there was little to do but obey orders. Ron guided the ship groundward. But as it came to rest on the charred soil of what had once been an orchard, he turned a control dial on which there were red marks--danger graduations, indicating the limiting point of safety. He turned the dial well past those points. The engines of the ship howled and groaned with a fearful overload for a moment. Then there was a dull, grinding, ripping noise astern, and the crackle and hiss of fire.
When the two Earthians emerged, red flames and black smoke were rising from the crumpled aft-portion of the vessel. The engines had been immersed in vats of oil to insulate their power. And now that oil was blazing. The _Barbarian_ at least would be useless to the enemy, and the secret of its cargo, whether a dangerous secret or not, would be hidden in the ashes and the ruins.
* * * * *
But for Anna Charles and Ron Leiccsen, this was the beginning of slavery. Within a hundred hours of their capture, Callistan heat-rays and shells and heat-bombs had put down the last resistance of the terrestrial colonists. They were all either chattels or dead--those who had not left Titan in time. The colony had possessed enough ships to remove everyone to Earth; but those that had not been used had fallen into Acharian hands.
The captives were herded into their barracks--the few half-ruined farm-buildings which still stood, after the conflict was over. They were put to work repairing damaged sun-towers, re-cultivating desolated fields, and helping the Callistan engineers erect the burnished metal structures which duplicated in architecture the buildings of that distant moon of Jupiter. Rapidly, Mado Achar--New Callisto--was being born. Bizarre cactiform vegetation, from the flowerless mother-world, began to sprout from spores, under the stimulus of the radiations from Bart Mallory's sun-ray towers.
And among the chattels, the whip was not spared. Frequently a slave, driven to vengeful mania by maltreatment and overwork, was blasted down with a heat pistol, by some furry, laughing overseer.
Ron Leiccsen saw Anna Charles only rarely, at assembly roll-call periods. Always she looked tired from endless hours in the fields. Still sweet and beautiful, though, even through the grime that covered her face and tattered clothing. Luckily Callistans were not attracted to Earth-women.
Once Ron got a chance to talk with her for a few minutes, in the shadow of a fire-charred warehouse.
"I can't stand it much longer, Ron," she whispered raggedly, her face strained with horror. "At the end of the last work-period, I saw Joe Kerrin killed, his head and shoulders burned off with a heat pistol, simply because he was too weak to carry a heavy box of tools. Kerrin was an old man, Ron, and a neighbor of mine. And that isn't all! Not long ago, Ollie Marvick, only eleven years old, was kicked to death by one of the overseers, because he was too ill to work. Ollie was a student of mine at school, and one of the few kids that wasn't gotten out of Titan in time. I tell you I can't endure it, Ron! I'll go crazy! So--well--some of us have been thinking of making a break for the hills."
The hills! Ron Leiccsen had seen horror, too; horror that there was no way to fight, downtrodden and disarmed as the Earthians here now were. The hills that rimmed Leiccsenland--the borderline region between the reclaimed territory, warmed by the sun-ray towers, and the still bleakly frigid portion of Titan, as yet uncolonized. Ron's mind ached with a fierce, sharp eagerness at the thought of the hills, and all the wild, self-reliant pioneer blood in him throbbed violently. It was natural for beautiful, reckless Anna Charles to be forced toward the idea of escape.
But then Ron looked toward those hills, and at the intervening rows of silvery Acharian ships resting on the ground. A barrier that stood in the way! And there were many furry guards pacing, too, their accoutrements and gaunt, deadly weapons glinting in the glare of the sun-ray globes.
Ron saw how hopeless it all was. It was all but impossible to get past those guards, and those heavily armed vessels. And even if you did get to the hills, what then? Doubtless even now they were the refuge of many colonists who had fled Leiccsenland before the final surrender. But sooner or later they would all be tracked down by burnished, vulture-like ships, flying overhead.