"Well, why not?" A sudden smile transformed Newton's stern visage.

"There are three chaplains with the police--a Methodist minister, a Catholic priest, and a Jewish rabbi. Also, we have on board two full-fledged I-P captains, either of whom is authorized to tie matrimonial knots. The means are not lacking--if you're both sure of yourselves?" and all levity disappeared as he studied the two young faces.

"Yes, you are sure," he continued after a moment "just as her mother and I were--and are. It is too bad that she cannot be here with you, but it may be a long time before we can return to Tellus, and you have indeed waited long.

"Oh thanks, Daddy, you're just a perfectly wonderful old darling!" Nadia exclaimed, as she threw her arms rapturously around his neck. "And this isn't a warship at all--you know perfectly well that it's a research laboratory, and that as soon as the Navy gets here, you won't let it fight a bit more, because such scientists can't be allowed to risk themselves! And also, you're forgetting that whole flock of women and babies that are coming out here just as fast as they can get themselves ready. So get going, daddy old dear, and let's do things! Steve's a Quaker and we're Presbyterians, so none of the chaplains will do at all.

Besides, I promised Captain King ages ago that he could marry me, so go get him and we'll do it now. Bill can be my bridesmaid, you'll give me away, and Steve can have the other two of his Big Three for best men.

I'm off to hunt up the flimsiest, fussiest white dress I can find in my trunks. Let's go!"

"Mr. Newton." Stevens spoke thoughtfully as Nadia darted away. "You said something about her mother, I didn't want to say anything to raise false hopes while she was here, but I've got an idea. Let's meet in Brandon's room instead of here. We can send code to Tellus easily enough on our ultrawave, and we may be able to fake up something on vision."

A few minutes later the Big Three were in Brandon's private study; staring intently into a screen of ground gla.s.s upon which played flickering, flashing lights, while the black-haired physicist manipulated micrometer dials in infinitesimal arcs.

"Once more, Mac," Brandon directed. "Pretty nearly had them that time.

We're stretching this projector about six hundred percent, but we've got to make this connection. Can't you give me just a little more voltage on those secondaries?"

"I can _not_!" the voice of the first a.s.sistant snapped from the speaker. "I'm overloading now so badly that some of my plates are getting hot--if I hold this voltage much longer, the whole secondary bank of tubes is going out. All x--you're on zero!"

"All x!" Flashing and waning, the lights upon the screen formed fleeting, shifting, nebulous images of a relay station upon distant Earth; but the utmost power of the transmitting fields could neither steady the image nor hold it.

"Back off, Mac," Brandon instructed. "I'm afraid we can't hold 'em direct--no use blowing a bank of tubes. We'll try relaying through Mars--we can hold them there, I think. It will muss up reception some, but it will probably be better than direct, at that. Point oh five three six ... all x--shoot!"

Brandon's relay station upon Mars was finally raised and held, and a corps of keenly interested engineers there made short work of the Earth-Mars linkage. Soon the screen glowed with the picture of the transmitter-room of the Terrestrial station, and while the three men were waiting for Mrs. Newton to be called to her own television set, the door behind them opened. Nadia and her escorts entered the room--but Stevens' eyes saw only the entrancing vision of loveliness that was his bride. Dressed in a clinging white gown of shimmering silk, her hair a golden blond corona, sweetly curved lips slightly parted and wide eyes eloquent, she paused momentarily as Stevens came to his feet and stared at her, his very heart in his eyes.

"You never saw me in a dress before--do you like me, Steve?"

"_Like_ you! You're beautiful!" and gray eyes and brown, deep with wonder and with love, met and held as, unheeding the presence of their friends, they went into each other's arms in a coalescence as inevitable and as final as Fate itself.

"Hi, Nadia old dear!" and "Daughter, from what I can see of my son-in-law, I believe that he may do," came together from the speaker.

Nadia tore herself from Stevens' embrace, to see upon the lambent screen the happily smiling faces of her mother and sister.

"Mother! Claire! Oh, you three wonder-workers!" She addressed simultaneously the distant Terrestrials and the scientists at her side, while broken exclamations, punctuated by ominous, crackling snaps, came from the laboring amplifier.

"Sorry to interrupt," MacDonald's voice broke in, "but you'll have to hurry it up. Alcantro and Fedanzo are doing their best, but every plate in my secondary bank's red hot, and you could fry an egg on any one of my transformers. Even my primary tubes are running hot. She won't hold together five minutes longer!"

Captain King opened his book, and in that small steel room, unadorned save for stack upon stack of bookcases, the brief but solemn ceremony joining two young lives was read--its solemnity only intensified by its unique accompaniment. For from Brandon at the primary controls, through the power-room of the _Sirius_ and the relay-station upon Mars, to the immense Interplanetary transmitter upon Earth, the greatest radio and television engineers of two planets were fighting overdriven equipment, trying to hold an almost impossible connection, in order that Nadia Newton's mother and sister might be present at her wedding, hundreds of millions of miles distant in s.p.a.ce!

"I p.r.o.nounce you man and wife. Whom G.o.d hath joined, let no man put asunder." The sacred old ritual ended and Captain King picked up the bride in his great arms as though she were a baby, kissed her vigorously, and set her down in front of the transmitter. In the midst of the joyous confusion that ensued a tearing, rattling crash came from the speaker and the screen went blank.

"There!" lamented MacDonald from the power room. "I knew they'd blow!

There goes my whole secondary bank--eight perfectly good ten-nineteens all shot to...."

"That's too bad, but it couldn't be helped; they went for a good cause,"

interrupted Brandon. "I'll come down and help clean up the mess."

Leaving the bridal party, he made his way rapidly to the power room, where he found MacDonald and the two Martians inspecting the smoking remains of what had been the secondary bank of their powerful ultra-transmitter. Spare parts in abundance were on hand, and it was not long until the damaged section was apparently as good as new.

"Now to try her out," Brandon announced. "We want to give her a good workout, but there's no use trying the I-P stations any more--they're altogether too hard to handle at this range. Czuv said something about an unknown race of monstrosities at the south pole of Jupiter--let's try it on them for a while."

He flung the field of force out into s.p.a.ce, as responsive to his will as a well-trained horse, and guided it toward the southern limb of that gigantic world. Down and down the projection plunged, through mile after mile of reeking, steaming fog, impenetrable to earthly eyes. Finally it came to rest upon the surface, hundreds of feet deep in a lush, dank, tropical jungle, and Brandon plugged into the Venerian room.

"Kenor? We've got a lot of use for you, if you can come down here for a while. Thanks a lot." He turned to the Martians. "Luckily, we've got a couple of infra-red transformers aboard, so we won't have to build one.

You fellows might break one out and shunt it onto this circuit while Dol Kenor is hunting up something for us to look at.

"Hi, old Infra-Eyes!" he went on, as the Venerian scientist waddled into the room in his bulging s.p.a.ce-suit. "We've got something here that's right down your alley. Want to see what you can see?"

"Ah, a beautiful scene!" exclaimed Dol Kenor, after one glance into the plate. "It is indeed a relief, after all this coldness and glare, to see such a soft, warm landscape--even though I have never expected to behold quite such a violent bit of jungle," and under his guidance the projection flashed over hundreds of miles of territory. To the eyes of the Terrestrials the screen revealed only a blank, amorphous grayness, through which at times there shot lines and ma.s.ses of vague and meaningless form; but the Venerian was very evidently seeing and enjoying many and diverse scenes.

"There, I think, is what you wish to see first," he announced, as he finally steadied the controls, and Brandon cut in upon the shunting screen the infra-red transformer. This device, developed long before to render possible the use of Terrestrial eyes in the opaque atmosphere of Venus, stepped up the fog-piercing long waves into the frequencies of light capable of affecting the earthly retina. Instantly the dull gray blank of the shunting screen became transformed into a clear and colorful picture of the great city of the Jovians of the South.

"Great Cat!" Brandon exclaimed. "Flying fortresses is right! They're in war formation, too, or I'm a polyp! We've got to watch this, Mac, all of it, and watch it close--it's apt to have a big bearing on what we'll have to do, before they get done. Better we rig up another set, and put a relay of observers on this job!"

CHAPTER XI

The Vorkul-Hexan War

Vorkulia, the city of the Vorkuls, was an immense seven-pointed star. At its center, directly upon the south pole of Jupiter, rose a tremendous shaft--its cross-section likewise a tapering seven-pointed star--which housed the directing intelligence of the nation. Radiating from the seven cardinal points of the building were short lanes leading to star-shaped open plots, from which in turn branched out ways to other stellate areas; ways reaching, after many such steps, to the towering inner walls of the metropolis. The outer walls, still loftier and even more ma.s.sive ramparts of sullen gray-green metal, formed a seamless, jointless barrier against an utterly indescribable foe; a barrier whose outer faces radiated constantly a searing, coruscating green emanation.

Metal alone could not long have barred that voracious and implacably relentless enemy, but against that lethal green emanation even that ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back, impotent.

Writhing and crawling, loathesomely palpitant with an unspeakable exuberance of foul and repellent vigor, possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained there, it threw its most hideously prolific growths against that radiant wall in vain.

The short, zig-zag lanes, the ways, and the seven-pointed areas were paved with a greenish gla.s.s. This pavement was intended solely to prevent vegetable growth and carried no traffic whatever, since few indeed of the Vorkuls have ever been earth-bound and all traffic was in the air. The princ.i.p.al purpose of the openings was to separate, and thus to render accessible by air, the mighty buildings which, level upon level, towered upward, with airships hovering at or anch.o.r.ed to doorways and entrances at every level. Buildings, entrances, everything visible--all replicated, reiterated, repeated infinite variations in the one theme, that of the septenate stelliform.

Color ran riot; ma.s.ses varied from immense blocks of awe-inspiring grandeur to delicate tracery of sheerest gossamer; lights flamed and flared in wide bands and in narrow, flashing pencils--but in all, through all, over all, and dominating all was the Seven-Pointed Star.

In and almost filling the s.p.a.ce, at least a mile in width, between the inner and the outer walls were huge, seven-sided structures--featureless, squat, forbidding heptagons of dull green metal. No thing living was to be seen in that s.p.a.ce. Its pavement was of solid metal and immensely thick, and that metal, as well as that of the walls, was burned and blackened and seared as though by numberless exposures to intolerable flame. In a lower compartment of one of these enormous heptagons Vortel Kromodeor, First Projector Officer, rested before a gigantic and complex instrument board. He was at ease--his huge wings folded, his sinuous length coiled comfortably in slack loops about two horizontal bars. But at least one enormous, extensible eye was always pointed toward the board, always was at least one nimble and bat-like ear c.o.c.ked attentively in the direction of the signal panel.

A whistling, shrieking ululation rent the air and the officer's coils tightened as he reared a few feet of his length upright, shooting out half a dozen tentacular arms to various switches and controls upon his board, while throughout the great heptagon, hundreds of other Vorkuls sprang to attention at their a.s.signed posts of duty. As the howling wail came to a climax in a blast of sound Kromodeor threw over a lever, as did every other projector officer in every other heptagon, and there was made plain to any observer the reason for the burns and scars in the tortured s.p.a.ce between the lofty inner and outer walls of Vorkulia.

For these heptagons were the monstrous flying fortresses which Czuv had occasionally seen from afar, as they went upon some unusual errand above the Jovian banks of mist, and which Brandon was soon to see in his visiray screen. The seared and disfigured metal of the pavement and walls was made so by the release of the furious blasts of energy necessary to raise those untold thousands of tons of ma.s.s against the attraction of Jupiter, more than two and a half times the gravity of our own world! Vast volumes of flaming energy shrieked from the ports. Wave upon wave, flooding the heptagons, it dashed back and forth upon the heavy metal between the walls. As more and more of the inconceivable power of those t.i.tanic generators was unleashed, it boiled forth in a devastating flood which, striking the walls, rebounded and leaped vertically far above even those mighty ramparts. Even the enormous thickness of the highly conducting metal could not absorb all the energy of that intolerable blast, and immediately beneath the ports new seven-pointed areas of disfigurement appeared as those terrific flying fortresses were finally wrenched from the ground and hurled upward.

High in the air, another signal wailed up and down a peculiar scale of sound and the mighty host of vessels formed smoothly into symmetrical groups of seven. Each group then moved with mathematical precision into its allotted position in a complex geometrical formation--a gigantic, seven-ribbed, duplex cone in s.p.a.ce. The flagship flew at the apex of this stupendous formation; behind, and protected by, the full power of the other floating citadels of the forty-nine groups of seven.

Due north, the amazing armada sped in rigorous alignment, flying along a predetermined meridian--due north!

At the end of his watch Kromodeor relinquished his board to the officer relieving him and shot into the air, propelled by the straightening of the powerful coils of his snake-like body and tail. Wings half spread, lateral and vertical ruddering fins outthrust, he soared across the room toward a low opening. Just before they struck the wall upon either side of the doorway the great wings snapped shut, the fins retracted, and the long and heavy body struck the floor of the pa.s.sage without a jar. With a wriggling, serpentine motion he sped like a vibrant arrow along the hall and into a wardroom. There, after a brief glance around the room, he coiled up beside a fellow officer who, with one eye, was negligently reading a scroll held in three or four hands; while with another eye, poised upon its slender pedicle, he watched a moving picture upon a television screen.

"h.e.l.lo, Kromodeor," Wixill, Chief Power Officer[2] greeted the newcomer in the wailing, hissing language of the Vorkuls. He tossed the scroll into the air, where it instantly rolled into a tight cylinder and shot into an opening in the wall of the room. "Glad to see you. Books and shows are all right on practice cruises, but I can't seem to work up much enthusiasm about such things now."

[Footnote 2: In order to avoid all unnecessary strain upon the memory of the reader, all t.i.tles, etc., have been given in the closest possible English equivalent, instead of in an attempted transliteration of the foreign word. This particular officer has no counterpart upon Tellurian vessels. He is the second in command of a Vorkulian fortress, his function being to supervise all expenditure of power.--E. E. S.]

Kromodeor elevated an eye and studied the screen, upon which, to the accompaniment of whistling, shrieking sound, whirled and gyrated an interlacing group of serpentine forms.

"A good show, Wixill," the projector officer replied, "but nothing to hold the attention of men engaged in what we are doing. Think of it!

After twenty years of preparation--two long lifetimes--and for the first time in our history, we are actually going to war!"