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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 29283 ***
+
+
+
+
+                         Transcriber's Note:
+
+     This etext was produced from Astounding Stories March 1933.
+     Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
+     U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+
+                           Salvage in Space
+
+
+                          By Jack Williamson
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of
+a derelict rocket-flier manned by death invisible.]
+
+
+His "planet" was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest,
+Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge,
+bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly
+in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric
+iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily
+away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark
+mystery of the void.
+
+His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red.
+He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron
+his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.
+
+Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of
+metal--a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds
+of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had
+not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the
+spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious
+metals was disappointingly minute.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars
+and Jupiter, is "mined" by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the
+platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small
+quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be
+fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law,
+should occupy this space.]
+
+On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen
+atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from
+its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment
+he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.
+
+Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the
+vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The
+magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected.
+He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.
+
+Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts?
+Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion,
+Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last instalment on his
+Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no
+more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of
+iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?
+
+He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole
+planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had
+braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors
+for hard years, who still hoped.
+
+But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....
+
+The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red
+hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a
+fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a
+girl waiting, at the silver door--a trim, slender girl in white, with
+blue eyes and hair richly brown.
+
+Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps
+through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could
+be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not
+amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white
+was yet only a glorious dream....
+
+[Illustration: Gigantic claws seemed to reach out of empty air.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it,
+pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a
+tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his
+native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below
+it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken
+sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness,
+emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.
+
+Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal
+vastness of space. And no work of man--save the few tools of his
+daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black
+iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being
+must be tens of millions of miles away.
+
+On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now
+he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that
+he was going mad. But sometimes....
+
+Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his
+huge metal helmet:
+
+"Brace up, old top. In good company, when you're by yourself, as Dad
+used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan
+and 'Chuck' and the rest of the crowd again, at Comet's place. What
+price a friendly boxing match with Mason, or an evening at the
+teleview theater?
+
+"Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real food, in place
+of these tasteless concentrates! A hot bath, instead of greasing
+yourself!
+
+"Too dull out here. Life--" He broke off, set his jaw.
+
+No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how
+did he know that a whirring meteor wasn't going to flash him out
+before he got back?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the suit, into its
+ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside pocket, and lighted it.
+The smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the air
+filters.
+
+"Darn clever, these suits," he murmured. "Food, smokes, water
+generator, all where you can reach them. And darned expensive, too.
+I'd better be looking for pay metal!"
+
+He clambered to a better position; stood peering out into space,
+searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric fragment that
+might be worth capturing for its content of precious metals. For an
+hour he scanned the black, star-strewn gulf, as the sputtering rocket
+continued to drive him forward.
+
+"There she glows!" he cried suddenly, and grinned.
+
+Before him was a tiny, glowing fleck, that moved among the unchanging
+stars. He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet.
+
+Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What treasure it
+promised! At first sight, it was impossible to determine size or
+distance or rate of motion. It might be ten thousand tons of rich
+metal. A fortune! It would more probably prove to be a tiny, stony
+mass, not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but
+moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it with the power of the
+diminutive Millen rocket.
+
+He studied the tiny speck intently, with practised eye, as the minutes
+passed--an untrained eye would never have seen it at all, among the
+flaming hosts of stars. Skilfully he judged, from its apparent rate of
+motion and its slow increase in brilliance, its size and distance
+from him.
+
+"Must be--must be fair size," he spoke aloud, at length. "A hundred
+tons, I'll bet my helmet! But scooting along pretty fast. Stretch the
+little old rocket to run it down."
+
+He clambered back to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming
+exhaust, to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead,
+filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite, which
+were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, and increased the
+firing rate.
+
+The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from the incandescent
+orifice of the exhaust. The vibration of the metal sphere increased.
+Thad left the sputtering rocket and went back where he could see the
+object before him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would he be in
+time to capture it as it passed, or would it hurtle by ahead of him,
+and vanish in the limitless darkness of space before his feeble rocket
+could check the momentum of his ball of metal?
+
+He peered at it, as it drew closer.
+
+Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery. Not the dull black of
+meteoric iron. And it was larger, more distant, than he had thought at
+first. In form, too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was no
+jagged mass of metal.
+
+His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were not the mass
+of rich metal for which he had prayed, it might be something as
+valuable--and more interesting.
+
+He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and
+advanced the firing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous
+explosion.
+
+When he returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him,
+he saw that it was a ship. A tapering silver-green rocket-flier.
+
+Once more his dreams were dashed. The officers of interplanetary
+liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their
+collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are
+menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship save a
+heliographed warning to keep clear.
+
+But how came a rocket-flier here, in the perilous swarms of the meteor
+belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid,
+in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal.
+
+The lanes more frequently used, between Earth, Mars, Venus and
+Mercury, were of course far inside the orbits of the asteroids. And
+the few ships running to Jupiter's moons avoided them by crossing
+millions of miles above their plane.
+
+Could it be that legendary green ship, said once to have mysteriously
+appeared, sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the primitive
+ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after in the remote
+wastes of space? Absurd, of course: he dismissed the idle fancy and
+examined the ship still more closely.
+
+Then he saw that it was turning, end over end, very slowly. That meant
+that its gyros were stopped; that it was helpless, drifting, disabled,
+powerless to avoid hurtling meteoric stones. Had it blundered unawares
+into the belt of swarms--been struck before the danger was realized?
+Was it a derelict, with all dead upon it?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Either the ship's machinery was completely wrecked, Thad knew, or
+there was no one on watch. For the controls of a modern rocket-flier
+are so simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at the bridge
+can keep a vessel upon her course.
+
+It might be, he thought, that a meteorite had ripped open the hull,
+allowing the air to escape so quickly that the entire crew had been
+asphyxiated before any repairs could be made. But that seemed
+unlikely, since the ship must have been divided into several
+compartments by air-tight bulkheads.
+
+Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason? The crew might
+have mutinied, and left her in the life-tubes. She might have been
+robbed by pirates, and set adrift. But with the space lanes policed as
+they were, piracy and successful mutiny were rare.
+
+Thad saw that the flier's navigation lights were out.
+
+He found the heliograph signal mirror at his side, sighted it upon the
+ship, and worked the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call.
+There was no response.
+
+The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he board her, and take her to
+Mars? By law, it was his duty to attempt to aid any helpless ship, or
+at least to try to save any endangered lives upon her. And the salvage
+award, if the ship should be deserted and he could bring her safe to
+port, would be half her value.
+
+No mean prize, that. Half the value of ship and cargo! More than he
+was apt to earn in years of mining the meteor-belt.
+
+With new anxiety, he measured the relative motion of the gleaming
+ship. It was going to pass ahead of him. And very soon. No more time
+for speculation. It was still uncertain whether it would come near
+enough so that he could get a line to it.
+
+Rapidly he unslung from his belt the apparatus he used to capture
+meteors. A powerful electromagnet, with a thin, strong wire fastened
+to it, to be hurled from a helix-gun. He set the drum on which the
+wire was wound upon the metal at his feet, fastened it with its
+magnetic anchor, wondering if it would stand the terrific strain when
+the wire tightened.
+
+Raising the helix to his shoulder, he trained it upon a point well
+ahead of the rushing flier, and stood waiting for the exact moment to
+press the lever. The slender spindle of the ship was only a mile away
+now, bright in the sunlight. He could see no break in her polished
+hull, save for the dark rows of circular ports. She was not, by any
+means, completely wrecked.
+
+He read the black letters of her name.
+
+_Red Dragon._
+
+The name of her home port, below, was in smaller letters. But in a
+moment he made them out. San Francisco. The ship then came from the
+Earth! From the very city where Thad was born!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gleaming hull was near now. Only a few hundred yards away.
+Passing. Aiming well ahead of her, to allow for her motion, Thad
+pressed the key that hurled the magnet from the helix. It flung away
+from him, the wire screaming from the reel behind it.
+
+Thad's mass of metal swung on past the ship, as he returned to the
+rocket and stopped its clattering explosions. He watched the tiny
+black speck of the magnet. It vanished from sight in the darkness of
+space, appeared again against the white, burnished hull of the rocket
+ship.
+
+For a painful instant he thought he had missed. Then he saw that the
+magnet was fast to the side of the flier, near the stern. The line
+tightened. Soon the strain would come upon it, as it checked the
+momentum of the mass of iron. He set the friction brake.
+
+Thad flung himself flat, grasped the wire above the reel. Even if the
+mass of iron tore itself free, he could hold to the wire, and himself
+reach the ship.
+
+He flung past the deserted vessel, behind it, his lump of iron swung
+like a pebble in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst from the burned
+lining of the friction brake, in the reel. Then the wire was all out;
+there was a sudden jerk.
+
+And the hard-gathered sphere of metal was gone--snapped off into
+space. Thad clung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured
+arms almost drawn from their sockets. Fear flashed over his mind; what
+if the wire broke, and left him floating helpless in space?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It held, though, to his relief. He was trailing behind the ship.
+Eagerly he seized the handle of the reel; began to wind up the mile of
+thin wire. Half an hour later, Thad's suited figure bumped gently
+against the shining hull of the rocket. He got to his feet, and gazed
+backward into the starry gulf, where his sphere of iron had long since
+vanished.
+
+"Somebody is going to find himself a nice chunk of metal, all welded
+together and equipped for rocket navigation," he murmured. "As for
+me--well, I've simply _got_ to run this tub to Mars!"
+
+He walked over the smooth, refulgent hull, held to it by magnetic
+soles. Nowhere was it broken, though he found scars where small
+meteoric particles had scratched the brilliant polish. So no meteor
+had wrecked the ship. What, then, was the matter? Soon he would know.
+
+The _Red Dragon_ was not large. A hundred and thirty feet long, Thad
+estimated, with a beam of twenty-five feet. But her trim lines bespoke
+design recent and good; the double ring of black projecting rockets at
+the stern told of unusual speed.
+
+A pretty piece of salvage, he reflected, if he could land her on
+Mars. Half the value of such a ship, unharmed and safe in port, would
+be a larger sum than he dared put in figures. And he must take her in,
+now that he had lost his own rocket!
+
+He found the life-tubes, six of them, slender, silvery cylinders,
+lying secure in their niches, three along each side of the flier. None
+was missing. So the crew had not willingly deserted the ship.
+
+He approached the main air-lock, at the center of the hull, behind the
+projecting dome of the bridge. It was closed. A glance at the dials
+told him there was full air pressure within it. It had, then, last
+been used to enter the rocket, not to leave it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thad opened the exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the chamber of
+the lock. The huge door swung open in response to his hand upon the
+wheel, and he entered the cylindrical chamber. In a moment the door
+was closed behind him, air was hissing into the lock again.
+
+He started to open the face-plate of his helmet, longing for a breath
+of air that did not smell of sweat and stale tobacco smoke, as that in
+his suit always did, despite the best chemical purifiers. Then he
+hesitated. Perhaps some deadly gas, from the combustion chambers....
+
+Thad opened the inner valve, and came upon the upper deck of the
+vessel. A floor ran the full length of the ship, broken with hatches
+and companionways that gave to the rocket rooms, cargo holds, and
+quarters for crew and passengers below. There was an enclosed ladder
+that led to bridge and navigating room in the dome above. The hull
+formed an arched roof over it.
+
+The deck was deserted, lit only by three dim blue globes, hanging from
+the curved roof. All seemed in order--the fire-fighting equipment
+hanging on the walls, and the huge metal patches and welding equipment
+for repairing breaks in the hull. Everything was clean, bright with
+polish or new paint.
+
+And all was very still. The silence held a vague, brooding threat that
+frightened Thad, made him wish for a moment that he was back upon his
+rugged ball of metal. But he banished his fear, and strode down the
+deck.
+
+Midway of it he found a dark stain upon the clean metal. The black of
+long-dried blood. A few tattered scraps of cloth beside it. No more
+than bloody rags. And a heavy meat cleaver, half hidden beneath a bit
+of darkened fabric.
+
+Mute record of tragedy! Thad strove to read it. Had a man fought here
+and been killed? It must have been a struggle of peculiar violence, to
+judge by the dark spattered stains, and the indescribable condition of
+the remnants of clothing. But what had he fought? Another man, or some
+thing? And what had become of victor and vanquished?
+
+He walked on down the deck.
+
+The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt patter of quick little
+footsteps behind him. He turned quickly, nervously, with a hand going
+instinctively to his welding arc, which, he knew, would make a fairly
+effective weapon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was merely a dog. A little dog, yellow, nondescript, pathetically
+delighted. With a sharp, eager bark, it leaped up at Thad, pawing at
+his armor and licking it, standing on its hind legs and reaching
+toward the visor of his helmet.
+
+It was very thin, as if from long starvation. Both ears were ragged
+and bloody, and there was a long, unhealed scratch across the
+shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a serious wound.
+
+The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy. But Thad thought he saw
+fear in them. And even through the stiff fabric of the Osprey suit, he
+felt that the dog was trembling.
+
+Suddenly, with a low whine, it shrank close to his side. And another
+sound reached Thad's ears.
+
+A cry, weird and harrowing beyond telling. A scream so thin and so
+high that it roughened his skin, so keenly shrill that it tortured his
+nerves; a sound of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing than
+any bodily pain.
+
+When silence came again, Thad was standing with his back against the
+wall, the welding arc in his hand. His face was cold with sweat, and a
+queer chill prickled up and down his spine. The yellow dog crouched
+whimpering against his legs.
+
+Ominous, threatening stillness filled the ship again, disturbed only
+by the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog. Trying to calm his
+overwrought nerves, Thad listened--strained his ears. He could hear
+nothing. And he had no idea from which direction the terrifying sound
+had come.
+
+A strange cry. Thad knew it had been born in no human throat. Nor in
+the throat of any animal he knew. It had carried an alien note that
+overcame him with instinctive fear and horror. What had voiced it? Was
+the ship haunted by some dread entity?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For many minutes Thad stood upon the deck, waiting, tensely grasping
+the welding tool. But the nerve-shattering scream did not come again.
+Nor any other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear. It
+leaped up at his face again, with another short little bark.
+
+The air must be good, he thought, if the dog could live in it.
+
+He unscrewed the face-plate of his helmet, and lifted it. The air
+that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply,
+gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: a
+curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.
+
+The dog kept leaping up, whining.
+
+"Hungry, boy?" Thad whispered.
+
+He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit, found a slab of
+concentrated food, and tossed it out through the opened panel. The dog
+sprang upon it, wolfed it eagerly, and came back to his side.
+
+Thad set at once about exploring the ship.
+
+First he ascended the ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it,
+studded with transparent ports. Charts and instruments were in order.
+And the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of the ship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thad had no expert's knowledge of the flier's mechanism. But he had
+studied interplanetary navigation, to qualify for his license to carry
+masses of metal under rocket power through the space lanes and into
+planetary atmospheres. He was sure he could manage the ship if its
+mechanism were in good order, though he was uncertain of his ability
+to make any considerable repairs.
+
+To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials revealed nothing wrong.
+
+He started the gyro motors, got the great wheels to spinning, and thus
+stopped the slow, end-over-end turning of the flier. Then he went to
+the rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes, and set them to
+firing. The vessel answered readily to her helm. In a few minutes he
+had the red fleck of Mars over the bow.
+
+"Yes, I can run her, all right," he announced to the dog, which had
+followed him up the steps, keeping close to his feet. "Don't worry,
+old boy. We'll be eating a juicy beefsteak together, in a week. At
+Comet's place in Helion, down by the canal. Not much style--but the
+eats!
+
+"And now we're going to do a little detective work, and find out what
+made that disagreeable noise. And what happened to all your
+fellow-astronauts. Better find out, before it happens to us!"
+
+He shut off the rockets, and climbed down from the bridge again.
+
+When Thad started down the companionway to the officers' quarters, in
+the central one of the five main compartments of the ship, the dog
+kept close to his legs, growling, trembling, hackles lifted. Sensing
+the animal's terror, pitying it for the naked fear in its eyes, Thad
+wondered what dramas of horror it might have seen.
+
+The cabins of the navigator, calculator, chief technician, and first
+officer were empty, and forbidding with the ominous silence of the
+ship. They were neatly in order, and the berths had been made since
+they were used. But there was a large bloodstain, black and circular,
+on the floor of the calculator's room.
+
+The captain's cabin held evidence of a violent struggle. The door had
+been broken in. Its fragments, with pieces of broken furniture, books,
+covers from the berth, and three service pistols, were scattered about
+in indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among the
+frightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing, of dissimilar
+fabrics. The guns were empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Attempting to reconstruct the action of the tragedy from those grim
+clues, he imagined that the five officers, aware of some peril, had
+gathered here, fought, and died.
+
+The dog refused to enter the room. It stood at the door, looking
+anxiously after him, trembling and whimpering pitifully. Several times
+it sniffed the air and drew back, snarling. Thad thought that the
+unpleasant earthy odor he had noticed upon opening the face-plate of
+his helmet was stronger here.
+
+After a few minutes of searching through the wildly disordered room,
+he found the ship's log--or its remains. Many pages had been torn from
+the book, and the remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff black
+mass.
+
+Only one legible entry did he find, that on a page torn from the book,
+which somehow had escaped destruction. Dated five months before, it
+gave the position of the vessel and her bearings--she was then just
+outside Jupiter's orbit, Earthward bound--and concluded with a remark
+of sinister implications:
+
+     "Another man gone this morning. Simms, assistant technician.
+     A fine workman. O'Deen swears he heard something moving on
+     the deck. Cook thinks some of the doctor's stuffed
+     monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous, of course. But
+     what is one to think?"
+
+Pondering the significance of those few lines, Thad climbed back to
+the deck. Was the ship haunted by some weird death, that had seized
+the crew man by man, mysteriously? That was the obvious implication.
+And if the flier had been still outside Jupiter's orbit when those
+words were written, it must have been weeks before the end. A lurking,
+invisible death! The scream he had heard....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He descended into the forecastle, and came upon another such silent
+record of frightful carnage as he had found in the captain's cabin.
+Dried blood, scraps of cloth, knives and other weapons. A fearful
+question was beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies of
+those who must have died in these conflicts? He dared not think the
+answer.
+
+Gripping the welding arc, Thad approached the after hatch, giving to
+the cargo hold. Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he was
+determined to find the sinister menace of the ship, before it found
+him. The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him,
+contributing nothing to his peace of mind.
+
+The hold proved to be dark. An indefinite black space, oppressive with
+the terrible silence of the flier. The air within it bore still more
+strongly the unpleasant fetor.
+
+Thad hesitated on the steps. The hold was not inviting. But at the
+thought that he must sleep, unguarded, while taking the flier to Mars,
+his resolution returned. The uncertainty, the constant fear, would be
+unendurable.
+
+He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He found it, as his
+feet touched the floor. Blue light flooded the hold.
+
+It was filled with monstrous things, colossal creatures, such as
+nothing that ever lived upon the Earth; like nothing known in the
+jungles of Venus or the deserts of Mars, or anything that has been
+found upon Jupiter's moons.
+
+They were monsters remotely resembling insects or crustaceans, but as
+large as horses or elephants; creatures upreared upon strange limbs,
+armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons, frightful, saw-toothed
+snouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow and green. They leered
+at him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow and purple.
+
+They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A cold shock of horror started along Thad's spine, at sight of those
+incredible nightmare things. Automatically he flung up the welding
+tool, flicking over the lever with his thumb, so that violet electric
+flame played about the electrode.
+
+Then he saw that the crowding, hideous things were motionless, that
+they stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were supported
+upon metal bars. They were dead. Mounted. Collected specimens of some
+alien life.
+
+Grinning wanly, and conscious of a weakness in the knees, he muttered:
+"They sure will fill the museum, if everybody gets the kick out of
+them that I did. A little too realistic, I'd say. Guess these are the
+'stuffed monstrosities' mentioned in the page out of the log. No
+wonder the cook was afraid of them. Some of then do look hellishly
+alive!"
+
+He started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from the armored
+enormities that seemed crouched to spring at him, motionless eyes
+staring.
+
+So, at the end of the long space, he found the treasure.
+
+Glittering in the blue light, it looked unreal. Incredible. A dazzling
+dream. He stopped among the fearful things that seemed gathered as if
+to guard it, and stared with wide eyes through the opened face-plate
+of his helmet.
+
+He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new, freshly smelted; bars of
+silver-white iridium, of argent platinum, of blue-white osmium. Many
+of them. Thousands of pounds, Thad knew. He trembled at thought of
+their value. Almost beyond calculation.
+
+Then he saw the coffer, lying beyond the piled, gleaming ingots--a
+huge box, eight feet long; made of some crystal that glittered with
+snowy whiteness, filled with sparkling, iridescent gleams, and inlaid
+with strange designs, apparently in vermilion enamel.
+
+With a little cry, he ran toward the chest, moving awkwardly in the
+loose, deflated fabric of the Osprey suit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beside the coffer, on the floor of the hold, was literally a mountain
+of flame--blazing gems, heaped as if they had been carelessly dumped
+from it; cut diamonds, incredibly gigantic; monster emeralds,
+sapphires, rubies; and strange stones, that Thad did not recognize.
+
+And Thad gasped with horror, when he looked at the designs of the
+vermilion inlay, in the white, gleaming crystal. Weird forms. Shapes
+of creatures somewhat like gigantic spiders, and more unlike them.
+Demoniac things, wickedly fanged, jaws slavering. Executed with
+masterly skill, that made them seem living, menacing, secretly
+gloating!
+
+Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated almost hypnotically.
+Three times he approached the chest, to lift the lid and find what it
+held. And three times the unutterable horror of those crimson images
+thrust him back, shuddering.
+
+"Nothing but pictures," he muttered hoarsely.
+
+A fourth time he advanced, trembling, and seized the lid of the
+coffer. Heavy, massive, it was fashioned also of glistening white
+crystal, and inlaid in crimson with weirdly hideous figures. Great
+hinges of white platinum held it on the farther side; it was fastened
+with a simple, heavy hasp of the precious metal.
+
+Hands quivering, Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted the lid.
+
+New treasure in the chest would not have surprised him. He was
+prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems or priceless metal. Nor
+would he have been astonished at some weird creature such as one of
+those whose likenesses were inlaid in the crystal.
+
+But what he saw made him drop the massive lid.
+
+A woman lay in the chest--motionless, in white.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a moment he raised the lid again; examined the still form more
+closely. The woman had been young. The features were regular, good to
+look upon. The eyes were closed; the white face appeared very
+peaceful.
+
+Save for the extreme, cadaverous pallor, there was no mark of death.
+With a fancy that the body might be miraculously living, sleeping,
+Thad thrust an arm out through the opened panel of his suit, and
+touched a slender, bare white arm. It was stiff, very cold.
+
+The still, pallid face was framed in fine brown hair. The fair, small
+hands were crossed upon the breast, over the simple white garment.
+
+A queer ache came into his heart. Something made him think of a white
+tower in the red hills near Helion, and a girl waiting in its fragrant
+garden of saffron and purple--a girl like this.
+
+The body lay upon a bed of blazing jewels.
+
+It appeared, Thad thought, as if the pile of gems upon the floor had
+been hastily scraped from the coffer, to make room for the quiet form.
+He wondered how long it had lain there. It looked as if it might have
+been living but minutes before. Some preservative....
+
+His thought was broken by a sound that rang from the open hatchway on
+the deck above--the furious barking and yelping of the dog. Abruptly
+that was silent, and in its place came the uncanny and terrifying
+scream that Thad had heard once before, on this flier of mystery. A
+shriek so keen and shrill that it seemed to tear out his nerves by
+their roots. The voice of the haunter of the ship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Thad came back upon the deck, the dog was still barking
+nervously. He saw the animal forward, almost at the bow. Hackles
+raised, tail between its legs, it was slinking backward, barking
+sharply as if to call for aid.
+
+Apparently it was retreating from something between Thad and itself.
+But Thad, searching the dimly-lit deck, could see no source of alarm.
+Nor could the structures upon it have shut any large object from his
+view.
+
+"It's all right!" Thad called, intending to reassure the frightened
+animal, but finding his voice queerly dry. "Coming on the double, old
+man. Don't worry."
+
+The dog had reached the end of the deck. It stopped yelping, but
+snarled and whined as if in terror. It began darting back and forth,
+moving exactly as if something were slowly closing in upon it,
+trapping it in the corner. But Thad could see nothing.
+
+Then it made a wild dash back toward Thad, darting along by the wall,
+as if trying to run past an unseen enemy.
+
+Thad thought he heard quick, rasping footsteps, then, that were not
+those of the dog. And something seemed to catch the dog in mid-air, as
+it leaped. It was hurled howling to the deck. For a moment it
+struggled furiously, as if an invisible claw had pinned it down. Then
+it escaped, and fled whimpering to Thad's side.
+
+He saw a new wound across its hips. Three long, parallel scratches,
+from which fresh red blood was trickling.
+
+Regular scraping sounds came from the end of the deck, where no moving
+thing was to be seen--sounds such as might be made by the walking of
+feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad.
+Something that was _invisible_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Terror seized him, with the knowledge. He had nerved himself to face
+desperate men, or a savage animal. But an invisible being, that could
+creep upon him and strike unseen! It was incredible ... yet he had
+seen the dog knocked down, and the bleeding wound it had received.
+
+His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For the moment he thought
+only blindly, of escape. He knew only an overpowering desire to hide,
+to conceal himself from the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he
+might have tried to leave the flier.
+
+Beside him was one of the companionways amidships, giving access to a
+compartment of the vessel that he had not explored. He turned, leaped
+down the steps, with the terrified dog at his heels.
+
+Below, he found himself in a short hall, dimly lighted. Several metal
+doors opened from it. He tried one at random. It gave. He sprang
+through, let the dog follow, closed and locked it.
+
+Trying to listen, he leaned weakly against the door. The rushing of
+his breath, swift and regular. The loud hammer of his thudding heart.
+The dog's low whines. Then--unmistakable scraping sounds, outside.
+
+The scratching of claws, Thad knew. Invisible claws!
+
+He stood there, bracing the door with the weight of his body, holding
+the welding arc ready in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked,
+and he felt a heavy pressure against the panels. But at last the
+scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn, at
+least for a time.
+
+When he had time to think, the invisibility of the thing was not so
+incredible. The mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were
+evidence that the flier had visited some unknown planet, where weird
+life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a planet should be
+inhabited by beings invisible to human sight.
+
+Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction of the
+spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to visible light,
+as human flesh is radiolucent to hard X-rays. Quite possibly it could
+be seen by infra-red or ultra-violet light--evidently it was visible
+enough to the dog's eyes, with their different range of sensitivity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pushing the subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room into
+which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied by a woman. A
+frail blue silk dress and more intimate items of feminine wearing
+apparel were hanging above the berth. Two pairs of delicate black
+slippers stood neatly below it.
+
+Across from him was a dressing table, with a large mirror above it.
+Combs, pins, jars of cosmetic cluttered it. And Thad saw upon it a
+little leather-bound book, locked, stamped on the back "Diary."
+
+He crossed the room and picked up the little book, which smelled
+faintly of jasmine. Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the
+secrets of an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but
+to seize any chance of learning more of this ship of mystery and her
+invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.
+
+Linda Cross was the name written on the fly-leaf, in a firm, clear
+feminine hand. On the next page was the photograph, in color, of a
+girl, the brown-haired girl whose body Thad had discovered in the
+crystal coffer in the hold. Her eyes, he saw, had been blue. He
+thought she looked very lovely--like the waiting girl in his old dream
+of the silver tower in the red hills by Helion.
+
+The diary, it appeared, had not been kept very devotedly. Most of the
+pages were blank.
+
+One of the first entries, dated a year and a half before, told of a
+party that Linda had attended in San Francisco, and of her refusal to
+dance with a certain man, referred to as "Benny," because he had been
+unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended:
+
+     "Dad said to-night that we're going off in the _Dragon_
+     again. All the way to Uranus, if the new fuel works as he
+     expects. What a lark, to explore a few new worlds of our
+     own! Dad says one of Uranus' moons is as large as Mercury.
+     And Benny won't be proposing again soon!"
+
+Turning on, Thad found other scattered entries, some of them dealing
+with the preparation for the voyage, the start from San Francisco--and
+a huge bunch of flowers from "Benny," the long months of the trip
+through space, out past the orbit of Mars, above the meteor belt,
+across Jupiter's orbit, beyond the track of Saturn, which was the
+farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached, and on to
+Uranus, where they could not land because of the unstable surface.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The remainder of the entries Thad found less frequent, shorter,
+bearing the mark of excitement: landing upon Titania, the third and
+largest satellite of Uranus; unearthly forests, sheltering strange and
+monstrous life; the hunting of weird creatures, and mounting them for
+museum specimens.
+
+Then the discovery of a ruined city, whose remains indicated that it
+had been built by a lost race of intelligent, spiderlike things; the
+finding of a temple whose walls were of precious metals, containing a
+crystal chest filled with wondrous gems; the smelting of the metal
+into convenient ingots, and the transfer of the treasure to the hold.
+
+The first sinister note there entered the diary:
+
+     "Some of the men say we shouldn't have disturbed the temple.
+     Think it will bring us bad luck. Rubbish, of course. But one
+     man did vanish while they were smelting the gold. Poor Mr.
+     Tom James. I suppose he ventured away from the rest, and
+     something caught him."
+
+The few entries that followed were shorter, and showed increasing
+nervous tension. They recorded the departure from Titania, made almost
+as soon as the treasure was loaded. The last was made several weeks
+later. A dozen men had vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of
+blood to hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran:
+
+     "Dad says I'm to stay in here to-day. Old dear, he's afraid
+     the thing will get me--whatever it is. It's really serious.
+     Two men taken from their berths last night. And not a trace.
+     Some of them think it's a curse on the treasure. One of them
+     swears he saw Dad's stuffed specimens moving about in the
+     hold.
+
+     "Some terrible thing must have slipped aboard the flier, out
+     of the jungle. That's what Dad and the captain think. Queer
+     they can't find it. They've searched all over. Well...."
+
+Musing and regretful, Thad turned back for another look at the smiling
+girl in the photograph.
+
+What a tragedy her death had been! Reading the diary had made him like
+her. Her balance and humor. Her quiet affection for "Dad." The calm
+courage with which she seemed to have faced the creeping, lurking
+death that darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow.
+
+How had her body come to be in the coffer, he wondered, when all the
+others were--gone? It had shown no marks of violence. She must have
+died of fear. No, her face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that.
+Had she chosen easy death by some poison, rather than that other
+dreadful fate? Had her body been put in the chest to protect it, and
+the poison arrested decomposition?
+
+Thad was still studying the picture, thoughtfully and sadly, when the
+dog, which had been silent, suddenly growled again, and retreated from
+the door, toward the corner of the room.
+
+The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its claws scratching
+across the door again. And he heard another dreadful sound--not the
+long, shrill scream that had so grated on his nerves before, but a
+short, sharp coughing or barking, a series of shrill, indescribable
+notes that could have been made by no beast he knew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The decision to open the door cost a huge effort of Thad's will.
+
+For hours he had waited, thinking desperately. And the thing outside
+the door had waited as patiently, scratching upon it from time to
+time, uttering those dreadful, shrill coughing cries.
+
+Sooner or later, he would have to face the monster. Even if he could
+escape from the room and avoid it for a time, he would have to meet it
+in the end. And it might creep upon him while he slept.
+
+To be sure, the issue of the combat was extremely doubtful. The
+monster, apparently, had succeeded in killing every man upon the
+flier, even though some of them had been armed. It must be large and
+very ferocious.
+
+But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his Osprey-suit. The
+heavy fabric, made of metal wires impregnated with a tough, elastic
+composition, should afford considerable protection against the thing.
+
+The welding arc, intended to fuse refractive meteoric iron, would be
+no mean weapon, at close quarters. And the quarters would be close.
+
+If only he could find some way to make the thing visible!
+
+Paint, or something of the kind, would stick to its skin.... His eyes,
+searching the room, caught the jar of face powder on the dressing
+table. Dash that over it! It ought to stick enough to make the outline
+visible.
+
+So, at last, holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until a
+time when the pressure upon the door had just relaxed, and he knew the
+monster was waiting outside. Swiftly, he opened the door....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thad had partially overcome the instinctive horror that the unseen
+being had first aroused in him. But it returned in a sickening wave
+when he heard the short, shrill, coughing cries, hideously eager, that
+greeted the opening of the door. And the quick rasping of naked claws
+upon the floor. _Sounds from nothingness!_
+
+He flung the powder at the sound.
+
+A form of weird horror materialized before him, still half invisible,
+half outlined with the white film of adhering powder: gigantic and
+hideous claws, that seemed to reach out of empty air, the side of a
+huge, scaly body, a yawning, dripping jaw. For a moment Thad could see
+great, hooked fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if an unseen
+tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it in fluids which
+made it invisible.
+
+That unearthly, half-seen shape leaped at him.
+
+He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the floor. Claws were
+rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit. His arm was seized
+crushingly in half-visible jaws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated electrode was
+driven toward his body. He fought to keep it away; he knew that it
+would burn through even the insulated fabric of his suit.
+
+A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound,
+as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and felt a thin pencil of
+pain drawn along his body, where a claw cut his skin.
+
+Suddenly the suit was full of the earthy fetor of the monster's body,
+nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and
+thrust upward hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood
+trickling from the wound.
+
+A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was carried from his
+hand. Flung to the side of the room, it clattered to the floor; and
+then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing the breath from his
+lungs. The monster stood upon his body and clawed at him.
+
+Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet, encountering a
+great, hard body. Futilely he beat and thrust with his arms against
+the pillarlike limb.
+
+His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick fabric. He heard
+it tear again, along his right thigh. But he felt no pain, and thought
+the claws had not reached the skin.
+
+It was the yellow dog that gave him the chance to recover the weapon.
+The animal had been running back and forth in the opposite end of the
+room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now, with the mad
+courage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at the monster.
+
+A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled it back across the room.
+It lay still, broken, whimpering.
+
+For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from Thad's body. And
+Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung himself across the room,
+snatched up the welding tool.
+
+In an instant the creature was upon him again. But he met it with the
+incandescent electrode. He was crouched in a corner, now, where it
+could come at him from only one direction. Its claws still slashed at
+him ferociously. But he was able to cling to the weapon, and meet each
+onslaught with hot metal.
+
+Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his blind, thrusting
+blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A terrible choking,
+strangling sound came from the air. And he heard the thrashing
+struggles of wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He prodded the
+thing again and again with the hot electrode, and it did not move. It
+was dead.
+
+The creature's body was so heavy that Thad had to return to the
+bridge, and shut off the current in the gravity plates along the keel,
+before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which he
+had entered the flier, and consigned it to space....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Five days later Thad brought the _Red Dragon_ into the atmosphere of
+Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in response to his signals, and
+docked the flier safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again,
+with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard to inspect
+the vessel.
+
+Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in the
+hold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at the
+treasure, he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of white
+crystal, and looked once more upon the still form of the girl within
+it.
+
+Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat.
+
+Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so lovely. How
+terrible her last days of life must have been, with doom shadowing the
+vessel, and the men vanishing mysteriously, one by one!
+Terrible--until she had sought the security of death.
+
+Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half the
+incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the award
+of salvage. If only the girl were still living.... He felt a
+poignantly keen desire to hear her voice.
+
+Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. A
+hasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among glittering gems.
+
+     "This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled
+     medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state
+     of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty
+     minims of zeronel.
+
+     "She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.
+
+     "I entreat the finders of this to have care given her, and
+     to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this
+     ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other
+     claims.
+
+     "Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a
+     hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and the
+     injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time
+     that must elapse.
+
+     "If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing upon
+     the ship has destroyed me and all my men.
+
+     "Please do not fail me.
+
+                                    Levington Cross."
+
+Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its
+Martian garden of saffron and purple, among the low ocher hills beside
+Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where the
+girl of his dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaulted
+chamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay, to
+look into her pallid face, and feel her cold wrist. He kept a nurse in
+attendance, and had a physician call daily.
+
+A long Martian year went by.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Looking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his
+eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting was
+aging him. And it might be a hundred years, he remembered, before
+Linda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence.
+
+He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while Linda lay still
+young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep; if she might awake,
+after long years, and see in him only a feeble old man. And he knew
+that he would not be sorry he had waited, even if he should die before
+she revived.
+
+On the next day, the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay.
+He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue,
+glorious.
+
+A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful wonder, then with
+confidence, and dawning understanding. And at last she smiled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 29283 ***
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Salvage in Space, by Jack Williamson
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 29283 ***</div>
+
+<div class="tr"><p class="center">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<p class="center">This etext was produced from Astounding Stories March 1933. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.</p></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/image_001.jpg" alt="Cover Page" width="500" height="711" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>Salvage in Space</h1>
+
+
+<h2>By Jack Williamson</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<div class="sidenote"><p>To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of
+a derelict rocket-flier manned by death invisible.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="f2">H</span>is "planet" was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest,
+Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge,
+bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly
+in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric
+iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily
+away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark
+mystery of the void.</p>
+
+<p>His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red.
+He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron
+his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.</p>
+
+<p>Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of
+metal&mdash;a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds
+of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had
+not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the
+spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious
+metals was disappointingly minute.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars
+and Jupiter, is "mined" by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the
+platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small
+quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be
+fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law,
+should occupy this space.</p></div>
+
+<p>On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen
+atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from
+its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment
+he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.</p>
+
+<p>Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the
+vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The
+magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected.
+He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.</p>
+
+<p>Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts?
+Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion,
+Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last instalment on his
+Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no
+more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of
+iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?</p>
+
+<p>He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole
+planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had
+braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors
+for hard years, who still hoped.</p>
+
+<p>But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....</p>
+
+<p>The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red
+hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a
+fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a
+girl waiting, at the silver door&mdash;a trim, slender girl in white, with
+blue eyes and hair richly brown.</p>
+
+<p>Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps
+through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could
+be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not
+amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white
+was yet only a glorious dream....</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img class="img1" src="images/image_002.jpg" width="400" height="435" alt="Gigantic claws seemed to reach out of empty air." />
+<span class="caption">Gigantic claws seemed to reach out of empty air.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it,
+pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a
+tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his
+native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below
+it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken
+sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness,
+emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.</p>
+
+<p>Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal
+vastness of space. And no work of man&mdash;save the few tools of his
+daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black
+iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being
+must be tens of millions of miles away.</p>
+
+<p>On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now
+he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that
+he was going mad. But sometimes....</p>
+
+<p>Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his
+huge metal helmet:</p>
+
+<p>"Brace up, old top. In good company, when you're by yourself, as Dad
+used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan
+and 'Chuck' and the rest of the crowd again, at Comet's place. What
+price a friendly boxing match with Mason, or an evening at the
+teleview theater?</p>
+
+<p>"Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real food, in place
+of these tasteless concentrates! A hot bath, instead of greasing
+yourself!</p>
+
+<p>"Too dull out here. Life&mdash;" He broke off, set his jaw.</p>
+
+<p>No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how
+did he know that a whirring meteor wasn't going to flash him out
+before he got back?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">H</span>e drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the suit, into its
+ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside pocket, and lighted it.
+The smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the air
+filters.</p>
+
+<p>"Darn clever, these suits," he murmured. "Food, smokes, water
+generator, all where you can reach them. And darned expensive, too.
+I'd better be looking for pay metal!"</p>
+
+<p>He clambered to a better position; stood peering out into space,
+searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric fragment that
+might be worth capturing for its content of precious metals. For an
+hour he scanned the black, star-strewn gulf, as the sputtering rocket
+continued to drive him forward.</p>
+
+<p>"There she glows!" he cried suddenly, and grinned.</p>
+
+<p>Before him was a tiny, glowing fleck, that moved among the unchanging
+stars. He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet.</p>
+
+<p>Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What treasure it
+promised! At first sight, it was impossible to determine size or
+distance or rate of motion. It might be ten thousand tons of rich
+metal. A fortune! It would more probably prove to be a tiny, stony
+mass, not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but
+moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it with the power of the
+diminutive Millen rocket.</p>
+
+<p>He studied the tiny speck intently, with practised eye, as the minutes
+passed&mdash;an untrained eye would never have seen it at all, among the
+flaming hosts of stars. Skilfully he judged, from its apparent rate of
+motion and its slow increase in brilliance, its size and distance
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Must be&mdash;must be fair size," he spoke aloud, at length. "A hundred
+tons, I'll bet my helmet! But scooting along pretty fast. Stretch the
+little old rocket to run it down."</p>
+
+<p>He clambered back to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming
+exhaust, to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead,
+filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite, which
+were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, and increased the
+firing rate.</p>
+
+<p>The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from the incandescent
+orifice of the exhaust. The vibration of the metal sphere increased.
+Thad left the sputtering rocket and went back where he could see the
+object before him.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>t was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would he be in
+time to capture it as it passed, or would it hurtle by ahead of him,
+and vanish in the limitless darkness of space before his feeble rocket
+could check the momentum of his ball of metal?</p>
+
+<p>He peered at it, as it drew closer.</p>
+
+<p>Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery. Not the dull black of
+meteoric iron. And it was larger, more distant, than he had thought at
+first. In form, too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was no
+jagged mass of metal.</p>
+
+<p>His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were not the mass
+of rich metal for which he had prayed, it might be something as
+valuable&mdash;and more interesting.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and
+advanced the firing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous
+explosion.</p>
+
+<p>When he returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him,
+he saw that it was a ship. A tapering silver-green rocket-flier.</p>
+
+<p>Once more his dreams were dashed. The officers of interplanetary
+liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their
+collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are
+menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship save a
+heliographed warning to keep clear.</p>
+
+<p>But how came a rocket-flier here, in the perilous swarms of the meteor
+belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid,
+in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal.</p>
+
+<p>The lanes more frequently used, between Earth, Mars, Venus and
+Mercury, were of course far inside the orbits of the asteroids. And
+the few ships running to Jupiter's moons avoided them by crossing
+millions of miles above their plane.</p>
+
+<p>Could it be that legendary green ship, said once to have mysteriously
+appeared, sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the primitive
+ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after in the remote
+wastes of space? Absurd, of course: he dismissed the idle fancy and
+examined the ship still more closely.</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw that it was turning, end over end, very slowly. That meant
+that its gyros were stopped; that it was helpless, drifting, disabled,
+powerless to avoid hurtling meteoric stones. Had it blundered unawares
+into the belt of swarms&mdash;been struck before the danger was realized?
+Was it a derelict, with all dead upon it?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">E</span>ither the ship's machinery was completely wrecked, Thad knew, or
+there was no one on watch. For the controls of a modern rocket-flier
+are so simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at the bridge
+can keep a vessel upon her course.</p>
+
+<p>It might be, he thought, that a meteorite had ripped open the hull,
+allowing the air to escape so quickly that the entire crew had been
+asphyxiated before any repairs could be made. But that seemed
+unlikely, since the ship must have been divided into several
+compartments by air-tight bulkheads.</p>
+
+<p>Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason? The crew might
+have mutinied, and left her in the life-tubes. She might have been
+robbed by pirates, and set adrift. But with the space lanes policed as
+they were, piracy and successful mutiny were rare.</p>
+
+<p>Thad saw that the flier's navigation lights were out.</p>
+
+<p>He found the heliograph signal mirror at his side, sighted it upon the
+ship, and worked the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call.
+There was no response.</p>
+
+<p>The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he board her, and take her to
+Mars? By law, it was his duty to attempt to aid any helpless ship, or
+at least to try to save any endangered lives upon her. And the salvage
+award, if the ship should be deserted and he could bring her safe to
+port, would be half her value.</p>
+
+<p>No mean prize, that. Half the value of ship and cargo! More than he
+was apt to earn in years of mining the meteor-belt.</p>
+
+<p>With new anxiety, he measured the relative motion of the gleaming
+ship. It was going to pass ahead of him. And very soon. No more time
+for speculation. It was still uncertain whether it would come near
+enough so that he could get a line to it.</p>
+
+<p>Rapidly he unslung from his belt the apparatus he used to capture
+meteors. A powerful electromagnet, with a thin, strong wire fastened
+to it, to be hurled from a helix-gun. He set the drum on which the
+wire was wound upon the metal at his feet, fastened it with its
+magnetic anchor, wondering if it would stand the terrific strain when
+the wire tightened.</p>
+
+<p>Raising the helix to his shoulder, he trained it upon a point well
+ahead of the rushing flier, and stood waiting for the exact moment to
+press the lever. The slender spindle of the ship was only a mile away
+now, bright in the sunlight. He could see no break in her polished
+hull, save for the dark rows of circular ports. She was not, by any
+means, completely wrecked.</p>
+
+<p>He read the black letters of her name.</p>
+
+<p><i>Red Dragon.</i></p>
+
+<p>The name of her home port, below, was in smaller letters. But in a
+moment he made them out. San Francisco. The ship then came from the
+Earth! From the very city where Thad was born!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he gleaming hull was near now. Only a few hundred yards away.
+Passing. Aiming well ahead of her, to allow for her motion, Thad
+pressed the key that hurled the magnet from the helix. It flung away
+from him, the wire screaming from the reel behind it.</p>
+
+<p>Thad's mass of metal swung on past the ship, as he returned to the
+rocket and stopped its clattering explosions. He watched the tiny
+black speck of the magnet. It vanished from sight in the darkness of
+space, appeared again against the white, burnished hull of the rocket
+ship.</p>
+
+<p>For a painful instant he thought he had missed. Then he saw that the
+magnet was fast to the side of the flier, near the stern. The line
+tightened. Soon the strain would come upon it, as it checked the
+momentum of the mass of iron. He set the friction brake.</p>
+
+<p>Thad flung himself flat, grasped the wire above the reel. Even if the
+mass of iron tore itself free, he could hold to the wire, and himself
+reach the ship.</p>
+
+<p>He flung past the deserted vessel, behind it, his lump of iron swung
+like a pebble in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst from the burned
+lining of the friction brake, in the reel. Then the wire was all out;
+there was a sudden jerk.</p>
+
+<p>And the hard-gathered sphere of metal was gone&mdash;snapped off into
+space. Thad clung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured
+arms almost drawn from their sockets. Fear flashed over his mind; what
+if the wire broke, and left him floating helpless in space?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>t held, though, to his relief. He was trailing behind the ship.
+Eagerly he seized the handle of the reel; began to wind up the mile of
+thin wire. Half an hour later, Thad's suited figure bumped gently
+against the shining hull of the rocket. He got to his feet, and gazed
+backward into the starry gulf, where his sphere of iron had long since
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody is going to find himself a nice chunk of metal, all welded
+together and equipped for rocket navigation," he murmured. "As for
+me&mdash;well, I've simply <i>got</i> to run this tub to Mars!"</p>
+
+<p>He walked over the smooth, refulgent hull, held to it by magnetic
+soles. Nowhere was it broken, though he found scars where small
+meteoric particles had scratched the brilliant polish. So no meteor
+had wrecked the ship. What, then, was the matter? Soon he would know.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Red Dragon</i> was not large. A hundred and thirty feet long, Thad
+estimated, with a beam of twenty-five feet. But her trim lines bespoke
+design recent and good; the double ring of black projecting rockets at
+the stern told of unusual speed.</p>
+
+<p>A pretty piece of salvage, he reflected, if he could land her on
+Mars. Half the value of such a ship, unharmed and safe in port, would
+be a larger sum than he dared put in figures. And he must take her in,
+now that he had lost his own rocket!</p>
+
+<p>He found the life-tubes, six of them, slender, silvery cylinders,
+lying secure in their niches, three along each side of the flier. None
+was missing. So the crew had not willingly deserted the ship.</p>
+
+<p>He approached the main air-lock, at the center of the hull, behind the
+projecting dome of the bridge. It was closed. A glance at the dials
+told him there was full air pressure within it. It had, then, last
+been used to enter the rocket, not to leave it.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>had opened the exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the chamber of
+the lock. The huge door swung open in response to his hand upon the
+wheel, and he entered the cylindrical chamber. In a moment the door
+was closed behind him, air was hissing into the lock again.</p>
+
+<p>He started to open the face-plate of his helmet, longing for a breath
+of air that did not smell of sweat and stale tobacco smoke, as that in
+his suit always did, despite the best chemical purifiers. Then he
+hesitated. Perhaps some deadly gas, from the combustion chambers....</p>
+
+<p>Thad opened the inner valve, and came upon the upper deck of the
+vessel. A floor ran the full length of the ship, broken with hatches
+and companionways that gave to the rocket rooms, cargo holds, and
+quarters for crew and passengers below. There was an enclosed ladder
+that led to bridge and navigating room in the dome above. The hull
+formed an arched roof over it.</p>
+
+<p>The deck was deserted, lit only by three dim blue globes, hanging from
+the curved roof. All seemed in order&mdash;the fire-fighting equipment
+hanging on the walls, and the huge metal patches and welding equipment
+for repairing breaks in the hull. Everything was clean, bright with
+polish or new paint.</p>
+
+<p>And all was very still. The silence held a vague, brooding threat that
+frightened Thad, made him wish for a moment that he was back upon his
+rugged ball of metal. But he banished his fear, and strode down the
+deck.</p>
+
+<p>Midway of it he found a dark stain upon the clean metal. The black of
+long-dried blood. A few tattered scraps of cloth beside it. No more
+than bloody rags. And a heavy meat cleaver, half hidden beneath a bit
+of darkened fabric.</p>
+
+<p>Mute record of tragedy! Thad strove to read it. Had a man fought here
+and been killed? It must have been a struggle of peculiar violence, to
+judge by the dark spattered stains, and the indescribable condition of
+the remnants of clothing. But what had he fought? Another man, or some
+thing? And what had become of victor and vanquished?</p>
+
+<p>He walked on down the deck.</p>
+
+<p>The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt patter of quick little
+footsteps behind him. He turned quickly, nervously, with a hand going
+instinctively to his welding arc, which, he knew, would make a fairly
+effective weapon.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>t was merely a dog. A little dog, yellow, nondescript, pathetically
+delighted. With a sharp, eager bark, it leaped up at Thad, pawing at
+his armor and licking it, standing on its hind legs and reaching
+toward the visor of his helmet.</p>
+
+<p>It was very thin, as if from long starvation. Both ears were ragged
+and bloody, and there was a long, unhealed scratch across the
+shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a serious wound.</p>
+
+<p>The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy. But Thad thought he saw
+fear in them. And even through the stiff fabric of the Osprey suit, he
+felt that the dog was trembling.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, with a low whine, it shrank close to his side. And another
+sound reached Thad's ears.</p>
+
+<p>A cry, weird and harrowing beyond telling. A scream so thin and so
+high that it roughened his skin, so keenly shrill that it tortured his
+nerves; a sound of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing than
+any bodily pain.</p>
+
+<p>When silence came again, Thad was standing with his back against the
+wall, the welding arc in his hand. His face was cold with sweat, and a
+queer chill prickled up and down his spine. The yellow dog crouched
+whimpering against his legs.</p>
+
+<p>Ominous, threatening stillness filled the ship again, disturbed only
+by the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog. Trying to calm his
+overwrought nerves, Thad listened&mdash;strained his ears. He could hear
+nothing. And he had no idea from which direction the terrifying sound
+had come.</p>
+
+<p>A strange cry. Thad knew it had been born in no human throat. Nor in
+the throat of any animal he knew. It had carried an alien note that
+overcame him with instinctive fear and horror. What had voiced it? Was
+the ship haunted by some dread entity?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">F</span>or many minutes Thad stood upon the deck, waiting, tensely grasping
+the welding tool. But the nerve-shattering scream did not come again.
+Nor any other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear. It
+leaped up at his face again, with another short little bark.</p>
+
+<p>The air must be good, he thought, if the dog could live in it.</p>
+
+<p>He unscrewed the face-plate of his helmet, and lifted it. The air
+that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply,
+gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: a
+curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.</p>
+
+<p>The dog kept leaping up, whining.</p>
+
+<p>"Hungry, boy?" Thad whispered.</p>
+
+<p>He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit, found a slab of
+concentrated food, and tossed it out through the opened panel. The dog
+sprang upon it, wolfed it eagerly, and came back to his side.</p>
+
+<p>Thad set at once about exploring the ship.</p>
+
+<p>First he ascended the ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it,
+studded with transparent ports. Charts and instruments were in order.
+And the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of the ship.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>had had no expert's knowledge of the flier's mechanism. But he had
+studied interplanetary navigation, to qualify for his license to carry
+masses of metal under rocket power through the space lanes and into
+planetary atmospheres. He was sure he could manage the ship if its
+mechanism were in good order, though he was uncertain of his ability
+to make any considerable repairs.</p>
+
+<p>To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials revealed nothing wrong.</p>
+
+<p>He started the gyro motors, got the great wheels to spinning, and thus
+stopped the slow, end-over-end turning of the flier. Then he went to
+the rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes, and set them to
+firing. The vessel answered readily to her helm. In a few minutes he
+had the red fleck of Mars over the bow.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I can run her, all right," he announced to the dog, which had
+followed him up the steps, keeping close to his feet. "Don't worry,
+old boy. We'll be eating a juicy beefsteak together, in a week. At
+Comet's place in Helion, down by the canal. Not much style&mdash;but the
+eats!</p>
+
+<p>"And now we're going to do a little detective work, and find out what
+made that disagreeable noise. And what happened to all your
+fellow-astronauts. Better find out, before it happens to us!"</p>
+
+<p>He shut off the rockets, and climbed down from the bridge again.</p>
+
+<p>When Thad started down the companionway to the officers' quarters, in
+the central one of the five main compartments of the ship, the dog
+kept close to his legs, growling, trembling, hackles lifted. Sensing
+the animal's terror, pitying it for the naked fear in its eyes, Thad
+wondered what dramas of horror it might have seen.</p>
+
+<p>The cabins of the navigator, calculator, chief technician, and first
+officer were empty, and forbidding with the ominous silence of the
+ship. They were neatly in order, and the berths had been made since
+they were used. But there was a large bloodstain, black and circular,
+on the floor of the calculator's room.</p>
+
+<p>The captain's cabin held evidence of a violent struggle. The door had
+been broken in. Its fragments, with pieces of broken furniture, books,
+covers from the berth, and three service pistols, were scattered about
+in indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among the
+frightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing, of dissimilar
+fabrics. The guns were empty.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">A</span>ttempting to reconstruct the action of the tragedy from those grim
+clues, he imagined that the five officers, aware of some peril, had
+gathered here, fought, and died.</p>
+
+<p>The dog refused to enter the room. It stood at the door, looking
+anxiously after him, trembling and whimpering pitifully. Several times
+it sniffed the air and drew back, snarling. Thad thought that the
+unpleasant earthy odor he had noticed upon opening the face-plate of
+his helmet was stronger here.</p>
+
+<p>After a few minutes of searching through the wildly disordered room,
+he found the ship's log&mdash;or its remains. Many pages had been torn from
+the book, and the remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff black
+mass.</p>
+
+<p>Only one legible entry did he find, that on a page torn from the book,
+which somehow had escaped destruction. Dated five months before, it
+gave the position of the vessel and her bearings&mdash;she was then just
+outside Jupiter's orbit, Earthward bound&mdash;and concluded with a remark
+of sinister implications:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Another man gone this morning. Simms, assistant technician.
+A fine workman. O'Deen swears he heard something moving on
+the deck. Cook thinks some of the doctor's stuffed
+monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous, of course. But
+what is one to think?"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Pondering the significance of those few lines, Thad climbed back to
+the deck. Was the ship haunted by some weird death, that had seized
+the crew man by man, mysteriously? That was the obvious implication.
+And if the flier had been still outside Jupiter's orbit when those
+words were written, it must have been weeks before the end. A lurking,
+invisible death! The scream he had heard....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">H</span>e descended into the forecastle, and came upon another such silent
+record of frightful carnage as he had found in the captain's cabin.
+Dried blood, scraps of cloth, knives and other weapons. A fearful
+question was beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies of
+those who must have died in these conflicts? He dared not think the
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>Gripping the welding arc, Thad approached the after hatch, giving to
+the cargo hold. Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he was
+determined to find the sinister menace of the ship, before it found
+him. The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him,
+contributing nothing to his peace of mind.</p>
+
+<p>The hold proved to be dark. An indefinite black space, oppressive with
+the terrible silence of the flier. The air within it bore still more
+strongly the unpleasant fetor.</p>
+
+<p>Thad hesitated on the steps. The hold was not inviting. But at the
+thought that he must sleep, unguarded, while taking the flier to Mars,
+his resolution returned. The uncertainty, the constant fear, would be
+unendurable.</p>
+
+<p>He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He found it, as his
+feet touched the floor. Blue light flooded the hold.</p>
+
+<p>It was filled with monstrous things, colossal creatures, such as
+nothing that ever lived upon the Earth; like nothing known in the
+jungles of Venus or the deserts of Mars, or anything that has been
+found upon Jupiter's moons.</p>
+
+<p>They were monsters remotely resembling insects or crustaceans, but as
+large as horses or elephants; creatures upreared upon strange limbs,
+armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons, frightful, saw-toothed
+snouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow and green. They leered
+at him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow and purple.</p>
+
+<p>They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">A</span>&nbsp;cold shock of horror started along Thad's spine, at sight of those
+incredible nightmare things. Automatically he flung up the welding
+tool, flicking over the lever with his thumb, so that violet electric
+flame played about the electrode.</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw that the crowding, hideous things were motionless, that
+they stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were supported
+upon metal bars. They were dead. Mounted. Collected specimens of some
+alien life.</p>
+
+<p>Grinning wanly, and conscious of a weakness in the knees, he muttered:
+"They sure will fill the museum, if everybody gets the kick out of
+them that I did. A little too realistic, I'd say. Guess these are the
+'stuffed monstrosities' mentioned in the page out of the log. No
+wonder the cook was afraid of them. Some of then do look hellishly
+alive!"</p>
+
+<p>He started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from the armored
+enormities that seemed crouched to spring at him, motionless eyes
+staring.</p>
+
+<p>So, at the end of the long space, he found the treasure.</p>
+
+<p>Glittering in the blue light, it looked unreal. Incredible. A dazzling
+dream. He stopped among the fearful things that seemed gathered as if
+to guard it, and stared with wide eyes through the opened face-plate
+of his helmet.</p>
+
+<p>He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new, freshly smelted; bars of
+silver-white iridium, of argent platinum, of blue-white osmium. Many
+of them. Thousands of pounds, Thad knew. He trembled at thought of
+their value. Almost beyond calculation.</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw the coffer, lying beyond the piled, gleaming ingots&mdash;a
+huge box, eight feet long; made of some crystal that glittered with
+snowy whiteness, filled with sparkling, iridescent gleams, and inlaid
+with strange designs, apparently in vermilion enamel.</p>
+
+<p>With a little cry, he ran toward the chest, moving awkwardly in the
+loose, deflated fabric of the Osprey suit.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">B</span>eside the coffer, on the floor of the hold, was literally a mountain
+of flame&mdash;blazing gems, heaped as if they had been carelessly dumped
+from it; cut diamonds, incredibly gigantic; monster emeralds,
+sapphires, rubies; and strange stones, that Thad did not recognize.</p>
+
+<p>And Thad gasped with horror, when he looked at the designs of the
+vermilion inlay, in the white, gleaming crystal. Weird forms. Shapes
+of creatures somewhat like gigantic spiders, and more unlike them.
+Demoniac things, wickedly fanged, jaws slavering. Executed with
+masterly skill, that made them seem living, menacing, secretly
+gloating!</p>
+
+<p>Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated almost hypnotically.
+Three times he approached the chest, to lift the lid and find what it
+held. And three times the unutterable horror of those crimson images
+thrust him back, shuddering.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing but pictures," he muttered hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>A fourth time he advanced, trembling, and seized the lid of the
+coffer. Heavy, massive, it was fashioned also of glistening white
+crystal, and inlaid in crimson with weirdly hideous figures. Great
+hinges of white platinum held it on the farther side; it was fastened
+with a simple, heavy hasp of the precious metal.</p>
+
+<p>Hands quivering, Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted the lid.</p>
+
+<p>New treasure in the chest would not have surprised him. He was
+prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems or priceless metal. Nor
+would he have been astonished at some weird creature such as one of
+those whose likenesses were inlaid in the crystal.</p>
+
+<p>But what he saw made him drop the massive lid.</p>
+
+<p>A woman lay in the chest&mdash;motionless, in white.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>n a moment he raised the lid again; examined the still form more
+closely. The woman had been young. The features were regular, good to
+look upon. The eyes were closed; the white face appeared very
+peaceful.</p>
+
+<p>Save for the extreme, cadaverous pallor, there was no mark of death.
+With a fancy that the body might be miraculously living, sleeping,
+Thad thrust an arm out through the opened panel of his suit, and
+touched a slender, bare white arm. It was stiff, very cold.</p>
+
+<p>The still, pallid face was framed in fine brown hair. The fair, small
+hands were crossed upon the breast, over the simple white garment.</p>
+
+<p>A queer ache came into his heart. Something made him think of a white
+tower in the red hills near Helion, and a girl waiting in its fragrant
+garden of saffron and purple&mdash;a girl like this.</p>
+
+<p>The body lay upon a bed of blazing jewels.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared, Thad thought, as if the pile of gems upon the floor had
+been hastily scraped from the coffer, to make room for the quiet form.
+He wondered how long it had lain there. It looked as if it might have
+been living but minutes before. Some preservative....</p>
+
+<p>His thought was broken by a sound that rang from the open hatchway on
+the deck above&mdash;the furious barking and yelping of the dog. Abruptly
+that was silent, and in its place came the uncanny and terrifying
+scream that Thad had heard once before, on this flier of mystery. A
+shriek so keen and shrill that it seemed to tear out his nerves by
+their roots. The voice of the haunter of the ship.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">W</span>hen Thad came back upon the deck, the dog was still barking
+nervously. He saw the animal forward, almost at the bow. Hackles
+raised, tail between its legs, it was slinking backward, barking
+sharply as if to call for aid.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently it was retreating from something between Thad and itself.
+But Thad, searching the dimly-lit deck, could see no source of alarm.
+Nor could the structures upon it have shut any large object from his
+view.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right!" Thad called, intending to reassure the frightened
+animal, but finding his voice queerly dry. "Coming on the double, old
+man. Don't worry."</p>
+
+<p>The dog had reached the end of the deck. It stopped yelping, but
+snarled and whined as if in terror. It began darting back and forth,
+moving exactly as if something were slowly closing in upon it,
+trapping it in the corner. But Thad could see nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Then it made a wild dash back toward Thad, darting along by the wall,
+as if trying to run past an unseen enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Thad thought he heard quick, rasping footsteps, then, that were not
+those of the dog. And something seemed to catch the dog in mid-air, as
+it leaped. It was hurled howling to the deck. For a moment it
+struggled furiously, as if an invisible claw had pinned it down. Then
+it escaped, and fled whimpering to Thad's side.</p>
+
+<p>He saw a new wound across its hips. Three long, parallel scratches,
+from which fresh red blood was trickling.</p>
+
+<p>Regular scraping sounds came from the end of the deck, where no moving
+thing was to be seen&mdash;sounds such as might be made by the walking of
+feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad.
+Something that was <i>invisible</i>!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>error seized him, with the knowledge. He had nerved himself to face
+desperate men, or a savage animal. But an invisible being, that could
+creep upon him and strike unseen! It was incredible ... yet he had
+seen the dog knocked down, and the bleeding wound it had received.</p>
+
+<p>His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For the moment he thought
+only blindly, of escape. He knew only an overpowering desire to hide,
+to conceal himself from the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he
+might have tried to leave the flier.</p>
+
+<p>Beside him was one of the companionways amidships, giving access to a
+compartment of the vessel that he had not explored. He turned, leaped
+down the steps, with the terrified dog at his heels.</p>
+
+<p>Below, he found himself in a short hall, dimly lighted. Several metal
+doors opened from it. He tried one at random. It gave. He sprang
+through, let the dog follow, closed and locked it.</p>
+
+<p>Trying to listen, he leaned weakly against the door. The rushing of
+his breath, swift and regular. The loud hammer of his thudding heart.
+The dog's low whines. Then&mdash;unmistakable scraping sounds, outside.</p>
+
+<p>The scratching of claws, Thad knew. Invisible claws!</p>
+
+<p>He stood there, bracing the door with the weight of his body, holding
+the welding arc ready in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked,
+and he felt a heavy pressure against the panels. But at last the
+scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn, at
+least for a time.</p>
+
+<p>When he had time to think, the invisibility of the thing was not so
+incredible. The mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were
+evidence that the flier had visited some unknown planet, where weird
+life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a planet should be
+inhabited by beings invisible to human sight.</p>
+
+<p>Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction of the
+spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to visible light,
+as human flesh is radiolucent to hard X-rays. Quite possibly it could
+be seen by infra-red or ultra-violet light&mdash;evidently it was visible
+enough to the dog's eyes, with their different range of sensitivity.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">P</span>ushing the subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room into
+which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied by a woman. A
+frail blue silk dress and more intimate items of feminine wearing
+apparel were hanging above the berth. Two pairs of delicate black
+slippers stood neatly below it.</p>
+
+<p>Across from him was a dressing table, with a large mirror above it.
+Combs, pins, jars of cosmetic cluttered it. And Thad saw upon it a
+little leather-bound book, locked, stamped on the back "Diary."</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the room and picked up the little book, which smelled
+faintly of jasmine. Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the
+secrets of an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but
+to seize any chance of learning more of this ship of mystery and her
+invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.</p>
+
+<p>Linda Cross was the name written on the fly-leaf, in a firm, clear
+feminine hand. On the next page was the photograph, in color, of a
+girl, the brown-haired girl whose body Thad had discovered in the
+crystal coffer in the hold. Her eyes, he saw, had been blue. He
+thought she looked very lovely&mdash;like the waiting girl in his old dream
+of the silver tower in the red hills by Helion.</p>
+
+<p>The diary, it appeared, had not been kept very devotedly. Most of the
+pages were blank.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first entries, dated a year and a half before, told of a
+party that Linda had attended in San Francisco, and of her refusal to
+dance with a certain man, referred to as "Benny," because he had been
+unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Dad said to-night that we're going off in the <i>Dragon</i>
+again. All the way to Uranus, if the new fuel works as he
+expects. What a lark, to explore a few new worlds of our
+own! Dad says one of Uranus' moons is as large as Mercury.
+And Benny won't be proposing again soon!"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Turning on, Thad found other scattered entries, some of them dealing
+with the preparation for the voyage, the start from San Francisco&mdash;and
+a huge bunch of flowers from "Benny," the long months of the trip
+through space, out past the orbit of Mars, above the meteor belt,
+across Jupiter's orbit, beyond the track of Saturn, which was the
+farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached, and on to
+Uranus, where they could not land because of the unstable surface.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he remainder of the entries Thad found less frequent, shorter,
+bearing the mark of excitement: landing upon Titania, the third and
+largest satellite of Uranus; unearthly forests, sheltering strange and
+monstrous life; the hunting of weird creatures, and mounting them for
+museum specimens.</p>
+
+<p>Then the discovery of a ruined city, whose remains indicated that it
+had been built by a lost race of intelligent, spiderlike things; the
+finding of a temple whose walls were of precious metals, containing a
+crystal chest filled with wondrous gems; the smelting of the metal
+into convenient ingots, and the transfer of the treasure to the hold.</p>
+
+<p>The first sinister note there entered the diary:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Some of the men say we shouldn't have disturbed the temple.
+Think it will bring us bad luck. Rubbish, of course. But one
+man did vanish while they were smelting the gold. Poor Mr.
+Tom James. I suppose he ventured away from the rest, and
+something caught him."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The few entries that followed were shorter, and showed increasing
+nervous tension. They recorded the departure from Titania, made almost
+as soon as the treasure was loaded. The last was made several weeks
+later. A dozen men had vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of
+blood to hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Dad says I'm to stay in here to-day. Old dear, he's afraid
+the thing will get me&mdash;whatever it is. It's really serious.
+Two men taken from their berths last night. And not a trace.
+Some of them think it's a curse on the treasure. One of them
+swears he saw Dad's stuffed specimens moving about in the
+hold.</p>
+
+<p>"Some terrible thing must have slipped aboard the flier, out
+of the jungle. That's what Dad and the captain think. Queer
+they can't find it. They've searched all over. Well...."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Musing and regretful, Thad turned back for another look at the smiling
+girl in the photograph.</p>
+
+<p>What a tragedy her death had been! Reading the diary had made him like
+her. Her balance and humor. Her quiet affection for "Dad." The calm
+courage with which she seemed to have faced the creeping, lurking
+death that darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow.</p>
+
+<p>How had her body come to be in the coffer, he wondered, when all the
+others were&mdash;gone? It had shown no marks of violence. She must have
+died of fear. No, her face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that.
+Had she chosen easy death by some poison, rather than that other
+dreadful fate? Had her body been put in the chest to protect it, and
+the poison arrested decomposition?</p>
+
+<p>Thad was still studying the picture, thoughtfully and sadly, when the
+dog, which had been silent, suddenly growled again, and retreated from
+the door, toward the corner of the room.</p>
+
+<p>The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its claws scratching
+across the door again. And he heard another dreadful sound&mdash;not the
+long, shrill scream that had so grated on his nerves before, but a
+short, sharp coughing or barking, a series of shrill, indescribable
+notes that could have been made by no beast he knew.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he decision to open the door cost a huge effort of Thad's will.</p>
+
+<p>For hours he had waited, thinking desperately. And the thing outside
+the door had waited as patiently, scratching upon it from time to
+time, uttering those dreadful, shrill coughing cries.</p>
+
+<p>Sooner or later, he would have to face the monster. Even if he could
+escape from the room and avoid it for a time, he would have to meet it
+in the end. And it might creep upon him while he slept.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, the issue of the combat was extremely doubtful. The
+monster, apparently, had succeeded in killing every man upon the
+flier, even though some of them had been armed. It must be large and
+very ferocious.</p>
+
+<p>But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his Osprey-suit. The
+heavy fabric, made of metal wires impregnated with a tough, elastic
+composition, should afford considerable protection against the thing.</p>
+
+<p>The welding arc, intended to fuse refractive meteoric iron, would be
+no mean weapon, at close quarters. And the quarters would be close.</p>
+
+<p>If only he could find some way to make the thing visible!</p>
+
+<p>Paint, or something of the kind, would stick to its skin.... His eyes,
+searching the room, caught the jar of face powder on the dressing
+table. Dash that over it! It ought to stick enough to make the outline
+visible.</p>
+
+<p>So, at last, holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until a
+time when the pressure upon the door had just relaxed, and he knew the
+monster was waiting outside. Swiftly, he opened the door....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>had had partially overcome the instinctive horror that the unseen
+being had first aroused in him. But it returned in a sickening wave
+when he heard the short, shrill, coughing cries, hideously eager, that
+greeted the opening of the door. And the quick rasping of naked claws
+upon the floor. <i>Sounds from nothingness!</i></p>
+
+<p>He flung the powder at the sound.</p>
+
+<p>A form of weird horror materialized before him, still half invisible,
+half outlined with the white film of adhering powder: gigantic and
+hideous claws, that seemed to reach out of empty air, the side of a
+huge, scaly body, a yawning, dripping jaw. For a moment Thad could see
+great, hooked fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if an unseen
+tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it in fluids which
+made it invisible.</p>
+
+<p>That unearthly, half-seen shape leaped at him.</p>
+
+<p>He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the floor. Claws were
+rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit. His arm was seized
+crushingly in half-visible jaws.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">D</span>esperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated electrode was
+driven toward his body. He fought to keep it away; he knew that it
+would burn through even the insulated fabric of his suit.</p>
+
+<p>A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound,
+as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and felt a thin pencil of
+pain drawn along his body, where a claw cut his skin.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the suit was full of the earthy fetor of the monster's body,
+nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and
+thrust upward hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood
+trickling from the wound.</p>
+
+<p>A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was carried from his
+hand. Flung to the side of the room, it clattered to the floor; and
+then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing the breath from his
+lungs. The monster stood upon his body and clawed at him.</p>
+
+<p>Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet, encountering a
+great, hard body. Futilely he beat and thrust with his arms against
+the pillarlike limb.</p>
+
+<p>His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick fabric. He heard
+it tear again, along his right thigh. But he felt no pain, and thought
+the claws had not reached the skin.</p>
+
+<p>It was the yellow dog that gave him the chance to recover the weapon.
+The animal had been running back and forth in the opposite end of the
+room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now, with the mad
+courage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at the monster.</p>
+
+<p>A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled it back across the room.
+It lay still, broken, whimpering.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from Thad's body. And
+Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung himself across the room,
+snatched up the welding tool.</p>
+
+<p>In an instant the creature was upon him again. But he met it with the
+incandescent electrode. He was crouched in a corner, now, where it
+could come at him from only one direction. Its claws still slashed at
+him ferociously. But he was able to cling to the weapon, and meet each
+onslaught with hot metal.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his blind, thrusting
+blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A terrible choking,
+strangling sound came from the air. And he heard the thrashing
+struggles of wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He prodded the
+thing again and again with the hot electrode, and it did not move. It
+was dead.</p>
+
+<p>The creature's body was so heavy that Thad had to return to the
+bridge, and shut off the current in the gravity plates along the keel,
+before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which he
+had entered the flier, and consigned it to space....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">F</span>ive days later Thad brought the <i>Red Dragon</i> into the atmosphere of
+Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in response to his signals, and
+docked the flier safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again,
+with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard to inspect
+the vessel.</p>
+
+<p>Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in the
+hold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at the
+treasure, he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of white
+crystal, and looked once more upon the still form of the girl within
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so lovely. How
+terrible her last days of life must have been, with doom shadowing the
+vessel, and the men vanishing mysteriously, one by one!
+Terrible&mdash;until she had sought the security of death.</p>
+
+<p>Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half the
+incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the award
+of salvage. If only the girl were still living.... He felt a
+poignantly keen desire to hear her voice.</p>
+
+<p>Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. A
+hasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among glittering gems.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled
+medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state
+of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty
+minims of zeronel.</p>
+
+<p>"She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.</p>
+
+<p>"I entreat the finders of this to have care given her, and
+to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this
+ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other
+claims.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a
+hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and the
+injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time
+that must elapse.</p>
+
+<p>"If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing upon
+the ship has destroyed me and all my men.</p>
+
+<p>"Please do not fail me.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p class="f1">Levington Cross."</p>
+
+<p>Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its
+Martian garden of saffron and purple, among the low ocher hills beside
+Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where the
+girl of his dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaulted
+chamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay, to
+look into her pallid face, and feel her cold wrist. He kept a nurse in
+attendance, and had a physician call daily.</p>
+
+<p>A long Martian year went by.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">L</span>ooking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his
+eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting was
+aging him. And it might be a hundred years, he remembered, before
+Linda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while Linda lay still
+young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep; if she might awake,
+after long years, and see in him only a feeble old man. And he knew
+that he would not be sorry he had waited, even if he should die before
+she revived.</p>
+
+<p>On the next day, the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay.
+He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue,
+glorious.</p>
+
+<p>A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful wonder, then with
+confidence, and dawning understanding. And at last she smiled.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 29283 ***</div>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Salvage in Space, by John Stewart Williamson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Salvage in Space
+
+Author: John Stewart Williamson
+
+Release Date: July 1, 2009 [EBook #29283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SALVAGE IN SPACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<div class="tr"><p class="center">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<p class="center">This etext was produced from Astounding Stories March 1933. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.</p></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/image_001.jpg" alt="Cover Page" width="500" height="711" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>Salvage in Space</h1>
+
+
+<h2>By Jack Williamson</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<div class="sidenote"><p>To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of
+a derelict rocket-flier manned by death invisible.</p></div>
+
+
+<p><span class="f2">H</span>is "planet" was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest,
+Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge,
+bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly
+in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric
+iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily
+away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark
+mystery of the void.</p>
+
+<p>His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red.
+He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron
+his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.</p>
+
+<p>Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of
+metal&mdash;a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds
+of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had
+not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the
+spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious
+metals was disappointingly minute.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars
+and Jupiter, is "mined" by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the
+platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small
+quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be
+fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law,
+should occupy this space.</p></div>
+
+<p>On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen
+atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from
+its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment
+he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.</p>
+
+<p>Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the
+vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The
+magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected.
+He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.</p>
+
+<p>Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts?
+Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion,
+Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last instalment on his
+Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no
+more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of
+iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?</p>
+
+<p>He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole
+planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had
+braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors
+for hard years, who still hoped.</p>
+
+<p>But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....</p>
+
+<p>The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red
+hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a
+fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a
+girl waiting, at the silver door&mdash;a trim, slender girl in white, with
+blue eyes and hair richly brown.</p>
+
+<p>Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps
+through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could
+be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not
+amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white
+was yet only a glorious dream....</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img class="img1" src="images/image_002.jpg" width="400" height="435" alt="Gigantic claws seemed to reach out of empty air." />
+<span class="caption">Gigantic claws seemed to reach out of empty air.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it,
+pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a
+tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his
+native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below
+it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken
+sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness,
+emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.</p>
+
+<p>Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal
+vastness of space. And no work of man&mdash;save the few tools of his
+daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black
+iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being
+must be tens of millions of miles away.</p>
+
+<p>On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now
+he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that
+he was going mad. But sometimes....</p>
+
+<p>Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his
+huge metal helmet:</p>
+
+<p>"Brace up, old top. In good company, when you're by yourself, as Dad
+used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan
+and 'Chuck' and the rest of the crowd again, at Comet's place. What
+price a friendly boxing match with Mason, or an evening at the
+teleview theater?</p>
+
+<p>"Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real food, in place
+of these tasteless concentrates! A hot bath, instead of greasing
+yourself!</p>
+
+<p>"Too dull out here. Life&mdash;" He broke off, set his jaw.</p>
+
+<p>No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how
+did he know that a whirring meteor wasn't going to flash him out
+before he got back?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">H</span>e drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the suit, into its
+ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside pocket, and lighted it.
+The smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the air
+filters.</p>
+
+<p>"Darn clever, these suits," he murmured. "Food, smokes, water
+generator, all where you can reach them. And darned expensive, too.
+I'd better be looking for pay metal!"</p>
+
+<p>He clambered to a better position; stood peering out into space,
+searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric fragment that
+might be worth capturing for its content of precious metals. For an
+hour he scanned the black, star-strewn gulf, as the sputtering rocket
+continued to drive him forward.</p>
+
+<p>"There she glows!" he cried suddenly, and grinned.</p>
+
+<p>Before him was a tiny, glowing fleck, that moved among the unchanging
+stars. He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet.</p>
+
+<p>Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What treasure it
+promised! At first sight, it was impossible to determine size or
+distance or rate of motion. It might be ten thousand tons of rich
+metal. A fortune! It would more probably prove to be a tiny, stony
+mass, not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but
+moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it with the power of the
+diminutive Millen rocket.</p>
+
+<p>He studied the tiny speck intently, with practised eye, as the minutes
+passed&mdash;an untrained eye would never have seen it at all, among the
+flaming hosts of stars. Skilfully he judged, from its apparent rate of
+motion and its slow increase in brilliance, its size and distance
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Must be&mdash;must be fair size," he spoke aloud, at length. "A hundred
+tons, I'll bet my helmet! But scooting along pretty fast. Stretch the
+little old rocket to run it down."</p>
+
+<p>He clambered back to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming
+exhaust, to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead,
+filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite, which
+were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, and increased the
+firing rate.</p>
+
+<p>The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from the incandescent
+orifice of the exhaust. The vibration of the metal sphere increased.
+Thad left the sputtering rocket and went back where he could see the
+object before him.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>t was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would he be in
+time to capture it as it passed, or would it hurtle by ahead of him,
+and vanish in the limitless darkness of space before his feeble rocket
+could check the momentum of his ball of metal?</p>
+
+<p>He peered at it, as it drew closer.</p>
+
+<p>Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery. Not the dull black of
+meteoric iron. And it was larger, more distant, than he had thought at
+first. In form, too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was no
+jagged mass of metal.</p>
+
+<p>His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were not the mass
+of rich metal for which he had prayed, it might be something as
+valuable&mdash;and more interesting.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and
+advanced the firing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous
+explosion.</p>
+
+<p>When he returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him,
+he saw that it was a ship. A tapering silver-green rocket-flier.</p>
+
+<p>Once more his dreams were dashed. The officers of interplanetary
+liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their
+collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are
+menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship save a
+heliographed warning to keep clear.</p>
+
+<p>But how came a rocket-flier here, in the perilous swarms of the meteor
+belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid,
+in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal.</p>
+
+<p>The lanes more frequently used, between Earth, Mars, Venus and
+Mercury, were of course far inside the orbits of the asteroids. And
+the few ships running to Jupiter's moons avoided them by crossing
+millions of miles above their plane.</p>
+
+<p>Could it be that legendary green ship, said once to have mysteriously
+appeared, sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the primitive
+ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after in the remote
+wastes of space? Absurd, of course: he dismissed the idle fancy and
+examined the ship still more closely.</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw that it was turning, end over end, very slowly. That meant
+that its gyros were stopped; that it was helpless, drifting, disabled,
+powerless to avoid hurtling meteoric stones. Had it blundered unawares
+into the belt of swarms&mdash;been struck before the danger was realized?
+Was it a derelict, with all dead upon it?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">E</span>ither the ship's machinery was completely wrecked, Thad knew, or
+there was no one on watch. For the controls of a modern rocket-flier
+are so simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at the bridge
+can keep a vessel upon her course.</p>
+
+<p>It might be, he thought, that a meteorite had ripped open the hull,
+allowing the air to escape so quickly that the entire crew had been
+asphyxiated before any repairs could be made. But that seemed
+unlikely, since the ship must have been divided into several
+compartments by air-tight bulkheads.</p>
+
+<p>Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason? The crew might
+have mutinied, and left her in the life-tubes. She might have been
+robbed by pirates, and set adrift. But with the space lanes policed as
+they were, piracy and successful mutiny were rare.</p>
+
+<p>Thad saw that the flier's navigation lights were out.</p>
+
+<p>He found the heliograph signal mirror at his side, sighted it upon the
+ship, and worked the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call.
+There was no response.</p>
+
+<p>The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he board her, and take her to
+Mars? By law, it was his duty to attempt to aid any helpless ship, or
+at least to try to save any endangered lives upon her. And the salvage
+award, if the ship should be deserted and he could bring her safe to
+port, would be half her value.</p>
+
+<p>No mean prize, that. Half the value of ship and cargo! More than he
+was apt to earn in years of mining the meteor-belt.</p>
+
+<p>With new anxiety, he measured the relative motion of the gleaming
+ship. It was going to pass ahead of him. And very soon. No more time
+for speculation. It was still uncertain whether it would come near
+enough so that he could get a line to it.</p>
+
+<p>Rapidly he unslung from his belt the apparatus he used to capture
+meteors. A powerful electromagnet, with a thin, strong wire fastened
+to it, to be hurled from a helix-gun. He set the drum on which the
+wire was wound upon the metal at his feet, fastened it with its
+magnetic anchor, wondering if it would stand the terrific strain when
+the wire tightened.</p>
+
+<p>Raising the helix to his shoulder, he trained it upon a point well
+ahead of the rushing flier, and stood waiting for the exact moment to
+press the lever. The slender spindle of the ship was only a mile away
+now, bright in the sunlight. He could see no break in her polished
+hull, save for the dark rows of circular ports. She was not, by any
+means, completely wrecked.</p>
+
+<p>He read the black letters of her name.</p>
+
+<p><i>Red Dragon.</i></p>
+
+<p>The name of her home port, below, was in smaller letters. But in a
+moment he made them out. San Francisco. The ship then came from the
+Earth! From the very city where Thad was born!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he gleaming hull was near now. Only a few hundred yards away.
+Passing. Aiming well ahead of her, to allow for her motion, Thad
+pressed the key that hurled the magnet from the helix. It flung away
+from him, the wire screaming from the reel behind it.</p>
+
+<p>Thad's mass of metal swung on past the ship, as he returned to the
+rocket and stopped its clattering explosions. He watched the tiny
+black speck of the magnet. It vanished from sight in the darkness of
+space, appeared again against the white, burnished hull of the rocket
+ship.</p>
+
+<p>For a painful instant he thought he had missed. Then he saw that the
+magnet was fast to the side of the flier, near the stern. The line
+tightened. Soon the strain would come upon it, as it checked the
+momentum of the mass of iron. He set the friction brake.</p>
+
+<p>Thad flung himself flat, grasped the wire above the reel. Even if the
+mass of iron tore itself free, he could hold to the wire, and himself
+reach the ship.</p>
+
+<p>He flung past the deserted vessel, behind it, his lump of iron swung
+like a pebble in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst from the burned
+lining of the friction brake, in the reel. Then the wire was all out;
+there was a sudden jerk.</p>
+
+<p>And the hard-gathered sphere of metal was gone&mdash;snapped off into
+space. Thad clung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured
+arms almost drawn from their sockets. Fear flashed over his mind; what
+if the wire broke, and left him floating helpless in space?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>t held, though, to his relief. He was trailing behind the ship.
+Eagerly he seized the handle of the reel; began to wind up the mile of
+thin wire. Half an hour later, Thad's suited figure bumped gently
+against the shining hull of the rocket. He got to his feet, and gazed
+backward into the starry gulf, where his sphere of iron had long since
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody is going to find himself a nice chunk of metal, all welded
+together and equipped for rocket navigation," he murmured. "As for
+me&mdash;well, I've simply <i>got</i> to run this tub to Mars!"</p>
+
+<p>He walked over the smooth, refulgent hull, held to it by magnetic
+soles. Nowhere was it broken, though he found scars where small
+meteoric particles had scratched the brilliant polish. So no meteor
+had wrecked the ship. What, then, was the matter? Soon he would know.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Red Dragon</i> was not large. A hundred and thirty feet long, Thad
+estimated, with a beam of twenty-five feet. But her trim lines bespoke
+design recent and good; the double ring of black projecting rockets at
+the stern told of unusual speed.</p>
+
+<p>A pretty piece of salvage, he reflected, if he could land her on
+Mars. Half the value of such a ship, unharmed and safe in port, would
+be a larger sum than he dared put in figures. And he must take her in,
+now that he had lost his own rocket!</p>
+
+<p>He found the life-tubes, six of them, slender, silvery cylinders,
+lying secure in their niches, three along each side of the flier. None
+was missing. So the crew had not willingly deserted the ship.</p>
+
+<p>He approached the main air-lock, at the center of the hull, behind the
+projecting dome of the bridge. It was closed. A glance at the dials
+told him there was full air pressure within it. It had, then, last
+been used to enter the rocket, not to leave it.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>had opened the exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the chamber of
+the lock. The huge door swung open in response to his hand upon the
+wheel, and he entered the cylindrical chamber. In a moment the door
+was closed behind him, air was hissing into the lock again.</p>
+
+<p>He started to open the face-plate of his helmet, longing for a breath
+of air that did not smell of sweat and stale tobacco smoke, as that in
+his suit always did, despite the best chemical purifiers. Then he
+hesitated. Perhaps some deadly gas, from the combustion chambers....</p>
+
+<p>Thad opened the inner valve, and came upon the upper deck of the
+vessel. A floor ran the full length of the ship, broken with hatches
+and companionways that gave to the rocket rooms, cargo holds, and
+quarters for crew and passengers below. There was an enclosed ladder
+that led to bridge and navigating room in the dome above. The hull
+formed an arched roof over it.</p>
+
+<p>The deck was deserted, lit only by three dim blue globes, hanging from
+the curved roof. All seemed in order&mdash;the fire-fighting equipment
+hanging on the walls, and the huge metal patches and welding equipment
+for repairing breaks in the hull. Everything was clean, bright with
+polish or new paint.</p>
+
+<p>And all was very still. The silence held a vague, brooding threat that
+frightened Thad, made him wish for a moment that he was back upon his
+rugged ball of metal. But he banished his fear, and strode down the
+deck.</p>
+
+<p>Midway of it he found a dark stain upon the clean metal. The black of
+long-dried blood. A few tattered scraps of cloth beside it. No more
+than bloody rags. And a heavy meat cleaver, half hidden beneath a bit
+of darkened fabric.</p>
+
+<p>Mute record of tragedy! Thad strove to read it. Had a man fought here
+and been killed? It must have been a struggle of peculiar violence, to
+judge by the dark spattered stains, and the indescribable condition of
+the remnants of clothing. But what had he fought? Another man, or some
+thing? And what had become of victor and vanquished?</p>
+
+<p>He walked on down the deck.</p>
+
+<p>The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt patter of quick little
+footsteps behind him. He turned quickly, nervously, with a hand going
+instinctively to his welding arc, which, he knew, would make a fairly
+effective weapon.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>t was merely a dog. A little dog, yellow, nondescript, pathetically
+delighted. With a sharp, eager bark, it leaped up at Thad, pawing at
+his armor and licking it, standing on its hind legs and reaching
+toward the visor of his helmet.</p>
+
+<p>It was very thin, as if from long starvation. Both ears were ragged
+and bloody, and there was a long, unhealed scratch across the
+shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a serious wound.</p>
+
+<p>The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy. But Thad thought he saw
+fear in them. And even through the stiff fabric of the Osprey suit, he
+felt that the dog was trembling.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, with a low whine, it shrank close to his side. And another
+sound reached Thad's ears.</p>
+
+<p>A cry, weird and harrowing beyond telling. A scream so thin and so
+high that it roughened his skin, so keenly shrill that it tortured his
+nerves; a sound of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing than
+any bodily pain.</p>
+
+<p>When silence came again, Thad was standing with his back against the
+wall, the welding arc in his hand. His face was cold with sweat, and a
+queer chill prickled up and down his spine. The yellow dog crouched
+whimpering against his legs.</p>
+
+<p>Ominous, threatening stillness filled the ship again, disturbed only
+by the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog. Trying to calm his
+overwrought nerves, Thad listened&mdash;strained his ears. He could hear
+nothing. And he had no idea from which direction the terrifying sound
+had come.</p>
+
+<p>A strange cry. Thad knew it had been born in no human throat. Nor in
+the throat of any animal he knew. It had carried an alien note that
+overcame him with instinctive fear and horror. What had voiced it? Was
+the ship haunted by some dread entity?</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">F</span>or many minutes Thad stood upon the deck, waiting, tensely grasping
+the welding tool. But the nerve-shattering scream did not come again.
+Nor any other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear. It
+leaped up at his face again, with another short little bark.</p>
+
+<p>The air must be good, he thought, if the dog could live in it.</p>
+
+<p>He unscrewed the face-plate of his helmet, and lifted it. The air
+that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply,
+gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: a
+curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.</p>
+
+<p>The dog kept leaping up, whining.</p>
+
+<p>"Hungry, boy?" Thad whispered.</p>
+
+<p>He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit, found a slab of
+concentrated food, and tossed it out through the opened panel. The dog
+sprang upon it, wolfed it eagerly, and came back to his side.</p>
+
+<p>Thad set at once about exploring the ship.</p>
+
+<p>First he ascended the ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it,
+studded with transparent ports. Charts and instruments were in order.
+And the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of the ship.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>had had no expert's knowledge of the flier's mechanism. But he had
+studied interplanetary navigation, to qualify for his license to carry
+masses of metal under rocket power through the space lanes and into
+planetary atmospheres. He was sure he could manage the ship if its
+mechanism were in good order, though he was uncertain of his ability
+to make any considerable repairs.</p>
+
+<p>To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials revealed nothing wrong.</p>
+
+<p>He started the gyro motors, got the great wheels to spinning, and thus
+stopped the slow, end-over-end turning of the flier. Then he went to
+the rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes, and set them to
+firing. The vessel answered readily to her helm. In a few minutes he
+had the red fleck of Mars over the bow.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I can run her, all right," he announced to the dog, which had
+followed him up the steps, keeping close to his feet. "Don't worry,
+old boy. We'll be eating a juicy beefsteak together, in a week. At
+Comet's place in Helion, down by the canal. Not much style&mdash;but the
+eats!</p>
+
+<p>"And now we're going to do a little detective work, and find out what
+made that disagreeable noise. And what happened to all your
+fellow-astronauts. Better find out, before it happens to us!"</p>
+
+<p>He shut off the rockets, and climbed down from the bridge again.</p>
+
+<p>When Thad started down the companionway to the officers' quarters, in
+the central one of the five main compartments of the ship, the dog
+kept close to his legs, growling, trembling, hackles lifted. Sensing
+the animal's terror, pitying it for the naked fear in its eyes, Thad
+wondered what dramas of horror it might have seen.</p>
+
+<p>The cabins of the navigator, calculator, chief technician, and first
+officer were empty, and forbidding with the ominous silence of the
+ship. They were neatly in order, and the berths had been made since
+they were used. But there was a large bloodstain, black and circular,
+on the floor of the calculator's room.</p>
+
+<p>The captain's cabin held evidence of a violent struggle. The door had
+been broken in. Its fragments, with pieces of broken furniture, books,
+covers from the berth, and three service pistols, were scattered about
+in indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among the
+frightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing, of dissimilar
+fabrics. The guns were empty.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">A</span>ttempting to reconstruct the action of the tragedy from those grim
+clues, he imagined that the five officers, aware of some peril, had
+gathered here, fought, and died.</p>
+
+<p>The dog refused to enter the room. It stood at the door, looking
+anxiously after him, trembling and whimpering pitifully. Several times
+it sniffed the air and drew back, snarling. Thad thought that the
+unpleasant earthy odor he had noticed upon opening the face-plate of
+his helmet was stronger here.</p>
+
+<p>After a few minutes of searching through the wildly disordered room,
+he found the ship's log&mdash;or its remains. Many pages had been torn from
+the book, and the remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff black
+mass.</p>
+
+<p>Only one legible entry did he find, that on a page torn from the book,
+which somehow had escaped destruction. Dated five months before, it
+gave the position of the vessel and her bearings&mdash;she was then just
+outside Jupiter's orbit, Earthward bound&mdash;and concluded with a remark
+of sinister implications:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Another man gone this morning. Simms, assistant technician.
+A fine workman. O'Deen swears he heard something moving on
+the deck. Cook thinks some of the doctor's stuffed
+monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous, of course. But
+what is one to think?"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Pondering the significance of those few lines, Thad climbed back to
+the deck. Was the ship haunted by some weird death, that had seized
+the crew man by man, mysteriously? That was the obvious implication.
+And if the flier had been still outside Jupiter's orbit when those
+words were written, it must have been weeks before the end. A lurking,
+invisible death! The scream he had heard....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">H</span>e descended into the forecastle, and came upon another such silent
+record of frightful carnage as he had found in the captain's cabin.
+Dried blood, scraps of cloth, knives and other weapons. A fearful
+question was beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies of
+those who must have died in these conflicts? He dared not think the
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>Gripping the welding arc, Thad approached the after hatch, giving to
+the cargo hold. Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he was
+determined to find the sinister menace of the ship, before it found
+him. The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him,
+contributing nothing to his peace of mind.</p>
+
+<p>The hold proved to be dark. An indefinite black space, oppressive with
+the terrible silence of the flier. The air within it bore still more
+strongly the unpleasant fetor.</p>
+
+<p>Thad hesitated on the steps. The hold was not inviting. But at the
+thought that he must sleep, unguarded, while taking the flier to Mars,
+his resolution returned. The uncertainty, the constant fear, would be
+unendurable.</p>
+
+<p>He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He found it, as his
+feet touched the floor. Blue light flooded the hold.</p>
+
+<p>It was filled with monstrous things, colossal creatures, such as
+nothing that ever lived upon the Earth; like nothing known in the
+jungles of Venus or the deserts of Mars, or anything that has been
+found upon Jupiter's moons.</p>
+
+<p>They were monsters remotely resembling insects or crustaceans, but as
+large as horses or elephants; creatures upreared upon strange limbs,
+armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons, frightful, saw-toothed
+snouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow and green. They leered
+at him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow and purple.</p>
+
+<p>They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">A</span>&nbsp;cold shock of horror started along Thad's spine, at sight of those
+incredible nightmare things. Automatically be flung up the welding
+tool, flicking over the lever with his thumb, so that violet electric
+flame played about the electrode.</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw that the crowding, hideous things were motionless, that
+they stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were supported
+upon metal bars. They were dead. Mounted. Collected specimens of some
+alien life.</p>
+
+<p>Grinning wanly, and conscious of a weakness in the knees, he muttered:
+"They sure will fill the museum, if everybody gets the kick out of
+them that I did. A little too realistic, I'd say. Guess these are the
+'stuffed monstrosities' mentioned in the page out of the log. No
+wonder the cook was afraid of them. Some of then do look hellishly
+alive!"</p>
+
+<p>He started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from the armored
+enormities that seemed crouched to spring at him, motionless eyes
+staring.</p>
+
+<p>So, at the end of the long space, he found the treasure.</p>
+
+<p>Glittering in the blue light, it looked unreal. Incredible. A dazzling
+dream. He stopped among the fearful things that seemed gathered as if
+to guard it, and stared with wide eyes through the opened face-plate
+of his helmet.</p>
+
+<p>He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new, freshly smelted; bars of
+silver-white iridium, of argent platinum, of blue-white osmium. Many
+of them. Thousands of pounds, Thad knew. He trembled at thought of
+their value. Almost beyond calculation.</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw the coffer, lying beyond the piled, gleaming ingots&mdash;a
+huge box, eight feet long; made of some crystal that glittered with
+snowy whiteness, filled with sparkling, iridescent gleams, and inlaid
+with strange designs, apparently in vermilion enamel.</p>
+
+<p>With a little cry, he ran toward the chest, moving awkwardly in the
+loose, deflated fabric of the Osprey suit.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">B</span>eside the coffer, on the floor of the hold, was literally a mountain
+of flame&mdash;blazing gems, heaped as if they had been carelessly dumped
+from it; cut diamonds, incredibly gigantic; monster emeralds,
+sapphires, rubies; and strange stones, that Thad did not recognize.</p>
+
+<p>And Thad gasped with horror, when he looked at the designs of the
+vermilion inlay, in the white, gleaming crystal. Weird forms. Shapes
+of creatures somewhat like gigantic spiders, and more unlike them.
+Demoniac things, wickedly fanged, jaws slavering. Executed with
+masterly skill, that made them seem living, menacing, secretly
+gloating!</p>
+
+<p>Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated almost hypnotically.
+Three times he approached the chest, to lift the lid and find what it
+held. And three times the unutterable horror of those crimson images
+thrust him back, shuddering.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing but pictures," he muttered hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>A fourth time he advanced, trembling, and seized the lid of the
+coffer. Heavy, massive, it was fashioned also of glistening white
+crystal, and inlaid in crimson with weirdly hideous figures. Great
+hinges of white platinum held it on the farther side; it was fastened
+with a simple, heavy hasp of the precious metal.</p>
+
+<p>Hands quivering, Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted the lid.</p>
+
+<p>New treasure in the chest would not have surprised him. He was
+prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems or priceless metal. Nor
+would he have been astonished at some weird creature such as one of
+those whose likenesses were inlaid in the crystal.</p>
+
+<p>But what he saw made him drop the massive lid.</p>
+
+<p>A woman lay in the chest&mdash;motionless, in white.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">I</span>n a moment he raised the lid again; examined the still form more
+closely. The woman had been young. The features were regular, good to
+look upon. The eyes were closed; the white face appeared very
+peaceful.</p>
+
+<p>Save for the extreme, cadaverous pallor, there was no mark of death.
+With a fancy that the body might be miraculously living, sleeping,
+Thad thrust an arm out through the opened panel of his suit, and
+touched a slender, bare white arm. It was stiff, very cold.</p>
+
+<p>The still, pallid face was framed in fine brown hair. The fair, small
+hands were crossed upon the breast, over the simple white garment.</p>
+
+<p>A queer ache came into his heart. Something made him think of a white
+tower in the red hills near Helion, and a girl waiting in its fragrant
+garden of saffron and purple&mdash;a girl like this.</p>
+
+<p>The body lay upon a bed of blazing jewels.</p>
+
+<p>It appeared, Thad thought, as if the pile of gems upon the floor had
+been hastily scraped from the coffer, to make room for the quiet form.
+He wondered how long it had lain there. It looked as if it might have
+been living but minutes before. Some preservative....</p>
+
+<p>His thought was broken by a sound that rang from the open hatchway on
+the deck above&mdash;the furious barking and yelping of the dog. Abruptly
+that was silent, and in its place came the uncanny and terrifying
+scream that Thad had heard once before, on this flier of mystery. A
+shriek so keen and shrill that it seemed to tear out his nerves by
+their roots. The voice of the haunter of the ship.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">W</span>hen Thad came back upon the deck, the dog was still barking
+nervously. He saw the animal forward, almost at the bow. Hackles
+raised, tail between its legs, it was slinking backward, barking
+sharply as if to call for aid.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently it was retreating from something between Thad and itself.
+But Thad, searching the dimly-lit deck, could see no source of alarm.
+Nor could the structures upon it have shut any large object from his
+view.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right!" Thad called, intending to reassure the frightened
+animal, but finding his voice queerly dry. "Coming on the double, old
+man. Don't worry."</p>
+
+<p>The dog had reached the end of the deck. It stopped yelping, but
+snarled and whined as if in terror. It began darting back and forth,
+moving exactly as if something were slowly closing in upon it,
+trapping it in the corner. But Thad could see nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Then it made a wild dash back toward Thad, darting along by the wall,
+as if trying to run past an unseen enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Thad thought he heard quick, rasping footsteps, then, that were not
+those of the dog. And something seemed to catch the dog in mid-air, as
+it leaped. It was hurled howling to the deck. For a moment it
+struggled furiously, as if an invisible claw had pinned it down. Then
+it escaped, and fled whimpering to Thad's side.</p>
+
+<p>He saw a new wound across its hips. Three long, parallel scratches,
+from which fresh red blood was trickling.</p>
+
+<p>Regular scraping sounds came from the end of the deck, where no moving
+thing was to be seen&mdash;sounds such as might be made by the walking of
+feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad.
+Something that was <i>invisible</i>!</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>error seized him, with the knowledge. He had nerved himself to face
+desperate men, or a savage animal. But an invisible being, that could
+creep upon him and strike unseen! It was incredible ... yet he had
+seen the dog knocked down, and the bleeding wound it had received.</p>
+
+<p>His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For the moment he thought
+only blindly, of escape. He knew only an overpowering desire to hide,
+to conceal himself from the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he
+might have tried to leave the flier.</p>
+
+<p>Beside him was one of the companionways amidships, giving access to a
+compartment of the vessel that he had not explored. He turned, leaped
+down the steps, with the terrified dog at his heels.</p>
+
+<p>Below, he found himself in a short hall, dimly lighted. Several metal
+doors opened from it. He tried one at random. It gave. He sprang
+through, let the dog follow, closed and locked it.</p>
+
+<p>Trying to listen, he leaned weakly against the door. The rushing of
+his breath, swift and regular. The loud hammer of his thudding heart.
+The dog's low whines. Then&mdash;unmistakable scraping sounds, outside.</p>
+
+<p>The scratching of claws, Thad knew. Invisible claws!</p>
+
+<p>He stood there, bracing the door with the weight of his body, holding
+the welding arc ready in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked,
+and he felt a heavy pressure against the panels. But at last the
+scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn, at
+least for a time.</p>
+
+<p>When he had time to think, the invisibility of the thing was not so
+incredible. The mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were
+evidence that the flier had visited some unknown planet, where weird
+life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a planet should be
+inhabited by beings invisible to human sight.</p>
+
+<p>Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction of the
+spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to visible light,
+as human flesh is radiolucent to hard X-rays. Quite possibly it could
+be seen by infra-red or ultra-violet light&mdash;evidently it was visible
+enough to the dog's eyes, with their different range of sensitivity.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">P</span>ushing the subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room into
+which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied by a woman. A
+frail blue silk dress and more intimate items of feminine wearing
+apparel were hanging above the berth. Two pairs of delicate black
+slippers stood neatly below it.</p>
+
+<p>Across from him was a dressing table, with a large mirror above it.
+Combs, pins, jars of cosmetic cluttered it. And Thad saw upon it a
+little leather-bound book, locked, stamped on the back "Diary."</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the room and picked up the little book, which smelled
+faintly of jasmine. Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the
+secrets of an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but
+to seize any chance of learning more of this ship of mystery and her
+invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.</p>
+
+<p>Linda Cross was the name written on the fly-leaf, in a firm, clear
+feminine hand. On the next page was the photograph, in color, of a
+girl, the brown-haired girl whose body Thad had discovered in the
+crystal coffer in the hold. Her eyes, he saw, had been blue. He
+thought she looked very lovely&mdash;like the waiting girl in his old dream
+of the silver tower in the red hills by Helion.</p>
+
+<p>The diary, it appeared, had not been kept very devotedly. Most of the
+pages were blank.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first entries, dated a year and a half before, told of a
+party that Linda had attended in San Francisco, and of her refusal to
+dance with a certain man, referred to as "Benny," because he had been
+unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Dad said to-night that we're going off in the <i>Dragon</i>
+again. All the way to Uranus, if the new fuel works as he
+expects. What a lark, to explore a few new worlds of our
+own! Dad says one of Uranus' moons is as large as Mercury.
+And Benny won't be proposing again soon!"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Turning on, Thad found other scattered entries, some of them dealing
+with the preparation for the voyage, the start from San Francisco&mdash;and
+a huge bunch of flowers from "Benny," the long months of the trip
+through space, out past the orbit of Mars, above the meteor belt,
+across Jupiter's orbit, beyond the track of Saturn, which was the
+farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached, and on to
+Uranus, where they could not land because of the unstable surface.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he remainder of the entries Thad found less frequent, shorter,
+bearing the mark of excitement: landing upon Titania, the third and
+largest satellite of Uranus; unearthly forests, sheltering strange and
+monstrous life; the hunting of weird creatures, and mounting them for
+museum specimens.</p>
+
+<p>Then the discovery of a ruined city, whose remains indicated that it
+had been built by a lost race of intelligent, spiderlike things; the
+finding of a temple whose walls were of precious metals, containing a
+crystal chest filled with wondrous gems; the smelting of the metal
+into convenient ingots, and the transfer of the treasure to the hold.</p>
+
+<p>The first sinister note there entered the diary:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Some of the men say we shouldn't have disturbed the temple.
+Think it will bring us bad luck. Rubbish, of course. But one
+man did vanish while they were smelting the gold. Poor Mr.
+Tom James. I suppose he ventured away from the rest, and
+something caught him."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The few entries that followed were shorter, and showed increasing
+nervous tension. They recorded the departure from Titania, made almost
+as soon as the treasure was loaded. The last was made several weeks
+later. A dozen men had vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of
+blood to hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Dad says I'm to stay in here to-day. Old dear, he's afraid
+the thing will get me&mdash;whatever it is. It's really serious.
+Two men taken from their berths last night. And not a trace.
+Some of them think it's a curse on the treasure. One of them
+swears he saw Dad's stuffed specimens moving about in the
+hold.</p>
+
+<p>"Some terrible thing must have slipped aboard the flier, out
+of the jungle. That's what Dad and the captain think. Queer
+they can't find it. They've searched all over. Well...."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Musing and regretful, Thad turned back for another look at the smiling
+girl in the photograph.</p>
+
+<p>What a tragedy her death had been! Reading the diary had made him like
+her. Her balance and humor. Her quiet affection for "Dad." The calm
+courage with which she seemed to have faced the creeping, lurking
+death that darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow.</p>
+
+<p>How had her body come to be in the coffer, he wondered, when all the
+others were&mdash;gone? It had shown no marks of violence. She must have
+died of fear. No, her face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that.
+Had she chosen easy death by some poison, rather than that other
+dreadful fate? Had her body been put in the chest to protect it, and
+the poison arrested decomposition?</p>
+
+<p>Thad was still studying the picture, thoughtfully and sadly, when the
+dog, which had been silent, suddenly growled again, and retreated from
+the door, toward the corner of the room.</p>
+
+<p>The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its claws scratching
+across the door again. And he heard another dreadful sound&mdash;not the
+long, shrill scream that had so grated on his nerves before, but a
+short, sharp coughing or barking, a series of shrill, indescribable
+notes that could have been made by no beast he knew.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>he decision to open the door cost a huge effort of Thad's will.</p>
+
+<p>For hours he had waited, thinking desperately. And the thing outside
+the door had waited as patiently, scratching upon it from time to
+time, uttering those dreadful, shrill coughing cries.</p>
+
+<p>Sooner or later, he would have to face the monster. Even if he could
+escape from the room and avoid it for a time, he would have to meet it
+in the end. And it might creep upon him while he slept.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, the issue of the combat was extremely doubtful. The
+monster, apparently, had succeeded in killing every man upon the
+flier, even though some of them had been armed. It must be large and
+very ferocious.</p>
+
+<p>But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his Osprey-suit. The
+heavy fabric, made of metal wires impregnated with a tough, elastic
+composition, should afford considerable protection against the thing.</p>
+
+<p>The welding arc, intended to fuse refractive meteoric iron, would be
+no mean weapon, at close quarters. And the quarters would be close.</p>
+
+<p>If only he could find some way to make the thing visible!</p>
+
+<p>Paint, or something of the kind, would stick to its skin.... His eyes,
+searching the room, caught the jar of face powder on the dressing
+table. Dash that over it! It ought to stick enough to make the outline
+visible.</p>
+
+<p>So, at last, holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until a
+time when the pressure upon the door had just relaxed, and he knew the
+monster was waiting outside. Swiftly, he opened the door....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">T</span>had had partially overcome the instinctive horror that the unseen
+being had first aroused in him. But it returned in a sickening wave
+when he heard the short, shrill, coughing cries, hideously eager, that
+greeted the opening of the door. And the quick rasping of naked claws
+upon the floor. <i>Sounds from nothingness!</i></p>
+
+<p>He flung the powder at the sound.</p>
+
+<p>A form of weird horror materialized before him, still half invisible,
+half outlined with the white film of adhering powder: gigantic and
+hideous claws, that seemed to reach out of empty air, the side of a
+huge, scaly body, a yawning, dripping jaw. For a moment Thad could see
+great, hooked fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if an unseen
+tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it in fluids which
+made it invisible.</p>
+
+<p>That unearthly, half-seen shape leaped at him.</p>
+
+<p>He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the floor. Claws were
+rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit. His arm was seized
+crushingly in half-visible jaws.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">D</span>esperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated electrode was
+driven toward his body. He fought to keep it away; he knew that it
+would burn through even the insulated fabric of his suit.</p>
+
+<p>A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound,
+as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and felt a thin pencil of
+pain drawn along his body, where a claw cut his skin.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the suit was full of the earthy fetor of the monster's body,
+nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and
+thrust upward hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood
+trickling from the wound.</p>
+
+<p>A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was carried from his
+hand. Flung to the side of the room, it clattered to the floor; and
+then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing the breath from his
+lungs. The monster stood upon his body and clawed at him.</p>
+
+<p>Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet, encountering a
+great, hard body. Futilely he beat and thrust with his arms against
+the pillarlike limb.</p>
+
+<p>His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick fabric. He heard
+it tear again, along his right thigh. But he felt no pain, and thought
+the claws had not reached the skin.</p>
+
+<p>It was the yellow dog that gave him the chance to recover the weapon.
+The animal had been running back and forth in the opposite end of the
+room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now, with the mad
+courage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at the monster.</p>
+
+<p>A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled it back across the room.
+It lay still, broken, whimpering.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from Thad's body. And
+Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung himself across the room,
+snatched up the welding tool.</p>
+
+<p>In an instant the creature was upon him again. But he met it with the
+incandescent electrode. He was crouched in a corner, now, where it
+could come at him from only one direction. Its claws still slashed at
+him ferociously. But he was able to cling to the weapon, and meet each
+onslaught with hot metal.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his blind, thrusting
+blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A terrible choking,
+strangling sound came from the air. And he heard the thrashing
+struggles of wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He prodded the
+thing again and again with the hot electrode, and it did not move. It
+was dead.</p>
+
+<p>The creature's body was so heavy that Thad had to return to the
+bridge, and shut off the current in the gravity plates along the keel,
+before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which he
+had entered the flier, and consigned it to space....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">F</span>ive days later Thad brought the <i>Red Dragon</i> into the atmosphere of
+Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in response to his signals, and
+docked the flier safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again,
+with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard to inspect
+the vessel.</p>
+
+<p>Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in the
+hold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at the
+treasure, he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of white
+crystal, and looked once more upon the still form of the girl within
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so lovely. How
+terrible her last days of life must have been, with doom shadowing the
+vessel, and the men vanishing mysteriously, one by one!
+Terrible&mdash;until she had sought the security of death.</p>
+
+<p>Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half the
+incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the award
+of salvage. If only the girl were still living.... He felt a
+poignantly keen desire to hear her voice.</p>
+
+<p>Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. A
+hasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among glittering gems.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled
+medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state
+of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty
+minims of zeronel.</p>
+
+<p>"She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.</p>
+
+<p>"I entreat the finders of this to have care given her, and
+to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this
+ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other
+claims.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a
+hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and the
+injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time
+that must elapse.</p>
+
+<p>"If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing upon
+the ship has destroyed me and all my men.</p>
+
+<p>"Please do not fail me.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p class="f1">Levington Cross."</p>
+
+<p>Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its
+Martian garden of saffron and purple, among the low ocher hills beside
+Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where the
+girl of his dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaulted
+chamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay, to
+look into her pallid face, and feel her cold wrist. He kept a nurse in
+attendance, and had a physician call daily.</p>
+
+<p>A long Martian year went by.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class="f2">L</span>ooking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his
+eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting was
+aging him. And it might be a hundred years, he remembered, before
+Linda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while Linda lay still
+young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep; if she might awake,
+after long years, and see in him only a feeble old man. And he knew
+that he would not be sorry he had waited, even if he should die before
+she revived.</p>
+
+<p>On the next day, the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay.
+He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue,
+glorious.</p>
+
+<p>A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful wonder, then with
+confidence, and dawning understanding. And at last she smiled.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Salvage in Space, by John Stewart Williamson
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Salvage in Space, by John Stewart Williamson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: Salvage in Space
+
+Author: John Stewart Williamson
+
+Release Date: July 1, 2009 [EBook #29283]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SALVAGE IN SPACE ***
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+Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
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+                         Transcriber's Note:
+
+     This etext was produced from Astounding Stories March 1933.
+     Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
+     U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+
+                           Salvage in Space
+
+
+                          By Jack Williamson
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: To Thad Allen, meteor miner, comes the dangerous bonanza of
+a derelict rocket-flier manned by death invisible.]
+
+
+His "planet" was the smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest,
+Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge,
+bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly
+in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric
+iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily
+away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark
+mystery of the void.
+
+His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red.
+He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron
+his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.
+
+Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of
+metal--a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds
+of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had
+not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the
+spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious
+metals was disappointingly minute.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars
+and Jupiter, is "mined" by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the
+platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small
+quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be
+fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law,
+should occupy this space.]
+
+On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen
+atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from
+its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment
+he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.
+
+Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the
+vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The
+magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected.
+He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.
+
+Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts?
+Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion,
+Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last instalment on his
+Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no
+more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of
+iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?
+
+He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole
+planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had
+braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors
+for hard years, who still hoped.
+
+But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....
+
+The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red
+hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a
+fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a
+girl waiting, at the silver door--a trim, slender girl in white, with
+blue eyes and hair richly brown.
+
+Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps
+through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could
+be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not
+amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white
+was yet only a glorious dream....
+
+[Illustration: Gigantic claws seemed to reach out of empty air.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it,
+pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a
+tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his
+native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below
+it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken
+sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness, blackness,
+emptiness. Ebon infinity, sprinkled with far, cold stars.
+
+Thad was alone. Utterly alone. No man was visible, in all the supernal
+vastness of space. And no work of man--save the few tools of his
+daring trade, and the glittering little rocket bolted to the black
+iron behind him. It was terrible to think that the nearest human being
+must be tens of millions of miles away.
+
+On his first trips, the loneliness had been terrible, unendurable. Now
+he was becoming accustomed to it. At least, he no longer feared that
+he was going mad. But sometimes....
+
+Thad shook himself and spoke aloud, his voice ringing hollow in his
+huge metal helmet:
+
+"Brace up, old top. In good company, when you're by yourself, as Dad
+used to say. Be back in Helion in a week or so, anyhow. Look up Dan
+and 'Chuck' and the rest of the crowd again, at Comet's place. What
+price a friendly boxing match with Mason, or an evening at the
+teleview theater?
+
+"Fresh air instead of this stale synthetic stuff! Real food, in place
+of these tasteless concentrates! A hot bath, instead of greasing
+yourself!
+
+"Too dull out here. Life--" He broke off, set his jaw.
+
+No use thinking about such things. Only made it worse. Besides, how
+did he know that a whirring meteor wasn't going to flash him out
+before he got back?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He drew his right arm out of the bulging sleeve of the suit, into its
+ample interior, found a cigarette in an inside pocket, and lighted it.
+The smoke swirled about in the helmet, drawn swiftly into the air
+filters.
+
+"Darn clever, these suits," he murmured. "Food, smokes, water
+generator, all where you can reach them. And darned expensive, too.
+I'd better be looking for pay metal!"
+
+He clambered to a better position; stood peering out into space,
+searching for the tiny gleam of sunlight on a meteoric fragment that
+might be worth capturing for its content of precious metals. For an
+hour he scanned the black, star-strewn gulf, as the sputtering rocket
+continued to drive him forward.
+
+"There she glows!" he cried suddenly, and grinned.
+
+Before him was a tiny, glowing fleck, that moved among the unchanging
+stars. He stared at it intensely, breathing faster in the helmet.
+
+Always he thrilled to see such a moving gleam. What treasure it
+promised! At first sight, it was impossible to determine size or
+distance or rate of motion. It might be ten thousand tons of rich
+metal. A fortune! It would more probably prove to be a tiny, stony
+mass, not worth capturing. It might even be large and valuable, but
+moving so rapidly that he could not overtake it with the power of the
+diminutive Millen rocket.
+
+He studied the tiny speck intently, with practised eye, as the minutes
+passed--an untrained eye would never have seen it at all, among the
+flaming hosts of stars. Skilfully he judged, from its apparent rate of
+motion and its slow increase in brilliance, its size and distance
+from him.
+
+"Must be--must be fair size," he spoke aloud, at length. "A hundred
+tons, I'll bet my helmet! But scooting along pretty fast. Stretch the
+little old rocket to run it down."
+
+He clambered back to the rocket, changed the angle of the flaming
+exhaust, to drive him directly across the path of the object ahead,
+filled the magazine again with the little pellets of uranite, which
+were fed automatically into the combustion chamber, and increased the
+firing rate.
+
+The trailing blue flame reached farther backward from the incandescent
+orifice of the exhaust. The vibration of the metal sphere increased.
+Thad left the sputtering rocket and went back where he could see the
+object before him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was nearer now, rushing obliquely across his path. Would he be in
+time to capture it as it passed, or would it hurtle by ahead of him,
+and vanish in the limitless darkness of space before his feeble rocket
+could check the momentum of his ball of metal?
+
+He peered at it, as it drew closer.
+
+Its surface seemed oddly bright, silvery. Not the dull black of
+meteoric iron. And it was larger, more distant, than he had thought at
+first. In form, too, it seemed curiously regular, ellipsoid. It was no
+jagged mass of metal.
+
+His hopes sank, rose again immediately. Even if it were not the mass
+of rich metal for which he had prayed, it might be something as
+valuable--and more interesting.
+
+He returned to the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and
+advanced the firing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous
+explosion.
+
+When he returned to where he could see the hurtling object before him,
+he saw that it was a ship. A tapering silver-green rocket-flier.
+
+Once more his dreams were dashed. The officers of interplanetary
+liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their
+collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are
+menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship save a
+heliographed warning to keep clear.
+
+But how came a rocket-flier here, in the perilous swarms of the meteor
+belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid,
+in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal.
+
+The lanes more frequently used, between Earth, Mars, Venus and
+Mercury, were of course far inside the orbits of the asteroids. And
+the few ships running to Jupiter's moons avoided them by crossing
+millions of miles above their plane.
+
+Could it be that legendary green ship, said once to have mysteriously
+appeared, sliced up and drawn within her hull several of the primitive
+ships of that day, and then disappeared forever after in the remote
+wastes of space? Absurd, of course: he dismissed the idle fancy and
+examined the ship still more closely.
+
+Then he saw that it was turning, end over end, very slowly. That meant
+that its gyros were stopped; that it was helpless, drifting, disabled,
+powerless to avoid hurtling meteoric stones. Had it blundered unawares
+into the belt of swarms--been struck before the danger was realized?
+Was it a derelict, with all dead upon it?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Either the ship's machinery was completely wrecked, Thad knew, or
+there was no one on watch. For the controls of a modern rocket-flier
+are so simple and so nearly automatic that a single man at the bridge
+can keep a vessel upon her course.
+
+It might be, he thought, that a meteorite had ripped open the hull,
+allowing the air to escape so quickly that the entire crew had been
+asphyxiated before any repairs could be made. But that seemed
+unlikely, since the ship must have been divided into several
+compartments by air-tight bulkheads.
+
+Could the vessel have been deserted for some reason? The crew might
+have mutinied, and left her in the life-tubes. She might have been
+robbed by pirates, and set adrift. But with the space lanes policed as
+they were, piracy and successful mutiny were rare.
+
+Thad saw that the flier's navigation lights were out.
+
+He found the heliograph signal mirror at his side, sighted it upon the
+ship, and worked the mirror rapidly. He waited, repeated the call.
+There was no response.
+
+The vessel was plainly a derelict. Could he board her, and take her to
+Mars? By law, it was his duty to attempt to aid any helpless ship, or
+at least to try to save any endangered lives upon her. And the salvage
+award, if the ship should be deserted and he could bring her safe to
+port, would be half her value.
+
+No mean prize, that. Half the value of ship and cargo! More than he
+was apt to earn in years of mining the meteor-belt.
+
+With new anxiety, he measured the relative motion of the gleaming
+ship. It was going to pass ahead of him. And very soon. No more time
+for speculation. It was still uncertain whether it would come near
+enough so that he could get a line to it.
+
+Rapidly he unslung from his belt the apparatus he used to capture
+meteors. A powerful electromagnet, with a thin, strong wire fastened
+to it, to be hurled from a helix-gun. He set the drum on which the
+wire was wound upon the metal at his feet, fastened it with its
+magnetic anchor, wondering if it would stand the terrific strain when
+the wire tightened.
+
+Raising the helix to his shoulder, he trained it upon a point well
+ahead of the rushing flier, and stood waiting for the exact moment to
+press the lever. The slender spindle of the ship was only a mile away
+now, bright in the sunlight. He could see no break in her polished
+hull, save for the dark rows of circular ports. She was not, by any
+means, completely wrecked.
+
+He read the black letters of her name.
+
+_Red Dragon._
+
+The name of her home port, below, was in smaller letters. But in a
+moment he made them out. San Francisco. The ship then came from the
+Earth! From the very city where Thad was born!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gleaming hull was near now. Only a few hundred yards away.
+Passing. Aiming well ahead of her, to allow for her motion, Thad
+pressed the key that hurled the magnet from the helix. It flung away
+from him, the wire screaming from the reel behind it.
+
+Thad's mass of metal swung on past the ship, as he returned to the
+rocket and stopped its clattering explosions. He watched the tiny
+black speck of the magnet. It vanished from sight in the darkness of
+space, appeared again against the white, burnished hull of the rocket
+ship.
+
+For a painful instant he thought he had missed. Then he saw that the
+magnet was fast to the side of the flier, near the stern. The line
+tightened. Soon the strain would come upon it, as it checked the
+momentum of the mass of iron. He set the friction brake.
+
+Thad flung himself flat, grasped the wire above the reel. Even if the
+mass of iron tore itself free, he could hold to the wire, and himself
+reach the ship.
+
+He flung past the deserted vessel, behind it, his lump of iron swung
+like a pebble in a sling. A cloud of smoke burst from the burned
+lining of the friction brake, in the reel. Then the wire was all out;
+there was a sudden jerk.
+
+And the hard-gathered sphere of metal was gone--snapped off into
+space. Thad clung desperately to the wire, muscles cracking, tortured
+arms almost drawn from their sockets. Fear flashed over his mind; what
+if the wire broke, and left him floating helpless in space?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It held, though, to his relief. He was trailing behind the ship.
+Eagerly he seized the handle of the reel; began to wind up the mile of
+thin wire. Half an hour later, Thad's suited figure bumped gently
+against the shining hull of the rocket. He got to his feet, and gazed
+backward into the starry gulf, where his sphere of iron had long since
+vanished.
+
+"Somebody is going to find himself a nice chunk of metal, all welded
+together and equipped for rocket navigation," he murmured. "As for
+me--well, I've simply _got_ to run this tub to Mars!"
+
+He walked over the smooth, refulgent hull, held to it by magnetic
+soles. Nowhere was it broken, though he found scars where small
+meteoric particles had scratched the brilliant polish. So no meteor
+had wrecked the ship. What, then, was the matter? Soon he would know.
+
+The _Red Dragon_ was not large. A hundred and thirty feet long, Thad
+estimated, with a beam of twenty-five feet. But her trim lines bespoke
+design recent and good; the double ring of black projecting rockets at
+the stern told of unusual speed.
+
+A pretty piece of salvage, he reflected, if he could land her on
+Mars. Half the value of such a ship, unharmed and safe in port, would
+be a larger sum than he dared put in figures. And he must take her in,
+now that he had lost his own rocket!
+
+He found the life-tubes, six of them, slender, silvery cylinders,
+lying secure in their niches, three along each side of the flier. None
+was missing. So the crew had not willingly deserted the ship.
+
+He approached the main air-lock, at the center of the hull, behind the
+projecting dome of the bridge. It was closed. A glance at the dials
+told him there was full air pressure within it. It had, then, last
+been used to enter the rocket, not to leave it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thad opened the exhaust valve, let the air hiss from the chamber of
+the lock. The huge door swung open in response to his hand upon the
+wheel, and he entered the cylindrical chamber. In a moment the door
+was closed behind him, air was hissing into the lock again.
+
+He started to open the face-plate of his helmet, longing for a breath
+of air that did not smell of sweat and stale tobacco smoke, as that in
+his suit always did, despite the best chemical purifiers. Then he
+hesitated. Perhaps some deadly gas, from the combustion chambers....
+
+Thad opened the inner valve, and came upon the upper deck of the
+vessel. A floor ran the full length of the ship, broken with hatches
+and companionways that gave to the rocket rooms, cargo holds, and
+quarters for crew and passengers below. There was an enclosed ladder
+that led to bridge and navigating room in the dome above. The hull
+formed an arched roof over it.
+
+The deck was deserted, lit only by three dim blue globes, hanging from
+the curved roof. All seemed in order--the fire-fighting equipment
+hanging on the walls, and the huge metal patches and welding equipment
+for repairing breaks in the hull. Everything was clean, bright with
+polish or new paint.
+
+And all was very still. The silence held a vague, brooding threat that
+frightened Thad, made him wish for a moment that he was back upon his
+rugged ball of metal. But he banished his fear, and strode down the
+deck.
+
+Midway of it he found a dark stain upon the clean metal. The black of
+long-dried blood. A few tattered scraps of cloth beside it. No more
+than bloody rags. And a heavy meat cleaver, half hidden beneath a bit
+of darkened fabric.
+
+Mute record of tragedy! Thad strove to read it. Had a man fought here
+and been killed? It must have been a struggle of peculiar violence, to
+judge by the dark spattered stains, and the indescribable condition of
+the remnants of clothing. But what had he fought? Another man, or some
+thing? And what had become of victor and vanquished?
+
+He walked on down the deck.
+
+The torturing silence was broken by the abrupt patter of quick little
+footsteps behind him. He turned quickly, nervously, with a hand going
+instinctively to his welding arc, which, he knew, would make a fairly
+effective weapon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was merely a dog. A little dog, yellow, nondescript, pathetically
+delighted. With a sharp, eager bark, it leaped up at Thad, pawing at
+his armor and licking it, standing on its hind legs and reaching
+toward the visor of his helmet.
+
+It was very thin, as if from long starvation. Both ears were ragged
+and bloody, and there was a long, unhealed scratch across the
+shoulder, somewhat inflamed, but not a serious wound.
+
+The bright, eager eyes were alight with joy. But Thad thought he saw
+fear in them. And even through the stiff fabric of the Osprey suit, he
+felt that the dog was trembling.
+
+Suddenly, with a low whine, it shrank close to his side. And another
+sound reached Thad's ears.
+
+A cry, weird and harrowing beyond telling. A scream so thin and so
+high that it roughened his skin, so keenly shrill that it tortured his
+nerves; a sound of that peculiar frequency that is more agonizing than
+any bodily pain.
+
+When silence came again, Thad was standing with his back against the
+wall, the welding arc in his hand. His face was cold with sweat, and a
+queer chill prickled up and down his spine. The yellow dog crouched
+whimpering against his legs.
+
+Ominous, threatening stillness filled the ship again, disturbed only
+by the whimpers and frightened growls of the dog. Trying to calm his
+overwrought nerves, Thad listened--strained his ears. He could hear
+nothing. And he had no idea from which direction the terrifying sound
+had come.
+
+A strange cry. Thad knew it had been born in no human throat. Nor in
+the throat of any animal he knew. It had carried an alien note that
+overcame him with instinctive fear and horror. What had voiced it? Was
+the ship haunted by some dread entity?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For many minutes Thad stood upon the deck, waiting, tensely grasping
+the welding tool. But the nerve-shattering scream did not come again.
+Nor any other sound. The yellow dog seemed half to forget its fear. It
+leaped up at his face again, with another short little bark.
+
+The air must be good, he thought, if the dog could live in it.
+
+He unscrewed the face-plate of his helmet, and lifted it. The air
+that struck his face was cool and clean. He breathed deeply,
+gratefully. And at first he did not notice the strange odor upon it: a
+curious, unpleasant scent, earthly, almost fetid, unfamiliar.
+
+The dog kept leaping up, whining.
+
+"Hungry, boy?" Thad whispered.
+
+He fumbled in the bulky inside pockets of his suit, found a slab of
+concentrated food, and tossed it out through the opened panel. The dog
+sprang upon it, wolfed it eagerly, and came back to his side.
+
+Thad set at once about exploring the ship.
+
+First he ascended the ladder to the bridge. A metal dome covered it,
+studded with transparent ports. Charts and instruments were in order.
+And the room was vacant, heavy with the fatal silence of the ship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thad had no expert's knowledge of the flier's mechanism. But he had
+studied interplanetary navigation, to qualify for his license to carry
+masses of metal under rocket power through the space lanes and into
+planetary atmospheres. He was sure he could manage the ship if its
+mechanism were in good order, though he was uncertain of his ability
+to make any considerable repairs.
+
+To his relief, a scrutiny of the dials revealed nothing wrong.
+
+He started the gyro motors, got the great wheels to spinning, and thus
+stopped the slow, end-over-end turning of the flier. Then he went to
+the rocket controls, warmed three of the tubes, and set them to
+firing. The vessel answered readily to her helm. In a few minutes he
+had the red fleck of Mars over the bow.
+
+"Yes, I can run her, all right," he announced to the dog, which had
+followed him up the steps, keeping close to his feet. "Don't worry,
+old boy. We'll be eating a juicy beefsteak together, in a week. At
+Comet's place in Helion, down by the canal. Not much style--but the
+eats!
+
+"And now we're going to do a little detective work, and find out what
+made that disagreeable noise. And what happened to all your
+fellow-astronauts. Better find out, before it happens to us!"
+
+He shut off the rockets, and climbed down from the bridge again.
+
+When Thad started down the companionway to the officers' quarters, in
+the central one of the five main compartments of the ship, the dog
+kept close to his legs, growling, trembling, hackles lifted. Sensing
+the animal's terror, pitying it for the naked fear in its eyes, Thad
+wondered what dramas of horror it might have seen.
+
+The cabins of the navigator, calculator, chief technician, and first
+officer were empty, and forbidding with the ominous silence of the
+ship. They were neatly in order, and the berths had been made since
+they were used. But there was a large bloodstain, black and circular,
+on the floor of the calculator's room.
+
+The captain's cabin held evidence of a violent struggle. The door had
+been broken in. Its fragments, with pieces of broken furniture, books,
+covers from the berth, and three service pistols, were scattered about
+in indescribable confusion, all stained with blood. Among the
+frightful debris, Thad found several scraps of clothing, of dissimilar
+fabrics. The guns were empty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Attempting to reconstruct the action of the tragedy from those grim
+clues, he imagined that the five officers, aware of some peril, had
+gathered here, fought, and died.
+
+The dog refused to enter the room. It stood at the door, looking
+anxiously after him, trembling and whimpering pitifully. Several times
+it sniffed the air and drew back, snarling. Thad thought that the
+unpleasant earthy odor he had noticed upon opening the face-plate of
+his helmet was stronger here.
+
+After a few minutes of searching through the wildly disordered room,
+he found the ship's log--or its remains. Many pages had been torn from
+the book, and the remainder, soaked with blood, formed a stiff black
+mass.
+
+Only one legible entry did he find, that on a page torn from the book,
+which somehow had escaped destruction. Dated five months before, it
+gave the position of the vessel and her bearings--she was then just
+outside Jupiter's orbit, Earthward bound--and concluded with a remark
+of sinister implications:
+
+     "Another man gone this morning. Simms, assistant technician.
+     A fine workman. O'Deen swears he heard something moving on
+     the deck. Cook thinks some of the doctor's stuffed
+     monstrosities have come to life. Ridiculous, of course. But
+     what is one to think?"
+
+Pondering the significance of those few lines, Thad climbed back to
+the deck. Was the ship haunted by some weird death, that had seized
+the crew man by man, mysteriously? That was the obvious implication.
+And if the flier had been still outside Jupiter's orbit when those
+words were written, it must have been weeks before the end. A lurking,
+invisible death! The scream he had heard....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He descended into the forecastle, and came upon another such silent
+record of frightful carnage as he had found in the captain's cabin.
+Dried blood, scraps of cloth, knives and other weapons. A fearful
+question was beginning to obsess him. What had become of the bodies of
+those who must have died in these conflicts? He dared not think the
+answer.
+
+Gripping the welding arc, Thad approached the after hatch, giving to
+the cargo hold. Trepidation almost overpowered him, but he was
+determined to find the sinister menace of the ship, before it found
+him. The dog whimpered, hung back, and finally deserted him,
+contributing nothing to his peace of mind.
+
+The hold proved to be dark. An indefinite black space, oppressive with
+the terrible silence of the flier. The air within it bore still more
+strongly the unpleasant fetor.
+
+Thad hesitated on the steps. The hold was not inviting. But at the
+thought that he must sleep, unguarded, while taking the flier to Mars,
+his resolution returned. The uncertainty, the constant fear, would be
+unendurable.
+
+He climbed on down, feeling for the light button. He found it, as his
+feet touched the floor. Blue light flooded the hold.
+
+It was filled with monstrous things, colossal creatures, such as
+nothing that ever lived upon the Earth; like nothing known in the
+jungles of Venus or the deserts of Mars, or anything that has been
+found upon Jupiter's moons.
+
+They were monsters remotely resembling insects or crustaceans, but as
+large as horses or elephants; creatures upreared upon strange limbs,
+armed with hideously fanged jaws, cruel talons, frightful, saw-toothed
+snouts, and glittering scales, red and yellow and green. They leered
+at him with phosphorescent eyes, yellow and purple.
+
+They cast grotesquely gigantic shadows in the blue light....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A cold shock of horror started along Thad's spine, at sight of those
+incredible nightmare things. Automatically be flung up the welding
+tool, flicking over the lever with his thumb, so that violet electric
+flame played about the electrode.
+
+Then he saw that the crowding, hideous things were motionless, that
+they stood upon wooden pedestals, that many of them were supported
+upon metal bars. They were dead. Mounted. Collected specimens of some
+alien life.
+
+Grinning wanly, and conscious of a weakness in the knees, he muttered:
+"They sure will fill the museum, if everybody gets the kick out of
+them that I did. A little too realistic, I'd say. Guess these are the
+'stuffed monstrosities' mentioned in the page out of the log. No
+wonder the cook was afraid of them. Some of then do look hellishly
+alive!"
+
+He started across the hold, shrinking involuntarily from the armored
+enormities that seemed crouched to spring at him, motionless eyes
+staring.
+
+So, at the end of the long space, he found the treasure.
+
+Glittering in the blue light, it looked unreal. Incredible. A dazzling
+dream. He stopped among the fearful things that seemed gathered as if
+to guard it, and stared with wide eyes through the opened face-plate
+of his helmet.
+
+He saw neat stacks of gold ingots, new, freshly smelted; bars of
+silver-white iridium, of argent platinum, of blue-white osmium. Many
+of them. Thousands of pounds, Thad knew. He trembled at thought of
+their value. Almost beyond calculation.
+
+Then he saw the coffer, lying beyond the piled, gleaming ingots--a
+huge box, eight feet long; made of some crystal that glittered with
+snowy whiteness, filled with sparkling, iridescent gleams, and inlaid
+with strange designs, apparently in vermilion enamel.
+
+With a little cry, he ran toward the chest, moving awkwardly in the
+loose, deflated fabric of the Osprey suit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Beside the coffer, on the floor of the hold, was literally a mountain
+of flame--blazing gems, heaped as if they had been carelessly dumped
+from it; cut diamonds, incredibly gigantic; monster emeralds,
+sapphires, rubies; and strange stones, that Thad did not recognize.
+
+And Thad gasped with horror, when he looked at the designs of the
+vermilion inlay, in the white, gleaming crystal. Weird forms. Shapes
+of creatures somewhat like gigantic spiders, and more unlike them.
+Demoniac things, wickedly fanged, jaws slavering. Executed with
+masterly skill, that made them seem living, menacing, secretly
+gloating!
+
+Thad stared at them for long minutes, fascinated almost hypnotically.
+Three times he approached the chest, to lift the lid and find what it
+held. And three times the unutterable horror of those crimson images
+thrust him back, shuddering.
+
+"Nothing but pictures," he muttered hoarsely.
+
+A fourth time he advanced, trembling, and seized the lid of the
+coffer. Heavy, massive, it was fashioned also of glistening white
+crystal, and inlaid in crimson with weirdly hideous figures. Great
+hinges of white platinum held it on the farther side; it was fastened
+with a simple, heavy hasp of the precious metal.
+
+Hands quivering, Thad snapped back the hasp, lifted the lid.
+
+New treasure in the chest would not have surprised him. He was
+prepared to meet dazzling wonders of gems or priceless metal. Nor
+would he have been astonished at some weird creature such as one of
+those whose likenesses were inlaid in the crystal.
+
+But what he saw made him drop the massive lid.
+
+A woman lay in the chest--motionless, in white.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a moment he raised the lid again; examined the still form more
+closely. The woman had been young. The features were regular, good to
+look upon. The eyes were closed; the white face appeared very
+peaceful.
+
+Save for the extreme, cadaverous pallor, there was no mark of death.
+With a fancy that the body might be miraculously living, sleeping,
+Thad thrust an arm out through the opened panel of his suit, and
+touched a slender, bare white arm. It was stiff, very cold.
+
+The still, pallid face was framed in fine brown hair. The fair, small
+hands were crossed upon the breast, over the simple white garment.
+
+A queer ache came into his heart. Something made him think of a white
+tower in the red hills near Helion, and a girl waiting in its fragrant
+garden of saffron and purple--a girl like this.
+
+The body lay upon a bed of blazing jewels.
+
+It appeared, Thad thought, as if the pile of gems upon the floor had
+been hastily scraped from the coffer, to make room for the quiet form.
+He wondered how long it had lain there. It looked as if it might have
+been living but minutes before. Some preservative....
+
+His thought was broken by a sound that rang from the open hatchway on
+the deck above--the furious barking and yelping of the dog. Abruptly
+that was silent, and in its place came the uncanny and terrifying
+scream that Thad had heard once before, on this flier of mystery. A
+shriek so keen and shrill that it seemed to tear out his nerves by
+their roots. The voice of the haunter of the ship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Thad came back upon the deck, the dog was still barking
+nervously. He saw the animal forward, almost at the bow. Hackles
+raised, tail between its legs, it was slinking backward, barking
+sharply as if to call for aid.
+
+Apparently it was retreating from something between Thad and itself.
+But Thad, searching the dimly-lit deck, could see no source of alarm.
+Nor could the structures upon it have shut any large object from his
+view.
+
+"It's all right!" Thad called, intending to reassure the frightened
+animal, but finding his voice queerly dry. "Coming on the double, old
+man. Don't worry."
+
+The dog had reached the end of the deck. It stopped yelping, but
+snarled and whined as if in terror. It began darting back and forth,
+moving exactly as if something were slowly closing in upon it,
+trapping it in the corner. But Thad could see nothing.
+
+Then it made a wild dash back toward Thad, darting along by the wall,
+as if trying to run past an unseen enemy.
+
+Thad thought he heard quick, rasping footsteps, then, that were not
+those of the dog. And something seemed to catch the dog in mid-air, as
+it leaped. It was hurled howling to the deck. For a moment it
+struggled furiously, as if an invisible claw had pinned it down. Then
+it escaped, and fled whimpering to Thad's side.
+
+He saw a new wound across its hips. Three long, parallel scratches,
+from which fresh red blood was trickling.
+
+Regular scraping sounds came from the end of the deck, where no moving
+thing was to be seen--sounds such as might be made by the walking of
+feet with unsheathed claws. Something was coming back toward Thad.
+Something that was _invisible_!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Terror seized him, with the knowledge. He had nerved himself to face
+desperate men, or a savage animal. But an invisible being, that could
+creep upon him and strike unseen! It was incredible ... yet he had
+seen the dog knocked down, and the bleeding wound it had received.
+
+His heart paused, then beat very quickly. For the moment he thought
+only blindly, of escape. He knew only an overpowering desire to hide,
+to conceal himself from the invisible thing. Had it been possible, he
+might have tried to leave the flier.
+
+Beside him was one of the companionways amidships, giving access to a
+compartment of the vessel that he had not explored. He turned, leaped
+down the steps, with the terrified dog at his heels.
+
+Below, he found himself in a short hall, dimly lighted. Several metal
+doors opened from it. He tried one at random. It gave. He sprang
+through, let the dog follow, closed and locked it.
+
+Trying to listen, he leaned weakly against the door. The rushing of
+his breath, swift and regular. The loud hammer of his thudding heart.
+The dog's low whines. Then--unmistakable scraping sounds, outside.
+
+The scratching of claws, Thad knew. Invisible claws!
+
+He stood there, bracing the door with the weight of his body, holding
+the welding arc ready in his hand. Several times the hinges creaked,
+and he felt a heavy pressure against the panels. But at last the
+scratching sounds ceased. He relaxed. The monster had withdrawn, at
+least for a time.
+
+When he had time to think, the invisibility of the thing was not so
+incredible. The mounted creatures he had seen in the hold were
+evidence that the flier had visited some unknown planet, where weird
+life reigned. It was not beyond reason that such a planet should be
+inhabited by beings invisible to human sight.
+
+Human vision, as he knew, utilizes only a tiny fraction of the
+spectrum. The creature must be largely transparent to visible light,
+as human flesh is radiolucent to hard X-rays. Quite possibly it could
+be seen by infra-red or ultra-violet light--evidently it was visible
+enough to the dog's eyes, with their different range of sensitivity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pushing the subject from his mind, he turned to survey the room into
+which he had burst. It had apparently been occupied by a woman. A
+frail blue silk dress and more intimate items of feminine wearing
+apparel were hanging above the berth. Two pairs of delicate black
+slippers stood neatly below it.
+
+Across from him was a dressing table, with a large mirror above it.
+Combs, pins, jars of cosmetic cluttered it. And Thad saw upon it a
+little leather-bound book, locked, stamped on the back "Diary."
+
+He crossed the room and picked up the little book, which smelled
+faintly of jasmine. Momentary shame overcame him at thus stealing the
+secrets of an unknown girl. Necessity, however, left him no choice but
+to seize any chance of learning more of this ship of mystery and her
+invisible haunter. He broke the flimsy fastening.
+
+Linda Cross was the name written on the fly-leaf, in a firm, clear
+feminine hand. On the next page was the photograph, in color, of a
+girl, the brown-haired girl whose body Thad had discovered in the
+crystal coffer in the hold. Her eyes, he saw, had been blue. He
+thought she looked very lovely--like the waiting girl in his old dream
+of the silver tower in the red hills by Helion.
+
+The diary, it appeared, had not been kept very devotedly. Most of the
+pages were blank.
+
+One of the first entries, dated a year and a half before, told of a
+party that Linda had attended in San Francisco, and of her refusal to
+dance with a certain man, referred to as "Benny," because he had been
+unpleasantly insistent about wanting to marry her. It ended:
+
+     "Dad said to-night that we're going off in the _Dragon_
+     again. All the way to Uranus, if the new fuel works as he
+     expects. What a lark, to explore a few new worlds of our
+     own! Dad says one of Uranus' moons is as large as Mercury.
+     And Benny won't be proposing again soon!"
+
+Turning on, Thad found other scattered entries, some of them dealing
+with the preparation for the voyage, the start from San Francisco--and
+a huge bunch of flowers from "Benny," the long months of the trip
+through space, out past the orbit of Mars, above the meteor belt,
+across Jupiter's orbit, beyond the track of Saturn, which was the
+farthest point that rocket explorers had previously reached, and on to
+Uranus, where they could not land because of the unstable surface.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The remainder of the entries Thad found less frequent, shorter,
+bearing the mark of excitement: landing upon Titania, the third and
+largest satellite of Uranus; unearthly forests, sheltering strange and
+monstrous life; the hunting of weird creatures, and mounting them for
+museum specimens.
+
+Then the discovery of a ruined city, whose remains indicated that it
+had been built by a lost race of intelligent, spiderlike things; the
+finding of a temple whose walls were of precious metals, containing a
+crystal chest filled with wondrous gems; the smelting of the metal
+into convenient ingots, and the transfer of the treasure to the hold.
+
+The first sinister note there entered the diary:
+
+     "Some of the men say we shouldn't have disturbed the temple.
+     Think it will bring us bad luck. Rubbish, of course. But one
+     man did vanish while they were smelting the gold. Poor Mr.
+     Tom James. I suppose he ventured away from the rest, and
+     something caught him."
+
+The few entries that followed were shorter, and showed increasing
+nervous tension. They recorded the departure from Titania, made almost
+as soon as the treasure was loaded. The last was made several weeks
+later. A dozen men had vanished from the crew, leaving only gouts of
+blood to hint the manner of their going. The last entry ran:
+
+     "Dad says I'm to stay in here to-day. Old dear, he's afraid
+     the thing will get me--whatever it is. It's really serious.
+     Two men taken from their berths last night. And not a trace.
+     Some of them think it's a curse on the treasure. One of them
+     swears he saw Dad's stuffed specimens moving about in the
+     hold.
+
+     "Some terrible thing must have slipped aboard the flier, out
+     of the jungle. That's what Dad and the captain think. Queer
+     they can't find it. They've searched all over. Well...."
+
+Musing and regretful, Thad turned back for another look at the smiling
+girl in the photograph.
+
+What a tragedy her death had been! Reading the diary had made him like
+her. Her balance and humor. Her quiet affection for "Dad." The calm
+courage with which she seemed to have faced the creeping, lurking
+death that darkened the ship with its unescapable shadow.
+
+How had her body come to be in the coffer, he wondered, when all the
+others were--gone? It had shown no marks of violence. She must have
+died of fear. No, her face had seemed too calm and peaceful for that.
+Had she chosen easy death by some poison, rather than that other
+dreadful fate? Had her body been put in the chest to protect it, and
+the poison arrested decomposition?
+
+Thad was still studying the picture, thoughtfully and sadly, when the
+dog, which had been silent, suddenly growled again, and retreated from
+the door, toward the corner of the room.
+
+The invisible monster had returned. Thad heard its claws scratching
+across the door again. And he heard another dreadful sound--not the
+long, shrill scream that had so grated on his nerves before, but a
+short, sharp coughing or barking, a series of shrill, indescribable
+notes that could have been made by no beast he knew.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The decision to open the door cost a huge effort of Thad's will.
+
+For hours he had waited, thinking desperately. And the thing outside
+the door had waited as patiently, scratching upon it from time to
+time, uttering those dreadful, shrill coughing cries.
+
+Sooner or later, he would have to face the monster. Even if he could
+escape from the room and avoid it for a time, he would have to meet it
+in the end. And it might creep upon him while he slept.
+
+To be sure, the issue of the combat was extremely doubtful. The
+monster, apparently, had succeeded in killing every man upon the
+flier, even though some of them had been armed. It must be large and
+very ferocious.
+
+But Thad was not without hope. He still wore his Osprey-suit. The
+heavy fabric, made of metal wires impregnated with a tough, elastic
+composition, should afford considerable protection against the thing.
+
+The welding arc, intended to fuse refractive meteoric iron, would be
+no mean weapon, at close quarters. And the quarters would be close.
+
+If only he could find some way to make the thing visible!
+
+Paint, or something of the kind, would stick to its skin.... His eyes,
+searching the room, caught the jar of face powder on the dressing
+table. Dash that over it! It ought to stick enough to make the outline
+visible.
+
+So, at last, holding the powder ready in one hand, he waited until a
+time when the pressure upon the door had just relaxed, and he knew the
+monster was waiting outside. Swiftly, he opened the door....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thad had partially overcome the instinctive horror that the unseen
+being had first aroused in him. But it returned in a sickening wave
+when he heard the short, shrill, coughing cries, hideously eager, that
+greeted the opening of the door. And the quick rasping of naked claws
+upon the floor. _Sounds from nothingness!_
+
+He flung the powder at the sound.
+
+A form of weird horror materialized before him, still half invisible,
+half outlined with the white film of adhering powder: gigantic and
+hideous claws, that seemed to reach out of empty air, the side of a
+huge, scaly body, a yawning, dripping jaw. For a moment Thad could see
+great, hooked fangs in that jaw. Then they vanished, as if an unseen
+tongue had licked the powder from them, dissolving it in fluids which
+made it invisible.
+
+That unearthly, half-seen shape leaped at him.
+
+He was carried backward into the room, hurled to the floor. Claws were
+rasping upon the tough fabric of his suit. His arm was seized
+crushingly in half-visible jaws.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Desperately he clung to the welding tool. The heated electrode was
+driven toward his body. He fought to keep it away; he knew that it
+would burn through even the insulated fabric of his suit.
+
+A claw ripped savagely at his side. He heard the sharp, rending sound,
+as the tough fabric of his suit was torn, and felt a thin pencil of
+pain drawn along his body, where a claw cut his skin.
+
+Suddenly the suit was full of the earthy fetor of the monster's body,
+nauseatingly intense. Thad gasped, tried to hold his breath, and
+thrust upward hard with the incandescent electrode. He felt warm blood
+trickling from the wound.
+
+A numbing blow struck his arm. The welding tool was carried from his
+hand. Flung to the side of the room, it clattered to the floor; and
+then a heavy weight came upon his chest, forcing the breath from his
+lungs. The monster stood upon his body and clawed at him.
+
+Thad squirmed furiously. He kicked out with his feet, encountering a
+great, hard body. Futilely he beat and thrust with his arms against
+the pillarlike limb.
+
+His body was being mauled, bruised beneath the thick fabric. He heard
+it tear again, along his right thigh. But he felt no pain, and thought
+the claws had not reached the skin.
+
+It was the yellow dog that gave him the chance to recover the weapon.
+The animal had been running back and forth in the opposite end of the
+room, fairly howling in excitement and terror. Now, with the mad
+courage of desperation, it leaped recklessly at the monster.
+
+A mighty, dimly seen claw caught it, hurled it back across the room.
+It lay still, broken, whimpering.
+
+For a moment the thing had lifted its weight from Thad's body. And
+Thad slipped quickly from beneath it, flung himself across the room,
+snatched up the welding tool.
+
+In an instant the creature was upon him again. But he met it with the
+incandescent electrode. He was crouched in a corner, now, where it
+could come at him from only one direction. Its claws still slashed at
+him ferociously. But he was able to cling to the weapon, and meet each
+onslaught with hot metal.
+
+Gradually its mad attacks weakened. Then one of his blind, thrusting
+blows seemed to burn into a vital organ. A terrible choking,
+strangling sound came from the air. And he heard the thrashing
+struggles of wild convulsions. At last all was quiet. He prodded the
+thing again and again with the hot electrode, and it did not move. It
+was dead.
+
+The creature's body was so heavy that Thad had to return to the
+bridge, and shut off the current in the gravity plates along the keel,
+before he could move it. He dragged it to the lock through which he
+had entered the flier, and consigned it to space....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Five days later Thad brought the _Red Dragon_ into the atmosphere of
+Mars. A puzzled pilot came aboard, in response to his signals, and
+docked the flier safely at Helion. Thad went down into the hold again,
+with the astonished port authorities who had come aboard to inspect
+the vessel.
+
+Again he passed among the grotesque and outrageous monsters in the
+hold, leading the gasping officers. While they marveled at the
+treasure, he lifted the weirdly embellished lid of the coffer of white
+crystal, and looked once more upon the still form of the girl within
+it.
+
+Pity stirred him. An ache came in his throat.
+
+Linda Cross, so quiet and cold and white, and yet so lovely. How
+terrible her last days of life must have been, with doom shadowing the
+vessel, and the men vanishing mysteriously, one by one!
+Terrible--until she had sought the security of death.
+
+Strangely, Thad felt no great elation at the thought that half the
+incalculable treasure about him was now safely his own, as the award
+of salvage. If only the girl were still living.... He felt a
+poignantly keen desire to hear her voice.
+
+Thad found the note when they started to lift her from the chest. A
+hasty scrawl, it lay beneath her head, among glittering gems.
+
+     "This woman is not dead. Please have her given skilled
+     medical attention as soon as possible. She lies in a state
+     of suspended animation, induced by the injection of fifty
+     minims of zeronel.
+
+     "She is my daughter, Linda Cross, and my sole heir.
+
+     "I entreat the finders of this to have care given her, and
+     to keep in trust for her such part of the treasure on this
+     ship as may remain after the payment of salvage or other
+     claims.
+
+     "Sometime she will wake. Perhaps in a year, perhaps in a
+     hundred. The purity of my drugs is uncertain, and the
+     injection was made hastily, so I do not know the exact time
+     that must elapse.
+
+     "If this is found, it will be because the lurking thing upon
+     the ship has destroyed me and all my men.
+
+     "Please do not fail me.
+
+                                    Levington Cross."
+
+Thad bought the white tower of his dreams, slim and graceful in its
+Martian garden of saffron and purple, among the low ocher hills beside
+Helion. He carried the sleeping girl through the silver door where the
+girl of his dreams had waited, and set the coffer in a great, vaulted
+chamber. Many times each day he came into the room where she lay, to
+look into her pallid face, and feel her cold wrist. He kept a nurse in
+attendance, and had a physician call daily.
+
+A long Martian year went by.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Looking in his mirror one day, Thad saw little wrinkles about his
+eyes. He realized that the nervous strain and anxiety of waiting was
+aging him. And it might be a hundred years, he remembered, before
+Linda Cross came from beneath the drug's influence.
+
+He wondered if he should grow old and infirm, while Linda lay still
+young and beautiful and unchanged in her sleep; if she might awake,
+after long years, and see in him only a feeble old man. And he knew
+that he would not be sorry he had waited, even if he should die before
+she revived.
+
+On the next day, the nurse called him into the room where Linda lay.
+He was bending over her when she opened her eyes. They were blue,
+glorious.
+
+A long time she looked up at him, first in fearful wonder, then with
+confidence, and dawning understanding. And at last she smiled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Salvage in Space, by John Stewart Williamson
+
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