Chapter II: Part 2

"It is a very old prophecy, carved in an ancient runic script on the stone walls of one of the vaults under this tower. Tradition says it was put there by the Old Ones who built this city, and of whose science we are the unworthy heirs." Rupin-Sang bowed and touched his forehead as he mentioned the Old Ones. "The Prophecy states that the day will come when a red-skinned man and a dark-haired woman and a ruddy, bearded giant will come together to the city from afar, and that within a month thereafter the Golden City of Larr will crumble and return to the dust."

"But surely you don't take such old legends seriously!" Gerry said. The old man smiled.

"My head tells me not to, but superstition is strong in we of Savissa. However--I can take comfort from the fact that the old legend also prophecies a re-birth for Savissa after the great catastrophe. But enough of this talk of portents and legends! I give you welcome to Savissa, and to the city of Larr. Also, I thank you for rescuing my youngest daughter from the Scaly Raiders. Whence come ye?"

Gerry sketched in hasty phrases the outline of present conditions on Earth and Mars, and told of their trip through space to Venus in the _Viking_. Rupin-Sang nodded without showing any particular surprise.

"And so that's the story," Gerry concluded. "We're curious about some of your conditions here. The women warriors, for instance...."

"It was not always so in the land of Savissa," Rupin-Sang said with a faint smile. "In the days of the Old Ones there was a natural balance of the sexes. But, as the slow centuries passed, the birth rate gradually changed. Now one child in five thousand born in Savissa is a male. The few men we do have are needed for certain administrative and scientific work, particularly the supervision of the alta-radium mines in the mountains from which we get the raw material for the alta-ray tubes that are our greatest protection against invasion."

"I saw the tubes on the walls," Gerry said, "but why is it that your mobile forces are armed only with primitive weapons like bows and arrows?"

"Because we cannot possibly mine and produce enough of the alta-radium to do more than supply the defences of the city and of the barrier forts. The possession of the secret of that ray has kept our borders free from the Scaly Ones except for isolated raids like the one you encountered today, but we cannot arm our troops with the ray."

"And the gas-guns of the Scaly Ones?"

"They are a good weapon--but we have not the materials to manufacture them on this side of the border."

"Sounds like what we used to call a 'balance of power' in the days when Earth was torn by wars," Gerry said with a smile. "But tell me one thing more. I notice that in this land you speak an archaic form of Martian."

"The Tempora-scope can tell you the story better than my words."

Rupin-Sang nodded to his attendant, and a cloth cover was removed from a broad metal disc that was attached to some kind of a machine. He touched a control lever, and the mechanism began to hum. Blinds were dropped down over the windows, so that the room was filled with a murky twilight. The humming sound grew steadily louder. Now the metal disc glowed with a brilliant light. Momentarily its polished surface clouded over, as though obscured by a thin fog, and then the mists drifted aside.

* * * * *

Before them they saw the Universe as it was in the youth of the world, when roaring volcanoes were still active on the Moon and the rings of Saturn were just drifting out from the girth of that spinning sphere. It was as though they were looking out through a circular window somewhere in the sky. The machine gave a perfect illusion of reality, not merely tri-dimensional but touching all the senses as well. They could hear the roar of new-made satellites spinning off into the void, and the rush of burning gases. They could smell the scent of molten rock.

Then time passed! The planets began to cool. The mud-flats steamed under a cloudy sun, the mountains shouldered their way upward through the tilted and riven fields. On the edges of inland seas, the hot shallows were filled with slimy things that crawled with their bellies dragging. They could hear the ripple of the waters, and the rustle of warm winds blowing through the flowerless and fern-like forests. Gerry could smell the rank odors of the steaming and primitive jungles. There was a pungent taste on his lips. Once he stretched his hand out toward a trilobite that seemed to be crawling up to his feet--and he felt the coarse surface of the shell before he pulled his hand back again.

The picture changed once more, centering on a ruddy planet that swept toward them while Portok exclaimed at the sight of Mars in the ancient days before the planets were built. Men and women walked its smooth fields, among the flaming scarlet flowers. Music and laughter and the voices of women drifted on the scented winds. But Mars was changing. It was drying up. Life could no longer be the same. Some of the people were beginning to draft the plans for the great canals that were to conserve the planet's failing supply of water, but others took to space-ships and sailed off into the void.

Then, for the first time, they saw the planet Venus as the Martian space-ships dropped down through the veiling clouds. They saw those first pioneers of space land on Venus, and subjugate the natives, and build mighty cities in the plains. But something happened to the birth-rate, and most of the science of the Old Ones was lost when a series of great quakes swept the planet. The holdings of the descendants of those interplanetary travelers of long ago dwindled to only the city of Larr and the land of Savissa itself.

The humming of the Tempora-scope died away. The big metal disc again became blank. The machine had ceased to function, and the illusion of the reality of the past was gone. They were simply in a shaded tower room with a tired old man who sat on a carved throne.

"And that is the tale of the rise and decline of our people, _hiziren_," he said sadly. "Now the sands of our nation run low. I am half inclined to believe that the old prophecy will come true, and that this is the twilight of Savissa and its people. But--enough of that. Raise the blinds again, Rotosa, so that we may have light while we can. And I ask you visitors from afar to dine with me tonight before you go back to your space-ship."

* * * * *

The banquet table was set on the ground floor of the Arrow-Tower, in a room where an open colonnade looked out on a walled garden behind the palace of the rulers of Savissa. A carved wooden table was set with golden plates. Faint music came from some hidden source. In the garden outside, night birds sang softly and there was a constant sound of running water from many fountains.

In addition to Rupin-Sang, there were three of his male attendants and about twenty women. On this ceremonial occasion they supplemented their usual scanty garb with long and graceful robes that gleamed like silk. Thin veils were attached to jeweled circlets. Catching a glimpse of the sullen discontent on Olga Stark's face, Gerry suddenly realized that the Earth woman was jealous of her own appearance.

"Probably hating my guts right now for making her wear her uniform!" he thought. "Women are queer!"

To Gerry Norton, that meal was a peaceful interlude between the monotonous strain of the long interplanetary voyage and the uncertainty of what lay ahead. Though some of the native dishes tasted strange to his Earthly palate, the food was generally good. Fragrant, heady wines from the hill country bordering Savissa were served in colored glass goblets. A sound of distant singing drifted across the garden.

Gerry was wondering what disaster had overtaken the first expedition that had set out to reach this planet, the space-ship _Stardust_ that had left Earth over two years ago under command of Major Walter Lansing. Perhaps it had landed in some less friendly part of the planet and been overwhelmed by the natives before it could get away again. Perhaps it had met some swift disaster in outer space and was now spinning endlessly in the void--a lifeless and man-made planetoid. In any case, he would make a thorough search for some trace of the _Stardust_ before he started back to Earth again.

* * * * *

When the meal was over and they all arose from the table, Gerry noticed that Angus and Olga Stark walked out into the garden together. It struck him as an odd combination, for Olga was the one person on board with whom the genial Scot was not friendly. Then he forgot about it.

A few minutes later Closana took Gerry's arm and led him out into the garden. Colored lanterns hung here and there along the paths, but most of the light came from globes of glowing metal that were concealed near the tops of the trees. The effect was much like Earthly moonlight, except that the moon was golden instead of silver. Angus and Olga should have been a few yards ahead of them, but both had disappeared. Gerry wondered about it--and then a dim figure rose up in the shadows immediately before him. A cloud of choking gas, hurled squarely in his face from some sort of flask, filled his lungs with the pain of many fiery needles.

Gerry crumpled soundlessly to the ground. He could see and hear what went on, but otherwise he was paralyzed and incapable of sound or movement. For a moment he thought that Closana was behind some form of treachery. Then dark figures swarmed around him, lifting him from the ground, and he saw the dim light gleaming on gray scales. The Scaly Ones had penetrated to the innermost sanctuary of the City of Larr!

Gerry's head fell back as they lifted him, and he could see that Closana was equally helpless in the grip of more of the raiders. A section of grass and bushes was swung back on a hidden trap door, revealing a flight of moss-covered stone steps leading downward. The two prisoners were carried down, and the door dropped hollowly into place above them.

* * * * *

They were in a narrow and very ancient stone passage. Moss and lichens covered the walls, moisture dripped from the ceiling. On the floor in the midst of another group of the Scaly Ones lay Angus McTavish, evidently also a victim of the paralyzing gas. Olga Stark stood nearby, her long dark hair loose about her shoulders and an expression of savage triumph in her eyes.

"Tie them securely!" she snapped to the officer in command of the Scaly Men. His long-nosed, brutish face creased in a grim smile.

"It shall be done, Mistress!"

Closana was stripped to her loin-cloth. A cloth gag was twisted into her mouth, her arms were tied behind her back. Gerry and Angus were treated in the same way. Control of his muscles was returning swiftly to Gerry Norton now, as the effects of the gas wore off, but he was already secured and helpless.

Grim rage filled Gerry then, but even greater than that emotion was his utter amazement. The thing was completely beyond his understanding. This was no routine raid of the Scaly Ones against the people of Larr, but a definite attempt to capture _him_! Strangest of all was the part played by Olga Stark, who acted as though she was in command of the Scaly Men. It just wasn't possible--but it was happening.

The three prisoners were pulled to their feet. Guards gripped their elbows. At the first bend in the passage a small waterfall came down from above and formed a gurgling stream that ran in a deep gutter at one side. The air was hot, and moist, and heavy with the scent of running water and fungus growths. Other jets of water came down from above to add to the trickle of water until, as the passage widened, a gurgling torrent ran along beside them. Suddenly Gerry realized where they were. This was the sewerage system that carried away the waste of the city's many flowing fountains!

At last they came to the main drain, a vaulted stone passage where a twenty-foot stream of black water flowed along beside the narrow foot-path. Tied up there, looking like a sea-monster in the dim light of the lanterns carried by the Scaly Men, was a metal boat that had only a narrow deck and a round dome above the water. A crude submarine!

The three prisoners were forced aboard. Their gags were removed, now that silence no longer mattered, but their arms remained bound and they were chained by the necks to a steel bar as they sat in a row at one side of the narrow hull. The raiders cast off, came aboard, and closed the dome behind them. Motors hummed softly, and then the submarine moved sluggishly down the stream.

At the moment the three of them were alone. They could see the scaly skins of some of their captors busied at various tasks in adjoining compartments, but there was no one within hearing. After twisting futilely at his bonds for a moment, Gerry leaned back against the steel bulkhead behind him and looked over at Angus.

"Well--here we are!" he said.

"Aye--so it seems!" The Scot's broad face was grim. "I should have known that black-haired witch had some deviltry in mind when she asked me to walk in the garden with her!"

"But where does she fit into the picture? How does she get her control over these scaly devils?"

"How do I know?" snorted McTavish angrily. "Ask me some more riddles! What's more to the point is where they're taking us in this queer craft."

"I can guess that," Closana said quietly. The girl was very pale, but she smiled faintly as she met Gerry's eyes. "This drain empties into the Giri river, and a few miles farther along that river forms the boundary between Savissa and the lands of the Scaly Ones. We have never known they could travel beneath the water this way."

"What will happen after they get us there?"

"Torture and death. Once any of our people are taken across into the land of Giri-Vaaka, they never return alive."

"Nice little trip we're taking, Gerry lad!" McTavish growled. "Too bad you didn't bring your cinema camera along!"

* * * * *

The submarine moved sluggishly ahead, silent except for the hum of its motors. As Gerry looked around he could see that it was a crudely constructed and makeshift craft. Even so, it was more than he would have expected from men of the apparent mentality of the Scaly Ones.

"This is a funny sort of submarine!" he said to Angus. The big engineer, who had twisted around to peer at the bulkhead directly behind them, growled deep in his throat.

"It's funnier than ye think, lad! Look at this!" McTavish nodded toward one of the sheets of thin steel from which the bulkhead had been built. On the edge there were stamped a few words. The letters were small, and in the dim light Gerry had to narrow his eyes for a moment before he could read them.

U. S. Gov't Steel Works
Atlanta, Ga.

"How in Heaven's name did they get that...?" Gerry's voice trailed off without finishing the sentence. McTavish shrugged.

"Ye don't need more than one guess. The _Stardust_ must have been wrecked somewhere near here, and these devils took some of her parts to build this outlandish craft."

At last, long hours later, the submarine came to a stop. As his captors led him up on deck, Gerry saw that the ungainly craft had grounded in the shallows on the shore of a broad river. It was just daylight. A pale yellow light filtered down through the canopy of clouds, and a flight of marsh-fowl was winging by just overhead.

"Where are we?" asked Gerry.

"This is the Giri River," Closana said. "Savissa lies on the far shore. This is the land of the Scaly Ones."

Some of the reptile men hauled the submarine into a cove and began to cover it over with piles of reeds. Some twenty others formed up in a column with the three prisoners in the center. Then the officer in command barked an order and they all moved out along a dirt road that led away from the river. Olga Stark was walking beside the first rank of scaly warriors. She had not looked at the prisoners at all.

They tramped steadily onward through the dust in silence except for the dull slap of the webbed feet of the reptile men and the jingle of their equipment. After a while the officer in command came back to look at the prisoners. He was a grizzled veteran with shaggy ridges above his eyes and the long-healed scars of half a dozen old wounds on his scaly body. McTavish glared at him for a moment.

"Take a good look, sonny boy!" the big Scot growled. "What's your name--if you have one?"

"I should tear out your tongue for speaking in that tone to an officer of Giri-Vaaka," the officer said. His voice had the high pitched and metallic quality typical of his race, and he bared his pointed teeth in a not unfriendly grin, "but the torturers of the Lord Lansa will take care of you soon enough. I am Toll, commander of a _strikka_ in the border guards."

"Where are you taking us?"

Toll grinned wickedly.

"To the palace of Lansa, overlord of all Venus."

* * * * *

Gerry noticed that this countryside of Giri-Vaaka was very different from the pleasant and cultivated fields of Savissa over which he had passed the day before. The roads were dirt and half over-grown. Not much of the country was under cultivation. Strange purple bushes with thorns a foot long covered much of the land, crowding close on the patches of forest where ten-foot ferns towered high overhead. Sometimes they came upon a grazing herd of the yard-long giant ants, who would go galloping away with their antennae waving in the air and their hard-shelled leg-joints clicking loudly.

Depression hung on Gerry Norton's chest like a physical weight. It was not alone the fact that every stride carried them deeper into a grim and hostile land--prisoners whose doom was probably already sealed--that set him biting his lower lip till he tasted the salt blood on his tongue. Nor even the fact that Closana shared the same fate because she happened to have been with him at the time of the raid. It was also the utter strangeness of everything. Yesterday, in Savissa, the people and the mode of life had been nearly enough to normal so that he was not deeply conscious of the strange vegetation and the other things in which Venus differed from Earth and Mars.

Now everything seemed different, and alien. The lowering yellow skies of Venus were ominous. The hot winds brought strange smells and seemed to carry a hint of doom. The one thought that gave him any real hope was the fact that Portok the Martian had not been captured with the rest of them. He must have missed them soon after the abduction. There might be a chance that he and Steve Brent would bring the _Viking_ to look for them.

* * * * *

They had begun to pass occasional small farms. These were scanty fields carved out of the creeping masses of purple thorns, usually with a roughly thatched hut in the center. On one such occasion the farmer and his family stood apathetically at the roadside to watch the patrol of Reptile Men go by.

"But they're not scaly!" Gerry exclaimed. Closana shook her head.

"No. They are of the Green Men of Giri. Once they held this land while the Scaly Ones dwelt in the marshes of Vaaka farther west, but the Scaly Ones have now been masters of this place for many generations."

The Green Men, Gerry noticed, looked like ordinary Earthlings except for a slight greenish cast to their skin. Probably, like the Golden Amazons, they were also descended from the Old Ones who had come from Mars so long ago. The ragged and mud-stained farmer gave Toll a perfunctory salute, and then leaned on his hoe to watch the column pass by.

The warriors of Toll swaggered along the road with the insolent assurance of men who know themselves masters of all around them. The farmer's green face was carefully expressionless, but there was a gleam in his eyes that spoke of no great liking for his scaly masters. When his glance lingered on Gerry's for an instant, the Earth-man read a definite sympathy in it.

They camped that night in a clearing beside a small stream. One of the guards shot a giant ant with his gas-gun, then cracked open the horny shell with his sword. They cut long strips of the meat and roasted it over a fire. Though the taste was peculiar the stuff was edible, and the three prisoners managed to swallow it.

"The condemned man ate a hearty meal!" Angus McTavish said with grim humor, wiping his fingers on the coarse yellow grass beside him.

Olga had gone on with a faster-moving detachment, and only a dozen Scaly Ones remained with Toll to guard the three prisoners. Gerry and Closana sat side by side before the fire, their bare shoulders touching. The ruddy and flickering glow of the firelight touched Angus' giant frame a little farther around the circle, and then the scaly skins and long snouts of the reptile men watching them. Gerry clasped his arms around his knees.

"Y'know Angus, at the moment we're living as our ancestors must have lived long generations ago. No ray-tubes or dura-steel armor. No portable electro-phones. Not even a low-speed rocket car to carry us along. It must have been this way back in the days when they built that little old building that's now used for a museum in New York. The Empire State Building."

"You've got your dates mixed, laddie," McTavish yawned. "The Empire State was built in the twentieth century, and even the people of those queer old days were more advanced than most of what we've seen of life on this planet of Venus."

"I don't suppose those Ancients knew what they were missing."

"Maybe they were better off! At least they only got into trouble on their own Earth instead of wandering off to other planets like a pack of fools as we have!"

Toll and two of his men came toward them, carrying the ropes with which they had earlier been bound.

"Sorry, but I must tie you up for the night," he said. For an instant Gerry thought of making a break. If he could get away he might find some way of rescuing the others. Then he decided against it. One of the reptile men would be almost sure to bring him down with a gas-gun before he got out of the circle of firelight, in spite of the greater strength of his Earthly muscles. So he shrugged, and allowed the guards to tie him up again. For quite a while he lay awake, hoping to hear the hum of the _Viking's_ motors, but at last he fell asleep.

* * * * *

On the third day of their journey, the trail led upward, into a range of bleak and rocky hills. A few mean huts were the only signs of human habitation. Then, as they rounded a bend in the trail which at this point clung to the face of a cliff, they saw the answer to a mystery that had puzzled the civilized world for two years.

It was the wreck of the space-ship _Stardust_. She lay at the foot of a cliff across the valley, her steel and duralite hull still gleaming brightly through the thick green creepers that had grown up around it. Even from this distance Gerry could see the hopelessly crumpled rocket-tubes at the stern, and the gaping holes where plates had been ripped away to make the submarine that had brought them out of the city of Larr.

"So that was the end of the _Stardust_!" Gerry muttered. "I wonder what happened to her crew!"

"We'll probably find out soon enough!" McTavish replied grimly. "I'll bet all the gold in Savissa against an empty rocket-oil tin that we're headed for the same fate right now."

"Poor devils--I suppose the Scaly Ones did get them. I never liked Walter Lansing, as you know, but I could have wished him better luck than this!"

At last they crossed the hills and saw a broad valley before them. Dim and snow-capped mountains notched the yellow sky on the far side of the Valley. A river wound through the plain, and on the shore of the saffron waters of a mighty lake they saw the gray walls of a city. Toll, the reptilian captain, pointed across the valley.

"Yonder lies the city of Vaaka-hausen. Soon you will stand before the Lord Lansa, and then," he added with a grim and ghoulish humor, "neither I nor anybody else will be bothered with you any more."

The countryside immediately around the city of the Scaly Ones was better kept and more cultivated than what they had seen of the rest of Giri-Vaaka. There were a number of small villages. Then they passed in through the walls, gray stone ramparts that seemed to be very old and were in poor repair. The muzzles of heavy caliber gas-guns peered over the battlements here and there.

The crowds in the streets stared curiously as Toll led his prisoners toward the center of the city. Tall reptile men swaggered through the crowds with their swords slung on their hips, but the shorter Green Men were in the great majority. Most of them, men and women alike, stared at the captives without any particular sign of emotion. This gray and crowded city of Vaaka-hausen had none of the atmosphere of pleasant friendliness that Gerry had noticed in Larr. It seemed a place of fear and oppression.

* * * * *

The palace of the ruler of the Scaly Ones was a squat gray building in the center of the city. An arm of the river swept along beneath one wall, with the muddy waters lapping at the aged gray stones. An iron gate swung aside to let the newcomers into the courtyard. Men who wore black metal breast-plates over their scales took over the prisoners from Toll, leading them down a long flight of stairs into the dungeons beneath the palace. They waited in a vaulted chamber where the only light was a shaft of yellow radiance that came from a narrow slit high up near the ceiling.

"It won't be long now!" Gerry muttered.

Then a gong sounded somewhere nearby. It was a very resonant and deep-throated gong, and instantly the rock-walled chamber became filled with a green light. It had no visible source, seeming to come from the walls or from the very air itself. Again the gong rolled.

"The Lord Lansa comes!" barked the captain of the guards, "the overlord of Venus is at hand. Down on your knees, captives and slaves."

Closana went to her knees, though otherwise holding herself proudly erect with her hands tied behind her back. In the greenish light her long blonde hair looked like molten gold. Angus McTavish muttered savagely in his beard and stayed on his feet. Instantly one of the reptile guards drew his sword and held the blade horizontally behind the Scot's knees.

"Kneel--or I cut the tendons!" he snapped.

"Come down, you stiff-necked idiot!" Gerry growled. With a muttered oath Angus dropped to his knees, and the guard stepped back into line.

Then the door opened, and three men came slowly into the room. Two were gray-scaled guards who carried their gas-guns cocked and ready. The third was a tall man in a loose green robe. His head was hooded, so that nothing of his face could be seen at all, his hands were tucked in the sleeves of his robe. There was something deadly and almost grotesque about that silent figure. Gerry knew that at last he was in the presence of Lansa, Lord of the Scaly Ones and ruler of Giri-Vaaka, self-styled Overlord of all Venus!

* * * * *

The seconds passed in silence. The guards were frozen motionless at attention. At last Lansa spoke, his voice coming hollowly from the shadows of his hood.

"Take them to the cells. Their doom shall be decided when the Serpent Gods have spoken. I have ordered it!"

The tyrant of Venus gestured sharply, and the guards closed in about the prisoners. For a fleeting instant Gerry had a glimpse of a thin green hand, a hand where the finger was missing at the second joint. Then Lansa went out and the door closed behind him. The deeply resonant gong sounded again, and the pulsating green light instantly vanished so that there was again no light except for the thin trickle of yellow radiance that came in the single high window. The prisoners were pulled to their feet.

There was no chance to speak to Angus or Closana again. Gerry's guards led him down a narrow corridor, past the steel doors of cells. It was very dim and silent. From some of the cells he heard a faint rattle of chains, from others a low groaning. Otherwise there was no sound but their own footfalls. At last the guards opened the door of a cell, pushed Gerry inside, and cut the ropes that bound his arms. As they slammed the heavy steel door behind them he heard the rasp of bolts. Then the slapping tread of the guards' webbed feet died away and he was left alone.

Dim as the light in the corridor had been, that in the cell was so much less that Gerry had to wait half a minute before he could see at all. Then he made out the outlines of a small, bare cell with a bunk made of a light and flexible metal at one side. There was nothing else in the place. Gerry rubbed his wrists a moment to restore circulation, then sat down on the edge of the bunk and dropped his head in his hands.

He seemed to be about at the end of his trail. Well--that was fate. He did not mind so much for himself and Angus. You knew you were taking risks when you signed up for interplanetary travel in the first place! But he was sorry that Closana had been dragged into it.

Gerry had now lost all hope of rescue by the _Viking_. He did not doubt that her duralite hull could withstand the explosive bullets of even the heaviest caliber gas-guns, nor that her three-inch ray-tubes could blast a way into these underground dungeons in a few minutes. If only Steve Brent knew where to come! That was the rub. There was now no way for Brent to learn where the prisoners were being held, and he could not search all the land of Giri-Vaaka.

Something small and furtive was moving about on the floor a few feet away. Gerry scuffed his feet on the stones, and the creature scampered quickly away. Probably a rat! It seemed that he was going to have pleasant company during his stay in this place.

Restless and gloomy, Gerry stood up again. He started to walk up and down the few feet that the length of his cell allowed him. Then he froze motionless! A faint tapping was sounding from somewhere to his left. Someone was knocking lightly on the wall of the adjoining cell. Then a voice spoke softly in Martian.

"You there! You in the next cell! Can you hear me?"

* * * * *

Gerry knelt down on the damp floor and put his head close to the base of the wall. Now he could hear the man more clearly, could even hear his heavy breathing. Gerry's groping fingers found a place between two of the stones where the mortar had been picked away to leave a small air space.

"Yes, I hear you!" he called softly. He heard a dry chuckle.

"Good! I have been waiting a long time for them to put someone in the next cell. Some of the stones are loose. I will come in."

There was a soft rattle of falling mortar, and a scrape of sliding stones. Gerry saw the head and shoulders of a man thrust through the opening, and then the man crawled laboriously into the cell.

"Who are you?" he whispered. "Your accent is not like that of the Green Men of Giri. Wait, I have a light here."

A small flashlight clicked on. Its beam pointed up into Gerry's face. Then the man gasped.

"Good Lord!" he whispered. "It ... it's Gerry Norton!"

Then the man swung the light so that it swung on himself. Gerry saw a tall, gaunt man in the tattered remains of a blue and silver uniform. It was Major Walter Lansing, once of the Interplanetary Fleet, who had commanded the ill-fated _Stardust_ when she set out on her voyage into space!

"Norton!" he gasped in a hoarse whisper. "Man, I never expected to see anyone from Earth again!"

"We thought you were dead."

"I might as well be!" Lansing said grimly. "But tell me how you come to be here."

As they squatted there in the darkened cell, Gerry whispered the story of the _Viking's_ expedition and of his own capture. Lansing told him how the _Stardust_ had been wrecked on the rim of the mountains when landing, and how the Scaly Ones had captured all the crew.

"They have kept me alive because the signs pointed that way when they cast the omens before the Serpent Gods," Lansing said, "but all the rest of the crew were used as bait for hunting the giant Dakta. They died. You and your companions will probably meet the same fate."

"Pleasant prospect!" Gerry said grimly. Lansing gripped his arm.

"There's a chance, Norton! Listen! I've been able to get these scaly devils to bring me a good many things from the wreck. I couldn't get a ray-tube, they were too wise for that, but I did get a portable radio by telling them it was my tribal god. I have it in my cell. We'll go over and you can phone your ship to come after us." He eyed Gerry eagerly.

"Let's go!"

They both crawled through the gap in the wall. It was like Gerry's own, but it was piled with an assortment of junk from the wrecked space-ship. In one corner stood a compact two-way radio telephone set with its tubes still intact.

"Think you can tell them how to come?" Lansing whispered.

"I'm not sure. They marched us along the roads, and the route was winding, and...."

"I'll draw you a map!" Lansing interrupted. "You hold the light."

While Gerry held the flash, the other man spread out a piece of crumpled paper on the floor and began to draw on it with the stub of a graphite stylus. He talked as he wrote, in a shrilly, excited whisper. Gerry had never liked the man in the old days, considering him excitable and undependable, and it was evident that the long captivity had not improved Walter Lansing's self-control. That did not matter. The main thing was to get out of this place. And then Gerry saw something that stiffened every muscle and made the short hair prickle all down the back of his neck. The ring finger of Lansing's left hand was missing at the second joint!

* * * * *

The suspicion that had come to Gerry Norton seemed impossible. Walter Lansing ... the Lord Lansa. It couldn't be. And yet--he was sure he had seen that same mutilated hand thrust out from the sleeve of a green robe an hour before! Lansing was still talking as he bent over the improvised map.

"Here's the line of the Giri River. Tell them to cross by the bald gray hill, then bear west-six-north, using Venusian magnetic bearings. After that...."

He suddenly stopped and looked up, catching Gerry's grim glance fixed on his left hand. Hastily he jerked it aside into the shadows. He must have read in Gerry's eyes that his move had been too late, for his own gaunt face hardened.

"_You rat!_" Gerry hissed between his teeth. His right hand shot out, clutching for the other man's throat, but Lansing twisted aside and jerked a dark object from his pocket. An instant later a stinging cloud of the paralysis gas took Gerry in the face, and he fell limply to the floor.

Lansing straightened up and tossed aside the flask that had held the gas. There was a savage gleam in his narrow eyes.

"All right, Norton," he said, "we'll do it the other way. Ho--guards!"

A gong sounded in the corridor, the pulsating green light immediately flooded the cell. Scaly-skinned guards swarmed in and saluted. Lansing ripped off the torn uniform, revealing a tight-fitting green garment beneath it, and one of the guards helped him on with the cowled robe he had worn before. He glanced down at Gerry for a moment.

"Bring him and the others up to me when he recovers the use of his muscles," he said.

* * * * *

By the time Gerry Norton recovered from the effects of the gas he had been securely bound again. Two guards led him to the end of a corridor and up a flight of stairs to the level above. This was also part of the prison zone of the castle, but built in an entirely different manner. Walls and floor were of a polished green metal. Super-charged electronic locks fastened each door, holding death for anyone who attempted to tamper with them. Metal globes gave a steady light. Mirrors above each cell door gave the guards who lounged in the corridors a complete view of the inside of every cell.

This, Gerry realized, was actually the prison used by the lords of Giri-Vaaka. He had been placed in the old and abandoned dungeons beneath as part of the scheme to lure him into calling the _Viking_ to her doom. Glancing in the door-mirrors of the cells as he went by, Gerry saw that most of the occupants were men and women of the Green Race of Giri, with a fair number of Golden Amazons and a few reptile men who had been guilty of some crime or infraction of discipline.

Then he saw Closana! The girl was tightly spread-eagled against one of the polished metal walls of her cell, her outstretched wrists and ankles held by steel cuffs. Gerry's jaw jutted stubbornly forward, and for a moment he twisted helplessly against the cords that held his arms behind him.

The guards halted before a door deep in the interior of the palace, where a pair of scaly warriors stood on guard with gas-guns cocked and ready. The opening itself was not closed by any door, but by what looked like a tightly stretched curtain of some transparent green material. On closer inspection he saw that it glowed with a steady pulsation, while occasional specks of green fire ran through it. When one of the guards moved incautiously back so that the tip of his scabbard touched the green glow filling the door, there was a crackling hiss. The tip of the scabbard simply vanished. It was as though it had been cleanly cut off by a very sharp knife.

A challenge came from within, and one of Gerry's guards shouted a reply. The green glow suddenly vanished from the doorway. Whatever elemental force it was that blocked the passage had been withdrawn, and they walked freely in through the opening.

* * * * *

The wide room before them was walled with slabs of polished black marble. The figures of writhing snakes and rearing reptiles were inlaid into the black walls with some iridescent green stone. Their eyes were inlaid jewels. Thin trails of pungent smoke drifted upward from their nostrils. A low and throbbing music, full of the thunder of muted drums, came from unseen source. At regular intervals around the walls stood tall golden standards with glowing globes atop them.

This was the throne room of Lansa, Lord of Giri-Vaaka, who had once been an officer in the flying forces of Earth. The man himself sat on a black marble throne with a dozen of the higher officers of his scaly warriors grouped around him. These Inner Guards wore breast-plates and helmets of a bright green metal, and their pointed ears protruded upward through twin openings in the sides of the helmets.

Lansa's swarthy face was gloatingly triumphant. It had always been Gerry Norton's private opinion that Walter Lansing was slightly mad. Brilliant in many ways, but definitely unstable. At last he appeared to have slipped over that shadowy border that divides the rational from the insane.

"It is unfortunate that my little scheme to have you summon your space-ship here did not work," Lansa said in English. "But we will find some other way of persuading you to do it."

"You think you're quite the little tin god, don't you?" Gerry sneered.

"I _am_ a god--to these people," Lansa replied quietly. "Though the _Stardust_ was damaged too badly to return to earth, little of her equipment was harmed except for the rocket tubes themselves. Within six months after landing I had made myself master of these primitive but obedient people. The submarine that brought you from the city of Larr shows what can be done with them. In the meantime I had communicated with friends on Earth by means of a secret radio frequency, and waited for the sending of the next space-ship...."

He broke off as a door behind the throne opened and a woman came into the room. It was Olga Stark, now wearing a long gown of shimmering green. Metal strands of the same color were braided into her dark hair, which was crowned by a circlet bearing the design of a rearing serpent. All the officers and courtiers lifted their arms in salute. The woman walked over and stood beside Lansa's throne, looking down at Gerry with a cold and impersonal scorn. It had not taken Olga Stark very long to fit herself into the role of the queen of Giri-Vaaka!

* * * * *

A number of things were clear to Gerry Norton now! It had been Olga Stark with whom Lansing had secretly communicated after he made himself master of the Scaly Ones, and that explained her insistent requests to join the expedition. Again, it had been Olga who had been surreptitiously using the radio to talk to Lansing that day when Gerry had stepped into the radio room on hearing the hum of the generator. They had been arranging the details of his abduction. Only--who was Olga's confederate who had knocked him over the head when he had walked in on them that time? There was still some traitor on board the _Viking_.

"I have now developed the resources of this country to the point where the final campaign is ready," Lansa boasted, "all these reptile men needed was a man of sufficient brains and initiative to lead them. We are making ray-tubes, modeled on those aboard the _Stardust_, and will soon be able to blast down the guardian forts of Savissa and to conquer those few other portions of this planet that still stand against me. Then I will return to the Earth in your _Viking_, taking with me enough gold to buy a vast fleet of ships. There is more gold available here on Venus than all your banks on Earth have ever imagined! I could make myself ruler of Earth with all that gold, but I will choose another method. I will bring back the space-ships, and load them up with my scaly warriors--and then sail to conquer the Outer Planets and whatever else may lie beyond the Solar System!"

Gerry Norton stared at Lansa in a grim silence. The man was undoubtedly mad. Stark, raving mad! No one but a maniac would cherish such a wild dream of Universal conquest. He had that dangerous combination of natural cleverness and distorted values that has often distinguished leaders who have taken nations into the shadowy valleys of ruin. For a moment Lansa hesitated, his narrow eyes blazing and one arm flung up in a dramatic gesture. Then some of the fire went out of him, and he returned to more prosaic and immediate things.

"But all that lies in the future. At the moment I must ask you to radio-phone the _Viking_ to come to this city and land in the plain just below the walls."

"I'll see you in hell first!" Gerry snapped. Lansa shrugged.

"I expected you to indulge in some such heroics! Your type always does. I have not forgotten your attacks on my reputation back on Earth some years ago, Norton, nor your charges that I was unfit to command the _Stardust_. It will give me considerable pleasure to watch what is about to happen to you. Ho--guards! Bring him down to the torture chamber."

* * * * *

The place of torture was a circular and low vaulted chamber. Gerry was led across to one of the walls, and his bound hands fastened behind him to a metal ring. The place was lit by a dim green light that had no visible source, though in one spot there was a ruddy glow where irons were heating in a brazier of burning charcoal. A bench was placed for Lansa and Olga to sit on, and four of their guards stood beside them.

The torturers themselves had been selected from among the Green Men of Giri, instead of the scaly skinned warrior race of Vaaka. They were squat and heavy men, those torturers, evidently of the most brutal and debased type that Lansa had been able to find. One in particular, whose wide green face was made hideous by an old scar that had put out one of his eyes, licked his thick lips in ghoulish anticipation as his fingers prodded the flesh about Gerry's ribs and felt the Earth-man's muscles.

"Bring in the other two," Lansa commanded.

All about the room were the tools of the torturer's art. Some were familiar things that have been used since men first began to mistreat his fellow creatures--leaded whips and stretching-racks and cradles lined with pointed spikes. Others were strange looking and probably even more horrible mechanisms of coils and wires and electrodes. Gerry licked his lips. The place had the hushed stillness of a chamber that has been thoroughly sound-proofed. Probably no screams of agonized victims ever penetrated beyond those smooth walls of polished green metal.

They brought Angus McTavish in first. He looked like some shaggy red giant, wearing only a loin-cloth with his hair and beard all awry. Then came Closana. Her crossed wrists were tied together before her by a cord that was held by one of the guards, and she was very pale.

Lansa nodded quickly.

"Let them begin," said Lansa tonelessly.

"A suggestion, sir!" Olga leaned forward on the bench. The glance of her brooding eyes was fixed on the young Amazon princess. "Let them work on the girl first. It will probably succeed more quickly. I think the man Norton has fallen in love with that empty headed young savage, and you know how men are."

"You are right. Let it be done that way."

Closana was spread-eagled in mid-air, her upstretched arms fastened to ropes that led to the ceiling and her ankles lashed to metal rings in the floor below. She could move nothing but her head as Olga Stark walked up to stand before her.

"This will repay for the condescension with which I was treated in Savissa!" the Earth-woman said venomously. Closana looked at her in silence for a moment, and then suddenly spat squarely in the other woman's face.

"_Atta girl!_" roared Angus with all the power of his big lungs. Olga struck the helpless girl twice in the mouth with her clenched fist, then returned to her seat.

"Begin!" she commanded.

One of the torturers tossed Closana's long hair forward on either side of her neck, to leave her back entirely bare for the lash. The girl's eyes were closed again, and there was a thin trickle of blood at one corner of her mouth. The torturer shook out the lash, whirled it once through the air and then brought it smashing across the middle of Closana's back.

* * * * *

The girl's whole body writhed convulsively for a moment. There was an instant red welt where the whip had struck. A low moan escaped between her clenched teeth. Then Gerry Norton leaned forward where he stood bound against the wall.

"You win, Lansing!" he said hoarsely, "stop it! Make them leave her alone and I'll do as you say."

"I thought you would," the renegade officer said softly. There seemed to be a definite disappointment in his cruel eyes. "I will have the radio set brought here and you can call the ship right now."

"Have them lower the girl down."

"She stays where she is until you have finished."

The portable radio-phone from the wrecked _Stardust_ was brought in and set up on a stand immediately in front of Gerry. Olga set up the sigmoid antenna on its duralite frame, and twisted the dials to the space-ship's wave length. Then she took the transmitter.

"Calling Steve Brent on the _Viking_! Calling Steve Brent on the _Viking_! Please come in!" she repeated over and over.

At last the answering signal lit up, and Steve's familiar voice came from the receiver.

"This is Steve Brent. Who is calling?"

Olga held the transmitter before Gerry's mouth. Lansa nodded to one of the torturers, who drew a white hot iron from one of the braziers and held it a little way from Closana's face.

"One false word and that iron goes into the girl's eyes," the Lord of Giri-Vaaka warned in a low hiss. "After that, all of you will live in agony for weeks before we have finished. Tell him to land near the city and bring all but a single watch-man to the east gate where they will be well received."

"Hello Steve. This is Gerry Norton!" Gerry said. Brent's voice shook with excitement.

"Jumping ray-blasts, chief, we all thought you were done for! Where did you go? What happened? Where are you now?"

"I'm being well entertained in the city of Vaaka-Havson. These Scaly Men are very pleasant and friendly when you get to know them. Cross the Giri River by a bald hill...."

Gerry finished the directions for the coming of the _Viking_ and the landing of its crew as ordered by Lansa. As the radio was turned off, the Lord of the Scaly Ones stood up with his thin lipped smile.

"Good! Our plans progress. Now you three will go back to a cell. And, since you are no longer of any value to us, you will be used when we hunt the giant Dakta on the shore tomorrow."

* * * * *

The three prisoners were placed in the same cell, all spread-eagled against the wall with their outstretched arms held by metal cuffs. Angus McTavish's face was sour and glowering as he turned to Gerry.

"That was an ill thing that ye did, Gerry Norton," he growled.

"I could not see them whip her any more."

"The three of us will probably meet as bad a fate soon anyway, from what that thin faced devil said at the end, and, meanwhile, ye've lured our comrades to destruction."

"It couldn't be helped," Gerry said, and closed his eyes. He had taken what was probably the longest chance of his career, and he was not in a mood to talk about it. Particularly when every faintest syllable uttered in one of these metal cells could be heard by the guards in the corridor outside!

There was little rest for any of them, chained in that awkward position and with the cell always filled with that pitiless green light. Gerry dozed fitfully from time to time. Closana seemed to have fallen asleep, drooping forward in her bonds with her head hanging low, but her long hair covered her face and it was hard to tell. Angus made no attempt to sleep at all, and for most of the intervening time he was muttering many tongued curses into his beard.