Chapter XXIII: The Green Slaves

Sam snapped off the arc as the silver ship fell, and the drumming of the generators stopped. For a little time the world was very still. Xenora stood tense and silent beside me. As I turned toward her, I caught the slight perfume of her dark hair.

Indeed, the Green Girl was a beautiful being! The white flannels she wore failed to conceal the delectable curves of her slight and boyish figure. Her rich, red lips were parted slightly, in the unconscious intensity of her outward gaze.

Abruptly she became conscious of my look, and turned to face me, with a quick smile on her face. There was a radiant, joyous light in her eyes. The soft green tint of her skin was obscured by the rich, warm flush of her excitement, and she smiled with gladness.

Impulsively she reached her slender hand out to take mine. "You have won, Melvin Dane!" her soft voice said. "The ship of Mutron is fallen! We shall not be slaves of the Lord of Flame! We shall not die the violet death in the pit of Xath!"

"I hope not, my Xenora," I said. "I hope----" and I stopped in a little confusion. I was not really embarrassed, but I could not go on. Really, talking to a princess like Xenora is quite a different thing from making protestations of love to a being of one's dreams.

"What is it that you hope?" she said quickly, with an impish smile.

Sam saved me by coming in from the turret, begrimed with the smoke of the little cannon. He was a wonderful man. He was still strong, erect, and confident, despite the load of toil and hardship our adventure was putting upon his seventy years. His white hair was tousled, and he was cheerfully loading up his ancient pipe, as calmly as if he were in his own kitchen in Florida.

"Looks like the arc did for 'em all right," he said briskly. "Suppose we get over and take a look. We might pick up something new."

"Very well," I assented, and turned to start the motors. I could not resist a grin at Xenora, who was still regarding me with a speculative smile. She laughed back at me; then was suddenly serious.

"Be careful! The Sleepers of Mutron! They might be alive in the wreck! As long as they breathe, the Lord of Flame rules them!"

I started the generators, and the Omnimobile rolled heavily down across the green slope, and through the fringe of flaming purple trees. In a few minutes we came upon the wreck of the silver car, a great tangle of twisted wreckage, half fused by the electricity, and bent and torn by the fall. It lay in the little open space, with a great tree splintered and smoking under it, and the ground about empurpled with fallen petals. The twisted metal plates gleamed brightly in the light of the scarlet sky.

I stopped the Omnimobile, and we got out and approached the wrecked machine. There was a vast mass of the débris. The globe must have been forty feet in diameter. We spent several minutes in gazing at it from different angles, and then Sam and I climbed into the tangle of bent white plates and massive twisted girders.

The machinery had been too completely destroyed for us to be sure just how it worked. But Sam thought that the shell had carried tanks of water, the gravity of which had been negatived by the emanations from tanks of the same luminous gas which supported the roof of waters, lifting the ship. From the nature of the fragments of electrical machinery we observed, it seemed that the horizontal propulsion was attained by the ionization and repulsion of the helium atoms in the air. The apparatus that had produced the atomic disintegration was too badly wrecked to be identified.

Presently I came upon the body of a man, caught between two twisted bars, and cut half in two. The body was naked. It had a greenish cast that was darker by far than that of Xenora's fair skin. The physique, and the size and shape of the head, showed a race of high intellectual development.

The dead man had a metal frame clamped upon his back. It was twisted and broken, and whatever had been fastened upon his body had been torn away in the crash. And the corpse had upon its back the strange violet stains that had been upon Xenora when we found her!

Presently Sam found another body. It had been half burned up by the arc. It, too, had the metal frame upon it, and the thing the frame was to hold was still clamped to it! The body bore, fastened to the back with those cruel metal clamps, a six-sided bar of blue metal! It was six inches in diameter and two feet long!

"This must be the thing Xenora calls a 'fire-crystal,'" Sam said, "though I don't see any fire about it. It's damned queer!"

"Do you suppose there is machinery in the bar, that generates forces or currents that move the man about like a puppet?"

"Might be. I don't know. The metal thing may be a receiver for the occult force set up in the ether by the Lord of Flame--hypnotism by radio, perhaps, or something of the kind."

"Anyhow, as you said, it's damned queer, like everything else we've found here--excepting Xenora."

"Suppose we take the thing along, and open it up when we have time?"

He produced a pair of pliers, and we twisted the odd blue bar out of its frame, and carried it to the machine. It was oddly light to be metal, though it must have been an irksome burden to the one on which it was fastened. We got aboard again, and moved for the cover of the purple wood, for we did not know how soon relief would come for the fallen ship. But Xenora assured us that the Lunaks, as she called the flying things, quite frequently destroyed the ships of Mutron, and that the fate of this one would be laid to them.