Part 6 (1/2)

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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e.

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 s.h.a.ggy 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 pa.s.sed 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-sh.e.l.led 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 pa.s.s occasional small farms. These were scanty fields carved out of the creeping ma.s.ses 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.