Here they could see that the great man was all but a negro in color. It was equally clear, however, from an examination of his mammoth cranium and extraordinary expression, that he was as highly developed along most mental lines as the greatest men on earth. It was the back of his head, however, so flat that it was only a continuation of his neck, or, rather, shoulders, that told where the flaw lay. That, together with the hardness of his eye, the cruelty of his mouth, and the absolute lack of softness anywhere in the ironlike face or frame--all this condemned the monster for what he was; inhuman.
It was not easy to get him down the two flights of stairs. More than once they had to prop the case on a step while they rested; and at one time, just before they reached that curious heap of rubbish at the foot of the upper stairs, Jackson"s strength gave way and it looked as though the whole thing would get away from them. Van Emmon saved it at the cost of a bruised shoulder.
Once at the bottom of the lower flight, the rest was easy. Within a very few minutes the astonished face of the engineer was peering into the vestibule; he could hardly wait until the air-tight door was locked before opening the inner valves. He stared at the mammoth figure in the case long and hard, and from then on showed a great deal of respect for his three friends.
Of course, at that time the members of the expedition did not understand the conditions of Mercury as they are now known. They had to depend upon the general impression they got from their first-hand investigations; and it is remarkable that the doctor should have guessed so close to the truth.
"He must have made up his mind to outlast everybody else," was the way he put it as he kicked off his suit. He stepped up to the cabinet and felt of the gla.s.s. "I wish it were possible, without breaking the case, to see how he was embalmed."
His fingers still rested on the gla.s.s. Suddenly his eyes narrowed; he ran his fingers over the entire surface of the pane, and then whirled to stare at a thermometer.
"That"s mighty curious!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "This thing was bitter cold when we brought it in! Now it"s already as warm as this car!"
Smith"s eyes lit up. "It may be," he offered, "that the case doesn"t contain a vacuum, but some gas which has an electrical affinity for our atmosphere."
"Or," exclaimed the geologist suddenly, "the gla.s.s itself may be totally different from ours. It may be made of--"
"G.o.d!" shouted the doctor, jerking his hand from the cabinet and leaping straight backward. At the same instant, with a grinding crash, all three sides of the case collapsed and fell in splinters to the floor.
"Look out!" shrieked Jackson. He was staring straight into the now unhooded eyes of the giant. He backed away, stumbled against a stool, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. Smith fumbled impotently with a hammer. The doctor was shaking like a leaf.
But Van Emmon stood still in his tracks, his eyes fixed on the Goliath; his fingernails gashed the palms of his hands but he would not budge.
And as he stared he saw, from first to last, the whole ghastly change that came, after billions of years of waiting, to the sole survivor of Mercury.
A glaze swept over the huge figure. Next instant every line in that adamant frame lost its strength; the hardness left the eyes and mouth.
The head seemed to sink lower into the ma.s.sive shoulders, and the irresistible hands relaxed. In another second the thing that had once been as iron had become as rubber.
But only for an instant. Second by second that huge mountain of muscle slipped and jellied and actually melted before the eyes of the humans.
At the same time a curious acrid odor arose; Smith fell to coughing. The doctor turned on more oxygen.
In less than half a minute the man who had once conquered a planet was reduced to a steaming mound of brownish paste. As it sank to the floor of the case, it touched a layer of coa.r.s.e yellow powder sprinkled there; and it was this that caused the vapor. In a moment the room was filled with the haze of it; luckily, the doctor"s apparatus worked well.
And thus it came about that, within five minutes from being exposed to the air of the sky-car, that whole immense bulk, chair and all, had vanished. The powder had turned it to vapor, and the purifying chemicals had sucked it up. Nothing was left save a heap of smoking, grayish ashes in the center of the broken gla.s.s.
Van Emmon"s fingers relaxed their grip. He stirred to action, and turned briskly to Smith.
"Here! Help me with this thing!"
Between them they got the remains of the cabinet, with its gruesome load, into the vestibule. As for the doctor, he was bending over Jackson"s still unconscious form. When he saw what the others were doing, he gave a great sigh of relief.
"Good!" He helped them close the door. "Let"s get away from this d.a.m.ned place!"
The outer door was opened. At the same time Smith started the machinery; and as the sky-car shot away from the ground he tilted it slightly, so that the contents of the vestibule was slid into s.p.a.ce. Down it fell like so much lead.
The doctor glanced through a nearby window, and his face brightened as he made out the distant gleam of another planet. He watched the receding surface of Mercury with positive delight.
"Nice place to get away from," he commented. "And now, my friends, for Venus, and then--home!"
But the other"s eyes were fixed upon a tiny sparkle in the dust outside the palace, where the vestibule had dropped its load. It was the sun shining upon some broken bits of gla.s.s; the gla.s.s which, for untold ages, had enclosed the throne of the Death-lord.
Part IV
THE QUEEN OF LIFE
I
NEXT STOP, VENUS!
When he first got the idea of the sky-car, the doctor never stopped to consider whether he was the right man for such an excursion. Personally, he hated travel. He was merely a general pract.i.tioner, with a great fondness for astronomy; and the sole reason why he wanted to visit the planets was that he couldn"t see them well enough with his telescope. So he dabbled a little in magnetism and so forth, and stumbled upon the principle of the cube.
But he had no mechanical ability, and was on the point of giving up the scheme when he met Smith. He was instantly impressed by the engineer"s highly commonplace face; he had had considerable experience with human contrariness, and felt sure that Smith must be an absolute wonder, since he looked so very ordinary.
Kinney"s diagnosis proved correct. Smith knew his business; the machinery was finished in a hurry and done right. However, when it came to fitting the outfit into a suitable sky-car, Kinney was obliged to call in an architect. That accounts for E. Williams Jackson. At the same time, it occurred to the doctor that they would need a cook. Mrs. Kinney had refused to have anything whatever to do with the trip, and so Kinney put an ad in the paper. As luck would have it, Van Emmon, the geologist, who had learned how to cook when he first became a mountaineer, saw the ad and answered it in hope of adventure.
The doctor himself, besides his training in the mental and bodily frailities of human beings, had also an unusual command of the related sciences, such as biology. Smith"s specialties have already been named; he could drive an airplane or a nail with equal ease. Van Emmon, as a part of his profession, was a skilled "fossilologist," and was well up in natural history.
As for E. Williams Jackson--the architect was also the sociologist of the four. Moreover, he had quite a reputation as an amateur antiquarian.
Nevertheless, the most important thing about E. Williams Jackson was not learned until after the visit to Mercury, after the terrible end of that exploration, after the architect, falling in a faint, had been revived under the doctor"s care.
"Gentlemen," said Kinney, coming from the secluded nook among the dynamos which had been the architect"s bunk; "gentlemen, I must inform you that Jackson is not what we thought.
"He--I mean, she--is a woman!"
Which put an entirely new face upon matters. The three men, discussing it, marveled that the architect had been able to keep her s.e.x a secret all the time they were exploring at Mercury. They did not know that none of E. Williams Jackson"s fellow architects had ever guessed the truth.
Ambitious and ingenious, with a natural liking for house-planning, she had resolved that her s.e.x should not stand in the way of success.
And when she finally came to herself, there in her bunk, and suspected that her secret was out--instead of shame or embarra.s.sment she felt only chagrin. She walked, rather unsteadily, across the floor of the great cube-shaped car to the window where the three were standing; and as they quietly made a place for her, she took it entirely as a matter of course, and without a word.
The doctor had been speaking of the peculiar fitness of the four for what they were doing. "And if I"m not mistaken," he went on, "we"re going to need all the brains we can pool, when we get to Venus.
"I never would have claimed, when we started out, that Mercury had ever been inhabited. But now that we"ve seen what we"ve seen, I feel dead sure that Venus once was peopled."
The four looked out the triple-glazed vacuum-insulated window at the steadily growing globe of "Earth"s twin sister." Half in sunlight and half in shadow, this planet, for ages the synonym for beauty, was now but a million miles away. She looked as large as the moon; but instead of a silvery gleam, she showed a creamy radiance fully three times as bright.
"Let"s see," reflected the geologist aloud. "As I recall it, the brightness of a planet depends upon the amount of its air. That would indicate, then, that Venus has about as much as the earth, wouldn"t it?"
remembering how the home planet had looked when they left it.
The doctor nodded. "There are other factors; but undoubtedly we are approaching a world which is a great deal like our own. Venus is nearly as large as the earth, has about nine-tenths the surface, and a gravity almost as strong. The main difference is that she"s only two-thirds as far from the sun as we are."
"How long is her day?" Smith wanted to know.
"Can"t say. Some observers claim to have seen her clearly enough to announce a day of the same length as ours. Others calculate that she"s like Mercury; always the same face toward the sun. If so, her day is also her year--two hundred and twenty-five of our days."
Van Emmon looked disappointed. "In that case she would be blistering hot on one side and freezing cold on the other; except," remembering Mercury, "except for the "twilight zone," where the climate would be neither one nor the other, but temperate." He pointed to the line down the middle of the disk before them, the line which divided the lighted from the unlighted, the day from the night.
The four looked more intently. It should be remembered that the very brilliance of Venus has always hindered the astronomers; the planet as a whole is always very conspicuous but its very glare makes it impossible to see any details. The surface has always seemed to be covered by a veil of hazy, faintly streaked vapor.