Beyond The Farthest Star

FOREWORD

We had attended a party at Diamond Head ; and after dinner, comfortable on hikiee and easy-chairs on the lanai, we fell to talking about the legends and superstitions of the ancient Hawaiians. There were a number of old-timers there, several with a mixture of Hawaiian and American blood, and we were the only malihinis-happy to be there, and happy to listen.

Most Hawaiian legends are rather childish, though often amusing; but many of their superstitions are grim and sinister-and they are not confined to ancient Hawaiians, either. You couldn't get a modern kane or wahine with a drop of Hawaiian blood in his veins to touch the bones or relics still often found in hidden burial caves in the mountains. They seem to feel the same way about kahunas, and that it is just as easy to be polite to a kahuna as not-and much safer.

I am not superstitious, and I don't believe in ghosts; so what I heard that evening didn't have any other effect on me than to entertain me. It couldn't have been connected in any way with what happened later that night, for I scarcely gave it a thought after we left the home of our friends; and I really don't know why I have mentioned it at all, except that it has to do with strange happenings; and what happened later that night certainly falls into that category.

We had come home quite early; and I was in bed by eleven o'clock; but I couldn't sleep, and so I got up about midnight, thinking I would work a little on the outline of a new story I had in mind.

I sat in front of my typewriter just staring at the keyboard, trying to recall a vagrant idea that I had thought pretty clever at the time, but which now eluded me. I stared so long and so steadily that the keys commenced to blur and run together.

A nice white sheet of paper peeped shyly out from the underneath side of the platen, a virgin sheet of paper as yet undefiled by the hand of man. My hands were clasped over that portion of my anatomy where I once had a waistline; they were several inches from the keyboard when the thing happened-the keys commenced to depress themselves with bewildering rapidity, and one neat line of type after another appeared upon that virgin paper, still undefiled by the hand of man; but who was defiling it? Or what?

I blinked my eyes and shook my head, convinced that I had fallen asleep at the typewriter; but I hadn't-somebody, or something, was typing a message there, and typing it faster than any human hands ever typed. I am passing it on just as I first saw it, but I can't guarantee that it will come to you just as it was typed that night, for it must pass through the hands of editors; and an editor would edit the word of God.

Chapter One

I WAS SHOT DOWN behind the German lines in September, 1989. Three Messerschmitts had attacked me, but I spun two of them to earth, whirling funeral pyres, before I took the last long dive.

My name is-well, never mind; my family still retains many of the Puritanical characteristics of our revered ancestors, and it is so publicity-shy that it would consider a death-notice as verging on the vulgar. My family thinks that I am dead; so let it go at that-perhaps I am. I imagine the Germans buried me, anyway.

The transition, or whatever it was, must have been instantaneous; for my head was still whirling from the spin when I opened my eyes in what appeared to be a garden. There were trees and shrubs and flowers and expanses of well-kept lawn; but what astonished me first was that there didn't seem to be any end to the garden-it just extended indefinitely all the way to the horizon, or at least as far as I could see; and there were no buildings nor any people.

At least, I didn't see any people at first; and I was mighty glad of that, because I didn't have any clothes on. I thought I must be dead-I knew I must, after what I had been through. When a machine-gun bullet lodges in your heart, you remain conscious for about fifteen seconds– long enough to realize that you have already gone into your last spin; but you know you are dead, unless a miracle has happened to save you. I thought possibly such a miracle might have intervened to preserve me for posterity.

I looked around for the Germans and for my plane, but they weren't there; then, for the first time, I noticed the trees and shrubs and flowers in more detail, and I realized that I had never seen anything like them. They were not astoundingly different from those with which I had been familiar, but they were of species I had never seen or noticed. It then occurred to me that I had fallen into a German botanical garden.

It also occurred to me that it might be a good plan to find out if I was badly injured. I tried to stand, and I succeeded; and I was just congratulating myself on having escaped so miraculously, when I heard a feminine scream.

I wheeled about, to face a girl looking at me in open-eyed astonishment, with just a tinge of terror. The moment I turned, she did likewise and fled. So did I; I fled to the concealment of a clump of bushes.

And then I commenced to wonder. I had never seen a girl exactly like her before, nor one garbed as was she. If it hadn't been broad daylight, I would have thought she might be going to a fancy dress ball. Her body had been sheathed in what appeared to be gold sequins; and she looked as though she had either been poured into her costume, or it had been pasted on her bare skin. It was undeniably a good fit. From the yoke to a pair of red boots that flapped about her ankles and halfway to her knees, she had been clothed in sequins.

Her skin was the whitest I had ever seen on any human being, while her hair was an indescribable copper colour. I hadn't had a really good look at her features; and I really couldn't say that she was beautiful; but just the glimpse that I had had assured me that she was no Gorgon.

After I had concealed myself in the shrubbery, I looked to see what had become of the girl; but she was nowhere to be seen. What had become of her? Where had she gone? She had simply disappeared.

All about this vast garden were mounds of earth upon which trees and shrubbery grew. They were not very high, perhaps six feet; and the trees and shrubbery planted around them so blended into the growth upon them that they were scarcely noticeable; but directly in front of me, I noticed an opening in one of them; and as I was looking at it, five men came out of it, like rabbits out of a warren.

They were all dressed alike-in red sequins with black boots; and on their heads were large metal helmets beneath which I could see locks of yellow hair. Their skin was very white, too, like the girl's. They wore swords and were carrying enormous pistols, not quite as large as Tommy guns, but formidable-looking, nonetheless.

They seemed to be looking for someone. I had a vague suspicion that they were looking for me… Well, it wasn't such a vague suspicion after all.

After having seen the beautiful garden and the girl, I might have thought that, having been killed, I was in heaven; but after seeing these men garbed in red, and recalling some of the things I had done in my past life, I decided that I had probably gone to the other place.

I was pretty well concealed; but I could watch everything they did; and when, pistols in hand, they commenced a systematic search of the shrubbery, I knew that they were looking for me, and that they would find me; so I stepped out into the open.

At sight of me, they surrounded me, and one of them commenced to fire words at me in a language that might have been a Japanese broadcast combined with a symphony concert.

"Am I dead?" I asked.

They looked at one another; and then they spoke to me again; but I couldn't understand a syllable, much less a word, of what they said. Finally one of them came up and toold me by the arm; and the others surrounded us, and they started to lead me away. Then it was that I saw the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life: Out of that vast garden rose buildings! They came up swiftly all around us– buildings of all sizes and shapes, but all trim and streamlined, and extremely beautiful in their simplicity; and on top of them they carried the trees and the shrubbery beneath which they had been concealed.

"Where am I?" I demanded. "Can't any of you speak English, or French, or German, or Spanish, or Italian?"

They looked at me blankly, and spoke to one another in that language that did not sound like a language at all. They took me into one of the buildings that had risen out of the garden. It was full of people, both men and women; and they were all dressed in skin-tight clothing. "Out of that vast garden rose buildings." They looked at me in amazement and amusement and disgust; and some of the women tittered and covered their eyes with their hands; at last one of my escort found a robe and covered me, and I felt very much better. You have no idea what it does to one's ego to find oneself in the nude among a multitude of people; and as I realized my predicament, I commenced to laugh. My captors looked at me in astonishment; they didn't know that I had suddenly realized that I was the victim of a bad dream: I had not flown over Germany ; I had not been shot down; I had never been in a garden with a strange girl… I was just dreaming.

"Run along," I said. "You are just a bad dream. Beat it!" And then I said "Boo!" at them, thinking that that would wake me up; but it didn't. It only made a couple of them seize me by either arm and hustle me along to a room where there was an elderly man seated at a desk. He wore a skin-tight suit of black spangles, with white boots.

My captors spoke to the man at length. He looked at me and shook his head; then he said something to them; and they took me into an adjoining room where there was a cage, and they put me in the cage and chained me to one of the bars.

Chapter Two

I WILL NOT BORE YOU with what happened during the ensuing six weeks; suffice it to say that I learned a lot from Harkas Yen, the elderly man into whose keeping I had been placed. I learned, for instance, that he was a psychiatrist, and that I had been placed in his hands for observation. When the girl who had screamed had reported me, and the police had come and arrested me, they had all thought that I was a lunatic.

Harkas Yen taught me the language; and I learned it quickly, because I have always been something of a linguist. As a child, I travelled much in Europe, going to schools in France , Italy and Germany , while my father was the military attach at those legations; and so I imagine I developed an aptitude for languages.

He questioned me most carefully when he discovered that the language I spoke was wholly unknown in his world, and eventually he came to believe the strange story I told him of my transition from my own world to his.

I do not believe in transmigration, reincarnation or metempsychosis, and neither did Harkas Yen; but we found it very difficult to adjust our beliefs to the obvious facts of my case. I had been on Earth, a planet of which Harkas Yen had not the slightest knowledge; and now I was on Poloda, a planet of which I had never heard. I spoke a language that no man on Poloda had ever heard, and I could not understand one word of the five principal languages of Poloda.

After a few weeks Harkas Yen took me out of the cage and put me up in his own home. He obtained for me a brown sequin suit and a pair of brown boots; and I had the run of his house; but I was not permitted to leave it, either while it was sunk below ground or while it was raised to the surface.

That house went up and down at least once a day, and sometimes oftener. I could tell when it was going down by the screaming of sirens, and I could tell why it was down by the detonation of bursting bombs that shook everything in the place.

I asked Harkas Yen what it was all about, although I could pretty well guess by what I had left in the making on Earth; but all he said was: "The Kapars."

After I had learned the language so that I could speak and understand it, Harkas Yen announced that I was to be tried.

"For what?" I asked.

"Well, Tangor," he replied, "I guess it is to discover whether you are a spy, a lunatic, or a dangerous character who should be destroyed for the good of Unis."

Tangor was the name he had given me. It means from nothing, and he said that it quite satisfactorily described my origin; because from my own testimony I came from a planet which did not exist. Unis is the name of the country to which I had been so miraculously transported. It was not heaven and it was certainly not hell, except when the Kapars came over with their bombs.

At my trial there were three judges and an audience; the only witnesses were the girl who had discovered me, the five policemen who had arrested me, Harkas Yen, his son Harkas Don, his daughter Harkas Yamoda, and his wife. At least I thought that those were all the witnesses, but I was mistaken. There were seven more, old gentlemen with sparse grey hairs on their chins-you've got to be an old man on Poloda before you can raise a beard, and even then it is nothing to brag about.

The judges were fine-looking men in grey sequin suits and grey boots; they were very dignified. Like all the judges in Unis, they are appointed by the government for life, on the recommendation of what corresponds to a bar association in America . They can be impeached, but otherwise they hold office until they are seventy years old, when they can be reappointed if they are again recommended by the association of lawyers.

The session opened with a simple little ritual; everyone rose when the judges entered the courtroom; and after they had taken their places, every one, including the judges said, "For the honour and glory of Unis," in unison; then, I was conducted to the prisoner's dock-I guess you would call it-and one of the judges asked me my name.

"I am called Tangor," I replied.

"From what country do you come?"

"From the United States of America ."

"Where is that?"

"On the planet Earth."

"Where is that?"

"Now you have me stumped," I said. "If I were on Mercury, Venus, Mars, or any other of the planets of our solar system, I could tell you; but not knowing where Poloda is, I can only say that I do not know."

"Why did you appear naked in the limits of Orvis?" demanded one of the judges. Orvis is the name of the city into which I had been ruthlessly catapulted without clothes. "Is it possible that the inhabitants of this place you call America do not wear clothing?"

"They wear clothing, Most Honourable Judge," I replied (Harkas Yen had coached me in the etiquette of the courtroom and the proper way to address the judges); "but it varies with the mood of the wearer, the temperature, styles, and personal idiosyncrasies. I have seen ancient males wandering around a place called Palm Springs with nothing but a pair of shorts to hide their hairy obesity; I have seen beautiful women clothed up to the curve of the breast in the evening, who had covered only about one per centum of their bodies at the beach in the afternoon; but, Most Honourable Judge, I have never seen any female costume more revealing than those worn by the beautiful girls of Orvis. To answer your first question: I appeared in Orvis naked, because I had no clothes when I arrived here."

"You are excused for a moment," said the judge who had questioned me; then he turned to the seven old men, and asked them to take the stand. After they had been sworn and he had asked their names, the chief judge asked them if they could locate any such world as the Earth.

"We have questioned Harkas Yen, who has questioned the defendant," replied the oldest-of the seven, "and we have come to this conclusion." After which followed half an hour of astronomical data. "This person," he finished, "apparently came from a solar system that is beyond the range of our most powerful telescopes, and is probably about twenty-two thousand light-years beyond Canapa."

That was staggering; but what was more staggering was when Harkas Yen convinced me that Canapa was identical with the Globular Cluster, N. G. C. 7006, which is two hundred and twenty thousand light-years distant from the Earth and not just a measly twenty-two thousand; and then, to cap the climax, he explained that Poloda is two hundred and thirty thousand light-years from Canapa, which would locate me something like four hundred and fifty thousand light-years from Earth. As light travels 186,000 miles per second, I will let you figure how far Poloda is from Earth; but I may say that if a telescope on Poloda were powerful enough to see what was transpiring on Earth, they would see what was transpiring there four hundred and fifty thousand years ago.

After they had quizzed the seven astronomers, and learned nothing, one of the judges called Balzo Maro to the stand; and the girl I had seen that first day in the garden arose from her seat and came forward to the witness-stand.

After they had gone through the preliminaries, they questioned her about me. "He wore no clothes?" asked one of the judges.

"None," said Balzo Maro.

"Did he attempt to-ah—annoy you in any way?"

"No," said Balzo Maro.

"You know, don't you," asked one of the judges, "that for wilfully annoying a woman, an alien can be sentenced to destruction?"

"Yes," said Balzo Maro; "but he did not annoy me. I watched him because I thought he might be a dangerous character, perhaps a Kapar spy; but I am convinced that he is what he claims to be."

I could have hugged Balzo Maro.

Now the judges said to me. "If you are convicted, you may be destroyed or imprisoned for the duration; but as the war has now gone into its one hundred and first year, such a sentence would be equivalent to death. We wish to be fair, and really there is nothing more against you than that you are an alien who spoke no tongue known upon Poloda."

"Then release me and let me serve Unis against her enemies," I made answer.

Chapter Three

THE JUDGES DISCUSSED my proposition in whispers for about ten minutes; then they put me on probation until the Janhai could decide the matter, and after that they turned me back to the custody of Harkas Yen, who told me later that a great honour had been done, as the Janhai rules Unis; it was like putting my case in the hands of the President of the United States or the King of England.

The Janhai is a commission composed of seven men who are elected to serve until they are seventy years old, when they may be re-elected; the word is a compound of jan (seven) and hai (elect). Elections are held only when it is necessary to fill a vacancy on the Janhai, which appoints all judges and what corresponds to our governors of States, who in turn appoint all other State or provincial officials and the mayors of cities, the mayors appointing municipal officers. There are no ward-heelers in Unis.

Each member of the Janhai heads a department, of which there are seven: War; Foreign, which includes State; Commerce; Interior; Education; Treasury and Justice. These seven men elect one of their own number every six years as Elianhai, or High Commissioner. He is, in effect, the ruler of Unis but he cannot serve two consecutive terms. These men, like all the appointees of the Janhai, the provincial governors, and the mayors, must submit to a very thorough intelligence test, which determines the candidate's native intelligence as well as his fund of acquired knowledge; and more weight is given the former than the latter.

I could not but compare this system with our own, under which it is not necessary for a Presidential candidate to be able either to read or write; even a congenital idiot could run for the Presidency of the United States of America , and serve if he were elected.

There were two cases following mine, and Harkas Yen wanted to stay and hear them. The first was a murder case; and the defendant had chosen to be tried before one judge, rather than a jury of five men.

"He is either innocent, or the killing was justifiable," remarked Harkas Yen. "When they are guilty, they usually ask for a jury trial." In a fit of passion, the man had killed another who had broken up his home. In fifteen minutes he was tried and acquitted.

The next case was that of the mayor of a small city who was accused of accepting a bribe. That case lasted about two hours and was tried before a jury of five men. In America , it would possibly have lasted two months. The judge made the attorneys stick to facts and the evidence. The jury was out not more than fifteen minutes, when it brought in a verdict of guilty. The judge sentenced the man to be shot on the morning of the fifth day. This gave him time to appeal the case to a court of five judges; they work fast in Unis.

Harkas Yen told me that the court of appeal would examine the transcript of the evidence and would probably confirm the finding of the lower court, unless the attorney for the defendant made an affidavit that he could bring in new evidence to clear his client. It he made such an affidavit, and the new evidence failed to altar the verdict, the attorney would forfeit his fee to the State and be compelled to pay all court costs for the second trial.

Attorneys' fees, like doctors', are fixed by law in Unis; and they are fair-a rich man pays a little more than a poor man, but they can't take his shirt. If a defendant is very poor, the State employs and pays any attorney the defendant may select; and the same plan is in effect for the services of doctors, surgeons and hospitalization.

After the second trial I went home with Harkas Yen and his son and daughter. While we were walking to the elevators, we heard the wail of sirens, and felt thee building dropping down its shaft. It was precisely the same sensation I had when coming down in an elevator from the 102nd story of the Empire State Building .

This Justice Building , in which the trials had been held, is twenty stories high; and it dropped down to the bottom of its shaft in about twenty seconds. Pretty soon we heard the booming of anti-aircraft guns and the terrific detonation of bombs.

"How long has this been going on?" I asked.

"All my life, and long before," replied Harkas Yen.

"This war is now in its one hundred and first year," said Harkas Don, his son. "We don't know anything else," he added with a grin.

"It started about the time your grandfather was born," said Harkas Yen. "As a boy and young man, your great-grandfather lived in a happier world. Then men lived and worked upon the surface of the planet; cities were built above-ground; but within ten years after the Kapars launched their campaign to conquer and rule the world, every city in Unis and every city in Kapar and many cities on others of the five continents were reduced to rubble.

"It was then that we started building these under-ground cities that can be raised or lowered by the power we derive from Omos." (The Sun of Poloda.) "The Kapars have subjugated practically all the rest of Poloda; but we were, and still are, the richest nation in the world. What they have done to us, we have done to them; but they are much worse off than we. Their people live in underground warrens protected by steel and concrete; they subsist upon the foods raised by subjugated peoples who are no better than slaves, and work no better for hated masters; or they eat synthetic foods, as they wear synthetic clothing. They themselves produce nothing but the material of war. So heavily do we bomb their land that nothing can live upon its surface; but they keep on, for they know nothing but war. Periodically we offer them an honourable peace, but they will have nothing but the total destruction of Unis."

Chapter Four

HARKAS YEN INVITED ME to remain in his home until some disposition of my case was made. His place is reached by an underground motorway a hundred feet beneath the surface. Throughout the city many buildings were still lower, those more than a hundred feet high having entrances at this hundred-foot level as well as at ground level when they were raised. The smaller buildings were raised and lowered in shafts like our elevator shafts. Above them are thick slabs of armour plate which support the earth and top soil in which grow the trees, shrubbery, and grass which hide them when they are lowered. When these smaller buildings are raised they come in contact with their protecting slabs and carry them on up with them.

After we left the centre of the city I noticed many buildings built permanently at the hundred-foot level; and when I asked Harkas Yen about this, he explained that when this underground city had first been planned it was with the expectation that the war would soon be over and that the city could return to normal life at the surface; that when all hope of the war's end was abandoned, permanent underground construction was commenced.

"You can imagine," he continued, "the staggering expense involved in building these underground cities. The Janhai of Unis ordered them commenced eighty years ago and they are nowhere near completed yet. Hundreds of thousands of the citizens of Unis live in inadequate shelters, or just in caves or in holes dug in the ground. It is because of this terrific expense that, among other things, we wear these clothes we do. They are made of an indestructible plastic which resembles metal. No person, not even a member of the Janhai, may possess more than three suits, two for ordinary wear and one suit of working-clothes, for all productivity must go into the construction of our cities and the prosecution of the war. Our efforts cannot be wasted in making clothes to meet every change in style and every silly vanity, as was true a hundred years ago. About the only things we have conserved from the old days, which are not absolutely essential to the winning of the war or the construction of our cities, are cultural. We would not permit art, music, and literature to die."

"It must be a hard life," I suggested, "especially for the women. Do you have no entertainment nor recreation?"

"Oh, yes," he replied, "but they are simple; we do not devote much time to them. Our forebears who lived a hundred years ago would think it a very dull life, for they devoted most of their time to the pursuit of pleasure, which was one of the reasons that the Kapars prosecuted the war so successfully at first, and why almost every nation on Poloda, with the exception of Unis, was either subjugated or exterminated by the Kapars."

The motorcars of Unis are all identical, each one seating four people comfortably, or six uncomfortably. This standardization has effected a tremendous saving in labour and materials. Power is conducted to their motors by what we would call "radio" from central stations where the sun's energy is stored. As this source of power is inexhaustible, it has not been necessary to curtail the use of motors because of war needs. This same power is also used for operating the enormous pumps which are necessary for draining this underground world, the mechanism for raising the buildings, and the numerous air-conditioning plants which are necessary.

I was simply appalled by contemplation of the cost of the excavating and constructing of a world beneath the surface of the ground, and when I mentioned this to Harkas Yen he said: "There never has been enough wealth in the world to accomplish what we have accomplished, other than the potential wealth which is inherent in the people themselves. By the brains of our scientists and our leaders, by the unity of our people, and by the sweat of our brows we have done what we have done."

Harkas Yen's son and daughter, Don and Yamoda, accompanied us from the Hall of Justice to their home. Yamoda wore the gold sequins and red boots that all unmarried women wear, while Don was in the blue of the fighting forces. He and I have hit it off well together, both being flyers; and neither of us ever tire of hearing stories of the other's world. He has promised to try to get me into the flying service; and Harkas Yen thinks that it may be possible, as there is a constant demand for flyers to replace casualties, of which there are sometimes as many as five hundred thousand in a month.

These figures staggered me when' Harkas Don first mentioned them, and I asked him how it was the nation had not long since been exterminated.

"Well, you see," he said, "they don't average as high as that. I think the statistics show that we lose on an average of about a hundred thousand men a month. There are sixteen million adult women in Unis and something like ten million babies are born every year. Probably a little better than half of these are boys. At least five million of them grow to maturity, for we are a very healthy race. So, you see, we can afford to lose a million men a year."

"I shouldn't think the mothers would like that very well," I said.

"Nobody does," he replied, "but it is war; and war is our way of life."

"In my country," I said, "we have what are known as pacifists, and they have a song which is called, 'I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier.'"

Harkas Don laughed and then said what might be translated into English as: "If our women had a song, it would be, 'I didn't raise my son to be a slacker.'"

Harkas Yen's wife greeted me most cordially when I returned. She has been very lovely to me and calls me her other boy. She is a sad-faced woman of about sixty, who was married at seventeen and has had twenty children, six girls and fourteen boys. Thirteen of the boys have been killed in the war. Most of the older women of Unis, and the older men, too, have sad faces; but they never complain nor do they ever weep. Harkas Yen's wife told me that their tears were exhausted two generations ago.

I didn't get into the flying service, I got into the Labour Corps-and it was labour spelled with all capitals, not just a capital L! I had wondered how they repaired the damage done by the continual bombing of the Kapars and I found out the first day I was inducted into the Corps. Immediately following the departure of the Kapar bombers we scurried out of holes in the ground like worker ants. There were literally thousands of us, and we were accompanied by trucks, motorized shovels, and scrapers, and an ingenious tool for lifting a tree out of the ground with the earth all nicely balled around the roots.

First, we filled the bomb craters, gathering up such plants and trees as might be saved. The trucks brought sod, trees, and plants that had been raised underground; and within a few hours all signs of the raid had been obliterated.

It seemed to me like a waste of energy; but one of my fellow workers explained to me that it had two important purposes-one was to maintain the morale of the Unisans, and the other was to lower the morale of the enemy.

We worked nine days and had one day off, the first day of their ten– day week. When we were not working on the surface we were working below-ground; and as I was an unskilled labourer, I did enough work in my first month in the Labour Corps to last an ordinary man a lifetime. On my third day of rest, which came at the end of my first month in the Labour Corps, Harkas Don, who was also off duty on that day, suggested that we go to the mountains. He and Yamoda got together a party of twelve. Three of the men were from the Labour Corps, the other three were in the fighting service. One of the girls was the daughter of the Elianhai, whose office is practically that of the President. Two of the others were daughters of members of the Labour Corps. There was the daughter of a university president, the daughter of an army officer, and Yamoda. The sorrow and suffering of perpetual war has developed a national unity which has wiped out all class distinction.

Orvis stands on a plateau entirely surrounded by mountains, the nearest of which are about a hundred miles from the city; and it was to these mountains that we took an underground train. Here rise the highest peaks in the range that surrounds Orvis; and as the mountains at the east end of the plateau are low and a wide pass breaks the range at the west end, the Kapars usually come and go either from the east or west; so it is considered reasonably safe to take an outing on the surface at this location. I tell you it was good to get out in the sun again without having to work like a donkey! The country there was beautiful; there were mountain streams and there was a little lake beside which we planned to picnic in a grove of trees. They had selected the grove because the trees would hide us from any chance enemy flyers who might pass overhead. For all of the lives of four generations they have had to think of this until it is second nature for them to seek shelter when in the open.

Someone suggested that we swim before we eat. "I'd like nothing better," I said, "but I didn't bring any swimming things."

"What do you mean?" asked Yamoda.

"Why, I mean clothes to swim in-a swimming-suit."

That made them all laugh. "You have your swimming suit on," said Harkas Don, "you were born in it."

I had lost most of my tan after living underground for a couple of months; but I was still very dark compared with these white-skinned people who have lived like moles for almost four generations, and my head of black hair contrasted strangely with the copper hair of the girls and the blond hair of the men.

The water was cold and refreshing and we came out with enormous appetites. After we had eaten we lay around on the grass and they sang the songs that they liked.

Time passed rapidly and we were all startled when one of the men stood up and announced that we had better leave for home. He had scarcely finished speaking when we heard the report of a pistol shot and saw him pitch forward upon his face, dead.

The three soldiers with us were the only ones who bore arms. They ordered us to lie flat on our faces, and then they crept forward in the direction from which the sound of the pistol-shot had come. They disappeared in the underbrush and shortly afterward we heard a fusillade of shots. This was more than I could stand, lying there like a scared rabbit while Harkas Don and his companions were out there fighting; so I crawled after them.

I came up to them on the edge of a little depression in which were perhaps a dozen men behind an outcropping of rock which gave them excellent protection. Harkas Don and his companions were concealed from the enemy by shrubbery, but not protected by it. Every time an enemy showed any part of his body one of the three would fire. Finally the man behind the extreme right end of the barrier exposed himself for too long; and we were so close that I could see the hole the bullet made in his forehead before he fell back behind the barrier. Beyond the point where he fell thick trees and underbrush concealed the continuation of the outcropping, if there was more, and this gave me an idea which I immediately set to work to put into execution.

I slipped backward a few yards into the underbrush and then crawled cautiously to the right. Taking advantage of this excellent cover, I circled around until I was opposite the left flank of the enemy; then I wormed myself forward on my belly inch by inch until through a tiny opening in the underbrush I saw the body of the dead man and, beyond it, his companions behind their rocky barrier. They were all dressed in drab, grey uniforms that looked like coveralls, and they wore grey metal helmets that covered their entire heads and the backs of their necks, leaving only their faces exposed. They had crossed shoulder belts and a waist-belt filled with cartridges in clips of about fifteen. Their complexions were sallow and unwholesome; and though I knew that they must be young men, they looked old; and the faces of all of them seemed set in sullen scowls. They were the first Kapars that I had seen, but I recognized them instantly from descriptions that Harkas Don and others had given me.

The pistol of the dead man (it was really a small machine-gun) lay at his side, and there was almost a full clip of cartridges in it. I could see them plainly from where I lay. I pushed forward another inch or two and then one of the Kapars turned and looked in my direction. At first I thought that he had discovered me, but I presently saw that he was looking at his dead comrade. Then he turned and spoke to his companions in a language I could not understand; it sounded to me something like the noise that pigs make when they eat. One of them nodded to him, evidently in assent, and he turned and started to walk toward the dead man. That looked like the end of my little scheme, and I was just about to take a desperate chance and make a lunge for the pistol when the Kapar foolishly permitted his head to show above the top of the barrier, and down he went with a bullet in his head. The other Kapars looked at him and jabbered angrily to one another; and while they were jabbering I took the chance, extended my arm through the underbrush, grasped the pistol and dragged it slowly toward me.

The Kapars were still arguing, or scolding, or whatever they were doing, when I took careful aim at the nearest of them and commenced firing. Four of the ten went down before the others realized from what direction the attack was coming. Two of them started firing at the underbrush where I was hidden, but I brought them down, and then the other four broke and ran. In doing so they were exposed to the fire of Harkas Don and his companions, as well as of mine, and we got every one of them.

I had crawled out from the underbrush in order to my friends would get me before they recognized me; so I called Harkas Don by name and presently he answered.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"Tangor," I replied. "I'm coming out; don't shoot."

They came over to me then, and we went in search of the Kapar ship, which we knew must be near by. We found it in a little natural clearing, half a mile back from the place where we had shot them. It was unguarded; so we were sure that we had got them all.

"We are ahead twelve pistols, a lot of ammunition, and one ship," I said.

"We will take the pistols and ammunition back," said Harkas Don, "but no one can fly this ship back to Orvis without being killed."

He found a heavy tool in the ship and demolished the motor.

Our little outing was over; and we went home, carrying our one dead with us.

Chapter Five

THE NEXT DAY, while I was loading garbage on a train that was going to the incinerator, a boy in yellow sequins came and spoke to the man in charge of us, who turned and called to me. "You are ordered to report to the office of the Commissioner for War," he said; "this messenger will take you."

"Hadn't I better change my clothes?" I asked. "I imagine that I don't smell very good."

The boss laughed. "The Commissioner for War has smelled garbage before," he said, "and he doesn't like to be kept waiting." So I went along with the yellow-clad messenger to the big building called the House of the Janhai, which houses the government of Unis.

I was conducted to the office of one of the Commissioner's assistants.

He looked up as we entered. "What do you want?" he demanded.

"This is the man for whom you sent me," replied the messenger.

"Oh, yes, your name is Tangor. I might have known by that black hair. So you're the man who says that he comes from another world, some 548,000 light-years from Poloda."

I said that I was. Poloda is four hundred and fifty thousand light– years from Earth by our reckoning, but it is 547,500 Polodian light– years, as there are only three hundred days in a Polodian year; but what's one hundred thousand light-years among friends, anyway?

"Your exploit of yesterday with the Kapars has been reported to me," said the officer, "as was also the fact that you were a flyer in your own world, and that you wish to fly for Unis."

"That is right, sir," I said.

"In view of the cleverness and courage which you displayed yesterday, I am going to permit you to train for the flying force-if you think you would prefer that to shovelling garbage," he added with a smile.

"I have no complaint to make about shovelling garbage, or anything else that I am required to do in Unis, sir," replied. "I came here an uninvited guest, and I have been treated extremely well. I would not complain of any service that might be required of me."

"I am glad to hear you say that," he said. Then he handed me an order for a uniform, and gave me directions as to where and to whom to report after I had obtained it.

The officer to whom I reported sent me first to a factory manufacturing pursuit-plane motors, where I remained a week; that is, nine working days. There are ten assembly lines in this plant and a completed motor comes off of each of them every hour for ten hours a day. As there are twenty-seven working days in the Polodan month, this plant was turning out twenty-seven hundred motors a month.

The science of aerodynamics, whether on Earth or on Poloda, is governed by certain fixed natural laws; so that Polodan aircraft do not differ materially in appearance from those with which I was familiar on Earth, but their construction is radically different from ours because of their development of a light, practically indestructible, rigid plastic of enormous strength. Huge machines stamp out fuselage and wings from this plastic. The parts are then rigidly joined together and the seams hermetically sealed. The fuselage has a double wall with an air space between, and the wings are hollow.

On completion of the plane the air is withdrawn from the space between the walls of the fuselage and from the interior of the wings, the resulting vacuum giving the ship considerable lifting power, which greatly increases the load that it can carry. They are not lighter than air, but when not heavily loaded they can be manoeuvred and landed very slowly.

There are forty of these plants, ten devoted to the manufacture of heavy bombers, ten to light bombers, ten to combat planes, and ten to pursuit planes, which are also used for reconnaissance. The enormous output of these factories, over a hundred thousand planes a month, is necessary to replace lost and worn-out planes, as well as to increase the fighting force, which is the aim of the Unisan government.

As I had in the engine factory, I remained in this factory nine days as an observer, and then I was sent back to the engine factory and put to work for two weeks; then followed two weeks in the fuselage and assembly plants, after which I had three weeks of flying instruction, which on several occasions was interrupted by Kapar raids, resulting in dog-fights in which my instructor and I took part.

During this period of instruction I was studying the four of the five principal languages of Poloda with which I was not familiar, giving special attention to the language of the Kapars. I also spent much time studying the geography of Poloda.

All during this period I had no recreation whatsoever, often studying all night until far into the morning; so when I was finally awarded the insignia of a flyer, I was glad to have a day off. As I was now living in barracks, I had seen nothing of the Harkases; and so, on this, my first free day, I made a beeline for their house.

Balzo Maro, the girl who had been first to discover me on my arrival on Poloda, was there, with Yamoda and Don. They all seemed genuinely glad to see me and congratulated me on my induction into the flying service.

"You look very different from the first time I saw you," said Balzo Maro, with a smile; and I certainly did, for I was wearing the blue sequins, the blue boots, and the blue helmet of the fighting service.

"I have learned a number of things since I came to Poloda," I told her, "and after having enjoyed a swimming party with a number of young men and women, I cannot understand why you were so shocked at my appearance that day."

Balzo Maro laughed. "There is quite a difference between swimming and running around the city of Orvis that way," she said, "but really it was not that which shocked me. It was your brown skin and your black hair. I didn't know what sort of wild creature you might be."

"Well, you know when I saw you running around in that fancy-dress costume in the middle of the day, I thought there might be something wrong with you."

"There is nothing fancy about this," she said. "All the girls wear the same thing. Don't you like it-don't you think it's pretty?"

"Very," I said. "But don't you tire of always wearing the same thing? Don't you sometimes long for a new costume."

Balzo Maro shook her head. "It is war," she said: the universal answer to almost everything on Poloda.

"We may do our hair as we please," said Harkas Yamoda, "and that is something."

"I suppose you have hairdressers who are constantly inventing new styles," I said.

Yamoda laughed. "Nearly a hundred years ago," she said, "the hairdressers, the cosmeticians, and the beauticians went into the field to work for Unis. What we do, we do ourselves."

"You all work, don't you?" I asked.

"Yes," said Balzo Maro, "we work that we may release men for men's work in the fighting service and the Labour Corps."

I could not but wonder what American women would do if the Nazis succeeded in bringing total war to their world. I think that they would arise to the emergency just as courageously as have the women of Unis, but it might be a little galling to them at first to wear the same indestructible costume from the time they got their growth until they were married; a costume that, like Balzo Maro's, as she told me, might be as much as fifty years old, and which had been sold and re– sold time and time again as each wearer had no further use for it. And then, when they were married, to wear a similar, destructible silver costume for the rest of their lives, or until their husbands were killed in battle, when they would change to purple. Doubtless, Irene, Hattie Carnegie, Valentina, and Adrian, would all commit suicide, along with Max Factor, Perc Westmore, and Elizabeth Arden. It was rather a strain on my imagination to visualize Elizabeth Arden hoeing potatoes.

"You have been here several months now," said Harkas Don; "how do you like our world by this time?"

"I don't have to tell you that I like the people who live in it," I replied. "Your courage and morale are magnificent. I like your form of government, too. It is simple and efficient, and seems to have developed a unified people without criminals or traitors."

Harkas Don shook his head. "You are wrong there," he said. "We have criminals and we have traitors, but unquestionably far fewer than in the world of a hundred years ago, when there was a great deal of political corruption, which always goes hand in hand with crimes of other kinds. There are many Kapar sympathizers among us, and some full-blooded Kapars who have been sent here to direct espionage and sabotage. They are constantly dropping down by night with parachutes. We get most of them, but not all. You see, they are a mixed race and there are many with white skins and blond hair who might easily pass for Unisans."

"And there are some with black hair, too," said Harkas Yamoda, as she looked at me meaningly, but softened it with a smile.

"It's strange I was not taken for a Kapar, then, and destroyed," I said.

"It was your dark skin that saved you," said Harkas Don, "and the fact that you unquestionably understood no language on Poloda. You see, they made some tests, of which you were not aware because you did not understand any of the languages. Had you, you could not have helped but show some reaction."

Later, while we were eating the noonday meal, I remarked that for complete war between nations possessing possibly millions of fighting ships, the attacks of the Kapars since I had been in Unis had not seemed very severe.

"We have lulls like this occasionally," said Harkas Don. "It is as though both sides became simultaneously tired of war, but one never can tell when it will break out again in all its fury."

He scarcely had ceased speaking when there came a single, high-pitched shrieking note from the loudspeakers that are installed the length and breadth of the underground city. Harkas Don rose. "There it is now," he said. "The general alarm. You will see war now, Tangor, my friend. Come."

We hurried to the car, and the girls came with us to bring the car back after they had delivered us to our stations.

Hundreds of ramps lead to the surface from the underground airdromes of Orvis, and from their camouflaged openings at the surface planes zoom out and up at the rate of twenty a minute, one every three seconds, like winged termites emerging from a wooden beam.

I was flying a ship in a squadron of pursuit planes. It was armed with four guns. One I fired through the propeller shaft, there were two in an after cockpit, which could be swung in any direction, and a fourth which fired down through the bottom of the fuselage.

As I zoomed out into the open the sky was already black with our ships. The squadrons were forming quickly and streaking away toward the southwest, to meet the Kapars who would be coming in from that direction. And presently I saw them, like a black mass of gnats miles away.

Chapter Six

OF COURSE, at the time that I had been killed in our little war down on Earth, there had not been a great deal of aerial activity; I mean, no great mass flights. I know there was talk that either side might send over hundreds of ships in a single flight, and hundreds of ships seemed a lot of ships; but this day, as I followed my squadron commander into battle, there were more than ten thou-sand ships visible in the sky; and this was only the first wave. We were climbing steadily at terrific speed in an effort to get above the Kapars, and they were doing the same. We made contact about twelve miles above the ground, and the battle soon after developed into a multitude of individual dog-fights, though both sides tried to keep some semblance of formation.

The atmosphere of Poloda rises about one hundred miles above the planet, and one can fly up to an altitude of about fifteen miles without needing an oxygen tank.

In a few minutes I became separated from my squadron and found myself engaged with three light Kapar combat planes. Ships were falling all around us, like dead leaves in an autumn storm; and so crowded was the sky with fighting ships that much of my attention had to be concentrated upon avoiding collisions; but I succeeded in manoeuvring into a commanding position and had the satisfaction of seeing one of the Kapars roll over and plummet toward the ground. The other two were now at a disadvantage, as I was still above them and they turned tail and started for home. My ship was very much faster than one of theirs, and I soon overhauled the laggard and shot him down, too.

I could not but recall my last engagement, when I shot down two of three Messerschmitts before being shot down myself; and I wondered if this were to be a repetition of that adventure-was I to die a second time?

I chased the remaining Kapar out over the enormous bay that indents the west coast of Unis. It is called the Bay of Hagar . It is really a gulf for it is fully twelve hundred miles long. An enormous island at its mouth has been built up with the earth excavated from the underground workings of Unis, pumped there through a pipe that you could drive an automobile through. It was between the coast and this island that I got on the tail of this last Kapar. One gunner was hanging dead over the edge of the cockpit, but the other was working his gun. Above the barking of my own gun I could hear his bullets screaming past me; and why I wasn't hit I shall never know, unless it was that that Kapar was Poloda's worst marksman.

Evidently I wasn't much better, but finally I saw him slump down into the cockpit; and then beyond his ship I saw another wave of Kapar flyers coming, and I felt that it was a good time to get away from there. The Kapar pilot that I had been pursuing must have seen the new wave at the same time that I did, for he turned immediately after I had turned and pursued me. And now my engine began to give trouble; it must have been hit by the last spurt from the dead gunner's piece. The Kapar was overhauling me, and he was getting in range, but there was no answering fire from the gunners in my after cockpit. I glanced back to find that they were both dead.

Now I was in a fix, absolutely defenceless against the ship pulling up behind me. I figured I might pull a fast one on him; so I banked steeply and dived beneath him; then I banked again and came up under his tail with my gun bearing on his belly. I was firing bullets into him when he dived to escape me, but he never came out of that dive.

To the west the sky was black with Kapar ships. In a minute they would be upon me; it was at that moment that my engine gave up the ghost. Ten or eleven miles below me was the coast of Unis. A thousand miles to the northeast was Orvis. I might have glided 175 or 180 miles toward the city, but the Kapars would long since have been over me and some of their ships would have been detached to come down and put an end to me. As they might already have sighted me, I put the ship into a spin in the hope of misleading them into thinking I had been shot down. I spun down for a short distance and then went into a straight dive, and I can tell you that spinning and diving for ten or eleven miles is an experience.

I brought the ship down between the coast and a range of mountains, and no Kapar followed me. As I climbed out of the pilot's cockpit, Bantor Han, the third gunner, emerged from the ship.

"Nice work," he said, "we got all three of them."

"We had a bit of luck," I said, "and now we've got a long walk to Orvis."

"We'll never see Orvis again," said the gunner.

"What do you mean?" I demanded.

"This coast has been right in the path of Kapar flights for a hundred years. Where we are standing was once one of the largest cities of Unis, a great seaport. Can you find a stick or stone of it now? And for two or three hundred miles inland it is the same; nothing but bomb craters."

"But are there no cities in this part of Unis?" I asked.

"There are some farther south. The nearest is about a thousand miles from here, and on the other side of this range of mountains. There are cities far to the north, and cities east of Orvis; but it has never been practical to build even underground cities directly in the path of the Kapar flights, while there are other sections less affected."

"Well," I said, "I am not going to give up so easily. I will at least try to get to Orvis or some other city. Suppose we try for the one on the other side of these mountains. At least we won't be in the path of the Kapars every time they come over."

Bantor Han shook his head again. "Those mountains are full of wild beasts," he said. "There was a very large collection of wild animals in the city of Hagar when the war broke out over a hundred years ago. Many of them were killed in the first bombing of the city; but all their barriers were broken down, and the survivors escaped. For a hundred years they have ranged these mountains and they have multiplied. The inhabitants of Polan, this city you wish to try to reach, scarcely dare stick their heads above-ground because of them. No," he continued, "we have no complaint-to make. You and I will die here, and that will mean that we have lost four men and one pursuit plane to their three light combat ships and, possibly, twenty men. It is a mighty good day's work, Tangor, and you should be proud."

"That is what I call patriotism and loyalty," I said; "but I can be just as patriotic and loyal alive as dead, and I don't intend even to think of giving up yet. If we are going to die anyway, I can see no advantage in sitting here and starving to death."

Bantor Han shrugged. "That suits me," he said. "I thought I was as good as dead when you tackled those three combat planes, and the chances are that I should have been killed in my next engagement. I have been too lucky; so, if you prefer to go and look for death instead of waiting for it to come to you, I'll trot along with you."

So Bantor Han and I took the weapons and ammunition of our dead comrades and entered the Mountains of Loras.

I was amazed by the beauty of these mountains after we entered them. We were about eight or nine hundred miles north of the Equator and the climate was similar to the south temperate zone of Earth in summertime. Everything was green and beautiful, with a profusion of the strange trees and plants and flowers which are so like those of Earth, and yet so unlike. I had been cooped up for so long in the underground city of Orvis that I felt like a boy lust released from a schoolroom for a long vacation. But Bantor Han was uneasy. "Of course, I was born here in Unis," he said, "but being on the surface like this is to me like being in a strange world, for I have spent practically all of my life either underground or high up in the air."

"Don't you think that this is beautiful?" I asked him.

"Yes," he said, "I suppose it is, but it is a little bewildering; there is so much of it. There is a feeling of rest, and quiet, and security down there in underground Orvis; and I am always glad to get back to it after a flight."

I suppose that was the result of living underground for generations, and that Bantor Han had developed a complex the exact opposite of claustrophobia. Possibly it has a name, but if it has I never heard it. There were streams in the mountains, and little lakes where we saw fish playing, and the first animal that we saw appeared to be some sort of an antelope. It was armed with long, sharp horns, and looked something like an addax. It was standing with its forefeet in shallow water at the edge of a lake, drinking, when we came upon it; and as it was up-wind from us it did not catch our scent. When I saw it I drew Bantor Han into the concealment of some bushes.

"There is food," I whispered, and Bantor Han nodded.

I took careful aim and brought the animal down with a single bullet through the heart. We were busy carving a few steaks from it when our attention was attracted by a most unpleasant growl. We looked up simultaneously.

"That's what I meant," said Bantor Han. "The mountains are full of creatures like that."

Like most of the animals that I have seen on Poloda, it did not differ greatly from those on Earth; that is, they all have four legs, and two eyes, and usually a tail. Some are covered with hair, some with wool, some with fur, and some are hairless. The Polodian horse has three– toed feet, and a little horn in the centre of his forehead. The cattle have no horns, nor are their hoofs cloven, and in fighting they bite and kick like an earthly horse. They are not horses and cows at all, but I call them by earthly names because of the purposes for which they are used. The horses are the saddle animals and beasts of burden, and occasionally are used for food. The cattle are definitely beef animals, and the cows give milk. The creature that was creeping toward us with menacing growls was built like a lion and striped like a zebra, and it was about the size of an African lion. I drew my pistol from its holster, but Bantor Han laid a hand upon my arm.

"Don't shoot it," he said, "you may make it angry. If we go away and leave this meat to it, it probably will not attack us."

"If you think I am going to leave our supper to that thing, you are very much mistaken," I said. I was amazed at Bantor Han! knew that he was no coward. He had an excellent record in the fighting service and was covered with decorations. But everything here on the ground was so new and strange to him. Put him twelve miles up in the air, or a hundred feet underground, and he wouldn't have backed down for man or beast.

I shook his hand off and took careful aim just as the creature charged, with a charge for all the world like an African lion. I let him have it straight in the heart-a stream of four or five bullets, and they almost tore him apart, for they were explosive bullets.

Civilized, cultured, as these Unisans are, they use both dumdum and exploding projectiles in their small arms. When I commented on the fact to one of them, he replied: "This is the complete war that the Kapars asked for."

"Well," exclaimed Bantor Han, "you did it, didn't you?" He seemed surprised that I had killed the beast.

We cooked and ate the antelope steaks, and left the rest where it lay, for we had no means of carrying any of it with us. We felt much refreshed, and I think that Bantor Han felt a little safer now that he had found that we were not going to be eaten up by the first carnivorous animal that we met.

It took us two days to cross through this mountain range. Fortunately for us, we had tackled it near its extreme northern end, where it was quite narrow and the mountains were little more than large hills. We had plenty to eat, and were only attacked twice more by dangerous animals, once by a huge creature that resembled a hyena, and again by the beast that I have named "the lion of Poloda." The two nights were the worst, because of the increased danger of prowling carnivora. The first we spent in a cave, and took turns standing watch, and the second night we slept in the open; but luck was with us and nothing attacked us.

As we came down out of a caсon on the east side of the mountains we saw that which brought us to a sudden stop-a Kapar plane not half a mile from us, on the edge of a little ravine that was a continuation of the caсon we were in. There were two men beside the plane, and they seemed to be digging in the ground.

"Two more Kapars for our bag, Bantor Han," I said.

"If we get them and destroy their plane, we can certainly afford to die," he said.

"You're always wanting to die," I said reproachfully. "I intend to live." He would have been surprised had he known I was already dead, and buried somewhere 548,000 light-years away! "And furthermore, Bantor Han," I added, "we are not going to destroy that plane; not if it will fly."

We dropped into the ravine and made our way down toward the Kapars. We were entirely concealed from above, and if we made any noise it was drowned out by the noise of the little brook running over its rocky bed.

When I thought we had gone far enough, I told Bantor Han to wait and then I clambered up the side of the ravine to reconnoitre. Sure enough, I had hit the nail right on the head. There were the two Kapars digging away, scarcely a hundred feet from me. I crouched down and beckoned Bantor Han to come up.

There is no chivalry in complete war, I can assure you. Those two Kapars didn't have a chance. They were both dead before they knew there was an enemy within a thousand miles. Then we went to see what they had been at, and found a box beside the hole which they had been excavating. It was a metal box with a waterproof top, and when we opened it we found that it contained two complete blue uniforms of the Unis Fighting Corps, together with helmets, boots, ammunition belts, daggers, and guns. There were also directions in the Kapar language for entering the city of Orvis and starting numerous fires on a certain night about a month later. Even the location of the buildings that might most easily be fired, and from which the fires would spread most rapidly, was given.

We put the box aboard the ship and climbed in.

"We'll never make it," said Bantor Han. "We're bound to be shot down."

"You're certainly determined to die, aren't you?" I said, as I started the engine and taxied for the takeoff.

Chapter Seven

I KNEW THAT THE SOUND-DETECTORS were already giving warning of the approach of a ship, and of a Kapar ship, too; for our ships are equipped with a secret device which permits the detectors to recognize them. The signal that it gives can be changed at will, and is changed every day, so that it really amounts to a countersign. Watchers must be on the alert for even a single ship, but I was positive that they would be looking up in the air; so I hugged the ground, flying at an elevation of little more than twenty feet.

Before we reached the mountains which surround Orvis, I saw a squadron of pursuit planes come over the summit.

"They are looking for us," I said to Bantor Han, who was in the after cockpit, "and I'm going right up where they can see us."

"You'll come down in a hurry," said Bantor Han.

"Now, listen," I said; "as soon as we get where you can distinguish the gunners and pilots and see that their uniforms are blue, you stand up and wave something, for if you can see the colour of their uniforms, they can see the colour of yours; and I don't believe they will shoot us down then."

"That's where you're mistaken," said Bantor Han; "lots of Kapars have tried to enter Orvis in uniforms taken from our dead pilots."

"Don't forget to stand up and wave," I said.

We were getting close now, and it was a tense moment. I could plainly see the blue uniforms of the gunners and the pilots; and they could certainly see Bantor Han's and mine, and with Bantor Han waving to them they must realize that here was something unusual.

Presently the Squadron Commander ordered his ships to take position above us; and then he commenced to circle us, coming closer and closer. He came so close at last that our wings almost touched.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"Bantor Han and Tangor," I replied, "in a captured Kapar ship."

I heard one of his gunners say: "Yes, that's Bantor Han. I know him well."

"Land just south of the city," said the Squadron Commander. "We'll escort you down; otherwise you'll be shot down.."

I signalled that I understood, and he said, "Follow me."

So we dropped down toward Orvis near the apex of a V-formation, and I can tell you I was mighty glad to pile out of that ship with a whole skin.

I told the Squadron Commander about what we had seen the two Kapars doing, and turned the box over to him. Then I went and reported to my own Squadron Commander.

"I never expected to see you again," he said. "What luck did you have?"

"Twenty-two Kapars and four ships," I replied.

He looked at me a bit sceptically. "All by yourself?"

"There were three in my crew," I said. "I lost two of them, and my ship."

"The balance is still very much in your favour," he said. "Who else survived?"

"Bantor Han," I replied.

"A good man," he said. "Where is he?"

"Waiting outside, sir."

He summoned Bantor Han. "I understand you had very good luck," he said.

"Yes sir," said Bantor Han; "four ships and twenty-two men, though we lost two men and our ship."

"I shall recommend decorations for both of you," he said, and dismissed us. "You may take a day off," he said, "you have earned it; and you, too, Bantor Han."

I lost no time in setting off to the Harkases. Harkas Yamoda was in the garden, sitting staring at the ground and looking very sad; but when I spoke her name she leaped to her feet and came running toward me, laughing almost hysterically. She seized me by both arms.

"Oh, Tangor," she cried, "you did not come back, and we were sure that you had been shot down. The last that anyone saw of you, you were fighting three Kapar combat planes alone."

"Harkas Don," I asked, "-he came back?"

"Yes; now we shall all be so thankful and so happy-until next time."

I had dinner with Yamoda and her father and mother, and after dinner Harkas Don came. He was as surprised and delighted as the others to see me.

"I didn't think you had a chance," he said. "When a man is gone three days, he is reported dead. You were very fortunate."

"How did the battle go, Harkas Don?" I asked.

"We thrashed them as usual," he said. "We have better ships, better pilots, better gunners, better guns, and I think that now we have more ships. I don't know why they keep on coming over. They sent over two waves of five thousand ships each this time, and we shot down at least five thousand of them. We lost a thousand ships and two thousand men. The others parachuted to safety."

"I don't see why they keep it up," I said. "I shouldn't think they'd be able to get men to fight when they know they are just going to their death for no good reason."

"They are afraid of their masters," replied Harkas Don, "and they have been regimented for so many years that they have no initiative and no individuality. Another reason is that they wish to eat. The leaders live like princes of old; the army officers live exceptionally well; and the soldiers get plenty to eat, such as it is. If they were not fighting men, they would be labourers, which, in Kapara, is the equivalent of being a slave. They get barely enough food to subsist upon and they work from sixteen to eighteen hours a day; yet their lot is infinitely better than that of the subjugated peoples, many of whom have been reduced to cannibalism."

"Let's talk of something pleasant," said Yamoda.

"I think I see something pleasant to talk about, coming," I said, nodding toward the entrance to the garden where we were sitting. It was Balzo Maro.

She came in with a brilliant smile, which I could see was forced. Harkas Don met her and took both her hands and pressed them, and Yamoda kissed her. I had never seen such demonstrations of affection before, for though those three people loved one another, and each knew it, they made no show of that love in front of others.

They evidently saw that I was puzzled, and Balzo Maro said, "My youngest brother died gloriously in the battle;" and after a pause she said: "It is war." I am not terribly emotional, but a lump came in my throat and tears to my eyes. These brave people! How they have suffered because of the greed for power, the vanity, and the hate of a man who died almost a hundred years ago!

They did not speak of Balzo Maro's loss again; they never would speak of it again. It is war.

"So you have tomorrow free," said Harkas Don. "Perhaps you are fortunate."

"Why?" I asked.

"Tomorrow we raid Kapara with twenty thousand ships," he said. "It is a reprisal raid."

"And then they will send over forty thousand ships in reprisal," said Harkas Yamoda; "and so it goes on forever."

"I shall not have a free day tomorrow," I said.

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Yamoda.

"I am going out with my squadron," I said. "I don't see why the commander didn't tell me."

"Because you have earned a day to yourself," said Harkas Don.

"Nevertheless, I am going," I said.

Chapter Eight

WE TOOK OFF THE NEXT MORNING just before dawn, thousands of planes of all descriptions. We were to fly at an altitude of twelve miles, and as we gained it, four of Omos' eleven planets were visible in the heavens, the nearest less than six hundred thousand miles away. It was a gorgeous sight indeed. Around Omos, the sun of this system, revolve eleven planets, each approximately the size of our Earth. They are spaced almost exactly equi-distant from one another; the path of their orbits being a million miles from the centre of the sun, which is much smaller than the sun of our own solar system. An atmospheric belt seventy-two hundred miles in diameter revolves with the planets in the same orbit, thus connecting the planets by an air lane which offers the suggestion of possible inter-planetary travel; this Harkas Yen told me might have been achieved long since had it not been for the war.

Ever since I came to Poloda my imagination has been intrigued by thoughts of the possibilities inherent in a visit to these other planets, where conditions almost identical with those on Poloda must exist. On these other planets there may be, and probably are, animal and plant life not dissimilar from our own, but which there is little likelihood that we shall ever see while complete war is maintained upon Poloda.

I had a long flight ahead of me, and speculating on inter-planetary travel helped to pass the time away. Kapara lies on the continent of Epris, and Ergos, the capital of Kapara, is some eleven thousand miles from Orvis; and as our slowest planes have a speed of five hundred miles an hour, we were due over Ergos a couple of hours before dawn of the following day. As all three of my gunners are relief pilots, we relieved each other every four hours. Bantor Han was not with me on this flight, and I had three men with whom I had not previously flown. However, like all of the men of the fighting forces of Unis, they were efficient and dependable.

After crossing the coastline of Unis we flew three thousand and five hundred miles over the great Karagan Ocean, which extends for eighty– five hundred miles from the northern continent of Karis to the southernmost tip of Unis, where the continents of Epris and Unis almost meet.

At an altitude of twelve miles there is not much to see but atmosphere. Occasional cloud banks floated beneath us, and between them we could see the blue ocean, scintillating in the sunlight, looking almost as smooth as a millpond; but the scintillation told us that high seas were running.

About noon we sighted the shore of Epris ; and shortly after, a wave of Kapar planes came to meet us. There were not more than a thousand of them in this wave; and we drove them back, destroying about half of them, before a second and much larger wave attacked us. The fighting was furious, but most of our bombers got through. Our squadron was escorting one of the heavy bombers, and we were constantly engaged in fighting off enemy attack planes. My plane was engaged in three dog– fights within half an hour, and I was fortunate to come through with the loss of only one man, one of the gunners in the after cockpit. After each fight I had to open her up wide and overtake the bomber and her convoy.

The cruising speed of these pursuit ships is around five hundred miles an hour, but they have a top speed of almost six hundred miles. The bombers cruise at about five hundred, with a top speed around five hundred and fifty.

Of the two thousand light and heavy bombers that started out with the fleet on this raid, about eighteen hundred got through to Ergos; and there, believe me, the real fighting commenced. Thousands upon thousands of Kapar planes soared into the air, and our fleet was augmented by the arrival of the survivors of the dogfights.

As the bombers unloaded their heavy bombs we could first see the flames of the explosions and then, after what seemed a long while, the sound of the detonation would come to us from twelve miles below. Ships were falling all about us, ours and the Kapars. Bullets screamed about us, and it was during this phase of the engagement that I lost my remaining after cockpit gunner.

Suddenly the Kapar fleet disappeared, and then the anti-aircraft guns opened up on us. Like the antiaircraft guns of Unis, they fire a thousand-pound shell twelve or fifteen reties up into the air, and the burst scatters fragments of steel for five hundred yards in all directions. Other shells contain wire nets and small parachutes, which support the nets in the air to entangle and foul propellers.

After unloading our bombs, some seven or eight thousand tons of them, upon an area of two hundred square miles over and around Ergos, we started for home, circling to the east and then to the north, which would bring us in over the southernmost tip of Unis. I had two dead men in the after cockpit; and I hadn't been able to raise the gunner in the belly of the ship for some time.

As we circled over the eastern tip of Epris, my motor failed entirely, and there was nothing for me to do but come down. Another hour and I would have been within gliding distance of the tip of Unis, or one of the three islands which are an extension of this tip, at the southern end of the Karagan Ocean .

The crews of many ships saw me gliding down for a landing, but no ship followed to succour me. It is one of the rules of the service that other ships and men must not be jeopardized to assist a pilot who is forced down in enemy country. The poor devil is just written off as a loss. I knew from my study of Polodan geography that I was beyond the southeastern boundary of Kapara, and over the country formerly known as Punos, one of the first to be subjugated by the Kapars over a hundred years before.

What the country was like I could only guess from rumours that are current in Unis, and which suggest that its people have been reduced to the status of wild beasts by years of persecution and starvation.

As I approached the ground I saw a mountainous country beneath me and two rivers which joined to form a very large river that emptied into a bay on the southern shoreline; but I found no people, no cities, and no indication of cultivated fields. Except along the river courses, where vegetation was discernible, the land appeared to be a vast wilderness. The whole terrain below me appeared pitted with ancient shell-craters, attesting the terrific bombardment to which it had been subjected in a bygone day.

I had about given up all hope of finding a level place on which to make a landing, when I discovered one in the mouth of a broad caсon, at the southern foot of a range of mountains.

As I was about to set the ship down I saw figures moving a short distance up the caсon. At first I could not make out what they were, for they dodged behind trees in an evident effort to conceal themselves from me; but when the ship came to rest they came out, a dozen men armed with spears and bows and arrows. They wore loincloths made of the skin of some animal, and they carried long knives in their belts. Their hair was matted and their bodies were filthy and terribly emaciated.

They crept toward me, taking advantage of whatever cover the terrain afforded; and as they came they fitted arrows to their bows.

Chapter Nine

THE ATTITUDE OF THE reception committee was not encouraging. It seemed to indicate that I was not a welcome guest. I knew that if I let them get within bow range, a flight of arrows was almost certain to get me; so the thing to do was keep them out of bow range. I stood up in the cockpit and levelled my pistol at them, and they immediately disappeared behind rocks and trees.

I wished very much to examine my engine and determine if it were possible for me to repair it, but I realized that as long as these men of Punos were around that would be impossible. I might go after them; but they had the advantage of cover and of knowing the terrain; and while I might get some of them, I could not get them all; and those that I did not get would come back, and they could certainly hang around until after dark and then rush me.

It looked as though I were in a pretty bad way, but I finally decided to get down and go after them and have it out. Just then one of them stuck his head up above a rock and called to me. He spoke in one of the five languages of Unis that I had learned.

"Are you a Unisan?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied.

"Then do not shoot," he said. "We will not harm you."

"If that is true," I said, "go away."

"We want to talk to you," he said. "We want to know how the war is going and when it will end."

"One of you may come down," I said, "but not more."

"I will come," he said, "but you need not fear us."

He came down toward me then, an old man with wrinkled skin and a huge abdomen, which his skinny legs seemed scarcely able to support. His grey hair was matted with twigs and dirt, and he had the few grey hairs about his chin which can note old age on Poloda.

"I knew you were from Unis when I saw your blue uniform," he said. "In olden times the people of Unis and the people of Punos were good friends. That has been handed down from father to son for many generations. When the Kapars first attacked us, the men of Unis gave us aid; but they, too, were unprepared; and before they had the strength to help us we were entirely subjugated, and all of Punos was overrun with Kapars. They flew their ships from our coastlines, and they set up great guns there; but after a while the men of Unis built great fleets and drove them out. Then, however, it was too late for our people."

"How do you live?" I asked.

"It is hard," he said. "The Kapars still come over occasionally, and if they find a cultivated field they bomb and destroy it. They fly low and shoot any people they see, which makes it difficult to raise crops in open country; so we have been driven into the mountains, where we live on fish and roots and whatever else we can find."

"Many years ago," he continued, "the Kapars kept an army stationed here, and before they were through they killed every living thing that they could find-animals, birds, men, women, and children. Only a few hundred Punosans hid themselves in the inaccessible fastnesses of this mountain range, and in the years that have passed we have killed off all the remaining game for food faster than it could propagate."

"You have no meat at all?" I asked.

"Only when a Kapar is forced down near us," he replied. "We hoped that you were a Kapar, but because you are a Unisan you are safe."

"But now that you are so helpless, why is it that the Kapars will not permit you to raise crops for food?"

"Because our ancestors resisted them when they invaded our country and that aroused the hatred upon which Kapars live. Because of this hatred they tried to exterminate us. Now they fear to let us get a start again, and if we were left alone there would be many of us in another hundred years; and once again we would constitute a menace to Kapara."

Harkas Yen had told me about Punos and I had also read something about the country in the history of Poloda. It had been inhabited by a virile and intelligent race of considerable culture. Its ships sailed the four great oceans of Poloda, carrying on commerce with the people of all the five continents. The central portion was a garden spot, supporting countless farms, where grazed countless herds of livestock; and along its coastline were its manufacturing cities and its fisheries. I looked at the poor old devil standing before me: this was what the warped, neurotic mind of one man could do to a happy and prosperous nation!

"Won't your ship fly?" he asked me.

"I don't know," I said. "I want to examine the motor and find out."

"You'd better let us push it into the caсon for you," he said. "It can be better hidden there from any Kapars who may fly over."

There was something about the poor old fellow that gave me confidence in him, and as the suggestion was a wise one, I accepted it. So he called his companions and they came down out of the caсon—eleven, dirty, scrawny, hopeless-looking creatures of all ages. They tried to smile at me, but I guess the smiling muscles of their ancestors had commenced to atrophy generations before.

They helped me push the ship into the caсon, where, beneath a large tree, it was pretty well hidden from above. I had forgotten the dead men aboard the ship; but one of the Punosans, climbing up on the wing, discovered the two in the after cockpit; and I knew that there must be another one in the belly of the ship. I shuddered as I thought what was passing through the creature's mind.

"There are dead men in the ship," he said to his fellows; and the old man, who was the leader, climbed up on the wing and looked; then he turned to me.

"Shall we bury your friends for you?" he asked, and a weight of fear and sorrow was lifted from my shoulders.

They helped me remove the cartridge belts and uniforms from the bodies of my friends and then they scooped out shallow graves with their knives and their hands, and laid the three bodies in them and covered them again.

When these sad and simple rites were ended, I started taking my engine down, the twelve Punosans hanging around and watching everything I did. They asked many questions about the progress of the war, but I could not encourage them to think that it would soon be over, or ever.

I found the damage that had been done to my engine, and I knew that I could make the necessary repairs, for we carried tools and spare parts; but it was getting late and I could not complete the repairs until the following day.

The old man realized this and asked me if I would come to their village and spend the night there.

I could have slept in the ship, but purely out of curiosity I decided to accept his invitation.

Before we started for his village he touched me timidly on the arm. "May we have the guns and ammunition of your dead friends?" he asked. "If we had them, we might kill some more Kapars."

"Do you know how to use them?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "we have found them on the bodies of Kapars who crashed here, and those whom we killed, but we have used up all the ammunition."

I followed them up the caсon and then along a narrow, precipitous trail that led to a tiny mesa on the shoulder of a towering peak. A waterfall tumbled from the cliff above into a little lake at its foot, and from there a mountain stream wandered across the mesa to leap over the edge of another cliff a mile away. Trees grew along one side of the stream and up to the foot of the cliff, and among these trees the village was hidden from the eyes of roving pilots.

Hide! Hide! Hide! A world in hiding! It seemed difficult to imagine that anyone had ever walked freely in the sunlight on the surface of Poloda without being ready to dodge beneath a tree, or into a hole in the ground; and I wondered if my world would ever come to that. It didn't seem possible; but for thousands of years, up until a hundred years ago, no inhabitant of Poloda would have thought it possible here.

In the village were a hundred people, forty women, fifty men, and ten children, poor, scrawny little things, with spindly arms and legs and enormous bellies, the result of stuffing, themselves with grasses and twigs and leaves to assuage the pangs of hunger. When the villagers saw my escort coming in with me they ran forward hungrily, but when they recognized my blue uniform they stopped.

"He is our friend and guest," said the chief. "He has killed many Kapars, and he has given us guns and ammunition to kill more." And he showed them the weapons and the ammunition belts.

They crowded around me then and, like the twelve men, asked innumerable questions. They dwelt much upon the food we had in Unis, and were surprised to know that we had plenty to eat, for they thought that the Kapars must have devastated Unis as they had Punos.

The little children came timidly and felt of me. To them I was a man from another world. To me they were the indictment of a hideous regime.

The hunting party whose activities I had interrupted had brought in a couple of small rodents and a little bird. The women built a fire and put a large pot on it, in which there wvas a little water. Then they took the feathers off the bird and skinned the rodents, and threw them in without cleaning them. To this they added herbs and roots and handfuls of grass.

"The skins will make a little soup for the children for breakfast," an old woman explained to me as she laid them carefully aside.

They stirred the horrible mess with a piece of a small branch of a tree, and when it boiled the children clustered around to sniff the steam as it arose; and the adults formed a circle and stared at the pot hungrily.

I had never seen starving people before, and I prayed to God that I might never see any again unless I had the means wherewith to fill their bellies; and as I watched them I did not wonder that they ate Kapars, and I marvelled at the kindliness and strength of will that kept them from eating me. When those mothers looked at me I could imagine that they were thinking of me in terms of steaks and chops which they must forego although their children were starving.

In a community in which there were forty adult women there were only ten children, but I wondered how there could be any, infant mortality must certainly be high among a starving people. I could imagine that I was looking at the remnant of a race that would soon be extinct, and I thought that there must be something wrong with all the religions in the universe that such a thing could happen to these people while the Kapars lived and bred.

When they thought the mess in the pot was sufficiently cooked, little cups of clay, crudely burnt, were passed out, and the chief carefully measured out the contents of the pot with a large wooden ladle. When he came to me, I shook my head; and he looked offended.

"Is our fare too mean for you?" he asked.

"It is not that," I said. "I am well fed, and tomorrow I shall eat again. Here are starving men, and starving women, and, above all, starving children."

"Forgive me," he said. "You are a very kind man. The children shall have your share." Then he dipped out other cupful and divided it among the ten children, scarcely a mouthful apiece; but they were so grateful that once again the tears came to my eyes. I must be getting to be a regular softy; but before I came to Poloda I had never seen such sadness, such courage, such fortitude, or such suffering, as I have upon this poor war-torn planet.

Chapter Ten

NEXT MORNING THE WHOLE VILLAGE accompanied me down the cation to see me take off for Orvis. Three men went far in advance and when he got down into the cation one of them came running back to meet us. I could see that he was very much excited, and he was motioning to us to be silent.

"There is a Kapar at your ship," he said, in a whisper.

"Let me go ahead," I said to the chief. "There will probably be shooting."

"We should have brought the guns," he said. "Why did I not think of that?" And he sent three men scurrying back to get them.

I walked down the caсon until I came to the other two men who had gone ahead. They were hiding behind bushes and they motioned me to take cover, but I had no time for that; and instead I ran forward, and when I came in sight of the ship a man was just climbing up onto the wing. He was a Kapar all right, and I started firing as I ran toward him. I missed him, and he wheeled about and held both hands above his head in sign of surrender.

I kept him covered as I walked toward him, but as I got nearer I saw that he was unarmed.

"What are you doing there, Kapar?" I demanded.

He came toward me, his hands still above his head. "For the honour and glory of Unis," he said. "I am no Kapar." He removed his grey helmet, revealing a head of blond hair. But I had been told that there were some blond Kapars, and I was not to be taken in by any ruse.

"You'll have to do better than that," I said. "If you are a Unisan, you can prove it more convincingly than by showing a head of blond hair. Who are you, and from what city do you come?"

"I am Balzo Jan," he said, "and I come from the city of Orvis ."

Now Balzo Jan was the brother that Balzo Maro had said was shot down in battle. This might be he, but I was still unconvinced.

"How did you get here?" I demanded.

"I was shot down in battle about two hundred miles from here," he said. "We made a good landing and some Kapars who saw that we were evidently not killed came down to finish us off. There were four of them and three of us. We got all four of them, but not before my two companions were killed. Knowing that I was somewhere in Epris, and therefore in Kapar-dominated country, I took the uniform of one of the Kapars as a disguise."

"Why didn't you take his gun and ammunition, too?"

"Because we had all exhausted all our ammunition," he replied, "and guns without ammunition are only an extra burden to carry. I had killed the last Kapar with my last bullet."

"You may be all right," I said, "but I don't know. Can you tell me the name of some of your sister's friends?"

"Certainly," he said. "Her best friends are Harkas Yamoda and Harkas Don, daughter and son of Harkas Yen."

"I guess you're all right," I said. "There are a couple of blue uniforms in the after cockpit. Get into one of them at once, and then we'll go to work on the motor."

"Look," he cried, pointing beyond me, "some men are coming. They are going to attack us."

I turned to see my friendly hosts creeping toward us with shafts fitted to their bows.

"It is all right," I shouted to them, "this is a friend."

"If he is a friend of yours, then you must be a Kapar," replied the chief.

"He is no Kapar," I insisted; and then I turned and shouted to Balzo Jan to get into a blue uniform at once.

"Perhaps you have deceived us," shouted the chief. "How do we know that you are not a Kapar, after all?"

"Our children are hungry," screamed a woman farther back up the caсon. "Our children are hungry, we are hungry, and here are two Kapars."

It was commencing to look very serious. The men were creeping closer; they would soon be within bow range. I had put my pistol back into its holster after I had been convinced that Balzo Jan was no impostor, and I did not draw it as I walked forward to meet the chief.

"We are friends," I said. "You see, I am not afraid of you. Would I have given you the three guns and the ammunition had I been a Kapar? Would I have let that man back there live if I had not known that he was a Unisan?"

The chief shook his head. "That is right," he said. "You would not have given us the guns and ammunition had you been a Kapar. But how do you know this man is not a Kapar?" he added suspiciously.

"Because he is the brother of a friend of mine," I explained. "He was shot down behind the Kapar lines and he took the uniform from a Kapar he had killed to use as a disguise, because he knew that he was in Kapar country."

About this time Balzo Jan crawled out of the after cockpit dressed in the blue suit, boots, and helmet of a Unisan fighting man.

"Does he look like a Kapar?" I asked.

"No," the chief said. "You must forgive us. My people hate the Kapars, and they are hungry."

With Balzo Jan's help I had the engine repaired and we were ready to take off a little after noon; and when we rose into the air the starving villagers stood sad-eyed and mute, watching us fly away toward a land of plenty.

As we rose above the mountains that lay between us and the coast I saw three ships far to our left. They were flying in a south-westerly direction towards Kapara.

"I think they are Kapars," said Balzo Jan, who was far more familiar with the lines of Polodian ships than I, having spent most of his lifetime looking at them.

Even as we watched, the three ships turned in our direction. Whatever they were, they had sighted us and were coming for us.

If they were Unisans, we had nothing to fear; nor for that matter did we have anything to fear if they were Kapars, for my ship could out fly them by a hundred miles an hour. Had they been as fast as ours, they could have cut us off, for they were in the right position to do so. We had been making about four hundred miles an hour and now I opened the throttle wide, for I did not purpose taking any chances, as I felt that we wouldn't have a chance against three Kapars, with three or four guns apiece, while we only had two. I opened the throttle, but nothing happened. The engine didn't accelerate at all. I told Balzo Jan.

"We shall have to fight, then," he said, "and I wanted to get home and get a decent meal. I have had practically nothing to eat for three days."

I knew how Balzo Jan felt, for I had had nothing to eat myself for some time, and anyway I had had enough fighting for a while.

"They are Kapars all right," said Balzo Jan presently.

There was no doubt about that now; the black of their wings and fuselages was quite apparent, and we were just about going to meet them over the island off the southern tip of Unis. We were going to meet right over the last and largest of the three islands, which is called the Island of Despair, where are sent those confirmed criminals who are not to be destroyed, and those Unisans whose loyalty is suspected, but who cannot be convicted of treason.

I had been fiddling with the engine controls, trying to step up the speed a little, when the first burst of fire whistled about us. The leading ship was coming head-on toward us, firing only from her forward gun, when Balzo Jan sent a stream of explosive projectiles into her. I saw her propeller disappear then, and she started to glide toward the Island of Despair .

"That's the end of them," shouted Balzo Han.

Quite suddenly and unexpectedly my motor took hold again, and we immediately drew away from the other two ships, which Balzo Jan was spraying with gunfire.

We must have been hit fifty times, but the plastic of our fuselage and wings could withstand machine-gun fire, which could injure us only by a lucky hit of propeller or instrument-board. It is the heavier guns of combat planes and bombers that these fast, lightly armed pursuit planes have to fear.

"I hate to run from Kapars," I shouted back to Balzo Jan. "Shall we stay and have it out with them?"

"We have no right to throw away a ship and two men," he said, "in a hopeless fight."

Well, that was that. Balzo Jan knew the rules of the game better than I; so I opened the throttle wide and soon left the remaining Kapars far behind, and shortly after, they turned and resumed their flight toward Kapara.

There are two pilot seats and controls in the front cockpit, as well as the additional controls in the after cockpit. However, two men are seldom seated in the front cockpit, except for training purposes, as there is only one gun there and the Unisan military chiefs don't believe in wasting man power. However, the seat was there, and I asked Balzo Jan to come up and sit with me.

"If you see any more Kapars," I said, "you can go back to your gun."

"Do you know," he said, after he had crawled up into the forward cockpit and seated himself beside me, "that we have been so busy since you first discovered me climbing into your ship that I haven't had a chance to ask you who you are. I know a lot of men in the fighting service, but I don't recall ever having seen you before."

"My name is Tangor," I said.

"Oh," he said, "you're the man that my sister discovered without any clothes on after a raid several months ago."

"The same," I said, "and she is mourning you for dead. I saw her at the Harkases the night before we took off for this last raid."

"My sister would not mourn," he said proudly.

"Well, she was mourning inwardly," I replied, "and sometimes that's worse for a woman than letting herself go. I should think a good cry now and then would be a relief to the women of Poloda."

"I guess they used to cry," he said, "but they don't any more. If they cried every time they felt like crying, they'd be crying all the time; and they can't do that, you know, for there is work to do. It is war."

Chapter Eleven

IT IS WAR! That was the answer to everything. It governed their every activity, their every thought. From birth to death they knew nothing but war. Their every activity was directed at the one purpose of making their country more fit for war.

"I should think you would hate war," I said to Balzo Jan.

He looked at me in surprise. "Why?" he demanded. "What would we do with ourselves if there were no war?"

"But the women," I said. "What of them?"

"Yes," he replied, "it is hard on them. The men only have to die once, but the women have to suffer always. Yes; it is too bad, but I can't imagine what we would do without war."

"You could come out in the sunshine, for one thing," I said, "and you could rebuild your cities, and devote some of your time to cultural pursuits and to pleasure. You could trade with other countries, and you could travel to them; and wherever you went you would find friends."

Balzo Jan looked at me sceptically. "Is that true in your world?" he asked.

"Well, not when I was last there," I had to admit, "but then, several of the countries were at war."

"You see," he said, "war is the natural state of man, no matter what world he lives in."

We were over the southern tip of Unis now. The majestic peaks of the Mountains of Loras were at our left, and at our right the great river which rises in the mountains south of Orvis emptied into the sea, fifteen hundred miles from its source. It is a mighty river, comparable, I should say, to the Amazon. The country below us was beautiful in the extreme, showing few effects of the war, for they have many buried cities here whose Labour Corps immediately erase all signs of the devastating effects of Kapar raids as soon as the enemy has departed.

Green fields stretched below us in every direction, attesting the fact that agriculture on the surface still held its own against the Kapars on this part of the continent; but I knew at what a price they raised their crops with low flying Kapar planes strafing them with persistent regularity, and bombers blasting great craters in their fields.

But from high above this looked like heaven to me, and I wondered if it were indeed for me the locale of that after-life which so many millions of the people of my world hope and pray for. It seemed to me entirely possible that my transition to another world was not unique, for in all the vast universe there must be billions of planets, so far removed from the ken of Earth men that their existence can never be known to them.

I mentioned to Balzo Jan what was passing in my mind and he said, "Our people who lived before the war had a religion, which taught that those who died moved to Uvala, one of the planets of our solar system which lies upon the other side of Omos. But now we have no time for religion; we have time only for war."

"You don't believe in a life hereafter, then?" I asked. "Well, I didn't either, once, but I do now."

"Is it really true that you come from another world?" he asked. "Is it true that you died there and came to life again on Poloda?"

"I only know that I was shot down by an enemy plane behind the enemy lines," I replied. "A machine-gun bullet struck me in the heart, and during the fifteen seconds that consciousness remained I remember losing control of my ship and going into a spin. A man with a bullet in his heart, spinning toward the ground from an altitude of ten thousand feet, must have died."

"I should think so," said Balzo Jan, "but how did you get here?"

I shrugged. "I don't know any more about it than you do," I replied. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream from which I must awake."

He shook his head. "Maybe you are dreaming," he said, "but I am not. I am here, and I know that you are here with me. You may be a dead man, but you seem very much alive to me. How did it seem to die?"

"Not bad at all," I replied. "I only had fifteen seconds to think about it, but I know that I died happy because I had shot down two of the three enemy planes that had attacked me."

"Life is peculiar," he said. "Because you were shot down in a war on a world countless millions of miles away from Poloda, I am now alive and safe. I can't help but be glad, my friend, that you were shot down."

It was a quiet day over Unis; we reached the mountains south of Orvis without sighting a single enemy plane, and after crossing the mountains I dropped to within about a hundred feet of the ground. I like to fly low when I can; it breaks the monotony of long flights, and we ordinarily fly at such tremendous altitudes here that we see very little of the terrain.

As we dropped down I saw something golden glinting in the sunshine below us. "What do you suppose that is down there. I said to Balzo Jan, banking so that he could see it.

"I don't know," he said, "but it looks amazingly like a woman lying there; but what a woman would be lying out in the open for, so far from the city, I can't imagine."

"I am going down to see," I said.

I spiralled down and as we circled over the figure I saw that it was indeed a woman, lying upon her face-an unmarried woman, I knew, for her suit was of golden sequins. She lay very still, as though she were asleep.

I put the plane down and taxied up close to her. "You stay at the controls, Balzo Jan," I said, for one must always think of Kapars and be ready to run, or fight, or hide.

I dropped to the ground and walked over to the still form. The girl's helmet had fallen off, and her mass of copper red hair spread over and hid that part of her face which was turned up. I knelt beside her and turned her over, and as I saw her face my heart leaped to my throat-it was Harkas Yamoda, little Harkas Yamoda, crushed and broken.

There was blood on her lips, and I thought she was dead; but I didn't want to believe it, I wouldn't believe it; and so I placed my ear against her breast and listened-and faintly I heard the beating of her heart. I lifted the little form in my arms, then, and carried it to the ship.

"It is Harkas Yamoda," I said to Balzo Jan, as I passed her up to him; "she is still alive. Put her in the after cockpit." Then I Sprang to the wing of the ship and told Balzo Jan to take the controls and bring the ship in.

I got in with Harkas Yamoda and held her in my arms as gently as I could, while the ship bumped over the rough ground during the take– off. I wiped the blood from her lips; that was all I could do, that and pray. I had not prayed before since I was a little boy at my mother's knee. I remember wondering, if there were a God, if He could hear me, so very far away, for I had always thought of God as being somewhere up in our own heaven.

It was only a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes before Balzo Jan set the ship down outside of Orvis and taxied down the ramp to our underground airdrome.

There are always fleets of ambulances at every airdrome, for there are always wounded men in many of the ships that come in. Also, close by is an emergency hospital; and to this I drove with Harkas Yamoda, after telling Balzo Jan to notify her father.

The surgeons worked over her while I paced the floor outside. They worked very quickly and she had only just been carried to her room when Harkas Yen, and Don, and Yamoda's mother came. The four of us stood around that silent, unconscious little form lying so quietly on her cot.

"Have you any idea how it happened?" I asked Harkas Yen.

He nodded. "Yes," he said, "she was on an outing with some of her friends when they were attacked by Kapars. The men put up a good fight and several of them were killed. The girls ran, but a Kapar overtook Yamoda and carried her away."

"She must have jumped from the plane," said Don.

"Planes!" said Yamoda's mother bitterly. "Planes! The curse of the world. History tells us that when they were first perfected and men first flew in the air over Poloda, there was great rejoicing, and the men who perfected them were heaped with honours. They were to bring the peoples of the world closer together. They were to break down international barriers of fear and suspicion. They were to revolutionize society by bringing all people together, to make a better and happier world in which to live. Through them civilization was to be advanced hundreds of years; and what have they done? They have blasted civilization from nine-tenths of Poloda and stopped its advance in the other tenth. They have destroyed a hundred thousand cities and millions of people, and they have driven those who have survived underground, to live the lives of burrowing rodents. Planes! The curse of all times. I hate them. They have taken thirteen of my sons, and now they have taken my daughter."

"It is war," said Harkas Yen, with bowed head.

"This is not war," cried the sad-faced woman, pointing at the still form upon the cot.

"No," I said, "this is not war-it is rapine and murder."

"What else can you expect of the Kapar's?" demanded Harkas Don. "But for this they shall pay.

"For this they shall pay," I, too, swore.

Then the surgeons came in and we looked at them questioningly. The senior surgeon put his hand on the shoulder of Yamoda's mother and smiled. "She will live," he said. "She was not badly injured."

Yes; planes used in war are a curse to humankind, but thanks to a plane Balzo Maro's brother had been returned to her, and little Yamoda would live.

Listen! The sirens are sounding the general alarm.