Corsairs of the Cosmos

4. Spaceward Ho!

When Star Pirate concluded his conversation and Commander Carew's image had faded from the groundglass viewscreen, the lithe redhead turned to order Phath to get the Jolly Roger ready for space, but the white-skinned Venusian (who had shamelessly eavesdropped on their talk) was already lugging provisions into the cargo hold of the trim little speedster, and grinning at the prospect of some action for a change. Star had his weird ancient stone hieroglyphics to keep him busy between adventures, but Phath had nothing else but cooking their meals to occupy himself with, and he sometimes missed the good old days when the two of them had lived a wild career of outlawry and space piracy.

Once aboard and vacuum-sealed, Phath took the controls.

"Where to, Chief? Callisto?" Star shook his head slowly.

"We'll go there later; right now, head for Mars," he said.

"Mars?"

"Mars."

The Venusian shrugged. "Okay, Mars it is." Power surged from the rocket engines and the trim little speedster, the Jolly Roger, lifted on a plume of flame from the twilit, jungle-clad surface of the tiny moonlet. Phath switched on the computer pilot, which alone had reflexes swift enough to read the radio signals flashed from secret beacons on the whirling meteors, and which alone could safely pilot their craft through the deathly storm of churning fragments of stone and metal.

Phath joined Star Pirate in the cozy little lounge and handed him a steaming mug of good Venusian coffee. "This guy. The Blur, has a ship that just plain disappears, right, chief?" he inquired.

"That seems to be the case," admitted the redhead. "But how—and why—nobody knows."

The Venusian shrugged. "Same way The Blur goes invisible, don't you think, Star?"

"It's not just a matter of becoming invisible, Phath," said the other, sipping the delicious hot brew. "Visible or un, nobody searches for a moving spaceship with eyes alone— they move too fast. But they can't elude magno-detectors. Spaceships have hulls, and hulls are made of steel—"

"Which show up on magno-detectors," grinned Phath. "Yon're right, chief: spaceships are made of steel ... excepting when they aren't.”

Star Pirate made a noncommittal sound. Both he and Phath knew that the Jolly Roger did not contain an atom of ferrous metal, but was constructed from an alloy of noble metals so as to be completely undetectable in space. It was one of the many secrets of Star Pirate, and one which had, back in the old wild, lawless days, enabled him to come and go as he pleased, thumbing his nose at the Patrol.

But there were limits, even to such a trick. The Jolly Roger was a tiny two-man scout, while the lean, black, wolfish cruiser of The Blur was capacious enough to house a crew of at least twelve, as counted by eyewitnesses aboard the Saturn Maid, and to carry half a billion credits worth of ingots of iridium, chromium and vanadium—

He paused, struck by a sudden thought. It was as if the first ray of light had just penetrated the darkness which had up till now clung about this mystery. And Star grinned, that impish, reckless grin of his that Phath knew so well.

"By Yakdar's brazen backside, you're on to something already, aren't you, chief!" yelped the Venusian admiringly.

"None of your heathen Swamp Country curses aboard my ship," said Star Pirate with a pretense of sternness. "I'm taking a nap in my cabin; let me know when we get to Mount Mern."

Mars loomed ahead, huge and ruddy and swollen in the viewscreens, when Star awoke. The surface of the sanguine sphere was laced with those uncanny markings which had reminded the terrene astronomers of an earlier century of canals, but which had proved eventually to be nothing more than oddly symmetrical patches of a rubbery-leafed shrub which distilled moisture from dust-dry soil, and was cultivated by the dwindling nomad tribes of Mars for precisely that purpose.

Their goal, Mount Mern, rose in a range of low, worn, age-old mountains In the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet—a region called Ygnarth, which was in the Drylands of Cotaspar. As the Jolly Roger came floating down on braking jets to the narrow stone plateau which served as a landing field, Star and Phath suited up. Although the air of Mars was breathable, even here on the top of one of her ancient mountains, it was thin and cold and dry, and an airmask was preferred by Earthmen to the dreaded disease, called drylung, which had claimed so many of the lives of early colonists from Earth.

They emerged from their craft and plodded across the bare stone plain, flogged on by icy gusts. Ahead loomed a strange domelike structure of dark stone. It was older than Babylon, that dome of darkness; older than Egypt. It had already been unthinkably ancient when the slim little red men set into place the cornerstone of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Perhaps it had been but newly built when the last of the dinosaurs died in the steaming fens of Earth, while the little mammalian ancestors of humauklnd stared on with awe.

Phath restrained a fastidious shudder. Home to him were the fetid bogs and bubbling fens of the Swamp Country of Venus ... this bitterly cold, desiccated, withered old world ran against his grain. He hated Mars, and everything about it—and especially the little old man they had come to see!

The portal of the incredibly ancient monastery was of wood, but of wood so ancient that it had petrified into a slab of grained and darksome stone. The symbol that portal bore was of a metal not unlike bronze, in the form of two crescents, linked back to back. The symbol was that of the Twin Moons of Mars, and this monastery was, or had been, ages agone, dedicated to the Moon Gods once worshipped by the ancient race whose nomadic remnants still lurked in the dust-choked ways of the immemorial, half-deserted cities of the Red Planet.

The man who answered the door, however, was no monk, and in no way to be thought of as a holy man. He was diminutive, little more than a dwarf, with a bald skull and an ugly, wrinkled, froglike face, which bore a perpetual scowl which seemed permanently carven into place on his wrinkled green-skinned face. It amused his warped sense of humor to wear the dusty, dark-red robes and scuffing sandals of the long-extinct order of Moon Priests.

"No missionaries, no salesmen, and no beggars," rasped the frogfaced green dwarf. Then, peering more sharply into Star's face which grinned behind the glastex faceplate of his air helmet, he blinked eyes like frozen chips of black ink and stepped back, opening the door more widely.

"Ah, lad, 'tis you! Come in, come in, and we'll share a drop of good wine to warm the blood! Welcome to yourself ... and even to that damp-skinned, web-footed swamp-wriggler you persist in keeping around, if only to draw the flies."

Phath flushed, one hand going to his gun butt, eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. "Why, you leatherskinned old dust-lizard, if I'd known it was you we were visiting, I'd have brought my sandmask to keep out the smell!"

"Is that so, you pasty-faced, pink-eyed scum of the Swamp Country!" snarled Dr. Zoar. "Why, I've half a mind to—"

"If you had half a mind, you'd move off this dried-out dustball of a planet, and find somewhere else more damp and soggy and liveable—"

"Boys, boys," sighed Star Pirate wearily. But it was no use: the feud between his Venusian sidekick and the aged Martian savant was of long standing, and the two seemed to thrive on insulting each other.