Destination: Saturn

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While reminiscing, the Wuj’s eyes had wandered about the gadget-cluttered hall, suddenly spotting Ajax and Emily busily at work unpacking a mad device that looked like an aluminum spaghetti dinner gone mad, all a tangle of glittering spikes and intertwined metallic loops and coils. While lifting this weird object carefully from its nest of plastic foam, Ajax had allowed the heavy machine to slip, with the result that one of the projecting spines struck him a resounding blow on the top of the shoulder.

With the result that his whole left arm fell off.

Emily, apparently undisturbed by this organic catastrophe, calmly set the bulky thing down, picked up the dismembered member and coolly handed it back to one-armed Ajax, who remained unflustered, simply popping the limb back in its shoulder socket. He stood there for a moment, grotesquely engaged in screwing his arm back in, for all the world as if it were nothing more personal than a section of sewer pipe.

The Wuj closed both eyes; opened the left one; closed it; opened the right one; closed it; then opened both. Nothing did any good. The ugly scene remained the same in all details: Ajax calmly standing there screwing on his arm, which revolved slowly about as he turned it, wrist flopping loosely. Once back on securely, he tested it once or twice, and calmly went back to his work.

The Wuj groaned.

While it is true that he knew, as yet, remarkably little about the ways of Earthfolk, this he definitely did know. Arms do not fall off Earthmen that easily. And, when and if a loose limb does happen to pop off and flop about on the floor somewhere, one does not take it as suavely as if it was no more serious than knocking a pencil off a table. In fact, remembering a time Ajax had banged his thumb with a hammer by sheer mischance, and recalling the anguished yelps and yawps his poor leader had voiced whilst hopping wildly about the room, wringing and waving the throbbing digit, the Wuj assumed (not incorrectly) that a certain amount of bodily discomfort might reasonably be expected to occur if one chanced to knock off an entire arm.

Thus it was with Earthfolk. Assuredly.

Thus, Ajax—or the individual below who certainly looked like Ajax—was neither truly Ajax, nor even another Earth-man pretending to be Ajax.

Nor was he (and here the faithful Wuj could of course, speak from a certain sum of personal experience) any member of the United Beings of Mars, all of whom were highly sensitive to physical pain, with the possible exception of the squirrel-beings. None of them within living memory of any Martian had ever been able to wake up long enough to report on the matter—the entire genus had hibernated forty-seven million years ago when the Red Planet began to cool towards its currently frosty state, and so completely had the highly advanced squirrel-beings perfected hibernation, they slept to this day.

The conclusion was inescapable: Ajax could only be a Saturnian. There was simply no one else in the entire Solar System! Not counting, of course, the cabbage-men of Deimos. No one ever bothered about them. The entire race had been simply vegetating for aeons.

Now, surely, Ajax had not always been a Saturnian. The Wuj was certain he would have noticed… come to think of it, he could not have been a Saturnian when he banged his thumb with the above-mentioned hammer. Therefore (the Wuj summed up the situation with the remarkable mathematical reasoning for which his kind were so widely noted in interplanetary circles)—therefore, he concluded, at some time after this hammer-banging episode, the real Ajax had been replaced with a fallacious Ajax.

And (obviously!) the same had happened in the case of Miss Emily Hackenschmidt. For, had that been the genuine original Emily Hackenschmidt down there, one might have expected a somewhat less phlegmatic and more violently emotional reaction from her when Ajax knocked off his entire arm.

The two humans below were not his master and mistress, but Saturnian spies.

Doubtless this explained the curious, un-Ajax-and-Emily-like behavior he had noticed in them ever since their abrupt return after leaving a few days ago.

Hence the real Ajax and Emily had never returned to the planetoid-ship, but were still back on Earth.

Hence… and here the Wuj’s heart sank and he began to realize the true enormity of what he had done!… hence when the two “impostors” whom he had threatened with legal punishment ‘phoned earlier in the day… they had been the real Emily and Ajax! The Wuj’s curious Martian mind reeled at the import of all this.

“Will my beloved leader forgive me,” he whispered sadly. “I called him a criminal impostor… alas, I have torn my web for good this time! The old family spinnery shall never see my face again, and all my eggs shall be scrambled for this unforgivable mistake! Should I ever dare set foot in the spinnery, the ancestral Web will vibrate with humiliation for my shame! Woe is me! Woe…”

For a moment, the Wuj gave way to unrestrained woe-saying, but the little spider-being was made of sterner stuff. Resolutely, he squared all eight shoulders, metaphorically speaking, and muttered in a determined little voice:

“The error is mine and mine alone. I should have known, now that I think of it, that no conceivable impostor—no matter how clever his disguise—could ever have guessed the code recognition-phrase my master and I arranged together in strict secrecy! Yet, of course, at the time he called, it seemed somehow to be a perfectly natural assumption… after all, the beloved leader and his nest-mate-to-be were right there in the next room all the time!”

The Wuj lifted his furry little chin doggedly. Through his carelessness, the kingdom of Ajaxia had fallen into grave times. It was almost within the hands (pseudopods, rather) of the Saturnian Empire, along with the scientific treasure trove of weapons it doubtless contained. And he and he alone was to blame for this fact.

Therefore, it was up to him to do something about it.

“Fear not, dear leader, the Wuj will defend the realm to the last drop of his faithful blood!” he said grimly.