Title: The Hairy Ones
Author: Wells, Basil
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Hairy Ones" ***


                            THE HAIRY ONES

                            by BASIL WELLS

               Marooned on a world within a world, aided
             by a slim girl and an old warrior, Patrolman
                 Sisko Rolf was fighting his greatest
                 battle--to bring life to dying Mars.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Winter 1944.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


"The outlaw ships are attacking!" Old Garmon Nash's harsh voice snapped
like a thunderclap in the cramped rocket flyer's cabin. "Five or six of
them. Cut the searchlights!"

Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket
jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio
beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in
order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked
series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the
reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too
cramped--disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away.

"Trapped us neatly," Rolf said through clenched teeth. "Tolled into
their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We
can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than....
We'll down some of them, though."

"Right!" That was old Garmon Nash, his fellow patrolman aboard the
Planet Patrol ship as he swung the deadly slimness of his rocket
blast's barrel around to center on the fiery jets that betrayed the
approaching outlaw flyers.

Three times he fired the gun, the rocket projectiles blasting off with
their invisible preliminary jets of gas, and three times an enemy craft
flared up into an intolerable torch of flame before they realized the
patrol ship had fired upon them. Then a barrage of enemy rocket shells
exploded into life above and before them.

Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a
looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin
of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him.
In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal,
and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's
meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail.

Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf
found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and
snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked
momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved
into an inferno of flame.

The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself
being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it
seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and
feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew
that he lay crushed against a rocky wall.

       *       *       *       *       *

Much later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to
rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came
to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the
sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.

There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and
heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had
blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash
must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a
deep crevice.

In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above
mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and
even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles
and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which
they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of
canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the
higher levels would spell death.

Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an
Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in
his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial
caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at
least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby
the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the
water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden.

The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the
emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the
oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy
flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the
pit.

He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an
empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the
gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged
flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun
glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor
stretching out ahead.

       *       *       *       *       *

Light! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white
light reached his eyes Rolf did not know--it had seemed an eternity of
endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel.

Rolf capped the solar torch. No use wasting the captive energy
needlessly he reasoned. And he loosened the expoder in its holster as
he moved carefully forward. The outlaw headquarters might be close
ahead, headquarters where renegade Frogs, Venusians from the southern
sunken marshes of Mars, and Earthmen from dusty North Mars, concealed
their precious hoard of water from the thirsty colonists of North Mars.

"They may have found the sunken seas of Mars," thought Rolf as he moved
alertly forward, "water that would give the mining domes new life." His
fists clenched dryly. "Water that should be free!"

Then the light brightened before him as he rounded a shouldering wall
of smoothly trimmed stone, and the floor fell away beneath his feet!
He found himself shooting downward into a vast void that glowed softly
with a mysterious all-pervading radiance.

His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles
below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him
there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared
majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which
his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through
the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.

It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the
nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk
of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!

The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny
world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half
alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As
the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the
great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided
the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of
the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was
content to let it move in that direction--from the heights of the wall
he could scout out the country beyond.

The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner
had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free
in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged
at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a
jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled
crevices sprouted green life.

So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the
other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into
great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of
sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite
loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him.

A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped
through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the
spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up
mass of stone blocks that was the wall.

Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the
rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand
dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There
was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged
bushes.

"Down, Altha," a deeper voice rumbled from above, "it's one of the
Enemy."

The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and
then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs
among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern
floor might be their headquarters.

"But, Mark," the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, "he
wears the uniform of a patrolman."

"May be a trick." The deep voice was doubtful. "You know their leader,
Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and
kidnap you."

The girl's voice was merry. "Come on Spider-legs," she said.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision
that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was,
with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but
beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm
flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was
sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down.

"Hello, patrol-a-man," she said shyly.

An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side.
"Altha," he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a
long-fingered hand, "why do you never listen to me? I promised your
father I'd look after you." He hitched at his tattered skin robe.

The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump
faster. "This Mark Tanner of mine," she explained to the patrolman,
"is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the
minds of others."

She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. "Do not be ashamed,"
she said. "I am not angry that you think I am--well, not too
unattractive."

Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his
grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there
had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited
telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded.

"That is better, perhaps." The girl's face was demure. "And now perhaps
you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk."

"Sorry," said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to
their side. "I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the
Hairy People."

"She one of them?" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch.

"Mother was." Mark Tanner's voice was louder. "Father was Wayne Stark.
Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant."

"Sure." Rolf nodded. "Lost in equatorial wastelands--uh, about twenty
years ago--2053, I believe."

"Only we were not lost on the surface," explained Tanner, his booming
voice much too powerful for his reedy body, "Wayne Stark was searching
for the lost seas of Mars. Traced them underground. Found them too." He
paused to look nervously out across the blasted wasteland.

"We ran out of fuel here on Lomihi," he finished, "with the vanished
surface waters of Mars less than four miles beneath us."

Rolf followed the direction of the other's pale blue eyes. Overhead now
hung the bottom of the cavern. An almost circular island of pale yellow
lifted above the restless dark waters of a vast sea. Rolf realized with
a wrench of sudden fear that they actually hung head downward like
flies walking across a ceiling.

"There," roared Tanner's voice, "is one of the seas of Mars."

"One," repeated Rolf slowly. "You mean there are more?"

"Dozens of them," the older man's voice throbbed with helpless rage.
"Enough to make the face of Mars green again. Cavern after cavern lies
beyond this first one, their floors flooded with water."

Rolf felt new strength pump into his tired bruised muscles. Here lay
the salvation of Earth's thirsting colonies almost within reach. Once
he could lead the scientists of North Mars to this treasure trove of
water....

"Mark!" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve
and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved
gray bushes. "The Furry Women attack!"

       *       *       *       *       *

A hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as
they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of
the desert half of Lomihi.

"Enemies?" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely.

"Right." The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its
notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. "They cross the
Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They
take them for slaves."

"I must warn them." Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes
flamed.

"The outlaws may capture," warned Tanner. "They have taken over the
canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember."

"I will take the glider." Altha was on her feet, her body crouched
over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way
swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward
the ruins of ancient Aryk.

Tanner shrugged his shoulders. "What can I do? Altha has the blood
of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the
outlaws have turned her people against her."

Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the
barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier.
Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully.

"They will pass within a few feet!" he hissed.

"Right." Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. "Pray that the wind does
not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they
resemble."

Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those
gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by
calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer.

Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple
as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head
of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into
the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed
utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of
smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky
penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl.

"See!" Tanner's voice was muted. "Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!"

Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed
bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body
she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless
frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from
her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike
linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged
litter.

Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms
had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals
of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered
with a silky coat of reddish hair.

Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these
maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down
firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head.

"Not yet," he said. "When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut
off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts
who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two
races mingled they hate the Furry Ones."

A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the
indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow
winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred.
Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons
of the Hairy People.

They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders
at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into
the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.
Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.

Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came,
bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the
beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a
hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he
flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry
Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of
explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their
fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove
arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran
fearlessly into that rain of death.

[Illustration: _The expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist._]

Tanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. "Retreat!" he gasped.

The Furry Amazons swarmed up over the lower terraces of rocks, their
snaky heads thrust forward and their swords slashing. The two Earthmen
bounded up and backward to the next jumbled layer of giant blocks
behind them, their powerful earthly muscles negating Lomihi's feeble
gravity. Spears showered thick about them and then they dropped behind
the sheltering bulk of a rough square boulder.

"Now where?" Rolf snapped another burst of expoder needles at the furry
attackers as he asked.

"To the vaults beneath the Forbidden City," Mark Tanner cried. "None
but the Outcasts and we two have entered the streets of deserted Aryk."

The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and
went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into
the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive
needles at the Furry Ones and followed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Darkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's
shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders
and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his
neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky
floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard
a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence.

Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and
beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp.
Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock
dungeon rose above him.

Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the
desolate land of the Hairy People.

Tanner's finger pointed. "Altha!" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the
glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. "She had warned the
Hairy People, and now she returns."

"The weasel heads won't follow us here?" asked Rolf.

Tanner laughed. "Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much
for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls."

"Then how about telling me about this hanging world?"

"Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from
the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer
all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own."

Rolf laughed. "Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth."

"Right." Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's
flyer as he spoke. "Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off
the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became
a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the
surface wars.

"The Hairy People were the rulers," he went on, "and the Furry Ones
were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two
warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable
blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races."

"But," Rolf frowned thoughtfully, "what keeps Lomihi from crashing into
the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?"

"The island is the answer," said Tanner. "Somehow it blocks the force
of gravity--shields Lomihi from...." He caught his breath suddenly.

"The outlaws!" he cried. "They're after Altha."

Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail
wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble
of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see
the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer
wall of the rock chamber.

Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A
section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side.

"Let me follow," he said. "I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder."

The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then
suddenly thought better of it. "You're right," he agreed. "Help her if
you can. Your weapon is our only hope now."

Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.
The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out
over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below
him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies
glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out
wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.

He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl
had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed
near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made
him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket
flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven
caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of
limitless water again.

       *       *       *       *       *

A man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up
his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with
one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good.
There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's
comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the
first to fire--his was the element of surprise.

A score of feet lay between them, and suddenly the outlaw whirled
about. Rolf pressed the firing button; the expoder clicked over once
and the trimmer key jammed, and the doughy-faced Venusian swung up his
own long-barreled expoder!

Rolf snapped his weapon overhand at the Frog's hairless skull. The
fish-bellied alien ducked but his expoder swung off the target
momentarily. In that instant Rolf launched himself from the open
framework of the slowly diving glider, full upon the Venusian.

They went down, Rolf swinging his fist like a hammer. He felt the Frog
go limp and he loosed a relieved whistle. Now with a rocket flyer and
the guard's rifle expoder in his grasp the problem of escape from
the inner caverns was solved. He would rescue the girl, stop at the
Forbidden City for Mark Tanner, and blast off for the upper crust forty
miles and more overhead.

He knelt over the prostrate Venusian, using his belt and a strip torn
from his greenish tunic to bind the unconscious man. The knots were
not too tight, the man could free himself in the course of a few hours.
He shrugged his shoulders wearily and started to get up.

A foot scraped on stone behind him. He spun on bent knees and flung
himself fifty feet to the further side of the narrow gulch with the
same movement. Expoder needles splintered the rocks about him as he
dropped behind a sheltering rocky ledge, and he caught a glimpse of two
green-clad men dragging the bronze-haired body of the girl he had come
to save into the shelter of the flyer.

A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his
captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded
man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched
tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have
been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had
not blasted a vital spot in the man's body.

The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another
outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The
flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four
was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end
of the ship's squatty fuselage.

And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was
crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled
greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of
his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered
endlessly at his skull.

       *       *       *       *       *

This sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first
glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that
he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and
the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his
eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates
of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only
undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate.

Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the
controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips
twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned
as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not
bound--apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting
for the moment.

By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch
was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base
of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.

The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased.
The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats.
Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling
of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar
torch away from his body and freed it.

Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the
oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him.

"Fire!" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees
in the blanketing fog and looked forward.

One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached
for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily
smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally
propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could
drop to his belted expoder.

The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees
jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf
bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving
instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a
moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of
smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat
and squeezed hard.

The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long
trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and
now he felt victory slipping from his grasp.

He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he
could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with
the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant
he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat.
His eyes cleared.

He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the
arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky
air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face.
Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the
outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin.

No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung
himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship
rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer
burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air.

"Patrolman," the girl's voice was beside him. "We're safe!"

"Everything bongo?" Rolf wanted to know.

"Of course," she smiled crookedly.

"Glad of that." Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A
sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.

Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. "Do you know," she said, "even
yet I do not know your name."

Rolf grinned up at her. "Need to?" he asked.

The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. "Handier
than calling you _Shorty_ all the time," she quipped.

Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten
Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of
Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of
the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast
surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in
plenty again.

Rolf snorted. "Shorty," he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm
went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.





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