Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/90

88 slave drivers who captured Dan."

"What did he say to them?"

"I'm not absolutely certain but I thought he told his men to throw Dan into something or another. It sounded like—but I'm sure I was mistaken."

"Spill it," Hawkins demanded. "What did it sound like?"

To which Sullivan replied, "The Martian word for silo."

"That's all I want to know," Hawkins exclaimed.

"You mean you know where Dan is?" Sullivan asked anxiously.

"Yes. And if he's still alive we'll have him out in two shakes of a meteor's tail. It's a good thing you heard that word 'silo, Hawkins added. "Otherwise we probably never would have found him."

In the fast waning twilight, he led the way to a remote corner of the wok farm. With his feet he explored the filth which strewed the ground, finally locating a slab of stone. This he quickly removed, disclosing a Cimerian pit from which a musty, putrid smell emanated.

"This is what the Martians call a silo," he whispered. "It's just a huge pit dug in the ground. They use it for storing wok fodder. It's a lucky break that I had the job of emptying this silo the day before yesterday. Otherwise I shouldn't have known about it."

But Sullivan wasn't listening. He was down on his knees, yelling into that horribly ominous pit: "Hi, Dan! Are you down there, Dan?" His words came rumbling back to him like a peal of distant thunder.

WthWith [sic] the reverberation was mingled a feeble cry which sounded as if it came from the very bowels of the planet. Sullivan couldn't understand the muffled words, but he recognized the voice of his pal.

"It's Dan, A. Z.! he rejoiced. "For God's sake, let us—"

But Captain Hawkins was already hurrying to the stables from which he promptly emerged carrying a coil of rope. A moment later they hauled Dan to safety. He was weak and haggard and he reeked to high heaven but otherwise seemed unharmed by his terrible ordeal.

By this time the Bedlam which had marked the revolt of the slaves had subsided. From the humming of the airmobile motors, the three space marines surmised that all the slaves who had survived the battle had escaped.

Quickly they returned to the barrack room, where Lieutenant Sullivan located Miss Andersen and carried her out in his muscular arms. The frigid blackness of the Martian night enveloped them; but, thanks to the luminous blaze-marks, they had no difficulty in finding their way back to the Cosmicraft.

As soon as they were all inside the ship, Captain Brink shoved off and headed for Menfol. As he approached the slavers' lair, he turned on the search beam, which drenched the ground with Q-rays. Slightly higher in frequency than ultra-violet emanations, this beam was utterly invisible to ordinary vision; but to the flyer's teleview with its super-sensitive filters and screens, the scene below was brilliantly illluminated.

In the objective of this marvelous device, Captain Brink witnessed the final episode of the wok-slave's revolt. The ground was already strewn with scores of motionless bodies. Sprawled in grotesque postures, which only death could sculpture, they told an eloquent tale of the furious battle which had just taken place. Brink was gratified to observe that most of the corpses were Martians.