Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/21

Rh in fifteen years, and it was almost like a sob. But Samuel Cabot, tall, hawk-nosed, white haired, appeared not to hear.

"Have you forgotten the dream of the Cabots, Dane?" he asked sadly. "We are relying on you, but so far you have failed us. Time is growing short. In a few months these cliffs will crumble, this valley fill with heaps of broken rocks, and all will be over. Only you can help us!"

"Where are you, Dad?" Dane cried aloud. "How can I help? Who are the people with you?"

"We are ready to leave this dying planet for Earth," the older Cabot went on somberly, ignoring him, "but you must pave the way for us. The Hundred would never let us land in peace. A million lives depend on you, Dane! You must organize resistance against the dictators. Prepare the factories and power-plants for mass sabotage. Be ready to destroy all munition dumps and dynamite their subways and airbases. We will know when you are ready, and will come."

He stepped back beside the dark-haired girl.

"Good-bye, Dane!" [sic] God be with you!"

"Wait—!" Dane ran forward, his hand upraised. Then the valley faded from his view, and there was only the echoing of his voice through the caverns, mocking him. The golden man was gone too. He was alone with the sleeping army.

HE chill air of the caves stole into Dane Cabot's heart. Alone and frightened, he stood there. He pushed stiff fingers through his hair. His first panicky thought was that he had dreamed. Proof to the contrary lay before him, Jeffrey Anson made a very realistic corpse.

Samuel Cabot's words still echoed in his brain. "A million lives depend on you!"

Yes, but who were the golden people? Where was his father? Hadn't they left him to die on a chunk of rock in space, fifteen years before?

All at once an acute need for getting out of this hall of horrors seized Dane. He leaped over Anson's body and sprang toward the stairs. Common sense forced him to return, take Anson by the heels, and drag him up the spiral stairway. With fumbling fingers he got into his space suit and rushed out, dragging the dead man with him.

Eighty-Eight's thin atmosphere leaped upon Anson's body like a pack of wolves, cold and swift-freezing. Thus Dane solved the problem of having a decaying corpse on his hands when—and if—he returned to the cavern.

There was nothing to hold him any longer. Perhaps in the confining quarters of the rocket ship he could marshal his wild thoughts. He hurried into the cruiser, rose from the crater, and roared back into the void.

Before he had covered half the distance back to Earth, he came to the conclusion that he had not dreamed and he was not crazy. His father was alive. Where, he couldn't guess. Just what his strange admonition had meant, he did not fully realize. But he knew there existed somewhere a whole world of sub-surface activity in which he, unknowingly, was the central figure!

Dane took a load of uncertainty back to Earth with him, but he took something else, too, a challenge that like a stinging lash: "We are counting on you, Dane!"

Not until he was nearing the great,