Page:Amazing Stories Volume 17 Number 06.djvu/27

Rh As I watched, the face was changing shape. The bridge of the nose sank and the nose broadened. Lean cheeks became fat ones. Eyebrows wandered upwards.

Then other machines made a sallow complexion look fresh, and turned the black hair green. Green hair on Mars, while uncommon, is not remarkable, but usually goes with poor intelligence. Hektorum now looked like a well-fed but half-witted farmer.

"Ah!" he said. "It be a nuisance, but now I shall have to go to Kuspilad to arrange about that mortgage!"

"How did you do it?" I asked.

"Portable plastic surgery outfit," he explained. "Very useful in my profession. Causes nerve, skin and muscle cells to dry up and shrink, or to absorb moisture and swell, according to the way one turns the handle. Works by deep-heating infra-red rays. It has one drawback. After several days the face begins to return to its natural state. The other rays, which change the chemical composition of the pigments in skin and hair, are too well known in Mars for me to need to explain them. The effects of them, too, wears off in time. But aren't we wasting time?"

EIL HEKTORUM was at the Princess's suite in a few minutes. He made Wimp dress in men's clothes and us three in women's clothes. The plastic surgery outfit made some changes in our appearance, although I had some doubt as to whether it was much use trying to disguise the enormous Hudells. Though, I must say, Hektorum did not make such a bad job of it, considering.

His next move seemed to me to spoil it all. He televised the airport and booked reservations in an air-liner for Princess Wimpolo, Vans Holors and me for a journey to Novwollo in the country of Kuspilad.

"Why go under our own names?" I asked.

"We don't,' he said.

"Your schemes are too deep for me," I said. "The news that the royal party will be on the liner will be everywhere in an hour."

"Just a normal precaution," he said. "Only our luggage will be on the liner. At the last moment we teleview the Captain telling him to start without us. Will you kindly come with me?"

We slipped out of a back entrance of the palace to a small secret airport. Hektorum's badge got us a quick passage. Then he showed us the queer-looking secret aircraft we were to travel in.

It was as round as an egg, transparent, had a helicopter propeller on top and a small propeller in front, with three landing wheels on telescopic props. Queerest-looking thing I ever saw.

A trusted operative of Martian International Investigators, which was the official name of Usulor's Secret Service, put the message through to the air-liner. The great liner rose in the air out of a big crowd that had gathered to show their loyalty by waving flags and cheering and to whisper "Isn't she getting fat!" Always well-nourished, Wimp was now nearly eleven hundredweight.

The big liner really didn't go awfully fast. There were too many twisty caverns to go through. What we lost on the straight stretches we made up on the bends. So that we kept it pretty well in sight most of the time.

T WAS an ordinary, dull journey for most of the time. I thought Hek-