Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/20

 along the wall and sprang to the door at Jean's side. Janet found her father's old revolver and loaded it with trembling unaccustomed fingers. The shotgun bellowed twice and a great gap opened in the charging horde of little men.

Rolf snatched up a rifle from the little pile beside him and sent a barrage of bullets after those devastating shotgun blasts. The mounted men galloped away then into the screening shelter of the trees and brush at the edge of the clearing.

"Quick!" Rolf shouted. "Down the tunnel before they circle the cabins. I'll hold off the runts for a little while and join you."

"Okay, skipper," said Jean saluting him in a very unmilitary manner by blowing him a kiss. "And give 'em hell!"

"Be careful, Rolf," cried Janet anxiously as she followed Jean and Jek into the inner room.

"Sure," grinned Rolf, "Be with you directly I hope."

OWN the narrow trail and through the weedy clearing about the cabins swarmed the mounted Little People and their brothers on foot. Hairy little men clad in the furry pelts of beasts and armed with clubs moved forward beside trimly garbed pygmies armed with swords, metal shields and spears. Hundreds of them gathered for the kill, and behind them pressed yet other hundreds.

Rolf emptied three more of the shotguns, reloaded them and fired again. A third time he emptied all his weapons into those clustering ranks; dropped the last gun, and raced for the cellar and the tunnel opening out from it.

Along a narrow, rough-timbered drift he ran for a hundred feet and emerged in the shelter of a heap of rocks and clustering brush. Less than fifty feet distant, at the base of a weathered yellow cliff, opened the hidden entrance to the cavern where the ancient rebuilt spaceship pointed its blunt nose skyward. He leaped forward out into the open stretch of rocky ground that lay between. Fifteen racing strides and he would be safe within the shelter of the great cavern. But from the rocks; from the very ground underfoot it seemed, there sprang screeching little spearmen, and behind them massed ranks of swordsmen and the hairy wielders of clubs.

In an instant his body was bleeding from a score of wounds and wicked little spears porcupined his heavy coat and trousers. Then he was ploughing through their frail ranks bellowing savagely with rage and pain. One arm he held before his eyes to ward off the showering spears but in his other hand he gripped the legs of two of the little men. With this improvised human club he battered a road open before him.

The unhurried crack, crack of Jean's rifle from the cavern's plank-doored entrance took a mounting toll of the swarming little monsters, and Janet fired her revolver blindly into their close-packed bodies, her eyes dry and hot with terrible rage. Rolf reached the door and stumbled headlong inside.

Jek swung the little two-handed axe that Rolf had fashioned for him, as the first of the little men poured into the cavern, and split a pygmy skull neatly. His axe swung up again.

The two girls slammed the heavy door shut against the crowding ranks of the enemy and barred it. A crushed tiny hand protruded from the crack where door met frame. Janet shuddered and her nostrils whitened. Then she turned resolutely upon the half-dozen ratlike warriors trapped inside. She swung her revolver by the barrel.

Grim work it was, and bloody, with the crunch of tiny skulls beneath the weight of their clubbed weapons and Jek's axe. In a moment it was over. When Rolf climbed weakly to his feet there were no Little People, save Jek, in the rocky passage. None that lived, that is.

After that it was the work of but a few minutes to close and seal the outer and inner locks of the space-pitted, patched old cruiser. Rolf and the two girls hurried to the control room blister. Jek they strapped into a space hammock much too large for him and then found hammocks for themselves. Carefully they checked every strap and spring of each canoe-like suspended bed designed to ease the sudden pressure of several times normal gravity.

"Here goes," shouted Rolf as his fingers snapped over the primary firing lever.

A mighty surge of power, a great hand that pressed chokingly against their chests, bore them back, until their hammocks flattened against the padded walls behind each hammock cubicle. Blackness snapped a sudden curtain across their brains.

The thin rock shell left above the old Vulcan's nose parted like rotten tissue as the great cigar of metal blasted skyward. And the Little People cowered on their bellies, trembling

Many stories would their meager brains concoct of the strange rock that stole away the last of the Giants, the Mosters, and fell up into the sky.

AR below drifted the silvery disc of Earth. The blackness of space was about them and the bright sparks of a myriad of stars blazed in hitherto undreamed-of beauty. Somewhere out there the four major moons of Jupiter beckoned them on.

Rolf's fingers tightened on the two girls peering from the observation port beside him. They faced the unknown together.

Together, adrift in a battered old wreck searching for a rounded chunk of rock somewhere out beyond.