George squinted through the telescope. The wheel, continually passing across the line of vision like the shutter of a movie projector, made everything look flickery. But he could see the circle of tanks, less than a kilo off. They were low built, with wide caterpillar treads and squat turrets, and gave the impression they were hugging the ground. They were slowly converging and every one of their gun muzzles was aiming straight at the ship.
Behind them a sort of huge torpedo on wheels was skirmishing around. It was quite fifty metres long. The nose of its cylindrical body was sharply pointed. The thing was made of some dull metal, had back-projecting fins, and the wheels on which it moved so swiftly were sheathed.
A thin and short streamer of white hot gas kept shooting from its tail.
“Rocket-propelled,” George observed. “At a guess I’d say it’s a highly mobile armored H.Q., directing operations well forward on the battle-field. Why, the darn thing looks almost as big as our ship!”
“Think you’re right, George,” said Freiburg. “We’re up against a whole mechanized army. We haven’t got a chance. We’d better raise the flag of truce and try for a parley, I’d like to know what they’ve got against us before they wipe us out, anyhow… Hey, they’ve all stopped advancing. What’s the idea?”
They waited, tensed up. The wheel’s note, which had been falling, died away to nothing. Even the secondary swishing sound, made by the wheel’s keen edge slicing the air, fell to a mere sighing. The wheel was bowling ever more slowly around. It began to wobble as it ran. They could see the hole in it distinctly now.
Then it keeled over and fell on its side, all momentum gone. It lay still.
“It’s served its purpose,” said the Captain, taking off his jacket. “And that was to keep us pinned down in the target area until all the guns could be brought to bear on us at close range. Did you notice the air flutes on the hub? We blew them off on the near side, but the ones on the other side stayed intact. That’s where the howl came from—to petrify and demoralize us: the old Japanese war-cry— Banzai!”
“I don’t think I’m gonna like these Venusians,” said Sparks, slowly and with care—his lip had stopped bleeding and he didn’t want to start it off again.
“Nor me,” said Freiburg. “All the same, we have to be reasonable. Like it or not, we’ve got to try to be friendly. Getting tough isn’t going to help us get any place.”
George was skeptical. “That’s a purely terrestrial gesture. It can’t mean a thing here.”
Bank! Bang! Bang! Three tanks shells, on a flat trajectory, arrived before the sound of their passage. They burst near the base of the ship. The skipper snatched his shirt back. “It means something. Obviously, the wrong thing.”
Sparks made an inarticulate noise, and gasped: “The ship!”
They swung around. The shells had burst near the battered fins of the ship and loosened them from the earth. The ship groaned and began to cant. It was like the Tower of Pisa pulling away from its foundations.
“Timber!” exclaimed George. But they were lucky. In relation to them it was falling sideways. It came down with an almighty crash, bounced once and rolled a couple of metres. The dust billowed up around it in a wide, brown cloud, then slowly settled. After that, nothing moved. The fallen ship lay as still as the fallen wheel.
The skipper used his shirt more effectively to mop his brow.
“The finishing touch,” he said. “You might as well write off your set now, Sparks.”
The radio-op nodded. His lower lip was bleeding again; he’d bitten it in the same place.
Then they all jerked their heads the other way, because a roaring sound had started way out on the plain.
“Gosh, this is no place for a rest cure,” said Freiburg. “I’m beginning to get the jitters. What the hell is it now?”
George said, looking hard: “It’s the armored H.Q. It’s coming this way—like a bullet.”
And indeed the great torpedo was hurtling head on towards them with its jet roaring. They could see only its blind, sharp nose. It sped through the ring of stationary tanks and the ground began to shake under its spinning metal wheels.
“Down,” said Freiburg, dazedly, wearily. He was getting tired of existence in a sort of recurring earthquake, bobbing up and down like some kind of jack-in-the-box; of continually being assailed by ear-shattering noises and uninvited missies. The collapse of the ship, his once proud charge, had brought the last of his failing spirits down with it. That was the last straw. He fell into a state of cynical despair.
The roaring ended, was supplanted by a nerve-tearing squealing, like powerful brakes being applied. Came a silence. And then the grinding of twenty-five tanks moving in unison grated through the heavy air. George caught Freiburg’s glazing eye. He grinned at him wryly. Freiburg tried to respond in kind, but failed. His expression asked dismally: How long can this go on?
Events answered with another change of tempo. Silence fell so abruptly that it seemed to have a noise of its own.
But now the skipper had become too apathetic to investigate. He merely lay waiting dully for whatever manifested itself. Sparks had given up, too, and lay resignedly at his side with a red-soaked handkerchief pressed to the lower half of his face.
Temperamentally different, George was alert and interested. He gazed boldly at the next surprise item on the program—and was duly surprised. For each and every one of the tanks had performed an about-face. Now they were facing outwards, their long gun barrels radiating like the spokes of a wheel. To the ship and men from Earth they presented only their apparently unprotected backs. And the great horizontal ship on wheels had also swung around to offer them a view of its rear. It stood there not two hundred metres distant, ignoring them, facing an unseen enemy, patiently waiting. The only thing moving appeared to be the slight heat haze rising from its tail. For the rest, it was a still-life picture, painted in low tones, with the motionless grey clouds hanging over all. George spurred his reluctant skipper into taking a look at it. The Captain gazed from under lowered, cynical eyelids. He grunted: “Oh, I see, it’s all only a game, after all. They want us to chase them now. To hell with them! I’m going to see how the other guys are.”
He shook off George’s restraining hand and climbed out of the pit. He walked at his own pace to the craters where the rest of his crew had gone to ground. But one crater was no longer there. It had become a filled-in double grave.
The mate and one other crew member were lying full-length at the bottom of their crater, face down. Shrapnel was strewn around like so much street rubbish, but none of it appeared to have touched them.
“Come on, you men,” said the skipper. “Time for chow.”
He stood on the crater rim careless of the array of mechanized might not so far beyond it. There had been just too much of everything, and he was beyond caring any more. Egotistically, he looked on it as a personal attack. Fate had always used him as a football, and now he could only accept that and shrug it off.
Slowly, the mate raised his grimy face. The shells had fallen closer to his refuge and the tide of thick, sooty gas had washed over it many times. There were tear furrows down his cheeks. He might have been crying. It might have been only the gas making his eyes stream.
“Milman’s dead, sir.”
The skipper frowned. “Are you sure? He doesn’t look it.”
“No, it was just one small splinter. In his right eye.”
Captain Jonah Freiburg sighed. “Barker and Heinz are dead, too. And buried. Which leaves only four of us. Four is just right for bridge. Got a deck of cards on you?”