He broke off, for suddenly Star Pirate stiffened in his chair before the big 'scope, and uttered a stifled gasp. There, directly ahead of the Jolly Roger, across the seemingly endless snowfields that lay dead and frozen beneath that glaring golden sky, melted into view something like a vast, bowl-shaped depression. A valley, it seemed, and from rim to rim it must have measured hundreds of square miles, perhaps even thousands. And it was green and fertile.
"By all the gods of space — Doc! Phath! Look at this!" he yelled, rousing the two from their study of the controls. They clustered about the big circular 'scope, staring with disbelief.
In all these supra-Arctic wastes, how could such a thing be? They saw farms and fields and forests, glades and gardens and groves, running rivers and lakes like looking-glasses, mirroring the bright yellow skies . . .
Sure looks like you hit it right on the nose, Doc, with your volcanic core and geysers of live steam," muttered the Pirate.
Something like a dim dome of pale radiance encompassed the Vale from lip to lip, barely discernible against the unchanging glare of the ever-luminous skies. Approaching the curious dome of force, Star probed it with the ship’s sensors, found nothing dangerous, and entered its perimeter. A faint, tingling shock ran through him and his companions, but was over in an instant. Whatever the force dome was, it was no barrier to solid objects, surely: probably it served to retain heat and moisture and atmosphere.
Zoar studied the meters. He wet his thin lips with a pointed tongue. "There’s air outside, lad! Eminently breathable, too; warm and moist, if these instruments haven’t gone haywire ..."
Star told Phath to cut their speed. Beneath the floating craft passed vistas of green enchantment. White roads meandered between fields and farms; tiny villages and hamlets appeared; miniature figures could be seen toiling in the fields below. Beyond all this loomed the ramparts and walls of a distant city, towards which the Jolly Roger veered her flight. All of dark gray stone was this city, and ringed by a massive wall breached by four gates at the cardinal points of the compass .
From a central plaza, where rose magnificent edifices that could be palaces or temples, broad, tree-lined avenues radiated like the spokes from the hub of a wheel.
Down towards the dark city swooped the little speedster. Tall towers whipped by, red-roofed, with walled gardens and broad boulevards, arcades, bazaars, mansions. How many thousand inhabitants the dark city housed was beyond guessing, but it was a metropolis of impressive dimensions.
"Who could have dreamed this dead ice-ball of a planet could have people on it!" muttered Dr. Zoar dazedly.
"How d’you know they’re people?" Phath demanded. "They could be any kind of monstrosity, you know—"
"Well, we’ll soon know," grunted Star Pirate. "Let’s take her down. You’re spoiling for some excitement, anyway."
"Sure; but do you really think this is smart, chief?" asked the Venusian. Star shrugged and grinned his mischievous grin, green eyes sparkling with excitement.
"It’s been a dull voyage so far," he chuckled. "Let’s see what we can do to liven it up! Besides, from the looks of the town I’d say the people are on the level of our own medieval times. Take a look down there and see for yourselves! No sign of mechanized vehicles or aircraft, and from the looks of those paven roads they were built for horse-drawn carts, or whatever ... actually, they seem to domesticate big lizard-like beasts for that purpose—see the paddock?"
"I’d say you are quite correct, lad," growled Zoar. "My sensors still show no sign of activity on electrical or radio wavelengths, and none of the neutrino-leakage we would expect to find from atom power."
"Right! Doubt if they’ve got the internal combustion engine yet, much less electricity or atomics. Which means we can fly and fight—if it should come to that—rings around them."
"I suppose you're right, lad ..." muttered the frogfaced little savant, fingering his jaw thoughtfully.
"Sure I am," Star grinned. He nodded to the scene in the big ’scope. "Phath, let’s take her down to a landing in that big central plaza. See it? There’s a stand of funny-looking trees in the very middle, ringed with a wide circle of crushed gravel. Bring us down there."
"You got it, chief!"
"Right: now, Doc, it's up to you and me to man the guns. Just in case we're way off the mark in supposing the Persephonians' level of technology is still back in the bow-and-arrow period. Oh, leave your sensors on and set them to 'record.' Every bit of data we can get may come in handy."
The two took stations at the big proton needle guns whose blisters protruded from the smooth hull of the trim little speedster. The proton needles could reduce half the city to rubble in minutes, so they felt they had little to fear from natives armed—most likely—with nothing less serious than pikes and javelins.
To either side of the central plaza rose two imposing edifices, built of the same lustrous, dark stone as were most of the buildings which composed the mysterious city. Whether the two, which faced each other across the greensward of the little park amidst the plaza, were palaces or temples it was impossible to guess. Probably one of each, was Star Pirate's guess, and his guess turned out to be accurate.
The Jolly Roger floated down on her null-gravity field. Then her keel crunched and squealed as it sank into the bed of gravel that ringed about the grove.
The rocket-tubes coughed and died.
They had landed on the surface of the unknown world!
11. The Flying Men
Chemical analysis proved that the air outside the ship was composed of a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen very similar to Earth's own atmosphere, and therefore breathable without the need of protective masks and bottled oxygen. So Star opened the control cabin airlock and stepped out, followed by Dr. Zoar and Phath, as soon as the Venusian pilot had locked the controls against any possibility of tampering.
They stepped forth not on grass, as they had unconsciously supposed they would, but on soft, cushiony, emerald-hued moss, pearled with sweet dew.
The air was warm and moist and fragrant with the heady aroma of many strange flowers and blossoming trees unfamiliar to the Earthling, the Martian and the Venusian. The frigid, howling gales that swept the golden skies of the world beyond the immense valley, sheltered behind its dim dome of force, seemingly could not penetrate into this alien Eden. Looking about at the lush shrubbery, the velvet moss, the strange flowers, Star shook his head; it was difficult to believe that, not half a mile away, the surface was locked under an adamantine sheath of eternal ice and swept by frozen hurricanes of terrific force, hostile to all life.
"People coming, chief!" snapped Phath warningly. Star Pirate looked up to see a strange sight. From the uppermost tiers of the big palace-like structures which faced each other across the plaza, there came hurtling towards them immense, red-furred, prick-eared creatures, with the ribbed, membranous wings of bats. But enormous bats—their wingspread must have measured thirty feet and more.
And mounted upon their backs, seated between the beating vans, were human riders! Star thrilled to a distinct shock as he had his first glimpse of the mysterious denizens of this weird new world. They rode their batlike steeds, seated in capacious wicker-work saddles, guiding their aerial mounts with long reins. The men—for only one of them seemed to be a woman—were completely humanoid, save for their dead-white skins and lustrous eyes, slightly larger and rounder than Star was accustomed to back in the many worlds of the System. They were as black as obsidian, those staring eyes, and the hair upon their heads, which they wore long and which whipped behind them in their flight like elfin banners, was of the rare shade called platinum-blond .