Accident alone—the matter of a chance stud depressed by a careless elbow—had activated the drive engines. A few hours of careful, prudent experiment had proved enough to enable them to turn on and off the drive, and to maneuver the giant ship in space. Right after that discovery, Ajax and Emily had proclaimed their defection, and—without even discussing the matter with the Wuj, or inquiring as to his opinion in the matter—they had driven the ship out of orbit and started in off along the long, long road to Saturn.
Wandering out of the corridor, the Wuj took a narrow catwalk which stretched above a truly enormous room, large enough to house a herd of dirigibles, with room left over to bunk a dozen or more elephants, if the situation should ever arise. This capacious hall was the largest storeroom they had yet managed to find in all the hundreds of chambers and compartments with which the planetoid-ship was filled. Here the newly changed Ajax and Emily had sequestered themselves for hours at a time, striving to discover the uses and natures of the bewildering complexity of machines with which the elephantine store-room was crowded. The Wuj paused on the narrow catwalk, gazing solemnly down at some of the peculiar objects far below, over which they had exhausted their imaginations and ingenuities fruitlessly.
For what conceivable purpose, for example, could that system of concentric spheres of milky jade be designed? Or that silvery cylinder resting on fat coils of brass-colored tubing? Or that huge system of odd-angled mirrors arranged about a light-projector, there in the center? The little Martian’s pugdog nose wrinkled in a grimace: curiouser and curiouser, he thought, and curiouser yet.
This particular device, the mirror-thing, worked from the bridge. This had also been discovered by accident, when idly polishing the control panels one day in order to seem useful in the eyes of his strangely changed master and mistress, the Wuj had depressed one of a series of large flat crimson studs within a blue circular board. A shout had come up from Emily, then busily engaged in categorizing the unknown mechanisms in the store-room, that the mirror-thing was clacking and clanking and its reflective components were adjusting themselves into curious and seemingly purposeless new alignments about a multi-tube-studded globe. In hopes of eliciting some clue as to the function of the odd device, the Wuj had promptly, if gingerly, depressed another of the large red pedals. A beam of intense light had shot from one of the tubes to impinge upon and reflect through a series of the mirrors… but nothing seemed to come of it, and they had at length discontinued further perhaps risky puttering…
“Oh! Oh, my mighty Egg!” the Wuj gasped, his green compound eyes suddenly riveting upon a totally unexpected and heart-stopping sight. He gasped, frozen with sheer surprise and shock.
There, far below his high and aerial vantage point, he suddenly saw something that made the spiderfuzz tingle on the nape of his neck. He clasped several pair of hands together in an ecstasy of despair, meanwhile not daring to take his insectoid eyes off the horrific scene being enacted far below his perch.
X
While reminiscing, the Wuj’s eyes had wandered about the gadget-cluttered hall, suddenly spotting Ajax and Emily busily at work unpacking a mad device that looked like an aluminum spaghetti dinner gone mad, all a tangle of glittering spikes and intertwined metallic loops and coils. While lifting this weird object carefully from its nest of plastic foam, Ajax had allowed the heavy machine to slip, with the result that one of the projecting spines struck him a resounding blow on the top of the shoulder.
With the result that his whole left arm fell off.
Emily, apparently undisturbed by this organic catastrophe, calmly set the bulky thing down, picked up the dismembered member and coolly handed it back to one-armed Ajax, who remained unflustered, simply popping the limb back in its shoulder socket. He stood there for a moment, grotesquely engaged in screwing his arm back in, for all the world as if it were nothing more personal than a section of sewer pipe.
The Wuj closed both eyes; opened the left one; closed it; opened the right one; closed it; then opened both. Nothing did any good. The ugly scene remained the same in all details: Ajax calmly standing there screwing on his arm, which revolved slowly about as he turned it, wrist flopping loosely. Once back on securely, he tested it once or twice, and calmly went back to his work.
The Wuj groaned.
While it is true that he knew, as yet, remarkably little about the ways of Earthfolk, this he definitely did know. Arms do not fall off Earthmen that easily. And, when and if a loose limb does happen to pop off and flop about on the floor somewhere, one does not take it as suavely as if it was no more serious than knocking a pencil off a table. In fact, remembering a time Ajax had banged his thumb with a hammer by sheer mischance, and recalling the anguished yelps and yawps his poor leader had voiced whilst hopping wildly about the room, wringing and waving the throbbing digit, the Wuj assumed (not incorrectly) that a certain amount of bodily discomfort might reasonably be expected to occur if one chanced to knock off an entire arm.
Thus it was with Earthfolk. Assuredly.
Thus, Ajax—or the individual below who certainly looked like Ajax—was neither truly Ajax, nor even another Earth-man pretending to be Ajax.
Nor was he (and here the faithful Wuj could of course, speak from a certain sum of personal experience) any member of the United Beings of Mars, all of whom were highly sensitive to physical pain, with the possible exception of the squirrel-beings. None of them within living memory of any Martian had ever been able to wake up long enough to report on the matter—the entire genus had hibernated forty-seven million years ago when the Red Planet began to cool towards its currently frosty state, and so completely had the highly advanced squirrel-beings perfected hibernation, they slept to this day.
The conclusion was inescapable: Ajax could only be a Saturnian. There was simply no one else in the entire Solar System! Not counting, of course, the cabbage-men of Deimos. No one ever bothered about them. The entire race had been simply vegetating for aeons.
Now, surely, Ajax had not always been a Saturnian. The Wuj was certain he would have noticed… come to think of it, he could not have been a Saturnian when he banged his thumb with the above-mentioned hammer. Therefore (the Wuj summed up the situation with the remarkable mathematical reasoning for which his kind were so widely noted in interplanetary circles)—therefore, he concluded, at some time after this hammer-banging episode, the real Ajax had been replaced with a fallacious Ajax.
And (obviously!) the same had happened in the case of Miss Emily Hackenschmidt. For, had that been the genuine original Emily Hackenschmidt down there, one might have expected a somewhat less phlegmatic and more violently emotional reaction from her when Ajax knocked off his entire arm.
The two humans below were not his master and mistress, but Saturnian spies.
Doubtless this explained the curious, un-Ajax-and-Emily-like behavior he had noticed in them ever since their abrupt return after leaving a few days ago.
Hence the real Ajax and Emily had never returned to the planetoid-ship, but were still back on Earth.