Then Helen stumbled into Jack’s arms. “I’m—going, too!” she gasped. “We’re—all going to die! I’m not needed! And I can—die with Jack.”
Alstair groaned. “Please!”
“I’m—going!” she panted. “You can’t stop me! With Jack! Whither thou goest—”
Then she choked. She pressed close. The Centaurian of the leather belts hooted impatiently into the dictawriter, “These—two—come.”
Alstair said in a strange voice: “Wait!” Like an automaton, he moved to his desk. He took up an electropen. He wrote, his hands shaking. “I am mad,” he said thinly. “We are all mad. I think we are dead and in hell. But take this.”
Jack tucked the official order slip in his pocket. The Centaurian of the leather bands hooted impatiently. He led them, with his queer, rolling gait, toward the air lock by which the plant men had entered. Three times they were seen by roving Things, which emitted that triply horrible shrill squeal. And each time the Centaurian of the leather bands hooted authoritatively and the plant men withdrew.
Once, too, Jack saw four creatures swaying backward and forward about something on the floor. He reached out his hands and covered Helen’s eyes until they were past. They came to the air lock. Their guide pointed through it. The man and the girl obeyed. Long, rubbery tentacles seized them and Helen gasped and was still. Jack fought fiercely, shouting her name. Then something struck him savagely. He collapsed.
He came back to consciousness with a feeling of tremendous weight upon him. He stirred, and with his movement some of the oppression left him. A light burned, not a light such as men know on Earth, but a writhing flare which beat restlessly at the confines of a transparent globe which contained it. There was a queer smell in the air, too, an animal smell. Jack sat up. Helen lay beside him, unconfined and apparently unhurt. None of the Centaurians seemed to be near.
He chafed her wrists helplessly. He heard a stuttering sound and with each of the throbs of noise felt a momentary acceleration. Rockets, fuel rockets.
“We’re on one of their damned ships!” said Jack coldly. He felt for his force gun. It was gone.
Helen opened her eyes. She. stared vaguely about. Her eyes fell upon Jack. She shuddered suddenly and pressed close to him.
“What—what happened?”
“We’ll have to find out,” replied Jack grimly.
The floor beneath his feet careened suddenly. Instinctively, he glanced at a porthole which until then he had only subconsciously noted. He gazed out into the utterly familiar blackness of space, illuminated by very many tiny points of light which were stars. He saw a ringed sun and points of light which were planets.
One of those points of light was very near: Its disk was perceptible, and polar snow caps, and the misty alternation of greenish areas which would be continents with the indescribable tint which is ocean bottom when viewed from beyond a planet’s atmosphere.
Silence. No hootings of that strange language without vowels or consonants which the Centaurians used. No sound of any kind for a moment.
“We’re heading for that planet, I suppose,” said Jack quietly. “We’ll have to see if we can’t manage to get ourselves killed before we land.”
Then a murmur in the distance. It was a strange, muted murmur, in nothing resembling the queer notes of the plant men. With Helen clinging to him, Jack explored cautiously, out of the cubbyhole in which they had awakened. Silence save for that distant murmur. No movement anywhere. Another faint stutter of the rockets, with a distinct accelerative movement of the whole ship. The animal smell grew stronger. They passed through a strangely shaped opening and Helen cried out:
“The animals!”
Heaped higgledy-piggledy were cages from the Adastra, little compartments containing specimens of each of the animals which had been bred from for food, and which it had been planned to release if a planet suitable for colonization revolved about Proxima Centauri. Farther on was an indescribable mass of books, machines, cases of all sorts-the materials ordered to be carried to the air lock by the leader of the plant men. Still no sign of any Centaurian.
But the muted murmur, quite incredibly sounding like a human voice, came from still farther ahead. Bewildered, now, Helen followed as Jack went still cautiously toward the source of the sound.
They found it. It came from a bit of mechanism cased in with the same lusterless, dull brown stuff which composed the floor and walls and every part of the ship about them. And it was a human voice. More, it was Aistair’s, racked and harsh and half hysterical.
“—you must have recovered consciousness by now, dammit, and these devils want some sign of it! They cut down your acceleration when I told them the rate they were using would keep you unconscious! Gary! Helen! Set off that signal!”
A pause. The voice again: “I’ll tell it again. You’re in a space ship these fiends I are guiding by a tight beam which handles the controls. You’re going to be set down on one of the planets which once contained animal life. It’s empty now, unoccupied except by plants. And you and the space ship’s cargo of animals and books and so on are the reserved, special property of the high, archfiend of all these devils. He had you sent in an outside-controlled ship because none of his kind could be trusted with such treasure as you and the other animals!
“You’re a reserve of knowledge, to translate our books, explain our science, and so on. It’s forbidden for any other space ship than his own to land on your planet. Now will you send that signal? It’s a knob right above the speaker my voice is coming out of. Pull it three times, and they’ll know you’re all right and won’t send another ship with preservatives for your flesh lest a priceless treasure go to waste!”
The tinny voice—Centaurian receptors were not designed to reproduce the elaborate phonetics of the human voice—laughed hysterically.
Jack reached up and pulled the knob, three times. Alstair’s voice went on: “This ship is hell, now. It isn’t a ship any more, but a sort of brimstone pit. There are seven of us alive, and we’re instructing Centaurians in the operation of the controls. But we’ve told them that we can’t turn off the rockets to show their inner workings, because to be started they have to have a planet’s mass near by, for deformation of space so the reaction can be started. They’re keeping us alive until we’ve shown them that. They’ve got some method of writing, too, and they write down everything we say, when it’s translated by a dictawriter. Very scientific—”
The voice broke off. “Your signal just came,” it said an instant later.
“You’ll find food somewhere about. The air ought to last you till you land. You’ve got four more days of travel. I’ll call back later. Don’t worry about navigation. It’s attended to.”
The voice died again, definitely.
The two of them, man and girl, explored the Centaurian space ship. Compared to the Adastra, it was miniature. A hundred feet long, or more, by perhaps sixty feet at its greatest diameter. They found cubbyholes in which there was now nothing at all, but which undoubtedly at times contained the plant men packed tightly.
These rooms could be refrigerated, and it was probable that at a low temperature the Centaurians reacted like vegetation on Earth in winter and passed into a dormant, hibernating state. Such an arrangement would allow of an enormous crew being carried, to be revived for landing or battle.
“If they refitted the Adastra for a trip back to Earth on that basis,” said Jack grimly, “they’d carry a hundred and fifty thousand Centaurians at least. Probably more.”
The thought of an assault upon mankind by these creatures was an obsession. Jack was tormented by it. Womanlike, Helen tried to cheer him by their own present safety.