Nison turned heavily, and he and his radiant companion looked back at the Planeteers.
After a moment, he spoke to Thorn. “Follow us,” Nison's voice reached them. “We will lead you to the radite."
As they started on westward across the shining desert, forging through the luminous blue haze beneath the dark, star-studded sky. An unearthly party — the three Planeteers in their grotesque black ray-proof space-suits, led by the two glowing radioactive men.
"It's like a nightmare” Gunner's voice reached Thorn, the Mercurian gripping his arm as they trudged along. “This hellish world, haunted by these pitiful ghosts of men."
"No wonder Martin Cain wouldn't tell anyone about what he'd seen here, when he got back,” muttered Sual Av.
They forged on for hours, ever west across the dim desert. The Planeteers followed closely behind their glowing guides, but the three comrades were beginning to tire from the weight of their asterium-coated space-suits, while the two radioactive men showed no sign of fatigue.
"Damn the gravitation of this world!” Gunner gritted. “It's as strong as Earth's, and it shouldn't be half that strong on a little planet like this."
"The huge radioactive core of this world gives it its unusual mass,” Sual Av declared. “And the radiation from it is responsible for the warmth that permits a gaseous atmosphere here,"
Thorn's heart quickened as he saw beyond their radiant guides, a low, barren dark range of mountains looming up through the haze.
"We're getting there!” Thorn cried eagerly.
Clymer Nison and his radioactive Martian comrade led them on through a pass between two peaks. The mountains towered a few thousand feet on either side, somber, bare rock slopes faintly luminous with the emanations throbbing from their radioactive atoms.
On into the tumbled peaks, through valleys thick with the shining blue haze, over long ridges, Nison led the way. For the space-pioneer who had wandered this dreary world for nine long centuries seemed to know each square yard of its surface.
They entered a deep chasm, a gloomy gorge with precipitous shining walls and a floor strewn with fallen masses of radiant rock. Along this the two radioactive men led the way. The shimmering sand of the chasm floor was deeply marked by a path, that had been trodden by many men coming and going in past times.
To the Planeteers, this gorge was an awesome and uncanny place. The great shining boulders through which the path wound, the feebly radiant cliffs that towered on either side, the strip of starry black sky far overhead, all combined to depress the spirit by their alien, forbidding atmosphere.
Through the blue, shimmering hazes that floated thick in the chasm, Clymer Nison and his companion led the way. At last Nison turned.
"The radite lies in a niche in the side of the cliff, just ahead,” he said heavily to the Planeteers. “We must be careful now, for there are almost sure to be some of my poor fellow sufferers near it, bathing in its rays."
"I hope not,” Gunner Welk muttered. “If these radioactive men can't be killed, they'd be tough customers."
They moved on, Nison and the glowing Martian leading, going more slowly and cautiously now.
As they rounded a turn in the crooked chasm, they saw ahead a place where the sand had been beaten down by many feet, over a long time. There was a small natural niche in the chasm wall there-but there was no radite in it.
"The radite's gone!” cried Clymer Nison in amazement, staring unbelievingly at the empty niche in the rock.
"Gone?” exclaimed John Thorn. His heart sank with despair. “Then Cheerly has been here ahead of us. He's taken the radite, and—"
"Listen!” Sual Av cried, turning his helmeted head sharply. “Hear that?"
"They heard, then. A dim uproar of raging voices from farther along the chasm, punctuated every few moments by the rumbling thunder and crash of great rocks falling.
"What can it be?” Nison wondered, his radiant face perplexed.
"I have an idea what it is!” Thorn cried. “Come on!"
They pressed on along the gloomy gorge. In a few minutes they had rounded another turn in it, and stopped short, petrified by the astounding scene ahead.
A few hundred feet ahead in the chasm was gathered a mob of dozens of glowing men. Radioactive men like Nison and the Martian, garbed in ragged remnants of clothing that showed they were of every time in the last nine centuries, of every world. Glowing men who had come to Erebus in past centuries and had been trapped here, transmitted into radioactive beings!
This crowd of glowing men was wildly seeking to storm a narrow ledge that jutted from the chasm wall a dozen feet up from the floor. With shrill, raging cries, the radioactive mob would scramble up to win the ledge, but would be repelled by the rocks rolled down upon them by the defenders.
The defenders of the ledge were three men clad in asterium-coated space-suits like those of the Planeteers. Behind them was another figure in a coated space-suit, but with arms bound together. And also on the ledge was a rude sledge of black asterium, upon which was tied a small mass of something that had been carefully wrapped in thick sheets of asterium.
"It's Cheerly and his men, and the bound figure is Lana!” Thorn exclaimed hoarsely. “And that mass on the sledge—"
"Must be the radite!” Gunner Welk cried. “Cheerly got the stuff from the niche, but the radioactive men caught him taking it!"
CHAPTER XIX
Cheerly's Cunning
The scene was one out of nightmare. The gloomy chasm of shimmering blue haze, the shining cliff upon a ledge of which the three spacesuited men desperately defended themselves, and the insanely shouting, raging mob of weirdly glowing radioactive men who attacked them.
John Thorn, his heart hammering at having come within actual sight of both Lana Cain and the precious raw radite, leaped forward. But the upraised warning hand of Clymer Nison stopped him.
"No!” said the glowing man. “That raging crowd of doomed ones would tear you to pieces if you tried to make your way through them. For very many of my fellow-sufferers on this world are crazed, made mad by our horrible existence."
"We've got to get Lana and the radite out of there quickly!” Thorn cried. “Cheerly and his men can't hold that mob off much longer!"
Cheerly and his two men were plainly being hard pressed. Only by snatching up shining rocks that lay strewn on the narrow ledge, and dashing them down at their attackers, could they keep the radioactive men from winning up to them,
"You run out of rocks soon and that'll be the end of them!” Sual Av exclaimed.
"Why the devil don't they use their atom-pistols?” Gunner demanded.
"They would be useless against such men as myself,” Clymer Nison declared sadly. ‘I know a way to get onto that ledge farther back along the chasm. Follow me!"
The Planeteers raced back along the chasm after Nison and his companion. The glowing men swerved and started climbing up a narrow crack in the shimmering cliff.
Thorn and his comrades struggled to follow. By tremendous effort, they hoisted their heavy figures up after the two glowing men. They found themselves on a precariously narrow shelf of the rock wall.
Nison and the glowing Martian led the way now back along the chasm to the battle, following this narrow shelf. There were places where it was hardly a yard wide. But in a few minutes, they had followed it to a point where it connected with the ledge upon which Cheerly and his men were defending themselves.
Cheerly turned, appalled, as the Planeteers and their two glowing guides appeared. The Uranian, unrecognizable in his shapeless spacesuit and coated helmet, made himself known by the cry that vibrated from him as he saw them.
"Have you come from the ship to help?” Cheerly cried, not recognizing the Planeteers. “How did you get here with those two glowing devils?"