The Three Planeteers

comrades.

They plunged forward. The crimson lightning died, and in the succeeding thick blackness, the whole citadel rocked wildly about them to the deafening shock of thunder.

The Planeteers collided with a wet metal wall in the darkness. The side of one of the ships! Then another fizzing flare of fiery lightning showed Thorn the ship door, a few feet away.

He pushed the unsealed door inward, and fell rather than jumped inside. As the other two Planeteers leaped in after him, through the bellowing thunder came a shout of voices.

Atom-shells flicked into the inertrum wall of the ship and exploded in bright little bomb-bursts of light. The guards running across the court toward them were shooting.

'Seal the door, Gunner!” Thorn yelled wildly. “I'll take her up!'

He pitched forward in darkness toward the control-room, Sual Av at his heels. He heard the door grinding shut as he pawed frantically for the controls, standardized in all ships.

More atom-shells flared outside. By their glare, Thorn found the injector lever and pulled it frantically. The power-chamber of the little ship burst into a roar,

The panel-lights sprang on as Sual Av found the switch, Thorn leaping to the firing-keys. His fingers flashed down.

With a nerve-shattering roar of all keel tubes blasting, the little cruiser shot almost vertically upward, rising on spuming fire-jets out of the big court at the heart of the citadel.

Thorn cut in all stern tubes, and the little ship screamed up on a steep slant through the raging storm. Rocked by buffeting bursts of thunder, lit by the dancing flares of red lightning, it roared up across storm-swept Saturnopolis with dizzying speed.

Sual Av had the oxygenators throbbing by now. Gunner Welk came staggering into the control-room, fighting the terrific acceleration pressure. Up through the storm they climbed till they were above the tempest, the roar of air outside now fading away.

* * *

Sual Av uttered an exultant cry as they burst out of mists into open space, with the colossal, gleaming arc of the rings spanning the star thick black firmament ahead.

'Clear space again!” he cried.

'They'll call an alarm to all their bases on the outer moons!” Thorn exclaimed. “If Stilicho isn't waiting at the rendezvous—'

Everything depended now, all three knew, on reaching the rendezvous in the rings where old Stilicho Keene had agreed to wait with the Venture, in Cassini's division at the west limb of the planet- shadow.

The colossal yellow bulk of Saturn was behind them, the mighty bow of the rings now close ahead. Thorn was heading toward the segment of the rings obscured by the shadow of the planet. Their little ship raced above the innermost, thinnest ring, roaring at top speed low over the vast circular swarm of whirling planetoids.

Soon ahead yawned Cassini's division, the gap of clear space between the two great outermost rings. As Thorn sent their craft flying down into the gap at the point where the west limb of the planet-shadow lay across it, he flipped the audio-switch.

'Stilicho, the Planeteers calling!” he spoke into the instrument. “We're being chased. Where are you?'

In a moment, there came a shrill, excited reply.

'Coming, boy! We've got you in our aura. Stand by and get your suits on, and we'll take you aboard!'

A few moments later the long, grim-lined Venture drove up from the gap between rings, and hovered beside the Planeteers’ little ship. The air-lock of the pirate craft was open.

Then a brief interval saw the Planeteers inside that air-lock, tearing off the space-suits they had worn as they jumped the gap between ships. And the Venture was roaring on through space with all the power of its great tubes, away from Saturn.

'I thought you boys were dead sure!” Stilicho Keene was babbling wildly to the Planeteers. “It's been days we've waited here. But where's Lana? You didn't leave the lass behind?'

The old pirate's wrinkled red face and rheumy eyes were tense as his cracked voice shrilled the question. And Ool, the space dog, looked up at Thorn with pleading eyes.

'Cheerly has Lana,” Thorn said hoarsely. “He sailed in a navel cruiser for Erebus, days ago. He has Lana's secret now, but he took her along in case she knew more than she'd told.'

'Erebus?” Old Stilicho's wrinkled face became ghastly. “God in heaven, if he's taken the lass there…'

'We've got to follow them, Stilicho!” Thorn cried. “For if Cheerly gets what he wants on Erebus, he'll come back, but he'll never bring Lana back.'

The old man's faded eyes blazed. “We'll follow to Erebus, yes! I'd follow the lass to hell itself!'

They climbed hastily to the control-room, where Stilicho seized the controls from the Jovian pilot on duty there.

'Calling Titan and Iapetus bases!” a Saturnian voice was yelling from the audio-speaker excitedly. “All cruisers out in net-patrol. The Planeteers are loose and breaking for space!'

'They can't catch us now!” Gunner cried fiercely.

The Venture was already roaring out to the orbit of Titan. Stilicho had changed course, and the huge, ringed bulk of Saturn and the small, bright sun lay dead astern. They were heading out toward the farthest limit of the system, toward the Solar System's last home of mystery.

Black reaction and apprehension were cold in John Thorn's heart as he looked haggardly ahead. Could they hope to overtake Cheerly's ship when it had such a start? And. if they did not, and so did not have Lana's secret knowledge to guide them, what would be their fate when they reached mysterious Erebus?

CHAPTER XVI Forbidden World

The frontier of the Solar System! A vast and gloomy darkness, a region of eternal night remote by six billion trackless miles from the far, bright star of the sun. A cold and awful immensity of space beyond which stretches only the shoreless sea of the interstellar void.

Yet even out into these far, dark spaces reached the invisible grip of the sun, to hold the outermost of its planetary children. Out here in eternal silence and darkness, far from the flaming orb that gave it birth, solemnly moved the dim world of Erebus on its slow, stupendous patrol.

A ship was moving out through the colossal dark toward the last planet. It was moving at tremendous speed under inertia, yet it seemed merely to be crawling through the vast emptiness as it held its course toward the dim, slowly enlarging sphere of Erebus.

John Thorn peered fixedly from the window of the control-room at the mysterious world ahead. It was like a little ghost-world, shining in the dark vault with a feeble blue light.

'It must have an extraordinarily high albedo to reflect so much sunlight at this distance,” Thorn muttered.

'Yes, it's cursed queer,” Sual Av agreed, frowning intently.

Beside the Planeteers, who had discarded their Saturnian disguises, old Stilicho Keene peered forward, a haunting apprehension in his faded eyes. The space dog crouched at his feet.

Gunner Welk was at the eyepiece of the ‘scope, staring toward dim Erebus. The towering Mercurian turned to Thorn.

'Cheerly's ship isn't in sight, John,” he rumbled. “He must already have landed on Erebus.'

Thorn's brown face contorted in agonized emotion.

'We should have overtaken him!” he cried, his voice raw and self-accusing. “If we'd put on a little more speed—'

'But boy, the Venture's been at top speed in all the long days since we left Saturn!” Stilicho quivered. “It's been like a nightmare voyage, with the power-chambers throbbing to the limit, and my crew getting more scared each day, and us sailin’ on toward God knows what on that world ahead!'