The World with a Thousand Moons

the door of the Falcon.

John Dark stood, a tall, dominant figure in the moonslight, barking orders to the scores of pirates who were bolting in the last of the new rocket-tubes. Kenniston's eyes swung toward the shimmering electric wall, and the horde of Vestan-dominated animals outside it.

The wall suddenly died! And as the electric barrier vanished, into the clearing came rushing the swarm of asteroidal animals.

'The wall's down!' John Dark yelled, his atom-gun leaping into his hand. 'Get back into the ship—get back —'

The crash of his atom-gun drowned his own shout. Other pirates were firing wildly at the hideous creatures assailing them.

For the little gray Vestans had detached themselves from their animal victims and were swarming upon the pirates, clambering with blurring speed up their legs and backs, sinking into their necks the tiny antennae.

Kenniston glimpsed John Dark, with a hideous little gray bunch now fastened to the back of his neck, drop his gun and stalk stiffly away toward the jungle. His face was an unhuman, lifeless mask—he was a human automaton, dominated utterly by the alien creature.

'Come on!' Kenniston yelled to his friends. 'Now's our chance to get into the ship!'

They plunged out of the hut into the gruesome melee. Screaming pirates were now running into the jungle in vain effort to escape the hordes of Vestans. More than half the corsairs were now overcome.

Kenniston heard a scream from Gloria as they ran, felt a swift scurrying up his back, then the needle-like stab of antennae sinking into his neck.

But the parasitic creature did not overpower his will! He reached around, grasped and tore loose the hideous little thing, and with strong revulsion flung it to the ground.

'Your formula works, Ricky—we're immune to them!' he gasped. 'But hurry!'

Other Vestans were clambering up on them like ghastly gray spiders as they ran, but were powerless to overcome them. They tore away the creatures and plunged on.

Holk Or appeared in the door of the Falcon, his green face blazing as his atom- pistol pumped crashing fire into pirates inside the ship.

'I've got the ship cleared of them!' the Jovian shouted to Kenniston. 'Let's get out of here!'

It was time they did so. Almost the last of John Dark's pirates had been possessed by Vestans and had become parasite-dominated robots stumbling off into the jungle. The remaining swarms of gray creatures were scurrying toward Kenniston's group.

They tumbled into the Falcon and slammed shut the space-door. The ship, completely if roughly repaired, was ready for take-off. Captain Walls and the men of the Sunsprite crew hastily started the newly-installed cyclotrons while Kenniston and the others raced up to the bridge.

Kenniston took the controls. He sent the big black pirate ship leaping up into the darkness upon flaming keel and tail-jets, and then it climbed steeply toward the wonderful sky of countless rushing moonlets.

By the time an hour had passed, the Falcon had groped out through the periodic break in the meteor-swarm around the asteroid. And it was throbbing at steadily increasing speed out into the vault of space, away from the World with a Thousand Moons.

'We'll head for Mars,' Kenniston told the others. 'We can report there to the Patrol.'

'If you don't mind,' Holk Or put in hastily, 'I'd just as soon you dropped me at some asteroid before then. I've no desire to meet the Patrol.'

Captain Walls told the Jovian, 'Nonsense! After what you've done, you'll get a full pardon from the Patrol.'

'You can count on it,' Hugh Murdock told the doubtful Jovian. 'We have some influence, back at Earth.'

'Well, I guess I'll have to go honest, then,' sighed Holk Or. 'All the real pirate outfits are gone now, anyway.' He shook his head heavily as he walked away. 'The System sure isn't what it used to be.'

Captain Walls was asking Ricky earnestly, 'You're quite sure your formula will cure my son? All these years, I've hoped and prayed—'

'I'm certain,' Ricky smiled. 'Within a few weeks after we get back to Earth, gravitation-paralysis will be a thing of the past.'

They moved off with the others. But Gloria lingered in the bridge with Kenniston.

'Where will you be going, after we get back?' she asked him quietly.

'Oh, back to space,' he answered, a little uncomfortably. 'There's nothing to hold me on Earth now that Ricky's work has succeeded.'

'Nothing to hold you on Earth?' Gloria repeated. 'That, I would say, is about the most ungallant speech on record.'

He flushed. 'You don't mean—that night on the Sunsprite—you weren't in earnest, surely—'

'Your passionate proposal is accepted,' Gloria said calmly.

Kenniston was aghast. 'But I didn't propose! I mean—I do love you, and you know it, but you're an heiress, and I—'

'We'll have all the way back to Mars to argue that out,' she told him. 'And I have an idea you'll lose.'

Kenniston had the same idea.

The End.