“Hunter and wood carver.”
“You are a Vepajan?”
“Yes.”
“From what city of Vepaja?”
“From Kooaad,” replied Kamlot.
“And you?” demanded the officer, addressing me.
“I am Carson of Napier,” I replied, using the Amtorian form; “I am a Vepajan from Kooaad.”
“What is your profession?”
“I am an aviator,” I replied, using the English word and English pronunciation.
“A what?” he demanded. “I never heard of such a thing.” He tried to write the word in his book and then he tried to pronounce it, but he could do neither, as the Amtorians have no equivalents for many of our vowel sounds and seem unable even to pronounce them. Had I written the word for him in Amtorian he would have pronounced it ah-vy-ah-tore, as they cannot form the long a and short o sounds, and their i is always long.
Finally, to cover his ignorance, he wrote something in his book, but what it was I did not know; then he looked up at me again. “Are you a doctor?”
“Yes,” I replied, and as the officer made the notation in his book, I glanced at Kamlot out of the corner of an eye and winked.
“Take them away,” the man now directed, “and be careful of this one,” he added, indicating me; “he is a doctor.”
We were taken to the main deck and led forward to the accompaniment of jeers and jibes from the sailors congregated on the deck. I saw the klangan strutting around, their tail feathers erect. When they saw us, they pointed at Kamlot, and I heard them telling some of the sailors that he was the one who had slain the basto with a single sword thrust, a feat which appeared to force their admiration, as well it might have.
We were escorted to an open hatch and ordered below into a dark, poorly ventilated hole, where we found several other prisoners. Some of them were Thorans undergoing punishment for infractions of discipline; others were Vepajan captives like ourselves, and among the latter was one who recognized Kamlot and hailed him as we descended into their midst.
“Jodades, Kamlot!” he cried, voicing the Amtorian greeting “luck-to-you.”
“Ra jodades,” replied Kamlot; “what ill fortune brings Honan here?”
“ ‘Ill fortune’ does not describe it,” replied Honan; “catastrophe would be a better word. The klangan were seeking women as well as men; they saw Duare” (pronounced Doo-ah-ree) “and pursued her; as I sought to protect her they captured me.”
“Your sacrifice was not in vain,” said Kamlot; “had you died in the performance of such a duty it would not have been in vain.”
“But it was in vain; that is the catastrophe.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Kamlot.
“I mean that they got her,” replied Honan dejectedly.
“They captured Duare!” exclaimed Kamlot in tones of horror. “By the life of the jong, it cannot be.”
“I wish it were not,” said Honan.
“Where is she? on this ship?” demanded Kamlot.
“No; they took her to the other, the larger one.”
Kamlot appeared crushed, and I could only attribute his dejection to the hopelessness of a lover who has irretrievably lost his beloved. Our association had not been either sufficiently close nor long to promote confidences, and so I was not surprised that I had never heard him mention the girl, Duare, and, naturally, under the circumstances, I could not question him concerning her. I therefore respected his grief and his silence, and left him to his own sad thoughts.
Shortly after dawn the following morning the ship got under way. I wished that I might have been on deck to view the fascinating sights of this strange world, and my precarious situation as a prisoner of the hated Thorists engendered less regret than the fact that I, the first earth man to sail the seas of Venus, was doomed to be cooped up in a stuffy hole below deck where I could see nothing. But if I had feared being kept below for the duration of the voyage, I was soon disillusioned, for shortly after the ship got under way we were all ordered on deck and set to scrubbing and polishing.
As we came up from below, the ship was just passing between the two headlands that formed the entrance to the harbor, in the wake of the larger vessel; and I obtained an excellent view of the adjacent land, the shore that we were leaving, and the wide expanse of ocean stretching away to the horizon.
The headlands were rocky promontories clothed with verdure of delicate hues and supporting comparatively few trees, which were of a smaller variety than the giants upon the mainland. These latter presented a truly awe inspiring spectacle from the open sea to the eyes of an earth man, their mighty boles rearing their weirdly colored foliage straight up for five thousand feet, where they were lost to view among the clouds. But I was not permitted to gaze for long upon the wonders of the scene. I had not been ordered above for the purpose of satisfying the aesthetic longings of my soul.
Kamlot and I were set to cleaning and polishing guns. There were a number of these on either side of the deck, one at the stern, and two on the tower deck. I was surprised when I saw them, for there had been no sign of armament when I came on board the preceding day; but I was not long in discovering the explanation—the guns were mounted on disappearing carriages, and when lowered, a sliding hatch, flush with the deck, concealed them.
The barrels of these pieces were about eight inches in diameter, while the bore was scarcely larger than my little finger; the sights were ingenious and complicated, but there was no breech block in evidence nor any opening into a breech, unless there was one hidden beneath a hoop that encircled the breech, to which it was heavily bolted. The only thing that I could discover that might have been a firing device projected from the rear of the breech
