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  . . . Gunnar reached out to quiet the growling dog, but Frankie was gone. Instead his hand encountered Martha’s and he gave it a reassuring squeeze. He listened, hardly breathing.

  From just outside the cave came the peculiar faint sound made only by splittoed Japanese shoes.

  “This is it,” he whispered as he pressed Martha’s pistol into her hand. “They’ve found us. Better save one shot for yourself.”

  Flashlights glimmered around the bend of the cave and the clothing hanging from the rocks shuddered and fell as a burst of Nambu fire roared. A Jap ran toward the huddled garments, chattering wildly.

  Gunnar knew they could hope only to take as many Nips as possible with them. Even as he opened fire he could hear Martha’s pistol start up beside him. The first Japs went down.

  Then his pistol clicked empty.

  “Just one more,” Gunnar prayed as he threw the useless weapon into the nearest yellow face and drew his knife for a final charge.

  HE EXPECTED to be met by a burst of fire as he stepped out, but the bullets did not come. Instead a Jap tripped and kicked at something near his feet, then tumbled violently backward with his hands coming up as though to protect his face. The Jap started to scream but stopped abruptly as blood spurted from a throat suddenly raw and mangled. A snarling growl echoed through the cave.

  Another Nip went down, struggling with something invisible.

  Panic gripped the Jap patrol. Two surviving soldiers broke and ran, but the lieutenant in charge snatched up a gun. Bullets whined off the rocks as he fired wildly, without a target.

  All at once Frankie lay in the middle of the floor, his spine shattered by a chance bullet but his fangs still bared in a snarl of defiance. The Jap kicked at the dog, then jumped aside and stared unbelievingly as his outlines blurred momentarily. He kicked again with deliberate brutality, and the dog gave one convulsive shudder and lay still.

  Without conscious volition Gunnar raised his arm. Twenty feet away bones crunched under the brass handle-studs of the trench knife. Gunnar felt the impact up his arm, and then the snick as the double-edged blade plunged between two ribs.

  Then he and Martha were alone with several dead Japanese and the body of a dog.

  Gunnar felt a pulling sensation in his shoulder. The bloody knife surged toward him through the air. He looked down.

  And he wasn’t there at all!

  “M—Martha!” he called unsteadily.

  “Yes, Gunnar,” her voice answered from nearby.

  “Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  “Where?”

  He glanced wildly around. Her pistol was floating in the air beside him, and then by the light of a flash the Japs had dropped he could just discern the tenuous, transparent outlines of her figure. He stared.

  She must have seen him too, for instantly she was completely invisible again.

  “What the hell—?” he asked.

  “I—I don’t know.” Her voice was shaky now. Her coveralls lifted themselves from the floor and fastened themselves.

  “Get them off,” he begged after one look. “I can see you that way, sort of.”

  Bullets had ripped through the garments and the rents disclosed large patches of nothingness inside. The result was both indecent and terrifying. Hurriedly she slipped them off.

  “I can’t see myself and I don’t feel cold at all,” she mused. “Are we dead?”

  Gunnar had a practical mind.

  “I don’t think so,” he decided. “I don’t know what’s happened to us, but if we can’t see ourselves or each other they sure as hell can’t see us either. And we’re going to damn well take advantage of it. Their radar station, first.”

  They floundered out into a snowstorm, keeping together by the sound of their voices and an occasional touch of hands.

  “I wish we had feet like snowshoes,” he remarked, trying to break the spell of spookiness with conversation.

  He felt a tug, a spreading, and found himself stepping lightly over the drifts.

  “Judas!” he said in awe. “If we’re dead, which place is this?”

  THE confidential agent from Imperial Headquarters confronted the garrison’s commandant. “You are a disgrace to the Imperial Army,” he snorted. “You have the mentality of an Ainu.”

  “But Excellency—”

  “Radar station destroyed. Coastal guns useless. Ammunition set afire. Supplies stolen. Sentries killed. But, instead of taking proper measures against these Yankee saboteurs who have very evidently sneaked ashore—due to more of your incompetence—you send us fables to cover your own deficiencies. Ghost hands. Ghost Yankees. All fables. Bah!

  “That is as absurd as the idea of my own pistol rising from its holster by itself and turning upon me.”

  “Excellency,” shrieked the overwrought officer. “Don’t say such things on this island!”

  The agent stared in horror-struck rigidity as his gun jerked itself clear, rose, and pointed. The gun spat twice, then floated rapidly across the room and placed itself gently in the commandant’s trembling hand.

  The headquarters bodyguard rushed in and jumped at conclusions as they saw their superior’s body. Their crossfire cut the unfortunate commandant almost in half.

  The major who was second in command stuck his head in the doorway for one horrified look. But when something unseen in that room of death laughed harshly in triumph he dashed hastily out again, screaming frantic orders . . .

  . . . Yark was unhappy. The majority reaction was profound shock at the realization that the great Yark was not infallible.

  “What shall we do?” a mental voice asked.

  “Destroy him!” The response was overwhelming.

  Yark recoiled. Erg was his masterpiece, and to destroy him would be to acknowledge utter failure. But his very status as a Great Brain was now in jeopardy.

  “It will be difficult to reach the real, the actual Erg, submerged as he is beneath his false schizophrenic personalities, but through me it can be accomplished. . .”

  “. . . We’d better get some clothes on,” Martha said bashfully. She could feel her outlines showing again. For the past couple of days it had become increasingly difficult to maintain complete invisibility. She and Gunnar were both beginning to flicker, to appear dimly and then vanish again.

  “That’s right. I’m beginning to feel the cold again, too.” Gunnar was a gentleman and spared her modesty. “Whatever it is, it’s wearing off.”

  The island lay several hours behind them when Martha glanced around once more at Gunnar’s apparently empty clothing and the dent the weight of his body made in the rubber boat. She gave a little squeal of surprise this time, for the dent and the clothes were occupied—by Gunnar, solid and in the flesh.

  He looked, and saw her, too. For a minute, neither said a word . . .

  THE HOT, HIGH WHINE scorched past his face and the slug splatted into the eroded grey wall beside him. He should have died then, but his instinctive recoil at feeling something sticky and moist beneath his feet saved him.

  Nick Tinker let himself crumple and fall, a trick which during the War days back on Earth had fooled more than one sniper. His left hand slid under his padded jacket toward his gun, but the movement looked as though he were clutching his chest. His right arm landed outstretched, and he let that hand clutch convulsively at the air. Then he lay very still beneath the unwinking Martian stars while the thin, chilling night wind whispered through the deserted, sand-drifted streets.

  The Gravinol was gradually leaving his brain, leaving him feeling fully alive for the first time since he had entered the Special Corps back on Earth at the age of seventeen. He wasn’t sure he liked being so completely alive, for it was all he could do to keep his body from cringing under the expectation of another, better-aimed bullet. The stoic fatalism was gone.

  He lay motionless, but his trained senses were busily sorting the eerie impressions of this undead Martian city, picking out a sensation of—someone wat
ching. The feeling localized itself on an oval opening in the hulking black building across the wide street. His gun hand moved imperceptibly and his jacket tore and smoldered as he fired. The recoil slide of the heavy automatic thumped a bruise against his ribs, and even as the explosive bullet flared against the window’s edge he was on his feet, zigzagging across the street in a stooping rush to flatten himself against the wall.

  He watched the greenish light of a glow-plate seeping from the window, hoping for a glimpse of the sniper’s silhouette. The window had been dark before, but his bullet had evidently damaged the screen-creature that covered the window. He knew the screen-creatures well, the living, amorphous and deadly remnants of a Martian civilization that still guarded almost every opening in this abandoned city, rendering it so hazardous for unwary Earthmen.

  His groping hands found the narrow entrance to the building and he ducked in. Someone had been there before him, and recently, for the door-creature inside the alcove hung in tattered shreds. One of its torn, limp folds touched his hand as he passed, and with a sudden resurgence of alien life it contracted around his wrist. It tried to unleash its deadly shock, but it was weak and Nick felt only a faint tingle.

  He jerked free and went up the inside ramp at a fast but quiet run, his finger ready on the trigger as he neared the top.

  Then Nick stopped dead as he saw his target. The girl looked hardly more than a child. Her tattered blouse was pulled aside and she was mopping blindly at a bleeding gash low on one shoulder. The back of her other hand scrubbed at her closed eyes. Her face, framed in uncombed coppery hair, was peppered with grey freckles of rock dust thrown by Nick’s explosive bullet.

  His boots gritting in the dust, warned her, for she whirled, opening red-rimmed, watering eyes and snatching up a heavy rifle.

  It would have been an easy shot, but Nick did not fire.

  HER RIFLE spat once into its silencer as he dived across the room and they went to the floor together. For a minute he was fully occupied in avoiding her teeth and fingernails and shrewdly placed kicks as she fought with the desperation of terror, but at last he got a grip on her hair and clipped her once on the point of the chin.

  He spat out a mouthful of acrid dust and tore the remains of her blouse into strips. There was haste and no gentleness in the way he tied her hands and feet. The exertion left him panting in the thin Martian air, so he took a breath of oxygen from his pocket sniffer bottle. Then, wanting to talk to the girl at once, he held the nose-piece to her face.

  He knew when she recovered consciousness, for her head twisted suddenly and her teeth sank into his hand. He slapped her face hard, and she lay staring up at him with hatred and terror.

  “You’re Susan Jones,” he declared. “Murderer!” she spat, her face twisted with loathing.

  He followed her glance to his uniform and laughed mirthlessly. “I’m outlawed,” he snorted. “The Mec is after me just as hot as they’re after you. I disobeyed orders.”

  She looked at him unbelievingly, suspecting some sort of trap. She knew from experience the ruthless resourcefulness of the Martian Exploitation Company.

  “You couldn’t disobey,” she said incredulously. “You couldn’t.”

  “Like hell,” he snapped. “I’ve had no Gravinol for six weeks. Now, where’s your father?”

  His temper flared as her lips set in a stubborn line. He had no time to lose. “I’ll make you talk, damn you!”

  The rush of treads and whine of brakes from the street interrupted him, sending him to the window with gun ready. The screen-creature, still alive with the almost unkillable vitality of those alien things, had dragged itself together to cover the opening again. Nick was careful not to touch it. He peered out, knowing that to the men climbing from the armored halftrack the window would appear dark. The screen-creatures passed light in one direction only.-As quietly as possible he closed the sliding panel at the top of the ramp and pushed in the locking plug.

  “Remember, get the old man alive. Stun him if necessary, but alive. That’s orders from The Man himself.” Nick recognized Colonel Hammer’s voice. The search must be tightening if the commandant himself took charge of a patrol. They were after Professor Jones and his daughter, but Nick knew that he too would be shot on sight. This time he was with the hunted instead of the hunters.

  The girl’s face went white as he drew his sheath knife. Then she stared uncomprehendingly as the blade slit her bonds instead of her throat.

  “Over the roofs,” he whispered. “Which way out?”

  She pointed, still uncertain of his intentions.

  A big man in a uniform like Nick’s own lay sprawled on the floor of the adjoining room, a black circle between his eyes. Nick spared him just one glance. And then he understood the sticky-moist splotch he had encountered in the street. The man with the straggly beard had caused it, bleeding his life away through the gaping rent in his chest.

  The girl ignored Nick’s ready pistol and ran to the low couch on which the old man reclined. “Dad!” she called softly, shaking his shoulder. “Dad!”

  Nick pulled her away and shook his head. Jackson Jones, the first man to reach Mars, was dead.

  “Shoot that panel down!” someone yelled from the ramp. “He’s in there!”

  “Wanna get took by the back-blast?” another voice complained. “Stand back.”

  “Which way?” Nick asked quietly.

  The girl darted to a window and Nick caught his breath as she reached toward the guarding screen-creature. Then he stared for, instead of killing her with its strange powers, the rubbery, no-color, living stuff flowed back into grooves in the edge of the stone. Susan gave one last backward glance at her father’s body and scrambled through.

  Nick followed nervously and sprawled beside her on a narrow roof ledge. She touched the screen-creature again and it closed with a silent, oily motion.

  “It felt my thoughts,” she whispered.

  He dragged her to her feet and they ran through the dim starlight, climbing across the uneven roofs, leaping the chasms between buildings in the darkness. Excited yells as the patrol broke through the panel and found the two bodies speeded them onward. The girl held her own, keeping the fast pace Nick set, although a few times he had to help her swing her slender body from a lower roof to a higher one.

  “Down!” he barked suddenly. A jet of orange light flung itself upward and outward behind them as someone turned a flame gun on the window through which they had escaped.

  “There she is!”

  An automatic roared a long burst. From a roof in the opposite direction from where they crouched behind a projecting cornice a cajora screamed as it tumbled, astonishingly like a woman in agony.

  “You got her, Fred!” someone yelled triumphantly. “Nice shooting!”

  Susan shivered, not entirely from the cold.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Hide.”

  THE PAUSE had given Nick time to get his bearings. Searchlights from a dozen cars were lancing through the city, and he knew they had to get under cover before flares flooded the roofs with brilliance. He found the hole in which he had hidden during the day, a spot of deeper blackness beneath an overhanging ledge, and motioned Susan inside.

  Instead of following immediately he belly-crawled to the edge of the flat roof. Two armored cars were approaching, still hidden from each other by the curving street, but he could see them both.

  Anger at his pursuers burned fiercely inside him, anger and the deep-seated prejudice against purely defensive action that was a legacy from the Special Corps days on Earth.

  Smiling grimly, he unslung the rifle he had taken from the girl and sent a single bullet richocheting harmlessly off the turret of each car.

  Then he followed Susan. Even through the massive stone walls of the building they could hear the whistling roar of two proton cannon—firing at each other. Colonel Hammer would be displeased with the survivors, Nick reflected with grim amusement.

  They pa
used just inside the black hole to let their labored breathing return to normal. It seemed to go right through the building, between inner and outer shells.

  “We’d better climb down and hope it goes deep enough,” he said at last. The Martian Exploitation Company had a little gadget, outgrowth of the last War on Earth, which could detect the presence of living creatures through a hundred feet of solid rock.

  “This passage will join the tunnels,” the girl said with quiet confidence. “We can dodge their detectors.”

  “What tunnels? You been here?” he asked sharply, trying to see her face in the blackness.

  “No, but a vora made this.”

  Nick didn’t understand, but there was no time for hesitation. They climbed down, into an underworld of blackness and silence. He went first, searching out niches in the almost vertical shaft with his toes, lowering his body, reaching overhead to guide Susan’s feet. Once one of them dislodged a sliver of rock that bounced and clicked into the depths for what seemed like minutes. His mind was seething with questions but the treacherous shaft required his full attention.

  Only the light gravity of Mars made the climb possible, and even then his muscles were stiff and aching when at last his feet touched a solid floor and they sprawled in what the echoes of their heavy breathing told them was a roughly horizontal tunnel. He estimated they had come at least a mile straight downward, perhaps more.

  For a long time they lay without moving in the powder-fine sand that had penetrated even here.

  “We’ve got to steal a ship,” he voiced the thought uppermost in his mind. Already he had accepted this girl as a partner in his venture, for she too was a fugitive from the tyranny of the Martian Exploitation Company.

  Her body jerked suddenly at his words, and then he had to fumble for her in the darkness and shake her with brutal insistence until her hysterical laughter stopped.

  “Just steal a ship!” she gasped finally, her voice still unsteady. “Dad and I tried for a year, ever since the Exploiters came and wrecked our Trailblazer. And now they’ve killed him!” She began to sob, but this time in sadness rather than hysteria.