"We greet our friends standing as long as we can stand," and, towering a full two feet above Brandon's own six-feet-two, Alcantro and Fedanzo in turn engulfed his comparatively tiny hand in a thick-shelled paw and lifted briefly the inner lids of quadruply-shielded eyes. For the Martian skin is not like ours. It is of incredible thickness; dry, pliable, rubbery, and utterly without sensation: heavily lined with fat and filled throughout its volume with tiny air-cells which make it an almost perfect non-conductor of heat and which prevent absolutely the evaporation of the precious moisture of the body. For the same reasons their huge and cat-like eyes are never exposed, but look through sealed, clear windows of membrane, over which may be drawn at will one or all of four pairs of lids—lids transparent, insensible, non-freezable, air-spaced insulators. Even the air they exhale carries from their bodies a minimum of the all-important heat and moisture, for the passages of their nostrils do not lead directly to the lungs, as do ours. They are merely the intakes for a tortuous system of tubes comprising a veritable heat-exchanger, so that the air finally expelled is in almost perfect equilibrium with the incoming supply in temperature and in moisture content. A grayish tan in color, naked and hairless—though now, out of deference to Terrestrial conventions, wearing light robes of silk—indifferent alike to any extreme of heat or cold, light or darkness: such were the two forbidding beings who arose to greet their Terrestrial friends, then again reclined.
"I suppose that you have been given to drink?" Westfall made sure that they had been tendered the highest hospitality of Mars.
"We have drunk full deeply, thanks; and it was not really necessary, for we drank scarcely three weeks ago."
Brandon and Westfall turned then and greeted the two Venerians, as different from the Martians as they were from the Terrestrials. Of earthly stature, form, and strength, yet each was encased in a space-suit stretched like a drum-head, and would live therein or in the special Venerian rooms of the vessel as long as the journey should endure. For the atmosphere of Venus is more than twice as dense as ours, is practically saturated with water-vapor, carries an extremely high concentration of carbon dioxide, and in their suits and rooms is held at a temperature of one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. The lenses of their helmets were of heavy, yellowish-red composition, protecting their dead-white skins and red eyes from all actinic rays—for the Venerian lives upon the bottom of an everlasting sea of fog and his thin epidermis, utterly without pigmentation, burns and blisters as frightfully at the least exposure to actinic light as does ours at the touch of a red-hot iron.
Out in space at last, cruising idly with the acceleration set at a point bearable for the Martians, Westfall called the meeting to order and outlined the situation facing them. Brandon then handed around folios of papers, upon which the Venerians turned the invisible infra-red beams of the illuminators upon their helmets, thus flooding them with the "light" to which their retinas were most responsive.
"Here's the data," Brandon began. "As you see from Sheet 1, we can already draw any amount of power we shall need from cosmic radiation alone...."
"Perpetual motion—ridiculous!" snapped from the sending disk upon the helmet of the master of mechanism.
"Not at all, Amonar," put in his fellow Venerian, "any more than a turbo-generator at the foot of a waterfall is perpetual motion. Those radiations originate we know not where, probably as a result of intra-atomic reactions. The fields of force of our hosts merely intercept these radiations, as a water-driven turbine intercepts the water. We merely use a portion of their energy before permitting them to go on, to we know not what end. Truly you have made a notable achievement in science, Tellurian friends, and we congratulate you upon its accomplishment. Please proceed."
"Upon the following sheets are described the forces employed by the Jovians, as we shall call them until we find out who or what they really are. We will discuss these forces later. For each force we have already calculated a screen, and we have also calculated various other forces of our own, with which we hope to arm ourselves before we reach Ganymede. The problems facing us are complex, since there are some nine thousand forcebands of the order in which we are working, each differing from all the others as much as torque differs from tension, or as much as red differs from green. Therefore we have appealed to you for help, knowing that we could do but little alone. Alcantro and Fedanzo will supervise the construction of the generators of the various fields from these calculations. Dol Kenor will correlate power and electricity to and with the fields. Westfall and I will help work out the theoretical difficulties as they arise. Pyraz Amonar, who can devise and build a machine to perform any conceivable mechanical task, will help us all in the many mechanical difficulties we shall certainly encounter. Discussion of any point is now in order."
Step by step and equation after equation the calculations and plans were gone over, until every detail was clear in each mind. Then the men bent to their tasks; behind them not only the extraordinarily complete facilities of that gigantic workshop which was the Sirius; but also the full power of the detachment of police—the very cream of the young manhood of the planet. Week after toilsome week the unremitting labor went on, and little by little the massive cruiser of the void became endowed with an offensive and defensive armament incredible. An armament conceived in the fertile and daring brain of a sheer genius, guided only by the knowledge that such things were already in existence somewhere; reduced to working theory by a precise, mathematical logician; translated into fields of force by the greatest known experts; powered by the indefatigable efforts of an electrical wizard; made possible by the artful mechanical devices of the greatest inventor that three worlds had ever known! Thus it was that they approached Ganymede, ready, with blanketing screens full out, save for one narrow working band, and with a keen-eyed observer at every plate. When even the hyper-critical Westfall was convinced that their preparations were as complete as they could be made with the limited information at hand, Brandon directed a beam upon the satellite and tapped off a brief message: