"Hard to realize there's a race of vampires across there, living in great metal domes," Bill muttered, as he threw himself flat on the rocks at the lip of the precipice, and leveled one of the heavy torpedoes before him. "But I don't blame 'em for wanting to go to a more cheerful world."
Looking behind him, he soon saw men busy with electric drills not a hundred yards from the slender silver cylinder that was the Red Rover. The earth quivered beneath him as a shot was set off, and he saw a great fountain of crushed rock thrown into the air.
Men with barrows, an hour later, were wheeling the crushed rock to gleaming electrical reducing apparatus that Dr. Trainor and the Prince were setting up beside the sunship. Evidently there had been no difficulty in finding ore that carried a satisfactory amount of cerium.
Bill continued to scan the orange-red desert below him through the powerful telescope along the rocket tube. He kept his watch before him, and at half-hour intervals sent the three short flashes with his ray pistol, which meant "All is well."
Two hours must have gone by before he saw the blue globe. It came into view low over the red rim of the desert below him, crept closer on a wavering path.
"Martian ship in view," he signalled. "A blue globe, about ten feet in diameter. Follows curious winding course, as if following something."
"Keep rocket trained upon it," came the cautiously flashed reply. "Fire if it observes us."
"Globe following animals," he flashed back. "Two grayish bipeds leaping before it. Running with marvelous agility."
He was peering through the telescope sight of the rocket tube. Keeping the cross hairs upon the little blue globe, he could still see the creatures that fled before it. They were almost like men—or erect, hairy apes. Bipeds, they were, with human-like arms, and erect heads. Covered with short gray hair or fur, they carried no weapons.
They fled from the globe at a curious leaping run, which carried them over the flat red desert with remarkable speed. They came straight for the foot of the cliff from which Bill watched, the blue globe close behind them. When one of them stumbled over a block of lava and fell sprawling headlong on the sand, the other gray creature stopped to help it. The blue globe stopped, too, hanging still twenty feet above the red sand, waited for them to rise and run desperately on again.