He was utterly exhausted when he reached the sunship, panting, gasping for the thin air. The others were all like himself, caked with dried red mud, gasping asthmatically from exertion and excitement. Men were struggling to get pieces of heavy machinery aboard the flier—vitalium power generators that had been used to heat the furnaces, and even a motor ray tube that had been borrowed from the ship's power plant for emergency use in the improvised smelter.
The Prince and Dr. Trainor were laboring furiously over an odd piece of apparatus. On the red sand beside the silver sunship, they had set up a tripod on which was mounted a curious glistening device. There were lenses, prisms, condensers, mirrors. The core of it seemed to be a strange vacuum tube—which had an electrode of cerium, surrounded with a queer vitalium grid. A tiny filament was glowing in it; and the induction coil which powered the tube, fed by vitalium batteries, was buzzing incessantly.
"Better get aboard, and off!" Bill cried. "No use to lose our lives, our chance to save the world—just for a little mining machinery."
The Prince looked up in a moment, leaving the queer little device to Dr. Trainor. "Look at the Martian ships!" he cried, sweeping out an arm. "Must be thirty in sight, swarming up like flies. We couldn't get away. And against those purple atomic bombs, the torpedoes wouldn't have a chance. Besides, we have some of the ship's machinery out here. Some generators, and a ray tube."
Bill looked up, saw the swarming blue globes, circling above them in the saffron sky, some of them not a mile above. He shrugged hopelessly, then looked anxiously off to the north again, scanning the red plateau.
"Paula! What's become of her?" he demanded.
"Paula? Is she gone?" The Prince turned from the tripod, looked around suddenly. "Paula! What could have happened to her?"
"A broken heart has happened to her," Bill told him.
"You think—you think——" stammered the Prince. There was sudden alarm in his dark eyes, and a great tender longing. His bitterly cynical smile was gone.
"Bill, she can't be gone!" he cried, almost in agony.