Bart Mallory, who had invented the atomic sun-ray towers, and held their patent rights for the exclusive use of the Titan Colony, was present, too. All of his small, nervous body, even his neatly kept Van Dyke beard, trembled with rage and grief.
"Arne was a good, practical man, when it came to taking care of fruit trees," he said. "But he was certainly no highly trained scientist. I haven't much faith in whatever his idea can be, either. Still, he was my friend. If I ran away from Titan, now that he's been killed, I'd feel like a dirty, yellow coward!"
Most of the other farmers had left the front of the bank building, to fight the fire across the street. But several of those who remained, nodded agreement with Bart Mallory. After all, everything they owned was on Titan. It was their home.
"If you don't go to Mars for that ship, Ron Leiccsen," Anna Charles said quietly, "I will! I know how to fly space-crafts as well as you do, anyway. My father was a racing pilot, and he taught me a few tricks of the trade! What Arne Reynaud said may be bunk; but there's a chance!"
Ron Leiccsen only growled inarticulately, and hurried off toward the blazing buildings. He had to fight something to expend some of his physical energies so that he could think, and clear his brain. Fighting the fire might do this. The release of atomic heat in the incandescent substance from the shattered sun-ray globe had ceased when the tower had collapsed; for the catalytic forces which induced the breakdown of the atoms had been cut off with the disruption of the apparatus. But the spilled contents of the globe were still terrifically hot. Only sand, poured on that dazzling fury, could cool and insulate it. And water was needed to quench the blazing debris of the buildings. So Ron Leiccsen worked like a demon with the other men.
And from the village jailhouse, opposite the row of fire-wracked ruins, hollow, booming laughter mocked him. There a Callistan combat pilot, captured some time ago when his ship had been shot down, clutched the bars of his prison's window with slender, furry, three-fingered hands, and made derisive, gloating remarks in his sketchy English.
"Eart'men! Vaah!" he taunted, his words rumbling in his vast chest. "Very little while—all done—you—here—Titan! Titan be—Mado-Achar—New Achar—New Callisto! Very little while we build shiny metal house here! You find out! You know already! Eart'men! Vaah! Huah!"
And then he would laugh, the breath sizzling in his wide nostrils, his little, close-set eyes, that peeped, like a poodle-dog's through the thick fur that covered his face, reflecting the flames and seeming to glow in appreciation of the situation, and of the choice Acharian insults he had hurled.
As he helped fight down the fire, Ron Leiccsen glanced often toward the defiant captive, wondering intently about all his kind. Tough and hardy, and immune to all terrestrial germ diseases, the Callistans came from a strange world of spore-plants and burnished, bizarre cities, over which a steady, cool climate brooded. Achar—Callisto—being a satellite of Jupiter, was far from the sun, too. But because Achar had a radioactive core, generating heat constantly, its surface was far warmer than would otherwise have been possible. And so there was life, there. It was a different kind of life, in many minor respects, than that of Earth. In that thin, cool atmosphere, nature had omitted certain biological phenomena.
Others of the fire-fighters hurled insults back at the captive Callistan—furious, defiant curses which showed that no sane argument could ever win a good half of them to retreat.