"As soon as I recognized this Voornizar ship, I let her have the choker beam. She immediately lost headway, began to drift. I came alongside and boarded her, being careful to put on a space suit, for the Voornizar require no atmosphere, and would not be likely to have the ship's interior conditioned. I found what I expected. There was not a living creature, or moving piece of machinery aboard. I had heard the fearsome Ghosts described many times, but these were the first I had seen. Their silvery, amorphous bodies are said to glow with a blinding white effulgence, but in death, these had turned to a dull leaden hue. There were hundreds of them in the great ship, which seemed to me mostly occupied by machinery with which to attract and grapple the radium worms, and holds in which to store them.
"On an upper deck, I found a row of small staterooms, which I thought wise to investigate. And well that I did, for my former presumption that nothing lived on the ship was not quite correct. That was one who barely lived—"
"Barely is the word, my friend," came a weak voice from the bunk, "I don't know what you did to those devils, but you sure stopped them in their tracks."
Denny had recovered consciousness. The trio hurried to his side.
"So they couldn't quite kill you?" Art grinned down at the space pilot.
"Weren't trying!" replied Denny briefly. "They seemed interested in the discoveries I'd made on Venus. Had the nicest ways of getting information; simple, too. All they had to do was touch my skin and I got a radium burn."
"You must have passed out just after I used the ray on them," Klalmar-lan commented. "But how did they get you in the first place?"
"Just slipped up behind us, showing a friendly signal, and slapped some kind of paralysis ray on us—went through the permirium hull and everything. They came aboard—but only took me off. The rest of the crew they left lying there, paralyzed. Then they just swung away a few miles and disintegrated the whole works. That was pretty tough to take—some of those boys had been to hell and back with me."
"They paid for that massacre," growled Klalmar-lan. "But that was only one of their countless thousands, perhaps millions of ships. I believe that they have a huge base on Venus, from which they are preparing to swoop down on Earth when the Ghlak-Ileth are ready. We will have to locate that base. Then we will radio the Martian Fleet. We have half a million ships, armed with choker rays and disintegrators. Long have we prepared to seize the treasure of Venus, and at the same time revenge ourselves on our ancient enemy. Speaking for the Greater Ring," and he drew himself up proudly, "I can promise you that we will fight as fiercely to save your race from extinction, though there be no gain, if it will in some measure alleviate the great wrong we have done you in leaving you unwarned and unprepared."