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<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2> Marlin woke with a smothering sensation and a foreboding. Fumbling for his flashlight, he sought the others. Maw Barstow was snoring stertoriously in her cubbyhole. Pearl, who should have occupied the pallet next to her, was gone. Sally, pale from the retching she had endured, was sleeping fitfully. In the storeroom, he found DuChane, lying in a stupor beside an empty bottle. There were several empties, in fact. DuChane and McGruder must have returned to make a night of it. But McGruder was nowhere in sight. With a grunt of distaste, Marlin turned his attention to the hull. It was progressively deteriorating. The blow had ruptured the corroded shell-plates in numerous places, and they were constantly giving way under the shifting stresses. His thoughts returned to Pearl. Strange that he had not come across the girl. He made an unavailing search of the staterooms, storerooms, the control room, and all passages and aisles of the unsteady superstructure. A taut feeling constricted his chest. She was so defenseless in her childish simplicity. She might have wandered out in the dark and fallen from any one of a dozen or more points of danger he could imagine. Memory of the fate that had overtaken Link, and presumably Norma's body, caused him to shudder. From searching the likely places, he fell to searching the unlikely ones. His flashlight beam unexpectedly picked up the two of them—Pearl and McGruder—in a segment between the outcurving hull and the end-wall of the cabin-like structure containing their sleeping compartments. The narrow crevice between the corner of the straight wall and the hull made it an almost inaccessible retreat. In the brief glimpse Marlin caught before McGruder turned his startled, snarling face toward the flashlight, the whole story was apparent. McGruder had pursued the girl and finally cornered her. She was struggling to escape from his grasp. The man cringed away from the light. "Get outa here!" he yelled hoarsely. "This don't concern you." "No?" Marlin spoke with deadly intensity. "Take your hands off that girl." "Says who?" "I've still got the gun, McGruder—and I don't mind admitting that I've itched all along for an excuse to use it on your carcass. Let go, damn you!" McGruder jerked the girl roughly around so that she offered a shield for his body. "Come ahead—shoot!" he taunted. Marlin pocketed his gun. "I'm coming after you." The lower part of the crevice was too narrow to admit his body, but it widened out above, where the hull sloped away from the wall. Pearl could have squeezed through at the floor level, but McGruder must have had to inch himself up a couple of feet before he could follow her. Methodically, Marlin set out to do the same. <hr class="tb" /> The feat required both hands, and McGruder seized the opportunity, when Marlin had squirmed himself part way up, to release the girl and plunge toward him with clenched fist. Marlin saved himself from a paralyzing blow in the midriff by leaping backward. He snatched for the gun, but before he could recover it, McGruder was well back inside, again using Pearl for a shield. "Smart guy!" he yelled tauntingly. "Coming in, are you!" This time, Marlin held his flashlight in one hand and the automatic in the other, training both on McGruder, while he slowly worked himself up the angle formed by the two walls by pressure of his out-thrust knees and elbows. McGruder, eyes glittering, backed away, still holding the bewildered girl before him. Slowly, keeping the gun and flashlight trained upon him, Marlin squeezed his bulk through the crevice. The vessel gave one of its now frequent lurches, groaning with the strain on yielding hull and weakened girders. In that instant, Marlin felt a movement of the two steel walls as they spread apart. He would have fallen if he had not involuntarily spread his elbows and shoulders to maintain his position. The next instant, the walls closed in on him, crushing—crushing—squeezing the life out of his body. Even in that agonized moment, a horrified gasp escaped his lips, at what was revealed by the stabbing ray of the flashlight. The heaving side of the vessel tightened cruelly, then released him from its vice-like grip. Limp with pain, Marlin dropped heavily to the floor within the narrow enclosure. He lay for a moment gasping for breath, neither knowing nor caring whether any bones were cracked. Then he gathered himself for a supreme effort. His body was one solid ache as tortured muscles strained to obey his will. "Look!" he gasped hoarsely, flashlight pointing. "Look—behind—!" McGruder, struggling dazedly to his feet with the girl still clutched in his embrace, swung around at the warning, but it was already too late. A great seam had opened in the hull directly behind him, and a mass of ooze was pouring in, like a surge of lava. Caught off-balance, he stumbled and slipped on one knee in the encroaching tide. As he floundered a bellow like that of a mired bull escaped his distorted lips. He was gripped tenaciously by the pitiless exudation. His eyes roved frantically. Then, as Marlin dragged himself partly erect, he saw McGruder do an incredible thing. Desperately, the detective twisted himself half around, with the girl in his arms, and forced her into the viscous tide. She struggled in a faintly bewildered manner. Bracing himself against her body, he gained a leverage which enabled him to release, first one foot and then the other. As he stumbled free, the girl was engulfed, almost before she could cry out. In that moment of horror, Marlin was conscious only of a consuming rage—a lust to kill that obliterated all else. Forgetful of the automatic, he dived toward McGruder, with hands that had suddenly become claws. "Don't! Don't! We've got to squeeze out of here! Before it catches—" McGruder's screaming protest was strangled as ruthless fingers closed around his windpipe. When the smothering ooze closed over both heaving bodies, Marlin was scarcely aware, through the red fury of his demoniac rage, that the end had come.... <hr class="tb" /> ... "But, mother, the goddesses were all beautiful, were they not?" "Yes, son, but Pi-Ruh-Al was the most beautiful." "Then why do the carvings always show Sa-Hala-Lee with a face, while Pi-Ruh-Al has none? I would think—" "Hush child! The beauty of Pi-Ruh-Al was so dazzling that no mortal might look upon it. Even the gods could scarce endure its splendor, and no sculptor has dared presume to represent her features. Not so with Sa-Hala-Lee, who is the goddess of N'urthly beauty and constancy. A touching legend relates to the manner by which she was wooed by Mah-Gurru-Dah, Lord of the East, patron of the forge. He was forced to wound her sore unto death with a lightning bolt forged in his smithy before she yielded—but thereafter she remained loyal with a faithfulness beyond mortal understanding. Yea, though it is reputed that both Maha-Ra-Lin and Bar-Du-Chan sought her because of her siren-like allure, she repulsed them with scorn. "Thus wrote the prophets of old: 'In the beginning was El-Leighi, dweller in the sun, who looked upon the sea of space and saw that it was a void, barren of all things. And El-Leighi hurled forth his thunderbolt and created a sphere of matter within that void. And he cast his thunderbolts again and yet again until he had created many spheres which circled slowly through the emptiness of space. "'El-Leighi looked upon his work, yet was not satisfied. Four of his bolts had formed spheres revolving so close to the sun that its rays scorched them with heat unbearable. Others—the mightiest bolts of all—formed planets immeasurably far away, lost in frigid coldness. "'So once again El-Leighi gathered his forces and hurled a thunderbolt into space. And on that thunderbolt rode great beings—gods inferior only to El-Leighi himself—whom he commanded to create a world on which life might exist. "'When the thunderbolt shattered, in a temperate region of space beyond the fourth planet, these gods fulfilled their destiny by gathering its fragments and out of them creating a new world....'" <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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