Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Stories September 1932. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. [Illustration: _A blinding beam sheared through Peabody's middle_.] Slaves of Mercury _A Complete Novelette_ By Nat Schachner * * * * * CHAPTER I _The Space Wanderer Returns_ [Sidenote: Hilary returns to find alien diskoids in Earth's stratosphere, and out-world lords patrolling her cities.] Hilary Grendon piloted his battered, time-worn space flier, the _Vagabond_, to the smiling Earth that rose rapidly to greet it. Only the instinctive ease of long practise prevented a smash-up, his hands trembled so at the controls. Home again--the old familiar Earth! He could scarcely believe it! Perhaps it was only a dream, and he'd wake up among the unhuman glittering cylinders of Saturn, shuddering and crawling with the iciness of their fixed regard. Hilary's eyes blurred with unaccustomed mistiness as he drank in the warm sunlight, the soft green of the grass and the gracious lines of the slender birches as they fluttered their leaves daintily in the unhurrying breeze. How different it all was from the harsh red angularities of Mars! He was outside, breathing deeply, inhaling the perfumed air with delight. This was the only heaven; beyond--that far-flung immensity of planetary orbs--was hell! He, Hilary Grendon, the carefree, smiling skeptic of old, was a Fundamentalist now. How long was it since they had started out on the first flight that man had taken into outer space--he and those stanch comrades? Five years? God! Had it been so long? Yet here he was, back on Earth again, the kindly, blessed Earth their eyes had clung to when they were fighting desperately for their lives against the protoplasmic things that inhabited Ganymede. Hilary brushed a tear away as he thought of those brave, loyal friends. Dick lay as he fell on Saturn, transfixed by an icicle dart; Martin had been engulfed in an unholy maw on Ganymede; Dorn was a frozen idol to the spiral beings of Pluto; and poor Hurley, his fate was the worst of all: his hideously bloated body was swinging in an orbit around Mars, a satellite through all eternity. He, Hilary Grendon, was the sole survivor of that tremendous Odyssey!