Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction; Venus (Planet) -- Fiction
And then events began to differ from those of the past; for the three
other Formians halted, and Doggo advanced alone. By the agitation of the
beast’s antennae the earth man could see that it was talking to him. But
Myles no longer possessed the wonderful electrical headset which he had
contrived and built during his previous visit to that planet, so as to
talk with Cupians and Formians, both of which races are earless and
converse by means of radiations from their antennae.
So he picked up two sticks from the beach, and held them projecting from
his forehead; then threw them to the ground with a grimace of disgust
and pointed to his ears.
Doggo understood, and scratched with his paw in Cupian shorthand on the
silver sands the message: “Myles Cabot, you are our prisoner.”
“What, again?” scratched Myles, then made a sign of submission.
He dreaded the paralyzing bite which Formians usually administer to
their victims, and which he had twice experienced in the past; but,
fortunately, it was not now forthcoming.
The other three ants kept away from him as Doggo led him to the beached
airplane, and soon they were scudding along beneath silver skies,
northward as it later turned out.
Far below them were silver-green fields and tangled tropical woods,
interspersed with rivulets and little ponds.
This was Cupia, his Cupia. He was home once more, back again upon the
planet which held all that was dear to him in two worlds.
His heart glowed with the warmth of homecoming. What mattered it that he
was now a prisoner, in the hands (or, rather, claws) of his old enemies,
the Formians? He had been their prisoner before, and had escaped. Once
more he could escape, and rescue the Princess Lilla.
Poor girl! How eager he was to reach her side, and save her from that
peril, whatever it was, which had caused her to flash that “S O S” a
hundred million miles across the solar system from Poros to the earth.
He wondered what could have happened in Cupia since his departure, only
a few sangths ago. How was it that the ant-men had survived their
airplane journey across the boiling seas? What had led them to return?
Or perhaps these ants were a group who had hidden somewhere and thus had
escaped the general extermination of their race. In either event, how
had they been able to reconquer Cupia? And where was their former
leader, Yuri, the renegade Cupian prince?
These and a hundred other similar questions flooded in upon the
earth-man, as the Formian airship carried him, a captive, through the
skies.
He gazed again at the scene below, and now noted one difference from the
accustomed Porovian landscape, for nowhere ran the smooth concrete roads
which bear the swift two-wheeled kerkools of the Cupians to all parts of
their continent. What uninhabited portion of Cupia could this be, over
which they were now passing?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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