1 - Warriors of Mars (15 page)

I opened my eyes and looked into
the smiling face of Doctor Logan—my chief assistant at the laboratories!

"
Logan
!"
I gasped. "Where am I—what has happened?"

"I don't know,
professor," he said. "Your body is a mass of scars—but you've put on
extra muscle from somewhere. How do you feel?"

"What has
happened!
"
I repeated loudly.

"You mean this end? Well, it
took us about seven hours, but we finally picked you up again on some funny
wavelength—we thought we'd lost you altogether. Something went wrong with the
transmitter. Some jamming, perhaps—I don't know."

I got up and seized him by his lab
coat.

"You've got to send me back!
You've got to send me back!"

"Hey—your experiences haven't
done you any good, prof," one of the technicians said. "You're lucky
to be alive at all. We've been working for seven hours—you were as good as
dead!"

"I still am," I said, my
shoulders sagging. I let go of
Logan
's
coat and stood there looking at the equipment. It had taken me to a place of
high adventure and a lovely woman—and it had brought me back to this drab
world.

I was hustled away to the sick bay
and they wouldn't let me out for weeks what with the doctors and psychologists
trying to discover what had 'really' happened to me. I was judged unfit for
work and they'd never let me get near the transmitter, of course—though I tried
several times. Finally they sent me to
Europe
—on
extended leave.

And here I am.

AND that, substantially, was the testament of Professor
Michael Kane, physicist and swordsmanscientist on Earth, warrior on Mars.

Believe it, as I believed it, if
you will. Do not believe it if you can.

After hearing Kane's story I asked
his permission to do two things.

He wanted to know what they were.

"Let me publish this
remarkable story of yours," I said, "so that the whole world might
judge your sanity and truthfulness."

He shrugged. "I suspect few
will make the correct judgment."

"At least those few will be
right."

"Very
well—and the other request?"

"That you let me finance a
privately built matter transmitter. Can it be done?"

"Yes. I am, after all, the inventor
of the machine. It would require a great deal of money, however."

I asked how much. He told me. It
would make a large hold in my income—really rather more than I could afford,
but I did not tell him that. I was ready to back my faith in his story with a
great deal of money.

Now the transmitter is almost
finished. Kane says he thinks he can tune it to the correct frequency. We have
worked like dogs for weeks to complete it, and I hope he is right.

This machine is in some ways more
sophisticated than the first one, in that it is really a type of 'transceiver'
being permanently tuned on this special wave.

Kane's idea is that if he can
return to Mars— however many centuries in the past it lies-he will be able to
build another machine there and thus travel back and forth at will. That side
of it seems, perhaps, a little too ambitious, but I have developed a great
respect for his scientific mind.

Will it work?

I do not yet know. As this
manuscript goes to press, we still have a week or so in which to test the
machine.

Perhaps, soon, I will have more to
write about the Warriors of Mars?

I hope so.

The End