The next was a miserable group of slaves, similar to the one who had operated the lawn-mower. In fact, the unhappy wreck of a man was one of them. But there was one slave who did not fawn and cringe. He was a tall, bald old man with a piercing eye and a patriarchal beard. He bore himself with an air of authority and dignity in striking contrast to the cheap slave's garb he wore. He stepped without hesitation before the magistrate.
"Excellency," he said, tapping his forehead with a finger, "my grandson is one of the weak-minded. It is for that reason that I have kept him hidden since babyhood — and his sister. It would have brought shame upon my household."
"Ha!" exclaimed the judge. "Shame on a slave's household — how droll!"
The old man stared back at him in patient dignity.
"These other men of my community, of which his lordship was kind enough to give me the sub-mayorship, have known nothing of my deception. They are innocent of wrong-doing. The fault is mine and mine alone."
"It matters not," cried the judge harshly. "The law of the Khan is just. The law of the Khan must be obeyed! The rule is that wherever an unbranded slave is found, the headman of the village and every tenth man in it shall be doomed to hard-labor on the Moon. Your effort at evasion is of no avail. Officer! Take them away."
Never would Allan Winchester forget his cruel examination. Nor could he rid from his mind the sentence he must now serve.
The forehold of the prison ship was a dreary place. The twelve condemned ordinary slaves of the Lohan estate sat on hard benches and stared stupidly at the floor.
Presently the aged patriarch spoke to Winchester.
"You wonder at my seeming sacrifice, my son? I did it, not for you, but for these poor villagers of mine. I preferred to lie while there was yet time."
"I see," said Winchester. "I'm sorry I brought this on you. I did not know."
"It does not matter," said the old man with resignation. "I have lived enough. Too long. Of all these I am the only one who knows and remembers the wonderful days before They came."
"They?"
"Yes. The rulers, these men from the plateaus of Central Asia, who wormed themselves into places of power and then betrayed their trust. Until then we had enjoyed ten centuries of peace and civilization; we had evolved a veritable Utopia. There was no strife or ambition, except for the better good of all. There was enough for everybody and to spare, while each man did what he was best suited for and received what he needed for his health and happiness.
"We perfected interplanetary travel and colonized and developed the distant bodies. We moved all our machinery and heavy industry to the Moon, where people worked a short term each year, then returned to Earth to enjoy their leisure period. The Earth then, as now, was a garden, except that it was for the use of all, not a small, self-chosen few."
Winchester's face was puzzled.
"But why," he demanded, "did so many yield to the few?"
"Because," replied the old man sadly, "we did not know how to defend ourselves. There were no weapons. For many generations the doctrine of brute force had been held to be abhorrent. Consequently, when this new breed of conquerors arose, we were caught by surprise. They were a small group, never quite assimilated to the single race that is now a blend of all those that existed before."
"But again, why?" insisted Winchester. "If conditions were so perfect, why should anybody rebel?"
The patriarch's eyes became sad and dispirited.
"There was a Mongoloid by the name of Hanu Sho-Tang, who had an overweening ambition and an imperious will. He was an able man, and had advanced to be the commander of a large spaceship, but the Regents of Transportation judged him to be unfit for further advancement — he was too dictatorial and harsh to his subordinates to fit our system.
"So he sulked and schemed and sowed discontent among those of similar disposition whom he knew. Above all he read. There were history books then — it was not until he became the Khan that he had them burned."
The patriarch pronounced the title almost in a whisper, and glanced anxiously about him. But none of the other slaves were attentive. They merely sat in stupid despair. He went on.
"He came upon the old histories of the distant past, when there were separate nations and men fought bloody, useless and inconclusive wars. He found the biography of a cruel conqueror named Genghis Khan, and the life-stories of other would-be conquerors — such ineffectual imitators as Napoleon and a creature called Hitler. From your testimony in court, that man must have been about your time."
Winchester nodded with a gleam in his eyes.
"The Mongoloid absorbed the philosophies of those men. He declared himself to be the direct descendant of the original Great Khan, and began to spread his doctrines. His own kind accepted them eagerly, and I am ashamed to say, so did many of our own race. It was easy after that for them to seize the supreme power."
He stopped talking and stared out the port.
"There is no hope," mumbled the old man brokenly.
"There is always hope!" said Winchester fiercely. His eyes lit up with the fire of resolution.
He felt a gnarled hand seize him, and was surprised at the warmth and vigor of its grip.
"Ah," said the old man. "If I were only young again!"
"Be young in spirit, then," Winchester challenged. "We shall have work to do!"
He thought of Cynthia then — Cynthia, a slave girl. The blood rushed angrily to his face, and he had to clench his fists to keep them quiet.
CHAPTER V
Break for Liberty
The area below was vast, and at first sight featureless. It was one of the tracts of the Moon known in the old days as "seas." But as the spaceship prison van approached nearer, Allan Winchester saw that the plain was pimpled over with small hemispherical mounds. Each was ringed with a faint aura of greenish light and connected with neighboring mounds by other slender beams of the same pale rays.
For awhile the ship approached no closer, but spiraled about the Moon as she lost velocity. The convex line of the horizon rolled slowly toward them, as if the Moon was a gigantic ball turning ponderously over. A string of immense craters came into view, and their slopes were studded with hundreds of minor ones.
Winchester saw that many were domed. He understood then why it was that when he had first seen them from the mouth of his cave in Munich, the satellite had appeared set with sparkling jewels. For the domes were of all shapes and colors, some spherical, some ellipsoidal and others polyhedral, showing many glistening facets.
"That is Tycho," pointed the old man to one larger than the rest, crested with a translucent dome that shimmered like polished mother-of-pearl. "In it is the great city of Cosmopolis, the largest in the System. There are the dormitories of the industrial slaves, the textile mills and many machine shops.
"The variegated colors show where the foreign quarters are, where the Martians and the Venusians live, and so on, each under his own planetary conditions. Beyond it, on that pinnacle, is the Great Observatory, one of the five located on the Moon."
"How do you know these things?" queried Winchester.
"I served here for thirty years," sighed the patriarch. "When my strength and skill failed, they reduced me to a domestic slave and sent me back to Earth to be headman of Prince Lohan's cattle herd."
The ship headed down into a vast, undomed crater. There were many spaceships