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creature’s physical anatomy, projected a strange, tubular device – rather like the telescopic sights of a rifle. Victoria had no time for further speculation. The Ice Warrior was now looming over her, cruel and menacing.
    ‘Stand!’ it commanded.
    Victoria forced herself upright. Her knees were like water. Only by spreading herself back against the wall could she safely stay on her feet. She tried to keep the terror out of her voice; her chin tilted upwards bravely.
    ‘Who are you?’ she demanded, looking up defiantly at the warrior head. At first, she heard only the eerie sound of its hissing breath; Victoria shivered beneath its dark, inscrutable gaze. What sort of creature was part reptile, part machine?
    ‘Where are you from?’ she cried out boldly, knowing all the while that if the creature made another sudden move, she would probably faint. The response from the creature made Victoria’s eyes grow round with wonder.
    ‘My name… is Varga…’ came the slow, faltering reply. ‘My home… is the Red Planet!’
    It can’t be true, Victoria thought to herself desperately. But she forced her voice to frame the question, ‘Mars?’
    Varga nodded proudly. Unearthly as he was, everything about him echoed the famous legends that Victoria had heard about the god of war; his pride, his strength and his savagery in battle. But this was a living, hideous alien – not a Greek god. And one who had been dead and buried in the glacier’s ice only hours ago. For a moment, curiosity overcame her fear.
    ‘But you were dead!’ exclaimed Victoria. ‘How did you come back to life?’ She stopped and flinched as Varga gestured angrily.
    ‘Enough questions!’ he hissed furiously. ‘Give me answers!’
    ‘Why should I?’ She never had liked being ordered about – even when frightened. But her defiance wavered. The Ice Warrior was now pointing the strange tubular device straight at her head.
    ‘Answers!’ came the insistent demand. Victoria nodded dumbly. The Ice Warrior continued. ‘How long was I trapped in the ice?’
    ‘I don’t know—’ Victoria started to say, then remembered that answers were compulsory. ‘One of the scientists here thinks you must have been inside the glacier since the First Ice Age…’ she faltered, hardly able to believe it herself, ‘… thousands of years ago.’
    The Ice Warrior hissed with astonishment. ‘As long ago as that?’ He paused in wonderment, and then quickly demanded, ‘They found nothing else?’
    Alarm flared suddenly in Victoria’s mind. She steeled herself to look into his expressionless face. ‘You mean… there are others like you?’ she whispered.
    The Ice Warrior lowered his arm, and stood strangely rigid. Victoria sensed the brooding change within Varga’s mind as he cast back through centuries of time, struggling to remember.
    ‘We were hovering… over the frozen lands. A sudden turbulence… our spacecraft crashed at the foot of the Ice Mountain.’ He paused. His memory was clearing. ‘We went outside our craft to investigate. The ice mountain shook… split open… swallowed us in a great whirlwind of snow, and there was only darkness.’
    He fell silent. Only the gentle labouring of his breath told Victoria anything of his state of mind. She spoke with sympathy.
    ‘The others with you,’ murmured Victoria, ‘did they all die – trapped inside the glacier?’
    Varga drew himself up proudly, and giving the staccato, dry cough that passed in his race for laughter, replied harshly. ‘If they are dead as I was… then they can be freed – and made to live!’
    The full meaning of what Varga was saying didn’t strike home to Victoria immediately. She could only see the impossibility of ever finding Varga’s companions – let alone recovering them from the glacier. ‘You’ll never be able to get them out by yourself!’ she declared.
    ‘You do not yet understand my capabilities,’ he murmured harshly. ‘But I will need your