The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Passing of Ku Sui, by Anthony Gilmore
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Title: The Passing of Ku Sui
Author: Anthony Gilmore
Release Date: October 20, 2009 [EBook #30303]
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Astounding Stories November 1932.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.
The Table of Contents is not part of the original magazine.
One word in Chapter II could not be read. It has been marked
as illegible.
The Passing of Ku Sui
_A Complete Novelette_
By Anthony Gilmore
* * * * *
CONTENTS
Chapter
I The Plan
II Three Figures in the Dawn
III The Raid
IV The Voice of the Brains
V "My Congratulations, Captain Carse!"
VI The Deadline
VII To the Laboratory
VIII White's Brain--Yellow's Head
IX Four Bodies
X The Promise Fulfilled
XI Ordeal
XII Flight
XIII In Earth's Shadow
XIV The Hawk Strikes
XV There Is a Meteor
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
_The Plan_
[Illustration: _Like a projectile Hawk Carse shot out in a direction
away from Earth._]
[Sidenote: A screaming streak in the night--a cloud of billowing
steam--and the climax of Hawk Carse's spectacular "Affair of the
Brains" is over.]
The career of Hawk Carse, taken broadly, divides itself into three
main phases, and it is with the Ku Sui adventures of the second phase
that we have been concerned in this intimate narrative. John Sewell,
the historian, baldly condenses those adventures of a century ago
together, but on research and closer scrutiny they take on an
individuality and significance deserving of separate treatment, and
this they have been given here. For fictionized presentation, we have
spaced the adventures into four connected episodes, four acts of a
vibrant drama which ranged clear from Saturn to Earth, the core of
which was the feud between Captain Carse and the power-lusting
Eurasian scientist, Dr. Ku Sui--that feud the reverberations of whose
terrible settling still echo over the solar system--and in this last
act of the drama, set out below, we come to its spectacular climax.
The words of John Sewell's epic history sit lightly on paper; easy
words for Sewell, once the collection of data was over, to write; not
very significant words for the uninitiated and casual reader who does
not see the irresistible forces beneath them. But consider the full
meaning of these words, and glance for a moment at the two figures
conjured up by them. We see Hawk Carse, a man slender in build, but
with gray eyes and lithe, strong-fingered hands and cold, intent face
that give the clue to the steel of him; we see Dr. Ku Sui, tall,
suave, unhurried, formed as though by a master sculptor, in whose rare
green eyes slumbered the soul of a tiger, notwithstanding the courtesy
and the grace that masked always his most infamous moves. These two we
see looming through and dwarfing Sewell's words as they face each
other, for they were probably the most bitter, and certainly the most
spectacular, foe-men of that raw period before the patrol ships swept
up from the home of man to lay Earth's laws through space.
Carse and Ku Sui, adventurer and scientist, each with his own
distinctive strength and his own unyielding character--those two were
star-crossed, fated to be foes, and whenever they met there was blood,
and never was quarter asked nor quarter expected. How could it have
been otherwise? Ku Sui controlled the isuan drug trade, and Carse was
against it, as he was against everything underhanded and unclean; Ku
Sui had tricked and, by a single deed, driven Carse's loved comrade,
Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow, from his honored position on Earth,
and Carse was sworn to bring Ku Sui to Earth to clear the old
scientist's name. Either of these alone was enough to seal the feud,
but there was more. Carse was sworn to release from their bondage of
life-in-death Ku Sui's most prized possession, his storehouse of
wisdom--the brains of five great Earth scientists, kept alive though
their bodies were dead.
These, then, were the forces glossed over so lightly by John
Sewell's words. These the forces that clashed in the episode set out
below: that clashed, then drew apart, and knew not one another for
years....
* * * * *
It will be recalled that, in the second of these four episodes, "The
Affair of the Brains,"[1] Hawk Carse, Eliot Leithgow, and the Negro
Friday broke free from Dr. Ku's secret lair, his outwardly invisible
asteroid, and in doing so thought they had destroyed the Eurasian and
all his works, including the infamous machine of coordinated brains.
In the third episode, "The Bluff of the Hawk,"[2] it will be
remembered that the companions came in Dr. Ku's self-propulsive
space-suits to Satellite III of Jupiter; and that there Carse learned
that in reality the Eurasian and the brains had survived, and that Dr.
Ku might very possibly soon be in possession of a direct clue to
Leithgow's hidden laboratory on Satellite III. We saw Carse take the
lone course, as he always preferred, sending Leithgow and Friday to
his friend Ban Wilson's ranch while he went to erase the clue. And we
saw him achieve his end at the fort-ranch of Lar Tantril, strong
henchman of Ku Sui, and, in brilliant Carse fashion, turn the tables
and escape from the trap that had seemingly snared him, and proceed
towards where, fourteen miles away, Leithgow and the Negro were
waiting for him.
[Footnote 1: See the March, 1932, issue of Astounding Stories.]
[Footnote 2: See the May, 1932, issue of Astounding Stories.]
His three friends were waiting very uneasily that day. Eleven hours
had passed since Leithgow and Friday had parted from the Hawk, and
they had heard nothing from him. They knew he was going into high
peril: Leithgow had in vain tried to dissuade him; and so it was with
growing fear that they watched the hours pass by.
With Ban Wilson, they sat near dawn in the comfortable living room of
the ranch's central building. Although largely rested from the ordeal
of the journey to Satellite III, the huge Negro was fidgety, and even
Leithgow, more controlled, showed the strain by continually raising
his thin white fingers to his lined face and stroking it. Wilson's men
were on watch outside in the graying darkness, but often Friday
supplemented them, going to the door, staring down to the beach of the
bordering lake, staring up to the skies, staring at the black and
murmurous flanks of the jungle--staring, scowling and returning to sit
and look gloomily at the floor.
* * * * *
Ban Wilson was the most active physically. He was a miniature dynamo
of a man, throbbing with a restless, inexhaustible tide of energy.
Short and wiry, he stared truculently at the universe through
wonderfully clear blue eyes, surrounded by a bumper crop of freckles
and topped by a mat of bristly red hair. His short stub nose had
prodded into countless hostile places where it most emphatically was
not wanted. It would be hardly necessary to old acquaintances of his
to say that he was now speaking.
"No, sir! I say the Hawk's safe and kicking! Can't kill _him_! By my
grandmother's false teeth, I swear I'd follow him to hell, knowin' I'd
come out alive and leavin' the devil yowlin' behind with his tail tied
into pretzels! He said he would meet you here? Well, then, he will."
Friday looked up mournfully.
"Yes, suh, Cap'n Ban; but Cap'n Carse was going into a pow'ful lot of
trouble. An' he was worn an' tired, an' he only had a space-suit an' a
raygun, an' you know he wouldn't stop for anything till he'd done
what he set out to. I kind of feel ... I dunno ... I dunno...."
"By Betelguese!" swore Ban Wilson, "if he doesn't come soon I'll take
that damned Porno apart till I find him!"
Eliot Leithgow gave up the late radio newscast from Earth he had been
pretending to read. A brief silence fell, and through it the old
scientist seemed to feel something, seemed to expect something. And he
was not mistaken.
"_Who's there?_"
It was a cry from one of the watchers outside. Friday leaped out of
his uneasy seat and was through the door even before Ban, who followed
with Leithgow. They heard the Negro roar from ahead:
"Cap'n Carse! Cap'n Carse! Sure enough, it's Cap'n Carse!"--and they
saw his great form go bounding down to the gray-lit beach of the lake,
to a slight, weary figure that came stumbling along it.
* * * * *
Hawk Carse had come as he said he would, but he was a sore figure of a
man. Though he was not in it now, for days he had worn the harsh,
grating metal and fabric of a space-suit, and its marks were left on
him. Even from a distance the others could see that his once-neat blue
trousers and soft flannel shirt were torn through in many places,
revealing ugly purplish bruises; on his haggard face was a nap of
flaxen beard, and in his blood-shot gray eyes utter exhaustion, both
mental and physical. The Hawk had been acting at high tension for days
past, and now the reaction was exacting its inevitable toll.
He came stumbling heavily along the beach, his feet dragging through
its coarse sand, and it seemed as if he would drop any moment. With a
slight smile he greeted Friday, then Eliot Leithgow and Wilson, all
running down.
"Hello, Eclipse," he murmured, "and Eliot--and Ban--"
There he wavered and half fell against the Negro's body. Friday wished
to carry him, but he would have none of it: by himself he walked up to
the ranch-house, where he slumped into a chair while Ban Wilson went
shouting into the galley for a mug of hot alkite.
After draining it, Carse revived slightly. Again aware of the three
men grouped around him, and recognizing their eagerness for his news,
he forced himself to speech.
"Sleepy--must sleep. But--yes--some things I'll tell you." In quick,
staccato sentences, his tired eyelids shut half the time, he sketched
his adventure at Lar Tantril's ranch, explaining how, even though
captured, he had destroyed the figures, telling of the location of
Leithgow's laboratory; and a slight smile appeared on his lips as he
told of the ruse by which he had escaped. "Got away. Told them the
lake-front was very dangerous to them. Made them let me show them. I
walked out--dozens of them round me, guns on me--walked out till I
went under water. Could do it in the suit. I walked under water half a
mile or so, then came up and cached the suit. I guess they're still
watching! Easy!"
* * * * *
He chuckled, and then, after a short pause, went on:
"But here's what's important--Ku Sui is alive. Yes, I know it. He has
an assignation with Tantril at Tantril's ranch. In five days. And the
coordinated brains I promised to destroy--they still exist. So, Eliot,
these are orders: prepare plans for infra-red and ultra-violet
devices--they ought to do it--so we can see Dr. Ku's invisible
asteroid when it comes. Friday, you go down and get my space-suit:
it's cached ten miles down the beach, beneath a big watrari tree. And
then--" His head slumped over; he appeared to have abruptly fallen to
sleep.
"Yes, Carse? What is your plan?" Eliot Leithgow asked softly. But the
Hawk was only making a great last effort to gather the threads of his
idea.
"Yes," he responded, "the plan. Ban stations a man to keep watch on
Tantril's ranch, while we go back to your laboratory, Eliot, where
you'll make the devices and repair the gravity-plates of my suit.
Then, four nights from now, if the watcher's seen no one arrive, Ban,
Friday and I return and lie in ambush round Tantril's ranch. Awaiting
Dr. Ku. When he comes, he'll surely leave his asteroid somewhere near.
And while he's at Tantril's, we capture the asteroid--and my promise
to the coordinated brains will be kept.
"Then--but that's enough for now; I am so tired. Ban, will you
please--some food--"
Wilson, who had been listening eagerly and, at the end, grinning in
prospect of action with the Hawk, darted off like a spark. A few
minutes later, after his third mouthful of food, Carse murmured:
"We'll use your ship to go to Eliot's lab in, Ban, but I think
you'll--have to--carry me--aboard. So sleepy. Wake me when we get
to--lab."
On this last word his sleep-denied body had its way, and at once he
was deep in the dreamless slumber of exhaustion.
While he slept, the others rapidly carried out his orders. Within two
hours Friday, in the ranch's air-car, had retrieved the cached suit.
Ban Wilson had manned and made ready his personal space-ship for the
trip to the laboratory, and Eliot Leithgow had jotted down a few
preliminary plans for the infra-red and ultra-violet instruments
which Carse would need in order to see the invisible asteroid of Dr.
Ku Sui.
CHAPTER II
_Three Figures in the Dawn_
The fourth night after the Hawk had met his friends at Ban Wilson's
was sunless and Jupiter-less, nor was there the slightest breath of
wind; and in the humid, dank jungle surrounding on three sides the
isuan ranch of the Venusian Lar Tantril the sounds of night-prowling
animals burst full and loud, making an almost continuous babel of
varied and savage noise.
In the midst of this dark inferno, Tantril's ranch was an island of
stillness. Within the high guarding fence, the long low buildings lay
quiet and were [illegible] brushed periodically by the light from the
watch-beacon high overhead as it swept its shaft over the jungle
smother and then around over the black glassy surface of the Great
Briney Lake, bordering the ranch enclosure on the fourth side. And,
vigilantly, the eyes of three Venusian guards followed the ray.
They stood on the three lookout towers which reared at equal intervals
up above the circumference of the ranch; and though the buildings
below seemed deserted, in reality wide-awake men were stationed at
posts within them, waiting for the clang of the alarm which the
pressing of a button in any one of the lookout towers would effect.
Lar Tantril's ranch was not asleep. It was as alert and wary as the
beasts tracking through the jungle outside its fence, and all its
defensive and offensive weapons were at the ready.
No one within the ranch knew it, but within two hundred yards lay the
foe Lar Tantril and his men feared most.
* * * * *
Regularly around the watch-beacon swept, slicing the blackness with an
oval white finger, the farthest edge of which reached a hundred and
fifty yards. Over the "western" lake--and its inky ripples sparkled
somehow ominously. Over the jungle's confusion--and trees, great
bushes, spiky vines and creeper-growths leaped into momentary
visibility, and then were again swallowed up in the tide of night.
Here a cutlas-beaked bird, spotlighted for an instant, froze into
surprised immobility with the pasty, bloated worm it had seized
twisting and dangling from its mouth, to flap squawking away as the
ray glided on: there the coils of a seekan, in ambush on a tree limb,
glittered crimson for the sudden moment of illumination; or a nameless
huge-eyed pantherlike creature was glimpsed as it clawed at a nest of
unfledged haris, while the frantic, screaming mother beat at it with
wings and claws....
But all this was usual and unalarming, merely the ordinary routine of
the jungle at night. Could the beacon have reached out another fifty
yards, the guards on their towers would have seen that which was not
usual--and would have summoned every weapon of the ranch beneath.
Or could the guards have heard, besides the cries and crashings and
yowls of the jungle folk, the man-made sounds which sped silently back
and forth across the ranch within their tight and secret radio
beams--then, too, the alarm would have clanged.
Had the beacon suddenly stretched its path outward another fifty
yards, it would have fallen upon a massive, leafy watrari tree, taller
than most: and the guards, looking close, might have caught in one
notch of the tree's many limbs a glint of metal: might have seen, had
the light held on that glint, a bloated monster of metal and fabric
braced there, hiding behind a screen of leaves.
This giant, not native to the jungle, was posted due "north" from the
ranch. Another waited to the "south," in a similarly large tree; and
another to the "east."
Hawk Carse and his friends were abroad again and waiting to strike.
* * * * *
Ban Wilson, hot, itching and uncomfortable inside the heavy space-suit
that he wore, and supremely aware of his consequent awkwardness,
watched the ranch's beacon sweeping past him thirty or more yards
away, and again sought relief from the tedium in conversation.
"Jupiter should be rising soon, Carse. It's the darkest hour--seems to
me he'll come now if he comes at all. What do you think?"
He was the one posted in a watrari tree "south" of Tantril's ranch.
Flung on the tight beam of his helmet-radio, which had been tuned and
adjusted by Eliot Leithgow so as to reach only two other radios, the
words rang simultaneously in the receivers of Friday, who was "east"
of the ranch, and Carse, who was "north."
The Hawk responded curtly:
"I don't know when he'll come; I suspect not before full morning."
Ban Wilson grunted at receipt of this discouraging opinion, and then
once more, as he had been doing regularly all through the night,
raised to his eyes the instrument that hung by a cord from the
neckpiece of the suit. Through it he scanned slowly and methodically
the portion of black heaven that had been assigned to him. The
instrument would have resembled a bulky pair of electro-binoculars
with its twin tubes and eyepieces, had not there been, underneath the
tubes, a small, compact box which by Leithgow-magic revealed the
world through infra-red light by one tube, and ultra-violet the other.
"Nothing!" Ban muttered to himself, lowering the device. "And damn Ku
Sui for makin' these space-suits so infernally uncomfortable! Might as
well have made 'em space-ships, while he was at it!... Say, Carse," he
began again aloud into his microphone, "maybe Dr. Ku's come already. I
know my men said no one had arrived at the ranch in a suit like these
we've got on--but, hell, if his whole asteroid's invisible, why
couldn't he make his space-suit invisible, too?"
"I don't think he's done that. Otherwise he would have--" The
adventurer's level tone raised incisively. "Now, both of you, still!
Conceal yourselves with great care--Jupiter's rising!"
* * * * *
The "western" horizon, a moment before indistinguishable, was now
faintly flushed, a flush which deepened quickly into glowing, riotous
crimson, causing long streamers to shoot out over the surface of the
Great Briney, tingling it, sparkling it. The light reached the jungle:
and when the first faint reflected rays filtered down through the
matted gloom of tree and vine and bush the creatures that had tracked
for prey all night looked to their lairs: and gradually, the tenor of
the jungle noises waned off into a few last screams and muttered
growls, and then died altogether into the heavy, brooding hush that
comes always with dawn over the jungles of Satellite III.
Jupiter thrust his flaming arch upwards over the horizon, and climbed
with his whole vast blood-blotched bulk into a sky turned suddenly
blue. Lake and jungle shimmered under the rapidly dissipating night
vapors. The ranch-beacon paled into unimportance. Day had come.
And now the three bloated figures of metal and fabric that were men
crouched closely back beneath the leaves of the trees that concealed
them, and waited tensely, not daring at first to move for fear of
discovery. Each one could see, through the intervening growth, the
watch-towers of the ranch; but Friday, from his post in the tree to
the "east," could see the area best, and it was Friday to whom Carse's
next words were addressed.
"Eclipse?" his terse voice asked. "Do the guards in the towers seem to
notice anything?"
The big Negro strained cautiously for a better view.
"No, suh, Cap'n Carse. Sure they can't see us at all. Just pacin'
round on their towers, kind of fidgety."
"Anyone else in sight?"
"No, suh.... Oh, now there's somethin'. Two of the guards are looking
below, cupping their ears. Someone down there must be tellin' them
somethin'. Now they're lookin' up to the sky--the northern sky. Yes,
suh! All three of 'em! They're expectin' someone, sure enough!"
"Good. He must be coming. Use your glasses."
* * * * *
Then in all three trees the instruments that Eliot Leithgow had shaped
were raised, and the whole sweep of horizon and the glowing, clear
blue dome of sky subjected to minute inspection through their
detecting infra-red and ultra-violet. Ban Wilson, perhaps, stared most
eagerly, for he had never seen Ku Sui's asteroid, and despite himself
still only half-believed that twenty craggy, twisted miles of rock
could be swung as its master willed in space, and brought down bodily
to Satellite III.
But he saw nothing in the sky; nothing looming gigantically over any
part of the horizon; and he reported disgustedly:
"Nothing doing anywhere. Carse."
"Don't see nothing either, suh," the Negro's deep voice added. And
both of them heard the Hawk murmur:
"Nor do I. But he must be--Ah! There! Careful! They're coming!"
"Where? Where is it?" yapped Ban excitedly, jerking the instrument to
his eyes again.
"Speak low. Not the asteroid. Three men."
For a tense minute there was silence between them, until, in a low,
crisp voice, the Hawk added:
"Three men in space-suits like ours, coming from the "north" straight
for Tantril's. Ban, you may not be able to see them till they get to
the ranch, so you keep hunting for the asteroid with your glasses.
Friday, you see them?"
"Yes, suh! Three! One ahead of the others!"
"Keep your eyes tight on them. No talking now from either of you
unless it's important."
The steely voice snapped off. And carefully, in his tree, Hawk Carse
brushed aside a fringe of leaves and concentrated on the three figures
the dawn had brought.
* * * * *
Hard and sharp they glittered in the flood of ruddy light from
Jupiter, great grotesque figures of metal and bulging fabric, with
shining quarzite face-plates and the abnormally large helmets and
boot-pieces which identified them as being of the enemy. At a level
fifty feet above the jungle's crown they came in fast, horizontal
transit, and there was much of beauty in the picture that they
made--sparkling shapes flying without sound or movement of limb
against the blue sky, over the heaped colors of the jungle below. One
flew slightly in the lead, and he, the watching Hawk felt positive,
was Ku Sui, and the other two his servants--probably men whose brains
had been violated, dehumanized--mere machines in human form.
Straight in the three figures flew, without hesitation or swerving,
closer and closer to the watching man in the tree. The Hawk's lips
compressed as his old enemy neared, and into his watching gray eyes
came the deadly cold emotionless look that was known and feared
throughout space, wherever outlaws walked or flew. Ku Sui--so close!
There, in that even-gliding figure, was the author of the infamy done
to Leithgow, of the crime to the brains that lived though their bodies
were dead; of the organized isuan trade. Go for him now? The thought
flashed temptingly through Carse's head, but he saw sense at once. Far
too dangerous, with the powerful, watching ranch so close. He could
not jeopardize the success of his promise to the brains.
And so Dr. Ku Sui passed, while two pairs of eyes from two leafy trees
watched closely every instant of his passing, and one man's hand
dropped unconsciously to the butt of a raygun.
Quickly, the Eurasian and his servitors were gone, their straight,
steady flight obscured by the trees around Tantril's ranch, below
which they slanted.
Dr. Ku Sui had arrived at his assignation. But where was the asteroid?
* * * * *
Through his instrument, Carse sought horizon and heaven for the
massive body, but in vain. He spoke into his helmet-radio's mike.
"Ban?"
"Yes, Carse?"
"See the asteroid anywhere?"
"Nowhere, by Betelgeuse! I've looked till my eyes--"
The Hawk cut him short. "All right. Stand by. Friday?"
"Yes, suh?"
"Can you see anything special?"
"No, suh--only that the three platform guards keep lookin' down
towards the center of the ranch."
"Good. That means Ku Sui's being received," said Carse; and then he
considered swiftly for a minute. Decided, he continued:
"Ban and Friday, you both wait where you are, keeping a steady
lookout. None of us can see the asteroid, but it must be somewhere
comparatively near, for Dr. Ku has no reason to bother with a long
journey in a space-suit. I think the asteroid's close down, hidden by
that distant ridge in the direction from which they came. I'm going to
find it. When I do, I'll tell you where to come meet me. Inform me at
once if Ku Sui leaves or if anything unusual happens. Understood?"
The assenting voices rang back to him simultaneously.
"Right!" he said; and slowly his great bulging figure lifted.
* * * * *
Cautiously, the adventurer made through the watrari tree to the side
facing away from the ranch. There, poising for a second, he
manipulated the lateral direction-rod on the suit's chest, and, still
very slowly, floated free from the shrouding leaves. Then, mindful of
the lookouts on the towers behind, he employed the tactics he had used
before, and kept constantly below the uneven crown of the jungle,
gliding at an easy rate through the leafy lanes created by the banked
tree-tops.
In that fashion, in the upthrust arms of the jungle, twisting,
turning, sometimes doubling, but following always a path the objective
of which was straight ahead, Hawk Carse soared soundlessly for miles.
He maneuvered his way with practised ease, and his speed increased as
the need for hiding his flight decreased.
He was familiar with the landmarks of the region, and it was towards
the most pronounced of them that he flew. Soon it was looming far
above him: a long, high ridge, rearing more than three miles above the
level of the Great Briney, and crowded with trees even taller and
sturdier than those of the lower jungle plains. Beyond it was the most
likely spot....
The Hawk paused at the base of the ridge. There had been no warning
from Ban or Friday, but, to make sure, he established radio
connection.
"Friday?" he asked into the microphone. "Any activity on the ranch?
Any sign they're aware of our presence?"
Clear and deep from miles behind, the Negro's voice answered:
"No, suh. Dead still. I guess they're inside the buildings--except the
guards, and they're taking things easy. Where are you, suh?"
"About ten miles from you, 'north' and a little 'east,' at the foot of
the ridge. I think I'll know something soon now. Stand by."
Then Carse moved forward again, slowly winding up between the trees to
the summit of the ridge.
At the top he stopped. His eyes took in a long, wide valley, of which
the ridge where he hung was the southernmost barrier. He knew at once
something was wrong. Through his opened face-plate he was aware of a
breathless hush that hovered over the valley, a hush which embraced
its fifty miles or more of jungle length, a hush which was rendered
actually visible in several places by the unmoving, limp-hanging
leaves of the trees. Below, in the valley, all the myriad life of the
jungle seemed to have frozen, and only occasionally was the pause of
life and sound disturbed by the faint, muffled cry of a bird.
What had wrought the hush? Nothing showed to the naked eye.
From the summit of the ridge, Hawk Carse lifted Leithgow's glasses to
his eyes. And the valley was suddenly changed, and the hush explained.
The miracle lay before him.
CHAPTER III
_The Raid_
A dim, shimmering outline through the infra-red, the valley lay
revealed as a great natural cradle for a mammoth body of rock which
had been swung down from the deeps of space to the surface of
Satellite III.
Titanic, breath-taking in its majesty of sheer bulk, the asteroid of
Dr. Ku Sui was made visible.
It hung suspended, low over the tree-tops of the valley, and it filled
the valley with rock and towered above it. This was the asteroid,
exploded into a separate entity by the cataclysm that gave birth to
the planets, which Dr. Ku Sui had wrenched from the asteroidal belt
between Mars and Jupiter and built into a world of his own, swinging
it through space as he willed, and cloaking it with invisibility to
baffle those who marveled at how he came and went, unseen, on his
various errands. This was the mighty rock fortress in which lay the
key-stone of his mounting power. This his lonely, unsuspected home,
come for a while to rest....
Hawk Carse scanned it closely.
It lay roughly head-on to him, its nearest massive, craggy end lying
some three miles from where he hung. On that end lived the life of the
asteroid, and were located all Ku Sui's works. On a space planed flat
in the rock, rested the dome, like an inverted quarter-mile-wide bowl
of glittering glasslike substance, laced inside with spidery
supporting struts--the half bubble from inside which men guided the
mass. Therein an artificial atmosphere was maintained, even as on any
space-ship, and there lay the group of buildings, chief of which was
the precious laboratory in which were the coordinated brains to whom
the Hawk had made his promise.
Carse lowered the glasses, and again the Jupiter-light poured normally
around him, the valley hushed and seemingly empty once more. He put
through his call to Friday and Ban, giving them simple directions how
to find him. And twenty-five minutes after that, he saw, looking back
down the ridge, their two giant metallic figures come twisting and
turning in noiseless flight through the top lanes of the jungle below,
and they were together.
* * * * *
It was seldom that Friday would intrude his thoughts when with his
master and his master's friends, so when he arrived he merely surveyed
the asteroid through his glasses and was silent. But Ban Wilson, after
a long, comprehensive stare, during which one could almost feel the
amazement leaping through him, sputtered:
"By jumping Jupiter, Carse--I never would've believed it! That Ku
Sui's sure a genius! To have that whole asteroid there, man, and to
take it with him wherever he wants to go! Look at it! Fifteen, twenty
miles long, it must be! And that dome--"
"Yes," said the Hawk shortly, "but easy on that now. We've work to do,
and it's got to be done quickly. Now listen:
"There are two main port-locks in the dome for space-ships, and the
starboard one has a smaller man-size lock beside it. We're going to
the smaller one. There'll no doubt be a guard on watch at it, so to
him we're Ku Sui and the two men who accompanied him. We'll have to
chance recognition; but at least there's no difference in the suits
we're wearing, and we'll clasp our glasses on all the way to the lock,
for surely Dr. Ku has to use some similar device. Keep your faces
averted as much as you can though, when near, and your rayguns in your
belts. If there's to be gunplay, leave the first shot to me. You'll
both follow me just as those two followed Dr. Ku."
Ban Wilson asked: "Will you go down into the valley between the trees,
then up the face of the rock? The guard wouldn't see us until we were
right at the lock."
"No, he wouldn't: but he'd wonder why Ku Sui was being so cautious.
We'll go straight across, in full view. We'll get in easily, or--well,
that depends. Ready?"
They fastened the glasses over their eyes, keeping the helmet
face-plates partly open. The rayguns they eased in their belt
holsters, and slid back the hinged palms of their mittens, to give
exit if need be to their gun-hands. They were ready.
Switching on the helmet gravity-plates to swift repulsion, the three
soared out of the trees, soared up on a straight, inclined line for
the dome on the asteroid, a steady, rapid climb that soon raised them
one mile, a second and a third, where they leveled off and sped
straight ahead. Now they could look right into the dome.
Rapidly the port-lock that was their objective grew in size. Behind it
were the buildings: the large, four-winged central structure and the
supplementary workshops and hangars, coolie-quarters and outhouses,
all dim and shimmering through the infra-red--the mysterious, lonely
citadel of Dr. Ku Sui. There it all was, inside the dome, with the
rest of the asteroid looming massive behind.
A quarter-mile away, and swiftly half that, and half again the three
grouped figures arrowed ahead without hesitation. And the Hawk said
curtly:
"I see no men--do either of you? It looks deserted."
"There!" cried Ban, after a second. "There! Beside the port-lock. Just
now!"
* * * * *
Beside the smaller port-lock's inner door a figure had appeared, clad
in the neat yellow smock of a servitor of Ku Sui. It was a smooth,
impassive Oriental face that turned to stare out at the approaching
men; and even Ban knew that this sentinel stationed at the lock was
one of the coolies whose brains Dr. Ku had altered, turning him into a
mechanicalized man who obeyed no orders but his. He watched closely
the three who swept on towards him, his hand at a raygun in his belt.
The same questions were in the minds of all three of the raiders.
Would he recognize something as being different, or suspicious? Would
he summon others of his kind from the small guard-box he had come out
of?
But the coolie evinced no alarm. It would have been difficult for
anyone to have discerned distinguishing features inside the cumbersome
helmets, behind the instruments clamped to the faces of the men who
wore the suits. He called no others, but merely watched.
Soon the opaque metal plates of the small lock's outer door had neared
to within a few feet of Hawk Carse, and he stopped short, Ban and
Friday following suit. They hovered there outside the door, gently
swaying like flies against the great gleaming sweep of the dome, the
craggy rock face dropping sickeningly down for miles beneath them.
And, like flies, they were powerless to open the door to gain
entrance. Only the coolie inside could do that; and he, through the
dome to one side, was peering at them.
Apparently he was satisfied with his scrutiny. After a moment, bolts
shifted and the door stirred and swung out, revealing the all-metal
atmosphere chamber and the inner door at the far side. Immediately
Carse floated into the chamber, and the two others pressed in behind.
They saw the outer door swing shut, and heard its locks thud over.
They were sealed from sight inside the port-lock's atmosphere chamber.
"Looks to me," whispered Ban Wilson, "like a very sweet trap. If that
fellow inside wants to--"
The Hawk's cool voice cut him off.
"We can take off the glasses now," he said casually. "Keep alert."
And for a full minute they waited.
* * * * *
At length a circle of light showed around the rim of the inner door,
and it grew quickly into the full flood of Jupiter-light as the door
opened.
Carse floated through, no longer attempting to avert his face.
The coolie, standing just outside the chamber, saw the adventurer's
features and remembered--and drew the raygun in his belt.
Carse did not shoot. He never killed unless he could not avoid it;
this was as much a part of his creed as his remorseless leveling of a
blood-debt. He struck with the suit. Under a quick turn of the
control, the great heavy bulk of fabric-joined metal lunged forward.
The move was quick, but not quite quick enough, for just before the
coolie was bowled headlong to the ground, he got out a high-pitched
warning yell; and then, as he lay sprawled out, apparently
unconscious, a thin hot orange streak sizzled by Hawk Carse's helmet
from the left.
This time Carse shot. His gun leaped from belt to hand, and had twice
spoken from the hip before one could quite grasp what had happened.
Seemingly without bothering to take aim, his deadly left hand had
stricken into lifeless heaps two coolies who had come running and
shooting from the nearby guard-box.
As Carse stood looking down at their bodies he was startled by another
sizzling spit. He wheeled to see Friday holding the raygun that had
spoken.
The Negro said apologetically:
"Sorry, suh--I had to. The other coolie, the one you knocked down,
came to and was aimin' at you. Guess they're all three dead now, sure
enough."
* * * * *
His master nodded, and said in a low, thoughtful voice: "In spite of
what some men have said, I never like to kill; but for these robots,
more machines than men, with nothing human to live for, it's release
rather than death.
"Well," he began again, more briskly, "we're inside, and whoever else
is here apparently doesn't know it yet. I expected more of a
commotion. I wonder how many coolies Ku Sui had, altogether? Fourteen
or fifteen were killed when we broke through the dome, before, and now
these three. There surely can't be many left. Of course, there are the
four white men, his surgical assistants."
Ban Wilson spoke after what was for him a long silence. He had watched
the Hawk's gunplay with an awe-stricken face; its speed never failed
to amaze him. He observed:
"These buildings certainly look lifeless. Well, what now, Carse?"
"A search." He planned it out in his head, then gave quick orders.
"Ban," he directed, "you go through all the out-buildings, your gun
ready. The five main ones are a workshop, a power-house, storehouse, a
ship hangar and a barracks for coolies. Whoever you find, take
prisoner. Keep in touch with me by radio."
"Friday," he continued, "I'm leaving you here. First get these bodies
in that guard-house they came out of. Then keep sharp watch. I don't
think Ku Sui will return within fifteen minutes, but we must take no
chance. At the first sign of him, warn me."
"Yes, suh. But what are you goin' to do?"
"Take over the central building," said the Hawk. "And then, when the
whole place has been reconnoitered, fulfil my promise to the brains."
"And what about Ku Sui?"
"Later," he said. "It should not be hard to take him prisoner.... Now,
enough!"
The three parted.
CHAPTER IV
_The Voice of the Brains_
The central structure of the group of buildings was shaped like a
great plus-mark, each of its four wings of identical square
construction, with long smooth metal sides and top, and with a door at
the end giving entrance to a corridor that ran straight through to the
chief central laboratory of Dr. Ku Sui.
Carse skimmed swiftly, two feet off the glittering metallic soil,
towards the end of the nearest wing, where he gently landed. He tried
the door giving entrance. It was open. He cautiously floated through
into complete darkness.
The Hawk was prepared for that. He drew a hand-flash from the belt of
his suit, and, standing motionless, his raygun ready in his left
hand, he probed the darkness with a long white beam. Spaced evenly
along the sides of the corridor were many identical doors, and at the
end a larger, heavier door which gave entrance to the central
laboratory. He found no life or anything that moved at all, so,
methodically, he set about inspecting the side rooms.
The doors were all unlocked, and he moved down the line without alarm,
like a mechanical giant preceded by a sweeping, nervous flow of light.
Such he might from the outside have appeared to be, but the man within
himself was more like a cat scenting for danger, all muscles and
senses delicately tuned to alertness. Door by door, a cautious and
thorough inspection; but he found nothing of danger. All the rooms of
that wing were used merely for stores and equipment, and they were
quite silent and deserted. When he came at last to its end, Carse knew
that the wing was safe.
He paused a minute before the laboratory door. He had expected to find
it locked, and that he would have to seek other means of entrance; but
it was not. By pushing softly against it, it easily gave inward on
silent well-oiled hinges. He entered.
* * * * *
Carse found himself in a place of memories, and they were sharp and
painful in his brain as he stood there. Here so much had happened:
here death, and even more than death, had been, and was, so near!
The high-walled circular room was dimly lit by daylight tubes from
above. The damage he, Carse, had wrought when besieged in it, a week
before, had all been repaired. The place was deserted--it seemed even
desolate--but in Carse's moment of memory it was peopled. There had
been the tall, graceful shape in black silk; there the operating table
and the frail old man bound on it; there the four other men, white men
and gowned in the smocks of surgeons, but whose faces were lifeless
and expressionless. Dr. Ku Sui and his four assistant surgeons and his
intended victim, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow....
They were all gone from the room now, but there was in it one thing of
life that had been there before. It lay behind the inlaid screen
which, standing on roller-legs, lay along the wall at one place. The
Hawk did not look behind the screen. He could see under it, to know
that no one lurked there. He knew what it was meant to conceal. There
his promise lay.
But his promise could not be fulfilled immediately. There were four
wings to the building, four doors leading into the laboratory, and he
had inspected but one.
An open door to his right revealed a corridor similar to the one he
had reconnoitered. He repeated down it his methodical search and found
no one. Then he returned to the laboratory.
Surely there were men somewhere! Surely someone was behind one of the
two closed doors remaining! Gun and flashlight still at the ready,
Carse listened a moment at the nearest one.
Silence. He grasped the knob, turned it and quickly threw the door
open. A rapid glance revealed no one. Wary and alert, he passed
through, and discovered that in this wing were the personal living
quarters of Dr. Ku Sui.
The quarters were divided into five rooms: living room, bedroom,
library, dining room and kitchen, and the huge metal figure passed
through all five, the cold gray eyes taking in every detail of the
comfortable but not luxurious furnishings. There was a great interest
to him, but it would have to wait.
He reentered the laboratory and went to the remaining door. Bending
his head he again listened. A sound--a faint whisper? He fancied he
heard something.
Ready for whatever it was, Carse pulled the door wide. And before him
he saw the control room of the asteroid, and the men for whom he had
been hunting.
* * * * *
They were white men. Carse recognized them immediately as the four
assistants of Dr. Ku Sui. Once, they had been eminent on Earth,
respected doctors of medicine and brain surgery, leaders in their
profession: now they were like the mechanicalized coolies. For their
brains, too, the Eurasian had altered, divested of all humanity and
individuality, so as to utilize unhampered their skill with medicine
and scalpel.
They were clad in soft yellow robes and seated at ease at one end of a
room crowded with a bewildering profusion of gauges, machines,
instruments, screens, wheels, levers, and other nameless controlling
devices. They did not show surprise at the huge clumsy figure that
stood suddenly before them, a raygun in one hand. Like the coolies,
their clean-cut features did not change under emotion. All they did
was rise silently, as one, gazing at the adventurer out of blank eyes,
saying nothing, and making no other move.
Carse tried simple measures in dealing with them. His voice gentle yet
firm, he said:
"You must not try to obstruct me. You have seen me before under
unfortunate conditions, yet I want you to know that I am really your
friend. I mean you no harm; but you must realize that I have a gun,
and believe that I will not hesitate to use it if you resist me. So
please do not. I only want you to come with me. Will you?"
They were simple words, and what he asked was simple, but would the
meaning reach these violated brains? Or would there instead be the
desperate reaction of the coolies, who had tried to kill him? Carse
waited with genuine anxiety. It would be hard to shoot them, and he
knew he could not shoot to kill.
A moment of indecision--and then with relief he saw all four, with
apparent willingness, move forward towards him. He directed them
through the laboratory and, without sign of resistance, herded them
down the corridor he had first searched to the outside.
* * * * *
The light of Jupiter, flooding undiminished through the dome, dazzled
him at first. When he could see clearly, he distinguished the great
form that was Friday standing motionless by the small port-lock, and,
an equal distance away, moving around one of the out-buildings,
another similar figure. He spoke by radio.
"Find any, Ban?"
Cheerful words came humming back.
"Only one coolie, Carse. Had no trouble after I disarmed him. He's now
locked inside a room in this building. Safe place for prisoners."
"Good," said Carse. "You can see I've got four men--white men. I
believe they're unarmed and quite harmless, but I want you to take
them, search them and put them away in that room too."
"Coming!"
The distant form rose lightly, skimmed low over the open area between,
and grew into the grinning, freckle-faced Ban Wilson. He bounced down
awkwardly, almost losing his balance, then surveyed, wonderingly, the
four assistants of Ku Sui.
"By Betelgeuse!" he muttered, "--like robots! Horrible!"
"Yes," said the Hawk shortly. "You had no trouble, eh?"
Ban grinned again. "Nothing to mention. This has been soft, hasn't
it?"
"Don't be too optimistic, Ban. All right--when you've put these men in
the room, please relieve Friday. Send him to me in the laboratory--he
knows where it is--and stand watch yourself. If Ku Sui appears--"
"I'll let you know on the instant!"
Hawk Carse nodded and turned back into the corridor from which he had
just come. Now he would fulfil his promise. With no possibility of a
surprise attack from anyone within the dome, and Ban Wilson posted
against the return of Ku Sui, he could attend unhampered to the vow
which had brought him there.
* * * * *
He returned to the central laboratory. Quickly be rolled back the high
screen lying across one part of the curved wall and stood looking at
what was behind it. The monstrousness of that dead-and-alive mechanism
overwhelmed his thoughts again.
Before him stood a case, transparent, hard and crystal-like, as long
as a man's body and half as deep, standing level on short metal legs.
What it contained was the most jealously guarded, the most precious of
all Dr. Ku Sui's works, the very consummation of his mighty genius,
his treasure-house of wisdom as profound as man then could know. And
more: it held the consummation of all that was so coldly unhuman in
the Eurasian. For there, in that case, he had bound to his will the
brains of five of Earth's greatest scientists, and kept them alive,
with their whole matured store of knowledge subservient to his need,
although their bodies were long since dead and decayed.
For some time the adventurer stood lost in a mood of thoughts and
emotions rare to him--until he was startled back into reality by a
heavy, clumping noise coming down the corridor through which he had
entered. His gun-hand flickered to readiness, but it was only Friday,
coming as he had been ordered. Carse greeted the Negro with a nod, and
said briefly:
"There's a panel in this room--over there somewhere--you remember--the
place through which Ku Sui escaped when we were here before. It's an
unknown quantity, so I want you to stand watch by it. Open your
face-plate wide, and warn me at the slightest sound or sight of
possible danger."
The Negro nodded and moved as silently as was possible in his
space-suit to obey. And Carse turned again to the thing to which he
had made a promise.
* * * * *
The icy-glittering case was full of a colorless liquid in which were
grouped at the bottom, several delicate, colored instruments, all
interconnected by a maze of countless spidery silver wires. Sheathes
of other wires ran up from the lower devices to the case's main
content--five grayish, convoluted mounds that lay in shallow
pans--five brutally naked things that were the brains of scientists
once honored and eminent on Earth.
Their bodies has long since been cast aside as useless to the ends of
Ku Sui, but the priceless brains had been condemned to live on in an
unlit, unseeing deathless existence: machines serving the man who had
trapped them into life in death. Alive--and with stray memories, which
Ku Sui could not banish entirely, of Earth, of love, of the work and
the respect that had once been theirs. Alive--with an unnatural and
horrible life, without sensation, without hope. Alive--and made to aid
with their knowledge the man who had brought them into slavery
unspeakable....
Hawk Carse's eyes were frigid gray mists in a graven, expressionless
face as he turned to the left of the case and pulled over one of the
well-remembered knife switches. A low hum came; a ghost of rosy color
diffused through the liquid in the case. The color grew until the
whole was glowing jewel-like in the dim-lit laboratory, and the narrow
tubes leading into the undersides of the brains were plainly visible.
Something within the tubes pulsed at the rate of heart-beats. The
stuff of life.
When the color ceased to increase, Carse pulled the second switch, and
moved close to the grille inset in a small panel above the case.
Slowly, gently he said into the grille:
"Master Scientist Cram, Professors Estapp and Geinst, Doctors Swanson
and Norman--I wish to talk to you. I am Captain Carse, friend of
Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. Some days ago you aided us in our
escape from here, and in return I made you a promise. Do you
remember?"
There was a pause, a silence so tense it was painful. And then
functioned the miracle of Ku Sui's devising. There came from the
grille a thin, metallic voice from the living dead.
"_I remember you, Captain Carse, and your promise._"
* * * * *
A voice from living brain cells, through inorganic lungs and throat
and tongue! A voice from five brains, speaking, for some obscure
reason which even Ku Sui could not explain, in the first person, and
setting to mechanical words the living, pulsing thoughts that sped
back and forth inside the case and were coordinated into unity by the
master brain, which had once been in the body of Master Scientist
Cram. A voice out of nothingness; a voice from what seemed so clearly
to be the dead. To Hawk Carse, man of action, it was unearthly; it was
a miracle the fact of which he could not question, but which he could
not hope to understand. And well might it have been unearthly to
anyone. Even to-day.
Still thrilling to the wonder of it, he went on:
"I have returned here to the asteroid with friends. Primarily I came
to keep my promise to you, but I intend to do more. Dr. Ku Sui is not
here now, and will not be for at least fifteen minutes; but when he
does return, I am going to capture him. I am going to take him alive."
He was silent for a moment.
"Perhaps you do not know," he continued levelly, "but the people of
Earth hold Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow responsible for your
disappearance. He is therefore a fugitive, and there is a price on his
head. It is my purpose to restore Eliot Leithgow to his old place by
returning Dr. Ku to Earth to answer for the crimes he has effected on
you.
"I am now ready to fulfil my promise to you. I expect no interruption
this time. I regret exceedingly my inability to destroy you when I was
here before, but I simply could not in the little time I had. I still
do not know how best to go about it. Perhaps you will tell me. I will
wait...."
An afterthought came to him. He added into the grille:
"There is no hurry. Your extraordinary position--your thoughts--I
understand...."
Then there was a long silence. For once the Hawk was not impatient; in
fact there was in him the feeling that the pause was only decent and
fitting. For before him were the brains of five great scientists, who
as captive remnants of men had asked him to end their cold and lonely
bondage. Limbless, his was to be the hand of their self-immolation.
The present silent, slow-passing minutes were to be their last of
consciousness....
And then at last spoke the voice:
"_Captain Carse, I do not wish you to destroy me. I wish you to give
me new life. I wish you to transplant me within the bodies of five
living men._"
* * * * *
The words, so unexpected, took Hawk Carse by perhaps the greatest
surprise he had ever known. For a time he was completely astounded; he
could hardly credit his ears. It required a full minute for him to
summon even the most halting reply.
"But--but could that be done?" He strove to collect himself, to
consider logically this course that he had never dreamed would be
requested. "Who could do it? I know of no man."
"_Dr. Ku Sui could transplant me._"
"Ku Sui? He could, but he wouldn't. He would destroy you, rather."
Almost immediately the artificial voice responded:
"_You have said, Captain Carse, that you will soon have Ku Sui
captive. Will you not attempt to force him to do as I desire?_"
Carse considered the suggestion, but it did not seem remotely
possible. Ku Sui could not be prevented from having endless
opportunities for destroying the brains while enjoying the manual
freedom necessary to perform the operations of re-embodying them.
"I do not see how," he began--and then he cut off his words abruptly.
Something had come into his mind, a memory of something Eliot Leithgow
had told him once, long before. Slowly the details came back in full,
and at their remembrance his right hand rose to the odd bangs of
flaxen hair concealing his forehead and began to smooth them, and a
ghost of a smile appeared on his thin lips.
"Perhaps," he murmured. "I think ... perhaps...."
He said decisively into the grille:
"Yes! I think it's quite possible that I can force Ku Sui to
transplant you into living bodies! I think--I _think_--I cannot be
sure--that it can be done. At least I will make a very good attempt."
The toneless, mechanical voice uttered:
"_Captain Carse, you bring me hope. My thoughts are many, and they are
grateful._"
But the Hawk had made a promise, and had to be formally freed of the
duty it entailed.
"You release me, then," he asked, "from my original promise to destroy
you?"
"_I release you, Captain Carse. And again I thank you._"
The adventurer returned the switches motivating the case, and the
faint smile returned to his lips at the thought that had come to him.
But the smile vanished suddenly at the quick, excited words that came
crackling into his helmet receiver.
"Carse? Carse? Do you hear me?"
He threw over his microphone control.
"Yes, Ban? What is it?"
"Come as fast as you can. Just caught sight of three distant figures
flying straight towards here. It's Ku Sui, returning!"
CHAPTER V
_"My Congratulations, Captain Carse!"_
A few minutes later the trap was in readiness.
It had been swiftly planned and executed, and it promised well. Both
the inner and outer doors of the smaller port-lock lay ajar. Hawk
Carse was gone from view. The only figure visible there was that which
lay sprawled face-downward on the ground close to the inner door of
the port-lock.
The figure seemed to have been stricken down in sudden death. It was
clad in the trim yellow smock of a coolie of Ku Sui. It was limp, its
arms and legs spreadeagled, and it lay there as mute evidence that the
dome of the asteroid had been attacked.
To one entering from outside, the figure was that of a dead coolie.
The coolie that had worn those clothes was dead; his clothes now
covered the wiry length of freckle-faced Ban Wilson.
Ban played the game well. His face lay in the ground, pointed away
from the lock, so he could not see what was going to happen behind
him: but before the Hawk had directed him to take off his suit and don
the yellow smock, he had glimpsed, rising swiftly over the
southernmost barrier of hills that edged the valley, three black dots
coming fast toward the asteroid in straight, disciplined flight, and
he knew that the leader of the three was Dr. Ku Sui.
As he lay limp on the ground, playing his important part as the decoy
of the trap, he knew that his life depended on the action and the
skill and the timing of Hawk Carse. But he did not worry about that.
He had implicit faith in the Hawk, and trusted his life to his
judgment without a tremor.
Still, it was hard for Ban to throttle down his excessively nervous
nature and maintain the dead man pose for the long silent minutes that
crawled by before there came any sound from behind. The Jupiter-light,
flooding down on him from the glittering blue sky above, was hot and
growing hotter, and of course he began to itch. Had he had the freedom
of his limbs, he would not have itched, he knew; it happened only when
he had to keep absolutely still; he cursed the phenomenon to himself.
Minute after minute, and no sound to tell him what was happening
behind, or how close the three approaching figures had come, or
whether Carse was at all visible or not--and the mounting, maddening
itch right in the middle of his back!
* * * * *
At last Ban's mental cursings stopped. His straining ears had caught a
sound.
It was quickly repeated, and again and again--the heavy, grating noise
of metal on metal. The boots of space-suits on the metal floor of the
port-lock. They had arrived!
Ku Sui would be there, close behind him; probably gazing at his
outflung figure; probably puzzled, and suspicious, and quickly looking
around for the enemies that had apparently killed one of his coolies.
With a raygun in hand--and guns in the hands of the two others with
him--glancing warily around over the guard-chamber close to the
port-lock, and the main buildings beyond, and the whole area inside
the dome, and seeing no one.
And then--approaching!
Ban could tell it by the silence, then the harsh crunch of the great
boots against the powdered, metallic upper crust of ground. But he lay
without an eyelash's flickering, a dead coolie, limp, crumpled. He
heard the crunch of boots come right up to him and then pause; and the
feeling that came to his stomach told him unmistakably that a man was
looking down on him....
Now--while Ku Sui's attention was on him--now was the time! Now!
Otherwise the Eurasian would turn him over and see that he was white!
It seemed to Ban centuries later that he heard the welcome voice of
the Hawk bark out:
"You are covered, Dr. Ku! And your men. I advise you not to move. Tell
your men to drop their guns--_sh!_"
The sound of the voice from the guard-chamber was replaced by two
spits of a raygun. Unable to restrain himself, Ban rolled over and
looked up.
He saw, first, the figure of the Hawk. Carse had stepped out from
where he had been concealed, in the guard-chamber, and was holding the
gun that had just spoken. Standing upright, close to the inner door of
the port-lock, were two suit-clad coolies. Ban saw that they had
turned to fire at Carse, and that now they were dead. Dead on their
feet in the stiff, heavy stuff of their suits.
Dr. Ku Sui was standing motionless above him, and through the open
face-plate of the Eurasian's helmet Ban could see him gazing at Hawk
Carse with a strange, faint smile on his beautifully chiselled,
ascetic face.
The Hawk came towards them, the raygun steady on his old foe; but
while he was still yards away, and before he could do anything to
prevent it, the Eurasian spoke a few unintelligible words into the
microphone of his helmet-radio. Carse continued forward and stopped
when a few feet away. Dr. Ku bowed as well as he could in his stiff
suit and said courteously, in English:
"So I am trapped. My congratulations, Captain Carse! It was very
neatly done."
* * * * *
The two puffed-out, metal-gleaming figures faced each other for a
moment without speaking. And in the silence, Ban Wilson, watchful,
with a raygun he had drawn from his belt, fancied he could _feel_ the
long, bitter, bloody feud between the two, adventurer and scientist,
there met again....
Carse spoke first, his voice steel-cold.
"You take it lightly, Dr. Ku. Do not rely too much on those words you
spoke in Chinese. I could not understand them--but such things as I do
not know about your asteroid I have already guarded against; and I
think we can forestall whatever you have set in action.... You will
please take off your space-suit."
"Willingly, my friend!"
"Watch close, Ban," said the Hawk.
Dr. Ku Sui unbuckled the heavy clasps of his suit, unscrewed the
cumbersome helmet, and in a moment stepped free. At the suit slid to
the ground, there stood revealed his tall, slim-waisted form, clad in
the customary silk. He wore a high-collared green silk blouse,
tailored to the lines of his body, full trousers of the same material,
and pointed red slippers and red sash, which set the green off
tastefully. A lithe, silky figure; and above the silk the high
forehead, the saffron, delicately carved face, the fine black hair.
Half-veiled by their long lashes, his exotic eyes rested like a cat's
on his old enemy.
The Hawk moved close to him, and swiftly patted one hand over his
body. From inside one of the blouse's sleeves he drew a pencil-thin
blade of steel from its hidden sheath. He found no other weapon.
Stepping back, he quickly divested himself of his suit also.
"And now, Captain?" the Eurasian murmured softly.
"Now, Dr. Ku," answered Carse, once again a slender, wiry figure in
soft blue shirt and blue denim trousers, "we are going to have a
little talk. In your living room, I think.
"Ban," he continued. "I don't believe there's anyone else who can even
see the asteroid, but we have to be careful. Will you stay on guard
here by the port-lock? Good. Close its doors, and yell or come to me
if anything should occur."
He turned to the waiting Eurasian again.
"You may go first, Dr. Ku. Into the laboratory, and then to the living
room of your quarters."
* * * * *
They found Friday on guard where he had been stationed in the
laboratory. The big Negro, on recognizing the Eurasian, grinned from
ear to ear and gave him what he considered a witty greeting.
"Well, well!" he said with gusto, "--come right in. Dr. Ku Sui! Make
yourself at home, suh! Sure glad to have you come visitin' us!" He
laughed gleefully.
But his words were wasted on Dr. Ku. His eyes at once fastened on the
case of coordinated brains, standing at one side. Carse noticed this.
"No. Dr. Ku," he said. "I have not touched the brains. Not yet. But
that's what we're going to talk about." He motioned to one of the four
doors connecting the central laboratory with the building's wings.
"Into your living room please, and be seated there. And no sudden
moves, of course: I have a certain skill with a raygun. Friday, keep
doubly alert now. Better take off your suit. I will call for you in a
few minutes."
Ku Sui walked on silent feet into the first division of his personal
quarters, the softly-lit living room. A lush velvet carpet made the
floor soft; ancient Chinese tapestries hid the pastelled metal of the
walls; books were everywhere. It was a quiet and restful room, with no
visible reminder of the asteroid and its controlling mechanics.
Dr. Ku sank into a deep armchair, linked his fingers before him and
looked up inquiringly.
"We were going to talk about the brains?" he asked.
* * * * *
Carse had closed the door behind him, and now remained standing. He
met the masked green eyes squarely.
"Yes." He was silent for a little, then, quietly and coldly he went to
the point.
"You'll be interested to hear that I have talked with the brains and
been relieved of my premise to destroy them. They requested something
else. Now I have committed myself to attempt their restoration into
living bodies."
"So?" murmured the Eurasian. "So. Yes, Captain, that is very
interesting."
"Very." The Hawk spoke without trace of emotion. "And some courtroom
on Earth will find more than interesting the testimony of your
re-embodied brains."
Dr. Ku Sui smiled in answer. "Oh, no doubt. But, my friend--this
transplantation--you accept its possibility so casually! Won't it
prove rather difficult for you, who have never even pretended to be a
scientist?"
"Not difficult. Impossible."
"And Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow--I have unbounded respect for his
genius, but brain surgery is a specialty and I really think that this
task would be outside even his capabilities. I am sure he himself
would admit it."
"You are right, Dr. Ku: he has admitted it. We both realize there is
only one person in the universe who could achieve it--you. So you will
have to perform the operations."
"Well!" said Dr. Ku Sui. The smooth, fine skin of his brow wrinkled
slightly as he gazed up at the intent man facing him. "Is this just
stupidity on your part, Captain? Or do you attempt a joke at which in
courtesy I should smile?"
The Hawk answered levelly: "I was never farther from joking in my
life."
* * * * *
With a delicate shrug of his silken shoulders, Ku Sui averted his
eyes. As if bored, he glanced around the room. Slowly he unclasped his
hands.
"I am a very fast shot, Dr. Ku," whispered Carse. "You must not make a
single move without my permission."
At that the Eurasian laughed aloud, a liquid laugh that showed his
even teeth between the finely cut lips.
"But I am so completely in your power, Captain Carse!" He held on to
the last syllable, a low, sustained hiss--and then he snapped it off.
"_S-s-stah!_" His mood had changed: the smile vanished from a face
suddenly thin and cruel; the green eyes unmasked, to show in their
depths the tiger.
"What insane talk! You say such things to me! Don't you know that to
coordinate those brains I worked for years with a devotion, a
concentration, a genius you can never hope even to comprehend? Don't
you realize they're the most precious possession of the greatest
surgeon and the greatest mind in the universe? Don't you understand
that I've fashioned a miracle? Realize these things, then, and marvel
at yourself--you who, with your gun and your egotism, think you can
make me undo their wonderful coordination!"
The tiger returned behind the veil, its power and fury again leashed,
and Dr. Ku Sui relaxed his green eyes once more masked and enigmatic.
Hawk Carse asked simply:
"_Could_ you transplant the brains?"
"You insist on continuing this farce?" murmured the Eurasian. "I would
not be rude, but really you try my patience!"
"_Could_ you transplant the brains?"
Dr. Ku Sui looked at the colorless face with its eyes of ice. With a
trace of irritation, he said:
"Of course! What I have once transplanted, I can transplant again. But
I will not do it--and my will no one, and no force, can alter. Perhaps
it is clear now? In no way can you touch my will. I am sorry that I so
grossly insulted you, Carse, for there are certain things about you
that in a small way I respect. But here you are helpless."
"Not entirely," said the Hawk.
* * * * *
Ku Sui leaned forward a trifle. In that moment, perhaps, he first felt
real concern, for Carse's quiet voice was so confident, so assured. He
attempted to sound him out.
"A gun?" he asked. "Torture? Threats? These against my will? Absurd!
Consider, my friend--even if I seemed to consent to the operations,
could I not easily destroy the brains while ostensibly working on
them?"
"Of course," said Carse, with a faint smile. "And threats and torture
would be absurd. Against your will, Dr. Ku, a more powerful weapon
will have to be used."
The Eurasian's eyes were brilliant with intuition.
"Ah--I see," he murmured. "Eliot Leithgow!"
"Yes, Dr. Ku!"
The two gazed at each other, Carse still with the faint smile, the
other with the face of a statue. Presently the adventurer went on:
"Unfortunately for you, Eliot Leithgow can provide a method of
compulsion neither you nor any other man could ever resist. Not guns,
torture, threats--no. A subtler weapon, worthy of your fine will."
As he spoke, Carse saw the Eurasian's green eyes narrow, and in the
pause that followed he knew that the swift, trained mind behind those
eyes was working. What would it evolve? What move? And those Chinese
words, uttered out by the port-lock--what would they result in, and
when? Dr. Ku Sui was concerned now, the Hawk knew, seriously
concerned, and inevitably, would take serious steps. What was growing
in his resourceful brain? He would have to ward off any trouble when
it came, for he could not know now. He said curtly:
"But enough of that. Now, I have a trifling favor to ask of
you--something concerning the laboratory. Will you please return to
it."
A strange light glimmered for an instant in Dr. Ku Sui's eyes--a
mocking of the slender man before him. Only for an instant; then it
was gone. Gracefully he raised his tall figure.
"The laboratory? Of course, my friend. And as for the favor--almost
anything."
CHAPTER VI
_The Deadline_
Friday greeted them with another wide grin, and would again have
bludgeoned the Eurasian with his wit had not the Hawk motioned him to
silence. Looking at Dr. Ku, he said:
"I have Friday posted here because of the secret panel somewhere in
this wall. You escaped through it before--do you remember?"
"Of course I remember. And if I'd had merely a fraction of your luck
then, my present situation would be quite different."
"Perhaps," said the Hawk. "This panel is now the unknown quantity so
far as I'm concerned, and I don't like unknown quantities; so I am
asking you to show me where it is and how it works. That's my favor.
Of course you can refuse to reveal it, but that will not delay me very
long. The method of compulsion I mentioned...."
Dr. Ku-Sui appeared to reflect a moment, but his decision was not
tardy in coming. He smiled.
"You terrify me, Captain, with your ominous hints about compulsion. I
suppose I'd better be reasonable and show it to you. Really, though,
your concern over the panel is rather wasted, inasmuch as it conceals
nothing more than a small escape passage leading out of this building.
Nothing important at all."
But his words, Carse somehow felt, were a screen; something else lay
beneath them. He watched the tall figure with its always present odor
of tsin-tsin blossoms move forward in a few indecisive steps, then
back again, considering. The smile and the easy words were a
camouflage, surely--but for what?
"Nothing important at all." Dr. Ku Sui repeated pleasantly. "Come. I
will show you. Friday--if I may so address you--over on that
switchboard you will find a small lever-control. It is the one with a
Chinese character above it. Will you be so kind as to throw it?"
The Negro glanced inquiringly at his master. Grimly Carse nodded.
An enigmatic light glimmered in the Eurasian's green eyes as they
watched the Negro go to the switchboard and put thumb and forefinger
on the control.
"Only a small escape passage," he said deprecatingly as the Hawk
crouched, gun ready, his eyes on the suspected place in the wall.
Friday threw the switch.
Immediately there sounded a short, sharp explosion. And acrid smoke
billowed out from under the case of coordinated brains!
* * * * *
Carse sprang to Ku Sui, gripped one arm and cried harshly:
"What have you done?"
"Not I, Captain--your obedient servant, the Black. Please, your
fingers--" He removed them from his arm; and then, smiling, he said:
"I am afraid that all your assurance, your threats, are now but so
much wasted breath."
"You mean--?"
"Surely, Captain," said Ku Sui, "you must have known I would provide
for such an emergency, as this. I chose not to risk your darkly-hinted
method of compulsion, and so had Friday remove the need for it. The
Chinese character above the switch stands for 'Death.'"
Frigidly the Hawk asked: "You've destroyed the brains?"
"I have destroyed the brains." The Eurasian's voice was deep with a
strange, unusual tone. "No matter: it was time. I am far, far ahead of
that work, great though it was; it has destroyed itself with its
inherent, irremediable fault. Yes, far ahead. Next time...." He
appeared to lapse into profound and melancholy reflections; seemed to
forget entirely the two men by him.
But the Hawk acted.
"We'll see," he said curtly. "Friday, watch the Doctor closely; this
trick may be only the first." An intent, grim figure, he strode to the
case of coordinated brains, pulled over the first of its two
controlling switches, and stood silent while slowly the pulsings of
light grew through the inner liquid and very slowly irradiated the
five gray, naked mounds that were human brains. The light came to
full, and Carse threw over the second switch. He said into the
grille:
"I am Captain Carse. I wish to know if you are aware of what has just
happened. Do you hear me, and did you feel anything a minute ago?"
* * * * *
Silence. Friday, close to the Eurasian and watchful, hung breathless,
hoping that words might come from the grille in answer. But the silken
figure he watched was there only in body; Dr. Ku's mind was in a far
space of his own.
Cold, unhuman words spoke out.
"_Yes, Captain Carse, I hear you. I felt the vibrations of the
explosion that occurred a minute ago._"
"Hah!" grunted Friday, immediately relieved. "All bluff, suh! No
damage to 'em at all!"
Carse asked quickly into the grille:
"You felt the explosion, but do you know what it meant?--what it did?"
Again a pause; and again the toneless voice:
"_A vital part of the machinery through which I live his been
destroyed. I have left only some three hours of life._"
The Hawk returned to Ku Sui. "Is that true?" he snapped.
"Yes, Captain." The words made a whisper, gentle and melancholy,
coming from afar. A man was turning back from the scanning of the long
years of one phase of his life. "Three hours is all that is left to
them.... But there was a fault inherent in such coordinated brains; it
is just as well that they are going.... Ah, Carse. I am so far ahead
of you ... but I tell you it is a painful thing to destroy so
wonderful a work of my hands...."
Silence filled the laboratory. It was broken by the awful voice of the
living dead.
"_I release you from your second promise, Captain Carse. No doubt
what happened was beyond your control.... I will soon be dead.
Although there is still nourishment in my liquid, I grow weaker
already. I am dying...._"
Harshly, the Hawk asked a final question into the grille:
"Within what time will you retain the vitality necessary to undergo
the initial steps of the transplanting operations? Do you know?"
Dr. Ku raised his head at this, though he seemed only mildly
interested in what the reply would be.
"_I think for two of the remaining three hours._"
"All right!" said Hawk Carse decisively. He threw off the case's
switches. "Dr. Ku," he said, "you've only succeeded in accelerating
things. Now for speed! Friday, we're taking this asteroid to Eliot
Leithgow's laboratory. Go see that the port-lock doors are closed
tight, then you and Wilson hurry back here! Fast! Run!"
CHAPTER VII
_To the Laboratory_
When the Negro returned, panting, with Ban Wilson, it was to discover
Carse in the control room of the asteroid. He was studying the
multifarious devices and instruments: and they, seeing his face so set
in concentration, did not disturb him, but went over to where Dr. Ku
Sui sat in a chair, and posted themselves behind it.
The apparatus in the control room resembled that of any modern
space-ship of its time, except that there were extra pieces of
unguessed function. Directly in front of Carse was the directional
space-stick above its complicated mechanism: above his eyes was the
wide six-part visi-screen, which in space would record the whole
"sphere" of the heavens: while to his right was the chief control
board, a smooth black surface studded with squads of vari-colored
buttons and lights, These were the essentials, familiar to any ship
navigator; but they were here awesome, for they controlled not the one
or two hundred feet of an ordinary craft, but twenty miles of this
space-ship of rock.
"Yes ... yes...." Carse murmured presently out of his study, then
turned and for the first time appeared to notice Friday and Ban. He
gave orders.
"Eclipse, you see the radio over there? Get Master Leithgow on it for
me--protected beam. Ban, you bind Dr. Ku Sui in that chair, please."
Wilson was surprised.
"Bind him? Isn't he going to run this thing?"
"No."
"_You're_ going to, Carse?"
"Yes. I don't quite trust Dr. Ku. The asteroid's controlled on the
same principles as a space-ship: I'll manage. Please hurry, Ban."
"Cap'n., suh! Already got the Master Scientist!" called Friday from
the radio panel. The Hawk strode swiftly to it and clamped the
individual receivers over his ears.
"M. S.?" he asked into the microphone. "You're there?"
"Yes. Carse? What's happened?"
"All's well, but I'm in a tremendous hurry: I've only got time, now,
to tell you we're on the asteroid with Dr. Ku prisoner, and that I'm
undertaking to transplant the coordinated brains into living human
bodies.... What? Yes transplant them! Please, M. S.--not now:
questions later. I'm calling primarily to learn whether you have any
V-27 on hand?"
Eliot Leithgow, in his distant laboratory, paused before replying.
When his voice sounded in the receivers again, it was excited.
"I think I see, Carse! Good! Yes, I have a little--"
"We'll need a lot," the Hawk cut in tersely. "Will you instruct your
assistants to begin preparing as much as they can in the next hour? Yes.
And your laboratory--clear it for the operations, and improvise five
operating tables. Powerful lights, too, M. S. Yes--_yes_--right--all
accessories. Have someone stand by your radio; I'll radio further
details while we're on our way."
"Right, Carse. All understood."
The Hawk remembered something else. "Oh, yes, Eliot--is everything
safe in your vicinity?"
"There's a small band of isuanacs foraging around somewhere in the
neighborhood, but otherwise nothing. They're harmless--"
"But possibly observant," finished Carse. "All right--I'll clear them
away before descending to the lab. Until later, Eliot."
* * * * *
Carse switched off the microphone and turned to catch Friday's shocked
expression. Carse looked inquiringly at his dark satellite.
"What's wrong?"
"Lordy, suh," the Negro whispered, "Dr. Ku could hear all you said!
He'll know where Master Leithgow's laboratory is!"
The Hawk smiled briefly. "No matter, Eclipse. I'm quite sure the
information will avail him nothing. For this ride to the laboratory
will be his last ride but one." He turned. "We're starting at once.
Ban, you've bound him well?"
"If he can get out of those knots," grinned Wilson, "I'll kiss him on
the mouth!"
The Eurasian's nostrils distended. "Then," he said. "I most certainly
will not try. But Captain Carse, may I have a cigarro before we start
on this journey?"
Carse had gone over so the space-stick and his eyes were on the
visi-screen, but he now turned them to his old foe for a moment. "Not
just now, Dr. Ku," he said levelly. "For it might be that all but two
puffs of it would be wasted. Yes--later--if we survive these next few
minutes."
The remark did nothing to ease the tension of their leaving. Ban
Wilson could not restrain a question.
"Carse, are you going to risk atmospheric friction all the way to the
laboratory?"
"No. Haven't time for that. Up and down--up into space, then down to
the lab--high acceleration and deceleration."
He grasped the space-stick, then in neutral, holding the asteroid
motionless in the valley. He glanced at the visi-screen again, checked
over the main controls and tightened his hand on the stick.
"Ready everyone," he said, and gently moved the stick up and forward.
* * * * *
There was, to the men in the control room, little consciousness of
power unleashed: only the visi-screen and the bank of positional
instruments told what had happened with that first, delicate movement
of the space-stick. It was an experiment, a feeler. The indicators of
the positionals quivered a little and altered, and in the visi-screen
the hills of the valley, that a moment before had been quite close and
large, had diminished to purple-green mounds below.
Then the accelerating sensations began. Carse had the "feel" of the
asteroidal ship and his controlling hand grew bolder. The steady
pressure on the space-stick increased, it went up farther and farther,
and the whole mighty mass of the asteroid streaked out at a tangent
through the atmosphere of Satellite III toward the gulf beyond.
With dangerous acceleration the gigantic body rose, and from outside
there grew a moaning which was quickly a shrieking--a terrible,
maddened sound as of a Titan dying in agony--the sound of the cloven
atmosphere. Twenty miles of rock were hurled out by the firm hand on
the space-stick, and that hand only increased its driving pressure
when the screaming of the air died away in the depthless silence of
outer space.
In one special visi-screen lay mirrored the craggy back-stretch of the
asteroid, half of it clear-cut and hard in Jupiter's flood of light,
the other half lost in the encompassing blackness of space. Over this
shadowed portion a faint, unearthly glow clung close, the result of
the terrific friction of the ascent. In miniature, in the regular
screens, was Satellite III, but a distorted miniature, for its
half-face appeared concave in shape, and dusted with the haze of its
atmosphere.
* * * * *
The Hawk was visibly relieved. He turned to the silent Ku Sui.
"I must congratulate you, Dr. Ku," he said, "on the operation of the
asteroid. It's as smooth as any ship. And now, your cigarro. Ban, have
you one?"
Wilson produced a small metal case from which he extracted one of the
long black cylinders.
"You will have to put it in my lips, please," murmured Dr. Ku. "Thank
you. And a light? Again thanks. Ah...." He drew in the smoke, exhaled
a fine stream of it from his delicately carved nostrils. "Good." Then
he looked up pleasantly at the Hawk.
"And my congratulations to you, Captain. Not only on your expert
maneuvering of my asteroid, but on everything: your resourcefulness,
your decision, your caution. I have long admired these qualities in
you, and the events of to-day, though for me perhaps unfortunate,
increase my admiration. My own weak resistance, my attempt to
frustrate your plans in connection with the brains--how miserable in
comparison! It would seem, Captain, that you cannot fail, and that you
will indeed succeed in giving the brains new life, so swiftly do you
move. Yes, my congratulations!"
He drew at the cigarro, and the smoke wreathed gently around his
ascetic saffron face. A faint, queer glint was visible under the long
lashes that half-veiled his eyes as he continued:
"But I have a question, Captain. A mere nothing, but still--"
"Yes, Dr. Ku?"
"The living bodies into which you propose to transplant the
brains--where are they?"
Hawk Carse's face was stern and his voice frigid as he answered:
"Fortunately, those bodies are right here on the asteroid."
"Here on the asteroid, Captain? I don't understand. What bodies are
here?"
"The bodies of your four white assistants, whom I have safely
confined, and one of your robot-coolies, also confined. I did not
intend to use these five, but, because you put a premium on time by
your attempted destruction of the brains, it cannot be helped."
* * * * *
Dr. Ku Sui's impassive demeanor did not change. He did not seem in the
least surprised. He puffed quietly at the cigarro and nodded.
"Of course, of course. You have five bodies right here on the
asteroid. Yes."
"At least," continued Carse levelly, "I do not regret having to use
the bodies of your men. They are no longer human: they are not men:
they are in effect but machines of your making, Dr. Ku."
"Quite. Quite."
"I suppose you find it an unpleasant thought, to have to be the means
of re-making them into whole, normal human beings?"
"On the contrary," breathed the Eurasian, "you inspire a very pleasant
thought in my brain, Captain Carse--though I must confess it is not
exactly the thought you mention." A smile, veiled by the smoke of the
cigarro, appeared on his lips.
The Hawk looked at him closely: the words had a hidden meaning, and it
was clear he was not intended to miss the implied threat. But what was
Ku Sui's thought? Back in his mind an anxiety grew, indefinite, vague
and devilish.
And that vague anxiety was still with him when, fifty-seven minutes
later, the asteroid returned from its inverted U-flight, slowed in its
hurtling drop from space and hovered directly over the secret, hidden
laboratory of Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow.
CHAPTER VIII
_White's Brain--Yellow's Head_
To Friday it was a bad mistake to reveal the location of the
laboratory to Dr. Ku Sui. From him above all men had that location up
to now been kept. Just a few days before, Hawk Carse had risked his
life to preserve the secret. And yet now, deliberately, he was showing
it to the Eurasian!
Nervously, Friday watched him, and he saw that his eyes were alive
with interest as they scanned the visi-screen. It was too much for the
Negro.
"Captain Carse," he whispered, coming close to the adventurer, "look,
suh--he's seein' it all! Shouldn't I blindfold him?"
Carse shook his head, but turned to Dr. Ku, where he sat bound in the
chair scrutinizing the visi-screen.
"Yes, Doctor," he said, "there it is--what you have searched for so
long--the refuge and the laboratory of Eliot Leithgow."
"There, Captain?" murmured the Eurasian. "I see nothing!"
And true, the visi-screen showed nothing but a hill, a lake, a swamp,
and the distant, surrounding jungle.
That spot on Satellite III had been most carefully chosen by the
Master Scientist and Carse as best suiting their needs. It lay at
least a thousand miles--a thousand miles of ugly, primeval
jungle--from the nearest unfriendly isuan ranch, and was diametrically
opposite Port o' Porno. Thus it allowed Leithgow and Carse to come and
go with but faint chance of being observed, and the steady watch kept
through the laboratory's telescopic instruments lessened even that.
And even if their movements to and from the laboratory had been
observed, a spy could have discovered little, so ingeniously was the
camouflage contrived to use to best advantage the natural features of
the landscape.
At this spot on Satellite III there was a small lake, long rather than
wide. At its shallow end, the lake lost itself in marshy, thick-grown
swamps; at its deep end it washed against the slopes of a low, rounded
hill. Topping the hill was a rude ranch-house, which to the casual eye
would appear the unimportant habitation of some poor jungle-squatter,
with beds of various vegetables and fruits growing around it, and
guarded against the jungle's animals by what looked like a makeshift
fence. The ground inside the fence had been cleared save for a few
thick, dead stumps of oxi trees, gnarled and weather-beaten, which
made the whole outlay look crude and desolate.
So desolate, so poor, so humble, as not to deserve a second glance
from the lowest of scavenger or pirate ships. So misleading!
* * * * *
Carse had brought the invisible asteroid to a halt perhaps a half mile
above the hill. The minutes were slipping by, bringing the two-hour
deadline ever closer, but he did not skimp his customary caution on
approaching the laboratory. From the control room, he swept the
electelscope over the surrounding terrain, and soon sighted the band
of isuanacs Eliot Leithgow had mentioned.
Through the 'scope's magnifying mirrors they seemed but yards away,
though they were wandering knee-deep in the marshes at the far end of
the lake. All their repulsive details stood out clearly.
More beasts than men, were such isuanacs (pronounced ee-swan-acs), so
called from the drug that had betrayed them step by step to a pit in
which there was no intelligence, no light, no hope--nothing but their
mind-shattering craving. In many and unpredictable ways did the drug
ravish their bodies. They were outcasts from the port of outcasts,
driven out of Porno into the wilderness, where they tracked out their
miry ways searching ever for the isuan weed until some animal ended
their enslavement, or the drug itself finally killed them in
convulsions. They were the legion of the damned.
This band of half a dozen was typical, grubbing through the slime of
the swamp, snarling at each other, now and again fighting over a leaf,
then squatting down in the mud where they were, to chew on it, their
torture of mind and body momentarily forgotten. Rags, mud-caked and
foul, partly covered their emaciated bodies: their hair was matted,
their eyes blood-shot....
Carse noted their position and looked up at Friday.
"Get the Master Scientist for me, please," he requested. The radio
connection took only seconds: and then he said into the microphone:
"Eliot? We're directly above you, as you probably have seen. All
well?"
"Yes, Carse. The laboratory's in readiness. But those
isuanacs--they're still outside."
"I've seen them, and I'm going to drive them away. Then I'll be down
to you. Have the upper entrance ready."
* * * * *
The Hawk turned back to the controls. Taking the space-stick out of
neutral, he moved it very slightly down and to one side. Ban and
Friday, not understanding his intention, watched the visi-screen.
The whole mass of rock that was the asteroid changed position at a
gentle speed. The band of isuanacs came nearer and nearer, and then
were to the right. Completely oblivious of the great bulk hovering
above them, they continued their grubbing through the swamp; and then
the asteroid was over the jungle beyond them, and lowering its craggy
under-side.
The under-side brushed the crown of the jungle. The trees bent,
crackled and broke, as if swept by a vicious but silent hurricane.
Only a moment of contact; but in that moment a square mile of
interwoven trees and vines was swept low--and to the isuanacs the
effect, as was intended, was terrifying.
They stared at the phenomenon. There had been no sound, no whip of
wind, nothing--yet all those trees had bent and crashed splintering to
the ground. Their slavering lips open, the isuan weed forgotten, they
stared: and then howling and shrieking they broke and went splashing
off panic-stricken through the marsh.
In five minutes the band had disappeared into the jungle in the
opposite direction and the district was cleared; and by that time
Hawk Carse was again in his space-suit, out of the control room and
busy at the mechanism of one of the great ship-sized port-locks in the
dome, having left behind him both Ban and Friday to guard Dr. Ku.
He mastered the controls of the port-lock quickly, and swung inner and
outer doors open. He glided through, and then, a giant, clumsy figure,
poised far out in the air, a soft breeze washing his face as he gazed
down at the hill five miles below, judging his descent. As he did not
use the infra-red instrument hanging from his neck, the asteroid might
not have been there at all.
A moment or so later, after a straight, swift drop, Carse landed on
the hill, close to a particular, gnarled oxi-tree stump. The nearby
ranch-house looked deserted, the whole place seemed desolate. The Hawk
waddled over to the stump, pressed a crooked little twig sticking out
from it, and a section of the seeming-bark slid down, revealing the
hollow, metal-sided interior of a cleverly camouflaged shaft.
There were rungs inside, but Carse could not use them. He squeezed
himself in, closed the entrance panel, and, carefully manipulating his
gravity controls, floated down. A descent of twenty-five feet, and he
was on the floor of a short, level corridor with gray walls and
ceiling.
Carse clumped along to the door at the other end of the corridor,
opened it, and stepped into the hidden underground laboratory of
Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow, which, with its storerooms, living
quarters and space-ship hangar, had been built into the hollowed-out
hill.
* * * * *
"Welcome back, Carse!"
"Hello, Eliot," the Hawk nodded, rapidly divesting himself of the
suit but retaining his infra-red device. "You've lost no time, I see."
The elderly scientist, his frail form clad in a buff-colored smock,
turned and surveyed the laboratory. In the center of the square room
five improvised operating tables were drawn up, each one flooded
individually with, light from focused flood-tubes above in the white
ceiling. Flanking them were tables for instruments and sterilizers,
and, more prominent, two small sleek cylindrical drums, from one of
which sprouted a tube ending in a breathing-cone.
"The best I could do on such short notice," Leithgow commented.
"Where are your assistants?"
"At work on the V-27. All I had on hand is in those cylinders."
"Much?"
"Enough for twelve hours for one man, but the process of its
manufacture is accelerating; fortunately I had plenty of ingredients.
Of course I've divined your intention, Carse. Ku Sui to perform the
operations under the V-27. And it's possible, possible! It's
stupendous--and possible!"
"Yes," said the Hawk, "but more later. I'm going up now to get Dr. Ku.
I'll use the air-car. It's ready?"
"Yes." Leithgow answered. "But, Carse--one question I must ask--"
The Hawk, already halfway to the door in the opposite wall of the
laboratory, paused and looked back inquiringly.
"What bodies are to be used?"
"The only ones available, Eliot," the adventurer replied, "since Ku
Sui, in his attempt to destroy the brains, left us only two hours--now
one hour--to complete the first steps of the transfer. They'll be
those four white assistants of his--those men, you remember, whose
intellects he's dehumanized--"
"Yes, yes?" Leithgow pressed him eagerly. "And the fifth?"
"A robot coolie."
"Good God!"
"I know, Eliot! It won't be pleasant for one of those brains to find
itself in a yellow body. But it's that or nothing."
The scientist nodded slowly, his first expression of shock leaving his
old face to sadness: "But, a coolie. A coolie...."
"Come, Eliot, we need speed! Speed! We've but an hour, remember, to
complete the first steps! I'll have Ku Sui and the five men down
immediately."
The Hawk opened the door and strode down the long corridor beyond. His
footsteps were swiftly gone: and then the sound of another door
opening and closing. In the laboratory there was a murmur from the old
man.
"A coolie! A scientist's brain in that ugly yellow head! When
consciousness returns, what a cruel shock!"
CHAPTER IX
_Four Bodies_
Hawk Carse had gone into Leithgow's ship hangar.
It was a vast place, occupying most of the hollowed-out space of the
hill. Seventy feet high and more than two hundred feet long, it was,
and, like the rest of the rooms, metal-walled and sound-proofed. Eliot
Leithgow's own personal space-ship, the _Sandra_, rested there on its
mooring cradle, and by its side was the laboratory's air-car, an
identical shape in miniature, designed for atmospheric transit.
The adventurer, a silent, swift figure, went straight to the air-car
and climbed into its control seat. He tested the controls, found them
responsive, then pressed a button set apart from the others: and the
huge port-lock door set in the farther wall of the hangar slid
smoothly open, revealing a metal chamber similar to that of the ship
port-lock on Ku Sui's asteroid. But whereas the chamber of the
asteroid's port-lock was for vacuum-atmosphere, this was for
water-atmosphere.
The clamps of the mooring cradle were released, and the air-car moved
gently into the lock chamber. The door swung shut behind. On the
pressing of another button there sounded a gurgling and splashing of
water, and quickly the chamber was filled. The air-car was now a
submarine. All these operations were effected by radio control from
within it.
When the water filled the inside of the chamber, the second door
opened automatically, and the car started forward through a long
steel-lined, water-filled tube. It continued on even keel until Carse,
watching through the bow window, saw a red light flash in the ceiling
of the tube: and then he tilted the car and rose.
A second later, the shiny, water-dripping shape of the car broke
through the surface of the lake that edged on the hill, and forsook
the water for the air.
To an outside observer, the appearance of the air-car and its
subsequent movements would have been incomprehensible. There lay the
hill, desolate, barren, apparently lifeless: and there, washing
against its slopes, the lake; nothing more. Then suddenly a curve of
gleaming steel thrust up through the muddy water, rose swiftly almost
straight into the cloudless blue of the sky, and as suddenly
disappeared, and remained gone from sight, as if the ether had opened
and swallowed it.
* * * * *
Using his infra-red device, Carse brought the car in neatly through
the ship-size port-lock of the dome, and sped it across to the
central building, to land lightly beside one of the wings. Debarking,
he ran down the wing's passage and in a few seconds was back in the
asteroid's control room.
Friday was sitting in a chair close by the bound Eurasian; Ban Wilson,
more restless, was pacing up and down. The Hawk nodded in response to
their looks of welcome and issued curt orders.
"All ready. Ban, the air-car's just outside; go over and get those
four men and the coolie and put them in it. Have your raygun ready,
but don't use it if humanly possible. We're going down to the
laboratory. I want speed. Please hurry."
"Right Carse!"
"Friday," the Hawk continued, "help me untie Dr. Ku."
They stooped to the chair and the impassive, silken figure sitting in
it, and in a moment the bonds were ripped off; all save those on the
wrists. Stretching himself, the Eurasian asked:
"You are taking the brains down now, Captain Carse?"
"No--just you, your assistants and that one coolie, this trip. Master
Leithgow and I wish to have a talk with you."
"I am always agreeable, my friend."
"Yes," said the Hawk, "you'll be surprisingly agreeable. And truthful
and helpful, too. Now--outside, please, and do not attempt to delay me
in any way. I am in a great hurry, and consequently will not be
patient at any tricks." He turned to the Negro. "Friday. I'm leaving
you here on guard. Stay alert, gun handy, and keep in radio contact.
I'll be back soon."
"Yes, suh!"
* * * * *
Walking behind his captive, the Hawk left, passing down the wing to
the air-car outside. There, Ban Wilson was waiting with the four white
assistants of Dr. Ku and the one robot-coolie, all unarmed, stolid,
emotionless. Carse placed them all in the rear seats of the car's
compartment, Ban facing them with drawn raygun. Then with a hum from
its generators the car raised, wheeled, slid forward, until through
the large port-lock, and swooped down to the lake.
Dr. Ku Sui watched everything with an interest he did not attempt to
disguise. There was being revealed to him the secret entrance to Eliot
Leithgow's laboratory, and long had he sought for that laboratory,
long pondered on its probable location. No doubt, at various times,
pissing over, he had seen the barren hill and its flanking lake, but
had never given them a second glance. Yet here, right in the lake, was
the doorway to Leithgow's refuge!
The air-car lowered like a humming bird to the lake's surface, paused
and dipped under. The light left the sealed ports and entrance
hatchway, and the water pressed around, dark and muddy. Down the car
sunk, apparently without direction, its course very slow, until ahead,
out of the blackness, a spot of red winked.
At once the air-car made towards it and slid into the tube leading
through the hill. Quickly it was in the chamber of the lock, the outer
door closed automatically behind, the water was drained out, and then
the inner door opened and the car, dripping, emerged into the
brilliantly-lit hangar and went to rest in its mooring cradle beside
Leithgow's space-ship.
A minute later its passengers were in the laboratory of the Master
Scientist.
* * * * *
Dr. Ku Sui took in the arrangements made in the laboratory with a
swift glance, and then his eyes went to a door that opened in the
opposite wall and to the slight, smock-garbed figure that came through
it. He smiled.
"Ah, Master Leithgow! A return visit, you see. At Captain Carse's
invitation. It is very interesting to me, this home of yours: so
cleverly concealed!"
Leithgow vouchsafed his archenemy no more than a look, but turned to
the Hawk.
"You are ready, Carse?"
"Some preliminaries first, Eliot. These men, the four whites and the
yellow, must be put in some place of safety. You can take care of
them, Ban. One of the storerooms; lock them in. You remember your way?
Then, better take off your suit."
Ban nodded, and led the five robot humans out. Leithgow, Hawk Carse
and Ku Sui were left alone in the laboratory, and for a minute there
was silence.
How much had passed between these three! How many plots, and
counter-plots: how much blood: how many lives affected! The feud of
Hawk Carse and Dr. Ku Sui--and Eliot Leithgow, who was the chief cause
of it--here again had come to a head. Here again were all the varied
forces of brains and guile, science and skill, marshaled in the great,
vital game on whose outcome depended the restoration of Eliot Leithgow
and the lives of the coordinated brains and, indeed, though more
distantly, the fate of all the tribes of men on all the planets. For
if Ku Sui won free he would go on irresistibly, and his goal was the
domination of the solar system....
Three men, alone in a room--and the course of the creature Man being
affected by their every move. Large words: but the histories of the
period bear them out. Though, doubtless, Ku Sui alone knew how great
were the stakes as they stood there in the laboratory.
* * * * *
Hawk Carse was uneasy. The odds seemed all on his side--yet there was
Ku Sui's strange, almost imperceptible smile, his mysterious words up
on the asteroid, his smooth, unruffled assurance! What did these
things mean? He intended now to find out. He said, tersely:
"Eliot. I have informed Dr. Ku that he is to be the means of the
transplantation of the coordinated brains to living human bodies,
since he is the only person capable of performing the operations. He
does not believe that we can force him to do our will, yet all the
same he is taking no chances: he started the death of the brains. We
shall have to work very fast--all right. But Dr. Ku has other cards to
play against us, and I don't know what they are. You and I must find
out now."
"I somehow feel that you mistrust me," interposed the Eurasian with
mock sadness. "Ah, if you could only read my mind.... Or can you? Is
that what you are coming to?"
The Hawk glanced at Leithgow; and Leithgow nodded, and placed a metal
chair close to one of the cylindrical drums--the one fitted with a
tube and breathing cone.
"Will you sit there. Dr. Ku?" Carse asked.
The green eyes scanned the drum.
"A gas, Master Leithgow?"
"That is all. Not harmful, not painful."
"I see. I see...." the Eurasian murmured. And suddenly, he smiled at
the two men facing him, and said pleasantly to Carse:
"Things repeat! Not long ago I asked you to sit in a chair and submit
to a treatment of mine, and you did as I asked. After so gallant a
precedent, how could I refuse? All right. Now, Master Leithgow, your
gas!"
* * * * *
With gentle fingers Eliot Leithgow fitted the cone on the Eurasian's
face and fastened it there. The fingers and thumb of one hand he kept
on Dr. Ku's pulse; with the other he pulled over slowly a control set
in the side of the drum. A ticking and slight hissing became audible,
and two indicators on the drum quivered and crept downward.
A minute of this--the ticking and soft hissing, the indicator's slow
fall, the silk-clad figure in the chair, watched closely by Carse on
one side and Eliot Leithgow on the other--and a change was apparent. A
ripple flowed over the Eurasian's silken garments; the body appeared
to loosen up, to become free of all muscular and mental tension. The
gas hissed on.
"The first step," murmured Leithgow abstractedly, out of his
concentration on dials and patient. "The muscles--notice--relaxed. The
will--the ego--the nexi of emotions and volitions which oppose
external direction--all being worked upon, submerged, neutralized--but
not his knowledge, not his skill. No--all that he will retain! You'll
notice nothing more until you see his eyes. A few minutes. What says
the red hand? Thirteen. At nineteen it should be completed."
Carse watched intently. It was wonderful to know that when the correct
amount of this substance, which he knew only as V-27, had been
administered, and Ku Sui awoke, there would be no enmity in him, no
opposition to their demands, no fencing with wits; that this same Ku
Sui, his great mentality unimpaired, would be subservient and entirely
dependable.
"Seventeen," murmured the old scientist. "Eighteen ... now!" With a
flick of his fingers he shut off the stream of V-27 and gently
unloosened the cone from Dr. Ku's face.
The ascetic features were in repose, the eyelids closed, their long
black lashes lying against the delicate saffron of the skin. Dr. Ku
Sui seemed resting in dreamless, unclouded sleep. But for only a
moment. Soon the eyelids quivered and slowly opened--and a great
change was immediately visible in the man's green eyes.
Many observers have recorded that under the veiled, enigmatic eyes of
Dr. Ku Sui there lurked a sultry glimmer of fire; or perhaps it was
that the observers who met these eyes always imagined the fire, being
conscious of the devil and the tiger in the man. But Carse and
Leithgow now saw that all that was gone.
No mask lay over the green eyes now, no spark of fire glinted deep in
them. They were clear and serene; they hid nothing; almost they were
the eyes of a fresh, innocent child. Dr. Ku Sui, he of a hundred
schemes, a score of plots, he of the magnificent capacity and untiring
brain bearing ever toward his goal of lordship of the solar system--it
was as if he had slipped into a magic pool whose waters had washed him
clean and given him innocence and eyes of peace....
* * * * *
The Eurasian breathed deeply, then smiled at the two men standing by
him.
"Now," whispered Eliot Leithgow. "Ask him anything. He will answer
truthfully."
The Hawk lost no time. He asked:
"Dr. Ku, you will perform the brain transplantations for us?"
"Yes, my friend."
The man's tone was different. Gone was the suaveness, the customary
polite mockery; it was frank, open, genuinely pleasant.
"Is it true, Dr. Ku, that your coordinated brains will die, if left in
their case?"
"Yes, they will die if left there."
"Within what time, to save them, must the operations to transplant
them into human bodies be started?"
"Within twenty-five, perhaps thirty, minutes at the most."
"Can all five brains be given the initial steps for transplantation
into the heads of your four white assistants and the coolie prisoner
within one hour--the remaining half of the two hours the brains said
they would retain the necessary vitality?"
Dr. Ku smiled at him. There was no malice in the thunderbolt that he
unleashed then. He simply told what he knew to be the truth.
"By fast work they could be, and so saved, although the subsequent
operations will take weeks. But the brains cannot be transplanted into
the heads of my four white assistants."
"What?" Both the Hawk and Leithgow cried the word out together. "They
cannot?"
* * * * *
Dr. Ku looked at them as though astonished.
"Why, no, my friends! I wish I were able to, but I cannot perform the
operations by myself, unaided. That would be impossible, absurd....
You seem startled. Surely you must have known that those assistants
would be vital to the work! I have taught them, you see; trained them;
they were specialists in brain surgery to begin with, and I do not
believe there are any others this side of Mars who could take their
place in operations of this type. Without them, I could never
transplant the brains."
This, then, had been the trick up his sleeve! This was why, in the
control room of the asteroid, he had shown relief when the Hawk told
him what bodies were to be used for the transplantation! For he had
known that, whatever Eliot Leithgow's method of forcing him to
perform the operations might be, and no matter how efficacious, the
coordinated brains simply could not be put in the heads of his four
assistants--because the assistants were themselves needed for the
operations!
"Then--it's hopeless!" said the Master Scientist bitterly. "All this
for nothing! You might find other bodies in Port o' Porno,
Carse--condemned men, criminals--but Porno's an hour away, two hours'
round trip, and in thirty minutes the brains will be too weak to
save...."
"I am sorry," Ku Sui continued. "I should have told you before,
perhaps. If there were any way out I knew of, I would tell you but
there does not seem to be...."
"Yes," broke in Hawk Carse suddenly. His left hand had been pulling at
his bangs of flaxen hair; his brain had been working very fast. He
added coldly:
"Yes, there is a way."
* * * * *
Leithgow and Ku Sui looked at him inquiringly.
"We need four bodies," he went on. "We have one--the coolie; he is not
needed to assist in the operations. Four bodies--and here, ready, in
twenty-five minutes. Not the bodies of normal men, of those with life
ahead of them. No. That would be murder. Four bodies of condemned
men--men with no hope left, nothing left to live for. I can get them!"
He brushed aside Ku Sui's and Leithgow's questions. He was all steel
now, frigid, intent, hard. "Ban!" he called. "Ban Wilson!"
"Yes, Carse?" Ban had been waiting outside the laboratory.
"Put on your propulsive space-suit. Hurry. Then here."
"Right!"
Carse ran over to where he had left his suit and rapidly got inside.
As he did so, he said:
"Eliot, there's fast work to be done while I'm gone with Ban. You must
take your assistants and Dr. Ku up to the asteroid in the air-car and
transfer down here all the equipment Dr. Ku says he'll need. Be
extremely careful with the case of coordinated brains. If you possibly
can, have everything in readiness by the time Ban and I return with
the four bodies."
Ban Wilson, in his suit, entered the laboratory. The Hawk gestured him
to the door which led to the tree-shaft to the surface.
"But, Carse, _what_ bodies? Where can you get four more living human
bodies?" Leithgow cried.
"No time, now, Eliot!" the Hawk rapped out, turning at the door. "Just
do as I say--and hurry! I'll get them!"
And he was gone.
CHAPTER X
_The Promise Fulfilled_
Although puzzled by the Hawk's promise, Leithgow could only put his
trust in it and go ahead with the preparations as he had been
directed. He took two of his three laboratory assistants off their
hurried manufacture of quantities of the V-27, and with Ku Sui went
out into the air-car. Passing by way of tube and lake and air, they
were quickly inside the dome on the asteroid, and then into Ku Sui's
laboratory, where Friday waited on guard.
Completely docile and friendly, the Eurasian indicated the various
instruments and devices he would need for the operations, and these
were transported quickly. Then came the case of coordinated brains.
Dr. Ku detached in connections with expert fingers, and all but
Leithgow took a corner and carried it with infinite care to the
air-car outside.
"Do I stay here, suh?" Friday asked the Master Scientist in a
whisper. Though informed of the change in Dr. Ku effected by the V-27,
he was still very suspicious of him. "Seems to me he's a bit too meek
and mild, suh. I think I ought to go down and watch him."
Eliot Leithgow did not quite know what answer to give. The Eurasian
forced the decision.
"I will need," he observed, in his new, frank voice, "all the
assistance you can possibly give me. I am faced by a tremendous task,
and the use of every man will be necessary. I would suggest, Master
Leithgow that the Negro be brought down."
And so Friday came and the asteroid was left unguarded. A mistake,
this turned out to be, but under the circumstances Eliot Leithgow
could hardly be blamed for it. There was so much on their minds, so
much work of vital importance, so desperate a need for speed, that
quite naturally other considerations were subordinated. The asteroid,
to the naked eye, was invisible; it could attract no attention; its
occupants had all been disposed of. Certainly it seemed safe enough to
leave it unguarded for a while.
However, Eliot Leithgow took one precaution. Down in his own
laboratory again, in the midst of the work of transferring Dr. Ku's
operating equipment from the air-car, he called aside one of his
assistants and instructed him to go and survey the asteroid through
the infra-red device every ten minutes: and with this order the old
scientist dismissed the matter from his mind, and turned all his
energies to preparing the laboratory for the operations.
* * * * *
Under Ku Sui's directions his cases of equipment were brought in and
arrayed, and the various drills and delicate saws, and such other
instruments as worked by electricity, were connected. Everything was
sterilized. Rapidly the plain, square room assumed the appearance of
an operating arena, the five tables in the center, spotlessly white
and clean under the direct beams of the tubes hanging from the
ceiling, at the head of every table a stand on which were containers
of antiseptics, bottles of etheloid, a breathing cone, rolls of gauze
and other materials, and along the edge of the stand identical,
complete sets of fine instruments.
The case of coordinated brains was brought into the laboratory last.
The inner liquid was now dark and apparently lifeless; to the casual
eye, it would not have seemed possible that the five grayish mounds
immersed in the liquid held life. And, indeed, Leithgow looked at them
doubtfully.
"Are you sure they're still alive? Do you think there's still time?"
he asked Dr. Ku.
The Eurasian picked up a long, slender, tubelike instrument with a
dial topping it. Then, going to the brain-case, he touched a cleverly
concealed catch and a square pane set in the top of the case swung
back. He dipped the instrument he held into the liquid, and for a
moment stood silent, watching the dial. Then he took it out, re-closed
the pane and turned to Leithgow.
"A test," he explained. "The indicator, interpreted means we have
about forty-eight minutes in which to complete the first phase of the
transplantation of the brains into human heads. It might be done if we
start in eight minutes. But the human heads--?" He paused.
"Eight minutes!" said Leithgow worriedly. "Eight minutes for Carse to
come! He promised the bodies, but ... well, we can only go ahead with
the preparations and trust to him. Is everything ready?"
"All but my assistants. I had better see them now."
* * * * *
The Master Scientist issued an order to one of his men, and presently
the four white assistants of Dr. Ku were led into the laboratory. For
these men, no V-27 was needed; their brains were utterly subservient
to Dr. Ku Sui, and his orders they would obey unquestioningly, no
matter what the work. There was no danger from them.
They stood motionless, their eyes fastened on their master, as he
spoke to them.
"Brain operations," he said. "These"--he indicated the case--"are to
be transplanted again into human heads. You have done work similar to
it before; you know the routine. But now it must be quick. Synchronize
your speed with mine; I will be working very rapidly, and it is vital
that you be in harmony with me every instant. When the bodies come,
you will prepare the heads: and then you will attend me through every
step. You understand." He turned to the old scientist. "Operating
gowns, gloves, masks, Master Leithgow?"
"I have your own. Over there. Your black costume is among them."
But Leithgow's answer was abstracted. Four minutes for Carse to come!
Or else, everything lost! He busied himself helping the four surgeons
and two of his own assistants into the white, sterilized gowns, and
the masks that left only the eyes free and the skin-tight rubber
gloves, but his mind was not with his actions. The old man looked very
frail now; his age showed in the deep lines now eminent on his face.
Three minutes--swiftly two....
"At least," observed Ku Sui, "we have one body ... the coolie. I had
better start immediately on him."
"Bring him out," Leithgow instructed one of his men. "One brain will
be saved. But--_there!_ Thank God! Hear that? Coming down the passage?
It's Carse, returning!"
* * * * *
It was Carse. He and Ban Wilson, coming down the passage from the top
of the tree-shaft. Everyone in the laboratory could hear plainly the
heavy, sliding tread of the great space-boots. Eliot Leithgow was
first to the door. He opened it, peered through eagerly and called:
"Carse? You've got them?"
"Yes, Eliot. Here--we need help."
The Hawk's voice sounded weary. Friday and the scientist ran down the
passageway until they reached the adventurer. In the faint light, they
saw he was carrying a limp body. He laid it carefully down on the
floor.
"Ban's coming down with another," he said, "and there are two more
above. Go up and get them, Friday."
The Negro started to obey. But Eliot Leithgow did not move, did not
utter a sound. He stood staring at the body Carse had laid down. The
parchmentlike skin of his face seemed to whiten; that was all; but he
winced and slowly brushed his eyes with his hands when, in a moment,
Ban Wilson floated down the shaft and, approached with a second
unconscious body.
At last Leithgow whispered:
"They're all--like that, Carse?"
"Yes," answered the emotionless voice. "There were two others, but we
let them go. They were worse." The gray eyes looked steadily at Eliot
Leithgow. "I know," the Hawk said. "It's horrible--but it can't be
helped. It was these or nothing. There was no choice."
Hawk Carse had fulfilled his promise. He had brought back four
isuanacs.
CHAPTER XI
_Ordeal_
Five bodies lay on the operating tables in Eliot Leithgow's
laboratory. The air, hushed and heavy, was pervaded by the various
odors of antiseptics and etheloid. The breathing cones had been
applied to each of the bodies, and they were now locked fast in
controlled unconsciousness.
On the first table lay the body of the robot-coolie, a man of medium
size, sturdy, well-muscled, with the smooth round yellow face and stub
nose of his kind. His short-cropped, bristly black hair had been
shaved off; the head was now bald. That head was destined to hold the
mighty brain of Master Scientist Raymond Cram.
On the second table lay a twisted, distorted thing, an apelike body
with which fate had played grotesque pranks. It was hairy, of middle
height, and its dark skin all over was wizened and coarse, almost like
the bark of a tree. The legs were short and bowed, the hands stubby
claws; the face, puckered even in unconsciousness, was that of a
gargoyle in pain. The long matted hair had been shaved away; the large
pate washed with antiseptics. Soon, were the operation successful,
that head would hold the brain of Professor Edgar Estapp, world-famous
chemist and bio-chemist.
On the third table lay a shape skeletonlike in appearance, so
emaciated was it, so closely did the bones press into the dry,
fever-yellowed skin. Of one leg, only the stump was left; this
creature had been forced to hop or crawl his way through the isuan
swamps. The head, too, was no more than a skull, with great sunken
dark-rimmed eyes, discolored fangs and loose, leathery lips. There had
been no hair on this death's head; it had long been bald, and now,
washed, clean for the first time in months or even years, it was to
hold the brain of Dr. Ralph Swanson, Earth's one-time leader in the
science of psychology.
On the fourth table lay a giant's body--but a hollow giant, a giant
made thin and pitiful by the ravages of his destroyer, isuan. A
roistering, free-booting space-ship sailor, this man may once have
been, but, from the drug, the mighty arms had been twisted and
shrivelled, the strong legs wasted away. One ear had been torn from
the skull in an old brawl, and what was left was naked and ugly to the
eye. Behind that bitter, drug-coarsened face would be the new home of
the brain of Sir Charles Esme Norman, wizard of mathematics and once a
polished, charming Englishman.
On the fifth table lay a dwarf. Its ridiculous body was not over four
and a half feet long, though the head was larger than that of a normal
man. In the old dark ages on Earth this body would have served for the
jester of a lord, the comic butt of a king; in more recent times as
the prize of a circus side-show. The huge, weighty head with its ugly
brooding mask of a face, the child's body below--this was for the
brain of Professor Erich Geinst, the solitary German who had stood
preeminent on Earth in astronomy.
* * * * *
These creatures were the result of Hawk Carse's desperate search. They
had composed, with one other, the band of isuanacs that had been
rooting in the swamp at the end of the lake when the asteroid had
first arrived. The Hawk had remembered them, and had quickly seen that
they were the only answer to the problem. And so, with Ban Wilson, he
had gone out for them, his mind steeled to the ghastly thought of the
great scientists' brains in such bodies. In space-suits they had swept
down on them. There had been no time for considerate measures: the
four isuanacs had been abruptly knocked out by the impact of the great
suits swooping against them, and carried back to the laboratory.
Eliot Leithgow had been shocked at the idea of a scientist's brain in
the head of the robot-coolie; how much greater, then, was his horror
when confronted by the need of using these appalling remnants of men!
But he could not protest. What else was there? Ku Sui, under the V-27,
had spoken the truth: the operations would be impossible without the
aid of his four assistants. The brains even now were dying. The choice
was: bodies of isuanacs or death for the brains. The scientist and the
adventurer had chosen.
Circumstances had required their use. Ku Sui's attempt to kill the
brains, thus inflicting a time limit: the presence of the band of
isuanacs near the laboratory; each circumstance with a long train of
other, minor ones behind it. Chance or Fate--whatever it is--whether
predetermined or accidental--men must wonder at its working, and know
awe from its patterns and results. Seldom, certainly, was there a
pattern more strange than this now being worked out in the laboratory
of Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow.
The bodies lay there, washed, shaved and swathed in customary loose
operating garments: globules of etheloid dropped steadily down into
the breathing cones, of hunchback, living skeleton, twisted giant,
dwarf and robot-coolie. One by one the isuanacs dropped with the
falling of the etheloid into unconsciousness--and that was their
farewell to the brains, each one debauched either by isuan-drug or
skill of genius, that they had known.
And movement began in the laboratory. White-clothed figures, masked
and capped, used gleaming instruments in their gloved hands; and all
the figures were mute--mute from their great concentration on the
delicate work in progress--or mute from horror that would not die....
* * * * *
So began the ordeal.
Of its details, Hawk Carse knew little. They were not of his world.
Only for the first half-hour could he follow intelligently what was
being done. He too had put on a white robe, as had Ban Wilson and
Friday; and he stood at one side of the room, a silent, intently
watching figure, with the two other men of action, Ban and the Negro,
while the rest moved in a kind of rhythm. The center-piece was the
black-garbed Ku Sui, moving from this table to that, slim gloved hands
flying, pausing, flying again, steadying, concentrating on a detail,
once more sweeping forward. No more than single words came from him;
he and his assistants worked almost as a whole, in perfect sympathy
and coordination, and a constant stream of instruments flowed to him
and then away, their task done.
The first table, and then to the second, with one white figure staying
behind at the first, finishing off details of the work, left by the
master. The third table; the fourth; the fifth; and then back to the
first, while two white figures detached themselves from the main group
and went to the nearby case of coordinated brains. An object held in a
specially formed type of pan was lifted out and carried to the first
table; and Carse sensed a crisis in the attitudes of the working men.
This, he knew, was the first great, step. A brain was being re-born.
The fingers of men, and one man in particular, were fashioning a
miracle.
How could he hope to understand? He could only hang on the movements
of that group of figures, and feel relief as he saw them settle into
smoothness again. Evidently the first crisis was past. A few minutes
more were spent at the first table; then once more Dr. Ku Sui went to
the second, and another object was carried from the coldly gleaming
case.
And in a long, deep pan standing on short legs beside the case,
something gray and shapeless and warm was placed.
The first phase came to an end when there were five similar things in
the open pan, and nothing, except the liquid and a multitude of
spidery, disconnected wires, in the case that but shortly before had
harbored the brains of five scientists....
* * * * *
A pause. Relaxation. Tests. The black-clad figure spoke to one in
yellow in a tone of pleased relief.
"Successful so far, Master Leithgow! We may congratulate ourselves on
the consummation of the first step. It has been done, I believe, well
within the time limit."
"Yes, Dr. Ku; yes. And now--how long will be needed to finish?"
"That is up to you. Normally, I would require a month. In that time
all could be done safely, with small chance--"
"Too long!" said Leithgow.
Carse intervened:
"Why too long, Eliot?"
The old scientist went over close to him, and, in a lowered voice,
explained:
"Ku Sui would develop immunity to the V-27 in a month. Two weeks of it
would give him part immunity. Even ten days might. He has to be
re-gassed four times a day."
"But, letting him come out of it every night and resting normally?"
the Hawk objected.
"I have allowed for that. The gas would still be in his system.
No--nine or ten days is the limit." He raised his voice again to reach
the Eurasian. "Can you complete the work within nine days, Dr. Ku?"
Ku Sui considered it. At last he said:
"That is a lot to ask, Master Leithgow. But--it might be possible.
However, it would mean prodigies of sustained, concentrated labor;
work and skill never-ceasing. We'll have to work in shifts,
naturally."
So it was arranged. All the assistants, both Ku Sui's and Leithgow's,
were portioned off into shifts of four hours' sleep and eight hours'
work: Carse, Ban Wilson and Friday, too, for now every one of them was
needed.
Nine days for the work of a month--and work as delicate and vital as
could possibly be! Small wonder that in the minds of all of them, the
Hawk and the old scientist, and Ban and the Negro, that period, when
remembered later, seemed no more than a confused, unreal, hazy dream;
rather, a nightmare connected imperishably with the odors of an
operating room, antiseptics, etheloid, and the glint of small, sharp
instruments.
It was a titanic task, an ordeal that stretched to the limit the
powers of the men working in that confined space. Normal life for them
ceased; the operating room became a new universe. Swiftly they lost
consciousness of time, even with the routine of the changing shifts
and the food which was brought in at regular hours. Antiseptics,
etheloid, the never-ceasing flow of the instruments, the five bodies
lying still and deathlike on the tables, the hard white glare of the
light beating down on them--all this and nothing more--all sealed away
underground from the life of the forgotten world above. On and on and
on....
* * * * *
It is impossible even to conjecture how the mind of Ku Sui saw the
colossal work that he was doing to aid his most bitter enemies. Even
when he was normal there are only moments when, through some recorded
speech or action of his, we can peer past the man's personality into
his brain; how great a sealed mystery must his thoughts remain to us
when held in that abnormal state by Eliot Leithgow's V-27! Envision
it: this arch-foe of Hawk Carse and Leithgow helping their designs,
lending all his intellect, his great skill, to their purposes, aiding
them in everything! Certainly, afterwards, the memory of what he had
been forced to do must have occasioned Dr. Ku many bitter moments.
Regularly, every four waking hours, he was led to the metal chair and
gassed afresh with the V-27; and his expression remained pleasant; his
eyes were always friendly. But the artificial state in which he was
kept showed soon on his face. It lost its clearness and became a
jaundiced yellow in color: and also it grew peaked and drawn.
But the other faces around him were peaked and drawn, too. The
terrific strain told in definite terms on all, no matter what
stimulants they took to keep going. Many a man would have been driven
to insanity by their sustained, terrible concentration, and the
knowledge that five lives hung on every action, however minute....
On and on and on, science made into a marathon. Four hours of
exhausted, deathlike sleep; eight hours more of the smells, and the
glaring light, and the moving instruments. Days of this, sealing the
brains permanently into their new homes, into their hideous new
bodies....
But finally came the climax, and the last exhausted spurt of work. For
the concluding twelve hours there was no sleep or rest for anyone; and
at the end a breathless, haggard tension held them as Dr. Ku Sui, a
shell of his former self, reviewed the results of the nine days'
ordeal. His verdict was:
"Four have come through, I think, safe. The fifth--I do not know. His
body was near death when he was brought here. He may live or die; it
is impossible to tell now. But it is finished."
Then the men slept. Some slipped to the floor and slept where they
were. In nine days, the work of a month had been done, and a miracle
wrought. The brains had been born again.
CHAPTER XII
_Flight_
It was to Hawk Carse that the news of imminent danger came first.
He had staggered from the laboratory into a sleeping room and, clad as
he was, fallen over into a berth. He would have wakened in a few
hours, such was his custom of years to four-hour watches on ships, but
he was permitted less than an hour of sleep. A hand pulled at him; a
voice kept calling his name. Awareness returned to him slowly as his
brain roused from the coma of sleep.
"Captain Carse! Captain Carse! Wake up, sir!"
It was one of Leithgow's assistants, a man named Thorpe. His tone was
excited and his manner distraught.
"Yes?" the Hawk muttered thickly. "What is it?"
"It's the asteroid, sir! I was instructed to watch it at intervals,
but I--I guess I fell asleep, and just now--"
Carse sat up. "Yes? What?"
"--when I looked, through the glasses--it was gone!"
"Gone? You're sure? Let me see."
Swiftly, Thorpe at his heels, Carse strode out from the room to a
cubby just off the laboratory, the watch-post, where observational
electelscopes and visi-screens provided a panorama of the surrounding
territory.
He gazed through the electelscope, which had been equipped with an
infra-red device and trained on the asteroid, and saw that now, where
the massive body of rock had been poised, there was nothing. Only the
brilliant light of mid-afternoon, the cloudless sky. Carse swept the
glass around. The search was fruitless. The heavens were bare. The
asteroid had gone.
In half a minute Carse had reasoned out the disappearance, saw the
consequences and made the inevitable decision. Gone was the torpor of
sleep, the weariness of the laboratory; this was a crisis, and this
was his work. During the operations, he had been able merely to obey
orders and do manual work. Now he assumed command.
"Your lapse has imperilled us all," he said curtly to Thorpe. "From
now on we're in great danger. Stay here and keep on watch, and sound
the alarm immediately if the asteroid reappears."
"Yes, sir. I--I'm sorry--"
The adventurer cut him off with a frigid nod and ran on silent, rapid
feet to the laboratory, where both Ban Wilson and Friday lay fast
asleep. Roughly Carse shook them into consciousness. Trained to
shipboard routine and the sudden emergencies of space, they needed but
little time to return to full wakefulness. In staccato sentences the
new situation was outlined to them.
"The asteroid's gone. That means danger to everything here. We will
have to evacuate. Ban, wake all the men, including Ku Sui and his
assistants, then come to me for further orders. Friday, see that
Leithgow's ship is ready for instant departure. Quick!"
Alarmed, but without questions, the two parted on their separate
errands. Carse went to the room where Eliot Leithgow lay asleep.
* * * * *
The pallor and weariness of the old scientist's face were emphasized
by the alarming news his friend brought him, but he took it with
spirit, and his voice was level and controlled as he asked:
"What does it mean, Carse? What must we do?"
"Leave, Eliot, and at once. We have no choice. Our danger while here
is immense. The asteroid, in the hands of enemies, could crush us like
a fly, simply by coming down on the top of the hill."
"But who could have taken it? There was no one on it, was there?"
The Hawk said wryly: "I thought not, but well, you remember the secret
panel in Dr. Ku's laboratory?"
"Through, which he escaped before? Yes."
"I suspected that he might have someone hidden behind it, and I
intended to question him when he was under the V-27, but in the
terrific rush of things it slipped my mind. Sheer carelessness, Eliot;
I'm very sorry. I should have known, for when we captured Ku Sui he
spoke some words in Chinese through his helmet-radio. Now I can see
that they must have gone to some man of his hidden there; and that
man, obeying instructions, simply lay low, heard all that passed in
Dr. Ku's laboratory, and then, at a suitable opportunity, took the
asteroid away in search of allies. He knows his master is a prisoner
here and unquestionably he will be back to release him. We must be out
of here and far away by the time he arrives."
"Yes," Leithgow nodded slowly. "As you say, there is no choice."
"But your work here is finished, Eliot," Carse went on. "If only we
can get to Earth safely, with Ku Sui and the brains in their new
bodies, we will have achieved everything we wanted to achieve. We have
proof of the crime done you, and we have Ku Sui, too. Your position
will be restored and the blame put where it belongs. But we must leave
for Earth at once! God knows how near the asteroid is, or who's on
it."
"All right, Carse." The scientist got up. "What are your
instructions?"
Ban Wilson appeared in the door, reporting that all the men had been
accounted for and awakened. Carse started the wheels moving.
"Everything of value here must be transported aboard the ship. Eliot,
you know better than I what to take, so you'll assume charge of the
loading. Ban, you and all the men save two of Eliot's assistants will
help. I'll need them to move the bodies. Send them to me in the
laboratory. But first, be sure Ku Sui and his four men are safely
confined. All right; let's go."
Within half an hour the general evacuation was finished and the ship
loaded.
* * * * *
The _Sandra_, Leithgow's ship, bearing his daughter's name, was a
sturdy vessel designed more for comfort and utility than speed, and so
her appointments, including offensive and defensive weapons, though
modern were limited. Her commodious cargo-holds were easily capable of
accommodating all of the Master Scientist's laboratory instruments and
devices, the volumes of his extensive library, his great mass of
personal papers and more intimate effects; all the more important
stores of the place, too, and its furnishings. The laboratory and its
surrounding rooms were pretty well stripped.
The largest of the _Sandra's_ cabins was transformed under the
direction of Leithgow into a hospital bay, and the five cots bearing
the prostrate, unconscious bodies of the patients put there. Though
hastily improvised, this hospital was complete, as fully equipped and
nearly as efficient as if it were on Earth and not in the belly of a
space-ship. The chances of the patients for complete recovery were not
diminished in any way by the sudden necessity for flight.
In a second, much smaller cabin, Dr. Ku Sui was confined by himself.
Its walls, of course, were of metal, and there was no possible means
of exit from it save by the door, which bore double locks. The
Eurasian, silent and drugged and stupid, immediately stretched his
tall form out on the single berth and in seconds was again sound
asleep. A third cabin was made over to his four assistants.
With everything completed, the underground refuge bare of articles of
value and the _Sandra_ stored and made ready for the long trip, the
inner door of the exit tube swung open, and the ship slid slowly out
of her cradle and into the water chamber for the last time. Her flight
to Earth had begun.
Eliot Leithgow stood near the Hawk in the control cabin, and his old
face was made sad by many memories. For years, this place that he was
now leaving had been his only home, his one sure haven. How carefully,
long ago, had he and Carse planned it and built it! How many times had
they met there, often when danger was close and enemies near, and
cemented still more firmly the bonds between them! To Leithgow, the
hill symbolized safety and friendship and his beloved work. Dangerous,
weary years, those he had spent in the hill, but priceless
nevertheless, warmed as they were by his achievements and the
friendship of Hawk Carse.
Now he was leaving it and going back to Earth. The outlaw years, it
seemed, were ended: Ku Sui was a prisoner, and the proof of his great
crime, which had been laid to Leithgow, was aboard. Earth--green
Earth! Separate, distinct, peerless in the universe; home of men, of
his kind! He had loved and worked and known honor and respect on
Earth; it held the grave of his wife, and the fresh, warm young love
of his wife reincarnate, his daughter Sandra. He was at last going
home to Earth from his exile on this desolate, raw frontier post.
There was a choking in Eliot Leithgow's throat at leaving the hill,
and he turned away, afraid at that moment of being observed by the
steel-gray eyes of his friend, Hawk Carse....
* * * * *
The _Sandra_ swam up through the lake's muddy tide and launched
herself, dripping, into the warm air of afternoon. Her generators
hummed with life given them by the firm hand at the controls, and
swiftly she arrowed forth into the blue. With a few words as to the
visual course, Carse handed the space-stick over to Friday, and
devoted himself to the matter of the watches.
Satellite III dropped swiftly to concavity, as the _Sandra_ was
expertly jockeyed through the rare outer layer of the stratosphere,
became a true globe again. The Negro reported:
"Through the atmosphere, suh. Orders?"
"Full acceleration. Continue visually for the present. I'll work out
the true course in a few minutes."
"Yes, suh!"
The hum of the generators deepened. In a matter of ten minutes,
shipboard routine was arranged, Carse, Friday and Ban splitting the
watches. The Hawk, as was his custom, took the first. Friday was
relieved of the space-stick and immediately went back for sleep, as
did Wilson. Eliot Leithgow did not retire right away, however.
He watched Carse snap on the automatic control and go to an
electelscope which had been equipped with an infra-red device. He
directed it rearward on Satellite III, back along the course the
_Sandra_ had described, and peered through its eyepiece for several
minutes. Then he turned to the old scientist.
"Nothing," he said. "No sign of the asteroid as yet. We'll have to
keep careful watch. The visi-screen's useless against the invisibility
of the asteroid; and the high magnification of this scope, with its
resulting small field of view, will require us continually and
methodically to search through a wide circle behind, in the attempt to
pick up the asteroid, should it appear. A tedious job, with chances of
sighting it about even.... At any rate, we'll have some sort of a
head-start," he finished.
* * * * *
This was the opportunity Leithgow had waited for; he wanted a few
frank words with his friend.
"Carse," he said slowly, "I wonder just where that man concealed
behind the secret panel would take the asteroid?"
"I've thought about that too," replied the Hawk. "We may be sure that
he went for allies: Dr. Ku has several on Satellite III. Of them all,
I think he would go for Lar Tantril."
"Tantril?"
"Yes, I think so. Lar Tantril, the Venusian. A fellow of much
self-confidence and one of Ku Sui's chief agents, and who at
present"--he smiled faintly--"nurses a special bitterness against me.
I told you how I tricked him on his ranch. He'd be very eager to
pursue us in the asteroid simply for the opportunity of repaying me
for that trick." The adventurer's left hand rose to the bangs of
flaxen hair combing down over his forehead, and he murmured, musingly:
"I rather hope it _is_ Lar Tantril...."
"You hope so?" Leithgow repeated, surprised. "When he hates you so?
And would be on the lookout for tricks? Why?"
"I would guess, Eliot, that Lar Tantril is not notable for intellect.
Blustering, domineering--pretty much of a braggart, you know.
Certainly he is not a model of caution; and he is not acquainted with
Dr. Ku's asteroid, for he did not even know it existed. He will be
able to run it, of course, with the advice of this hidden man, but
surely he will not have the perception to discern the weakness in it.
Yes, I hope it is he."
Leithgow went on to the main thing on his mind.
"I'm a little unsettled, Carse," he admitted. "I've been imagining
this as the end of my outlaw years, and the beginning of my
re-establishment on Earth. But this ship is slow, and I see now that
if the asteroid does pursue us and capture us.... What do you really
think of our chances?"
* * * * *
The Hawk pursed his lips slightly, and for a little while he looked
away and did not answer. When his voice came, it was tinged with
bitterness.
"Eliot," he said, "I've been trying to find an excuse for my lapse.
But there is none. It was the blunder of a novice, my not remembering
to question Ku Sui about that secret panel. That was the cardinal
point, yet it slipped my mind, in my preoccupation with the
emergencies connected with the restoration of the brains.
"Our chances are only fair, Eliot; I'm telling you frankly how it
appears to me. I believe we'll be pursued, and if we are the odds are
greatly against us. The asteroid's far more powerful than we. And
Jupiter only knows what new offensive resources Ku Sui may have given
it: I had no time to study the several strange mechanisms I saw in its
control room. Then, no nearby patrol ship would help us if we were
attacked, for to them our enemy would be invisible, and they'd think
us crazy."
He paused. But seeing the somber expression on the other's face, he
smiled and cuffed him on the back.
"But maybe we won't even be pursued, Eliot! Maybe we'll be too far
ahead for them to catch us! No doubt I've made it look too serious, so
cheer up! We're alive, we've got everything we wanted, and we're
hitting at full speed for Earth! And you know the luck of that
space-adventurer they call the Hawk!"
Leithgow smiled gently in answer, then left the cabin for the sleep he
needed so badly. Hawk Carse was left alone on watch in the fleeing
_Sandra_.
A lonely, intent figure, he stood over the chart-table, working out
their best course to Earth. Presently, however, he went back to the
infra-red electelscope and swept it over the leagues behind. Carse
could not detect any sign of the asteroid, but he remained for a
little while at the eyepiece, staring at Satellite III. There it lay,
a diminishing globe, three-quarters of it gleaming in the light flung
by Jupiter. Dark patches mottled it: they would be the jungles. And
there was the scintillant sheet that was the Great Briney Lake, with
Port o' Porno nearby. On the other side of the little world, now, lay
the hill containing Leithgow's laboratory. All going ... going ...
falling swiftly behind. Satellite III, scene of so many clashes, plots
and counter-plots, where so many times he and Eliot Leithgow had
fought off the reaching hand of Ku Sui--soon it would be a million
miles away. What adventures would he have before he saw it again?...
A little sound came from the Hawk, a half-sigh. Abruptly he called one
of the men on his watch and stationed him at the 'scope, and then he
returned to the chart-table and the work of calculating their course
to Earth.
CHAPTER XIII
_In Earth's Shadow_
Hour after hour and day after day, for a week the _Sandra_ tracked on
through the boundless leagues, the waxing sunlight beating steadily on
her starboard bow and her silent gravity-plates and singing generators
bringing Earth ever nearer. Friday, who possessed an extensive
knowledge of all the practical sciences, did extra service in the role
of cook, and his regularly served meals disguised the undifferentiated
hours of space into Earth-mornings, noons and nights. Watch in and
watch out, and nothing to disturb the even routine.
As for the ever-feared pursuit, there was no sign of it.
Systematically and carefully the men stationed at the electelscope
turned it through the region behind, but never did their watching eyes
discern the bulk of the asteroid. Its disappearance, and the kindred
mystery of who had been on it, remained unsolved.
Therefore peace came to Eliot Leithgow's face, and the tiredness left
his eyes. The long, hunted years were beginning to be washed from him,
and daily, to Carse, he appeared younger. Often in the control cabin
or over a meal he talked of what lay ahead, and the happiness Earth
held waiting for him. There was his daughter, Sandra, whom he had seen
last as a girl of fourteen, and even then interested in his work. She
would be matured now, and she would perhaps be eager to help him in
the work he intended to resume. There was so much of it! Discoveries,
theories, evolved during his fugitive years--now he could complete
them and give them to his old circles of brother scientists. All this
was in his conversations; but secret and unworded in his thoughts were
anticipations of the old dear beauty of Earth, that beauty for which
his ageing heart had pined so long....
And Earth was drawing nearer.
* * * * *
Another week passed.
Twice a day the door of Dr. Ku Sui's cabin was unlocked and he was
brought out under guard for several turns through the ship. Though for
safety's sake they continued to dose him with the V-27, it was
apparent that the gas had less and less effect on him. Four, then
eight, then twelve times a day they re-gassed him--as often as they
dared, considering its ultimate destructive mental effect--but more
and more of the frankness and serenity foreign to his green eyes
melted away. Gradually the normal veil came to hide their depths and
make them enigmatic; and sometimes there was again on his face the
hint of something strong and tigerish and cruel lying waiting. They no
longer trusted him to attend to the five patients. He spoke seldom. A
tall, reserved figure in black silk, attended either by Ban Wilson or
Friday, he strolled through the ship for fifteen minutes and was
returned to his lonely cabin. Of all the marks his experience must
have left upon him, the only one apparent was his silence.
It was on the seventeenth day that he forsook that silence and
directly accosted Carse. He had a request. The saffron face impassive,
the long lashes lying low over the eyes, he said softly:
"I wonder, Captain Carse, if I might be permitted a glimpse of the
subjects of my transplantation?"
Leithgow and Wilson were at the time with Carse in the control cabin,
and they regarded their friend intently, curious as to what the reply
would be. They saw his steel-gray eyes meet Dr. Ku's gaze squarely;
and the two men looked at each other: Hawk Carse, complete victor at
last, and Ku Sui, the vanquished.
The adventurer answered:
"Your request is only natural, Dr. Ku. Certainly you may see them, and
perhaps offer an opinion on their progress, which has so far been in
the hands of your assistants. But I shall have to accompany you."
"You are kind."
"Take the controls, Ban," Carse directed, and together they left the
cabin.
* * * * *
There was no visible change in the five bodies. They lay stretched out
in cots, sheets drawn up to their necks, and it seemed almost as if
they were quietly slumbering and would presently wake up; though in
reality consciousness would not return to the fine brains in their
hideous, distorted bodies for many weeks, and then only if the healing
processes were successful. Bandages swathed the heads, leaving eyes
and nostrils alone visible. An assistant of Leithgow's, at present on
watch there, moved occasionally with instrument in hand to time the
fevered pulses.
"I must ask you to stand back here, Dr. Ku," said the Hawk, indicating
a spot some five feet from the nearest cot. His left arm hung easily
by his side, the hand resting by the butt of his holstered raygun; and
the position was not accidental.
Ku Sui nodded and doubtless noted the gun, but his eyes were on the
bodies. He stood regarding his own handiwork in silence, his face
inscrutable, and Carse did not disturb him. At last, in a low tone he
asked the assistant:
"The food injections take successfully?"
The man nodded.
"I remember," the beautifully modulated voice went on. "I was not sure
of one subject. Swanson's brain, was it not? Is his condition any
better?"
"We are not sure."
"Ah, yes ... yes...." He appeared to muse, and no one disturbed him in
the minutes of silence that followed. Finally he looked away and said:
"It was a great feat. Thank you, Captain Carse. I am pleased by this
glimpse of the miracle my hands were made to perform. I am ready to
return."
But at the door of his cabin he paused, and his eyes rested again on
the cold, firm face close to him. He said:
"I suppose, Captain Carse, you intend to bring me before Earth's World
Court of Justice?"
"Yes. Along with our living proof of your abduction of the five
scientists."
The Eurasian smiled. "I see. And since there is no questioning that
proof, it would appear that Earthlings will soon levy punishment on
Dr. Ku Sui.... So.... You know, Captain Carse, I find your caution a
great handicap. You keep gassing me; I am locked in; and since I have
observed no excitement aboard the ship, apparently there are no
friends anywhere near me. You have stripped me of everything." His
eyes lowered for a moment. "Everything save this ring."
On the forefinger of his right hand, set simply in a platinum band,
was a large dark stone.
"A black opal," said Dr. Ku. "I have worn it for years and I prize it
highly. Perhaps at the last I will give it to you as a memento of
these past years, Captain Carse." And he went into the cabin, where
they gassed him again.
* * * * *
The third week passed.
Crossing the orbit of Mars, now approximately in opposition to
Jupiter, the _Sandra_ streaked on into the last leg of her long
voyage. The sun was a vast, flame-belching disk on her starboard side,
and ahead lay Earth, growing each hour. Cheerfulness pervaded the
ship, nerves were relaxing, faces lightening. Carse could not remember
when Eliot Leithgow had worn a smile so constantly. It was only
natural, for to the old scientist and his personal assistants Earth
was home, the fulfillment of every desire, the reality and symbol of
normal life and love of man.
But to Hawk Carse the Green Planet was not home. He was the
adventurer, and wanderer, the seeker of new places with the alluring
lustre of peril. Earth was to him little more than a port of call, and
it brought him sadness to see how eagerly Leithgow stared at her
growing face. Their parting was not far away now.
The _Sandra_ logged off the miles. Then came the day when only ten
thousand were left, and, soon after, five thousand. Deceleration had
long since been begun. Slightly but unvaryingly the ship's momentum
slackened until she arrived at the two thousand mile mark, where the
great curving stretch of the planet filled her bow windows, and the
well-remembered continents and seas stood out as clearly as on a
tilted classroom globe.
Carse leaned musing in a corner of the control cabin, oblivious to the
well-meaning but toneless voice with which Ban Wilson, at the
electelscope was butchering a song. A gentle tap on the shoulder
summoned him out of his study.
He turned and saw that Leithgow had come to him. Carse smiled at the
old scientist, and said:
"Well, Eliot, we'll be in soon now. Apparently we've made it safely,
and there's nothing to stand between you and the day you've waited for
so long."
* * * * *
"Yes. But Carse--what of you? How long will you stay? I only wish I
could persuade you--"
"To retire, Eliot? Settle down? Become a humdrum landlocked
Earthling?" He chuckled, and shook his head. "No, no, old friend. Oh,
I'll stay on Earth for a few weeks; I suppose I'll have to, to testify
before the World Court of Justice when it takes up your case; but
after that's settled, I'll be going back. You know me, Eliot: I'll
never change. There are a number of things I must attend to at once.
My ship, the _Star Devil_, is still on Iapetus, remember; I must find
her and get her tuned up again. She's the fastest craft in space, bar
none. Then I must make the round of my ranches and see that things are
running smoothly. I've a lot of work on the Iapetus ranch,
particularly. Then, there's that Pool of Radium--not that I need the
wealth, if it really exists; but the job has killed so many who have
sought for it that I'd like to take a crack at it myself. Oh, plenty
to do!"
Leithgow looked at him, and there was all affection in his eyes, and
friendship as close as it can be between men.
"No, Carse," said Leithgow softly. "I suppose Earth will never get her
gravity on you for keeps. But I hope you will come down occasionally
to see me, and perhaps once a year, say, spend a month with Sandra and
me in our--"
"Carse!"
Ban shouted the name out. His face, turned from the electelscope, was
alive with excitement.
"Here! Look!"
"What is it?"
"The asteroid! It's close!"
In two strides Carse was at the eyepiece of the infra-red glass
attached to the instrument. One look through it served to verify Ban's
report. The asteroid of Dr. Ku Sui had at last appeared.
* * * * *
It was not more than fifty miles from the _Sandra_, a craggy fragment
of rock, peanut-shaped, and tipped by its gleaming dome. Its speed
seemed the same as theirs, but its course was different; and to Carse,
that fact immediately explained its sudden appearance. He turned from
the eyepiece with a face grown hard and cold.
"Well, it's happened," he said. "Instead of a stern chase, which would
give us some chance of spotting them, they at once got off to the side
and have all this time been flanking us. Now they're cutting in,
straight behind, no doubt ready for business. All right. Ban, sound
the alarm."
Like a gladiator about to step sword in hand into the arena, the
_Sandra_, though a ship never designed for space duels, girded her
loins and made herself ready for what at its best could only be an
unequal struggle. She was outclassed in weapons, weight and speed--in
all save pilots. She had Hawk Carse at her helm.
The harsh alarm bell at once rang through the ship, an emergency call
to stations. Carse, at the controls, rapped out another order.
"Defensive web on, Ban, and build up power for the ray batteries."
As the echoes of the bell died, a piercing whine grew amidships, and
shreds of blue light swiftly scattered by the _Sandra's_ ports. They
were quickly gone, but they left behind an almost invisible envelope
of blue which enwrapped the ship completely. The defensive web against
attacking rays was on.
Friday tumbled into the control cabin, and on his heels two of
Leithgow's assistants, the third being on duty with the patients.
Carse briefly explained what had happened. "Friday," he ordered, "you
take the stern ray batteries. Ban--"
But Ban Wilson had returned to the electelscope, and it had given him
more news. Interrupting, he cried out:
"They must be attacking! A light just flashed in the dome!"
With his words they all saw the light. The visi-screen, though it did
not reveal the asteroid, showed the first weapon with which it
struck--a lustrous ray of purple which in a blink had leaped out to
the _Sandra_ and enfolded her. A shower of sparks crackled out from
the ship's defensive web, but the purple ray continued.
"I don't know that ray, Eliot." Carse said. "What's on our speed
indicator?"
The scientist's gasp was plainly audible as he read the dial. "Why,
it--it's dropping! Much faster than our deceleration accounts for!
That ray--why, it must have magnetic properties! Carse, the asteroid's
stopping us!"
CHAPTER XIV
_The Hawk Strikes_
No surprise showed on the Hawk's face, though the others were visibly
shaken. He, at the helm, merely nodded and continued with further
orders.
"Williams," he said to one of Leithgow's assistants, "get Thorpe and
go and dose Ku Sui with V-27. Give him plenty. Then both of you
station yourselves, ray guns in hand, outside his cabin. We'll take no
chances with him, gassed or not. Friday, open our radio receiver to
the general band. Just the receiver, not the mike.... Our speed,
Eliot?"
"Down to seven hundred, and falling steadily."
Carse went to the electelscope, after giving the controls over to Ban.
Squarely behind the _Sandra_, and within twenty-five miles, the
peanut-shaped body had come. It was an ominous and silent approach.
The _Sandra_ remained pinned by the purple ray for minutes while the
Hawk studied her aggressor. As he watched the asteroid, the others
watched him; Ban Wilson fidgety, Friday clenching and unclenching his
big hands. Eliot Leithgow with whitened face and shoulders that seemed
to have bowed a little.
The forward speed of the _Sandra_ decreased to four hundred miles an
hour, and still the Hawk studied the massive body behind....
A sputter sounded in the radio receiver. Carse turned away from the
electelscope and listened to the heavy Venusian voice that was
suddenly speaking to him from it.
"Carse, I've got you! You've seen our ray, of course, but have you
looked at your speed-indicator? You're caught--and this time you're
going to stay caught. You cannot possibly resist the magnetic ray I
have on you, and in a few minutes you will be drawn right into me. I
advise you to surrender peacefully. No tricks--though there's no trick
that could do you any good! Nothing! I have you this time!"
A frosty smile tightened the Hawk's lips.
"I was right, Eliot," he murmured. "The man behind the panel took the
asteroid to Lar Tantril. He is our opponent."
* * * * *
Those were his words, but he did nothing. He seemed content to stand
with cold, intent face looking back through the infra-red
electelscope. The _Sandra's_ speed sank to three hundred, two hundred
and soon a hundred, and the asteroid, which was of course also
decelerating, crept up remorselessly. Ban Wilson had every confidence
in the Hawk, but finally the inaction grew too much for him to bear.
"Jumping Jupiter, Carse!" he sputtered. "--aren't you going to do
anything? Use our rays! Try maneuvering to the side! Damn it, we're
just letting them take us!"
The adventurer might not have heard, for all the sign he gave. The
Earth-clock on the wall ticked on; seconds built minutes, and the
minutes passed. The asteroid was only ten miles astern.
"Eliot," said Carse quietly, "get me one of your infra-red glasses."
He took over the controls again. Carefully he varied the forward
repulsion and sent current to the side gravity-plates, and slowly the
_Sandra_ answered by rotating, longitudinally, reversing her position.
Still maintaining a slight and dwindling speed toward Earth, her bow
swung from that planet's eye-filling panorama and came to face,
instead, the invisible asteroid. When turned completely around, the
men in her control cabin looked through the bow windows right into
the brilliant cone of the purple ray.
Lar Tantril's voice again boomed from the broadcasting shell, and this
time it was harsh with anger.
"Try no tricks, Carse! I see what you intend. You plan to suddenly
_answer_ my ray, instead of continuing to resist it, and so drive
right past me and escape. But I warn you I have terrific power, and if
you move towards me of your own volition, I can burn you to a cinder
in three seconds, and I'll do it. You can't escape! If I have to
destroy Ku Sui, all right--but I'll get you!"
* * * * *
The Hawk strapped over his eyes the infra-red glasses Leithgow now
gave him.
Reversing the _Sandra's_ ends had neither increased nor decreased the
rate at which the asteroid's purple stream was bringing her closer.
Obviously the magnetic stream was being varied. The space-ship's
forward momentum merely continued to drop normally until the moment
came when she had no Earthward velocity at all; and then more quickly
she moved toward the restraining asteroid.
With his infra-red glasses, through the bow windows, Carse could now
see the massive body in full detail. There was the dome, a huge,
gleaming cup of transparent stuff now showing wisps of blue, from the
defensive web around it; and inside were the several buildings, and
minute black dots which were the figures of men. There was a great
number of them. The largest group was clustered inside one of the
large ship-size port-locks in the dome. The lock's outer door was
open, and it was from there that the purple ray seemed to originate.
Obviously the intention of the enemy was to draw the _Sandra_ right
in. Five miles now separated asteroid and ship.
Again the Venusian chief spoke.
"I warn you once more, Sparrow Hawk, try no tricks. You can see the
men I have here, but you can't see my ray projectors. They're hidden,
but they're centered on you, every one, and my hand's at the control
that fires them. They have terrific power, Carse. Better not attempt
anything!"
The Hawk switched on the extension microphone at his side. He said
levelly into it:
"Lar Tantril, I'll make a bargain with you: a favor for a favor."
"What?" shot from the loudspeaker.
"I will agree to surrender peaceably when you've drawn my ship inside
if, for your part, you promise to free Eliot Leithgow, who is aboard
with me, and the five patients on whom Ku Sui operated. If you don't
grant me that, I will oppose you to the last pull of my finger on
trigger."
"But, Carse--" the Master Scientist began, horrified: but his
expression of amazement faded when the slender man at the radio turned
his head and half-closed one eye in a wink.
"You will agree to that--and no tricks?" Tantril's voice repeated.
"I will agree to it. And as for tricks, what could I possibly try?
Your rays could burn through the maximum power of my web in three
seconds, as you say: I know it as well as you. I only wish there was a
chance to get out of your range in time."
"All right!" the Venusian replied decisively. "I agree. I'll release
Leithgow and the five patients. Keep away from the controls and I'll
draw you in."
* * * * *
Carse switched off the microphone.
"A hell of a lot Tantril's word is worth!" muttered Ban Wilson. Once
more, surprisingly, the Hawk winked. Friday was grinning now. For
once in his life he had guessed his master's strategy before the
others.
A mile and a half to the front lay the dome-end of the asteroid.
Perhaps nine hundred miles to the rear lay the tremendous mottled
curve of Earth with her dangerous upper layers of the stratosphere all
too close. In the very face of Earth, all three on a line, the ship
lay linked by a stream of purple to the great rough-hewn, errant
asteroid. Half the bulk of all three lay sharply outlined against the
black of space by the intense yellow light of the flaming distant sun.
The asteroid neared to a mile, then a half-mile. Hawk Carse said
curtly:
"Ban, when I give the word, put all the power we've got into our
defensive web. Load the generators; overload them; tax them to the
limit. That web must be as tough as possible for five seconds."
"Got you, Carse."
"You've--a trick?" ventured Leithgow timidly.
"I think I have, Eliot. Lar Tantril might have caught on when I turned
the ship, but unfortunately for him his brain is incapable of
proceeding past a certain point.... All right, Ban."
"Feel it!"
In answer to Ban's hands, the deck of the control cabin was literally
vibrating under the mounting speed of the generators in the
power-room. The generators could not stand that terrific overload
long: they would burn out. But Carse needed only a few seconds of it.
The asteroid was a quarter of a mile away, seen through the infra-red.
The dome loomed large.
"All right!" whispered Hawk Carse. "Hold on!"
With the words he unleashed the _Sandra's_ full acceleration.
* * * * *
It was a risk and a big one, but the Hawk had it calculated to a
fraction of a second, and so, without hesitation, he took the chance.
A little less than four seconds to reach his objective, he reckoned; a
little more than one second for Tantril to release the asteroid's
disintegrating rays as he had threatened; therefore about two and a
half seconds for the _Sandra_ to be exposed to those rays. The chance
that her defensive web could resist them for that long would decide
it.
From almost a standing start, the _Sandra_ swept ahead, generators
humming, her web a blue mist around her, acceleration at the full.
Straight down through the heart of the narrowing purple ray she sped,
a hurtling metallic projectile, hundreds of tons in mass, her stub bow
levelled dead at the dome.
After a second the asteroid bared its fangs.
A cone of brilliant orange flamed and washed around the _Sandra's_
bow, and a storm of soundless sparks engulfed her. She was caught in a
maw of fire, and held there for the remaining terrific seconds of her
wild forward dash. But the seconds passed; the hands of Hawk Carse
were delicate on her controls; and the _Sandra_, curving slightly
upward, struck, crashed, wrenched terribly in every joint; and then
the jolt and the protesting wrench and the spluttering sparks were
gone from her, and there was around her only the deep silence of
lifeless space.
At three hundred miles an hour the _Sandra_ had nicked the upper
plates of the dome and streaked on, unharmed!
It was not necessary now to use infra-red glasses to see the asteroid.
It was there in the visi-screen for naked eyes, but for seconds not
one of the men in the ship's control-cabin thought to look. The awful
acceleration and shock had dazed them. They had not known what was
coming, except Friday and the Hawk, and only the latter was able to
retain reasonable alertness. He, almost immediately after the impact,
cut down the load on the generators, and brought the _Sandra_ out of
her mad drive forward, rotating the ship until she was facing back
towards the asteroid. Then all of them looked through the bow windows,
and what they saw told the story in an instant.
"It's visible! See--the invisibility's gone!" cried Friday.
* * * * *
A score of miles away the body lay, fully revealed, its starboard half
gleaming hard and sharp in the sunlight. Cautiously the _Sandra_ drew
closer. Carse gave the controls to Ban and examined it carefully
through the electelscope, after removing the infra-red attachment.
He saw that the keel of the _Sandra_ had torn a great, mangled rent in
the dome and through this the air had rushed out. Space had taken
possession. The disintegrating rays which had been burning at the
_Sandra_ had been snapped off with the sheathing of invisibility; in
that one wild second of impact, all the asteroid's functioning
mechanism had been destroyed. Lar Tantril had not thought quite far
enough: he had not sealed the buildings air-tight against a possible
crashing of the dome, and for that reason alone he and his men had
gone down in full defeat under the drive of the Hawk.
Shreds of flotsam drifting and turning in space around the dome now
became visible--bits of wreckage hurled out from the tear, and also a
number of white, bloated things which once had been the bodies of men.
The outrushing tide of air had taken them along, and now they drifted,
shapeless, all of a kind, in the lifelessness of space.
"Merciful heaven!" whispered Eliot Leithgow, staring at the
desolation. "Gone! Just snuffed out!"
The Hawk took over again and brought and held the _Sandra_ in a
position a quarter of a mile above the now rapidly falling asteroid.
"They're all dead, I'm sure," he said in a voice hard and emotionless
as his graven face. "They must be, for the asteroid is now visible,
and that means that the doors of the power building were open. Inside
and out, all there is dead, machinery and men.... Still, it had to be
done. It was they or we. A variation of the trick we used to escape
from the dome before, Eliot; and Tantril of course didn't expect it
and protect himself as Ku Sui did that other time. It's all done
now--yes, its gravity-plates too, for see, it's turning."
"And fast!" murmured Friday.
The body was rotating around its longer axis at about twice the speed
of an Earth-watch's second hand. Now the dome was sliding under, out
of their sight, the craggy rock belly coming up to take its place.
Nine hundred miles away was Earth--rather, less than that, for the
body was now free to accept the tremendous gravity pull of the planet
so near. Soon it would plunge to destruction there....
* * * * *
A thought came to Carse, and he said:
"Perhaps Ku Sui would like to see what has become--"
On the last word he stopped and whirled around. His eyes were suddenly
intense and his face startled.
"I heard a hiss!" said Friday.
"You too? Then it was a port-lock!" Carse turned to the visi-screen.
"Look there!" he cried.
In the screen Earth made a titanic background against which, a
falling, dwindling figure in a clear-cut in the sunlight, gleamed
space-suit. Down it went, rapidly, even as they stared, until it hung
just off the also-falling asteroid. It was obviously preparing to
enter the dome.
"Take the helm, Ban, and watch him!" Carse ordered harshly, and ran
aft from the control cabin.
Leithgow and Friday, following at once, found him inside the open door
of Dr. Ku Sui's cabin, examining two figures stretched limp at his
feet. The men were Thorpe and Williams, who had been set to gas and
guard the Eurasian. Carse said:
"Both dead. Poison. Look at Thorpe's wrist."
On the right wrist of the dead man was a line of red, a scratch, and
swollen, discolored flesh was ugly around it. One cheek of Williams
bore a similar patch. Both had been armed with rayguns, but now they
were gone. Half to himself, the Hawk murmured:
"Yes, poison. It might have been in the ring. Everyone else was in the
control cabin. The men entered the door, Ku Sui was waiting--quick
death.... Well, I'm going after him."
Not understanding, still horrified by the contorted face of the man on
the deck, the other two gazed at the adventurer.
"But, Carse!" Leithgow broke out. "How can you? How can you
possibly--"
"He's gone back to the dome," the Hawk cut in frostily. "He can't make
it to Earth as he is now, for we'd see him and easily be able to pick
him up. No; he's got some reason for returning, to the dome. Something
important. He thinks he's escaped.... He's mistaken."
A shudder passed over Friday, for Hawk Carse's eyes had fallen on him,
and they were deadly.
"Let me by, Eliot," the man whispered. "This time he goes or I go, but
by the gods of space it'll be one of us!"
CHAPTER XV
_There Is a Meteor_
His face set and cold, Carse ran to the stores cabin, just as the
Eurasian must have hurried there a few minutes before. He took one of
Dr. Ku's self-propulsive space-suits down from the rack and slipped
into it, sticking a raygun in the belt. Still not speaking, he glided
to the rear port-lock, Leithgow and Friday running alongside and
attempting to dissuade him from the dangerous pursuit. Their words
were wasted. Carse gave them only a faint smile and a few directions.
"Keep the ship as close as you can without danger. No, Eclipse; I'm
going by myself; there's no need to risk two. If I don't come out,
you've everything needed to prove your case. Eliot--the re-embodied
brains, Ku Sui's four white assistants--"
"I tell you you're going to your death! You'll be caught inside!
Earth's attracting the asteroid now, and in a few minutes it will be
plunging through the atmosphere with terrific speed! The friction will
make it a meteor, and you'll burn. Carse! You'll die in flames! You
haven't but a few minutes to do the whole thing!"
"Have to risk that, Eliot." He swung open the inner door of the lock
and stepped into the chamber. "Remember, keep as close to the asteroid
as possible, and a steady watch for Ku Sui and me." He looked levelly
at them, white man and black, for a moment, then turned his face away.
"That's all. Good-by," he said.
The door swung shut in their faces with a hiss of compressed air.
The Hawk closed the face-plate of his helmet and rapidly spun over the
controls. Another hiss, and the outer door moved wide. He stepped with
force into space.
* * * * *
The panorama below him was breath-taking: Earth seemed almost to hit
him in the face. He had not realized it was so close. The sheer,
mighty stretch of the globe filled his eyes, and for seconds he could
not focus on anything else, so overwhelming to his vision was the
colossal map. It reached away to left and right, before and behind,
and he was so near that it seemed almost flat, a sun-gleaming plain on
which stood out in sharp outline the continent of Europe, the Atlantic
Ocean and, bordering it, the edge of North America.
To his left was the flaming orb of the sun; and directly underfoot,
rotating against the vast background of the North Atlantic, he now saw
the asteroid, glinting metallically along its craggy length as it
swung over. Carse centered every bit of power he had on it, and at
maximum acceleration began to overhaul his objective.
The asteroid was plunging free to Earth, and the rate of its
uncontrolled plunge was second by second mounting tremendously; but
Carse's power-fall quickly enabled him to overtake it. As the dome
swooped up in front of him, and the sunlight washed briefly over its
desolate buildings, he looked hard for a shape moving amongst them,
without success. Doubtless the Eurasian was well inside by now.
The job of getting into the dome was a hazardous one. About every
thirty seconds the asteroid described a complete rotation, making the
rim turn at a speed of half a mile a second, and that made the task of
entering extremely dangerous to a man whose only protection was the
metal and fabric of a space-suit. Misjudgment would either rip the
suit or dash him to instant death. He had to slip cleanly down through
the jagged tear in the dome, planning his swoop accurately to the
fraction of a second.
Never cooler, the Hawk made it. Building a parallel speed equal to
that of the rotating dome, he followed it over in a dizzy whirl; and
as the rent came below he shot curving down and in with sufficient
precision, and at once swiftly adjusted his gravity to offset the
asteroid's great centrifugal force.
* * * * *
For alternating fifteen-second periods the sunlight filled the dome
and its buildings; and on the tail of the first of these, even as the
sable tide swept all vision from him, the Hawk arrived at the door of
one wing of the central building. He had not seen Ku Sui, and he had
no time for exploration, but he did have a hunch as to where the
Eurasian had gone, and he followed that hunch. A silent, giant-gray
thing in the black silence of the corridor, grim, intent and seeming
irresistible, he swept along it; and every second he knew that a
raygun might spit from where it had been waiting in ambush to puncture
his suit and kill him. For whether or not Ku Sui was aware that he was
being tracked by his old, bitter foe, Carse did not know.
The asteroid plunged down faster and faster. Earth's atmosphere, with
all its perils of friction, coming ever closer, and the great bosom of
the planet lying waiting to receive and bury the rock hurtling towards
it. Throughout most of the leagues of space that asteroid had tracked
on its master's diverse errands, and in many distant places the trails
of Hawk Carse and Ku Sui had crossed and left blood and crossed again;
and now those three--asteroid, Eurasian and the Hawk--were drawn once
more together for the spectacular and epic climax, now only minutes
away. No power in the universe was to stop the plunge of the asteroid;
it remained to be seen how one or both of the two living humans on it
could get out in time....
But of all this, nothing was in Hawk Carse's mind except the beating,
driving realization that few minutes were left in which to play out
the last scene. With reckless haste he sped to where his hunch led
him, the secret panel in Dr. Ku's laboratory. As he reached it, faint
sunlight came filtering in from somewhere and he saw that the panel
was open.
He looked within and dimly saw a ladder reaching down into black
depths. Without hesitation he thrust through the opening and dropped
into the blackness. He dared not lose a second.
* * * * *
He hit bottom with a thud, changed his glove controls and reached out
in the darkness. He felt that he was in one end of a passageway. As
rapidly as he could, his arms stretched wide, all his nerves and
muscles and senses alert, he pressed along it.
Continually he was thrown into the rough wall at his right by the
centrifugal force of the asteroid. How far did the passageway extend?
Was Ku Sui at the end of it? It occurred to the Hawk that the asteroid
was a developing shooting star, eating up the few hundred miles of
life that remained, streaking down into the atmosphere, where waited
quick friction and incandescence--and he down in the heart of it,
blind, without clue to what lay in front of him, ignorant of
everything, and with only minutes in which to achieve his end. There'd
be no heat-warning through his insulated suit. Even now, perhaps,
there was no time to get out; already the deadline might have been
crossed; he could not know. He went on....
How far? A hundred yards; two hundred? Easily that, he thought, and
still no variation in the blackness around him! The passageway seemed
straight, so he might now be past the rim of the dome above.
Then, for just a second, he saw a faint wisp of light ahead!
Automatically Carse's raygun came up, but in the time that simple
motion took the light was gone and the blackness was as deep and
lifeless as before. But he was coming to something. He went on,
perhaps a little faster, hot to discover the last emergency resource
of Dr. Ku. He took no pains to avoid making noise, for he knew Ku Sui
could not hear him through the airless space between.
After another hundred yards or so the light from ahead winked again.
It was stronger. Only a second of it, but he now suspected that it
came at regular intervals. It was a machine, perhaps, working under
the hands of the Eurasian. On--on! With the seconds fleeting by,
building to the small total which would bring friction to the
asteroid, and incandescence, and scalding death for him within it!
Again, suddenly, the mysterious light. It left instantly as usual, but
not before it revealed, well ahead, the end of the passage. Quickly he
traversed the remaining distance and felt around with his hands. He
found what he half expected. There was an opening, a doorway, to his
right. The room beyond surely held the final secret of the asteroid.
And if Dr. Ku Sui were anywhere, he was in there.
* * * * *
Carse restrained an impulse to rush in, deciding to wait for the
recurring light. Everything in him told him that this was the climax,
that through the door to his right lay the object of his chase; and in
spite of his consciousness of the plunging asteroid, and the
up-leaping skin of Earth's atmosphere, now so close, he stood full in
the doorway, gun ready, waiting. Seconds were precious, but this was
the part of common sense. He needed the light to show him what perils
he must face; he could not go into that chamber ignorant of the
situation there.
For what seemed ages the fantastic figure stood there. The great rock
turning over and over, with awful speed dropping down. Earth nearing,
death ever closer--and he standing in silence and darkness, waiting to
finish the feud! He might never escape; he knew that; it might already
be too late to try; but the core of the man, his grim and steely will,
would not let him think of retreating towards safety until he had
faced Dr. Ku Sui and decided the account between them forever.
The wall of darkness melted. A ghostly light filtered through. He
stared, and in its brief maximum saw before him a high, bare
rectangular room, hewn out of the rock--and at its far side a man in a
space-suit. Ku Sui, brought to bay!
But Carse, for one of the few times in his life, doubted his eyes.
What trick were they playing him? For it was not a real, sharp figure
that he saw; it was an indefinite one, shimmering and elusive, like a
mirage. A prank of the strange light, perhaps. But Ku Sui
nevertheless! Ku Sui trapped!
The Hawk leaped forward with outstretched arms to seize and hold the
Eurasian's motionless figure. As he moved, the second of ghostly light
dissolved away, and in the blackness his eager reaching arms closed
on--nothing!
Surely Ku Sui had been there! Surely he had not just imagined he saw
him!
* * * * *
Baffled and coldly raging, the Hawk whirled and groped frantically.
The centrifugal force caught him off balance and hurled him into a
wall, but dizzy he continued his desperate search, sweeping his arms
all around him, over walls and floor and, rising, the ceiling. The
tumbling asteroid banged him unmercifully into the six sides of the
room, but even as he was flung he reached and felt in every
direction--felt without result.
In some incredible way, Ku Sui had eluded him. The second the light
failed, he must have slipped by and escaped down the passageway
behind. The Hawk could hardly understand how it might have been
achieved, but there was no other explanation. So, with lips firm set
in his cold, grim face, he felt to the doorway, ready to track back
through the long, unlit passage. He might still overhaul and capture
the other. If there was still time....
But _was_ there?
The passing seconds had not been idle. Inexorably they had brought him
to Earth's atmosphere. He stared around the room in sheer horror.
For its blackness was relieved by the faintest of glows. It was not
that of the recurring light; it came from the whole rock ceiling
above. Carse was overwhelmed by the realization that within numbered
seconds the surface of the asteroid would reach incandescence.
Thoughts raced like lightning through his head. He could not get free
through the corridor and dome behind: that would take at least three
minutes, and not a quarter of a minute was left. Ku Sui too, if he
were in the corridor trying to reach the dome, was trapped and
finished. A meteor flaming to Earth would be their common grave!
A searing, hideous death! Trapped within fiery walls of melting rock!
At that moment the regularly re-recurring flash of light came, and
under pressure of his great need the phenomenon meshed with
understanding in Carse's mind. That light was sunlight! It come at
definite intervals as the dome side of the asteroid rotated to face
the sun.
And that light could reach the room only by way of some channel in the
ceiling!
* * * * *
In the waxing glow of the rock above him, Carse swiftly found the
channel--a vertical bore several feet wide, in one corner of the
ceiling. Its rock sides glowed redly, and at their end was a round
black patch that caused his heart to leap with hope. Outer space!--and
a short, straight escape to it! In a flash he saw how Ku Sui perhaps
had eluded him.
The Eurasian's prepared emergency exit would also be his!
He lost not a fraction of a second. Turning his glove controls to
maximum acceleration, he rose with a rush into the bore. Despite his
good aim the asteroid's centrifugal force threw him heavily into one
red-hot side. His heart went cold; would the fabric of the suit burn
through? No time for such worries--must make the frigid air
outside--fast--fast--never mind bumps--quick out--and must stay
conscious--_must_ stay conscious to exert repulsion against Earth!
Like a projectile Hawk Carse shot out of that tunnel of hell at a
tangent to the asteroid and in a direction away from Earth, and in an
instant the doomed body was far below him, and streaking faster and
ever faster to the annihilation now so near.
He fought to come out of his dizziness. Shaking his head, he glanced
back for sight of a minute, suit-clad figure. Had Ku Sui preceded him
through the emergency exit, his shape should be visible somewhere,
etched by the sunlight.
There was no sign of him.
Carse's eyes dropped to the asteroid. He saw it already miles below,
a breath-taking celestial object, a second sun, brilliant and
increasingly brilliant as it diminished over the watery plain waiting
to receive it. His mind saw the Eurasian, caught in the long corridor
to the dome, already dead on this last flight of his extraordinary
vehicle of space....
The end came at once. The sun was quickly a great, brilliant shooting
star, then a blinding smaller one: then its straight mad flight
through the heavens was over, and it was received in the waters of the
Atlantic Ocean and buried deep.
A cataclysmic burial. A titanic meteor, an incandescent, screaming
streak in the night--a cloud of billowing steam--a wall of water
rearing back from the strange grave of the asteroid, so far come from
its accustomed orbit around Mars.... The thought came to Carse that
Dr. Ku Sui had died as he lived, spectacularly, with a brilliance and
a tidal wave and an earthquake to disturb the lives of men....
And a sadness fell over the heart of the Hawk....
* * * * *
He roused from it in a moment. He felt heat! In the rush of events he
had not before noticed that his space-suit had started to burn from
the friction of his own passage through the atmosphere. Fortunately,
it was already cooling off.
For in spite of his own leaving speed and the added centrifugal
velocity the asteroid had given him, he had hurtled down after the
doomed rock; and only then was his building repulsion neutralizing
Earth's gravity and his initial Earthward velocity. He had slowed down
just in time to keep his space suit intact.
He came to rest, in relation to the Earth, and hovered there. Again he
scrutinized the black untenanted wastes of space above. Far out,
approaching as rapidly as it dared, was the _Sandra_.
He wanted to be sure, so he cut in his mike and asked Leithgow if they
had, through their electelscope, seen, Ku Sui leave the asteroid.
The anxious scientist told him they had not.
With a slight sigh Hawk Carse snapped off his contact and waited till
the sharp, growing spot that was the _Sandra_ should come dropping
down to pick him up, and his friends learn from his own lips the story
of the passing of Ku Sui....
[Illustration: Advertisement.]
* * * * *
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