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Title: Saboteur of Space
Author: Robert Abernathy
Release Date: August 21, 2020 [EBook #62997]
Language: English
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Saboteur of Space
By ROBERT ABERNATHY
Fresh power was coming to Earth, energy
which would bring life to a dying planet.
Only two men stood in its way, one a cowardly
rat, the other a murderous martyr; both pawns
in a cosmic game where death moved his chessmen
of fate--and even the winner would lose.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Ryd Randl stood, slouching a little, in the darkened footway, and
watched the sky over Dynamopolis come alive with searchlights. The
shuttered glow of Burshis' Stumble Inn was only a few yards off to his
right, but even that lodestone failed before the novel interest of a
ship about to ground in the one-time Port of Ten Thousand Ships.
Now he made out the flicker of the braking drive a mile or so
overhead, and presently soft motor thunder came down to blanket the
almost lightless city with sound. A beam swayed through the throbbing
darkness, caught the descending ship and held it, a small gleaming
minnow slipping through the dark heavens. A faint glow rose from Pi
Mesa, where the spaceport lay above the city, as a runway lighted
up--draining the last reserves of the city's stored power, but draining
them gladly now that, in those autumn days of the historic year 819,
relief was in sight.
Ryd shrugged limply; the play was meaningless to him. He turned to
shuffle down the inviting ramp into the glowing interior of Burshis'
dive.
The place was crowded with men and smoke. Perhaps half the former were
asleep, on tables or on the floor; but for the few places like Burshis'
which were still open under the power shortage, many would have frozen,
these days, in the chilly nights at fourteen thousand feet. For
Dynamopolis sprawled atop the world, now as in the old days when it had
been built to be the power center of North America.
The rocket blasts crescendoed and died up on Pi Mesa as Ryd wedged
himself with difficulty into the group along the bar. If anyone
recognized him, they showed it only by looking fixedly at something
else. Only Burshis Yuns kept his static smile and nodded with
surprising friendliness at Ryd's pinched, old-young face.
Ryd was startled by the nod. Burshis finished serving another customer
and maneuvered down the stained chrome-and-synthyl bar. Ryd was
heartened.
"Say, Burshis," he started nervously, as the bulky man halted with his
back to him. But Burshis turned, still smiling, shaking his head so
that his jowls quivered.
"No loans," he said flatly. "But just one on the house, Ryd."
The drink almost spilled itself in Ryd's hand. Clutching it
convulsively, he made his eyes narrow and said suspiciously, "What you
setting 'em up for, Burshis? It's the first time since--"
Burshis' smile stayed put. He said affably, "Didn't you hear that ship
that just came down on the Mesa? That was the ship from Mars--the
escort they were sending with the power cylinder. The power's coming
in again." He turned to greet a coin-tapping newcomer, added over his
shoulder: "You know what that means, Ryd. Some life around here again.
Jobs for all the bums in this town--even for you."
He left Ryd frowning, thinking fuzzily. A warming gulp seemed to clear
his head. Jobs. So they thought they could put that over on him again,
huh? Well, he'd show them. He was smart; he was a damn good helio
man--no, that had been ten years ago. But now he was out of the habit
of working, anyway. No job for Ryd Randl. They gave him one once and
then took it away. He drank still more deeply.
The man on Ryd's immediate right leaned toward him. He laid a hand on
his arm, gripping it hard, and said quietly: "So you're Ryd Randl."
* * * * *
Ryd had a bad moment before he saw that the face wasn't that of any
plain-clothes man he knew. For that matter, it didn't belong to anybody
he had ever known--an odd, big-boned face, strikingly ugly, with a
beak-nose that was yet not too large for the hard jaw or too bleak for
the thin mouth below it. An expensive transparent hat slanted over the
face, and from its iridescent shadows gleamed eyes that were alert and
almost frighteningly black. Ryd noted that the man wore a dark-gray
cellotex of a sort rarely seen in joints like Burshis'.
"Suppose we step outside, Ryd. I'd like to talk to you."
"What's the idea?" demanded Ryd, his small store of natural courage
floated to the top by alcohol.
The other seemed to realize that he was getting ahead of himself.
He leaned back slightly, drew a deep breath, and said slowly and
distinctly. "Would you care to make some money, my friend?"
"_Huh?_ Why, yeh--I guess so--"
"Then come with me." The hand still on his arm was insistent. In his
daze, Ryd let himself be drawn away from the bar into the sluggish
crowd; then he suddenly remembered his unfinished drink, and made
frantic gestures. Deliberately misunderstanding, the tall stranger
fumbled briefly, tossed a coin on the counter-top, and hustled Ryd out,
past the blue-and-gold-lit _meloderge_ that was softly pouring out its
endlessly changing music, through the swinging doors into the dark.
Outside, between lightless buildings, the still cold closed in on
them. They kept walking--so fast that Ryd began to lose his breath,
long-accustomed though his lungs were to the high, thin air.
"So you're Ryd Randl," repeated the stranger after a moment's silence.
"I might have known you. But I'd almost given up finding you tonight."
Ryd tried feebly to wrench free, stumbled. "Look," he gasped. "If
you're a cop, say so!"
The other laughed shortly. "No. I'm just a man about to offer you a
chance. For a come-back, Ryd--a chance to live again.... My name--you
can call me Mury."
Ryd was voiceless. Something seemed increasingly ominous about the
tall, spare man at his side. He wished himself back in Burshis' with
his first free drink in a month. The thought of it brought tears to his
eyes.
"How long have you been out of a job, Ryd?"
"Nine ... ten years. Say, what's it to you?"
"And why, Ryd?"
"Why...? Look, mister, I was a helio operator." He hunched his narrow
shoulders and spread his hands in an habitual gesture of defeat. "Damn
good one, too--I was a foreman ten years ago. But I don't have the
physique for Mars--I might just have made it _then_, but I thought the
plant was going to open again and--"
And that was it. The almost airless Martian sky, with its burning
actinic rays, is so favorable for the use of the helio-dynamic engine.
And after the middle of the eighth century, robot labor gave Mars its
full economic independence--and domination. For power is--power; and
there is the Restriction Act to keep men on Earth even if more than two
in ten could live healthily on the outer world.
"Ten years ago," Mury nodded as if satisfied. "That must have been the
Power Company of North America--the main plant by Dynamopolis itself,
that shut down in December, 809. They were the last to close down
outside the military bases in the Kun Lun."
Ryd was pacing beside him now. He felt a queer upsurge of confidence in
this strange man; for too long he had met no sympathy and all too few
men who talked his language. He burst out: "They wouldn't take me, damn
them! Said my record wasn't good enough for them. That is, I didn't
have a drag with any of the Poligerents."
"I know all about your record," said Mury softly.
Ryd's suspicions came back abruptly, and he reverted to his old
kicked-dog manner. "How do you know? And what's it to you?"
* * * * *
All at once, Mury came to a stop, and swung around to face him
squarely, hard eyes compelling. They were on an overpass, not far
from where the vast, almost wholly deserted offices of the Triplanet
Freighting Company sprawled over a square mile of city. A half-smile
twisted Mury's thin lips.
"Don't misunderstand me, Ryd--you mean nothing at all to me as an
individual. But you're one of a vast mass of men for whom I am
working--the billions caught in the net of a corrupt government and
sold as an economic prey to the ruthless masters of Mars. This, after
they've borne all the hardships of a year of embargo, have offered
their hands willingly to the rebuilding of decadent Earth, only to
be refused by the weak leaders who can neither defy the enemy nor
capitulate frankly to him."
Ryd was dazed. His mind had never been constructed to cope with such
ideas and the past few years had not improved its capabilities. "Are
you talking about the power cylinder?" he demanded blurrily.
Mury cast a glance toward the Milky Way as if to descry the Martian
cargo projectile somewhere up among its countless lights. He said
simply, "Yes."
"I don't get it," mumbled Ryd, frowning. He found words that he had
heard somewhere a day or so before, in some bar or flophouse: "The
power cylinder is going to be the salvation of Earth. It's a shot in
the arm--no, right in the heart of Earth industry, here in Dynamopolis.
It will turn the wheels and light the cities and--"
"To hell with that!" snapped Mury, suddenly savage. His hands came up
slightly, the fingers flexing; then dropped back to his sides. "Don't
you know you're repeating damnable lies?"
Ryd could only stare, cringing and bewildered. Mury went on with a
passion shocking after his smooth calm:
"The power shell is aid, yes--but with what a price! It's the thirty
pieces of silver for which the venal fools who rule our nations have
sold the whole planet to Mars. Because they lack the courage and
vision to retool Earth's plants and factories for the inescapable
conflict, they're selling us out--making Earth, the first home of man,
a colony of the Red Planet. Do you know what Earth is to the great
Martian land-owners? _Do you?_" He paused out of breath; then finished
venomously, "Earth is a great pool of labor ready to be tapped, cheaper
than robots--cheap as _slaves_!"
"What about it?" gulped Ryd, drawing away from the fanatic. "What you
want _me_ to do about it?"
Mury took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. His face was
once more bleakly impassive; only the mouth was an ugly line. "We're
going to do something about it, you and I. Tonight. Now."
Ryd was nearly sober. And wholly terrified. He got out chokingly,
"What's that mean?"
"The power shell--isn't coming in as planned."
"You can't do that."
"_We_ can," said Mury with a heavy accent on the first word. "And there
are fifty thousand credits in it for you, Ryd. Are you with us?"
Suspicion was chill reality now in Ryd's mind. And he knew one thing
certainly--if he refused now to accompany Mury, he would be killed, by
this man or another of his kind. For the secret power known only as
_We_ never took chances. Whispered-of, terrible, and world-embracing,
desperate upshot of the times in its principles of dynamitism, war, and
panclasm--that was _We_.
The question hung in the air for a long moment. Then Ryd, with
an effort, said, "Sure." A moment later it struck him that the
monosyllabic assent was suspicious; he added quickly, "I got nothing to
lose, see?" It was, he realized, the cold truth.
"You won't lose," said Mury. He seemed to relax. But the menace with
which he had clothed himself clung, as he turned back on the way they
had come.
Ryd followed dog-like, his feet in their worn shoes moving without his
volition. He was frightened. Out of his very fright came a longing to
placate Mury, assure him that he, Ryd, was on the same side whatever
happened....
After some steps he stole a sidelong glance at his tall companion, and
whined, "Where ... where we going now?"
Mury paused in his long stride, removed a hand from a pocket of the
gray topcoat that wrapped him as in somber thoughts. Wordlessly, he
pointed as Ryd had known he would--toward where a pale man-made dawn
seemed breaking over Pi Mesa.
II
"One blow for freedom!" said Mury with caught breath. His voice fell
upon air scarcely stilled since the sodden thump of the blow that had
killed the guard.
The body lay between them, face down on the graveled way in the inky
moon-shadow. On one side Pi Mesa stretched away two hundred yards to
drop sharply into the night; on the other was the unlighted mass of the
long, continuous, low buildings that housed now unused fuel pumps and
servicing equipment. Looking down at the dead huddle at his feet, a
little stunned by the reality of this, Ryd knew that he was in it now.
He was caught in the machinery.
Mury hefted the length of steel in his hand once more, as if testing
the weight that had crushed a man's skull so easily. Then, with a short
wrist-flip, he sent it flying into the dried weeds which had over-grown
the aero field on the mesa's rim during the summer months after State
order had grounded all fliers in America.
"All right, Ryd," he said coolly. "Trade clothes with this fellow. I've
brought you this far--you're taking me the rest of the way."
The rest of the way.
Ryd was still panting, and his side was paining from the strenuous
exertion of the long climb up the side of the mountain, far from the
guarded highway. His fingers, numbed by the cold of the high, thin air,
shook as he knelt and fumbled with the zippers of the dead guard's
uniform. The belted gun, however, was heavy and oddly comforting as
he clumsily buckled it about his hips. He knew enough of weapons
to recognize this as, not the usual paralyzer, but a flame pistol,
powerful and deadly. He let his hand linger on its butt; then strong
fingers tightened on his bony wrist, and he looked up with a start into
the sardonic black eyes of the Panclast.
"No use now for firearms," said Mury. "All the guns we could carry
wouldn't help us if we were caught out there. That gun is just a
stage property for the little play we're going to give in about three
minutes--when you'll act a guardsman escorting me, a Poligerent of
Dynamopolis, aboard the towship _Shahrazad_."
For a moment Ryd felt relief--he had hazily imagined that Mury's hatred
of Mars and all things Martian might have led him to try to sabotage
the Martian warship which lay somewhere on the runways beyond the long,
low buildings, and which would be closely guarded. But the towship
would also be guarded ... he shivered in the cold, dry night air.
Mury had melted into the shadow a few yards away. There was a light
scraping, then a green flame sputtered, briefly lighting up his hands
and face, and narrowing at once to a thin, singing needle of light.
He had turned a pocket electron torch against the lock-mechanism of a
small, disused metal door.
Ryd watched in painful suspense. There was no sound in his ears save
for the hard, dry shrilling of the ray as it bit into the steel. It
seemed to be crying: _run, run_--but he remembered the power that knew
how to punish better than the law, and stood still, shivering.
The lock gave way and the door slipped aside. A light went on inside,
and Ryd's heart stopped, backfired, and started again, raggedly. The
same automatic mechanism that had turned the lights on had started the
air-fresher, which picked up speed with a soft whine, sweeping out the
long-stale atmosphere. Mury motioned to Ryd to follow him in.
* * * * *
It was still musty in the narrow passage, between the closely-pressing
walls, beneath the great tubes and cable sheathings that fluted the
ceiling overhead. A stairway spiraled up on the right to the control
cupola somewhere overhead; even in the airtight gallery a thin film
of dust lay on every step. Up there were the meters and switches of
the disused terminal facilities of the spaceport; beyond the metal
door marked CAUTION, just beyond the stairwell, lay the long runway
down which the ships of space had glided to be serviced, refueled, and
launched into the sky once more by now dormant machines.
"Wait," said Mury succinctly; he vanished up the spiral stair, his
long legs taking two steps at a time. After an aching minute's silence,
he was back. All was clear as seen from the turret-windows overhead.
They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to
the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many
lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights
shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long
runways--no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis'
glory--stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful
of odd ships--mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had
berthed--huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by
the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.
As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of
protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport.
Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed
buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must
mean safety for them.
And indeed no guard challenged them. There were armed men watching
for all intruders out on the desert beyond the runways, but once
inside, Ryd's borrowed blue seemed to serve as passport enough.
Nonetheless, the passport's knees were shaking when they stood at last,
inconspicuous still, at the shadowed base of the Communications Tower.
Not far off, a half-dozen dignitaries, huddled close together in the
midst of these Cyclopean man-made things that dwarfed their policies,
their principles and ambitions, stood talking rather nervously with two
officers, aristocratically gaudy in the scarlet of the Martian Fleet.
Blue-clad guardsmen of Earth watched from a distance--watched boredly
enough.
And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number
Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive
magnets--the _Shahrazad_, panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of
steam. She was plainly ready to go into space. The bottom dropped out
of Ryd's stomach before he realized that a warning at least must be
sounded before the ship could lift. But that might come any moment now.
"Relax," said Mury in a low voice. "Nothing's gone wrong. We'll be
aboard the _Shahrazad_ when she lifts." For a moment his black eyes
shifted, hardening, toward Runway Four. The Martian warship lay there
beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with
blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters.
It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable; it could not be leaving
again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding
its crew. About it a few figures stood that were stiffly erect and
immobile, as tall as tall men. From head to toe they were scarlet.
"Robots!" gasped Ryd, clutching his companion's arm convulsively.
"Martian soldier robots!"
"They're unarmed, harmless. They aren't your police with built-in
weapons. Only the humans are dangerous. But we've got to move. For
God's sake, take it easy."
Ryd licked dry lips. "Are we going--out into space?"
"Where else?" said Mury.
* * * * *
The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat
had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought
to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed
guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards
from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was--as it came
about--just a little too late.
The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving
pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing
uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle
in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between
the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other
in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the
_Shahrazad's_ airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables
attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety
by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.
The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and
vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the
topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face,
but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.
"Yes?" he inquired frostily.
"What goes on here?" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure
silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. "The crew's signaled all
aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be--"
"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis," interrupted
the tall man with asperity. "The City is naturally interested in the
delivery of the power which will revivify our industries." He paused,
sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. "I
suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?"
The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century
bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod
with an appearance of brusqueness.
Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the
pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive
instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as
he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun
no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent,
pointing at its licensed owner.
"I think," Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the
while his right held the gun steady, "that you'd better come aboard
with us."
The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed
civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the
ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both
hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway--for he was still very
sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.
Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved
wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable
countersunk mirror of metal.
"Cover him, Ryd," ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out
the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously
tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his
fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on
the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.
Nothing happened.
"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!" The outer gangway had slid up,
the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.
* * * * *
Mury smiled with supernal calm. "We won't be here long," he said.
Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: "The central control panel and
the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are
on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the
switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central
control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting."
Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch
he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets.
Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as
he slipped cat-like into the passage.
"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock."
Ryd backed--the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own
nervous gaze--and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal
pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering
somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.
He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning,
back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled
to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a
crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing
lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch
outside.
The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant,
the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a
scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite
lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.
"You damned clumsy little fool--" said Mury with soft intensity. Then,
while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with
blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two
quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the
starboard airlock.
Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash "Ready" to
the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But
the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped
in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in
an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned
guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his
little cell of steel.
"It's been tried before," said one of the masked men. He had a blond,
youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with
an astrogator's triangled stars which made him _ex officio_ the brains
of the vessel. "Stealing a ship--it can't be done any more."
"It's been done again," said Mury grimly. "And you don't know the half
of it. But--you will. I'll need you. As for your friends--" The gun
muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. "Out of
those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock."
He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before
they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from
themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor;
the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting
still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:
"What do you think you're trying to do?"
"What do _you_ think?" demanded Mury in return. "I'm taking the ship
into space. On schedule and on course--to meet the power shell." The
flame gun moved with a jerk. "And as for you--what's your name?"
"Yet Arliess."
"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?"
The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking
goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. "Why, yes," he
said as if in wonder, "I do."
III
_Shahrazad_ drove steadily forward into deep space, vibrating slightly
to the tremendous thrust of her powerful engines. The small, cramped
cabin was stiflingly hot to the three armored men who sat before its
banked dials, watching their steady needles.
Ryd had blacked out, darkness washing into his eyes and consciousness
draining from his head, as the space ship had pitched out into
emptiness over the end of the runway on Pi Mesa and Mury had cut in the
maindrive. Pressure greater than anything he had ever felt had crushed
him; his voice had been snatched from his lips by those terrible forces
and lost beneath the opening thunder of the three-inch tubes. Up and
up, while the acceleration climbed to seven gravities--and Ryd had lost
every sensation, not to regain them until Earth was dropping away under
the towship's keel.
A single gravity held them back and down in the tilted seats, and the
control panels seemed to curve half above them, their banks of lights
confused with the stars coldly through the great nose window. In the
control room all sounds impinged on a background made up of the insect
hum of air-purifiers, the almost supersonic whine of the fast-spinning
gyroscopes somewhere behind them, the deep continuous growl of the
engines.
Mury's voice broke through that steady murmur, coming from Ryd's right.
"You can unfasten your anticlamps, Ryd," he said dryly. "That doesn't
mean you," to the young navigator, on his other hand as he sat in
the pilot's seat with his pressure-clamps thrown back and his gloved
hands free to caress the multiplex controls before him. Clipped to the
sloping dash at his left elbow was a loaded flame gun.
Ryd emerged, with much bungling, from his padded clamps, and shook his
head groggily as he ran a hand through his slightly thinning hair. He
ventured shakily, "Where are we?"
Mury smiled slightly. "Only our astrogator," he indicated Arliess,
still masked and fettered, "can tell you that with precision. I
understand only enough of astrogational practice to make sure that he
is holding to the course outlined on the log. For that matter ... he
is an intelligent young man and if he were not blinded by notions of
duty to an outworn system.... We are now somewhere near the orbit of
the Moon. Isn't that right, Arliess?"
The other did not seem to hear; he sat staring blindly before him
through his goggles at the slowly-changing chart, where cryptic lights
burned, some moving like glowing paramecia along fine-traced luminous
tracks.
Mury too sat silent and immobile for a minute or more. Then, abruptly,
he inclined his universal chair far to the right, and his long frame
seemed to tense oddly. His finger stabbed out one of the sparks of
light.
"What's that, Arliess?"
The astrogator broke his silence. "A ship."
"I know that well enough. What ship?"
"I supposed you had examined the log. It would have told you that
that's the liner _Alborak_, out of Aeropolis with a diplomatic mission
for Mars."
Mury shook his head regretfully. "That won't wash, Arliess. Even if you
suppose her off course, no liner aspace ever carried a tenth of that
drive."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Arliess. But his voice
was raw and unsteady.
"I'm talking about this. That ship is a warship, and it's looking for
us--will intercept us inside of twenty minutes at the most!"
* * * * *
Arliess turned his head at last, slowly, as if the movement were
painful. His dispassionate goggles regarded the telltale needles that
had come quiveringly alive on the radiodetector box between them,
bluntly giving the lie to the automatic chart. "You know more than I
supposed," he said, and laughed unpleasantly. "But it won't do you
any good now. We're to be inspected in space--a surprise of which we
weren't informed until a few minutes before you came sneaking into the
ship."
"That's too bad," said Mury. He sounded as if he thought it was too
bad. As he spoke, he leaned sidewise, to the left this time, and closed
a switch, lighting a darkened panel on the board; his long forefinger
selected and pressed two studs. "_Too bad_," he repeated, and picked
up the flame pistol. Young Arliess exploded in another furious surge
against the binding clamps, clawing with clumsy gloved hands for the
release; then he quieted, and stared at the small black bore trained on
him.
He was trembling a little with fury. "You damned louse. Why don't you
make it a clean job by giving it to me, now?"
"I'll need you, now if not before," said the Panclast softly. "Your
friends would have stayed alive if that warship hadn't showed its nose.
You must understand that. I was forced into counter-measures."
Then Ryd, squirming sidewise in his seat, understood. Those studs
had controlled the outer airlocks. And now the men who had been in
those locks, the young guardsman and the _Shahrazad's_ pilot and
engineer--were no longer there.
"You--need _me_?" Arliess was briefly incredulous. "Oh--I get it. There
have to be three in the crew." Then he sprang like a tiger.
But the moment in which he had thumbed the release and wrenched free of
the padded clamps had been too long. Ryd flinched away--but there was
no roar, no flame stabbed blue. They grappled an instant, swaying on
the tilted floor--and then the pistol, reversed in Mury's hand, chopped
down on Arliess' temple, a glancing blow, but fiercely struck.
The astrogator let go, staggering; and the gun swung up again and
felled him.
Mury let the pistol drop into his own crew-seat, and, lugging Arliess
under the arms, got him into his seat with a grunting heave. He said
breathlessly, regretfully, "It was the only way...." The mask came off
at once; the shock-pale face that emerged was even more youthful than
Ryd had thought. The red trickle across the forehead was startling
against its pallor.
Ryd sat staring--unshaken by the thought of yet another murder, but
with a knot of fear tightening in his stomach as he thought of the
warship somewhere out of their vision, questing nearer with every
racing second--while the motors throbbed, the airvalves sang softly,
and the gyroscopes whined somewhere.
And Mury's long, brown fingers explored rapidly through the stunned
man's blond thatch; he nodded with satisfaction, and then with sure
motions secured Arliess in his place. Ryd, on peremptory gesture, did
for himself the same, with fingers that were oddly numb and jointless.
Then Mury was back in the pilot's chair. For a moment he sat as if
poised, staring into starry space with knitted brows; then he reached
far over, in front of the sagging astrogator, and with a decisive flick
of the wrist switched on the ship's magnets to their full power.
"What's that for?" stammered Ryd, bewildered and more than a little
scared. "Why--"
Mury made no answer. Instead, he had fixed once more on the detector
box, watching it intently as the minutes crawled. The movements by
which he secured his own anticlamps were automatonlike.
* * * * *
Twice the needles jumped briefly. Mury did not stir. But when they
began to swing slowly over the scale, his hands leaped at the control
studs; in the next instant _Shahrazad_ leaped and shivered, and a
powerful acceleration fought to lever them out of their seats. The
noise was deafening; one thin layer of sound proofing was between the
cabin and the one-inch tubes of the overdrive.
Ryd's eyes rolled up in his head and grew filmed; the control room
for him a blur of dizzy flame. He almost blacked out again; he seemed
to see the face of the white Moon, leprously diseased, float like a
runaway balloon past the curved nose window and disappear below his
topsy-turvy field of vision; but he couldn't be sure it wasn't his own
head spiraling away from its moorings. And then it was over and the
ship bored steadily along her new tangent through space.
But now she vibrated yet more deeply to the great thrust of the
afterdrive, and the light blurred more and grew dim. _Shahrazad_ raced
into darkness, and the needles that told of a magnetic mass somewhere
not far ahead, cutting swiftly through her far-flung field, swung
steadily over.
Then _bang!_ in one unreverberating explosion, and the ship bucked
hard and the blurred lights came down in a rain of fiery pinwheels.
The motor died with a snap. Silence rang and Ryd's stomach boiled with
weightlessness; slowly his eyes could see again. _Shahrazad_ held
straight on her course toward some unknown target star; the gyroscopes
still whined.
"Seven thousand feet a second," came Mury's voice from nowhere. "That's
the speed at which we overran the meteoroid. It wouldn't have been nice
if it had come through here; the armor before the control panel would
have stopped it if it didn't strike higher...."
Ryd fell to shuddering. He mouthed with difficulty, "My God, you don't
hit meteors on purpose!"
"You damned well do," said Mury crisply, "if you have to." His manner
brought a sort of frightened admiration into Ryd's dark, unsteady eyes.
Mury added, with apparent lack of connectedness, "Astrogators' heads
don't just crack themselves on switch handles." The underdrive, roaring
alive as he pressed the bottom stud on the control circle, caught Ryd's
breath against his diaphragm and left him none to answer with if he had
wished to.
She leveled out on course with short jerky bursts from the various
banks of tubes. Mury was doing all his own course-plotting now, and his
teeth were sunk in his lower lip as he frowned at the charts and at the
rows of figures that spun into view on the calculator. He was still
correcting feverishly when the stars dimmed and space throbbed like a
tympanum.
A voice clanged through the strobophones. "_Shahrazad! Algol_ calling
_Shahrazad_! Cut your drive to one vertical gravity. We will parallel
and send a boat across. That is all."
Mury's right hand moved slightly on the sloping ledge and closed the
throttle. The forward thrust again collapsed into weightlessness, and
the _Shahrazad_ seemed to hang motionless for a moment before the
underdrive took up the load. And meanwhile the meters told their tale
of the swift onrush of the great battle cruiser in whose forward sphere
of exhaust gases they already flew. Across the starry sky ahead crept a
vast belt of hazy light like a zodiacal glow.
"The _Algol_," said Mury musingly. "A stellar dreadnaught. They aren't
sparing precautions...." Abruptly he dropped his right hand from
the dashboard, grasped a sheathed wire that curved away beneath the
radiodetector box, and detached it with a brisk jerk. The needles
dropped instantly to a uniform zero. The chain of causation was
complete.
* * * * *
So there was no warning of the approach of the spaceboat. It bumped
alongside and grappled to the towship's starboard airlock a couple of
minutes later; Ryd stiffened, drew a long breath, and held it as if
he would hold it forever. Mury, hand steady, depressed the studs that
opened the lock ... for the second time since the ship had lifted.
The man who came aboard, from the warship hanging somewhere out there
among the stars, was the very avatar of the Fleet in that second decade
of the ninth century. Incarnate in space-blue and silver stars, with
smoothly smiling face, shaven with a more than military meticulousness,
that radiated power and the confidence of power. Power flanked and
overshadowed his medium-tall figure, in the shape of two armed robot
marines. The eyes of the Panclast masked their smoldering lights as
they met those beneath the winged officer's cap; but the latter,
aristocratically bored, noticed little or nothing.
"You appear to have had an accident, Captain Yaher," said the
lieutenant with unblinking calm. "We noticed from a distance that your
undershell was badly scored as if by collision with some solid body.
Unfortunately ... and remarkably. Is any of your equipment out of
order?"
Mury shrugged without effort, jerked a gloved thumb at the dangling
wire. The lieutenant raised narrow eyebrows.
"Damaged before you lifted?"
"We were inspected thoroughly on the runway. It must have happened
during initial acceleration."
The other frowned, fine vertical lines creasing his smooth forehead.
"Odd."
Mury smiled a thin, crooked smile. "You military men don't know what
can happen aboard a run-down towship. Anything, literally. The merchant
fleet isn't at its best since the embargo."
"I know," said the officer curtly. "Even in the Fleet--" He stopped
short, and his eyes, shifting, found a new subject ready-made in the
slumped figure of Arliess. "Was this man seriously injured, Captain?"
"Just stunned, I think. He's an astrogator, and astrogators are tough."
* * * * *
The officer laughed perfunctorily. He moved forward and made a brief,
distasteful examination of Arliess' tousled head, then stepped back,
rubbing his fingers together.
"There's no fracture. But if he's concussed, he's in no shape to stand
heavy acceleration."
Mury said smoothly, "We're not going to be using any. We're up to speed
and our orders are to handle that power cylinder like a soap bubble."
The young lieutenant stroked his smooth chin, standing with feet
braced against the tilt of the floor beneath which the rockets rumbled
steadily, holding him erect as if under Earth gravity. The two men at
the control board watched him with stares equally unblinkingly but far
different in sentiment. Mury's was inscrutable; it might have veiled
anything. Ryd's was all sick fear and certainty that something would
betray them before the nerve-racking scene was played out.
"I think," said the blue-clad officer, "that if it won't incommode you
too much to hold this acceleration a bit longer--"
"Not at all," said Mury, and Ryd silently but no less hysterically
cursed his facile confidence.
"... I'll cross over again and send a ship's doctor to attend to your
astrogator. A shot in the arm should bring him around."
Mury nodded placidly. The officer turned casually, spoke to the two
blue-chromiumed robots, who faced about smartly; then, snapping his
fingers, their master wheeled once more. "Just a moment. I almost
forgot this.... Strangely enough, one of my men stumbled over it in
your starboard lock." He fumbled inside his tunic a moment, displayed
in his hand a heavy .20 service flame gun.
A flat and terrible silence lay in the control room. Then Mury broke
it, as it had to be broken quickly:
"We weren't supposed to have any arms aboard. I can't say where that
came from."
"Can't say, eh?" said the other musingly. Ryd, cold sweat on his
forehead, stared in horrid fascination, first at the man and then at
the fighter robots. He tensed himself to fight back, now, at the last,
like a cornered rat--he hardly knew how or why.
With a shrug, the officer dropped the weapon into his pocket. "Ah,
well--so many of these little mysteries remain just that. We mustn't
hold up Terra's power supply." He turned once more to go. "I'll have
the medico here in a flicker."
The trio passed out through the whispering locks, out to the waiting
spaceboat. Ryd found that his mouth was parchment-dry; he stared at the
apparently unshaken Mury, and drew a shuddering breath.
"I guess," he said jerkily, "we fooled them."
Mury smiled. "Yes," he agreed. "We fooled them this time."
Then a thought jolted Ryd; he gasped, "Listen! Did you think
about--That battleship might have picked up those guys you dropped
out of the locks! They've got us right here--we can't get away--maybe
they're just--"
"Why would they?" Mury shrugged again. "But that chance had to be
taken. Space is rather big, you know."
IV
It was not more than three minutes later that young Arliess began
to twitch and mutter under the neuromuscular impact of a cc. of
arterially-injected _vitalin_. The Fleet doctor straightened and
returned his small, bright needle to its velvet-lined case, snapping it
shut hurriedly.
"He'll recover consciousness within a very few minutes. You'll be
wanting to be on your way, no doubt...."
When the doctor had escaped gratefully from the _Shahrazad's_
topsy-turvy gravity, Mury gave power to the overdrive, sent the ship
swinging back into a course for the point of intersection with the
flight of the power projectile. The great curve that had taken them
off the planet had placed them now almost directly in front of that
hurtling objective; _Shahrazad_, still slowly gathering additional
momentum, would be overtaken by the cargo shell at the moment that she
reached a velocity practically equal with its own.
To ensure that, Mury's long, skillful fingers twirled a vernier,
finely adjusting the fuel flow into the disintegration chambers behind
the after bulkhead, and with it the volume of steam which, smashed
to atoms, was hurled at stupendous velocity from the driving jets
to propel the rocket ship. An acceleration just a trifle under one
gravity--the calculator clicked out its results down to six decimals.
The gyroscopes locked the towship in its new groove in space.
Yet Arliess jerked ineffectually in his clamps, cried out thickly. His
eyes came stickily open behind their square goggles. He sat stiff and
still for a long minute.
Ryd underwent a considerable egoflation in his contempt for this other
man's defeat. It had been long since he had known the savage joy of
winning.
Arliess said weakly, raising both hands to press flat against his
temples, "Where--are we?" The same words Ryd had whimpered not so long
ago.
Mury turned slightly to look at the astrogator out of the corners
of his eyes. He said deliberately, "We're past. Inspection's over,
and--thanks largely to you, Yet Arliess, we're clear."
The young man sat for a moment with head buried in his hands. Then he
looked up and out toward the motionless star fields that glittered
ahead.
"So?" he said bitterly. "What next? Are you going to try to steal the
power shell? And if so, where are you going to escape to? I suppose
you realize that you'd have to scoot right out of the System to even
get clear of the _Algol's_ guns--and there are four other Earth
dreadnaughts in planetary space alone?"
Arliess' words, coldly confident of a victory that would be death for
him, chilled Ryd. But he took heart from Mury's jeering laughter.
"Do you think I'd have come this far if I had feared your dreadnaughts?
_They'll_ have enough to think of before the next twenty-four hours are
past, when they are hurled in battle against all the power of Mars!"
Arliess stiffened. "Are you crazy? There's no war in the air. A
year ago, yes, perhaps--but now, with the treaties signed and trade
resuming--"
"And Earth," snapped Mury, "sold for that very trade into the hands of
the Martian overlords. No, war is preferable--and we'll have war, now."
"You talk," said Arliess in a curiously flat voice, "as if the choice
of courses rested in your hands."
"It does. Or rather, it will--so soon as I hold in these hands the
weapon of the power projectile."
* * * * *
Mury's voice became orotund. His hands rested lightly on the pilot's
controls before him and he gazed into space-darkness as if toward an
invisible dawn. "When a Terrestial city goes skyward in one terrific
blast of disintegration--When Pi Mesa and Dynamopolis vanish together
from the face of Earth in a warningless holocaust--Then Earth will
realize the truth, if only through deception."
Ryd's veins were trickling ice water instead of warm blood, and his
nerve centers were paralyzed. It was too big for him, and his courage
was gone again.
Mury talked on, and his voice was that of one sincerely and earnestly
trying to convince:
"Earth's government has made peace with the Martians, but the instinct
of the people infallibly distrusts the treacherous rival world. Why
not--since Mars is indeed ready and avid to topple Earth from her old
place as the mother-planet, mistress of the System? Mars, with twice
Earth's area and five times the sunlight to drive his heliodynes--Mars
with his robot millions and his human oligarchy athirst for power and
glory, intoxicated with the strength of a new, raw, rich world. Only if
we fight now can we escape domination. I am going to strike the blow
that will wake Earth to battle, and bring her at last through pain and
repentance to her age-old greatness!"
_Shahrazad_ hurtled steadily on before the long hydrogen flares of her
afterdrive, and three men sat behind her controls--and their triumph
and fear and hate might have been strong enough to reach out beyond the
metal shell and form an auro, not so bright but more fiercely potent,
about the rushing ship.
Then young Arliess said through his teeth, "You know damn well it won't
work."
"It will," said the Panclast, preternaturally calm, while his eyes
were watchful on the slowly shifting dials. Somewhere behind them in
bleak space sixty tons of concentrated hell was creeping up.
"You can't deceive a whole planet," exclaimed Arliess rapidly,
desperately. "You can't plunge them into a war that will cost a hundred
million lives, that will wreck the cities and the commerce of the whole
System. There hasn't been war for seventy years ... between Earth and
Mars, never...." His voice trailed off and he gasped for breath as if
the cabin had grown stifling.
"It is almost done," said Mury solemnly. With the words he cut off the
afterdrive. Silence fell clublike, mind-numbing after the pounding of
the rockets.
Arliess spoke again, with all the feeling washed out of his voice.
"Where do you and your pal come out on this?" he demanded carefully.
"You don't think you can get away with this, do you, even if you
succeed in blowing up Dynamopolis?"
"There are some things I can't reveal even now, slight as are the
chances of failure," said Mury smoothly. "We won't be caught, though; I
can tell you that surely. And you'll accompany us to our destination.
It would be best if you did so willingly." Ryd thought he knew what
was implicit in the Panclast's words. There would be some hiding-place
maintained by the secret power of We. In Antarctica, perhaps, as rumor
whispered. Ryd clung hard to his new faith in Mury, and was warmed by
it. He dreamed.... Perhaps, he, Ryd, in some new world to come from
chaos....
* * * * *
Mury thumbed a stud; the sidethrust of the starboard drive made the
counterpoised seats tilt far to the left. Then, as they drifted in free
flight again: "Perhaps, since you have heard the truth, Arliess, you
would like to join our cause. Secret now, it will soon be victorious
over all Earth ... a cause of glory which will have its heroes...."
The astrogator gazed stonily ahead. "You may be right," he said
stiffly, strangely. "But right on wrong, you're mad. Mad with power."
The other laughed softly. "That's very true. It is a little heady. The
power that will rock any planet--power indeed!"
All at once the stars were darkened. From overhead as the ship was
oriented, a long black shape, picked out by patterned lights, drove
past and dwindled into the flaming constellations. The power shell had
arrived. Words were at an end.
Instead, there roared out the mighty voices of the after tubes. The
sustained forward leap of the ship took breath from their bodies. But
the colored lights came slipping back out of the starfields, their
pattern expanding swiftly as seconds passed. As suddenly as he had
accelerated, Mury closed the throttle, cut in the foredrive, and
started braking his speed. Then, with delicate spurts of power from all
the rockets, he brought the _Shahrazad's_ speed and course to parallel
that of the great projectile which coasted effortlessly through space
less than a mile away.
In the weightless pause, Mury said quietly to the astrogator: "The
magnet controls are before you, Arliess. Would it be too much strain on
your conscience to operate them now?"
The board had been built for efficiency; of the minor duties aboard
the vessel, communications was assigned to the engineer, control of
the powerful grapples to the astrogator, on the theory that while
intership communication might be needed simultaneously with the use
of the magnets, the plotting of the course would not so coincide.
The strobophones and radio--the latter dead and lightless at the
moment--fronted Ryd as he fidgeted in the engineer's place.
Arliess had delayed a moment. Now he answered harshly, "All right. What
do you want?"
"I was sure you would see.... Your cooperation won't be difficult.
The magnet rheostat is already stopped at the safety maximum for the
fuel we're going to handle. Give them all full power, then." Ryd
knew vaguely that too powerful magnetic fields upset delicate atomic
balances, had in fact caused the great Tenebris disaster of 803 on
Venus--a match-sputter, that, compared to what would soon hit North
America--
Woodenly, Arliess gave the magnets power. Unseen, his hands curled
themselves tensely inside his sweat-slippery rubberized gloves; he was
dangerously near hysteria. His keen, youthful imagination could see
all too clearly into the near future. Over half of Earth, the skies
would be red; there would be storm and earthquake, mountains splitting,
rivers in flood, the fires of new volcanoes.
_Shahrazad_ picked up speed again, swinging in to intercept the power
cylinder in its constant flight. She forged forward on bright wings of
flame, a small, squat ship of Fate, not a part but a target. [1]rest on
her broad plated back.
"Half magnets," said Mury shortly, firing another bank of tubes to
correct his course. Still robot-like, Arliess obeyed. His right hand
obeyed. But his left snaked very slowly off the dash, under the
detector box at his elbow, captured a dangling wire. Then--bend this
way, bend that way, bend this way--
The last power-thrust died. Inch by inch, _Shahrazad_ and the fuel
shell drifted together in their parallel courses. "Full magnets,"
ordered Mury, and the drift accelerated. For two long, waiting minutes
it continued; then the towship lurched slightly, like a boat meeting
a long swell, and the great masses met with a prolonged grinding
of curving steel on stegosauric plates of iron. A moment while
they settled solidly together and clung, locked; then the rockets
roared once more to life and _Shahrazad_ surged ahead evenly. To the
greatly-overpowered towship, the mere sixty tons of the loaded cargo
shell made little or no difference.
Mury sat bolt upright in his universal chair. His face was masked and
serene, but the straight line of his head and neck was eloquent. His
hand, resting lightly on the controls, was that of Zeus, gripping a
thunderbolt.
Slowly, without speaking, he drove the ship's nose upward--upward as
they were leveled off, but in reality downward, for gradually from
overhead the great black curve of a planet's dark limb crept down,
shutting out the stars. Then its sunlit side burst into sight and the
pallid glare came flooding through the great nose window to make the
glow-lamps needless.
It was Earth, and somewhere on that great globe, where the distorted
shape of North America sprawled through half a dark hemisphere, was Pi
Mesa. For this ship of Fate, not a port but a grim target.
Then Yet Arliess' voice fell hard and deadly on that triumphant moment.
"Mury. Cut the drive!"
Mury's attention snapped to the astrogator. Even so with the back of
his head to Ryd, the latter could see the slow tensing of his spare
body, the sudden immobility that took him. Ryd froze.
"You'd better think twice, Arliess," said Mury in a low, brittle tone.
"Cut the drive," ordered Arliess again. "This is journey's end, Mury.
If you don't cut it now, we'll all die."
* * * * *
Ryd inched forward in his seat; his fingers, numbed as if the cold
of sheer space had crept into the cabin, found the release. Then he
was able to see Arliess, hunched forward close to his control board.
One hand clenched over the magnet rheostat; but something had gone
wrong. The astrogator had bent the synthyl handle out and away from
its contacts; and now something gleamed half-hidden in his hand. Its
ends were almost touching the inner contact of the switch handle and
the minimum-resistance tap of the rheostat coil--a short piece of bared
silver wire, whose placing between those contacts would send current
leaping through the shortened circuit and pouring full into the magnet
coils. It would envelop _Shahrazad_ and power cylinder in a field of
great intensity--but of brief duration, a fractional instant before the
equilibrium of the stored atoms toppled and towship and cargo shell,
together like one, vanished in one exploding flame, brighter than the
Sun.
This was the end. Mury was beaten, and of course he, Ryd, was beaten
too. For keeps, this time. With maudlin self-pity, he saw himself as
one caught and singled out for destruction by the gods in the machine.
"Cut the drive," repeated Arliess for the third time.
Still the Panclast did not move, and his face betrayed none of what
he must feel of the terrible irony by which a bit of wire, a short
circuit, could wreck the plan that was to have shaken a planet. He said
without stirring, "You can't use bluff on me, Arliess."
"I know that and I'm not bluffing," said young Arliess, pale to the
lips, with burning eyes. "I know your type, Mury. The monomaniac.
You're not afraid of dying, but you are afraid when the success of your
mission is threatened. But you can forget those plans now. We're going
to stop, flash a distress signal."
"I never meant we should escape the final crash of the power shell,"
said Mury. "Escape was needless to the plan, and to die in such a
cause.... But I'll make you a bargain now, Arliess. I'll let you
parachute to safety when we're in the atmosphere, if you'll swear to
reveal nothing. Otherwise--perhaps you are aware of the power of--_We_."
Arliess' grin was savage. "Don't try to frighten me with children's
boogie-men. I know that such an organization exists, and I knew one
of their members once--a poor, starved gutter-rat without principles
or courage or anything but a vicious wish to kick the world that had
kicked him. No, Mury, _you're_ something else again."
"I've explained my aims to you, Arliess. I have no private wrongs to
avenge. I have acted because all history urges Earth and Mars to the
death grapple; I have been an agent of history. You, not I, are the
madman if you try to stand in the way."
Arliess laughed shortly. "I hold the final argument, though.... _Cut
the drive!_"
V
For a moment their eyes met. Mury, all his weapons blunted, sat
unmoving. Ryd, forehead beaded, gripping the arms of his chair, afraid
to move or cry out lest he bring doom upon the ship, thought he saw
Arliess' fingers start to tighten.
But in that instant a voice crashed into the death-still cabin. Harsh
and vibrant, it rang through the open strobophones.
"_Shahrazad! Algol_ calling _Shahrazad_! You are twenty-one degrees off
course and failing to correct as per schedule. What is the matter?"
"All right," said Arliess, his voice husky. "Last chance, Mury, before
I blow us to atoms. Call them back. Tell them to overhaul us and board.
From the intensity of that signal, they can't be far away."
And indeed, even now the stars began to blur to the approach of the
battle cruiser. Plainly, it had been trailing near; the dead detectors
had told them nothing. Perhaps, after all, suspicion had been born
behind the official calm facade. At any rate, here upon them were
_Algol_ and its guns.... Again the voice came through the phones,
querulously now.
Mury, without making any sudden motion, pressed his release. With equal
care he came to his feet, standing without effort against a little more
than one gravity.
"The message sent," he said coolly, "will be 'Temporarily electrical
failure. All under control.'" With that he knelt down in the narrow
space between the crew-chairs and the instrument board.
"If that fool tries to jump me, Ryd, use the gun." His hands started
to grope at the under panels of the control board, purposefully but
without haste. "I'm going to disconnect the central fuse."
"You'll never touch it," said Arliess with a gasp. "I'm shorting the
coil--_now!_"
Ryd had, in a dazed automatism, lifted the gun. It was heavy and
unsteady in his gloved right hand. He stared with eyes out of focus and
with a sense of nightmare; death was coming and he wanted to live, had
to stop it somehow, anyhow, _now_--
Then all at once the gun steadied in his hand, burned hot as it spat
its crisping thunderbolt. The cabin shook to the blast.
And the weapon slipped from Ryd's hand. He drew in air, sharp with
ozone, in short sobbing gasps, and cowered in his padded seat, shaking
uncontrollably. But he was alive, still alive.
Arliess crouched half in and half out of his seat. He brought up the
pistol which he had snatched almost as it fell, trained it across the
motionless bundle between them on the floor. Mury was dead, as dead as
many another dreamer whose human tools have turned in his hands.
The astrogator snapped, "Take the strobophone sender and call _Algol_.
Tell them--tell them--"
"He'd have killed us all," gasped Ryd, cringing.
He choked off as the astrogator lashed out open-handed, knocking him to
the floor. The young man stood for a moment gazing down on him, hands
clenched at his sides; then--
"You rat!" he snarled. "You filthy little _rat_!"
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: Transcriber's Note: Missing text due to printer's error.]
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