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 overgrown 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 Shahrasad.”
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 Shahrasad, 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 Shahrasad 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 tow-ship 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 Shahrasad’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 ab
oard 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 p
aramecia 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.
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