by Andre Norton
He’d lived with normal fear for years—that was another thing; but only once before had he known a sensation comparable to this awareness of swirling, white-hot pools of unholy terror—held back from his mind now by the thinnest of brittle crusts! That had been long ago, in Lab-controlled training tests.
He knew better, however, than to try to probe into that sort of phenomenon just now! If he did, the probability was that it would spill full over him at about the moment he was getting his attack under way—which would be, rather definitely, fatal!
But there were other methods of emotional control, simple but generally effective, which might help steady him over the seconds remaining:
There was, for example, the undeniably satisfying reflection that not only had the major disaster of a Ceetal-dominated galaxy been practically averted almost as soon as it was recognized, but that in the same operation—a bonus from Lady Luck!—the long, long hunt for one of civilization’s most ruthless enemies was coming to an unexpectedly sudden end! Like the avenging power of Vega personified was the deadly machine behind him, guided by a mind which was both more and less than his own, as it traced its graceful geometrical paths about the doomed yacht. Each completed circle would presently indicate that exactly one more minute had passed of the twenty which were the utmost remaining of U-1’s life.
Just as undeniable, of course, was the probability that Pagadan’s lease on life would come to an end even sooner than that—if she still lived!
But there wasn’t much he could do about it. If he waited for the Vegan destroyers to arrive, the Lannai would have no chance at all. No normal being could survive another six hours under the kind of deliberately measured mental pressure U-1 would be exerting on her now to drain every possible scrap of information through her disintegrating protective patterns.
By acting as he was, he was giving her the best chance she could get after he had sent her in to spring the trap about U-1 on Gull. In the circumstances, that, too, had been unavoidable. Ironically, the only alternative to killing U-1 outright, as she no doubt had tried to do, was to blunder into one of the situational traps indicated by Correlation, and so restore that grim spacer to his own savage personality—which could then be counted on to cope with any Ceetal attempt to subordinate him once more to their purposes!
Waiting the few hours until he could get there to do the job himself might have made the difference between the survival or collapse of civilization not many decades away! If he had hesitated, the Department would have sent the Interstellar operative in, as a matter of course—officially, and at the risk of compromising the whole Lannai alliance as a consequence.
No, there hadn’t been any real choice—the black thoughts rushed on—but just the same it was almost a relief to turn from that fact to the other one that his own chances of survival, just now, were practically as bad! Actually, there was no particular novelty in knowing he was outmatched. Only by being careful to remain the aggressor always, consciously and in fact, by selecting time and place and method of attack, was he able regularly to meet the superiority of the monstrous mentalities that were an Agent’s most specific game! And back of him had been always the matchless resources of the Confederacy, to be drawn on as and when he needed them.
Now that familiar situational pattern was almost completely reversed. U-1, doomed himself as surely as human efforts could doom him, had still been able to determine the form of the preliminary attack and force his enemy to adopt it!
So, as usual, the encounter would develop by plan, but the plan would not be Iliff’s! His, for once, was to be the other role, that of the blundering, bewildered quarry, tricked into assault, then rushed through it to be struck down at the instant most favorable to the hunter.
Almost frantically, he tore his mind back from the trap! But it was just a little late—the swirling terror had touched him, briefly, and he knew his chances of success were down by that further unnecessary fraction.
Then the two-hundred-foot fire-studded bulk of the yacht came flashing toward him, blotting out space; and as he braked his jets for the approach he had time to remind himself that the quarry’s rush did, after all, sometimes carry it through to the hunter! And that, in any event, he’d thought it all out and decided he still disliked an unfinished job—and that he had liked Pagadan.
Swinging himself up to the yacht’s forward space lock, every weapon at the ready, he caught the robot’s brief thought:
“He’s waiting for you! All locks have been released from inside!” Iliff’s “Hm-m-m!” was a preoccupied salute to his opponent’s logic. The lock had swung gently open before him—there was, of course, no point in attempting to hold it closed against a more powerful ship’s sucking tractors; it would, simply, have been destroyed. Gingerly, he floated up to and through the opening, rather like a small balloon of greenish steel-alloy in his bulky armor.
No force-field gripped at his defenses, no devastating bolts of radiant energy crashed at him from the inner walls. That spectral, abnormal terror of a moment ago became a dim sensation which stirred somewhere far down in his mind—and was gone!
He was on the job.
He drove through the inner transmitter, and felt the telepathic barrier that had blanked out the yacht dissolve and reform again behind him. In that instant, he dropped his shields and sent his mind racing full-open through the ship’s interior.
There was the briefest of flickering, distorted thought-images from Pagadan. No message, no awareness of his presence—only the unconscious revelation of mind, still alive but strained to the utmost, already marked by the incoherence of ultimate exhaustion! As he sensed it, it vanished. Something had driven smoothly, powerfully, and impenetrably between—something that covered the Lannai’s mind like a smothering fog.
Iliff’s shields went up just in time. Then he himself was swaying, physically, under as stunning a mental attack as he had ever sustained.
Like the edge of a heavy knife, the impalpable but destructive force sheared at him—slashed once, twice, and was flicked away before he could grip it, leaving his vision momentarily blurred, his nerve-centers writhing.
A wash of corrosive atomic fire splashed blindingly off the front of his armor as he appeared in the control-room door—through it twin narrow-beam tractor rays came ramming in reversed, brain-jarring thrusts at his face-piece. He drove quickly into the room and let the tractors slam him back against the wall. They could not harm him. They were meant to startle and confuse, to destroy calculation before the critical assault.
The fire was different. For perhaps a minute, his armor could continue to absorb it, but no longer. He was being hurried into the attack from every side. There had been no serious attempt to keep him from getting to the control room—he was meant to come to it.
He saw Pagadan first then, as he was meant to see her. Halfway down the narrow room, she sat facing him, only a few feet from the raised control platform against the wall, across which the projector fire came flashing in bluish twelve-inch jets. She was in an ordinary spacesuit—no armor. She sat rigid and motionless, blocking his advance down that side of the room because the suit she wore would have burst into incandescence at the first splash of the hellish energies pouring dangerously past her.
U-1 made the point obvious—since he was here to get his ally out of the trap, he could not kill her.
He accepted the logic of that by flicking himself farther along the opposite wall, drawing the fire behind him. As he did so, something like a giant beetle shifted position beyond the massive steel desk on the control platform and dipped from sight again, and he knew then that U-1 was in armor almost as massive as his own—armor that had been a part of Pagadan’s Interstellar equipment. To the end, that was the only glimpse he had of the spacer.
There remained then only the obvious frontal attack with mind-shields locked—across the platform to bring his own powerful projectors to bear directly on his opponent’s armor!
If he could do that, he would very l
ikely win almost instantly, and without injuring Pagadan. Therefore, whatever was to happen to him would happen in the instant of time he was crossing the room to reach the spacer.
And his gamble must be that his armor would carry him through it.
Some eight seconds had passed since he entered the room. A stubby tentacle on the front of his chest armor now raised a shielded projectile gun and sprayed the top of the desk beyond which U-1 crouched with a mushrooming, adhesive blanket of incendiaries. The tractor rays, their controls smothered in that liquid flaring, ceased to be a distraction; and Iliff launched himself.
The furious glare of U-1’s projectors winked out abruptly.
The force that slammed Iliff down on the surface of the platform was literally bone-shattering.
For an endless, agonizing instant of time he was in the grip of the giant power that seemed to be wrenching him down into the solid hull of the ship. Then, suddenly released, he was off the edge of the platform and on the floor beside it. Momentarily, at least, it took him out of the spacer’s line of fire.
But that was about all. He felt bones in his shattered right arm grinding on each other like jagged pebbles as he tried to reach for the studs that would drive him upward again. Throughout his body, torn muscles and crushed nerve-fibers were straining to the dictates of a brain long used to interpret physical pain as a danger signal only; but to activate any of the instruments of the miniature floating tank that incased him was utterly impossible.
He was doubly imprisoned then—in that two-and-a-half-ton coffin, and in ruined flesh that jerked aimlessly in animal agonies or had gone flaccid and unfeeling. But his brain, under its multiple separate protective devices, retained partial control; while the mind that was himself was still taut as a coiled snake, bleakly unaffected by the physical disaster.
He knew well enough what had happened! In one titanic jolt, the control platform’s gravity field had received the full flow of the projector’s energies. It had burned out almost instantaneously under that incalculable overload—but not quite fast enough to save him.
And now U-1’s mind came driving in, probing for the extent of his enemy’s helplessness, then coldly eager for the kill. At contact range, it would be only a matter of seconds to burn through that massive but no longer dangerous armor and blast out the life that lingered within!
Dimly, Iliff felt him rise and start forward. He felt the probing thoughts flick about him again, cautious still, and then the mind-shields relaxing and opening out triumphantly as the spacer approached. He dropped his own shields, and struck!
Never before had he dared risk the sustained concentration of destructive energy he hurled into U-1’s mind—for, in its way, it was an overload as unstable as that which had wrecked the gravity field! Instantly, the flaring lights before his face-piece spun into blackness. The hot taste of gushing blood in his mouth, the last sensation of straining lungs and pain-racked twitching nerves vanished together. Blocked suddenly and completely from every outward awareness, he had become a bodiless force bulleting with deadly resolution upon another.
The attack must have shaken even U-1’s battle-hardened soul to its core. Physically, it stopped him in mid-stride, held him rigid and immobilized with nearly the effect of a paralysis gun. But after the first near-fatal moment of shock, while he attempted automatically and unsuccessfully to restore his shields before that rush of destruction, he was fighting back—and not with a similar suicidal fury but with a grim cold weight of vast mental power which yielded further ground only slowly if at all.
With that, the struggle became so nearly a stalemate that it still meant certain victory for the spacer. Both knew the last trace of physical life would drain out of Iliff in minutes, though perhaps only Iliff realized that his mind must destroy itself even more swiftly.
Something tore through his consciousness then like jagged bolts of lightning. He thought it was death. But it came again and again—until a slow, tremendous surprise welled up in him:
It was the other mind which was being torn! Dissolving now, crumbling into flashing thought-convulsions like tortured shrieks, though it still struggled on against him—and against something else, something which was by then completely beyond Iliff’s comprehension.
The surprise dimmed out, together with his last awareness of himself—still driving relentlessly in upon a hated foe who would not die.
The voice paused briefly, then added: “Get that part to Lab. They’ll be happy to know they hit it pretty close, for once.”
It stopped again. After a moment the bright-looking young man in the Jeltad Headquarters office inquired, not too deferentially:
“Is there anything else, sir?”
He’d glanced up curiously once or twice at the vision tank of the extreme-range communicator before him, while he deftly distributed Iliff’s after-mission report through the multiple-recorders. However, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a Zone Agent check in from the Emergency Treatment Chamber of his ship, completely inclosed in a block of semisolid protective gel, through which he was being molded, rayed, dosed, drenched, shocked, nourished and psychoed back to health and sanity.
With the irreverence of youth, the headquarters man considered
that these near-legendary heroes of the Department bore on such occasions, when their robots even took care of heartbeat and breathing for them, a striking resemblance to damaged and bad-tempered embryos. He hoped suddenly no one happened to be reading his mind.
“Connect me,” Iliff’s voice said, though the lips of the figure in the vision tank did not move, “with Three for a personal report.”
“I’ve been listening,” came the deep, pleasantly modulated reply from an invisible source. “Switch off, Lallebeth—you’ve got all you need. All clear now, Iliff—and once more, congratulations!” And the picture of the tall, gray-haired, lean-faced man, who was the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan Confederacy, grew slowly through the telepath-transmitter into the mind of the small, wiry shape—half restored and covered with irregular patches of new pink skin—in the ship’s Emergency Treatment Chamber.
“Back in the tank again, eh?” the Co-ordinator observed critically. “For the second day after a mission, you don’t look too bad!” He paused, considering Iliff closely. “Gravity?” he inquired, “Gravity!” admitted the embryo.
“That will mess a fellow up!” The Co-ordinator was nodding sympathetically, but it seemed to Iliff that his superior’s mind was on other matters, and more pleasing ones.
“Lab’s just going to have to design me a suit,” Three ran on with his usual chattiness, “which will be nonreactive to any type of syntheti-gravs, including tractors! Theoretically impossible, they say, of course! But I’m sure the right approach—”
He interrupted himself:
“I imagine you’ll want to know what happened after she got you back to your ship and contacted the destroyers?”
“She left word she was going to get in touch with you on her way back to Jeltad,” Iliff said.
“Well, she did that. A remarkably energetic sort of person in a quiet way, Iliff! Fully aware, too, as I discovered, of the political possibilities in the situation! I persuaded her, of course, to take official credit for the death of U-1, and the termination of that part of the Ceetal menace—and, incidentally, for saving the life of one of our Department Agents.”
“That wasn’t so incidental,” Iliff remarked.
“Only in comparison with the other, of course. She really did it then?”
“Oh, she did it all right! I was on my way out fast when she burned him down. Must have been a bad shock to U-1. I understand he hadn’t released her mind for more than three or four seconds before she was reaching for his projector.”
The Co-ordinator nodded. “The mental resiliency of these highly developed telepathic races must be really extraordinary! Any human being would have remained paralyzed for minutes after such pressures—perhaps for hours! Well, he wasn’t omniscient, after all. He
thought he could just let her lie there until he was finished with you.”
“How long had he been pouring it on her?”
“About four hours! Practically ever since they hit space, coming out from Gull.”
“She didn’t crack at all?” Iliff asked curiously.
“No, but she thinks she couldn’t have lasted more than another hour. However, she seems to have had no doubt that you would arrive and get her out of the mess in time! Rather flattering, eh?” The agent considered. “No,” he said then. “Not necessarily.”
His superior chuckled. “At any rate, she was reluctant to take credit for U-1. She thought, if she accepted, you might feel she didn’t fully appreciate your plunging in to the rescue.”
“Well, you seem to have reassured her. And now, just what are the political results going to be?”
“It’s too early to say definitely, but even without any help from us they’d be pretty satisfactory. The Ceetal business isn’t for public consumption, of course—the boys made a clean sweep of that bunch a few hours back, by the way!—but there’ve always been plenty of idiots building U-1 up into a glamorous figure. The Mysterious Great Bandit of the Spaceways and that sickening kind of stuff! They’ll whoop it up just as happily now for the Champion of Vegan Justice who sent the old monster on his way, to wit—the Lannai Pagadan! It won’t hurt either that she’s really beautiful. And through her, of course, the glamour reflects back on her people, our nonhuman allies.”
Iliff said thoughtfully: “Think they’ll stay fashionable long’ enough to cinch the alliance?”
The Co-ordinator looked rather smug. “I believe that part of it can be safely left to me! Especially,” he added deliberately, “since most of the organized resistance to said alliance has already collapsed!”