“Curt,” Farge protested. “I won’t let you take that risk. An energy bombardment of five or ten billion volts could kill you instantly, or destroy brain cells and leave you a mindless imbecile. We can at least test it on laboratory animals first.”
“We don’t have any animals and we don’t have time to order them now. This is coming to a head too fast. At any moment we can expect the counterattack from the entities, and whatever form that takes we can be sure of one thing: It will be nasty.”
“All the more reason for you to be alive and fighting back.”
“There’s another consideration,” Temple said quietly. “The most important of all, Al. According to the radio, their new moon rocket is completed. Day after tomorrow it is scheduled to blast off for the moon with five hundred Plague victims on board. Five hundred innocent people face some horror we can’t even imagine—unless I can stop that flight. If I can take the beam from that projector and survive, I’m leaving at once. Don’t forget, I might have to walk clear back to Denver to get a car.”
Behind them a quiet voice said, “I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to leave if I were you.”
Temple and Farge spun around, gaping. Just inside the lab door stood two young men with grim faces and sharp, watchful eyes. Each held a stubby pistol centered steadily on them. Beside them stood Lee Mason, an expression of grim triumph on her face.
The taller man held a small, flat folder that was vaguely familiar. He flipped it open. “I’m Tillotson, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and this is my partner, Mr. Rowe. This young lady has preferred charges against you two for kidnapping and unlawful detention. Will you come along quietly, please?”
CHAPTER 12
Flight
Temple stood rigid, the blood draining from his face. Beside him he heard Farge’s labored breathing. The two FBI men were looking curiously at the detector jutting from the harness above his eyes. Lee was also eyeing it warily. The projector lay on the bench behind Farge, hidden by his bulky figure.
Tillotson spoke again, his voice sharper. “Well? I have the warrant here if you insist on seeing it. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Farge said sharply. “This is either the end of everything or a beginning, Curt, and there’s only one way to find out. No matter what happens, you’re the best qualified to carry on.”
Temple shouted, “Allen…don’t!” But he was too late. Farge snatched up the projector and put the barrel against the side of his head.
Lee Mason screamed. It was a cry of shock and horror, wrung from her by the unexpected sight of an undamaged projector. The FBI men were momentarily paralyzed by the suddenness of Farge’s movement, the appearance of something resembling a gun, and most of all by Lee’s piercing shriek.
In that instant, when time stood still, Farge pressed the trigger stud. He went rigid, then crumpled to the floor, the projector dropping from his limp hand.
Temple ignored the guns and dived to his knees, lifting Farge’s head. There was a dull roaring in his ears and he saw the slack face of his friend through a mist of anguish. Dimly he heard the smaller FBI man’s shaken yell.
“Tilly, he did the Dutch right in front of us. But what with, for hell’s sake? I didn’t hear any shot.”
Lee Mason screamed again in a shrill, inhuman voice. “Grab that thing! It isn’t a gun. It’s a horrible new deadly weapon, a death ray, they’ve been working on. Get it before he uses it to kill us all.”
Tillotson swore in a thick, stunned gasp and dived forward, grabbing the projector gingerly by its barrel. Rowe took an uncertain forward step, looking dazed, the pistol weaving in his hand.
At that precise moment Farge opened his eyes, smiled up at Curtis Temple and murmured, “Success!”
Temple was on his knees beside his friend. His lunge caught both FBI men off balance and unprepared. His left hand closed on Tillotson’s wrist and his right caught the butt of the projector and wrenched it free. Rowe was still swinging his pistol around when the firing stud clicked twice. Both men went down as if pole-axed. There had been no hum of power, no visible beam, but they lay unmoving.
Still yelping breathless shrieks, Lee Mason spun around and made a desperate leap for the door. With tight lips and cold eyes, Temple leveled the projector, centering it on the back of her head, and pressed the stud.
She stopped as if ramming an invisible wall. The echoes of an unfinished scream quivered in the air as her slim figure collapsed in the doorway.
On the tiny screen in front of Temple’s eyes, a glowing ball of violet light flared up to almost intolerable brilliance for an instant and then vanished.
“Curt,” Farge shouted, lurching to his feet. “You killed it! You destroyed it instantly. I saw it with my naked eye. It was like a little cloud of glowing mist that puffed out of her hair and whipped away to nothing. Curt, we’ve won!”
Temple was bending over Lee, feeling a surge of unutterable joy as he saw the rise and fall of her breast and felt the strong, steady beat of her pulse. He snatched the silver cap from the bench and fitted it down over the golden hair.
“We’ve won two tickets to the electric chair if we aren’t long gone before those two Federal men wake up,” he said. “Grab the projector and come on. We’re about to add stealing government property to the list of our crimes.”
A powerful sedan stood in the driveway, its engine idling softly. They scrambled in, with Temple at the wheel and Lee’s limp figure propped between them. He stepped on the gas and the sedan whipped around in a tight, grinding turn. Its speedometer needle was at fifty and climbing when the narrow winding road plunged into the inky blackness of pine forest and Temple was forced to turn on the lights.
“Where do we go from here?” Farge asked. “The first thing those two do will be to set off a nationwide manhunt for us.”
Temple chuckled thinly. “Not quite the first thing, Al. The first thing, thanks to Lee, will be to stumble through ten or fifteen miles of black woods to find a telephone. By that time we ought to be halfway to the Kansas line.”
“You’re—you’re heading back to the camp?”
“Where else? We’ve got the detector and we’ve got the weapon. The only thing we don’t have is any more time. That has just about run out—for us or for the entities.”
Between them Lee Mason stirred and opened her eyes. For a moment she blinked dazedly, then gasped with the return of awareness. She flung herself against Temple, clutching his arm, sobbing, “Oh, Curt, I’m free I’m free! You wouldn’t give up, even after all those horrible things I did to you.”
He grinned, steering with one hand and using the other to give her shoulders a quick pressure. “You didn’t do them, honey. It was that thing in your brain. But it’s all over now and it can’t ever happen again as long as you keep that silver cap on as a shield.”
“I know, Curt. I—I watched you making it somewhere, way deep inside me, I was praying that I’d soon be wearing it.” She whirled suddenly and threw her arms around the startled Farge. “But I wouldn’t be if you weren’t the bravest man and finest friend anyone ever had, Allen Farge. When you turned that projector on yourself, a part of me almost died for fear it might be too powerful.”
Farge was beet red and stammering with embarrassment. “Now now, Miss Mason, I didn’t do anything heroic. Curt is the one who has taken all the risks and is still taking them.”
“I wish we could stop awhile and enjoy a real reunion,” Temple said wistfully, “but that will have to wait. Right now we need to know every little thing you can tell us about those entities—what they are, where they came from, how they control so many people and what their real purpose is.”
She sat up, frowning, and her lip quivered. “But that’s the terrible part of it, Curt. I don’t know. I—I can’t answer a single one of your questions. You probably know more about those things right now than I do.”
Temple took his eyes from the road long enough to throw her a startled, penetrating look. Farge was gaping at he
r openly.
“Let’s take that from the beginning once more, a little slower this time so I can try to grasp it. Lee, you’ve been the mental and physical slave of those beings for more than a month, on the inside of everything that’s occurred. There’s even pretty strong evidence that you were a leader of the group.”
She stared at him blankly. “Was I? All I really remember are bits and flashes of things that don’t hitch together or make very much sense to me. Everything is clear enough up to the night we chipped through the covering on those meteorites. I remember a sharp pain in the back of my head and feeling dizzy. Then we all stood there, talking some kind of ridiculous gibberish for a few minutes. After that my memory seems to be all out of focus.”
Temple pounded the wheel in impotent anger. “Of course. That damnable intelligence would take steps to guard against anyone’s escaping with dangerous knowledge. In pioneer days Indians dragged a leafy branch behind them to wipe out their tracks. That’s roughly what that thing must have done in your mind, Lee.”
“We’d better have every scrap of what she does remember, Curt,” Farge said. “That intelligence isn’t perfect. We know hers made a couple of goofs. It might have accidentally let a fragment of important knowledge slip through without being fully erased.”
“Yes,” Lee said thoughtfully. “There were mistakes. I’ve forgotten what they were but I know they did happen. Part of it was trying to operate through imperfect human minds and bodies. It was a little like—like Heifitz trying to make a ten-dollar fiddle sound like a Stradivarius.”
Temple grinned in spite of himself. “The dopey blob that let you wander off by yourself with a projector was no Heifitz, thank heaven. Go ahead, honey.”
Dawn was breaking by the time Lee finished her scattered and misty recollections and slumped back in the seat, exhausted. Temple turned each disconnected item around in his mind, examining it from every angle without finding any hidden clue or fact of major significance. He glanced at Farge who shrugged and shook his head helplessly.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I wish I could help but everything is so confused and vague. I know I built projectors and helped design that rocket and its propulsion system, but not consciously. The real knowledge came through my brain, not out of it. I know quite a little about rocketry, but my own mind couldn’t begin to understand what my hands were doing. Only once or twice, when I needed to solve smaller problems, I’d feel a sudden rush of energy, like an overdose of Benzedrine; my brain would race like crazy, and up would come the answer I needed.”
Temple met Farge’s look. “Pure mind energy, as we figured. How about your conversations? You must have had talks, discussions of projects.”
“When we talked, it was just us talking. But I know those things had a way to communicate without us. Sometimes we’d all just stand or sit and I could feel thoughts flying. Then we’d all plunge into some new project. Once in a while words would pop into my mind and I’d say them to one of the others without knowing why. Sometimes I couldn’t even understand what I was saying.”
“Maybe,” Farge said thoughtfully, “they were practicing or experimenting with our lower forms of thought and communication simply to discover what uses they could make of it. But you agree that Curt is right about the Crimson Plague? It’s not a disease but a temporary condition they create for some purpose of their own?”
She shuddered. “Yes. That much I’m sure of, but what that purpose could be I haven’t a ghost of memory. I only feel that it’s something fantastic and utterly horrible.”
They drove in silence for some time. Then Temple said, “The night I saw that first rocket launched, it went up a few miles, seemed to explode and completely vanished. I was frantic, wondering if it had blown up with you in it.”
“They all do that,” Lee said, and then started. “What made me say that? For a moment I almost recalled something.”
“Think,” Temple said sharply. “Think as hard as you can Lee, about the rocket ship. It started almost like a regular rocket, then vanished in a flash of light. Keep trying!”
“It’s coming, Curt. Yes, the rocket has two propulsion systems. One is a very advanced development of our own rocket engines. That lifts it high enough so whatever happens when it shifts into another kind can’t damage the camp. That’s all I know, except that second stage is fast—faster than light. And coming back, it doesn’t use the rocket at all. There’s a flash of light and it just appears out of nowhere, sitting on its pad in the silo.”
That was all she could tell them, despite a barrage of eager questions from both men. Temple said at last, “Okay, honey. But it looks to me as if there may be more memories only half buried that we can dredge up if we can figure out where to dig. Keep trying and tell us anything that pops into your mind.”
The roadblock was waiting to trap them at the Kansas line. They saw it from some distance back—a highway patrol car parked crosswise, blocking half the road, a movable barricade across the remainder. Two state troopers got out of the car and stood in the road, waiting.
As Temple braked to a stop a few yards back, one of the troopers looked from their license plate to a paper in his hand and stiffened. He said something to his companion. Both dropped hands to their pistols and moved forward in a wary, stiff-legged stalk. Temple swung his door open and slid partway out, smiling pleasantly, waiting.
The two were separating to approach the car on both sides when he brought the projector up from his lap and pressed the stud. The troopers collapsed, as limp as rag dolls.
He jumped out, saw with relief that they were breathing shallowly and began to drag one toward their car. Farge and Lee jumped out to bring the other.
“Dump them in the back,” Temple ordered, “then let the air out of all four tires. Unscrew the valves and throw them as far as you can. We’ll need every extra minute of time we can buy.”
While Farge and Lee went at that task, he tore out the microphone of the police radio and hurled it into a clump of weeds, sending the ignition key after it. He reached behind the radio panel, jerked out a tangle of multicolored wires and threw them out into the field.
“I can just see the coroner’s report on us,” Farge said with grim humor. “Cause of death—compound fracture of the criminal laws. Anyhow, it’s been nice knowing us.”
They drove through, replaced the barricade and raced on, the speedometer quivering at ninety. Dusk was closing in when they neared the meteor camp turnoff to find the highway jammed with lines of slow-moving cars and the shoulders on both sides parked solid. Crowds stood by the parked cars, talking in low voices and watching the sky to the north.
Temple leaned out as they crept past one group. “What’s all the excitement? What is everybody waiting for out here?”
“The big rocket,” a man grunted. “Didn’t you hear the news? They speeded up work and set the launching a full day ahead of schedule. It’s blasting off at nine tonight with the first load of bodies for the moon.”
Temple heard Lee gasp and Farge blurt a startled curse. He said grimly, “We can probably thank our success for that. Maybe they hoped to get off before we could start any more trouble. We haven’t a moment to lose if we’re to prevent their getting away with five hundred more helpless victims of their scheme.”
But the highway was jammed and there was no place to pass or turn off. They could only sweat and fume while the traffic inched forward at an agonizing crawl. Where the road turned off to the camp they found the reason for the tie-up. A wooden barricade, illuminated by a row of flare-pots, barred the dirt road to the camp, and the gaunt figure of Gus Solle stood in front, waving a red lantern.
“Lee,” Temple whispered urgently. “He might remember me from the night he picked up Mullane. You take over the wheel and turn in. He knows you and he may not have been alerted to your escape. Open your door so he can recognize you and call him over close.”
Traffic was stationery at the moment. Temple scrambled over the back and crouched on the
rear floor while Lee wriggled under the wheel. In a moment the car moved ahead and he felt it swing to the left. Gus Solle’s nasal voice rose in a shout.
“Get back there, you! Can’t you see this here barricade? Get back in line and keep going.”
Lee’s door opened, automatically switching on the dome light. In a cold voice she snapped, “Gus, you know me. It’s Miss Mason and I must get to the tower at once.”
“I dunno.” The voice sounded suspicious. “I was told not to let nobody in… Say, who’s that next to you?”
“Come over here so I don’t have to shout and I’ll explain.”
“No!” Solle’s voice was shrill. “I’m staying right here until I get orders.”
Temple raised up and triggered the projector. An entity in the act of leaving vanished in a soundless flash and Gus Solle collapsed, falling back out of sight among the weeds. It was over so swiftly that people in the cars might not have even noticed.
He sprang out and hurled the barricade off into the ditch. As he turned back he saw a few drivers leaning out, staring, and some men were running from parked cars. He waved his arms.
“Come along, everybody!” he bawled at the top of his lungs. “There’s plenty of free parking right in front of the launch pad.”
He sprang into the back and slammed the door. “Step on it, Lee. In about thirty seconds this road is going to turn into a drag strip for motorized lunatics and we’d better stay ahead of it. I only hope the sight of that mob of cars charging down on the camp gives those neon nasties something to think about besides us.”
From behind rose a cacophony of blaring horns and clashing fenders as a stream of cars poured off the highway to follow them. He had a feeling that the entities would be more than a little distracted by the horde of uninvited spectators at his back. If they were to block the flight of the giant rocket, they would need plenty of diversion—and plenty of luck.
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