by Eando Binder
“Are you sure,” fretted Thane, “that the Morlians have a waking and sleeping period, like on earth?”
“Yes,” nodded Miribel. “They are creatures of habit, as all intelligent beings seem to be throughout the galaxy.”
“And when will their sleep period come?”
“In five hours, at the soonest.” The girl looked gravely at Thane. “Or as long as 8 hours, if my estimates are wrong.”
“Eight hours,” grunted Thane, turning a little pale. “We’ll never live that long. It’s got to come before seven hours…or else.”
Chapter 21
Time did not drag. It fairly flew. Three hours passed and Thane could picture the Vigilante armada gathering speed and plunging through space toward a tiny spark in space that was nearing earth, ready to graze it by 5000 miles.
Thane could also picture the Supreme High, chief of the Morlians, gloatingly watching earth enlarge with his finger poised at the button that would trigger off instant doom for all earth-people.
Four hours passed…five hours.
“Two more hours to go,” whispered Miribel.
“And still no sign of any slackening off below,” groaned Thane. “Our only hope is to steal one of their ships, but not while a thousand Morlians are around. When will they ever knock off work and…”
“Wait,” said Miribel sharply. “They won’t. Oh, Thane, it was stupid of me. But you see, they won’t stop working today. They will be sending out all or most ships to carry out the earth-doom project in two hours.”
“That’s right,” gasped Thane with a sinking heart. “All their ships equipped with the mind-suction tubes and military escorts.”
And just then, taking off one by one, a hundred huge saucercraft spun out of the hangar and out of the dome.
“The same thing is happening at perhaps a dozen other domes on the asteroid,” surmised Miribel. “All their vast fleet will be poured into this giant operation.”
In the next hour, another thousand craft silently poured out of the hangar and out of the dome, for their rendezvous with—earth.
Suddenly, a psycho-voice boomed in their minds. “Thalkon calling Thane Smith and Miribel. The Supreme High, we calculated, would set his zero-hour for the moment when the asteroid is closest to earth—two hours from now. We will strike one hour from now. It was the best we could do, as to timing.” He seemed to draw a breath. “Now, have you any chance of escaping before the end?”
Thane glanced at the girl’s taut face. “It’s going to be touch-and-go, Thalkon. But of course, nothing must hold up your attack at the specified time. If we lose out, only two lives are lost. If you lose out, 3½ billion lives are lost—on earth.”
“Goodbye, father,” said Miribel’s psycho-voice resignedly, “in case we never see you again.”
“May the Great Guardian bless you both for what you have done, making our victory possible.”
His psycho-voice faded out.
“Come on,” snapped Thane. “I’ll be damned if I’ll sit here and wait for the axe to fall. Down we go, depending on the element of surprise to carry us through.”
With that, Thane made a swan-dive off the girder, Miribel instantly following. They glided down in slow-motion, with no danger of landing with killing shock.
They landed on the roof of the hangar. A quick look around and he pointed at a cupola. “An air duct, as I hoped. Let’s go.”
They wormed their way into the air duct, then hung over the scene of activity, as more Morlian saucercraft wheeled out.
“Drop down on that one below, in back of those now leaving,” hissed Thane. “If we’re in luck, the pilot or pilots will be too busy with their instruments to see us.” Their two featherweight bodies drifted down toward the domed disk below. Their feet hardly made a sound as they landed. Miribel pointed silently at the open hatchway in the side of the dome.
As they crept, they came face to face with a startled Morlian pilot, about to close the hatch.
Thane had one of his blasters in hand, but hesitated. Unlike a Vigilante weapon, it would not hurl the victim into the Nth dimension, but into oblivion. Thane sweated….
But Miribel’s para-gun was already hissing and the Morlian pilot slumped like a rag doll.
“Good work,” said Thane thankfully.
He dragged him across the saucer’s rounded top to the rim and dropped him off. Leaping headlong in a fifty-foot dive back to where Miribel stood, Thane led the way inside the saucer.
“If the other pilot heard anything, he’ll be coming to investigate,” whispered Miribel. “Listen…his footsteps.”
They sounded from a cross corridor that came from the pilot’s bubble. Thane got down in a ready crouch. It would be too risky trying to gun him down from a distance. As soon as the Morlian turned the corner, Thane leaped, hurling his body 30 feet down the corridor. The impetus of his earth muscles shot him forward like a cannon shell. His head struck the Morlian in the chest, thrusting him backward for 10 feet, meeting a wall with a sodden thud.
“Two down,” panted Thane, “and none to go. Hurry, to the pilot room.”
In the pilot’s bubble of transparent material, they sat down at the controls. “Can you drive this crate, Miribel?” At the girl’s nod, Thane went on. “You take the drive controls. I’ll take the gun controls, of the second seat. Tell me how they work.”
Miribel ran through it swiftly, Thane nodding and absorbing it. “Now, the trick is…”
A radio voice broke in from their panel speaker, in an alien gibberish.
“The Morlian language,” said Miribel. “I’ll translate… Blaster craft #Z-777. Prepare for take-off. Follow route ZY. That is all.”
Faking a man’s gruff voice, Miribel then spoke into a panel mike, and Thane assumed she gave the Morlian equivalent of ‘Roger.’ She shut off the mike carefully, then worked pushbuttons that made their saucer trundle itself out of the hangar on wheels. Outside, she retracted the wheels and began to spiral the saucer upward in the same take-off pattern the preceding ship had used.
“If nobody caught a glimpse of us in our bubble,” Thane breathed, “we have a good chance to get away scot free. How much time to the deadline, Miribel?”
“Just twenty minutes.”
“Ouch,” said Thane with a world of feeling. “If anything delays us…”
“We re gone gooses,” said Miribel, unconsciously using earth idiom. They smiled bleakly at each other.
Miribel expertly used the off-phase control to shift their vibrational range to where they could ooze through the solid dome into open space. At that moment, the automatic speaker circuit boomed out ominously.
“Attention!” translated Miribel. “Emergency alarm! Two unauthorized persons have been seen in ship #Z-777. Chase them down, if you are near.”
She turned to Thane, face ashen. “That’s our fatal delay,” Miribel said, pointing to where three Morlian saucers were wheeling around and coming at them.
“Not if I work fast—and you outmaneuver them,” hissed Thane. “Come on, give me the right shooting positions.”
The Morlian ships were already hurling out blaster-beams, but Miribel played her fingers dancingly over the control keyboard, and their saucer slewed away at a right angle.
Thane again marveled, in flashing thought, at the miraculous null-inertia system that allowed these saucers to turn and twist in violent flying contortions without straining one bolt. Miribel’s fingers kept playing a skillful tattoo and their saucer spun crazily, or so it seemed. But suddenly she yelled: “Now, Thane!”
And Thane found he had a perfect shot at the backside of one Morlian saucer. Pressing the stud of his blast-gun, Thane sent one vicious blaster-beam stabbing ahead. The enemy craft burst into a billion sparkles, just as the first saucer had dining the dogfight on eart
h that he had witnessed.
Morlian blast-beams narrowly missed them in the next minute. But twice more Miribel wrenched their ship through impossible turns to utterly surprise the Morlian pilots. And twice more Thane had the satisfaction of seeing space fireworks herald the end of Morlian war-craft.
“Unfortunately, we are forced to take Morlian lives,” said Miribel, with a pained face. “They never equipped their weapons to send out the saving ray that first hurls a living pilot to the Nth dimension before his ship blows up.”
“That was only three Morlian lives,” spat out Thane without remorse. “They were ready to wipe out all humanity….”
“Look!” yelled Miribel. “We’ve got to get out of here fast. There comes the Vigilante warfleet.”
Thane stared. A cloud in space was expanding and blocking out the stars. The cloud grew immense as a vast fleet of Vigilante ships arrowed toward the asteroid on which lay a dozen domes.
Miribel worked frantically at her controls trying to slew their saucer out of the path of the growing cloud. But the cloud expanded faster than their flight path.
“Hopeless,” said Miribel tightly. “The Vigilante fleet probably covers an area of space a million miles wide. It’s like a bug trying to escape a vast flock of birds.”
“And we’re in a Morlian ship—which they’ll shoot down,” added Thane. “We escaped the asteroid but not soon enough.”
“We’re sitting ducks, as you would say on earth.”
“But we’re not through,” protested Thane. “We simply contact Thalkon with a psycho-beam.”
He tried. Miribel tried. There was no answer. “We can’t get through to him,” Miribel said tonelessly. “I didn’t expect to. As commander of this all-out attack against the main Morlian base, he’s receiving hundreds of psycho-messages from his subcommanders.”
“And ours is lost in the shuffle,” said Thane. “But we’re going to make our death count. Swing back, Miribel. Back to where the Morlian fleet is massing. Get it? They won’t know it’s us. We’ll be right in the middle of their fleet and then open up on all sides.” His face was savage now.
Their saucer spun in a long arc to join the outer fringes of the Morlian fleet. The ships originally sent toward earth had been hastily recalled when the approaching Vigilante fleet had been detected.
But it was a haphazard formation and in the disorder, Miribel weaved her ship toward the central core. They did not have long to wait.
With the arrival of the Vigilante vanguard, both sides opened fire. Fission and fusion powered, a wide assortment of blast-beams stabbed back and forth. Morlian ships began to burst into brilliant showers of sparks. But the rest had formed roughly into a phalanx in depth, in the path of the Vigilante armada.
“Now’s the time,” hissed Thane. “We’ll punch a hole through them for the Vigilante fleet to get through.”
Thane’s finger went down on the filing button. A livid blast-beam caught the nearest Morlian ship squarely, creating another sunburst of sparks in space. As Miribel swung the ship around slowly, Thane fired continuously, raking Morlian craft like a row of targets in a shooting gallery.
“They don’t know what hit them,” gloated Thane, then kept up the grim count he had begun “…25…26…27…28…”
Utterly bewildered at the attack, the Morlian formation began to break up ahead. Two craft even rammed each other in the confusion.
Thane laughed aloud and counted mentally. “…46…47…48…”
Chapter 22
Miribel glanced back and gasped.
“Thane! Where is the asteroid?”
Thane whirled. There was no asteroid back of them, as there should be. Then, in the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the small dim body, slowly receding into space.
“It’s moving,” said Thane, stunned. “The Supreme High had an ace up his sleeve. The asteroid is powered somehow.”
Miribel groaned audibly. “And if the Morlian fleet holds up the Vigilante forces long enough, the Supreme High can slip close to earth, send out the ships with psycho-suction tubes, and steal all earthy minds. Then he could lose himself and his tiny asteroid in space. Under power, he would return safely to Morli with his psychobattery fully ‘charged’ to operate his psycho-computer and plot the conquest of the cosmos.”
“Damn,” swore Thane in a rage, “how can we stop him? Wait, what power system would the asteroid have?”
“I can only guess,” said Miribel slowly, swinging their saucer around to follow the receding asteroid. “It would have to be an electrogravity power plant, such as the kind the United Worlds Planetary Engineering Bureau uses for moving moons around and reshaping solar systems that are badly arranged by nature.”
“Where would it be located?” Thane asked hurriedly.
“Probably under an aerated dome for the benefit of the engine crew. The telltale sign would be an aura of violet light around it, a standard by-product of the electrogravity power plant.”
“Then catch up with the asteroid,” snapped Thane. He grinned crookedly. “They’ll take our saucer for one of their own, returning from some military mission or other. With the emergency at hand, it’s a sure thing nobody will be watching every ship that comes down.” Miribel nodded and rammed the saucer ahead, soon overtaking the runaway asteroid. Beyond, earth was ballooning into a ball that rapidly enlarged. Calculating rapidly, Miribel warned: “Thane! The asteroid will be within 5000 miles of earth in just 5 minutes.”
“Unless we find the right dome and stop it,” supplied Thane, peering down intently as they swooped low over the asteroids jagged surface. Three domes appeared, widely spaced. None of them glowed with violet light.
“The next dome, Miribel,” fumed Thane. “Hurry!”
More minutes were wasted in checking nine more domes. Then Thane stared below at the first dome they had seen hove into view. “No more domes?” he gasped.
Miribel shook her head. “I circled the asteroid in an orbital pattern, shifting each time and covering the whole surface. They have only 12 domes.” Her voice was edged with panic. “Did I guess all wrong about an electrogravity power plant? Thane, the Supreme High’s zero-moment is close now. Only a minute left….”
Thane stiffened and pointed down. “Look. A violet glow from that miniature mountain peak.”
Miribel stared eagerly, her face lighting up. “They camouflaged it under stone. Get ready, Thane. As I make a low pass over the peak, send down an infra melt-beam. Fourth button to the right on your weapon keyboard.”
The saucer tilted and sliced downward at a steep slant. As it abruptly made a 60-degree turn just above the mountain, an angry red beam spat forth and touched the peak. Molten lava instantly formed as the peak melted away.
“Now to get away fast,” Miribel half-screeched, sending their saucer careening away at 1000-g’s of acceleration. “When that molten stone floods down into the power plant and wrecks the electrogravity unit, at least 100 giga-dynes will be released.”
Dynes? Dynes? Then Thane remembered. The unit of energy. And “giga” was the metric system’s prefix for ‘billion.’
The asteroid had receded behind them to a tiny star. But suddenly the star grew into a nova, then a supernova. And still it grew and grew and grew….
An invisible tide of smashed molecules, driven at superhurricane speed, overtook the fleeing saucer. The blow was like that of a giant fist, tumbling the saucer like a cork. Inside, Thane was thrown against the side wall with a shade less than bone-crushing force. Then Miribel’s flying form struck him in the chest, knocking his breath out explosively.
Cushioned from a crash into metal by Thane’s body, the girl recovered first, whimpering as a dozen bruises throbbed painfully. Thane lay sprawled on the floor, limp, pale, not breathing. Miribel felt for his pulse.
“Dead,” she
said hollowly.
* * * *
Thane sat up. He was in a white-walled chamber, in bed. Obviously a Vigilante sick bay aboard one of their ships. The door opened and Miribel came in, followed by Thalkon.
“I’m alive?” marveled Thane, feeling himself all over. “But I was sure I was dying, back in the Morlian saucer….”
“You did die,” said Miribel matter-of-factly.
Thane grunted. “All right, what’s the punch line?”
“It is not a joke,” spoke up Thalkon, smiling. “Miribel rushed you here to my flagship. We didn’t shoot down her Morlian ship because the battle was over and all Morlians were surrendering. Our doctors then restarted your heart electrically, used a bio-bellows to get your lungs pumping, and gave drugs that revved up your other organs.”
Thane arched his brow. “On earth, I’d have been in a funeral parlor, being fixed up for my grand exit from this world.”
“Our medical science is a bit ahead of yours,” said Thalkon in an enormous understatement.
“The asteroid…?”
“Scattered through the solar system as atomic debris,” said Thalkon. “The Supreme High never sent down the trigger-beam for his great mental thievery—thanks to you and my daughter. It was a magnificent feat.”
Miribel didn’t blush, but Thane did.
“With the explosion of their asteroid, and all their plans, the Morlians lost all heart to continue the pointless battle. They surrendered. We captured 40,000 craft. Their crews will be sent to exile in the Nth Dimension.” He drew up, pointing at the globe of earth in space. After 75 years of struggle, your world is free of menace…until the next time.”
“Thanks to you and the Vigilantes,” said Thane earnestly.
Thalkon shrugged. “It’s our duty.” He eyed Thane speculatively. “Now the question is, what to do with you. You’re the only earthman who knows all about the flying saucers. The tremendous earth-shaking truth. But we request—”