Secret of the Red Spot

by Eando Binder

  Whump!

  Bruce’s sight wheeled from the vibration, but he saw the slim, beautiful Everest skyscraper crack at its foundations and totter. Majestically, it toppled, measuring its length over the lesser buildings, crumpling apart like matchwood.

  Worlds at war!

  This was the true picture of it. Holocaust rampant. The proud works of man leveled in seconds. Incalculable damage in the wink of an eye. A legion of lives snuffed out between heartbeats. Merciless, rapacious, satanic destruction. And probably with each gun blast, the Ginzies were politely murmuring, “So sorry!”

  Sick to the core, Bruce watched with tormented eyes.

  But then he saw bright searchlight shafts stab upward from the city’s internal defenses. A forest of beams limelighted the Martian ships. Proton-charges blasted up. One Martian vessel suddenly shuddered, faltered. Gaping holes marred its smooth hull. Its rockets died and it plummeted down like a stone. The antiaircraft guns began peppering away at the other nine.

  Those, too, would soon be shot down, their vicious career ended. The inner raid would not mean much after all. New York was a big city. There were only a few ships, already doomed.

  Thank Heaven only ten ships had come through, not the thousands the Martian spies had planned. Bruce, somewhat relieved, forced his thoughts back to himself.

  At least he had nipped the Martian plot before it was too late. Two things now stood out clearly in his mind. One, to finally get the information about the Martian war base on Jupiter to Earth authorities. Second, Dora and Dr. Kent—he groaned—but what could he do about that? As for John Gorson, the police would pick him up when Bruce reported his story. Gorson would get what he deserved.

  Bruce ran from the roof into the room—and into the arms of two blue-coated police officers. Gorson was behind them.

  “That’s the man,” Gorson shouted. “Hold him. He’s dangerous. You see, officers, it’s just as I told you. There are the two Martian spies I shot. This Earthman, their renegade accomplice, got the jump on me, but I escaped to call you. Arrest this man, Jay Bruce, as a Martian agent.”

  Bruce gasped in sheer dumfoundment.

  “Wait,” he snapped as the two police grabbed his arms. “You don’t believe that preposterous story? It’s John Gorson who is the Martian agent. I was the one who killed those spies…”

  “Don’t listen to him,” broke in Gorson quickly. “Naturally he’d twist things around. I’m John Gorson, interplanetary mining magnate; you know me and my integrity. I’ll prove later that Bruce let these two dead spies into the city, helped them set up a machine that let in those ten Martian ships. Whose word do you take, mine or this man’s?”

  “Yours, Mr. Gorson, of course,” said one of the officers. He prodded Bruce with his gun. “Come along, you. I’d like to shoot you down like a dog now—letting those Martian ships through…”

  Bruce’s protests subsided in helplessness. He saw the evil leer on Gorson’s battered face and realized how clever the man had been. In having Bruce arrested and shot for this night’s doing, the mining magnate would cover his own tracks.

  Bruce’s mind labored as the police roughly jerked him down the hall to the elevator. Everything was against him. He had brought the two spies into the city. He had helped set up the machine. He would be court-martialed, sentenced and shot within hours. No chance to prove his innocence.

  And in the meantime, the Martian war base on Jupiter was still unexposed. Dora and Dr. Kent still doomed up there. He had the feeling again of being a pawn in some vivid nightmare. Doomed. And John Gorson would go free. The Martians would capture Callisto. Dora and Dr. Kent…

  Chapter 9

  Bruce groaned in his inner torment. He was hardly aware of being flown in a jet-squad car to central police headquarters. He was marched down a stone-walled hallway into a cell. The steel door clanged shut behind him.

  Bruce’s world had temporarily ended. Was there any way out of his trap? He sat alone for several hours, twisting his hands and pacing his cell. Finally, the door scraped open and the jailer motioned him out. Waiting was a military guard, four uniformed men who flanked him as he was marched down the hall to a courtroom. Seated at a long bench were three military officers.

  “Since you, Jay Bruce, volunteered for the Space Navy upon your arrival on Earth, you are under the jurisdiction of the military. This is a court-martial. The charges will be read.”

  A military clerk read from papers. “Deposition obtained from John Gorson, mining magnate, declares that Jay Bruce piloted two Martian espionage agents disguised as Earth-people from Jupiter to Earth. He aided them in going through customs without the spy checkout. He obtained lodgings for them near one edge of the ion-dome and aided Balto, one of the Martian spies, in obtaining the necessary materials for constructing an ion-dome penetrator, which allowed ten Martian dreadnaughts to enter and attack New York City…”

  It went on, seemingly an open and shut case, with Gorson’s lying words then claiming that he, Gorson, had appeared and shot the two spies, had escaped a beating by the infuriated traitor, Jay Bruce, and had gone to summon police.

  “Signed and sworn by John Gorson, loyal Earth citizen,” finished the clerk.

  The military judge rapped his gavel. “What have you to say in your defense, Jay Bruce?” he said with a hateful gleam in his eye, fully convinced of Bruce’s guilt.

  “Plenty,” rasped Bruce, his lips dry. “First of all it is Gorson who is the traitor and set up the whole deal for Balto, using me as an innocent dupe. Furthermore, let me tell you the important thing—there is a secret Martian war base on Jupiter in the Red Spot, and…”

  Bruce faltered, already seeing the cold light of utter disbelief in the three military judges’ eyes. They glanced at one another cynically as if to say, “What lengths a weaseling traitor will go to in trying to save his worthless skin.”

  Bruce kept on passionately, telling the whole story, but he knew his words fell on deaf ears. Gorson had also been cunning enough in advance to swear he had never received a radio-call from Bruce on Mars revealing the Red Spot war base.

  “But what about Dr. Kent, held in Martian hands up there?” demanded Bruce, half shouting. ‘They’re trying to torture the secret of a new lightweight alloy from him…”

  “Torture?” grinned one judge. “According to Gorson, he’s being feted and honored by the Martians in some laboratory for defecting from Earth and willingly offering them his discovery. Dr. Kent, as you know, had cause to hate Earth for his prison sentence. And you delivered his daughter to the Martians, too, in order to let them disguise the two spies and thus carry out their sabotage plan for New York—with your full and voluntary aid.”

  “Lies, lies,” yelled Bruce, half berserk at the nightmarish web closing around him. His eyes lit up. “Wait. How come Gorson seems to know every little detail of the spy plot from start to finish? If he only stumbled on it here on Earth, without knowing anything, how would he know the full scheme he charges me with?”

  “Ah, but he didn’t just stumble on it,” said the chief judge, picking up another paper. “Gorson also explains how before he fled from Mars, when hostilities started, he had been tipped off about your whole plot by a renegade Martian who wanted a rich reward which Gorson gave him.”

  Bruce collapsed mentally. Gorson had thought of everything and set his trap with care. Bruce’s unsupported word had no power to make the judges see how the tissue of lies had been diabolically built up.

  When asked if had any more to say, Bruce shook his head dumbly, overwhelmed. Then the words shocked their way into his brain. “We hereby declare Jay Bruce to be a traitor and we sentence him to be shot at sunrise.”

  A time-honored custom with spies, still no different in the 25th century. In peacetime, his sentence might have been softened to hard labor in the Moon mines for life. But this was wartime, and grim measures were now the rule.

  The four military guards began to escort him out of the courtroom but not back to his cel
l. They marched him outside to where a jet-limousine waited, painted in military colors. The execution would take place at New York military headquarters, naturally.

  A half-mad gleam came into Bruce’s eyes. Why be led tamely to the slaughter? He was innocent and it was his right to try to escape. If he failed, it would only be a quicker and more merciful death.

  The guards were staring apprehensively up at the ion-dome, as if worried whether in time the Martian attacks would succeed. Two of the men got into the front seat, and a third man slipped into the back. There was only one guard holding the back door open now, and motioning Bruce in.

  The door was only half-opened. Pretending to stoop to get into the car, Bruce instead whirled and shoved the door back into the face of the guard, making him stagger off his feet. Bruce leaped away down the night street, holding his breath.

  Shouts sounded behind him as the other three guards scrambled out of the car and pulled their hand-weapons. Proton-beams hummed their deadly tune past Bruce’s ear. In a moment they’d steady their aim and blast him down…

  But Bruce had reached an alleyway and darted in. A proton-beam nicked the edge of the corner a second too late. Bruce sped down the alley, desperately seeking another break before they came after him. Then he saw it—a man about to garage his jetabout.

  “Sorry,” said Bruce, knocking him down with one blow. Then he grinned wryly at being polite like a Ginzie when committing an atrocity. Leaping in the small flyer, Bruce shot into the air with drumming jets. Below, at the corner, Bruce could see the guards staring up and shooting futilely. He was already out of range.

  But it wasn’t long before the jetsquad catapulted into the air in pursuit. With their powerful 500-jet engine they would easily overtake his 25-jet private vehicle. That was on paper. But the other factor was that Bruce had the skills of a class-A pilot and jetabouts on Earth were not fundamentally different from rocketing spaceships.

  Gripping the control stick firmly, Bruce deliberately kept low with a forest of skyscrapers ahead. He slewed around one tower in a tight turn and saw the jetsquad lose ground with a clumsier turn.

  Darting and weaving among the buildings, using every trick of his trade, Bruce lengthened his lead steadily. They dared not fire their proton-beam machine gun for fear of hitting a building where someone might be working late at night.

  Grinning at how the jetsquad was blundering around, narrowly missing stone corners of uprearing buildings, Bruce suddenly darted down to land on a flat roof hidden in the shadow of a giant ventilator intake. Far to the side, the jetsquad spun by in hopeless circles, having lost their quarry entirely. Bruce relaxed, wiping the sweat of tension away.

  But now what? The jetabout was made only for atmospheric travel and had no auxiliary oxygen supply to bum fuel in space. Besides, the ion-dome was on all night now. Yet space, Bruce had decided, was his only chance for survival. On Earth he would be a hunted man, a hated traitor. Freedom lay only beyond Earth.

  Bruce thought a moment, brow furrowed, then shot his jetabout around toward the spaceport. True, the squadmen would sooner or later suspect he would head for the spaceport and radio ahead to military police there. But there was a chance Bruce might beat them to it, with an idea burning in his brain. A plan that brought a twisted smile to his lips—it would be poetic justice, so to speak.

  When he reached the port, he made for a phone booth, calling the port’s office around the corner. “This is John Gorson,” he snapped authoritatively. “You have my ship in your hangar. Bring it out, ready for flight.”

  “But, Mr. Gorson,” came the protest, “you can’t leave the city. The ion-dome will be on for hours yet…”

  “Bring it out,” roared Bruce. “You know who I am…the influence I have.”

  The bluff worked. Bruce watched from a station window. When he saw a small, sleek ship wheeled from the drome, he ran to it, pushed the attendants aside, jumped in. He roared into the air.

  He could not go through the ion-dome. But he had another plan. It was a mad plan that only a maniac would try. But Bruce was a maniac now…

  He knew of the great military underground ship passages, allowing Earth’s fighting ships out and returning ships in at the end of their timed periods of battle. He shot his little ship over the entrance to the passage. A contingent of destroyers was embarking into the tunnel, shooting in one by one.

  With a mad skill that took his own breath, Bruce dove, slipped in between two big ships, and roared along the wide passage, following the tail of a warship. A minute later he swooped out of the other end of the passage, beyond the ion-dome. The fighting ships zoomed over to the battle zone. Bruce’s little private flyer arrowed straight up.

  He drove upward recklessly, till the hull-heat needle hovered close to danger from air resistance. At last he burst into free space. Before his conning port lay the Moon. Behind him the hell of battle around New York dwindled to a fiery speck, died away.

  Bruce chortled aloud as he spun away from Earth. He had used Gorson’s own spaceship to make his escape from the ignominious fate Gorson had planned for him. A neat joke on the fat mining magnate.

  Bruce sobered suddenly as a flaming speck in space rapidly enlarged. A huge needle-nosed craft came boring straight for him. The Space Patrol. Though many of the armed cruisers had been conscripted for the frontline battles, a skeleton corps still operated as the lawkeepers of space. If he were captured, he’d be sent straight back to the firing squad.

  And worst of all, Bruce had now compounded his supposed crimes by stealing Gorson’s ship. On all counts, falling into the hands of the Space Patrol spelled disaster. And again Bruce found himself using his piloting know-how to avoid the worst.

  But this time there were no buildings among which to lose himself in daring maneuvers. There was just empty black space…no, wait. A meteor flock was whizzing along on a trajectory close to Earth. Bruce brightened, his thoughts formulating a plan.

  “Attention,” came over his radio from the cruiser. “Maintain unaccelerated speed and identify yourself.”

  But Bruce was already streaking his ship straight toward the mass of huge stones gleaming in the moonlight. He was still in Earth’s huge shadow, safe from being exposed by the glare of sunlight. Few pilots would risk getting anywhere near a meteor flock, or try to match its velocity down to the necessary decimal point. One slip and that was it.

  Carefully, Bruce powered up parallel to the string of meteors extending for dozens of miles. With infinite caution he inched closer to the mainstream. Then, breathing a prayer, he eased between meteors and worked his way toward the center of the massed stones of space.

  Then he put his hand on the ship’s nose searchlight and flashed a bright burst of light. Squeezing out between the meteors, the bright flash would seem exactly like a spaceship being struck by a meteor and exploding silently in airless space.

  Bruce grinned ghoulishly as he picked up the radio operator’s voice. “Attention. Do not try to flee—great green moons!” The voice had changed from a drone to sharp excitement. “The crazy fool tried to slip into that meteor swarm and got clobbered. He’s done for, whoever he was.”

  When the Space Patrol ship lumbered away, Bruce eased himself out of the meteor flock. “Mighty obliged,” he said, waving at the receding horde in his port window.

  But now his face grew solemn. Space was not true freedom, not for a hunted traitor and renegade. The arm of the law and the Patrol stretched all through space, despite the war now going on. With his name, description, the traitorous crime radioed to every ship, he would be hounded down anywhere in space.

  Nor could he aim for Jupiter, as Gorson’s small spacecraft would have to be refueled and supplied for the long trip. Bruce cursed in frustration. He could not go and rescue Dora and her father from the Red Spot war base. And the base would remain a secret, with all the advantage it implied for the Martians in the war.

  Bruce was blocked on all sides from finishing his personal mission. But his most
immediate problem was to escape being captured and shot as a spy. How he could ever clear up his name rested in a nebulous unknown future.

  Bruce snapped his fingers. There was one great way he could escape the law and be a fugitive no longer. He hesitated at doing it but it was the only out. He punched the computer buttons now, setting a course for the Moon. Military guard ships closed in but let him pass as an Earth ship as he lowered and hovered over the huge dome in the bottom of Tycho Crater. A giant neon sign, now darkened in the wartime blackout, faintly spelled out its message in the strong Earthshine—OUTER PLANET SPACE NAVY HEADQUARTERS.

  Chapter 10

  A radio message flashed up to him: “Identify.” Bruce knew that proton-cannon were aimed at his hovering craft.

  “Jay Bruce,” he returned boldly, knowing that this military base far from Earth would not be concerned with a fugitive back home. They were involved in strictly military affairs. Besides, the overriding excitement of a state of war would overshadow any small criminal events. Every man below was concentrating on the grim struggle among worlds.

  “Returning from my civilian job on Venus to join the Outer Planet Space Navy, sir,” Bruce continued.

  “Good man,” came back heartily. “Take underground airlock tunnel No. 3 to come up in the dome. Report at the recruitment office.”

  The rest was routine, as Bruce found tunnel No. 3 and drove in. Automatic airlocks opened ahead of him at the stated speed, and he stepped out in the aerated dome. It was a beehive of activity with uniformed men and women scurrying about, each bearing the green-gold circle-star emblem of the Space Navy on his sleeve.

  On Earth, Jay Bruce’s record was being removed from the recruitment files of the Earth Space Navy as a wanted criminal. On the Moon, Jay Bruce’s record was duly entered as an Outer Planet Space Navy recruit. And never the twain would meet or be double-checked—Bruce hoped. But there was a good chance that as usual the ponderous machinery of war’s left hand would never know what the right hand was doing. There were stories of criminals who had served for years in the military before they were exposed, and then only by sheer accident.