His breath sobbing in his throat, Bowen hurled himself down the ladder. Almost two months up and down that ladder had given him the agility of a monkey, the sure-footedness of a mountain goat. He knew every rung, every turn. Now he went down like a lightning bolt along a path of ionized air.
The leader of the aliens was half way down. As if warned by some subtle sense of danger, it whirled around. But scarcely had it brought up its weapon, when Bowen hit it. The terrific impact lifted the alien from the ladder and sent it sailing across the room to hit suddenly against a wall. Overbalanced, Bowen toppled over the hand rail, but his clutching fingers caught a rung and he dropped easily to the floor.
One glance assured him that the leader of the aliens was dead. Its body had been soft, fragile, little more than a huge brain in a tentacled case. It sprawled grotesquely upon the floor, a nauseous-yellow-green liquid beginning to fill, the space inside its transparent suit.
There was a sharp crackle and Bowen sucked in his breath, wincing in agony as something burned along his arm. Two aliens were coming down the ladder.
FRANTICALLY, Bowen flung himself down the rest of the way. Again the crackle sounded, and this time pain knifed across his thigh. He somersaulted over the hand rail, landed jarringly half upon his feet and knees.
Before him was the airlock foyer, behind him the engine room. He darted for the space suits dangling on their hooks in the foyer. But even as he did so, he knew that he wouldn’t have time to get into one and out of the airlock. The two aliens were coming fast. They had seen the dead body of their leader. Now they were out for vengeance.
Bowen hurled the airlock foyer door shut. But hardly had he done so when the crackles lifted to a whine and the door swiftly began to glow a cherry red. In a matter of seconds, he knew, it would be molten.
He crouched against one wall, his gaze swiveling desperately about the room. And then his eyes lighted in incredulous surprise.
Just to the right of the inner door of the airlock was a heat-beam. It was one of the three large weapons which Searles and Platt had set up about the station.
Bowen leaped for the weapon, brought the tapering vulcanium muzzle to bear upon the door, which already was white and beginning to-run. He had tinkered with standard types of weapons at ground school. He knew what had to be done.
A flick of the ignition switch, and a bolt of ravening energy licked high on one wall. Bowen steadied the gun by putting his weight against the hand-grips.
Molten metal sloughed away from the door, and now there was a swiftly growing hole. It was into this hole that Bowen directed the terrible finger of the heat beam. Already weakened, the door blew outward like an exploding soap bubble. Bowen caught a momentary glimpse of the grey bodies of the two aliens just before the beam struck them. A glimpse—and there was nothing.
With a gesture of infinite weariness, he switched off the weapon. He waited, listening. But as the minutes dropped away, ho sound came to his straining ears, and at last he accepted the realization that he was the only one left alive in the station.
He groped his way up the ladder and entered the control room. His eyes clouded with pain. The body of Searles lay draped across the control board. Only his dark hair was recognizable. His green and gold uniform, once so bright and crisp, hung, in charred tatters. Andy Platt lay half over the remains of one of the two dead aliens, an expression of terrible anguish upon his homely face, thinner now and older in death. The rest of the room was a shambles. Wielded with vindictive thoroughness, the terrible weapons of the aliens had cut great swathes of destruction.
Bowen could reconstruct what had taken place. In their sudden drive upon the four aliens, Searles and Platt had hoped to throw them into confusion. They had obviously known that it would be impossible to get all four. They had been prepared to die.
FROM THE position of Searles body, it was clear that he had whirled around from his attack and leaped for the televideo set, hoping to get out a warning. Either he or Platt had already disposed of one of the aliens. As Searles dove for the televideo, one of the three remaining had cut him down. Platt had made a futile effort to avert the death of his friend. Failing to do so, he had exacted swift vengeance. Then he, too, had gone down. Furious, the remaining two aliens had wrought havoc upon the interior of the control room.
Bowen realized that he had been the ace-in-the-hole. The main purpose of the attack made by the two Rangers had been to enable him to escape and reach their ship. Searles had known that he might fail in his attempt to reach the televideo set and get a message through.
Gently, Bowen removed the body of Searles from the control board. Then he turned his attention to Platt. He laid the two Rangers side by side, covering them with blankets from the bed. For a long while, he stared down at their still forms, and as he looked, a little more of the youthfulness went out of his face.
He didn’t know how long he stood there until he remembered the second alien vessel which was waiting off Ganymede. When he did it was a sudden surge of dismay.
That second ship was a sword of Damocles hanging over the System. Should it ever return to its galaxy, carnage and enslavement would be the result for the Solarians.
Bowen crossed to the control board. Like the televideo set, it was a twisted ruin. Whole banks of keys, tubes, and dials had been obliterated. The delicate wiring and relay system was fused into a useless mass.
The great space beacon on the roof of the station was dark. The complex and fragile mehanism in the control board that was its brain was dead. Only with a complete repair job would it ever function again. And Bowen had neither the time nor the materials to do that.
“The beacons must burn!” That was the watchword of the men who tended them.
The beacon on Io was dark. Bowen knew that someone would come to investigate the reason—but precious hours would pass before anyone got worried enough to do so. Even now, the aliens off Ganymede must be growing suspicious at the failure of their companions to return. Soon they would come to find out what was wrong.
His heart racing with urgency. Bowen descended to the airlock foyer and climbed into a spacesuit. He struck out for the Ranger ship in which Searles and Platt had arrived. In the ship would be a televideo. He could make contact with the Ranger outpost on Callisto. Searles had told him that the Ranger Fleet was preparing for an expedition against pirates. Now the Fleet would be warned would know who the pirates really were. Men like Searles and Platt, the Rangers were. They wouldn’t fail to wipe out the aliens, even though it took every man among them to do so.
AND THEN, within fifty feet of the vessel, Bowen stopped dead in his tracks. It was as though a giant hand had suddenly gripped him.
For the Ranger ship had been destroyed. All that remained was an assortment of twisted girders.
After landing and rendering unconscious the men within the station, the aliens must have turned one of their awful weapons on the ship. They had reduced it to a mere skeleton of metal.
Bowen’s gaze shot around desperately. His haggard face was covered with beads of perspiration. He felt trapped, futile.
Not far distant was the cube-shaped vessel of the aliens. Bowen’s eyes settled upon it, narrowing. In another moment, he was running clumsily towards it.
There were no port holes in the strange vessel. Its silvery expanse was unbroken, save on one side where a rectangular door fitted flush with the hull. A short scrutiny, and Bowen knew that the only way to gain entrance into the ship was by force. There was no handle in that door, no button, nothing to show how it opened.
Slowly, tiredly, he turned away. Cutting into the ship would take time—and with the strange alloy of which it was constructed, he doubted if any weapons or tools which he had at hand would be effective. Nothing short of space artillery would pierce that hull. And there remained the almost certain possibility that he wouldn’t know how to operate the vessel even if he did get in.
With eyes that held only a vast bitterness, Bowen gazed up at the great orb
of Jupiter. Ganymede had swung around behind it. Callisto was off just to the right. Callisto! There would be men there. Rangers. But men that he couldn’t reach.
Searles and Platt had died so that he would be able to reach and warn those men up there. And now he couldn’t, for every means was closed to him. They had died in vain, those two Rangers.
That last thought was agony to Bowen. Biting his lips, he turned and began to plod back toward the station.
He had to do something, he told himself desperately. There must be some way in which he could get out a warning. He shook his head, trying to get some order into the chaotic race of his thoughts.
Suddenly the idea of building a huge bonfire occured to him, but he rejected this at once; a fire wouldn’t burn in Io’s neon atmosphere. And then—at that moment it seemed so irrelevant that he almost pushed the thought aside—he remembered something Platt had said in the control room.
“Reminds me of one of them funny tubes—what do you call ’em?—that the scientists monkey around with.”
“You mean vacuum or cathode tubes?” Bowen had answered.
Bowen’s figure tensed, a brightness springing into his widening eyes. Neon. Vacuum tubes. Of course!
He almost deafened himself with the shout he released inside his helmet. Galvanized into sudden, furious activity, he raced back to the station.
FOR MORE than twenty minutes, Bowen was busy. When he was finished, a simple yet enigmatic contrivance had taken shape outside, on the landing field before the station. It was in the form of two metal plates fastened to rods of a non-conducting material, and spaced one hundred feet apart. Each of these places were connected in a circuit. In the engine room, Bowen pulled a knife switch. The circuit was closed.
His blood drummed in his ears. Would it work? Anxiously, he replaced his helmet and hurried out of the airlock. A triumphant grin spread over his lips.
It had worked.
Between those two metal plates a great, brilliant red glow now spread. It was a distress signal that couldn’t fail to be noticed by anyone who might be wondering why the beacon on Io had gone dark.
Bowen stood staring up into the sky until his eyes ached and a dizziness in his head announced that the air in his suit was getting bad. He returned to the station, removed his suit, and resumed his eager watch. Only now did he become conscious of the throbbing pain in his seared arm and leg.
Tediously, the time inched away.
And then his pulse quickened. Not one, but two Rangers ships were coming. They had seen the red glow of the signal. They had come in answer.
It seemed hours, years before the Rangers left their ships and entered the airlock. There were more than a dozen of them. In the foyer they flipped back their helmets, staring from Bowen to the glow of the signal.
“What’s wrong, young fellow?” one of them demanded, his sharp gaze taking in the blackened ruin of the airlock foyer door, melted by the blast of the heat-beam. His hair was grayed at the temples, and he wore the stripes of a captain.
Swiftly, Bowen explained. He took the Rangers on a tour of the station to bear out the fantastic truth of his story. Sight of the bodies of the aliens convinced them more than any words.
The eyes of the Rangers hardened, and a cloak of bleak purpose seemed to settle over them. They turned to go. But before they did so, they gave a-stirring, simple salute to the two, covered forms that lay there so quietly on the floor of the control room. Then, replacing their helmets, they began to file from the station.
The Captain paused. His brown hand gripped tightly at Bowen’s arm.
“We’ll get them, kid,” he promised softly, yet terribly grimly. “And we won’t need the Fleet to help us, either.” Then he, too, was gone.
Now that the long minutes of tension and strain were over, Bowen felt exhausted, unutterably weary. He made a futile attempt to clean up this control room, but did not succeed. He fell asleep in one of the chairs, close by the bodies of Searles and Platt. And as he slept, he seemed to feel their presence near him.
IT WAS the piercing drone of the airlock buzzer that awakened Bowen. He hurried down to the foyer.
A group of men in spacesuits stood at the outer door of the airlock, waiting to enter. Though dim in the view-screen, their faces behind the glassite helmets were eager, smiling. A momentary thrill of elation shot through Clay Bowen.
He did not bother with the communicator, but pulled the opening lever at once. The Rangers tramped into the room. Without speaking they removed their heavy metal suits, hanging them upon the prongs which projected from the walls.
A tall, space-burned oldster, with a shock of thick, white hair, swung around to face Bowen. He held out his hand.
“I’m General Price,” he said. “These”—gesturing to the others—“are my men. So you’re Clay Bowen?”
Bowen nodded, feeling himself completely unable to speak.
General Price gripped the young beacon tender’s shoulder. For a moment it seemed that he would not be able to speak, either.
“Captain Randall got them, lad,” he began softly. “He contacted us before the battle began, managed to get a complete report through. His name will go down on the honor roll of the Rangers, along with those of Searles and Platt. You see, Captain Randall and his entire detachment of six vessels were wiped out. We and the rest of the Fleet weren’t in time to help. But the alien ship is in our post on Callisto. There isn’t much of it left.”
“I’m glad, sir,” Bowen said simply. “More glad than I can say in words.”
“We owe it all to you,” General Price reminded. “If it weren’t for your ingenious signalling device, we’d never have known about the aliens until too late. I think I know how you managed to accomplish it, but I’d like to have you explain to my men.”
Bowen moistened his lips, feeling young and terribly awkward under the smiling gaze of the Rangers.
“I’d never have thought of doing it myself if it wasn’t for a remark by Andy Platt,” he began. “He likened the exterior of Io to a vacuum or cathode tube during a conversation. You have all seen these tubes on Earth or Mars in the common form of a neon sign. When I was unable to get a message through to the outpost on Callisto, I remembered what Andy Platt had said.
“Well, there isn’t much to what I did. I just got two aluminum plates from the station for electrodes—anode and cathode—and set them up a hundred feet apart on non-conducting posts. With insulated cable from my supply of repair materials, I connected them to the generators in the engine room. Io’s neon atmosphere is at a low pressure—almost a vacuum—such as we must obtain for cathode tubes to function. When the current was run into the electrodes, a huge, crude neon sign resulted. That’s all!”
“That was enough, lad,” General Price said. “We saw your signal.” He studied Bowen a moment. “You’re a cadet, aren’t you, and have to serve here a year to earn your stars, in addition to another two on flying government junk-heaps before you get your commision?”
“Yes, sir,” Bowen answered, holding his breath against the sudden leaping of his heart.
General Price’s grin was almost youthful.
“I think,” he remarked, “that the the Earth Council will be glad to give you your stars and commission at once—or anything else that you may want, for that matter.”
They were cheering, then, the Rangers in the foyer. Their noise filled the air with deafening volume.
But to Clay Bowen it seemed to come from far, far away. He was back in his thoughts with the girl whose name was Alice. How bright her gray-green eyes were! And then there was Nick Searles’ twisted smile and Andy Platt’s slow drawl. And then he gulped them all away, and things were blurred and hazy before his eyes.
“I’ll have two boys,” he whispered, as though he had settled some momentous decision. “Two, tall fine kids. And I’m going to name them Nick and Andy;”
“Right,” said General Price gently. “Damn fine names, both of them.”
The FIRE GLO
BE
TAPPING a booted foot impatiently, Jaron stood at one end of the huge, octagonal stone fountain which occupied the center of Victory Plaza in the fortress-city of Dorn. A painted mask of stiffened cloth covered his face, this and his long cloak being his only concession to the holiday period reaching its climax on this particular evening.
Under the mask, Jaron muttered in growing displeasure. Where in all the seven hells of Zur was Nela? He had slipped away from important duties at the palace to keep this tryst, If she were playing a joke . . . well, queen of the fortress-city of Harn though she might be, he’d tell her a thing or two!
His amber eyes, peering through slits in the mask, roved restlessly about him. Victory Plaza was filled with swirling groups of torch-bearing celebrants, their masked costumes and unrestrained gaiety rendered weird by the flickering light. Laughter and singing mingled with the blare of horns, rising over the more distant sounds of drums and flutes, which drifted from the numerous inns and taverns beyond the plaza. This was the Carnival of Gods, a three-day period when even the deities were reputed to lay aside their heavenly burdens and indulge in carefree merry-making. And what could mere mortals do but follow suit?
Personally, Jaron did not care for the idea. There was a certain element of danger attached to it. For during the Carnival, Dorn opened its massive gates in hospitality to the rulers of the various other fortress-cities scattered over the surface of Gran. They were accompanied by their courts and by large contingents of armed guards and followed by streams of pilgrims. All came to do homage at the temples of Dorn, since it was believed that Dorn was the birthplace of the gods and thus occupied sacred ground. Perhaps this was the reason why Dorn was the largest, most magnificent, and most powerful of the fortress-cities.
Jaron well knew that Dorn was strategic. He who held it almost literally held Gran—and with a king less benevolent than old Kalar this would certainly have been the case. The rulers of the other fortress-cities were rumored to have secret designs upon Dorn, and the Carnival of Gods offered an ideal opportunity for their fulfillment. During the Carnival, of course, all political quarrels and strife were to be suspended, but among the other rulers were undoubtedly more than one ambitious enough to dare the wrath of the gods by using the Carnival as a time of attack.
The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 6