"That's me," John and Jerry said, with one voice, standing at attention, volunteering, not realizing how well they had been conned by the cool brain of the red-hot alien. Before they really realized what they had become involved in, they were in heatproof suits, stuffing the protesting Chuck into one as well, waving good-bye to Sally and rushing out of the city in a great tractor-treaded vehicle with Lord Prrsi at the wheel.
"We didn't bring much in the way of supplies," Jerry grumbled.
"Either way, this trip won't take long," Lord Prrsi said breezily.
"Gee, thanks," John muttered, and they settled down to a day and a night of uncomfortable boredom. The powerful machine tore across the desert, the untiring Prrsi at the controls, sending up an immense cloud of dust from its treads. When night fell, glaring headlights of piercing actinic light speared through the darkness and their pace never slowed. At noon, on the second day, they raced toward a range of mountains that had been growing steadily before them, and Lord Prrsi braked to a squealing stop at the mouth of a narrow canyon.
"I don't imagine you chaps can feel them, with your rudimentary powers, but I have been fighting mental waves of great intensity for the last couple of hours, attempting to turn me away. Instead, I have followed them to their source, this canyon. I am afraid I must let you out here, for I dare not go on. Take your hopelessly incapacitated friend and proceed. I wish you the best of luck."
"An atomic pistol would be a lot more help," Jerry said ingratiatingly.
"Weapons are forbidden in the valley. To possess them means instant death, I will wait for you here. Farewell,"
Step by hesitant step, the brave Earthmen climbed up through the crumbling scree, leading the Chuck-thing at the end of a leash, It was hard going, and they had to stop to rest many times and suck at the nipples of the water tanks inside their helmets. They neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary, though both were possessed by a feeling of immense dread. A wave of depression against which they had to push physically. But they pushed because they were that kind of men, now having to carry the screeching, brainless Chuck forcefully. Finally, before a sharp turn in the narrow valley, there came a mental blast that almost seared out their synapses, a mental command that said but one thing.
"STOP!"
They stopped, frozen, unable to move, even Chuck paralyzed by the intensity of the command. Then a voice spoke to them, or rather a mental voice spoke within their own minds, and they heard it louder than they had ever heard any sound with their ears.
"LEAVE HERE WHILE YOU ARE STILL ALIVE!"
"We have come this far, we will not turn back," Jerry said staunchly. "And would you mind turning the volume down?" When the voice spoke to them again, it was still loud, but bearable.
"You know that there is no return from this valley of death unless the Test is passed? And few pass it,"
"We know that, but we have come for our friend's sake. If we pass the test, we sort of hoped-"
"No bargains! I will decide what is to be done. Come forward."
Their feet almost did not obey them as they shuffled forward against the mounting wave of mental dread that filled the valley. Around the turn they staggered and stopped, without willing it, below a shelf that lay just in front of the black opening of a cave. They knew it was in that cave, even if the skulls and skeletons scattered on the ground before it were not a dead giveaway.
"I am called Baksheesh, and all who have come here have feared me!"
"Well, here are three more, Mr. Baksheesh," Jerry gasped, knees trembling despite everything he did, chilled and shivering despite the 240-degree temperature outside their suits.
"Are you prepared for the question?"
"We are." John shivered in response.
"Then you are first. You have ten seconds to answer the following. . . ."
"Hey, you didn't mention any time limit before this."
A cold chuckle was his only answer. "Prepare now. We play this game by my rules since it is my game. Ready. What is black and deadly and sits in a tree?"
John tightened his forehead in concentration as the seconds ticked away, gleefully counted off by the murderous Baksheesh. Jerry leaned over and tried to whisper, but a blast of mental energy blew up a boulder next to him.
"None of that or the mind blast blasts right now."
"Sorry, I didn't know coaching was against the rules."
"It is now. Seven . . . eight . . . nine. . . ."
"I have it! A crow with a machine gun."
A wave of miffed mental radiation swept over them and was instantly gone. "Think you're so smart!" the mental voice muttered. "So let's see how well your buddy does on the next one. Five seconds on this one. And miss one question and you all die."
Jerry steeled himself, tightening his muscles and thinking healthy thoughts to clean his brain. "Ready when you are, Baksheesh," he said. And back came the mental blast with the question.
"What looks like a box, smells like a lox – and flies? Five. . . four. . . ." It was counting faster now. "Three . . . two. . ."
"A flying lox box!" Jerry shouted defiantly, and the muttering wave of mental anger in reply told him that he was right.
"That's two out of three, but it's anyone's ball game yet. I'm going to ask your drooling friend there the next question. . . ."
"But you can't! He's not human. His mind has been chopped up by the vile Lortonoi."
"Hmmm, yes, so it has. And a sloppy job too, just like them. Here, I'll lift this mental block, erase that pattern, pour another in here, tap this subconscious memory and drain it into the right lobe. There, he's as good as new, maybe better. Now my question. . . ."
"Hold on," John called out. "We don't know if you have really fixed his brain; you may just be saying that. We'll have to talk to him first." His words were cut off by a bone-chilling cackle of shrill laughter.
"My rules, remember? Now, Chuck-thing, you have one second to answer the following question. Ready now, think. What is the square of the product of 456.78 times 923.45 divided by 65.23 plus 92565.286? The answer?"
"99031.75 is the product to two decimal places, and the square of that number is, dropping the decimal places for the moment, 980713896. Do you want it with the decimal places too?"
A mentally muttered morbid curse was his only answer, and Chuck smiled warmly as his two friends came forward to beat him on the back and welcome him back to sanity.
"I was going to ask you what we were doing here. The last I remember is some torture or other and things getting dim; then, bango, I'm in this valley and somebody asked me that question, and by reflex of course, I put the old brain box to work and dug up the answer. I was startled so it was a good thing it was a simple question."
"That's about enough of the old self-laudatory praise," the voice spoke coldly in their minds. Not only in their minds, but they realized suddenly that they were hearing it with their ears. They looked up at the ledge whence the voice had spoken and recoiled together. For there was Baksheesh.
He was an ancient, gnarled, scratched and generally beat-up native of the planet Haggis, that was obvious. But he was old. Generations of spiders had built webs between his claws until he was almost wrapped in a cocoon. Yet for all his age, the light of a great intelligence burned in his crystalline eyes. Nor was that all. His color. . . .
"White. I know what you are thinking," the thought crackled down at them. "Hideous white like the vile Hagg-Loos, not beautiful and black like the Hagg-Inder. Well, I have news for you. I AM a Hagg-Loos. Ha! You might very well cringe back at that news. But I am above petty politics now. Once I was as human as any other, and as mad as any, but the fortunes of war brought me here, and I crawled into that cave and came to rest over a powerful radioactive source. My madness was cured, and my intelligence soared as I was made immortal by most standards. Including my own, I must add. But to remain immortal I must toast over the radioactives. If I leave the cave, I die, so now I must return. You know my secret, but you will not betray me
, for my wisdom is of the ages. I have come before you to tell you one thing that you must never forget." It rattled its antenna wildly, and the last thought blasted like a hurricane through their minds.
"BEWARE THE KRAKAR!"
They staggered under the mental blast, and when they looked up, the pallid creature had gone, and they were alone among the bones and chitin of the dead.
16
ENIGMA IN SPACE
"Krakar . . . Krakar . . . now where did I hear that before?"
Lord Prrsi muttered to himself, trying to place the transient memory that rattled around inside the chitin of his head. This was at the meeting of the top executives of the Galaxy Rangers, and they were having this first historical meeting in the first-class lounge of the Pleasantville Eagle. Sally, who had been made president of the Ladies' Auxiliary and given a gold brooch with a miniature star on it, was serving drinks while the Rangers discussed the fateful final words spoken by Baksheesh. Sally passed around cigars, and most of the Earthmen lit up, though Jerry was enjoying a joint, and the aliens present either ate theirs or threw them under the chairs when no one was looking.
"I have it!" Lord Prrsi shouted and snapped his claws in excitement, cutting a solid steel lounge chair in half without noticing it. "Somewhere in the transcript from one of the Hagg-Loos prisoners we took when we raided their secret laboratory. Just hold on, chaps, I'll send a mental command to the computer to dig it out and beam it back to me. Won't take long."
John rapped for attention with his whiskey glass, then held it up to Sally for a refill.
"While we're waiting for that thought to come through, let's hear that security report that old squid-head SlugTogath put together on the Lortonoi. You have the floor, Sluggy."
The Garnishee prime minister rose and coughed with two or three of his mouths, then picked up the report with the tentacles on his head and held it before a couple of his close-reading eyes. He coughed again and began.
"This is an amalgamation of all information that could be obtained about our traditional and mentally repulsive enemy, the brain-sucking Lortonoi. Evidence was taken from every race that has fought the Lortonoi, and more evidence tortured out of those who have fought cheek by jowl with these disgusting creatures. The first fact we have uncovered is that no one, not even their allies, has ever seen a Lortonoi. They arrive in their own spaceship and hardly ever leave it, since all instructions and commands are given by mental telepathy. On certain occasions, as in the secret laboratory of the Hagg-Loos, they have made an appearance, but since they arrived in a great armored tank and never left it, this isn't much help either."
"So you've told us what we don't know," John said.
"What do we know?"
"I'm just getting to that part. We know that they have fantastic mental powers which they use only for evil. They appear at many places through the galaxy and aid any race they can either mentally control or which is nasty enough to go along with them. In their travels they seem to have picked up a knowledge of all the weapons and science that are around, so that any race they aid immediately goes to war with any other race nearby. Very nasty. Their goal seems to be complete control of the galaxy for their own evil ends."
"And ours is to crush them for free enterprise, a rigid class system and all the other forms of democracy we love," John shouted, and all present cheered. "Now what about it, Lord Prrsi, you old red-hot scorpion, any word yet from your molasses-clogged computer? Seems pretty slow."
"Really quite fast, Number One. The answer came back within three nanoseconds, but I didn't want to interrupt the pep talk. It seems that while we were questioning one of the technicians, he shouted something like 'The Krakar will get you, ha-ha' before he lapsed into acoma."
"Coma?"
"Understandable. Our questioning can be rather severe at times, but after all, they are only Hagg-Loos, and working class at that."
"Can you get any more out of him?" Jerry asked.
"Maybe even a spot of torture if you have to."
"My dear boy! What on Haggis do you think our normal questioning is? Short of stripping off his chitin and boiling him like a lobster, there is little else we can do. He is still recovering from the last round of questioning, and I sincerely doubt that more of the same will reveal any more than this. Very strong-willed, these blighters, and insane to boot."
"Why don't you try curing his madness?" Sally asked, refilling the glasses, but they went on talking, ignoring her completely. Jerry was holding forth in great detail on Earthly torture methods to see if the Hagg-Inder had missed any when she raised the glass martini jug and dropped it onto his head. Well, this caught their attention a bit, and while she had it, she repeated her question.
"Why don't you try curing the prisoner's insanity and perhaps he will cooperate voluntarily?"
"Bourgeois sentimentality!" Lord Prrsi snorted.
"Did you have to do that?" Jerry said aggrievedly, picking a pickled onion out of his ear.
"I think you might have an idea there, Sally." John rapped again for order. "What about it, Prrsi you old sting-tail monster? Why don't you have your shrinks try to cure this guy, put a metal box around his brain so he doesn't have a relapse, read to him from the Bible, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. . . ."
"Fill his head with that subversive rot!"
"Sure, you can always kill him afterward so the word doesn't spread, but it might work."
"I say, it might indeed. I'll issue an order by thought mail . . . there, it's gone. Work will begin at once."
"All right, then to new business," John said. "Work on our secret Ranger base on Planet X, tenth planet of this sun Sirius, has been completed and we can move our volunteers there so the Hagg-Inder can turn off their air conditioning."
"Well, thank Great Cacodyl!" Lord Prrsi breathed. "I swear I am turning blue-black from the cold and feel galloping pneumonia coming on. Anything below the boiling point of water gives me a positive chill on my liver."
"Save the medical chitchat for later," John said. "Let's get on with this so we can get down to some heavy drinking, and listen, Jerry, that is the third joint in a quarter hour, and your eyes are getting glassy. Can you kindly hold off a bit, huh? So, more business. We sent a spy team in a fast battle cruiser to scout out the star cluster where the Lortonoi headed when they escaped last time. Just for a change we shouldn't go off half-cocked racing around the stars without a bit of look-see first. While we are waiting for their report, we are consolidating our position, building our base, getting more volunteers by capturing slave ships and that kind of thing. It also gives us some time to look into this Krakar thing, which has a very nasty sound to it, before we get involved in more fighting, that is, and it turns out that the Lortonoi are going to give us the Krakar, right in the old you-know-where."
"I'll second that motion," Chuck said. "Krakar must be solved."
The medical teams went to work. Utilizing their great mental skills, as well as some Earthling techniques like aversion therapy, prefrontal lobotomy, shock treatment, dianetic auditing, and the psychoanalytic couch, they did a quick cure on the laboratory technician. As soon as he was sane, he saw the error of his ways and voluntarily told everything he knew. Everything turned out to be something, but not very much: the spatial coordinates of the place where Krakar was supposed to be and the interesting information that whoever controlled Krakar controlled the galaxy.
"Let's go," Jerry shouted, rubbing his hands together. Blast in, full force, take 'em by surprise, atomize the enemy, grab Krakar, and the galaxy is ours!"
"Best not to go off half-cocked," Chuck mused. "Whatever that means."
"I know," Sally said. "A historical expression relating to the early weapons that had a flint and steel and were cocked-"
"Shut up," Jerry hinted. "If you have a better idea, Chuck old man – why, let us hear it."
"I think we ought to have a quick scout first to see what we are getting into and to find out maybe what Krakar is. If
it could be grabbed by force that easily, you can bet the Lortonoi would have done it long before this. Just us Earthmen, and Sally along for cooking, and we shouldn't be away more than a day or two."
"Great, Chuck," John agreed. "Sort of a holiday, and we deserve it."
"And I deserve permanent KP?" Sally asked, but no one was listening.
Soon the faithful Pleasantville Eagle was ready and rarin' to go. Fuel tanks filled, oxygen brimming over, guns loaded, bar restocked. With Jerry at the controls they made great ten-light-year leaps toward their destination. There was a newly mounted electronic superscope in the ship's nose that threw a highly magnified picture onto a screen, and Chuck was at the controls.
"Nothing," he mused. "Yet we are almost to the center of the star cluster where Krakar is supposed to be. Are you sure we haven't got the wrong figures or something?"
"Negative," John said, going through the tech reports.
"We have carefully plotted the spatial directions eight ways from Sunday and to one hundred and thirteen decimal places. Krakar has to be near here somewheres. I tell you what, make another jump, a teensy jump, maybe just a couple of light-years this time, no more than 1,671,321,600,000 nautical miles, which is two lightyears."
"Here we go."
They jumped – and instantly every alarm in the ship blasted an earsplitting cacophony as they appeared almost in the shadow of a fantastically huge space battleship that was at least a mile long. Widemouthed gunports were ranged the length of its deadly gray metal hide, and it reeked of an overpowering air of efficient destruction. Jerry jabbed at the button that would jump them out of there, but before his thumb could touch it, mighty magnet beams locked onto the great form of the 747, a mosquito compared to an eagle now, and instantly whisked it up against the pocked metal skin of the ship. Paralyzer rays flooded the ship, and they could not move. At the same moment a jointed metal tube shot out from the battleship, and a device on the end, very much resembling an electric can opener, buzzed noisily in a circle, and a section of hull fell clanging inside the plane. Zombie rays must have been operating as well because they all stood, despite their every effort to resist, and they marched slowly into the cabin to stand ranked before the ragged opening. Heavy footsteps clumped down the tube toward them, and their hands all flashed up to their temples in a snappy salute.
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers Page 14