by Paul Kenyon
Penelope and Skytop exchanged glances. Sumo! They must have caught Tommy Sumo!
There was a commotion at the curving wall of the dome, some fifty or sixty yards away. She squinted through the shadows around the door there. A Chinese soldier came through it. Two more soldiers emerged, escorting a naked man.
"No, it can't be!" Inga exclaimed.
It was Omogoy. The big Mongol was weighted down with leg and wrist shackles. A free length of chain dangled from an iron collar around his neck. Penelope wondered why they weren't leading him by it. Omogoy was being strangely docile.
As he came closer, she saw why. There was a ring piercing his nose. The soldier in front was leading him by a cord, as if he were a trained bear.
"We caught him and three companions two days ago," Major Sung said. "They were wandering around the lower slopes. The rest of them evidently died of exposure. They claimed to be a hunting band who lost their way. The first man I questioned told me the truth in less than an hour. The other two added nothing substantial, despite my finest efforts. I saved the big one for last."
Omogoy stood there sullenly, his hairless body bulging with muscles. He looked into the cage. When Penelope caught his eyes, he showed no reaction.
"You should be happy to see him die," Sung said. "He tried to kill you and your friends. And I understand that his men raped you."
"I'm not fond of him," Penelope said. "But why not kill him quickly and have done with ii? You won't get any additional information from him."
The major's codfish lips stretched. A gold tooth glittered somewhere in the slit. "I'm not after information. I'm after pleasure. It will be a relief not to have to ask a lot of stupid questions this time."
"You're a piece of filth, Major."
The lips stretched further. "I'll remember that when I'm working on you."
The soldier leading Omogoy jerked at the string. Omogoy winced with pain and ambled obediently toward the drum. One of the other soldiers prodded him in the testicles with a rifle barrel.
They stretched him, spread-eagled, over the top of the drum, fastening the leg, arm and neck chains. Omogoy waited dumbly. Major Sung sauntered over and tugged and prodded at the Mongol, arranging the position of his body to his liking. He cocked his head like a display artist, then seated himself at the console.
All of a sudden the dome was bright. Major Sung liked to see what he was doing. He pulled a switch and waited for the accumulators to warm up. He studied something that looked like an anatomy chart.
At last he moved his fingers over the controls. A fine red line stretched through the dome, visible even under the bright fights. There was a tiny sizzling sound. Omogoy twitched, but kept silent.
Major Sung walked over and inspected the spread-eagled man. He seemed to have trouble finding what he was looking for, then he gave a little grunt of satisfaction.
"The laser drilled a pinpoint hole through the tibia," he announced. "It was fine as a hair. It went through muscle, bone and came out at the shin. You can just barely see a little red spot there. It isn't bleeding, because the heat of the laser cauterized it."
"Major Sung," Penelope said, "unless you stop this, I promise you that you'll be dead before the sun rises."
"My dear lady, I have no intention of allowing you within six feet of me. I understood what I saw when you went for Professor Thing, even if he didn't. Those were the moves of a superbly efficient killing machine."
He fiddled with the console. A thread of light jumped out of Omogoy's belly button. He gave a little grunt of surprise.
"That was canted to avoid the spine," Major Sung said. "I don't want him to lose sensation in the lower part of his body. I also avoided the bladder, the large forked arteries and other structures. Mainly, I penetrated several loops of small intestine. I imagine Omogoy has a bit of a bellyache right now."
"You bastard!" Skytop yelled, rattling the bars.
The next thing the major did was to slice a microtome layer of skin off Omogoy's cheek. It left a reddish patch.
"No worse than a mild sunburn," he said, "but we'll progress gradually."
It took three hours for him to butcher the Mongol. The screams had been horrible until he burned out the larynx. In the end, there was nothing but a red blob lying there, slices of flesh surrounding it like roast beef. The limbs had been amputated and cauterized. The head was an oozing, featureless ball.
What was worse, the blob was alive. Penelope could see the twitching movements.
"Kill him, for God's sake!" she shouted.
Major Sung smiled lazily. "I think I will," he said. "It will add an extra touch of enjoyment to have you remember it when I don't kill you."
He punched the console. The thread of laser light moved in a short arc. It sliced across Omogoy's neck, iron collar and all. The head rolled a couple of inches. The twitching stopped.
"If Coin doesn't kill you, I will," Wharton said quietly.
Major Sung seemed not to have heard. He yawned, and came out from behind the console. He folded up the anatomy chart.
"You'll be locked up separately," he said. "I don't trust you together. You'll be taken out in the cage when Professor Thing is ready to burn up the American spaceship." He fixed Penelope with an oily leer. "Unless I can persuade him to let me have you before then."
* * *
A flickering red glow shone through the judas hole. There was an unpleasant metallic smell in the air. The underground cell was stifling hot from the industrial process taking place on the other side of the wall.
The Baroness stirred in her sleep. She was lying on the stone floor in her bra and tricot panties, the white thermal suit rolled up for a pillow under her head.
An instant later she was fully awake. There was a sound out there. She opened her eyes cautiously, without moving, and looked at the judas hole. There was no one there. She sprang to her feet and glided silently to the door. Standing on tiptoe, she peeped outside.
Her two guards were talking to a newcomer. The three of them were silhouetted against the red haze of the enormous vat of molten ruby material. The third soldier was showing her guards a piece of paper: a pass or order of some kind. He wasn't armed, so this wasn't a change of guard. All she could tell from the outline of his figure was that he was wearing sunglasses, like the two guards and half the soldiers she'd seen. Sunglasses were in style around here. They were all imitating Professor Thing, the way so many Nazis had imitated Hitler's mustache.
They were arguing. The Baroness caught the name of Major Sung several times. Her flesh crawled. Any kind of message from Major Sung was bound to be bad news.
After a lot of head shaking and arm waving, some sort of decision was reached. The two guards headed toward her door, unslinging their rifles. The newcomer waited behind, tapping his foot impatiently.
She shot back to her improvised pillow and pretended to be asleep again. Perhaps she could get them to come into the cell after her. Or, with luck, reach the door in the fraction of a second after they unlocked the bolt, before they stepped back out of range. She'd chosen her sleeping spot carefully, measuring distances.
But they'd been briefed too well by Major Sung. One of the soldiers looked through the judas hole, just back out of reach of her forearm. He shouted at her.
"Hsing, hsing!"
It was no use. He wasn't going to open the door until she moved to the far wall. She shrugged and picked up the camouflage suit. She didn't put it on.
There were at least four ways she could use it as a weapon if she got the chance.
She heard the bolt slide back. A voice shouted, "Lai, lai!"
She moved to the door and pushed it open. They waited far back, giving her a wide berth. They were at least fifteen feet apart. Even if she could nail one, the other would shoot before she could reach him.
The one she called Ugly because of his squashed nose and bad complexion motioned angrily with his gun. He wanted her to put on the thermal suit. It was offensive to the morality of the n
ew China to have a half-naked western woman walking through the corridors. She pretended not to understand.
She padded barefoot ahead of them, feeling the heat of the crucible. It bulked over her head like a giant's bowl, bubbling with its crimson gruel. They'd have to pass by it — not too close; there was a guard rail around it, and a metal catwalk above leading into other parts of the observatory complex. She craned her neck, fascinated. There was a massive industrial motor, the size of a truck, suspended from overhead trolley rails above the vat. A huge telephone-pole-sized rod projected toward the vat, rotating slowly. The rod was literally pulling a huge glob of red taffy out of the vat. It seemed incredible that it could be suspended there. You expected it to fall back into the crucible with a splash.
She shuddered. Any such splash would burn her alive where she stood.
She looked back at the soldiers. The nearer one was at least ten feet behind her. He'd slowed down when she had, careful not to catch up. The other two were a dozen feet behind him, conversing as they walked. The shimmering red fight fell on their faces.
She walked on. She knew what she had to do now.
She waited for the telltale sound. It would have to come any moment now. It came. It was nothing more than a boot scraping across the floor, a faint slap like a single handclap.
Instantly she whirled like a ballerina, leaning far outward to add to her reach. One sleeve of the thermal suit was in her hand. The rest of the suit whipped in an arc, the heavy boots attached to the ankles giving it weight.
Ugly, the guard, had turned his head for a split second to see what was going on behind him. The legs of the thermal suit caught him at the neck. The boots kept going, wrapping the legs around his throat.
She jerked him toward her. Her leg came up and forward in a flat-footed savate kick. The bony club of the heel caught him in the lower belly. All the force of his momentum toward her was added to her own vicious kick. She could feel the shook all the way to her spine. It must have ruptured his bladder and the lower portion of his small intestine. The massive shock turned him into jelly. She finished him off by breaking his neck with the heel of her hand.
Further beyond, Sumo was just lowering the other guard to the floor. His head was lolling in a way that meant his neck was broken.
"I had to take a chance that you'd recognized me," Sumo said. "I figured you'd be waiting for me to make my move."
"Thanks, Tommy," she said. "What was that piece of paper you showed them?"
"I don't know. I took it off the bulletin board in the dormitory. I only speak Chinese. I can't read it. But neither could they."
She laughed. "It was supposed to be an order from Major Sung?"
"That was the idea."
Swiftly she told him about Professor Thing's plan to murder the three Apollo astronauts when they docked with the Russians.
"We've got to stop it, Tommy."
He looked worried. "I don't know where they're keeping Skytop and Wharton and Inga. There wouldn't be time to spring them anyway. We've got maybe thirty minutes. We've got to do it on our own."
"Why thirty minutes, Tommy?"
"It's just about sunrise. You probably lost track down here. The night shift at the observatory just went off duty. They're not making daylight observations. But the visiting PLA units will be moving out right after their breakfast. There're going to be a lot of people moving around then."
"We don't have our explosives. It's going to be awfully hard to do serious damage to something as big as that telescope. Most of it can be repaired. Except the mirror. You don't get three-hundred-inch mirrors at the hardware store."
He shook his head. "You'd have to work at it with a sledge hammer. That's a massive piece of superhard glass. And then you'd only ruin it for observation. You'd spoil his hobby. But he could use any small segment of the curvature for focusing his laser beam."
"Tommy, I have an idea." She told him about the arrangement of laser reflectors that were placed at the top of the telescope. "Will it work?"
He took off his sunglasses and grinned at her. "You bet it will!"
"Let's get up there!"
She stepped over the body of the man she'd killed and started for the iron steps leading up. There was a sound high above her. She looked up at the catwalk.
Major Sung was standing there. He leaned over the rail, taking in the dead bodies, the half-naked woman standing over them.
Abruptly he turned, running across the catwalk for a door at the far end.
Sumo grabbed for a rifle.
"No, Tommy! A shot would bring the whole place down on us!"
The catwalk spanned the whole vast chamber. The only way up was a ladder far behind Major Sung, in a direction opposite to his goal. There was no way to intercept him in time.
She knelt and unwrapped her thermal suit from around the dead guard's neck. She held it in one hand by the sleeves and began swinging it in circles around her head like a lasso.
Major Sung was halfway across, just over the seething cauldron. Above him the suspended machinery stirred the giant swizzle stick poking into the vat.
The Baroness released the sleeves. The thermal suit flew high in the air, spinning around by the weight of the boots.
It came in low, under the rail, and caught Major Sung around the ankles. He fell like a roped steer. The momentum of his rush carried him forward. His hands flailed for balance.
He tumbled over the rail. Somehow he grabbed the enormous rod. But it was polished crystal, the seed rod for the ruby. He began slipping downward. Somehow he got his legs free and wrapped them around the pole. The thermal suit dangled from one ankle and fell toward the vat.
It burst into flame before it touched the ruby surface.
Major Sung cast a despairing glance downward and tried to keep himself from slipping. But the rod was hot. And it was rotating. The Baroness could see smoke curling up from Sung's crotch and inner thighs, and the sleeves of his jacket where they touched the rod. His hands must be broiled. But he hung on. He had no alternative. His face contorted in agony.
Slowly, inexorably, he slid down the rod. His boots touched the great blob of taffylike crystal and disappeared into it. Sung screamed. The Baroness didn't mind. Screams were nothing unusual around here.
Major Sung slid down some more. His body disappeared to the waist. There couldn't have been anything left of the lower half of his body. It would have melted, incinerated, turned to ashes. But the arms still clung to the pole. The face worked, screaming in a few stubborn seconds of remaining life.
Then the arms let go. The Baroness could see their undersides, burned away to the bone. Sung's torso, what remained of it, fell into the fiery red lava and disappeared.
Something was happening up there. His body had detached the growing boule of ruby. It wobbled like a tall pyramid of jelly. The tip softened and collapsed. The boule turned gooey and sank back into the glowing slush in the crucible.
It had all taken about a minute.
They headed for the iron ladder. On the way, the Baroness took a moment to slip through the guard rail around the crucible and open a valve. By the time they reached the catwalk, the molten ruby material had poured in a huge gloppy mess over the floor, burying the machinery around the vat.
"Ruby's one of the hardest materials in the world," Sumo said happily. "When that hardens, it hardens for good. They'll never be able to use this apparatus again."
She tossed her head. "It's too expensive a grave for Major Sung."
The door Sung had been trying to reach led to a small private elevator that took them directly to the observatory floor. They stepped into a dome that was beginning to brighten with the first rays of the sun.
Sumo said, "There's no time to calculate reflection angles. You'll have to stay down here and operate the laser. Turn it on for just a second when I'm ready."
He began the long climb up the dome, shinnying like a monkey up the crane track that curved over the top of the dome and down the side. He dan
gled from the hook of the big crane, just at the rim of the telescope cage, no more than a yard from the prime focus. He waved his hand in a signal.
The Baroness had been trying to make sense out of the control console while he climbed. She adjusted dials and threw a switch, knowing that she stood a good chance of cooking Sumo alive.
The ruby light flashed. She saw it bounce off the big mirror and up the tube. It made a bright shaft a bare twelve inches from Sumo's head. He gave her a sign with a circled thumb and forefinger, and she turned it off. Sumo removed his sunglasses and went to work. It took him only a few minutes.
She waited for him at the bottom of the crane track. He was just dropping lightly to the floor when a blue tide poured into the dome. It was Major Sung's security force, dozens of them. Sticking up out of the middle of them was the tall red figure of Professor Thing.
The Baroness and Sumo stayed where they were. The blue tide engulfed them. There were hands all over them, gripping them. A dozen gun barrels were pushed into their faces.
Tears rolled down Professor Thing's left cheek. The pink coral tree pulsed in his dead-white face. "You've ruined my crystal-growing apparatus!" he choked.
She looked coolly up at him. "Major Sung needed a bath."
He stood there for a moment, breathing hard, the white face and the black pools of the sunglasses looking like a skull. He spoke at last.
"You'll join your American astronauts in death. I'm going to impale you on a spear one hundred and ten miles long."
19
The ruby rod felt cold between her legs. It was as thick around as a tree trunk and hard as polished marble. They'd wrapped ropes around her legs from thigh to ankle, keeping her rigidly in position. It was like straddling some crazy bar stool, a hundred and fifty feet high.
She was leaning backward at a thirty-degree angle, her torso supported by three taut guy lines. When they opened the dome slot and tilted the telescope toward the vertical, she'd be sitting as erect as a schoolgirl atop the ruby column. She looked down past her legs and saw the long ruby pole, circled by rings of flash tubes, stretching within the telescope cage all the way to the glinting mirror far below.