by Perry Rhodan
The voice fell silent. The clearer Tiffs mind became the more he became convinced that he had really not heard a voice at all but that his brain had received a telepathic message. This was the reason he couldn't recognize the language: no words had been spoken; he had received thought-impulses which were not limited by the restrictions of spoken language.
Tiff tried to remember what happened. There was the short oblique corridor, the room full of instruments, the row of concave mirrors—and then the stunning blow.
Tiff was reminded of the time when he felt a similar if less violent hit when he followed the Honos during the night in the basin and caught up with them near the wall.
What was it? A paralyzing weapon?
An adversary able to produce such sophisticated toxins as Argonin was also bound to possess nerve weapons to which he attributed his paralysis.
All he could move were his eyelids. He studied the room where he found himself—or rather the sector he could see, from his position, which was very little; but he determined that he was lying in a small low chamber. He was unable to tell how far the chamber stretched behind him since it was outside his field of vision. The next object his eyes caught terrified him—3 shimmering concave mirrors hanging where the wall of the chamber joined the ceiling exactly in front of him. The mirrors were inclined in such a way that one of them shone straight into Tiffs face.
It took Tiff awhile to digest their import; the single shock dealt by the radiation from the big concave mirrors in the circular room was insufficient to keep the prisoners immobilized for an extended period. To secure their prisoners permanently the Gods had to maintain the influence on their nerves.
Break those mirrors up there and everything will be all right again,Tiff concluded. However he was not even able to stir his head, let alone get up and carry out his thoughts.
Three mirrors, Tiff kept thinkingthis means—
He tried instinctively to move his head again but had no more luck than the first time.
Tiff figured that Halligan and O'Keefe had to be nearby, judging from the presence of the 3 mirrors, unless there were more such rooms and the Gods kept the prisoners separated.
Tiff racked his brains how to solve the problem. Finally the question was answered in an unexpected manner. He heard a rasping noise in his helmet radio like the scraping of a saw, followed by a sharp hissing whistle and then something that sounded like "bah".
Finally a voice stammered slowly and awkwardly: "S-s-ssir...?"
Tiff wanted to answer but his tongue, jaw and vocal chords obeyed as little as his other muscles; he
remained mute.
"S-s-sir...?" the voice asked a second time, now already a little more fluently. It was without a doubt O'Keefe's voice.
To his surprise O'Keefe seemed to realize the situation Tiff was in. He said: "S-sir... I know what... it did to you. I was a little... luckier. I shot the last moment at the... damn mirror... didn't catch such a severe shock. Am still able to move."
Good old boy O'Keefe, Tiff thought;but why doesn't he get up and smash the mirrors if he still can move?
O'Keefe's talking became more articulate the longer he spoke. "The damn... Gods... have locked us up in here. Arms and transmitter... everything is still here... They think... we're all paralyzed. I can see your face, sir. Do you want me to shoot up the mirrors? If yes, close your eyes twice. Or can't you move your eyes either?"
O'Keefe, you old dogface,Tiff thought enthusiastically, closing his eyes twice.
"OK," O'Keefe groaned. "I got you!"
Tiff heard a variety of noises. He thought he heard O'Keefe turning to his side and slowly reaching for something lying farther away. He moaned continuously while swearing under his breath. Finally he panted: "... oooh... aaah... I've got it. Wait a minute, sir!"
The muzzle of a thermo-beamer emerged at the extreme right edge of Tiffs restricted field of sight and he narrowed his eyes. O'Keefe groaned once more as if it were a great effort to pull the trigger. Then he blasted away.
The 3 mirrors were devastated with blinding light from one second to the next. Steaming liquid metal dripped from the ceiling and splashed on the floor.
The climate control of Tiff's spacesuit started with a click. He felt as if an oppressive load had been lifted from him when the mirrors were consumed by the blaze but his attempts to move were still stymied as before.
O'Keefe was aware of his troubles. "Don't think he panted, "that your lame state is all over at once. It takes awhile."
O'Keefe hit upon the idea to inform the Titan immediately. Tiff was happy to see that he crawled with much grunting to the transmitter, switched it on and sent the somewhat incoherent message Rhodan received just in time.
After that was done O'Keefe returned to the pit at which one of the 3 mirrors had been focused, and rested.
Tiff tried to anticipate the next turn of events. He was anxious to restore the resilience of his nerves again and concentrated for a few minutes on the reaction of his right arm. Suddenly he let the dammed up potential energy of his brain flow into an explosive command:
Bend the right arm!
And the arm moved, not as much as Tiff had wished, but it moved.
Tiff continued relentlessly and after awhile he was able to manipulate his right arm in obedience to his will. ,The left arm began to function much quicker. Then he trained his legs and finally his mouth, tongue and vocal chords.
An hour and a half after he woke up he was able to utter his first two words: "Good job...!" which was meant to praise O'Keefe.
Then he rose, each movement causing him great pain. If his vocal chords had been in better shape he would have screamed. He staggered past Halligan's motionless figure to the place where the Gods had deposited their weapons in the mistaken belief that their captives would never be able to use them again.
He picked up his disintegrator but the strain was so great he had to sit down again as soon as he held the weapon in his arms.
Tiff was baffled why the Gods failed to take action. Surely they must have noticed that the hollow mirrors had been destroyed. Why did they neglect to get their prisoners back under control?
Part of the answer probably was that their antagonists knew the long-lasting effect of the shock treatment and felt no need for urgency.
The other part of the answer could not be known by Tiff. At this very moment the Gods had to worry about a far more dangerous intruder than the 3 prisoners, a resolute, swift and powerful force advancing with a plethora of extraordinary fighting equipment toward their base.
Perry Rhodan and his 500 men.
• • •
The procurement of the nets had required an hour and a half and to reach the valley basin with the carplanes took 2 more.
There they first removed those poisoned by the Argonin from the basin and sent them on their way to the Titan, which caused a delay of 30 minutes.
It took only 10 more minutes to locate the entrance to the subterranean stronghold. Rhodan ordered the mountain walls of the basin razed by disintegrators. What remained was a wall 50 feet farther back, exposing a dark hole which led down into the rocks.
At this moment the robot flies launched their first attack. However they were caught in the fine mesh of the nets draped around the helmets and spacesuits of the men. The flies lost their energy and fell harmlessly to the ground, where they remained till their energy was restored again by the positronic.
By that time Rhodan's 500 men were already deep inside the tunnel.
• • •
It would have taken Halligan much longer to get back on his feet if O'Keefe wouldn't have made him so furious with his ribbing. "You lame duck will still be lying here a week from now...!"
Halligan shot up like a bolt from the floor in an astonishing performance, staggered to his feet and lurched with raised fists toward O'Keefe. Shortly before he reached his tormenter his abruptly acquired strength left him and he fell ignominiously to his knees.
"You see,
now you got the idea," O'Keefe laughed.
Tiff couldn't help it: the sight evoked his smile. And it distracted his attention long enough so that he failed to see when a section of the wall on the left side of the chamber started to slide back. O'Keefe was much too busy having fun with Halligan to notice it either. When Tiff finally caught on, the opening was already 3 feet wide.
He managed to utter an inarticulate cry when he saw a metallic figure come through the wall but it was enough to alert O'Keefe.
Tiff threw himself backward to the floor and hit it so hard that he had trouble lining up his disintegrator, while O'Keefe jumped to the side to protect the helpless Halligan. His sudden movement disturbed the huge robot, which had already raised his weapon arm.
O'Keefe went down to the floor on one knee and fired. He couldn't miss his target. Before the robot was able to swivel its arm in his direction the beam of O'Keefe's thermo-gun blasted it apart and spattered the molten metal in all directions.
As the experienced close-combat fighter O'Keefe was, he dashed forward and crouched at the side of the open door. It was amazing how well his muscles already performed.
Spurred by O'Keefe's bravado, Halligan rose once more, grabbed his weapon and crawled to the other side of the door. O'Keefe saw him coming and growled: "I didn't mean to get you up, old boy. Lie down and rest a little! I can handle it by myself."
"That's what you think," Halligan grunted, nearly choking on his words.
O'Keefe shrugged his shoulders and cautiously stuck out his head through the door to see what was behind it. "There's a corridor out there," he reported, "30 feet long on both sides and the ends are closed. No more robots in sight."
"Where did the robot come from?" Tiff asked.
O'Keefe looked at the rubble of the fighting machine. "I'd say from the right-hand side."
"Alright," Tiff groaned, "let's go to the right. The Gods seem to have stopped playing around with the robot flies; now they're going all out with deadly weapons."
It was a pretty tired bunch that shuffled down the corridor, with the exception of O'Keefe who had
meanwhile recovered completely. The closed end of the corridor didn't present much of an obstacle. O'Keefe walked a few steps up and down near the end and the wall slid to the side. He was so overwhelmed by the exposed view that he momentarily dropped to his knees.
Tiff swerved to the side as quickly as he could and Halligan flung himself against the wall. "Use your disintegrators!" O'Keefe shouted. "If I shoot with the thermo-beamer we'll never get through here." The room behind the door stretched very far back. The subdued light revealed shimmering rows of
stationary metallic figures lined up in a regular order as if waiting for something. Robots! Hundreds of robots! Tiff decided without the slightest hesitance. The robots were not activated. The Gods did not yet know that their 3 prisoners were standing at this door and the robots had up to now received no orders to go into, action.
Halligan had already raised his weapon. "Fan your fire!" Tiff shouted, suddenly gripped by a fighting fury that wiped out the last twinges of pain lingering from the shock treatment.
The trio marched into the room with O'Keefe in the middle. The robots stood stock-still and let
themselves be slaughtered without putting up any resistance. Tiff estimated their number at 500. It seemed to take an eternity to finish off the entire robot army although they had spent no more than 15 minutes on the job.
Clouds of metallic vapors and dust swirled and glittered in the air. By the time the green beam of the disintegrator had dissolved the last robot, they had reached the far end of the room.
"Thank heavens!" O'Keefe sighed with relief. "I thought they'd pounce on us any moment." Tiff's zeal permitted no rest. He walked along the rear wall and found the door leading out of the room exactly opposite from the one through which they had entered.
The door opened to another room illuminated by the same subdued light but not as large as the place where the robots had waited.
Tiff screamed with delight "Now we're getting somewhere, fellows! This is a control room!" It was unmistakable. Wide control panels covered the walls, interspersed with oscillograph- and picto-screens. A multitude of instruments and aggregates were humming softly.
But no trace of the Gods!
Tiff stormed ahead. The next door opened before him and he ran into another hallway, O'Keefe and
Halligan following on his heels.
The hallway spread out and grew into a tremendous hall at whose center the outline of a small cylinder-shaped rocketship could be more guessed than seen in the weak light.
Tiff suddenly caught sight of 3 long-legged figures in colorful cloaks running to the rocketship which was apparently ready to lift off.
"The Gods!" O'Keefe cried out jubilantly. "The Gods are taking it on the lam!" He kneeled down and carefully drew a bead with his thermo-beamer.
"We want them alive!" Tiff admonished.
O'Keefe conceded and started shooting. First he drew a glowing line along the 3 fleeing figures, forcing them to the left. Then he drew a second line past their left side, throwing them into confusion and causing one of them to stumble. He fell down but quickly got up again. The 2 others had scrambled ahead of him.
O'Keefe increased the intensity of his fire and caused the rocky ground near the fugitives to melt. They tried to escape to the opposite side but O'Keefe methodically surrounded them with a circle of fire.
Tiff saw them collapse one by one as the heat rendered them unconscious. With a wary look at the rocketship he wanted to run over to the fallen men when the hall was suddenly filled by a thunderous roar. The rocketship rose in a cloud of dust, hovered for a moment suspended in the air and shot up to the ceiling of the hall. Tiff saw what he had failed to notice before: a broad fissure gaped in the ceiling through which the red light penetrated. There was no artificial light source as Tiff had assumed at first.
The rocket disappeared through the crack with almost unbearable thunder, raising a storm of hurricane proportions inside the hall which slowly ebbed away along the walls.
O'Keefe cautiously lifted himself up and stared at the 3 motionless figures. "That monster!" O'Keefe gnashed his teeth in frustrated fury.
Tiff understood why he was outraged. The 3 helpless men had been caught in the wake of the rocket engine, which used the propulsion of highly accelerated particle streams like all rockets in the Great Empire.
"The poor devils!" O'Keefe mumbled, perturbed; "they're more radioactive than a lump of lead after 2 years in a reactor."
They went over to the 3 Gods who were lying as if asleep. There was no longer any need for haste. When the fugitives fainted they had closed their eyes. Nobody could tell by looking at them how badly they were contaminated by radioactivity.
O'Keefe and Halligan turned the trio on their back. They were Nathan's erstwhile companions—the 3 Honos who had shown Maj. Chaney the way to the abandoned village.
There was a sudden commotion at the entrance to the hall. Tiff was startled. "What's going on?"
"Don't worry!" Halligan calmed him. "It's only the Boss!"
Perry Rhodan surged into the hall, leading 50 men.
7/ ENTER: THE ARAS
It took 10 days to search the subterranean fortress from top to bottom. Then they knew that there were no more 'Gods' present on Honur.
The little rocketship had been tracked by the Ganymede and was shot down after it had been vainly warned 3 times. The sole occupant didn't survive the blast. He turned out to be Nathan, as had been suspected all along.
The underground base served as the inspection established, mainly as a production facility for Argonin. The Nonues were bred in 3 vast domes under artificial conditions that imitated the world outside in all details. The grass with which they were fed had been especially treated and the little animals produced the virulent toxin from their fodder.
There were also facilities for extracting the surplus poison from 100,000 Nonues in a f
ew hours and for filling it in ampoules. The entire operation was fully automatic and the base required no more than 4 men for supervision.
These 4 men were all dead and it was too late to pry the secret from them of why they had played this often-grotesque game of confusion and deception.
But there was no paucity of pure conjectures, such as the theory Rhodan began to expound: "Despite their elaborate installations they were mortally afraid of us. They endeavored to eliminate the crew of the Titan step by step, forced the pilots of the 3 Gazelles to ditch their ships and tried to lead our land-water-air mobile team to disaster. Before that they evacuated all real Honos and left a track from the deserted village into the mountain gorge to lure our men where they wanted them.
"Meanwhile we've also found the tracked vehicle. It's 20 feet long, very flexible and holds the inhabitants of a village of about 20 men. If we'd investigate the other villages we'd find the same tracks although perhaps not as distinct.
"After the attempt to subdue Maj. Chaney's group with an attack with robot flies miscarried because of Chaney's circumspection, they staged their reunion with Tifflor's team in order to mollify his suspicions. Subsequently they led him and some of his men into the valley basin where they used their trick with the flies again when Chaney had begun to doubt their existence. The fact that they themselves took off before that proves 2 points: firstly, they're not immune to Argonin and secondly, they don't have the antidote available here on Honur. Otherwise they'd not have aroused premature suspicion by their flight.
"In any case this is where our special plan came in. I had already considered this contingency among a number of others and had given the necessary instructions to Lt. Tifflor. It was a lucky accident that 2 other sergeants beside himself escaped the injuries and remained fit.
"The 3 men infiltrated the base and you already know the rest of the story. However it's puzzling that it was relatively easy for them to break through to the 'Gods' themselves. I'd guess that the explanation for this lies in the fact that the 'Gods' have not yet been able to take our true measure. They thought they could rely on their technical superiority, especially as they must have felt they were bothered by only 3 intruders, who had been stunned by a nervous shock.