The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (77 page)

The last of the three visitors settled to ground where hoar frost partly whitened the desert’s face. A full power carrier wave spread out from it. In the control room of the
Erebus
a speaker suddenly barked savagely:

“Stan Buckley! I’m here to kill you! Communicate!” A pause, and the same savage words again:

“Stan Buckley! I’m here to kill you! Communicate!”

Esther gasped. She recognized the voice. Rob Torren. Back more than two months before Stan had expected him. The words did not make sense to her. Stan had tried to spare her despair by concealing the fact that Torren’s return would be to kill him, under a compact which her presence here made void.

“Rob!” cried Esther softly into the transmitter. “Rob Torren. It’s Esther calling! Esther Hume!”

An indescribable sound emitted from the speaker. With trembling hands she adjusted the vision receiver. She looked into the taut, drawn, raging features of Rob Torren. He stared at her out of the screen.

“Stan’s asleep, Rob!” cried Esther eagerly. “He didn’t expect you back for a long time yet! You’re wondering how I got here? Oh—”

Laughing a little, joyously, she told of her desperate voyage to be with Stan when he should be tried, and how her drive had been burned out by impinging on the drive of the space skid on which Stan had left the
Stallifer
. Of course she told of her subsequent meeting with Stan.

“There are inhabitants here,” she finished eagerly, “and they’ve been trying to kill us. They attacked tonight and we fought them off. Stan has some hope, I think, of getting the material to repair our drive from the machines he wrecked.”

She was all joy and relief at Torren’s arrival. But his face was ravaged by conflicting emotions, all of them intense and all harrowing. He did not smile. His eyes seemed to burn. The strangeness of his look struck her, suddenly.

“But—what’s the matter, Rob?” she asked. “You look so queer!” Then she added in abrupt, startled doubt. “And Rob! Why did you say you had come back to kill Stan? You were joking, weren’t you?”

He raged at her instantly:

“He coached you, eh? To pretend you didn’t know anything? Trying to make me take you both to safety on a promise of fighting me later? It won’t work! I’ve a line on your wave and I’ll be coming! I’ll be coming fast! Maybe you’ve no weapons, but I have! I’ve a Space Guard one-man ship. I forced the
Stallifer
to dock at Lora Beta and put me ashore! I got this ship to hunt back for Stan, claiming his recapture as my responsibility! I did plan to have him write you a letter before I killed him, but since you know everything now—”

She saw the beginning of an infuriated movement. Then the screen went blank.

After a moment’s frightened irresolution she went to Stan. She woke him, and after the first three words he was sternly alert. He listened, though—his hands clenched—until she was through.

“This sets things up nicely!” he said bitterly. “You didn’t know about him, of course, but—our friends of the grid are concocting weapons to destroy us, and now he’s streaking here along his locator line to blast us with everything a Space Guard ship can carry! He’ll have long range stuff! He can burn us to a crisp if we put a repeller beam on him! We can’t sandblast him! We can’t—”

He stopped, frowning.

“We don’t know how far away he is,” he snapped. “There’s a margin of error in locators on a planet. It might take him just long enough to find us—”

He began to struggle swiftly into a spacesuit. Esther said quickly:

“Wherever you’re going, I’m going too!”

“You’re not!” he said harshly. “You’ll go in the control room with your hands on the beam controls. If some of the local citizens are hiding in those wrecks, you’ll smash them if they jump me! I haven’t so much as a pocket knife! You’ve got to be my weapons while I dig into those wrecks!”

He went swiftly out the airlock with only a cutting torch in his hands. He fairly ran toward the debris of the attacking army of machines. He reached the first. It had been sliced longitudinally in half by a stream of sand particles traveling at fifty miles or better per second, in a stream of air of the same velocity. Nothing could have withstood such an attack. No material substance in the universe could have resisted it. Four-inch plates of steel and foot-thick girders had been cut through like so much dough, the severed edges turned not to liquid but to vapor by the deadly stream.

The whole mechanism of the machine was exposed. The great biting jaws, designed to tear away huge masses of intermingled sand and ice. The tusks to break loose sections for the jaws to handle. The tanks to contain the precious damp material. The machine had not been made for fighting, but it, alone, could have torn the
Erebus
to fragments. With an army of such machines—

Stan clambered into the neatly halved shell with his cutting torch. All about him were small devices; cryptic things; the strictly practical contrivances of a hundred thousand year old civilization. He itched to examine them, but he needed certain bars of allotropic graphite he suspected would be here. They were. The motors which ran the leg movements were motors like those which turned the great slabs. They consisted of slabs of graphite and the metal which slid past them. That was all. Only one special allotrope of graphite makes a motor of such simplicity. Only—

He burdened himself with black, flaky bars, cutting ruthlessly through machinery an engineer would have devoted months to study. He had an even dozen of the bars in his arms when a sudden blast rocked him. He whirled, and saw a small cloud of still incandescent vapor and something which was separating horribly into many steaming pieces. Other things seemed to leap to smother him under their weight. He could not see them save as vague shapes, but he knew they were there.

Another exploded as Esther, in the
Erebus
and watching with the infrared scanner, desperately used the weapon which had never existed before and could not be used anywhere save on this one planet.

Stan ran clumsily for the ship over the drifting, powdery sand. Inhumanly resolute unhuman things leaped after him. He saw the flares as Esther destroyed them. He knew that she was wide-eyed and trembling and sick with horror at what she had to do.

He stumbled into the airlock and dogged it shut behind him. Esther came running to greet him, not shaking and not trembling and not horrified, but with burning eyes and the fiery anger of a Valkyrie.

“They tried to kill you!” she cried fiercely. “They were hiding! They’d have murdered you—”

He put down his bars of allotropic graphite. He reached out to take her in his arms. But—

“Darn these spacesuits!” he said furiously. “You’ll have to wait to be kissed until this job’s finished!”

He tore up the flooring hatch above the little ship’s drive. He jerked off the housing.

“Keep watch!” he called to the control room. “At least one of the machines must be waiting behind the dunes, hoping for a break!”

He worked with frantic haste, shedding his spacesuit by convulsive movements. This should have been the most finicky of fine fitting jobs. To repair a Bowdoin-Hall drive unit by replacing its graphite bars for maximum efficiency is a matter for micrometric precision. But efficiency was not what he wanted, now, but speed. The stolen bars almost fitted. They were vastly unlike the five hundred pound monsters for the grid slabs. They should at least move the ship, and if the ship could be moved—

He had two of them in place and six more to go when the speaker in the control room blared triumphantly.

“Stan Buckley! Tune in! I’m right above your ship! Tune in!”

Stan swore in a sick disgust. Two out of eight was not enough. He was helpless for lack, now, of time. The corrosive hatred that comes of helplessness filled him. He went into the control room and said drearily to Esther:

“Sorry, my dear. Another twenty minutes and you’d have been safe. I think we lose.”

He kissed her, and with fury steadied fingers tuned in the communication plate. Rob Torren grinned furiously at him.

“I thought I’d let you know what’s happening,” said Torren in a voice that was furry with whipped-up rage. “I’m going to go back and report that you were killed resisting arrest. I’m going to melt down the yacht until it could never be identified as the
Erebus
—if anybody ever sees it again! And—maybe you’ll enjoy knowing that I did the things I charged you with, and have the proceeds safely banked away! I faked the evidence that proved it on you. I hoped to have Esther, too, but she’s spoiled that by trying to come and help you! Now—”

“Now,” said Stan coldly, “you’ll stand off a good twenty miles and beam us. You’ll take no chances that we might be able to throw a handful of sand at you! You’ll be so cautious that you won’t even come close to see your success with your own eyes! You’ll read it off on instruments! You’re pretty much afraid of me!”

“Afraid?” raged Rob Torren. “You’ll see!”

The communication screen went blank. Stan leaped to the meteor repeller controls and stared at the vertical vision plate which showed all the sky above.

“Not the shadow of a chance,” he said coldly, “but a beam does make a little glow! if he misses us once—but he won’t—maybe I can get in one blast…”

There was tense silence. Deadly silence. The screen overhead showed a multitude of cold, unwinking stars. One of them winked out and on again.

“I’ll try—” began Stan.

Then the screen seemed to explode into light. Something flared like a nova in the sky. Intolerable brilliance filled a quarter of the screen, and faded. Swiftly. It went out.

“Wh-what was that?” chattered Esther.

Stan drew a deep breath.

“That,” be said softly, “I think it was sixty thousand million horsepower in a power beam. I think our friends the grid-makers have been working on armament to fight us with, and I think they’ve got something quite good! They don’t like strangers. Torren was a stranger, and they got a shot at him, and they took it. Now they’ll get set to come over here after us. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to the drive.”

He returned to the cabin where two out of a necessary eight graphite bars were in place. He worked. Fast. No man ever worked so fast or so fiercely or with such desperately steady hands. In twenty minutes he made the last, the final connection. Just as he dropped the hatch in place, Esther called anxiously:

“More machines coming, Stan! The microphones picked them up!”

“Coming!” he told her briskly. He went to the instrument board and threw switches here and there. “The normal thing,” he said evenly, “would be to lift from the ground here, on landing drive, and go into field drive out of atmosphere. But we don’t do it for two reasons. One is that we have no landing drive. The other is that at normal takeoff acceleration our friends of the grid would take a pot shot at us with the thing they used on Rob Torren. With sixty thousand million horsepower. So—here goes!”

He stabbed a simple push button.

With no perceptible interval and with no sensation of movement, the
Erebus
was out in deep space. The screens showed stars on every side—all the stars of the galaxy. These were not the hostile, immobile, unfriendly stars the first voyagers of space had seen. With the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times a second, the stars moved visibly. The nearer ones moved more swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. The cosmos seemed very small and almost cozy, and the stars mere fireflies and the Rim itself no more than a few miles away.

Stan watched. He said:

“We’re not making much time. Not over six hundred lights, I’d say. But we’ll get there.”

“And—and when we do—”

“Hm,” said Stan. “You can swear Torren said he’d committed the crimes he charged me with and faked the evidence against me. With that testimony, they’ll examine the evidence as they do when there are no witnesses. It’ll fall down. I’ll be cleared.”

“Stan!” said Esther indignantly. “I meant—”

“When I’m cleared,” said Stan. “We’ll get married.”

“That,” admitted Esther, “is what I had in mind.”

He kissed her, and stood watching the moving cosmos critically.

“Our friends the grid-builders have gotten waked up now,” he observed. “They know they’re not the only intelligent race in the universe, and they may not like it. They’re a fretful crew! But they’ll have to be made friends with. And quick, or they might cause trouble. I think I’ll apply to be assigned the task force that will undertake the job. It ought to be interesting! Not a dull moment!”

Esther scowled at him.

“Now,” she protested, “you reduce me to being glad we’re not making our proper speed! Because after you get back—”

“Listen, my dear,” said Stan generously. “I’ll promise to come home from time to time. And when I do I’ll grab you like this, and kiss you like this—” There was an interlude. “And do you think you’ll manage to survive!”

Esther gasped for breath. But she was smiling.

“I—I think I’ll be able to stand it,” she admitted.

“Good!” said Stan. “Now let’s go have some breakfast!”