Triplanetary
you've closed Clio's ether-wall switch. If I take this ray off it for a
second we're sunk. Five floors up, straight ahead down a
corridor--fourth door on right. When you're at the switch you'll feel my
ray on your watch. Snap it up!"
"Right!" and the captain leaped away at a pace to be equaled by few men
of half his years.
Soon he was back, and after Costigan had tested the ether-wall of the
"bridal suite" to make sure that no warning signal from his desk or his
servants could reach Roger within it, the two officers hurried away
toward the room in which their discarded space-armor had been stored.
"Too bad they don't wear uniforms," panted Bradley, short of breath from
the many flights of stairs. "Might have helped some as disguise."
"I doubt it--with so many robots around, they've probably got signals
that we couldn't understand, anyway. If we meet anybody it'll mean a
battle. Hold it!" Peering through walls with his spy-ray, Costigan had
seen two men approaching, blocking an intersecting corridor into which
they must turn. "Two of 'em, a man and a robot--the robot's on your
side. We'll wait here, right at the corner--when they round it, take
'em!" And Costigan put away his goggles in readiness for strife.
All unsuspecting, the two pirates came into view, and as they appeared
the two officers struck. Costigan, on the inside, drove a short, hard
right low into the human pirate's abdomen. The fiercely driven fist sank
to the wrist into the soft tissues and the stricken man collapsed. But
even as the blow landed, Costigan had seen that there was a third enemy,
following close behind the two he had been watching, a pirate who was
even then training a ray projector upon him. Reacting automatically,
Costigan swung his unconscious opponent around in front of him, so that
it was into that insensible body that the vicious ray tore, and not into
his own. Crouching down into the smallest possible compass, he
straightened his powerful body with the lashing force of a mighty steel
spring, hurling the corpse straight at the flaming mouth of the
projector. The weapon crashed to the floor and dead pirate and living
went down in a heap. Upon that heap Costigan hurled himself, feeling for
the enemy's throat. But the pirate had wriggled clear, and countered
with a gouging thrust that would have torn out the eyes of a slower man,
following it up instantly with a savage kick for the groin. No automaton
this, geared and set to perform certain fixed duties with mechanical
precision, but a lithe, strong man in hard training, fighting with every
foul trick known to his murderous ilk.
But Costigan was no tyro in the art of dirty fighting. Few indeed are
the maiming tricks of foul combat unknown to even the rank and file of
the highly efficient Secret Service of the Triplanetary League; and
Costigan, a Sector Chief of that unknown organization, knew them all.
Not for pleasure, sportsmanship, nor million-dollar purses do those
secret agents use Nature's weapons. They come to grips only when it
cannot possibly be avoided, but when they are forced to fight in that
fashion they go into it with but one grim purpose--to kill, and to kill
in the shortest possible space of time. Thus it was that Costigan's
opening soon came. The pirate launched a particularly vicious kick, the
dreaded "coup de sabot," which Costigan avoided by a lightning shift. It
was a slight shift, barely enough to make the kicker miss, and two
powerful hands closed upon that flying foot in midair like the sprung
jaws of a bear-trap. Closed and twisted viciously, in the same fleeting
instant. There was a shriek, smothered as a heavy boot crashed to its
carefully pre-determined mark: the pirate was out, definitely and
permanently.
The struggle had lasted scarcely ten seconds, coming to its close just
as Bradley finished blinding and deafening the robot. Costigan picked up
the projector, again donned his spy-ray goggles, and the two hurried on.
"Nice work, Chief--it must be a gift to rough-house the way you do,"
Bradley exclaimed. "That's why you took the live one?"
"Practice helps some, too! I've been in brawls before, and I'm a lot
younger and maybe some faster than you are," Costigan explained briefly,
penetrant gaze rigidly to the fore as they ran along one corridor after
another.
Several more guards, both living and mechanical, were encountered on the
way, but they were not permitted to offer any opposition. Costigan saw
them first. In the furious beam of the projector of the dead pirate they
were riven into nothingness, and the two officers sped on to the room
which Costigan had located from afar. The three suits of Triplanetary
space armor had been sealed into a cabinet whose doors Costigan
literally blew off with a blast of force, rather than consume time in
tracing the power leads.
"I feel like something now!" Costigan, once more encased in his own
armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with
one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have
any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along--we'll
carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it
up after we've wrecked the works."
Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode toward the
room which housed the pulsating heart of the immense fortress of space.
Guards were encountered, and captains--officers who signaled frantically
to their chief, since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his
command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted silence--but the
enemy beams were impotent against the mighty ether-walls of that armor;
and the pirates, without armor in the security of their own planet as
they were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons.
As they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio's
voice raised in her first and last appeal, an appeal wrung from her
against her will by the extremity of her position.
"Conway! Hurry! Oh, hurry! I can't last much longer--good-bye, dear!" In
the horror-filled tones both men read clearly the girl's dire extremity.
Each saw plainly a happy, care-free young earth girl, upon her first
trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall with an over-brained,
under-conscienced human machine--a super-intelligent but lecherous and
unmoral mechanism of flesh and blood, acknowledging no authority, ruled
by nothing save his own scientific drivings and the almost equally
powerful urges of his desires and passions! She had fought with every
resource at her command. She had wept and pleaded, she had stormed and
raged, she had feigned submission and had played for time--and her
torment had not touched in the slightest degree the merciless and
gloating brain of the being who called himself Roger. Now his
tantalizing, ruthless cat-play was done, the horrible gray-brown face
was close to hers--she wailed her final despairing message to Costigan
and attacked that hideous face with the fury of a tigress.
Costigan bit off a bitter imprecation. "Hold him just a second longer,
sweetheart!" he cried, and the power room door vanished.
Through the great room the two Lewistons swept at full aperture and at
maximum power, two rapidly opening fans of death and destruction. Here
and there a guard, more rapid than his fellows, trained a futile
projector--a projector whose magazine exploded at the touch of that
frightful field of force, liberating instantaneously its thousands upon
thousands of kilowatt-hours of stored-up energy. Through the delicately
adjusted, complex mechanisms the destroying beams tore. At their touch
armatures burned out, high-tension leads volatilized in crashing,
high-voltage sparks, masses of metal smoked and burned in the path of
vast forces now seeking the easiest path to neutralization, delicate
instruments blew up, copper ran in streams like water. As the last
machine subsided into a semi-molten mass of metal the two wreckers, each
grasping a brace, felt themselves become weightless and knew that they
had accomplished the first part of their program.
Costigan leaped for the outer door. His the task to go to Clio's aid....
Bradley would follow more slowly, bringing the girl's armor and taking
care of any possible pursuit. As he sailed through the air he spoke.
"Coming, Clio! All right, girl?" Questioningly, half fearfully.
"All right, Conway." Her voice was almost unrecognizable, broken in
retching agony. "When everything went crazy he ... found out that the
ether-wall was up ... forgot all about me. He shut it off ... and seemed
to go crazy, too ... he is floundering around like a wild man now....
I'm trying to keep ... him from ... going down-stairs."
"Good girl--keep him busy one minute more--he's getting all the warnings
at once and wants to get back to his board. But what's the matter with
you? Did he ... hurt you, after all?"
"Oh, no; not that. But I'm sick--horribly sick. I'm falling.... I'm so
dizzy I can scarcely see ... my head is breaking up into little pieces
... I just _know_ I'm going to die, Conway! Oh ... oh!"
"Oh, is _that_ all!" In his sheer relief that they had been in time,
Costigan did not think of sympathizing with Clio's very real present
distress of mind and body. "I forgot that you're a
ground-gripper--that's just a little touch of space-sickness. It'll wear
off directly.... All right, I'm coming! Let go of him and get as far
away from him as you can!"
He was now in the street. Perhaps two hundred feet distant and a hundred
feet above him was the tower room in which were Clio and Roger. He
sprang directly toward its large window, and as he floated "upward" he
corrected his course and accelerated his pace by firing backward at
various angles with his heavy service pistol, uncaring that at the point
of impact of each of those shells a small blast of destruction erupted.
He missed the window a trifle, but that did not matter--his flaming
Lewiston opened a way for him, partly through the window, partly through
the wall. As he soared through the opening he trained projector and
pistol upon Roger, now almost to the door, noticing as he did so that
Clio was clinging convulsively to a lamp-bracket upon the wall. Door and
wall vanished in the Lewiston's terrific beam, but the pirate stood
unharmed. Neither ravening ray nor explosive shell could harm him--he
had snapped on the protective shield whose generator was always upon his
person.
But Roger, while not exactly a ground-gripper, did not know how to
handle himself without weight; whereas Costigan, given six walls against
which to push, was even more efficient in weightless combat than when
handicapped by the force of gravitation. Keeping his projector upon the
pirate, he seized the first club to hand--a long, slender pedestal of
metal--and launched himself past the pirate chief. With all the momentum
of his mass and velocity and all the power of his mighty right arm he
swung the bar at the pirate's head. That fiercely driven mass of metal
should have taken Roger's head from his shoulders, but it did not. That
shield of force was utterly rigid and impenetrable; the only effect of
the frightful blow was to set him spinning, end over end, like the
flying baton of an acrobatic drum-major. As the spinning form crashed
against the opposite wall of the room, Bradley floated in, carrying
Clio's armor. Without a word the captain loosened the helpless girl's
grip upon the bracket and encased her in the suit. Then, supporting her
at the window, he held his Lewiston upon the captive's head while
Costigan propelled him toward the opening. Both men knew that Roger's
shield of force must be threatened every instant--that if he were
allowed to release it he probably would bring to bear a hand-weapon even