The Affair of the Brains Part 14

"That one," he snapped. "We'll have two chances, the _Scorpion_ and the port, but the port's safest; we could never get the whole ship underway and through the lock in time. To prevent pursuit, all we have to do is leave the lock open after us."

They hastened along the roof of the wing that ran that way. As yet there was no outside pursuit; most of the settlement's guards seemed to have been concentrated in the attack on the laboratory. But Ca.r.s.e knew it would only be a matter of seconds before coolies would emerge from half a dozen different points. He was trying to figure out which points they were likely to be when there pa.s.sed, perilously close, the spit of an orange ray. He glanced back, to see the first of the crowd which had broken into the laboratory come clambering up through the roof. Then, as a second shot sizzled by, they arrived at the end of the wing.

Friday took the fifteen-foot drop without hesitation. Ca.r.s.e lowered Leithgow to him and then swung down himself. They panted forward again, over grayish, glittering soil.

Some three hundred yards of open s.p.a.ce lay between them and the port-locks. Friday now led the way, weighted down under the heavy suits; the scientist came next and then the Hawk, his sole remaining gun replying at intervals to the ever-thickening barrage from behind. They had covered perhaps a half of that distance when the negro's steps suddenly faltered and he halted.

"Look there!" he groaned. "Cuttin' us off! We'll never make it, suh!"

Ca.r.s.e looked where he pointed, and saw a squad of half a dozen men emerging from a building well to their left. They were running at full speed for the lock, and, as Friday had said, it was obvious that they would get there first. He glanced quickly around. Pursuit from the laboratory in the rear was hot--and moreover three coolies were angling sharply out on each side, to outflank them! In a minute they would be surrounded! Unable to reach either the port or the ship!

And then came the crowning piece of ill-luck. Suddenly the Hawk winced; staggered; clapped a hand to his shoulder. A lucky shot from an enemy gun had caught him.

"You're hit!" cried Leithgow.

"It's nothing...."

The slender adventurer stood very still, thinking. He was trapped. But he was never more dangerous than when he was trapped.

Leithgow timidly ventured a suggestion.

"Why can't we put on our s.p.a.ce-suits and rise up in the dome?"

Crisply the answer came back:

"Hard to maneuver laterally. Never get out ports. Sure death.... _I have it!_" he ended.

Tersely he gave the two men orders:

"We've a bare chance--if I'm lucky. Now listen, and obey me exactly. Put on your s.p.a.ce-suits. Shut them tight. Lie flat. You, Friday, use your ray-guns _and keep the guards from coming close_. Wait here. Do absolutely nothing save keep them off. And keep your suits intact or you're dead!"

He grabbed one of the suits from Friday and crept toward the _Scorpion_ on hands and knees. The three coolies from the pursuit at the rear had already cut him off from the ship. Friday could not control his alarm at this apparently crazy act. He called after:

"But you can't get to the ship through those guards! And if you did, you couldn't run it yourself--and pick us up!"

Ca.r.s.e turned, his face white with cold pa.s.sion. "When will you learn to obey me implicitly?" he said harshly--and crept on.

Old Leithgow trusted his friend a little more. "Get your suit on, Friday," he said gently, and slipped into his own. The negro, ashamed, followed his example; then both were flat on the ground, back to back, sniping--Leithgow also--as best they could under such conditions at the groups of men who now were bellying ever nearer from three directions.

The Hawk's plan might well have appeared hair-brained to one who did not know the man, and what he was capable of accomplishing under pressure.

The very first step in this plan required the destroying of the three outflanking guards between him and the s.p.a.ce-ship.

As so often in the great adventurer's career, he was lucky. The unthinking have always admitted his luck, but never seen that he forced it--forced it by doing the unexpected--attacking when he was attacked.

He was doing that now. The three coolie-guards in his way must have known who he was, so their alarm at finding themselves, the attackers, attacked, will account for their making a move of poor strategy. Instead of scattering and defending the open entrance-port of the s.p.a.ce-ship from a short distance, they in their alarm made haste to get inside to defend it from there. The interior was the best place to defend the ship--if they had already been inside--for they could lie in the inner darkness and sweep the open port when the Hawk entered.

But to try to pa.s.s through the port--that was bad judgment. It was only necessary for Ca.r.s.e to hold bead on it and fire when they pa.s.sed in line.

This was the present "luck" of the adventurer. He might have sniped the guards anyway, but he had it easier. From fifty yards away, p.r.o.ne and carefully sighting, he took the three lives that had been so viciously, so subversively altered by Ku Sui.

A moment later, the way cleared, he was inside the ship--and his s.p.a.ce-suit lay on the ground outside.

Rapidly the three groups of guards closed in on Leithgow and Friday. The two men made their advance as uncomfortable as possible, but they could do no accurate shooting at such difficult targets as crawling men, from within the cramped interiors of their c.u.mbrous suits. Not even Friday, who was a crack shot. They could not hold out long--nor did they expect to.

They had been too occupied to notice what had become of Ca.r.s.e. Within their suits all was silence; they heard neither their friend's shots as he struck down the three coolies nor their own. Quick glances at the ship's open port revealed no one; nothing. Probably, they thought, the Hawk was dead. Even if he were not, they would soon be. A matter of a minute. Maybe two. Their suits were still intact, but they could not remain so much longer. Ku Sui had this time ordered them destroyed.

And now half a dozen coolies were leaving the ring tightening around them and creeping to the _Scorpion_ as additional guards....

It was then, in those last few seconds, with death staring them in the face, that Friday did a magnificent thing. It happened that Ca.r.s.e saw him do it as the adventurer jumped out of the _Scorpion_ again and with frantic speed slipped into the s.p.a.ce-suit he had left waiting. Friday stood straight up, a hundred feet from the enemy--a great bloated monster in his padded suit--and charged. Leithgow and the Hawk heard, by their suit helmet-radios, his battle yell of defiance, but the coolies did not. All silent, apparently, he rushed them--slowly, because of his hampering suit--his ray-gun spitting orange contempt--and other pencils of fiery death pa.s.sing him narrowly by.

And then, while he still charged, the rays stopped stabbing past him, and he saw the faces of the coolie-guards turn upward. So surprised was the expression on their faces, that he turned and looked too--and saw the _Scorpion_, her entrance ports still open, forty feet off the ground and rising with swift acceleration.

Faster and faster she rose; all ray-guns were silenced before her astounding ascent. Higher and higher--faster and faster--till with a stunning, ear-deafening crash she struck the great dome and was through.

Then came chaos.

A huge, jagged gash marked the ship's pa.s.sage, and through this the air inside the dome poured with cyclonic force, s.n.a.t.c.hing into in maelstrom everything unfastened within the dome and hurling it crazily into s.p.a.ce.

For seconds the flood rushed out, a visible thing, gray from the soil which it scooped up; and while its fury lasted every building on the asteroid quivered and groaned from the terrific strain.

And where, a moment before, men had stood--two white men and a black, and a score of coolie-guards--there was now nothing save the flat rock under the gaping hole. The upper soil had been ripped out and flung forth like a concealing veil around the bodies that had gone with it....

For an interval Hawk Ca.r.s.e knew nothing. He had ceased to live, it seemed, and was soaring through Eternity. He never knew how much time pa.s.sed before his numbed senses began to return and he became aware of weight and of a furious roaring in his head.

He was moving forward at blinding speed. Something kept flashing before him--a wide stream of ruddy orange light: his dazed brain could connect it with nothing he had ever known. Soon the orange stream settled into spasmodic bursts, pitch blackness filling the intervals; and when it came more slowly he saw that it was in reality the vast flaming ball of Jupiter, streaking across the line of vision as he tumbled over and over, head over heels--free in s.p.a.ce!

The realization helped his return to alertness. As the wild tumbling motion gradually ceased, and Jupiter tended to stay more and more under his feet, he peered around through his face-plate. To one side he glimpsed two grotesque, bulky figures, one half of them limned glaringly against the blackness of s.p.a.ce by the near-by planet's light. He saw other figures, too, spread out in a scattered fringe--figures of men in smocks, dead and bloated and white.

They were the coolies, these last, and the other two were of course Leithgow and Friday. But had they survived the outrush of air? Ca.r.s.e felt in his left glove for the suit's gravity control lever; found it and tentatively moved it. His acceleration slowly increased. He brought the lever part-way back. Then, into the microphone encased inside the helmet, he called:

"Leithgow! Leithgow! Can you hear me? Friday!"

The radio broadcast his words. Soon welcome answers came in Eliot Leithgow's tired voice and the negro's emphatic ba.s.s.

"Maneuver together," Ca.r.s.e instructed them. "We must lock arms and stay close."

Slowly, clumsily, the three monstrous figures made toward each other, and presently they were reunited in a close group. Ca.r.s.e pointed an arm into the face of Jupiter where there hung poised a gleaming globe of white, dappled with dark splotches.

"Satellite III," he said, "--our goal. And we'll get there without interruption now that Ku Sui, his laboratory, his coordinated brains, are destroyed.... You are very quiet, Eliot. Aren't you happy at our success?"