"No, Karl. That was just a gag. I burned loose the muscle hinges
that holds them clams together, but I still couldn't get out. Then,
when the tide came and backed up into that moat, the Venusians
swam up and rescued me. They knew what had happened; they used
their thought-crystals. Listen, it ain't fantastic at all. Them
memory-spheres are mental power synthesizers, just like dynamos.
The Sea People have been working on these things secretly to fight
the Jovians with. Listen, Karl. You're the instrument, see? We all
concentrate on our crystals and you can blast that infernal black
box to Kingdom Come. I'll be in there with you in two shakes of a
three-tailed _ghroat_. I'm just outside S.S.C. now! Give him hell,
Karl!"
"But--how?" his mind almost gasped.
Then he heard Vale's laugh--and it was a joyous thing. "Too many people
have told you too little," her message came through. "Come--we haven't
much time now. You must trust these people. They will show you how...."
Arm in arm, then, they soared up into green translucence. Curiously, as
they rose, the green grew deeper, darker, and choking terror tore once
again at Venard's throat--a terror cunningly without reason.
He suddenly felt the dark box nestling against his ribs. Had he been
carrying the Jovian even down among the Sea People?
And where was Vale? The warming sense of her presence was withdrawn.
Fear stabbed into him again. Fear--and those tendrils of white-hot
anguish.
He was back in the body bank ... alone ... with the Jovian. Black fury
burst once more against his reeling mind, but through it rose the
faintest of echoes: "Give him hell, Karl!"
Energy, strength, courage, power flooded through him. Still, there was
no reality, no visible enemy, no material hall with body banks and
mosaic walls and solid plastic floors. Out of a black sea bobbed a
cloudy sphere of coruscating evil hate. Venard leaped, his body bending
through an arc of torture. He had the sphere in his dripping hands,
holding it high. He must hurl it from him, smash it, but it clung to
him, seemed a part of him. Blindness thickened his sight; then, as it
thinned, he blinked. The Jovian cubicle body was smashing against the
high, up-curving wall of the buried body bank hall in S.S.C.
A dazzling greenish glare exploded in a bright crackling flame that
flung him full length. In his mind burst an ultimate unhuman cry of raw
agony from the Jovian. It climbed beyond his auditory range so high
that a stark-shock wrenched his spine and shook his brain in his skull.
And the Jovian spewed out in a pulsating, semi-liquid mass, ran down
the smoothly polished mosaic.
Venard rubbed his burning eyes, as he sat there wearily trying to grasp
some general understanding. His body was terribly tired. The Martian
medic helped him to his feet, but he couldn't stand alone. While he
swayed dizzily, the Martie's body sac nodded gently. "Thank you,
Lieutenant Venard. S.S.C. is free at long last. We had abandoned all
hope. A burial place of knowledge is always a final graveyard of hope."
* * * * *
Venard was leaning wearily against the wall and the Martian medic was
lifting the first Zharkon's brain-sac into the refrigerated bank when
Larson and Vale came running down the hall. Larson was a spectacle for
sore eyes. His uniform was waving tatters, his skin a splotched mass
from digestive acids of the carnivorous clam. Vale wrapped unforgotten
arms around Venard's neck and for a while he forgot Larson, the
Zharkon's brain. He forgot almost everything.
"You defeated it," she breathed proudly, eyes shining. "You defeated
it! We couldn't help here in S.S.C. We were powerless. But, for that
few days when I was free, you would never have known about it."
"_He_ defeated it?" howled Larson from a raw, flaming face. "I defeated
it. Me and the Sea People did, that is. But we ain't got any time to
argue about who gets the medals. The Martians are outside with a couple
of Battlewagons. They're setting up electro-cannons, vibratory beams,
oxo-hydro guns, and God alone knows what they got in secret. They're
gonna break in here or bust."