He opened the port, after donning a suit and Helmet, and let the ship
fill with the chlorine atmosphere. It would be better than oxygen, for
his purposes. Iodine vapor would be even more effective, but he could
not create that. If only he were a scientist, a technician, he could
probably discover some other way of creating an artificial Heaviside
Layer.
But it didn’t matter. This way was surest and quickest, and there would
be no machinery to fail him.
Sealed within the ship once more, Duncan found the shipment of Martian
radium, hi-jacked from the _Maid_, and removed it from its thick leaden
container. He left it exposed, and went to the controls.
The cruiser lifted from the surface of the plateau. It slanted up
through the chlorine atmosphere, rockets bellowing.
There was no need for split-second timing or unusual accuracy—within
certain limits. He was heading Sunward. Nothing more was necessary.
Except power—
* * * * *
The tubes thundered with ravening fury. The cruiser blasted up,
acceleration jamming Duncan back into his seat. Then they were out of
the air-envelope, in free space, controls locked. There was nothing more
to do now but to drive on. The rockets would blast their fury into the
void till the fuel was exhausted. Even then, the ship would speed on,
into the tracks of commerce and the orbits of the inhabited planets.
On the visiplate specks of light glimmered, resolving themselves into a
nebulous cloud—the Varra.
It was the final proof. Duncan was the first man who had ever landed on
Pluto. The Varra intended to destroy him, giving him no opportunity of
telling what he knew to Earth.
Duncan checked the radio. It was repeating his message, sending it
steadily into space. At this distance from the Sun there was no chance
that it would be picked up. But later—
He clicked the power on in his Helmet. There was no response. The Varra,
as he had thought, could not penetrate his artificial barrier, his
pseudo-Heaviside Layer.
It was nothing, actually, but a blanket of ionization. But the Varra
could not break through it. Duncan glanced at the exposed radium on the
floor. A pound of it, sending out its powerful emanations, gamma, beta
and electrons, ionizing the chlorine even more effectively than it would
have affected oxygen—invisible armor, protecting Duncan from the Varra.
They were massing ahead, determined to stop him. Thoughts began to
penetrate his mind, furtive, random, but indications that the group
power of the Varra was stronger than he had expected.
Duncan seated himself at a panel, the one controlling the blaster
cannons. His face, haggard and strained, twisted in a bitter smile.
“Okay, Andrea,” he whispered. “I’m taking the message back for you. But
I’m doing this—for myself! Because they killed you, damn them—”
The chill tentacles probed deeper into Duncan’s brain. He swung a cannon
into position, pressed a stud, and watched a streak of electronic energy
go blasting across space, silent thunder in the void, smashing
relentlessly at the Varra. It struck in a maelstrom of flame.
“Vulnerable!” Duncan said, “Yeah, they’re vulnerable as all hell!”
The Varra closed in. Through their massed ranks the cannon blazed and
pounded, till space seemed afire. The rocking recoil of the blasts,
mingled with the booming of the rockets, thudded in Duncan’s ears even
through the Helmet.
And he fought them. There were no witnesses to that battle, none to see
the black cruiser plunging on through the cloud of attackers, belching
Jove’s lightning, shaking with the vibrations of its murder-madness. For
the spaceship was mad, Duncan thought, a relentless, destroying avenger,
a dark angel bringing the terror of Armageddon to the Varra. And the
energy-beings never paused; their life and their future was in the
scales. If Duncan broke through, they were doomed. He must be stopped.
* * * * *
They could not stop him! Almost blind with the agony burning within his
brain, Saul Duncan nevertheless hunched over the controls, while the
cannons thundered their demoniac message into space. By dozens and
hundreds the Varra died, their energy-matrices wrenched and broken by
the electronic bolts. Duncan and the ship were one—and both were mad.
He got through. He had to. Nothing could have stopped Saul Duncan, not
even the Varra. In the end, the black cruiser raced Sunward, cannons
silent, for the Varra were scattered.
Duncan got up wearily. He stood above Andrea’s body, watching the still
features, the long lashes that would never rise.
“It’s done,” he said. “Finished. Earth will get the message—”
Earth would get the message. The Varra could not stop the cruiser now,
and the radio would continue to send out its signal till the fires of
the Sun swallowed the black ship.
Duncan knelt. His legs were weak. The radium, of course. His suit could
not protect him from the fatal radiations of a pound of the pure ore.
But the stuff had served its purpose. It had kept the Varra at a
distance till Duncan could fulfill his vengeance.
And now it would kill him—unless he replaced it in the leaden casket.
But even that might not work now.
Duncan shrugged. It was better to die of radium burns than by the power
of the Varra.
He would be dead long before then.
But the Varra would be hunted down, ruthlessly slain, their power broken
forever. Earth-science would destroy them, as they themselves had slain
so many, as they had killed Andrea.
The bellow of the rockets died. The ship held true to its course,
plunging on faster and faster toward the sunlit worlds where men knew
joy and laughter and happiness. It would go on, to the funeral pyre of
the Sun.
But it would leave a message in its wake.