The lonesome echoes of his own madness came crashing back at him. He
hugged the ladder and wept. He could not say why he was crying, except
he felt he had been betrayed somehow. He knew he was young, too young
to deal with this tremendous horror Rex was planning. And M'hort had
sensed that horror.
After awhile, he started climbing up again. There was a flame in his
heart, a heat that rived him, made him something less than human. He
was going to kill Rex if Rex didn't talk, didn't tell him the details
of the plan. As for the main plan, Carl already knew it.
On the surface, he waited. The sun came up, moved redly toward noon.
The space-ship came back. As Rex appeared in the opening airlock, face
perspiring, lips set with a cruel satisfaction that did not belong to
youth, Carl jumped him. It was over in a moment. Rex lay unconscious.
* * * * *
When Rex came to, Carl had the ship in the sky again, driving toward
the dying red sun. He left the controls again, and stood over Rex, who
was rope-bound to a chair.
"I think," Carl said, his eyes burning, "I've put two and two together
at last. Took me a whale of a long time to do it, too. Now go ahead and
talk."
Rex's square face was set into a disinterested mold. He looked Carl up
and down, shrugged. "Sure, I'll talk. But it won't do any good, Carl.
It's already fixed. Nothing you can do can change it. And it's funny
you picked out today to check up on me."
"Just today?" Carl asked hollowly.
"Just today." Rex spoke so calmly it was as if all the acid bitterness
in him had been alkalized in one moment. For the first time in many
months, he was a kid again, without a secret thought, without an
equivocation on his lips.
Rex said, "There's two hundred thousand tons of merbohydrates out
there, Carl. It's taken me two years to manufacture the stuff. The most
powerful explosive ever invented.
"You see, Carl, I wasn't as crazy as you thought when I said I was
going to send up a distress signal. It's a matter of nine or ten hours.
And you can't stop it."
Carl stood with eyes closed, muscles iron-hard. "Rex," he said, "give
me the position coordinates of that two hundred thousand tons of
merbohydrate."
Rex gave him the coordinates. Carl set the ship on a slightly different
course. An hour passed. The Wortan sun grew until it was a red globe
glued to space.
Carl operated the photo-amplifiers, set the telescopic perilens into
position. Space expanded. In the vision plate grew a tiny dot that
seemed to rush rapidly into sight though it was still several hundred
thousand miles away. It resolved itself into detail--countless neatly
stacked and baled ingots of merbohydrate, each bale in turn attached to
another by short lengths of wire. The mass was a thirty-foot cube.
[Illustration: In the vision plate grew a tiny dot....]
In the matter of size, it was a speck in space.
In the matter of explosive potentialities, it was a bomb of untold
violence, falling toward the dying red star.
Carl got another notch of speed from the ship. He was abruptly aware
that sweat had formed stickily on his body. A blast of furnace heat was
already radiating from the bulkheads.
Behind him, Rex said derisively, "Save yourself the trouble. You can't
catch up with it. It's inside the boiling zone, you idiot.
"For two years, Carl, that mass of merbohydrate was on an orbit about
the sun. Every once in a while I'd come out and add more to the main
mass. Today I figured I had enough. I hauled it out of its orbit, took
it as close as I could to the sun. Right smack to the edge of the
boiling zone. Then I gave it a running start and let go. The sun and
the merbohydrate will meet at the convergence of their trajectories."
"Then what?"