Pete whirled around and saw Russell Page for the first time. The
scientist sat in front of a great control board, his swift, skillful
fingers playing over the banks of keys, his eyes watching the instrument
and the screen that slanted upward from the control banks.
Pete felt dizzy as he stared at the screen. He could see the interior of
the ship he had been yanked from a moment before. He could see his three
companions, talking excitedly, frightened by his disappearance.
* * * * *
His eyes flicked away from the screen, looked up through the skylight
above him. Outlined against the sky hung the ship. At the nose and
stern, two hemispheres of blue-white radiance fitted over the metal
framework, like the jaws of a powerful vise, holding the craft
immovable.
His gaze went back to the screen again, just in time to see Chizzy
disappear. It was as if the man had been a mere figure chalked upon a
board ... and then someone had taken a sponge and wiped him out.
Russ's fingers were flying over the keys. His thumb reached out and
tripped a lever. There was a slight hum of power.
And Chizzy stood beside him.
Chizzy did not pull his gun. He whimpered and cowered within the
invisible cradle of force.
"You're yellow," Pete snarled at him, but Chizzy only covered his eyes
with his arms.
"Look, boss," said Pete, addressing Scorio, "what are you doing here? We
left you back in New York."
Scorio did not answer. He merely glared. Pete lapsed into silence,
watching.
* * * * *
Manning stood poised before the captives, rocking back and forth on his
heels.
"A nice bag for one evening," he told Russ.
Russ grinned and stoked up his pipe.
Manning turned to the gangster chief. "What do you think we ought to do
with these fellows? We can't leave them in those force shells too long
because they'll die for lack of air. And we can't let them loose because
they might use their guns on us."
"Listen, Manning," Scorio rasped hoarsely, "just name your price to let
us loose. We'll do anything you want."
Manning drew his mouth down. "I can't think of a thing. We just don't
seem to have any use for you."
"Then what in hell," the gangster asked shakily, "are you going to do
with us?"
"You know," said Manning, "I may be a bit old-fashioned along some
lines. Maybe I am. I just don't like the idea of killing people for
money. I don't like people stealing things other people have worked hard
to get. I don't like thieves and murderers and thugs corrupting city
governments, taking tribute on every man, woman and child in our big
cities."
"But look here, Manning," pleaded Scorio, "we'd be good citizens if we
just had a chance."
Manning's face hardened. "You sent these men here to kill us tonight,
didn't you?"
"Well, not exactly. Stutsman kind of wanted you killed, but I told the
boys just to get the stuff in the safe and never mind killing you. I
said to them that you were pretty good eggs and I didn't like to bump
you off, see?"
"I see," said Manning.
He turned his back on Scorio and started to walk away. The gangster
chief came half-way out of his chair, and as he did so, Russ reached out
a single finger and tapped a key. Scorio screamed and beat with his
fists against the wall of force that had suddenly formed about him. That
single tap on the great keyboard had sprung a trap, had been the one
factor necessary to bring into being a force shell already spun and
waiting for him.
Manning did not even turn around at Scorio's scream. He slowly paced his
way down the line of standing gangsters. He stopped in front of Pete and
looked at him.
"Pete," he said, "you've sprung a good many prisons, haven't you?"
"There ain't a jug in the System that can hold me," Pete boasted, "and
that's a fact."
"I believe there's one that could," Greg told him. "One that no man has
ever escaped from, or ever will."
"What's that?" demanded Pete.
"The Vulcan Fleet," said Greg.
Pete looked into the eyes of the man before him and read the purpose in
those eyes. "Don't send me there! Send me any place but there!"
Greg turned to Russ and nodded. Russ's fingers played their tune of doom
upon the keyboard. His thumb depressed a lever. With a roar five
gigantic material energy engines screamed with thrumming power.
Pete disappeared.
The engines roared with thunderous throats, a roar that seemed to drown
the laboratory in solid waves of sound. A curious refractive effect
developed about the straining hulks as space near them bent under their
lashing power.
Months ago Russ and Greg had learned a better way of transmitting power
than by metal bars or through conducting beams. Beams of such power as
were developing now would have smashed atoms to protons and electrons.
Through a window in the side of the near engine, Greg could see the iron
ingot used as fuel dwindling under the sucking force.
* * * * *
The droning died and only a hum remained.
"He's in a prison now he'll never get out of," said Greg calmly. "I
wonder what they'll think when they find him, dressed in civilian
clothes and carrying a heat gun. They'll clap him into a photo-cell and
keep him there until they investigate. When they find out who he is, he
won't get out--he has enough unfinished prison sentences to last a
century or two."
For Pete was on one of the Vulcan Fleet ships, the hell-ships of the
prison fleet. There were confined only the most vicious and the most
depraved of the Solar System's criminals. He would be forced to work
under the flaming whip-lashes of a Sun that hurled such intense
radiations that mere spacesuits were no protection at all. The workers
on the Vulcan Fleet ships wore suits that were in reality photo-cells
which converted the deadly radiations into electric power. For electric
power can be disposed of where heat cannot.
Quailing inside his force shell, Scorio saw his men go, one by one. Saw
them lifted and whisked away, out through the depths of space by the
magic touch upon the keyboards. With terror-widened eyes he watched
Russ set up the equations, saw him trip the activating lever, saw the
men disappear, listened to the thunderous rumbling of the mighty
engines.
Chizzy went to the Outpost, the harsh prison on Neptune's satellite. Reg
went to Titan, clear across the Solar System, where men in the infamous
penal colony labored in the frigid wastes of that moon of Saturn. Max
went to Vesta, the asteroid prison, which long had been the target of
reformers, who claimed that on it 50 per cent of the prisoners died of
boredom and fear.
Max was gone and only Scorio remained.
"Stutsman's the one who got us into this," wailed the gangster. "He's
the man you want to get. Not me. Not the boys. Stutsman."
"I promise you," said Greg, "that we'll take care of Stutsman."
"And Chambers, too," chattered Scorio. "But you can't touch Chambers.
You wouldn't dare."
"We're not worrying about Chambers," Greg told him. "We're not worrying
about anyone. You're the one who had better start doing some."
Scorio cringed.
"Let me tell you about a place on Venus," said Greg. "It's in the center
of a big swamp that stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction.
It's a sort of mountain rising out of the swamp. And the swamp is filled
with beasts and reptiles of every kind. Ravenous things, lusting for
blood. But they don't climb the mountain. A man, if he stayed on the
mountain, would be safe. There's food there. Roots and berries and
fruits and even small animals one could kill. A man might go hungry for
a while, but soon he'd find the things to eat.
"But he'd be alone. No one ever goes near that mountain. I am the only
man who ever set foot on it. Perhaps no one ever will again. At night
you hear the screaming and the crying of the things down in swamp, but
you mustn't pay any attention to them."
* * * * *