"You'll find my campfires," Greg told him, "if the rain hasn't washed
them away. It rains a lot. So much and so drearily that you'll want to
leave that mountain and walk down into the swamp, of your own free will,
and let the monsters finish you."
Scorio sat dully. He did not move. Horror glazed his eyes.
Greg signed to Russ. Russ, pipe clenched between his teeth, reached out
his fingers for the keys. The engines droned.
Manning walked slowly to a television control, sat down in the chair
and flipped over a lever. A face stared out of the screen. It was
strangely filled with anger and a sort of half-fear.
"You watched it, didn't you, Stutsman?" Greg asked.
Stutsman nodded. "I watched. You can't get away with it, Manning. You
can't take the law into your own hands that way."
"You and Chambers have been taking the law into your hands for years,"
said Greg. "All I did tonight was clear the Earth of some vermin. Every
one of those men was guilty of murder ... and worse."
"What did you gain by it?" asked Stutsman.
Greg gave a bitter laugh. "I convinced you, Stutsman," he said, "that it
isn't so easy to kill me. I think it'll be some time before you try
again. Better luck next time."
He flipped the switch and turned about in the chair.
Russ jerked his thumb at the skylight. "Might as well finish the ship
now."
Greg nodded.
An instant later there was a fierce, intolerably blue-white light that
lit the mountains for many miles. For just an instant it flared,
exploding into millions of brilliant, harmless sparks that died into
darkness before they touched the ground. The gangster ship was destroyed
beyond all tracing, disintegrated. The metal and quartz of which it was
made were simply gone.
Russ brought his glance back from the skylight, looked at his friend.
"Stutsman will do everything he can to wipe us out. By tomorrow morning
the Interplanetary machine will be rolling. With only one purpose--to
crush us."
"That's right," Greg agreed, "but we're ready for them now. Our ship
left the Belgium factories several hours ago. The _Comet_ towed it out
in space and it's waiting for us now. In a few hours the _Comet_ will be
here to pick us up."
"War in space," said Russ, musingly. "That's what it will be."
"Chambers and his gang won't fight according to any rules. There'll be
no holds barred, no more feeble attempts like the one they tried
tonight. From now on we need a base that simply can't be located."
"The ship," said Russ.
_CHAPTER FOURTEEN_
The _Invincible_ hung in space, an empty, airless hull, the largest
thing afloat.
Chartered freighters, leaving their ports from distant parts of the
Earth, had converged upon her hours before, had unloaded crated
apparatus, storing it in the yawning hull. Then they had departed.
Now the sturdy little space-yacht, _Comet_, was towing the great ship
out into space, 500,000 miles beyond the orbit of the Moon. Slowly the
hull was being taken farther and farther away from possible discovery.
Work on the installation of the apparatus had started almost as soon as
the _Comet_ had first tugged at the ponderous mass. Leaving only a
skeleton crew in charge of the _Comet_, the rest of the selected crew
had begun the assembly of the mighty machines which would transform the
_Invincible_ into a thing of unimaginable power and speed.
The doors were closed and sealed and the air, already stored in the
ship's tanks, was released. The slight acceleration of the _Comet's_
towing served to create artificial weight for easier work, but not
enough to handicap the shifting of the heavier pieces of apparatus. An
electric cable was run back from the little yacht and the _Invincible_
took her first breath of life.
The work advanced rapidly, for every man was more than a mere engineer
or spacebuster. They were a selected crew, the men who had helped to
make the name of Gregory Manning famous throughout the Solar System.
First the engines were installed, then the two groups of five massive
power plants and the single smaller engine as an auxiliary supply plant
for the light, heat, air.
The accumulators of the _Comet_ were drained in a single tremendous
surge and the auxiliary generator started. It in turn awoke to life the
other power plants, to leave them sleeping, idling, but ready for
instant use to develop power such as man never before had dreamed of
holding and molding to his will.
Then, with the gigantic tools these engines supplied ... tools of pure
force and strange space fields ... the work was rapidly completed. The
power boards were set in place, welded in position by a sudden furious
blast of white hot metal and as equally sudden freezing, to be followed
by careful heating and recooling till the beryl-steel reached its
maximum strength. Over the hull swarmed spacesuited men, using that
strange new power, heat-treating the stubborn metal in a manner never
before possible.
The generators were charging the atoms of the ship's beryl-steel hide
with the same hazy force that had trapped and held the gangster ship in
a mighty vise. Thus charged, no material thing could penetrate them. The
greatest meteor would be crushed to drifting dust without so much as
scarring that wall of mighty force ... meteors traveling with a speed
and penetrative power that no gun-hurled projectile could ever hope to
attain.
Riding under her own power, driven by the concentration of gravitational
lines, impregnable to all known forces, containing within her hull the
secrets of many strange devices, the _Invincible_ wheeled in space.
* * * * *
Russell Page lounged in a chair before the control manual of the
tele-transport machine. He puffed placidly at his pipe and looked out
through the great sweep of the vision panel. Out there was the black of
space and the glint of stars, the soft glow of distant Jupiter.
Greg Manning was hunched over the navigation controls, sharp eyes
watching the panorama of space.
Russ looked at him and grinned. On Greg's face there was a smile, but
about his eyes were lines of alert watchfulness and thought. Greg
Manning was in his proper role at the controls of a ship such as the
_Invincible_, a man who never stepped backward from danger, whose spirit
hungered for the vast stretches of void that lay between the worlds.
Russ leaned back, blowing smoke toward the high-arched control room
ceiling.
They had burned their bridges behind them. The laboratory back in the
mountains was destroyed. Locked against any possible attack by a sphere
of force until the tele-transport had lifted from it certain items of
equipment, it had been melted into a mass of molten metal that formed a
pool upon the mountain top, that ran in gushing, fiery ribbons down the
mountain side, flowing in gleaming curtains over precipices. It would
have been easier to have merely disintegrated in one bursting flash of
energy, but that would have torn apart the entire mountain range,
overwhelmed and toppled cities hundreds of miles away, dealt Earth a
staggering blow.
A skeleton crew had taken the _Comet_ back to Earth and landed it on
Greg's estate. Once again the tele-transport had reached out, wrapped
its fingers around the men who stepped from the little ship. In less
than the flash of a strobe light, they had been snatched back to the
_Invincible_, through a million miles of space, through the very walls
of the ship itself. One second they had been on Earth, the next second
they were in the control room of the _Invincible_, grinning, saluting
Greg Manning, trotting back to their quarters in the engine rooms.
* * * * *
Russ stared out at space, puffed at his pipe, considering.
A thousand years ago men had held what they called tournaments. Armored
knights rode out into the jousting grounds and broke their lances to
prove which was the better man. Today there was to be another
tournament. This ship was to be their charger, and the gauntlet had been
flung to Spencer Chambers and Interplanetary Power. And all of space was
to be the jousting grounds.
This was war. War without trappings, without fanfare, but bitter war
upon which depended the future of the Solar System. A war to break the
grip of steel that Interplanetary accumulators had gained upon the
planets, to shatter the grim dream of empire held by one man, a war for
the right to give to the people of the worlds a source of power that
would forever unshackle them.
Back in those days, a thousand years ago, men had built a system of
government that historians called the feudal system. By this system
certain men were called lords or barons and other titles. They held the
power of life and death over the men "under" them.
This was what Spencer Chambers was trying to do with the Solar
System ... what he would do if someone did not stop him.
* * * * *
Russ bit viciously on his pipe-stem.
The Earth, the Solar System, never could revert to that ancient way of
government. The proud people spawned on the Earth, swarming outward to
the other planets, must never have to bow their heads as minions to an
overlord.
The thrum of power was beating in his brain, the droning, humming power
from the engine rooms that would blast, once and forever, the last
threat of dictatorship upon any world. The power that would free a
people, that would help them on and up and outward to the great destiny
that was theirs.
And this had come because, wondering, groping, curiously, he had sought
to heat a slender thread of imperm wire within Force Field 348, because
another man had listened and had made available his fortune to continue
the experiments. Blind luck and human curiosity ... perhaps even the
madness of a human dream ... and from those things had come this great
ship, this mighty power, these many bulking pieces of equipment that
would perform wonders never guessed at less than a year ago.
Greg Manning swiveled his chair. "Well, Russ, we're ready to begin.
Let's get Wrail first."
Russ nodded silently, his mind still half full of fleeting thought.
Absent-mindedly he knocked out his pipe and pocketed it, swung around to
the manual of the televisor. His fingers reached out and tapped a
pattern.
Callisto appeared within the screen, leaped upward at them. Then the
surface of the frozen little world seemed to rotate swiftly and a dome
appeared.
The televisor dived through the dome, sped through the city, straight
for a penthouse apartment.
Ben Wrail sat slumped in a chair. A newspaper was crumpled at his feet.
In his lap lay a mangled dead cigar.
"Greg!" yelled Russ. "Greg, there's something wrong!"
Greg leaped forward, stared at the screen. Russ heard his smothered cry
of rage.
In Wrail's forehead was a tiny, neatly drilled hole from which a single
drop of blood oozed.
"Murdered!" exclaimed Russ.
"Yes, murdered," said Greg, and there was a sudden calmness in his
voice.
Russ grasped the televisor control. Ranthoor's streets ran beneath them,
curiously silent and deserted. Here and there lay bodies. A few shop
windows were smashed. But the only living that stirred was a dog that
slunk across the street and into the shadows of an alley.
Swiftly the televisor swung along the streets. Straight into the screen
clanked a marching detail of government police, herding before them a
half dozen prisoners. The men had their hands bound behind their backs,
but they walked with heads held high.
"Revolution," gasped Russ.
"Not a revolution. A purge. Stutsman is clearing the city of all who
might be dangerous to him. This will be happening on every other planet
where Chambers holds control."
Perspiration ran down Russ's forehead and dripped into his eyes as he
manipulated the controls.
"Stutsman is striking first," said Greg, calmly ... far too calmly.
"He's consolidating his position, possibly on the pretense that plots
have been discovered."
A few buildings were bombed. A line of bodies were crumpled at the foot
of a steel wall, marking the spot where men had been lined up and mowed
down with one sweeping blast from a heater.