_The Inquisition_
Blind, animal fear caught Dex and shook him in its grip. Then rage
filled his heart, driving out the fear as a gale dissipates fog. With
pain-dimmed eyes he glared at the gangling, hateful figure that gazed
down on him with icy eyes. If he could only blast that monstrous,
physically feeble but mentally ferocious thing to bits! Annihilate it!
Blow it to the four corners of Jupiter! And all the other Rogans with
it!
And with this thought he suddenly saw, through the red mists of rage,
the shock-tube that was dangling indifferently from the Rogan leader's
hand.
Instantly the red mists began to clear away. Another change took place
in the tortured lieutenant's mind. The blind hot rage faded into more
deadly, cold wrath. A plan began to bud into thought. It was a futile
plan, really. It could not possibly accomplish anything vital. But it
_might_ give him a chance for a little revenge before his life was
snuffed out--might give him a chance to strike a blow for the dead
Journeyman and the other gallant explorers who had perished here in
this chamber before him.
He closed his eyes to hide the hate and calculation in them. The tall
Rogan leaned lower over the rack.
"You are ready to do as I command?" he demanded.
"Yes," whispered Dex. "Yes."
In the beautiful Greca's eyes, as she translated his assent, was
horror. But then, faintly, her mind caught the thought that lay
beneath the Earthman's apparent surrender. She veiled her own eyes
with long lashes, lest they betray the captive's plan to the alert
Rogan. Her lips moved silently; perhaps she was praying to her Great
White One.
* * * * *
"Release him," the Rogan ordered, triumph in his bird-like, shrill
voice. The metal hoops were unfastened. Dex stretched his outraged
body, wincing with the pain of movement; then felt life and strength
returning to him.
"Come with us to the motor," commanded the Rogan, his dull eyes
glinting in anticipation of learning the coveted secret that should
add one more planet to the Rogan's tyranny.
Dex walked to the dismantled atomic engine with him. He walked slowly,
pretending more stiffness and weakness than he really owned to. No use
in letting his captors know that his resilient muscles were so quickly
throwing off the torment of the rack.
As he walked he kept his gaze covertly on that shock-tube that dangled
in the leader's grasp. The rest of the guard had none; they had laid
their weapons down on a far bench on their entrance to the chamber,
depending on the one with which their leader was armed.
Eagerly the Rogans crowded around Dex and the motor that had thus far
baffled them. They bent down from their twelve-foot heights to bring
their staring goggle-eyes closer to the lesson in atomic motive power,
till Dex was in a sort of small dome of Rogans, with their long,
pipe-like legs forming the wall around him, and their thin torsos
inclining forward to make a curved ceiling over him.
The Rogan leader drew Greca within the circle to interpret the
Earthman's explanations.
Dex moved a trifle, to bring himself nearer the tall leader. Again he
glanced covertly at the shock-tube.
"The first thing to tell about our motor," said Dex, stalling for
time, "is that it utilizes the breaking up of the atom as its source
of power."
* * * * *
He edged closer to the Rogan leader.
"You see those electrodes?" he said, pointing to two copper castings
in a chamber between the fuel tank and the small but enormously
powerful turbine that whirled with the released atomic energy. The
Rogan leader blinked assent. His small, horrible mouth was pursed with
his concentration of thought.
"The electrodes partially break down the atoms of fuel passing from
the tank," explained Dex, desperately attempting scientific
phraseology for a matter as far over his head as the remote stars. He
raised his hand a trifle, bringing it nearer the Rogan's tube....
"Is that the outlet from the tank?" inquired the Rogan, pointing with
the tube, and so raising it out of Dex's reach.
"Yes," mumbled Dex, sick with disappointment: he'd been on the point
of leaping for the weapon. He sidled close again. Greca bit her lips
lest she cry out with suspense.
"The partially disintegrated atoms pass into the turbine chamber," he
went on, "and are there completely broken down by heat, which has been
generated by the explosive energy of the atoms passing in before
them."
"I warn you to speak true," said the leader, suddenly removing his
gaze from the specimen motor and staring icily down at Dex. Dex's hand
dropped abruptly from its place near the tube. Again his fingers had
come within a foot of it.
* * * * *
"We will get ahead faster," piped the Rogan, an edge of suspicion
sounding in his shrill voice, "if I conduct the explanation. I will
ask questions for you to answer. What is the fuel used?"
"Powdered zinc," Dex answered promptly. No harm in admitting that. The
Rogans must already know it; zinc was common to Jupiter, as Earth
spectroscopes had showed long since; and they had no doubt analyzed it
by now. The chances were that the leader was merely testing him, to
see if he were sincere in his ostensible surrender.
That his guess was right, he read in the fishy, dull eyes. The Rogan
leader nodded at his answer, and some of the lurking suspicion in his
gaze died down.
"How is it prepared?"
Now this marked the beginning of the end, Dex knew. The preparation of
the powdered metal was half the secret of atomic power--and Dex hadn't
the faintest idea what it was! This questions-and-answers affair was
going to pin him down in short order!
"How is it prepared?" repeated the Rogan leader inexorably. "Tell us,
or--"
But at that instant Dex attained his objective.
Once more his hand had crawled slowly toward the tube--till, once
more, it was within reach. Then, more bold as his position grew more
desperate, he straightened up--and, with a lightning move, had
wrenched it from the sucker-disk that held it!
He shouted his triumph. He had it! _Now_ let the devils put him back
on the torture bed if they could! _Now_ let them try to make him
betray his planet!
* * * * *
There was an alarmed squeak from the Rogan leader, and in an instant
the huge laboratory was in an uproar. The Rogan guards whipped their
hose-like arms toward the Earthman. Dex, with a sweep of his hands,
knocked the pipe-stem legs of two of the guards from under them,
leaped over their bodies, and stood at bay in a corner--guarding the
bench on which the guards had laid their tubes when they filed into
the laboratory.
The air resounded with the shrill calls of the excited Rogans. Then
they began to close in on him, all the while eyeing the tube in his
hand with terror written large on their hideous faces.
Dex's eyes blazed with the light of vengeful exultation. For the death
of Journeyman and the rest, for the coming inevitable death of himself
and Brand, he was going to pay--at least in part--with the captured
tube of death in his hand! It was a lovely thought, and for a few
seconds he delayed acting in order to savor it.
Then, with a smile of pure happiness, he leveled the tube at the
nearest Rogan in order to shrivel him to nothingness as he had seen
the slave shrivelled in the street.
The Rogan did not fall! Full in the face of the death tube he teetered
forward, his arms reaching savagely toward the Earthman.
Dex stared incredulously. Cold fear crept into his heart. He pointed
the tube more accurately, and squeezed harder on the coil handle.
Still nothing happened. The Rogans warily drew closer.
* * * * *
Perspiration began to trickle down Dex's cheeks. In God's name, why
didn't the tube work? He had thought all he had to do was point it and
squeeze down on the handle. But evidently there was more to the trick
than that!
He groaned. He had staged all this elaborate play for a weapon as
useless to his untrained mind as one of Earth's explosive guns, with
the safety-lock clamped on, would have been to an abysmal Venusian
savage!
By now the nearest Rogan was within reaching distance of him. One of
its two pairs of slimy arms uncoiled toward him. The other pair
strained to reach around him and get to the weapons on the bench by
his side.
With a cry, Dex dashed the useless shock-tube down on the reaching
arms. As long as he didn't know how to work it anyway, he might as
well use it as a club.
The Rogan squeaked with pain; the arms recoiled. Dex jerked the tube
back over his shoulder for another blow....
There was a shriek from the doomed wretch fastened to the metal plate.
The slave that had been tortured before Dex's eyes as an object
lesson! He had been returned to consciousness a short time since, and
had been writhing and shuddering against the plate.
Dex flashed a glance at him over his shoulder, as he shrieked, and
cried aloud himself at what he saw.
* * * * *
The tortured slave was rapidly disappearing! Another shriek left his
lips, to be broken off halfway. In an instant nothing was left of the
struggling body but a wisp of greasy black smoke!
Dex stared stupidly at the tube in his hand. Then, as a squeak of
agony sounded from a Rogan in front of him, his mind grasped what had
happened. Somehow its mechanism had been jarred into functioning when
he dashed it against the groping arm. In some way its death dealing
power had been unleashed. With a cry of exultation, Dex began to use
it!
The Rogan in front of him, squealing, collapsed on the floor,
dwindling swiftly into nothingness. Dex turned the mysterious death
against another teetering creature. It too went up in oleaginous
smoke.
The Rogan leader came next. Dex whirled the tube in his direction, and
saw him go down. Then he sprang to annihilate still another grotesque
monster who had almost reached the bench on which were the other
tubes. He shouted and raved as this fourth Rogan crumbled. Torture
him, would they! Plan to capture Earth, would they! He'd kill off the
whole damned population with this tube!
The Rogan survivors, squeaking in panic, gave over their attempts to
retrieve the tubes. They dove for various hiding places--under
benches, behind retorts, anywhere to get away from the terror running
amuck in their midst. And after them sprang Dex, mad with his sudden
miraculous success, to ferret them out one by one and blow them into
hell with their own horrible death-engine.
* * * * *
In his ecstasy of rage, Dex overlooked the Rogan leader. He had seen
that attenuated monstrosity go down, and had assumed he was dead. But
such was not the case. In the corner Dex had vacated when he sprang
after the fleeing guard, the tall leader twisted feebly and sat up.
One of his four arms was missing, a smoking stump showing where the
annihilating ray from the tube had blasted it off at the shoulder. But
he was far from being dead. With cold purpose in his great staring
eyes, he moved snakily toward the bench Dex had now left unguarded.
The Earthman got another Rogan; whirled to track down still another.
Promptly the leader sank motionless to the floor. The Rogan leader
continued his crawling. He reached the bench, fumbled up and along its
surface for the nearest tube.
Dex, unconscious of the sure fate gathering behind him to strike him
down, dashed past a great glass tank behind which Greca was huddling
in mortal fear, and charged down on two more of the squeaking guards.
Then, suddenly, some sixth sense warned him that something was wrong.
He whirled toward the corner he had left.
The Rogan leader, two of his surviving arms propping feebly against
the bench, was pointing a shock-tube squarely at him!
* * * * *
Dex fell to the floor to escape the first discharge of the tube, and
leveled his own. He felt the thing grow hot in his hand, saw a
blinding blue-white fire leap into being in the space between them as
the rays from the two tubes met and absorbed each other. He shifted,
to get out of the line and blast the creature he had too hastily
reckoned as dead. But he was not quick enough. A fraction before him,
the Rogan leader shifted.
Dex felt a terrible burning sensation all over his body, as the ray
from his tube met the conflicting ray less squarely, and allowed a
little of it to reach him. He shrieked as the slave had shrieked when
he felt the annihilating current from the plate sweeping through his
body.
A black fog seemed to close in around the Earthman's senses. He
crashed to the floor, with a glimpse of the leering triumph on the
Rogan's face as the last picture to stamp itself in his failing
consciousness.
The tall Rogan, obviously in great agony from his blasted arm,
squeaked a faint command. The four guards who were left issued
fearfully from their hiding places and came to him.
He pointed his tube at Dex Harlow, lying unconscious on the floor.
There he hesitated an instant, his soft little mouth slobbering in his
rage and pain. Then he let the tube sink slowly off its line.
He gave another command. The four guards picked the Earthman up and
carried him to the metal torture-plate on which the slave had met his
death. The tall leader's eyes gleamed with vicious hatred as the limp
body was fastened to the metal.
Mouthing and squealing with the pain of his seared arm-stump, he
wobbled toward the lever, a mere turn of which would readily convert
the plate into a bed of agony.