_Into the Enclosure_
In the torture chamber Dex wavered slowly back to consciousness to get
the growing impression that he was being immersed in a bath of liquid
fire. Burning, intolerable pain assailed him with increasing intensity
as his senses clarified.
At last he groaned and opened his eyes, for the moment not knowing
where he was nor how he had come to be there. He saw strange torture
instruments and tall monstrosities with pumpkin-shaped heads
surrounding him closely in a semicircle, and staring at him out of
great, dull eyes.
Remembrance came back with a rush, and he gathered his muscles to
spring at the hateful figures. But he could not move. At waist and
throat, at wrists and ankles, were hoops of metal. He closed his eyes
again while the burning waves of invisible fire shot through him
recurrently from head to foot.
Dully he wondered that he was still alive. His last recollection had
been of the Rogan leader pointing his shock-tube full at him, his
shapeless countenance working with murderous fury. However, alive he
was; and most unenviably so!
His hands, circumscribed to a few inches of movement by the bonds on
his wrists, felt the smooth substance at his back. And with a thrill
of horror he realized his position: he was crucified against the metal
slab on which the slave had writhed in agony a short half hour ago.
Again he strained and tugged, vainly, to get free. Off to one side,
pressed back against a huge glass experimental tank, he saw the
beautiful Greca, her eyes wide with horror; and caught her frantic
pleading message to her "Great White One."
* * * * *
The Rogan leader, squealing and grimacing, advanced toward the victim
on the metal plate. One of the long arms went out and a sucker-disk
was pressed to Dex's cheek. Dex quivered at the loathsome contact of
that soft and slimy substance; then set his jaws to keep from groaning
as the disk was jerked away, to carry with it a fragment of skin and
flesh.
Gingerly, the tall leader felt the twitching, blackened stump of his
blasted arm. Dex grinned mirthlessly at that: he'd struck one or two
blows in his own defense, anyhow!
At sight of the Earthman's grin, an expression of defiance and grim
joy that needed no interpreting to be understandable, the Rogan leader
fairly danced with rage. His long arm went out to the switch beside
the plate, and pulled it down another notch--just a little, not nearly
to the current that had torn at the slave.
At the increased torment resulting from that slight movement of the
regulating lever, Dex yelled aloud in spite of all his will power. It
seemed as though his whole body were about to burst into
self-generated flame. Every cell and fiber of him seemed on the verge
of flying apart. He could feel his eyes start from his head, could
feel every hair on his scalp stand up as though discharging electric
sparks.
A minute or two of that and he would go mad! He cried out again, and
twisted helplessly in his bonds. And then the terrible torture
stopped.
The Rogan had not touched the switch--yet whatever sort of current it
was that charged the plate was abruptly clicked off, as though someone
at a distance had cut a wire or thrown a master-switch.
* * * * *
Simultaneously with its ceasing, an invisible, crushing sea seemed to
envelope everything. Dex felt his body sag against his metal bonds as
if it had been changed to lead.
Before him the Rogans, who had been crowding closer to watch
gloatingly each grimace he made, shot doorward as though their
pipe-stem legs had been swept from under them. The leader fell on the
stump of his seared arm and, a deafening squeal of rage and pain came
from his little mouth. His tube fell from his grasp and rolled over
the floor half a dozen yards away from him.
Amazed, observing the stricken creatures only dimly through a haze of
pain, Dex saw them struggle vainly to get up again, and heard them
chattering excitedly to themselves. For the moment, in the face of
this queer phenomenon, the prisoner seemed to be forgotten. And Dex
was quick to seize the momentary advantage.
"Greca!" he called. "The tube! There--on the floor!"
The girl raised her head quickly, and followed his imploring gaze.
Laboriously she started for the tube. At the same instant the Rogan
leader began to feel around him for his lost weapon. Not finding it,
he raised his head and glanced about for it. He saw the girl making
her way toward it and, with a squeak of terror, began to crawl toward
it himself.
* * * * *
He was not quick enough. The girl, though not nearly as active under
the increased pull of gravity as a person of Earth might be, was yet
more agile than the Rogans. And she was the faster mover in this
tortuous, snail-like race. While the Rogan leader was still several
feet away, she retrieved the shock-tube.
"Kill him!" begged Dex. "And all the rest of the filthy creatures!"
With feminine horror of the thing that faced her, Greca hesitated an
instant--a hesitation almost long enough to be fatal. Then, just as
the Rogan leader was reaching savagely out for her, she leveled the
tube at him and turned it to its full power.
One last thin squeal came from the Rogan's mouth, a squeal that
cracked abruptly at its height. What had been its gangling body
drifted up in inky smoke.
"The others!" called Dex. "Quick! Before they get their weapons--"
Greca swept the death-tube in a short arc in front of her, over the
bodies of the remaining Rogans, as if spraying plants with a hose. One
after another, toppling in swift succession like grotesque falling
dominoes, the creatures sagged to the floor and melted away. That one
small part of Jupiter's red spot, at least, was cleared of Rogan
population.
* * * * *
Long shudders racked Greca's body, and her lips were a bloodless line
in her pallid face. But she did not go into womanly hysterics or swoon
at the slaughter it had been her lot to inflict. Moving as quickly as
she could, she went to the metal slab and began, with shaking fingers,
to undo the fastenings that held Dex prisoner.
"Good girl," said Dex, patting her satiny bare shoulder as he stood
free again. "You're a sport and a gentleman. You don't understand the
terms? They're Earth words, Greca, that carry the highest praise a man
can give a woman. But let's get out of here before another gang comes
and takes us again. Where can we hide?"
"I don't know any hiding places," confessed Greca despairingly. "The
Rogans swarm everywhere. We will be seen the moment we try to leave
here."
"Well, we'll hunt for a hole, anyway," said Dex. He essayed to walk.
What with the tendency of his muscles to jerk and collapse with the
aftermath of the torture he had endured, and the sudden and
inexplicable increase in gravity that bore him down, he made heavy
going of it. "First we'll go up and get Brand."
"Yes, yes," said Greca, a soft glow in her clear blue eyes. "Let us go
quickly."
She started toward the door, panting with the effort of moving. But
Dex halted an instant, to stoop and pick up another of the tubes.
"We might as well have one of these apiece," he said. "You've proved
you have the grit to use one; and maybe the dirty rats will think
twice about rushing us if we each have a load of death in our hands."
* * * * *
They made their way out of the torture laboratory, and up the incline
to the street level. And it was just as they reached this that the
burden of gravity under which they staggered was lifted from their
shoulders as quickly as it had descended on them.
Dex raised his arms just in time to fend his body from a collision
with the wall in front of him. "Now what!" he exclaimed.
Greca lifted her hand for silence, inclined her head, and listened
intently. As she did so, Dex heard the same noise her quick ears had
caught an instant before his: a distant pandemonium of ringing gongs
and siren shrieks, and squealing cries of a multitude of agitated
Rogans.
"What the devil--" began Dex. But again Greca raised her hand to
silence him, and listened once more. As she listened, her sea-blue
eyes grew wider and wider with horror. Then, frantically, she began to
race down a long corridor away from the street door.
Dex hastened to follow her. "What is it?" he demanded, when he had
caught up to her flying little feet. "This is not the way up to the
room where Brand--"
"Your friend is not there," she interrupted. She explained swiftly,
distractedly: "From the shouts of the Rogans I learn that he got into
the great dome building, somehow, and then was driven into the pen of
the...."
Dex could not get the next term she used. But her telepathic message
of the peril she mentioned formed in his mind clearly enough.
He got a flashing brain picture of a great, high-walled yard with a
monster in it of the kind he had caught a close-range glimpse a short
while before. Also, he saw a blurred, tiny figure, running from wall
to wall, that was Greca's imagining of Brand and his efforts to escape
the enormous beast.
"Good heavens!" groaned Dex. "Penned in with one of the things they
showed me while I was stretched on the rack! Are you sure, Greca?"
She nodded, and tried to run faster. "This way," she gasped, turning
down a passage to the left that ended in a massive metal door. "This
leads to the enclosure. Oh, if only we can be in time!"
Her slim fingers tore at a massive bolt that secured the door. "Here,"
said Dex, wrenching it open for her. And they stepped out into thin
sunlight, onto a hard surface of reddish ground that was crisscrossed
with innumerable rounded furrows like the tracks old-fashioned,
fifty-passenger airplane wheels used to make on soft landing fields.
* * * * *
Greca shrieked, and pointed to the far end of the enclosure. Down
there, flattened against the wall of the dome building, was Brand. And
waddling toward him with a tread that caused the ground to quiver, was
a mate to the hideous creature the Rogans had used to terrify Dex in
the torture chamber.
Dex leveled the tube he was carrying, swore, hit it frenziedly against
his hand. "How do you work this damned thing, Greca--Oh! Like that!
There--see if _that_ puts a sting in your hide!"
The distant monster stopped its advance toward Brand. A raw white spot
as big as a dinner plate leaped into being on one of its enormous hind
legs. It whirled with an ear-splitting hiss, to see what thing was
causing such pain in its rear. The frightful head whipped back at the
end of the long neck, to nuzzle at the seared spot. Then the giant
lizard turned toward Brand again.
A second time Dex pressed the central coil that formed the handle of
the tube, as Greca had showed him how to do. A second time the ray
shot down the field to flick a chunk of flesh weighing many pounds
from the monster's flank. And this time it definitely abandoned the
quarry behind it. With a scream like the keening of a dozen steam
whistles, it charged back over its tracks toward the distant pigmies
that were inflicting such exasperating punishment on it.
Dex swept the tube before him in a short half-circle. A smoking gash
appeared suddenly in the vast fore-quarters of the monster. It
stopped abruptly, its clawed feet plowing along the ground with the
force of its momentum. An instant it stood there. Then, with its head
swinging from side to side and lowered so that its looped neck dragged
on the reddish, dusty ground, it began to back away from the source of
its hurt, bellowing and hissing its rage and bewilderment.
"Brand!" shouted Dex. "This end! Run, while I hold the thing off!"
Brand began to race down the long enclosure, ten feet to a leap. The
great lizard darted after him, like a cat after an escaping mouse; but
a flick of the tube sent it bellowing and screaming back to its
corner.
"Dex!" gasped Brand. "Thank God!"
For a moment he leaned, white and shaken, against the wall. Then Greca
caught his hand in both of hers, and Dex put his arm supportingly
around his shoulder. They retreated back through the doorway behind
them, and slid the bolt across the metal door.