_Out Under the Dome_
Within the well of darkness rang the metallic reverberations from the
battering on the four doors all around. The fluid nothingness was a
place of fear. Its nerve-shattering, mind-confusing bedlam might have
come from the fantastic anvils of some giant, malevolent blacksmith.
The Hawk's curt voice cut through imperatively:
"Keep your heads. We'll have a light in a second. Light of a sort."
He threw the switch by the side of the chamber of brains.
Seconds passed, and where was darkness grew a faint glow. The switch had
operated; the current, probably from the device's own batteries, was
there! Quickly and steadily the liquid within the case took on its
self-originating glow, until the midnight laboratory was faintly washed
with the delicate rosy light. The wires emerged in their complexity as
before, and then the brains, all gruesome and naked in their cradles of
unnatural life.
Around the internally-lit case were the three besieged Earthlings, half
in blackness, the light from the front making ghastly shadows on their
faces. Acolites at some sorcerer's rite they looked, with the long inky
patches that left them to dissolve formlessly against the far walls of
the room.
Grotesque in the operating garments he wore, his bald head shining in
the eery light, Eliot Leithgow approached the microphone Dr. Ku had used
to communicate with his pathetic subjects. He looked down at the brains,
at the wires which threaded the pans they lay in, at the narrow gray
tubes that pulsed with blood--or whatever might be the fluid used in its
stead. All mechanical was the apparatus--all of metal and other
cunningly fashioned man-made materials--all but the brains....
* * * * *
To the old Master Scientist there came a vision of five human figures,
rising specterlike from the case they were entombed in; straight, proud
young figures, two of them; two others old, like himself, and the fifth
a gnarled hunchback. Very different were they, each from each other, but
each face had its mark of genius; and each face, to Eliot Leithgow, was
warm and smiling, for these five men were friends....
So he saw them in vision....
"Another switch has to be thrown to talk with them, Carse," he said. The
Hawk indicated one inquiringly. Leithgow nodded. "Yes. That was it." The
switch went over.
He steadied himself and said into the speaking grille:
"I am Eliot Leithgow--Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. Once you knew me.
Professors Geinst, Estapp and Norman, Dr. Swanson and Master Scientist
Cram--do you remember me? Do you remember how once we worked together;
how, long ago on our Earth, we were friends? Do you remember your old
colleague, Leithgow?"
He stopped, deeply shaken. In seconds his mind sped back through the
years to those five men as he had last seen them--and to two women he
had met, calm-faced as their husband-scientists.... God forbid those
women should ever learn of this!
Carse watched his old comrade closely, fearful of the strain this was on
him.
Then came a cold, thin, mechanical voice.
_"Yes, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. I remember you well."_
The scientist strove to keep level his voice as he continued:
"Two friends and I are trapped here. Dr. Ku Sui desires my brain. He
wishes to add it to----" He stammered, halted; then burst out: "If it
would help you in any way, I'd give it gladly! But it couldn't, I know;
it would only aid his power-mad schemes. So my friends and I must
escape. And we can see now no way!
"You can hear that noise? It's very loud; men are outside each door,
battering at them, and soon they must break through. How can we escape?
Do you know of a way, out of your knowledge of conditions here? Will you
tell me, old colleagues?"
He waited.
* * * * *
Fifty feet away from this scene, and missing almost all of it, was
Friday. From his post at the panel he kept throwing fearful looks at the
nearest door, which was shuddering and clanging and threatening any
moment to be wrenched off its hinges. A good thing--he was
thinking--that the doors were of stout metal. When one did go he would
get five or six of the soulless devils before they brought him down.
Carse waited tensely for the response--if one there was to be. His ears
were throbbing in unison with the regular crash of rams on metal, but
his eyes never left the convoluted mounds of intelligent matter so
fantastically featured by the internal radiance of the life-giving
liquid. Impossible, it seemed, that thoughts were stirring inside those
gruesome things....
"Please hurry!" he said in a low voice; and Leithgow repeated
desperately:
"How can we escape? Please be quick!"
Then the miracle of mechanism and matter functioned and again gave forth
the cold voice of the living dead.
"_It is my disposition to help you, Eliot Leithgow. On a shelf under one
of the tables in this room you will find a portable heat-ray. Melt a
hole in the ceiling and go out through the roof._"
"Then what can we do?"
"_In lockers behind the table there are space-suits, hanging ready for
emergencies. Don them and leave through one of the asteroid's
port-locks._"
"Ask if the ports are sealed," Carse interjected instantly.
Leithgow asked the question.
"_Yes_," replied the unhuman voice. "_But twice four to the right will
open any of them._"
* * * * *
The Master Scientist wiped his brow. Though trembling under the strain
of conversing with this machine on which his life depended, he did not
overlook a single point.
"But the asteroid's gravital pull would hold us close to it," he said.
"Is there a way of breaking free from it?"
"_You'll find the space-suits are equipped with small generators and
gravity-plates which I helped Ku Sui develop. The switch and main
control are in the left-hand glove._"
"Thank you! Oh, thank you! You give us a chance!" exclaimed old
Leithgow.
He turned and looked for the Hawk, and found him already in the lockers
and pulling out three space-suits. The clumsy, heavy cone of a portable
heat-ray lay on the table ready to hand.
They had little time to waste. The torrid temperature of a new smell of
burned metal around the door they had just entered told them as well as
words that the large projector in the corridor was at last being used to
bore a way in.
With surprising strength in one so slender, Carse lifted the ray and
pointed it at an angle toward the middle of the ceiling. He pressed the
control button, and a blinding stream of violet radiance splashed
against the metal above. It hissed and sputtered where it touched;
molten drops fell sizzling and splattering to the floor; then suddenly
there was a flood of ruddy illumination, and the Hawk dropped the
heat-ray, stepped forward and looked up.
* * * * *
Up through a neatly melted round hole, up at the great glasslike dome
which arched over the whole settlement--up, past it, into the vast face
of Jupiter, hanging out there oppressively near!
Friday, champing for action, left his post by the panel and dragged a
long low cabinet to position under the hole. On top of it he placed the
operating table, and, after he had tripped the table's small wheels,
another table on top of that.
"You first, Eclipse!" his master rapped out as he finished. "I'll pass
the suits to you; then swing Leithgow up."
The negro answered by acting. Swiftly he climbed the rude pile, and
reached for the edge of the hole. It was still searingly hot, and he
gasped with hurt as his palms and fingers clenched over it, but he did
not let go. Levering himself rapidly up, he got a leg through and then
his body. A second later he peered back in and lowered his hands down.
"No one up here yet!" he reported. "All right for the suits!"
Carse passed the three bulky suits to him, and also two extra ray-guns
he had found in the locker.
"Now, Eliot--up!"
With the Hawk's help, Leithgow clambered onto the cabinet. He was just
mounting the operating table when, from behind, came a thin, metallic
voice:
"_Master Leithgow--Eliot Leithgow--please, a favor?_"
* * * * *
Leithgow turned and stared, then understood. It was the coordinated
brains. They had forgotten to return the switches. And now the cold
voice was speaking of its own accord; and somehow--though it might have
been imagination entirely--there seemed to be a tinge of loneliness to
the words that sounded from its speaker.
Instantly Leithgow got down and hurried over to the grille. Seconds were
precious, but Carse and he were heavily obligated to the brains, and any
request in reason had to be fulfilled.
"Yes. What can I possibly do?"
The lower hinge of one side of the barricaded door gave, burned out, and
the door wrenched inward at a resumption of the battering. The other
hinge still held, but it was bending with each mighty blow. Outwardly
calm, Hawk Carse watched the weakening door, a gun in each hand.
"_This_," said the toneless voice: "_Destroy me. Leave no slightest
trace. I live in hell, and have no way to move.... There are old
memories ... things that once were dear ... Earth ... my homes ... my
lives there.... Eliot Leithgow, destroy me. But promise, on your honor
as a Master Scientist, never to let a single word regarding my fate
reach those on Earth who knew me, loved me...._"
Leithgow looked at the Hawk. The adventurer nodded.
"I'll use the heat-ray," he said, with pity.
He ran and picked it up. But he had taken only one step in return when
the second hinge of the yielding door wrenched free. An ear-piercing
screech rent the bedlam--and the door fell, half twisting, to lie in the
doorway.
As if by a signal the crashing at the other doors stopped. In an
extraordinary silence a mob of gray-smocked bodies pressed forward.
Orange streaks laced the dim laboratory. The Hawk shouted, "Up, Eliot!
For God's sake, up!" as, with deadly effect, he poured his two ray-guns
at the advancing men.
For a second, shaken by the terrible barrage, they fell back, leaving
several sprawled bodies on the floor; but they came right back again.
Leithgow got safely to the top of the pile and was snatched out to
temporary safety. Frantically Friday called down to his master; he
seemed on the point of jumping down into the fight himself. But Hawk
Carse had been party to a promise.
He was behind the structure of furniture under the hole he had made in
the ceiling. With one gun he spat death at the coolies, while the other
he emptied at the case of brains. Two stabbing streams of orange angled
from him, one telling with awful effect on the men only two score feet
away, and the other absolutely useless. All over the still-glowing case
it spat its hits, but the glasslike substance resisted it completely,
and remained unscathed.
Carse swore harshly. He hurled one empty gun at the case, turned with a
last salvo of shots at the coolies, and then was up on the pile and
leaping for Friday's hands.
They caught and gripped his, swung him once--twice--and hauled him
swiftly out. But as the Hawk disappeared he shouted down the case:
"I'll be back!"