_The Final Mystery_
On the roof, Carse quickly scanned their situation. They were standing
on the hub of the four-winged building. Far to the left was one set of
the dome's great and small port-locks; exactly opposite was the other.
Near the left hand ports; a little "north," lay the _Scorpion_. The
whole area enclosed was a flat plain of gray soil.
Looming over the great transparent dome hung the flaming disk of
Jupiter, so oppressively near that it seemed about to crash onto the
asteroid. Its rays poured in a ruddy flood over the settlement, clearly
illuminating each detail; and comparatively close against the face of
the mighty planet they could see the whitish globe of Satellite III. It
offered the nearest haven. They might arrive famished, but in the
power-equipped space-suits which Friday was lugging they should be able
to span the gap.
The Hawk nodded to the port-locks on the left.
"That one," he snapped. "We'll have two chances, the _Scorpion_ and the
port, but the port's safest; we could never get the whole ship underway
and through the lock in time. To prevent pursuit, all we have to do is
leave the lock open after us."
They hastened along the roof of the wing that ran that way. As yet there
was no outside pursuit; most of the settlement's guards seemed to have
been concentrated in the attack on the laboratory. But Carse knew it
would only be a matter of seconds before coolies would emerge from half
a dozen different points. He was trying to figure out which points they
were likely to be when there passed, perilously close, the spit of an
orange ray. He glanced back, to see the first of the crowd which had
broken into the laboratory come clambering up through the roof. Then, as
a second shot sizzled by, they arrived at the end of the wing.
* * * * *
Friday took the fifteen-foot drop without hesitation. Carse lowered
Leithgow to him and then swung down himself. They panted forward again,
over grayish, glittering soil.
Some three hundred yards of open space lay between them and the
port-locks. Friday now led the way, weighted down under the heavy suits;
the scientist came next and then the Hawk, his sole remaining gun
replying at intervals to the ever-thickening barrage from behind. They
had covered perhaps a half of that distance when the negro's steps
suddenly faltered and he halted.
"Look there!" he groaned. "Cuttin' us off! We'll never make it, suh!"
Carse looked where he pointed, and saw a squad of half a dozen men
emerging from a building well to their left. They were running at full
speed for the lock, and, as Friday had said, it was obvious that they
would get there first. He glanced quickly around. Pursuit from the
laboratory in the rear was hot--and moreover three coolies were angling
sharply out on each side, to outflank them! In a minute they would be
surrounded! Unable to reach either the port or the ship!
And then came the crowning piece of ill-luck. Suddenly the Hawk winced;
staggered; clapped a hand to his shoulder. A lucky shot from an enemy
gun had caught him.
"You're hit!" cried Leithgow.
"It's nothing...."
* * * * *
The slender adventurer stood very still, thinking. He was trapped. But
he was never more dangerous than when he was trapped.
Leithgow timidly ventured a suggestion.
"Why can't we put on our space-suits and rise up in the dome?"
Crisply the answer came back:
"Hard to maneuver laterally. Never get out ports. Sure death.... _I have
it!_" he ended.
Tersely he gave the two men orders:
"We've a bare chance--if I'm lucky. Now listen, and obey me exactly. Put
on your space-suits. Shut them tight. Lie flat. You, Friday, use your
ray-guns _and keep the guards from coming close_. Wait here. Do
absolutely nothing save keep them off. And keep your suits intact or
you're dead!"
He grabbed one of the suits from Friday and crept toward the _Scorpion_
on hands and knees. The three coolies from the pursuit at the rear had
already cut him off from the ship. Friday could not control his alarm at
this apparently crazy act. He called after:
"But you can't get to the ship through those guards! And if you did, you
couldn't run it yourself--and pick us up!"
Carse turned, his face white with cold passion. "When will you learn to
obey me implicitly?" he said harshly--and crept on.
Old Leithgow trusted his friend a little more. "Get your suit on,
Friday," he said gently, and slipped into his own. The negro, ashamed,
followed his example; then both were flat on the ground, back to back,
sniping--Leithgow also--as best they could under such conditions at the
groups of men who now were bellying ever nearer from three directions.
The Hawk's plan might well have appeared hair-brained to one who did not
know the man, and what he was capable of accomplishing under pressure.
The very first step in this plan required the destroying of the three
outflanking guards between him and the space-ship.
* * * * *
As so often in the great adventurer's career, he was lucky. The
unthinking have always admitted his luck, but never seen that he forced
it--forced it by doing the unexpected--attacking when he was attacked.
He was doing that now. The three coolie-guards in his way must have
known who he was, so their alarm at finding themselves, the attackers,
attacked, will account for their making a move of poor strategy. Instead
of scattering and defending the open entrance-port of the space-ship
from a short distance, they in their alarm made haste to get inside to
defend it from there. The interior was the best place to defend the
ship--if they had already been inside--for they could lie in the inner
darkness and sweep the open port when the Hawk entered.
But to try to pass through the port--that was bad judgment. It was only
necessary for Carse to hold bead on it and fire when they passed in
line.
This was the present "luck" of the adventurer. He might have sniped the
guards anyway, but he had it easier. From fifty yards away, prone and
carefully sighting, he took the three lives that had been so viciously,
so subversively altered by Ku Sui.
A moment later, the way cleared, he was inside the ship--and his
space-suit lay on the ground outside.
* * * * *
Rapidly the three groups of guards closed in on Leithgow and Friday. The
two men made their advance as uncomfortable as possible, but they could
do no accurate shooting at such difficult targets as crawling men, from
within the cramped interiors of their cumbrous suits. Not even Friday,
who was a crack shot. They could not hold out long--nor did they expect
to.
They had been too occupied to notice what had become of Carse. Within
their suits all was silence; they heard neither their friend's shots as
he struck down the three coolies nor their own. Quick glances at the
ship's open port revealed no one; nothing. Probably, they thought, the
Hawk was dead. Even if he were not, they would soon be. A matter of a
minute. Maybe two. Their suits were still intact, but they could not
remain so much longer. Ku Sui had this time ordered them destroyed.
And now half a dozen coolies were leaving the ring tightening around
them and creeping to the _Scorpion_ as additional guards....
It was then, in those last few seconds, with death staring them in the
face, that Friday did a magnificent thing. It happened that Carse saw
him do it as the adventurer jumped out of the _Scorpion_ again and with
frantic speed slipped into the space-suit he had left waiting. Friday
stood straight up, a hundred feet from the enemy--a great bloated
monster in his padded suit--and charged. Leithgow and the Hawk heard, by
their suit helmet-radios, his battle yell of defiance, but the coolies
did not. All silent, apparently, he rushed them--slowly, because of his
hampering suit--his ray-gun spitting orange contempt--and other pencils
of fiery death passing him narrowly by.
And then, while he still charged, the rays stopped stabbing past him,
and he saw the faces of the coolie-guards turn upward. So surprised was
the expression on their faces, that he turned and looked too--and saw
the _Scorpion_, her entrance ports still open, forty feet off the ground
and rising with swift acceleration.
Faster and faster she rose; all ray-guns were silenced before her
astounding ascent. Higher and higher--faster and faster--till with a
stunning, ear-deafening crash she struck the great dome and was through.
Then came chaos.
A huge, jagged gash marked the ship's passage, and through this the air
inside the dome poured with cyclonic force, snatching into in maelstrom
everything unfastened within the dome and hurling it crazily into space.
For seconds the flood rushed out, a visible thing, gray from the soil
which it scooped up; and while its fury lasted every building on the
asteroid quivered and groaned from the terrific strain.
And where, a moment before, men had stood--two white men and a black,
and a score of coolie-guards--there was now nothing save the flat rock
under the gaping hole. The upper soil had been ripped out and flung
forth like a concealing veil around the bodies that had gone with it....
* * * * *
For an interval Hawk Carse knew nothing. He had ceased to live, it
seemed, and was soaring through Eternity. He never knew how much time
passed before his numbed senses began to return and he became aware of
weight and of a furious roaring in his head.
He was moving forward at blinding speed. Something kept flashing before
him--a wide stream of ruddy orange light: his dazed brain could connect
it with nothing he had ever known. Soon the orange stream settled into
spasmodic bursts, pitch blackness filling the intervals; and when it
came more slowly he saw that it was in reality the vast flaming ball of
Jupiter, streaking across the line of vision as he tumbled over and
over, head over heels--free in space!
The realization helped his return to alertness. As the wild tumbling
motion gradually ceased, and Jupiter tended to stay more and more under
his feet, he peered around through his face-plate. To one side he
glimpsed two grotesque, bulky figures, one half of them limned glaringly
against the blackness of space by the near-by planet's light. He saw
other figures, too, spread out in a scattered fringe--figures of men in
smocks, dead and bloated and white.
They were the coolies, these last, and the other two were of course
Leithgow and Friday. But had they survived the outrush of air? Carse
felt in his left glove for the suit's gravity control lever; found it
and tentatively moved it. His acceleration slowly increased. He brought
the lever part-way back. Then, into the microphone encased inside the
helmet, he called:
"Leithgow! Leithgow! Can you hear me? Friday!"
The radio broadcast his words. Soon welcome answers came in Eliot
Leithgow's tired voice and the negro's emphatic bass.
"Maneuver together," Carse instructed them. "We must lock arms and stay
close."
* * * * *
Slowly, clumsily, the three monstrous figures made toward each other,
and presently they were reunited in a close group. Carse pointed an arm
into the face of Jupiter where there hung poised a gleaming globe of
white, dappled with dark splotches.
"Satellite III," he said, "--our goal. And we'll get there without
interruption now that Ku Sui, his laboratory, his coordinated brains,
are destroyed.... You are very quiet, Eliot. Aren't you happy at our
success?"
"I am very tired," the old scientist said. "Oh, but we'll sleep and
feast and game when we get back to my hidden lab on Three--won't we!"
"Chicken for me!" exclaimed Friday. "Even at twenty dollars a can!"
"Your shoulder, Carse--how is it?" asked the Master Scientist
solicitously. "And how did you ever get out of that space-ship in time,
after you had given it such an acceleration?"
There was a tired smile in the adventurer's voice when he replied:
"My shoulder--a trifle. I have a dozen such burns. But my feet still
hurt from the twenty-foot drop I took out of the _Scorpion_. I had to
get out: the shock of the crash would have killed me.
"But I've been looking for the asteroid," he went on--and interrupted
himself. "By the horn of the phanti!" he exclaimed in amazement. "Look,
Eliot! That explains it all!"
His whole body was tilted back to allow him to look upward. Friday and
the Master Scientist followed his startled gaze, and they too gaped in
wonder.
For there was nothing above or around them--no dwindling fragment of
rock--no sign of any asteroid: only the eternal stars.
"Yes," said Eliot Leithgow slowly, "that explains it all...."
"It explains what?" asked Friday, staring. "And where is the asteroid?"
"It's up there," the Hawk replied. "Don't you see now, Eclipse, why no
one's ever found it; why we could hunt forever for it and hunt in vain?
Ku Sui made his whole asteroid invisible!"
End of Project Gutenberg's The Affair of the Brains, by Anthony Gilmore