And so he rushed, his oxygen carefully adjusted, out through the
massive main-city-lock almost on the heels of Onupari's helmeted men,
and they, for the greater part drunken and stumbling blindly along,
heeded him not.
The rockets were coming from Kaa, out of Kaa flashing flames in the
night! But they would be far too late! Onward he ran, his heart
screaming protest against the violence of his pace, an endless mile
across the desert waste.
Onupari's men were streaming up the gleaming aluminum plated ramp now,
pouring into the bowels of the ship resting on the ways. Frederix drove
forward, a disrupter clenched in his right hand, leaped towards the
ramp, yards behind the last man.
And Meevo, thin, haughty Meevo, stood before him, recognition dawning
in his wide, cruel eyes, hand reaching for a disrupter. Frederix heard
the faint purring of the warming atomics. The Vron in his way! He must
reach the controls, wreck them, even though his life be in forfeit!
He brought the gun up even as Meevo whipped out his.
Frederix fired first--right into that glassite helmet--red burst of
flame, blood spurting out of a jugular vein severed from nothingness;
the Vron's decapitated body crumpled.
But the lock crashed shut, and a man loomed within a lighted gun turret.
The atomics were hissing more loudly now, the intense wave of heat
driving Frederix back. A leader flashed past him, fabricating an
ionized path for the incredible bolt of lightning which crashed nearby,
sucking him into the very heart of a stunning thunderclap.
He regained his feet unsteadily, tried to run on, intent on escaping
the roaring atomics ere they blasted him with their dispersed fury.
He stumbled, went down, and his mad eyes saw the outdistanced
robot coming towards him. A lightning leader flashed, smiting the
metallic automaton squarely in the fuel compartment--_the radium
compartment_--fusing the whole into a blinding, white hot, leaping
electrical aura which strung itself out in a roaring, seething,
zigzagging finger _which leaped backwards along that ionized pathway
towards the ship_!
[Illustration: _In a glory of pyrotechnic thunder the ship was off--but
in seeking revenge the captain made one mistake!_]
A tiny voice keened above that mad tumult, shrilling out of that
gutted, wrecked automaton:
"_We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!_"
Even as that plaintive, laughing voice cut across the prostrate,
half-blinded man's brain, so spoke more mightily the thunder of the
atomics, flinging the mighty hull up the ways into the illimitable
starshine. His nerve centers revolted. The agonizing white of afterjets
initially super-charged; then that excruciatingly painful splash of
furious lightning intermeshed and blazing in supernal glory on the
ship's side.
The very roof of the heavens seemed to cleave in twain. The universe
became one crazy, all encompassing roar; the skies were a livid,
screaming wave of white, brain singeing, ear bursting agony.
Frederix was blasted end over end, his bones snapping like matchwood,
intolerable pain crushing in on him--
Vibration upon mad vibration. Reverberation of hell thunder.
Pain--unutterable, endless voids of swimming pain--
Consciousness remained. Sound--crushing sound.
And, at length, silence.
* * * * *
The man tried to drag his broken, throbbing, bleeding body from beneath
the debris of the hangars against which he had been thrown, which
had sheltered him from the highest fury of that unleashed cargo of
_seedrona_, set aspark by the short circuit caused by the disrupting
blast of unnatural lightning, radium transformed into flame.
Frederix looked up into the blackness and strained to see beyond it.
A faint, almost ironic smile crossed his pain wracked, bleeding lips.
Gone, the minions of those who sought to subjugate a system--gone, the
deadly cargo which, treated and compressed, would have destroyed the
spacestations and laid the World bare to conquest.