There was only the faint echo of my voice, coming back at me from the
steel cubby wall. The door was ajar. I shoved at it, burst in and stood
stricken, transfixed, with so great a horror flooding me that the eerie
scene in the helio cubby swam before my gaze. At his instrument table
the white-uniformed figure of young Smith lay sprawled, a white figure
crimsoned ghastly with blood. A knife handle protruded from his back.
Horribly his head dangled sidewise, with grisly severed neck.
And as I rushed forward, my movement jostled the body. It slumped, fell
from the stool, hitting the floor with a thud. The blow broke the neck
vertebrae; the head--ghastly little ball--rolled across the room and
stopped at the wall, gruesomely right side up, with Smith's dead eyes
staring at me--eyes with the agony of death frozen in them.
Then I saw the wreckage of the instrument table. All our
communications smashed, wrecked beyond repair! For another second I
numbly stared. Then, from some distant point of the ship's interior,
a strident little electric whistle sounded. A signal! From another
section I heard it answered. And then a shot! The barking explosion
of a powder-gun ... the hiss of a stabbing heat-ray ... a commotion
in the lower corridors--shouts of startled passengers ... a turmoil
everywhere....
The attack had begun!
* * * * *
The turmoil that all in those seconds was spreading about the ship
like fire in prairie grass released me from my numbness. I whirled;
dashed back through the helio cubby door to the roof deck. It was still
unoccupied. Back on the stern deck triangle, where just the stern tip
of it showed from here, with the dull-red Earth-light upon it, there
was the sizzling flash of a heat-gun. I saw the stern lookout collapse
back from his telescope; fall to the deck.
Toward the bow, through the chart-room window where the shade now was
up, Wilson was staring out. "Penelle!"
His voice reached me. Beyond the kiosk of chart room and control
turret, a figure appeared coming up the little catwalk ladder from the
bow deck. It seemed to be the bow lookout, but whether friend or foe I
had no way of guessing.
"Watch yourself, Wilson," I shouted. "Watch the turret--" I was dashing
for the side companionway. Whatever transpired up here, there was only
one thing in my mind in the chaos of that moment. Nina.... She was
alone down in her cabin. I must get her up here....
I leaped down the last half of that little side ladder. On the dim side
deck ten feet away, two men were fighting, one in white gold uniform,
the other a deckhand. They rolled on the deck. A knife flashed....
Another man came suddenly from the smoking lounge doorway. He plunged
at me, whirling an iron bar. My Banning flash met him head on; I jumped
aside as his dead body catapulted to the deck. There was another flash.
One of the rolling, fighting men on the deck went limp. The other rose.
It was the fat little Peter Green, Second Officer. He was panting; his
face streaked with blood.
"Get to your room," he gasped as he saw me. "All passengers stay in
your cubbies. Piracy!"
The passengers were shouting now; from a nearby corridor entrance women
were screaming. Then from up at the turret, Mackensie turned on the
vessel's distress siren. Its shrill, dismal electrical whine sounded
above the turmoil.
"Go up to the control turret," I shouted at Green. I dashed into the
corridor. Passengers scattered to right and left before me.
"Get into your rooms," I shouted. "Everybody stay in. Barricade--"
An Earth-woman screamed; somebody shouted, "That big
Martian--murderer--I saw him killing--" Two little Lunites, mine
workers, a young man and a girl, stood with arms around each other
in one of the doorways. Pallid little people, confused, helpless,
cringing. I shoved them back into their room and banged their door.
Then I turned into the main corridor, ran aft along it, came to the
next cross passage. Nina! I saw her, ahead of me in the corridor, close
by her smashed door. She was struggling, fighting with the snaky Venus
man Ollog Torio; his arms lifted her up as he tried to carry her. I
shouted an oath; I did not dare fire. And at the sound of my voice he
dropped her, made off through the end door so quickly that I had no
time to drill him.
"Nina! Nina!"
I gathered her up, frail little thing in her negligee with her
luxuriant black hair streaming down.
"Nina, did he hurt you?"
"No! No, I'm all right."
She was breathless; pallid; her dark eyes were pools of terror.
"Oh, dear God!" she gasped. "It's come." She clutched at me. "That
hunchback--that fellow Durk--have you seen him?"
"No, I haven't." Her question sent a shudder through me. I set her on
her feet. "We've got to get up to the control turret. The captain--his
loyal officers up there."
"Oh--Oh, Lord!" With a new anguish of terror upon her face she jerked
away from me, ran for her doorway. I saw where Torio had melted through
its lock with a heat blast. I dashed through it after her, and caught
her in the center of her room.
"Nina, what's the matter?"
* * * * *
The oblong coffin box! It lay flat on the floor, over by the wall of
the dim room. In a sudden lull of the ship's chaos the rhythmic ticking
was audible. And now there were other sounds from within the box! A
thumping! A low, mumbling man's voice!
A rasping voice in the cabin doorway sounded behind me. Gun in hand, I
whirled. One of the huge deckhands stood there, murder on his face, a
blood-stained knife between his teeth so that he looked like an ancient
picture of a surface vessel pirate. He lunged in at us. My flash caught
him full in the face; horribly his features blackened as he went down.
"Oh--Oh, I had no chance to let you out!" Nina was half sobbing it
as she flung herself down over the box. The ship's alarm siren had
suddenly died. Did that mean that the captain and the others in the
control turret had been killed? The thought stabbed at me. Distant
shots were still sounding. The oaths of fighting men were audible--the
loyal members of the crew, fighting those traitors who had so suddenly
set upon them. Footsteps were thudding on the roof-deck overhead.
"No chance to let you out!" The pallid girl with trembling fingers was
fumbling at the box. Its lid rose up, with the head and shoulders of a
man appearing beneath; a man entombed, hiding in there, breathing with
the air-renewers of the ticking mechanism. A stalwart man of iron-gray
hair. Georg Blake! Nina's father. I recognized him from the many
pictures I had seen. He leaped out of the box, stared at me.
"A Government man," Nina gasped. "Here to help us."
The report of Blake's death--his possible murder--all that had been
Blake's own doing. He gripped me now; murmured it swiftly. A giant,
dominant fellow, he towered over me. Nina was unpacking his weapons
from the box as he told me. He had believed there was a plot on the
Moon against him; was smuggling himself to the Moon, where in secret,
with the villains thinking him dead and only his young daughter to
cope with, he expected to expose them. And most of the voyage he had
been hidden in the box, afraid of eavesdroppers or some prying Benson
curve-ray.
"Give me those guns, Nina. These damnable murderers--" Then he swung at
me; lowered his voice: "Mackensie has the catalyst?"
"Yes," I murmured.
"Good! I know where. By Heaven, they can kill us both and still they
won't find it." He was buckling his weapons to his huge belt.
"The captain's in the control turret," I said. "Making a stand up
there. We should go to him."
"Yes. You're right. Come on."
We ran. I put my arm around the girl as she sagged like a terrified
child against me. Bow and stern, the sounds of the fighting seemed
somewhat to have slackened. The passengers still were screaming; I
shoved them back in their doorways as we dashed past. And suddenly,
reaching the side deck, I realized that the towering Blake was not
with us. The deck here was wet with blood. Three or four bodies lay
nearby. An Earth-woman lay writhing, her white throat slashed with
crimson. There was nothing I could do to help her. My gun ranged the
deck; there was nothing to shoot at. Off at the stern, I saw a running
man leap high in the air and go down. Then the red Earth-light back
there momentarily darkened. Someone had thrown a darkness bomb; its
light-absorbing gas came spreading along the deck toward us.
"This way, Nina--climb. I'll follow."
We went up the little ladder. Near the top I held her back, poking
my head cautiously up, in advance of her. The dimly starlit deck was
blurred with gas and heat fumes. We were mid-forward, perhaps halfway
between the helio cubby and the chart room. In a patch here on the
deck, darkness gas hung in a layer, a black shroud nearly waist deep.
Light still showed in the window of the helio room, where the grewsome
body of Len Smith lay sprawled. The chart room was dark, its door
closed; but the steel shutter of its window, facing this way, was up a
few inches. I thought I saw the muzzle of a gun protruding.
Good enough. Mackensie, Wilson and perhaps others were in
there--barricaded, still holding out. I shouted, "I'm Penelle. Don't
fire!"
"Come ahead," Mackensie's great voice roared.
* * * * *
Life, or death, can hang upon such a little thing. Directly across
the thirty-foot roof deck from me the top of the other side-ladder
was visible above the layer of darkness. A man's head and shoulders
suddenly appeared there. My weapon leveled; but then I saw that it was
Nina's father. He saw me at the same instant, waved at me and jumped
from the ladder, wading through the waist-high darkness toward the
chart room.
I do feel that there was nothing I could have done. Heaven knows I
would give anything now if only I had had some flash of intuition.
But I was thinking only of Nina. I turned to gaze down at her, where
she stood a step or two below me on the ladder. "Come on, it's all
safe."
Safe? I turned back just in time to see a hand and arm come up out of
the layer of darkness. Weird, as though detached from its body, it
swung; the fingers loosed a little globe. It was only a few feet behind
Blake. The globe hurtled at his head, struck it--an explosive bomb.
It burst with a sharp report and a little puff of yellow-red light.
Perhaps I caught a glimpse of the ghastly scattered fragments of what
had been a human head. There was only a grewsome gory neck-stump as the
giant body of Blake toppled down into the layer of darkness.
I fired into the darkness gas. The stab of heat dispelled it a little.
I hit nothing. Then, as I jumped from the ladder, forgetful of Nina,
from the chart-room window Mackensie was wildly firing from two
weapons. One of the sizzling heat-rays barely missed me. And then
someone behind him, Wilson perhaps, tossed a light-bomb. Its blinding
actinic glare momentarily dispelled the gloom. At the other side
companion-ladder we caught a vague glimpse of the massive head and
shoulders of Mokk as he leaped down to the lower deck. His triumphant
laugh floated up after him.
"You, Penelle, bring the girl in here," Mackensie was roaring. "Hurry
now."
I all but carried the half-fainting Nina. The darkness gas was floating
away; but I thanked God that enough remained to shroud the fallen
headless body of her father as we passed it. The door of the chart room
opened; I dashed in with her; hands banged the steel door closed and
bolted it.
"I guess we're all here," Mackensie said. The _X-87_ captain was grim,
his thick face puffed with the choleric blood swelling it. His left
arm hung almost limp at his side; I saw where his white uniform was
burned with the scorching edge of a heat-stab. Young Wilson was here,
disheveled, wild-eyed. The little oval to the control turret was open;
I could see the fat little Peter Green and James Polter, the purser, in
there, crouched at a slit of the forward visor window, weapons in hand.
I went in to them.
"Just us," I murmured. "Where's Dr. Frye?"
Polter grimly gestured. "Down there--see him? Damned traitor. I drilled
him. See him?"
The _X-87_ was still on her course. The forward deck triangle was still
bathed in moonlight, save that gases blurred it. The forward lookout's
telescope lay in a wreck, with his body upon it. Other motionless forms
were strewn about; chairs were overturned--those same chairs where Nina
and the rest of us had gathered in the moonlight so short a time ago.
Dr. Frye's thin body lay huddled down there.
I was aware now that all the fighting had ceased; there was only the
distant murmurs of the terrified passengers, in their cabins beneath
us. The mutineers everywhere had won; I could not doubt it. The thing
was a swift massacre. Those crew members who had tried to be loyal
were all dead. I stared, from the tiny hatch-opening in the bow, which
led down to the forward messroom, a hand cautiously appeared. There
was a stab of flame; a report; an old-fashioned leaden slug thudded
harmlessly against a corner of the catwalk bridge, only a few feet from
the slit at which we were peering. And in the silence, the sniper's
chuckle sounded.
At my elbow, suddenly there was a buzzing. Green turned his head
slightly. "Call--coming from the main gravity plate room," he
murmured. "Answer it, Penelle."
I moved toward the little mouthpiece. But Mackensie had heard it and
came running in from the adjacent chart room. "I'll take it. Keep at
your lookouts, everybody--this may be a ruse to catch us off guard."
I could hear the tiny voice coming from the receiver as Mackensie
clapped it to his ear.
"This is Torio," the voice said suavely. "Have you had enough, Captain?"
"You go to hell," Mackensie roared.
"That would be very nice, Captain, but it's more likely to be your own
destination." I could picture the sleek, ironically smiling Venus man
down there at the speaking tube. "We demand your surrender now--if you
do not wish to die."
"To hell with you--"
"All you have to do is come out of the turret, with your hands up.
You'll be treated--like the passengers. Fair treatment, I do assure
you."
"I'll have all you pirates in the detention pen before this is ended,"
Mackensie roared.
"All we want is your surrender. And to have you tell us where you've
hidden that little leaden cylinder."
"By Heaven, you'll never find it. Dead or alive."
"Dead, if you say so," Torio's voice snapped. And then his irony
returned. "We'll give you five minutes to decide."
"I want nothing from you. By the gods, I'm still Master here!"
"Empty title, Captain."
"I'm steering us back to Earth," the captain rasped. "The
Interplanetary Patrol is coming for us."