Purple balls hung in the air before the Zarathzan!
They shimmered and glittered, filled with opalescent mists of green
and red and white and purple. They danced eerily, as though drunk, as
though to the music of some alien piper. They bounced and swayed on
invisible strings in a wild and eerie saraband. They swung outward,
circling.
Then darted straight at Jonathan.
* * * * *
Jonathan threw every bit of mental power at his control into his
defense, but the first bubble did not break before it got within three
feet of him. The others fell apart easily after that.
Jonathan frowned, and an automatic hung in the air before him. It
turned to grey mists and faded, struck by a bolt of liquid fire.
Morka Kar rasped laughter, "Do better Earthling. We of Zarathza have
forgotten weapons such as that."
A haze of colorless hue quivered in front of the Zarathzan. It seemed
only a heat haze; but when he saw the sandy waste inside the shimmer,
when he saw grey and rolling ocean instead of the sand, and saw ocean
turn to roaring flames, he knew he looked on a weapon utterly foreign
to Earth thought.
His knuckles bulged until the skin over them whitened in the fury of
his concentration. Gasping, he saw the shimmer fade.
He cast a beam of radio-waves; saw them strike a beam of like power and
shatter, useless. He hurled acid. It met an alkali. He threw a bullet
and watched it melt in a shield of heat that turned the lead to smoke.
All the while the Zarathzan taunted him, shrilling, "Ape. Go back to
the steamy jungles of your planet, ape. We do not need a loose-brain
here. Go back, ape!"
A red triangle formed in the air before Morka Kar even as he spoke. It
glowed and burned with green hell-fires. Jonathan dropped water on it
and the green fires raged and grew and expanded, feeding on the water.
Jonathan shuddered when he finally extinguished them. Beads of cold
sweat rose on his forehead. He was growing weaker. His brain could not
stand this punishment. He had been subjecting it to too much. It would
give, soon. It was not conditioned, as was the Zarathzan's.
He thought fleetingly of last night, with Adatha Za's mouth burning
beneath his. Never to know that mouth again! She had trusted in his
strength, in his boasts. She had told him of her villa above the sea.
Now he was to fail her. He had bragged of a mickey finn. Of brass
knuckles. What a crude jest. He had even mentioned--
Jonathan sat upright. He thought.
When Morka Kar saw the club in his hands, he hooted.
"A club! The ape has found a club with which to kill. Lallista! He
jests."
Jonathan swung the wood in his hands with easy familiarity. He lifted
it above his shoulders, then brought it about viciously. There was a
sudden _splat_.
Morka Kar, still laughing his derision, crumpled and toppled from the
ebony seat.
Jonathan discovered his knees shaking. He sat down quickly.
Adatha Za came running, sobbing, laughter.
"You beat him. You beat him. What a strange weapon. What was it? Morka
Kar thought it but a club. He did not deign to spend his mental forces
on it. But you fooled him!"
Jonathan held up the wood and shook it, laughing, "This is known in
America as a baseball bat. A Louisville slugger. The old hickory, the
ash. And the thing that hit Morka Kar was a baseball. Gods! A jest, he
called it."
Shar Bytu looked from Morka Kar to Jonathan, saying, "You must destroy
him. It is the great rule of mental monomachy."
But Jonathan shook his head, wearily.
Shar Bytu looked down at the Zarathzan. He almost seemed to relish what
he did. But it was over in an instant. A few grains of dust settled
groundwards. Jonathan felt sick.
The others gathered around him. Their voices were excited.
"A new weapon to fight the flames."
"The Earthling has solved our problem."
"If it baffled a monomachy fighter like Morka Kar, it might work on the
flames."
Jonathan tried to explain, looking down at their faces.
"No, no," he cried out, talking down their thoughts. "It isn't a
weapon. It's a sport we play back on Earth. I--it--the bat is used to
hit a ball. Morka Kar didn't know that. He thought it just a club.
"Luckily, I could call my shot. A straight fast ball. Not a curve. A
straight--"
Jonathan blinked. He stopped, choking; eyes wide.
"Maybe," he whispered. "Maybe--"
The others grew quiet, watching. They felt his intense excitement, saw
his hands quiver, and the way his lips twitched. Adatha Za clung to his
arm and her eyes were pools of purple hunger.
It wasn't too fantastic--yet.
It all depended on straight lines and curves, and whether a straight
line can ever be curved. The shortest distance between two points. If
the straight line could be moved to turn, then he was wrong.
But if he were right! If this type of straightness _could not_ curve,
then it might conceivably eat its way through a universe which was
based on something that should curve: light.
* * * * *
Dr. Wooden and he had made strides in their experiments on light rays
derived from calcatryte. They had explored the quantum theory, had
forced homogenous light against a metal plate and seen the electrons it
extracted from it. This light energy had been partially turned into the
kinetic energy of the bombarded electrons of metal.
From this it had been a step upward in discovering that calcatryte
yielded a photon shower of such terrific concentration that it ate
right through the metal plate; had given no evidence of stopping until
they had constructed the plasticite screen: pure black, coated with a
fine dust of calcatryte itself.
They had no way of knowing whether the rays stopped at the screen,
exactly. They might go on and on. And if they ate through metal,
releasing the electrons that composed it--they might eat through the
universe!
Jonathan shuddered and looked around him.