"Where else?" said Mury.
* * * * *
The official-looking individual in the expensive topcoat and sport hat
had reached the starboard airlock of the towship before anyone thought
to question his authorization, escorted as he was by a blue-uniformed
guardsman. When another sentry, pacing between runways a hundred yards
from the squat space vessel, paused to wonder, it was--as it came
about--just a little too late.
The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving
pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing
uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle
in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between
the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other
in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the
_Shahrazad's_ airlocks from more distant view; the gang of notables
attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety
by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up.
The slight man in guardsman's blue glanced over his shoulder and
vanished abruptly into the circular lock. His companion wheeled on the
topmost step, looking down with some irritation on his unhandsome face,
but with no apparent doubt of his command of the situation.
"Yes?" he inquired frostily.
"What goes on here?" snapped the guard, frowning at the tall figure
silhouetted against the glow in the airlock. "The crew's signaled all
aboard and the ship lifts in two minutes. You ought to be--"
"I am Semul Mury, Poligerent for the City of Dynamopolis," interrupted
the tall man with asperity. "The City is naturally interested in the
delivery of the power which will revivify our industries." He paused,
sighed, shifting his weight to the next lower step of the gangway. "I
suppose you'll want to re-check my credentials?"
The guard was somewhat confused; a Poligerent, in ninth-century
bureaucracy, was a force to be reckoned with. But he contrived to nod
with an appearance of brusqueness.
Fully expecting official papers, signed and garnished with all the
pompous seals of a chartered metropolis, the guard was dazed to receive
instead a terrific left-handed foul to the pit of the stomach, and as
he reeled dizzily, retching and clawing for his gun, to find that gun
no longer holstered but in the hand of the self-styled Poligerent,
pointing at its licensed owner.
"I think," Mury said quietly, flexing his left wrist with care the
while his right held the gun steady, "that you'd better come aboard
with us."
The guard was not more cowardly than the run of politically-appointed
civic guardsmen. But a flame gun kills more frightfully than the
ancient electric chair. He complied, grasping the railing with both
hands as he stumbled before Mury up the gangway--for he was still very
sick indeed, wholly apart from his bewilderment, which was enormous.
Above, Ryd Randl waited in the lock, flattened against the curved
wall, white and jittering. The inner door was shut, an impenetrable
countersunk mirror of metal.
"Cover him, Ryd," ordered Mury flatly. In obedience Ryd lugged out
the heavy flame pistol and pointed it; his finger was dangerously
tremulous on the firing lever. He moistened his lips to voice his
fears; but Mury, pocketing the other gun, threw the three-way switch on
the side panel, the switch that should have controlled the inner lock.
Nothing happened.
"Oh, God. We're caught. We're trapped!" The outer gangway had slid up,
the lock wheezed shut, forming an impenetrable crypt of niosteel.
* * * * *
Mury smiled with supernal calm. "We won't be here long," he said.
Then, to quiet Ryd's fears, he went on: "The central control panel and
the three local switches inside, between, and outside the locks are
on the circuit in that order. Unless the locks were closed from the
switch just beyond the inner lock, that lock will open when the central
control panel is cut out in preparation for lifting."
Almost as he paused and drew breath, a light sprang out over the switch
he had closed and the inner lock swung silently free of its gaskets.
Ryd felt a trembling relief; but Mury's voice lashed out like a whip as
he slipped cat-like into the passage.
"Keep him covered. Back out of the lock."
Ryd backed--the white, tense face of the prisoner holding his own
nervous gaze--and, almost out of the lock, stumbled over the metal
pressure rings. And the gun was out of his unsure grip, clattering
somewhere near his slithering feet, as he started to fall.
He saw the guardsman hurl himself forward; then he was flung spinning,
back against the engine-room door. In a flash, even as he struggled
to keep on his feet, he saw the man in the airlock coming up from a
crouch, shifting the pistol in his right hand to reach its firing
lever; he saw Mury sidestep swiftly and throw the master control switch
outside.
The inner lock whooshed shut, barely missing Ryd. At the same instant,
the flame gun lighted locks and passage with one terrific flash, and a
scorched, discolored spot appeared on the beveled metal of the opposite
lock a foot from Mury's right shoulder.
"You damned clumsy little fool--" said Mury with soft intensity. Then,
while the air around the metal walls still buzzed and snapped with
blue sparks, he whirled and went up the control-room gangway in two
quick bounds. Even as he went the flame gun thundered again in the
starboard airlock.
Mury was just in time, for the pilot had been about to flash "Ready" to
the Communications Tower when the explosions had given him pause. But
the latter and his two companions were neither ready nor armed; clamped
in their seats at the controls, already marked, they were helpless in
an instant before the leveled menace of the gun. And the imprisoned
guardsman, having wasted most of his charges, was helpless, too, in his
little cell of steel.
"It's been tried before," said one of the masked men. He had a blond,
youthful thatch and a smooth healthy face below the mask, together with
an astrogator's triangled stars which made him _ex officio_ the brains
of the vessel. "Stealing a ship--it can't be done any more."
"It's been done again," said Mury grimly. "And you don't know the half
of it. But--you will. I'll need you. As for your friends--" The gun
muzzle shifted slightly to indicate the pilot and the engineer. "Out of
those clamps. You're going to ride this out in the portside airlock."
He had to repeat the command, in tones that snapped with menace, before
they started with fumbling, rebellious hands to strip their armor from
themselves. The burly engineer was muttering phrases of obscene fervor;
the weedy young pilot was wild-eyed. The blond astrogator, sitting
still masked and apparently unmoved, demanded:
"What do you think you're trying to do?"
"What do _you_ think?" demanded Mury in return. "I'm taking the ship
into space. On schedule and on course--to meet the power shell." The
flame gun moved with a jerk. "And as for you--what's your name?"
"Yet Arliess."
"You want to make the trip alive, don't you, Yet Arliess?"
The young astrogator stared at him and at the gun through masking
goggles; then he sank into his seat with a slow shudder. "Why, yes," he
said as if in wonder, "I do."