IV

It was not more than three minutes later that young Arliess began

to twitch and mutter under the neuromuscular impact of a cc. of

arterially-injected _vitalin_. The Fleet doctor straightened and

returned his small, bright needle to its velvet-lined case, snapping it

shut hurriedly.

"He'll recover consciousness within a very few minutes. You'll be

wanting to be on your way, no doubt...."

When the doctor had escaped gratefully from the _Shahrazad's_

topsy-turvy gravity, Mury gave power to the overdrive, sent the ship

swinging back into a course for the point of intersection with the

flight of the power projectile. The great curve that had taken them

off the planet had placed them now almost directly in front of that

hurtling objective; _Shahrazad_, still slowly gathering additional

momentum, would be overtaken by the cargo shell at the moment that she

reached a velocity practically equal with its own.

To ensure that, Mury's long, skillful fingers twirled a vernier,

finely adjusting the fuel flow into the disintegration chambers behind

the after bulkhead, and with it the volume of steam which, smashed

to atoms, was hurled at stupendous velocity from the driving jets

to propel the rocket ship. An acceleration just a trifle under one

gravity--the calculator clicked out its results down to six decimals.

The gyroscopes locked the towship in its new groove in space.

Yet Arliess jerked ineffectually in his clamps, cried out thickly. His

eyes came stickily open behind their square goggles. He sat stiff and

still for a long minute.

Ryd underwent a considerable egoflation in his contempt for this other

man's defeat. It had been long since he had known the savage joy of

winning.

Arliess said weakly, raising both hands to press flat against his

temples, "Where--are we?" The same words Ryd had whimpered not so long

ago.

Mury turned slightly to look at the astrogator out of the corners

of his eyes. He said deliberately, "We're past. Inspection's over,

and--thanks largely to you, Yet Arliess, we're clear."

The young man sat for a moment with head buried in his hands. Then he

looked up and out toward the motionless star fields that glittered

ahead.

"So?" he said bitterly. "What next? Are you going to try to steal the

power shell? And if so, where are you going to escape to? I suppose

you realize that you'd have to scoot right out of the System to even

get clear of the _Algol's_ guns--and there are four other Earth

dreadnaughts in planetary space alone?"

Arliess' words, coldly confident of a victory that would be death for

him, chilled Ryd. But he took heart from Mury's jeering laughter.

"Do you think I'd have come this far if I had feared your dreadnaughts?

_They'll_ have enough to think of before the next twenty-four hours are

past, when they are hurled in battle against all the power of Mars!"

Arliess stiffened. "Are you crazy? There's no war in the air. A

year ago, yes, perhaps--but now, with the treaties signed and trade

resuming--"

"And Earth," snapped Mury, "sold for that very trade into the hands of

the Martian overlords. No, war is preferable--and we'll have war, now."

"You talk," said Arliess in a curiously flat voice, "as if the choice

of courses rested in your hands."

"It does. Or rather, it will--so soon as I hold in these hands the

weapon of the power projectile."

* * * * *

Mury's voice became orotund. His hands rested lightly on the pilot's

controls before him and he gazed into space-darkness as if toward an

invisible dawn. "When a Terrestial city goes skyward in one terrific

blast of disintegration--When Pi Mesa and Dynamopolis vanish together

from the face of Earth in a warningless holocaust--Then Earth will

realize the truth, if only through deception."

Ryd's veins were trickling ice water instead of warm blood, and his

nerve centers were paralyzed. It was too big for him, and his courage

was gone again.

Mury talked on, and his voice was that of one sincerely and earnestly

trying to convince:

"Earth's government has made peace with the Martians, but the instinct

of the people infallibly distrusts the treacherous rival world. Why

not--since Mars is indeed ready and avid to topple Earth from her old

place as the mother-planet, mistress of the System? Mars, with twice

Earth's area and five times the sunlight to drive his heliodynes--Mars

with his robot millions and his human oligarchy athirst for power and

glory, intoxicated with the strength of a new, raw, rich world. Only if

we fight now can we escape domination. I am going to strike the blow

that will wake Earth to battle, and bring her at last through pain and

repentance to her age-old greatness!"

_Shahrazad_ hurtled steadily on before the long hydrogen flares of her

afterdrive, and three men sat behind her controls--and their triumph

and fear and hate might have been strong enough to reach out beyond the

metal shell and form an auro, not so bright but more fiercely potent,

about the rushing ship.

Then young Arliess said through his teeth, "You know damn well it won't

work."

"It will," said the Panclast, preternaturally calm, while his eyes

were watchful on the slowly shifting dials. Somewhere behind them in

bleak space sixty tons of concentrated hell was creeping up.

"You can't deceive a whole planet," exclaimed Arliess rapidly,

desperately. "You can't plunge them into a war that will cost a hundred

million lives, that will wreck the cities and the commerce of the whole

System. There hasn't been war for seventy years ... between Earth and

Mars, never...." His voice trailed off and he gasped for breath as if

the cabin had grown stifling.

"It is almost done," said Mury solemnly. With the words he cut off the

afterdrive. Silence fell clublike, mind-numbing after the pounding of

the rockets.

Arliess spoke again, with all the feeling washed out of his voice.

"Where do you and your pal come out on this?" he demanded carefully.

"You don't think you can get away with this, do you, even if you

succeed in blowing up Dynamopolis?"

"There are some things I can't reveal even now, slight as are the

chances of failure," said Mury smoothly. "We won't be caught, though; I

can tell you that surely. And you'll accompany us to our destination.

It would be best if you did so willingly." Ryd thought he knew what

was implicit in the Panclast's words. There would be some hiding-place

maintained by the secret power of We. In Antarctica, perhaps, as rumor

whispered. Ryd clung hard to his new faith in Mury, and was warmed by

it. He dreamed.... Perhaps, he, Ryd, in some new world to come from

chaos....

* * * * *

Mury thumbed a stud; the sidethrust of the starboard drive made the

counterpoised seats tilt far to the left. Then, as they drifted in free

flight again: "Perhaps, since you have heard the truth, Arliess, you

would like to join our cause. Secret now, it will soon be victorious

over all Earth ... a cause of glory which will have its heroes...."

The astrogator gazed stonily ahead. "You may be right," he said

stiffly, strangely. "But right on wrong, you're mad. Mad with power."

The other laughed softly. "That's very true. It is a little heady. The

power that will rock any planet--power indeed!"

All at once the stars were darkened. From overhead as the ship was

oriented, a long black shape, picked out by patterned lights, drove

past and dwindled into the flaming constellations. The power shell had

arrived. Words were at an end.

Instead, there roared out the mighty voices of the after tubes. The

sustained forward leap of the ship took breath from their bodies. But

the colored lights came slipping back out of the starfields, their

pattern expanding swiftly as seconds passed. As suddenly as he had

accelerated, Mury closed the throttle, cut in the foredrive, and

started braking his speed. Then, with delicate spurts of power from all

the rockets, he brought the _Shahrazad's_ speed and course to parallel

that of the great projectile which coasted effortlessly through space

less than a mile away.

In the weightless pause, Mury said quietly to the astrogator: "The

magnet controls are before you, Arliess. Would it be too much strain on

your conscience to operate them now?"

The board had been built for efficiency; of the minor duties aboard

the vessel, communications was assigned to the engineer, control of

the powerful grapples to the astrogator, on the theory that while

intership communication might be needed simultaneously with the use

of the magnets, the plotting of the course would not so coincide.

The strobophones and radio--the latter dead and lightless at the

moment--fronted Ryd as he fidgeted in the engineer's place.

Arliess had delayed a moment. Now he answered harshly, "All right. What

do you want?"

"I was sure you would see.... Your cooperation won't be difficult.

The magnet rheostat is already stopped at the safety maximum for the

fuel we're going to handle. Give them all full power, then." Ryd

knew vaguely that too powerful magnetic fields upset delicate atomic

balances, had in fact caused the great Tenebris disaster of 803 on

Venus--a match-sputter, that, compared to what would soon hit North

America--

Woodenly, Arliess gave the magnets power. Unseen, his hands curled

themselves tensely inside his sweat-slippery rubberized gloves; he was

dangerously near hysteria. His keen, youthful imagination could see

all too clearly into the near future. Over half of Earth, the skies

would be red; there would be storm and earthquake, mountains splitting,

rivers in flood, the fires of new volcanoes.

_Shahrazad_ picked up speed again, swinging in to intercept the power

cylinder in its constant flight. She forged forward on bright wings of

flame, a small, squat ship of Fate, not a part but a target. [1]rest on

her broad plated back.

"Half magnets," said Mury shortly, firing another bank of tubes to

correct his course. Still robot-like, Arliess obeyed. His right hand

obeyed. But his left snaked very slowly off the dash, under the

detector box at his elbow, captured a dangling wire. Then--bend this

way, bend that way, bend this way--

The last power-thrust died. Inch by inch, _Shahrazad_ and the fuel

shell drifted together in their parallel courses. "Full magnets,"

ordered Mury, and the drift accelerated. For two long, waiting minutes

it continued; then the towship lurched slightly, like a boat meeting

a long swell, and the great masses met with a prolonged grinding

of curving steel on stegosauric plates of iron. A moment while

they settled solidly together and clung, locked; then the rockets

roared once more to life and _Shahrazad_ surged ahead evenly. To the

greatly-overpowered towship, the mere sixty tons of the loaded cargo

shell made little or no difference.

Mury sat bolt upright in his universal chair. His face was masked and

serene, but the straight line of his head and neck was eloquent. His

hand, resting lightly on the controls, was that of Zeus, gripping a

thunderbolt.

Slowly, without speaking, he drove the ship's nose upward--upward as

they were leveled off, but in reality downward, for gradually from

overhead the great black curve of a planet's dark limb crept down,

shutting out the stars. Then its sunlit side burst into sight and the

pallid glare came flooding through the great nose window to make the

glow-lamps needless.

It was Earth, and somewhere on that great globe, where the distorted

shape of North America sprawled through half a dark hemisphere, was Pi

Mesa. For this ship of Fate, not a port but a grim target.

Then Yet Arliess' voice fell hard and deadly on that triumphant moment.

"Mury. Cut the drive!"

Mury's attention snapped to the astrogator. Even so with the back of

his head to Ryd, the latter could see the slow tensing of his spare

body, the sudden immobility that took him. Ryd froze.

"You'd better think twice, Arliess," said Mury in a low, brittle tone.

"Cut the drive," ordered Arliess again. "This is journey's end, Mury.

If you don't cut it now, we'll all die."

* * * * *

Ryd inched forward in his seat; his fingers, numbed as if the cold

of sheer space had crept into the cabin, found the release. Then he

was able to see Arliess, hunched forward close to his control board.

One hand clenched over the magnet rheostat; but something had gone

wrong. The astrogator had bent the synthyl handle out and away from

its contacts; and now something gleamed half-hidden in his hand. Its

ends were almost touching the inner contact of the switch handle and

the minimum-resistance tap of the rheostat coil--a short piece of bared

silver wire, whose placing between those contacts would send current

leaping through the shortened circuit and pouring full into the magnet

coils. It would envelop _Shahrazad_ and power cylinder in a field of

great intensity--but of brief duration, a fractional instant before the

equilibrium of the stored atoms toppled and towship and cargo shell,

together like one, vanished in one exploding flame, brighter than the

Sun.

This was the end. Mury was beaten, and of course he, Ryd, was beaten

too. For keeps, this time. With maudlin self-pity, he saw himself as

one caught and singled out for destruction by the gods in the machine.

"Cut the drive," repeated Arliess for the third time.

Still the Panclast did not move, and his face betrayed none of what

he must feel of the terrible irony by which a bit of wire, a short

circuit, could wreck the plan that was to have shaken a planet. He said

without stirring, "You can't use bluff on me, Arliess."

"I know that and I'm not bluffing," said young Arliess, pale to the

lips, with burning eyes. "I know your type, Mury. The monomaniac.

You're not afraid of dying, but you are afraid when the success of your

mission is threatened. But you can forget those plans now. We're going

to stop, flash a distress signal."

"I never meant we should escape the final crash of the power shell,"

said Mury. "Escape was needless to the plan, and to die in such a

cause.... But I'll make you a bargain now, Arliess. I'll let you

parachute to safety when we're in the atmosphere, if you'll swear to

reveal nothing. Otherwise--perhaps you are aware of the power of--_We_."

Arliess' grin was savage. "Don't try to frighten me with children's

boogie-men. I know that such an organization exists, and I knew one

of their members once--a poor, starved gutter-rat without principles

or courage or anything but a vicious wish to kick the world that had

kicked him. No, Mury, _you're_ something else again."

"I've explained my aims to you, Arliess. I have no private wrongs to

avenge. I have acted because all history urges Earth and Mars to the

death grapple; I have been an agent of history. You, not I, are the

madman if you try to stand in the way."

Arliess laughed shortly. "I hold the final argument, though.... _Cut

the drive!_"

V

For a moment their eyes met. Mury, all his weapons blunted, sat

unmoving. Ryd, forehead beaded, gripping the arms of his chair, afraid

to move or cry out lest he bring doom upon the ship, thought he saw

Arliess' fingers start to tighten.

But in that instant a voice crashed into the death-still cabin. Harsh

and vibrant, it rang through the open strobophones.

"_Shahrazad! Algol_ calling _Shahrazad_! You are twenty-one degrees off

course and failing to correct as per schedule. What is the matter?"

"All right," said Arliess, his voice husky. "Last chance, Mury, before

I blow us to atoms. Call them back. Tell them to overhaul us and board.

From the intensity of that signal, they can't be far away."

And indeed, even now the stars began to blur to the approach of the

battle cruiser. Plainly, it had been trailing near; the dead detectors

had told them nothing. Perhaps, after all, suspicion had been born

behind the official calm facade. At any rate, here upon them were

_Algol_ and its guns.... Again the voice came through the phones,

querulously now.

Mury, without making any sudden motion, pressed his release. With equal

care he came to his feet, standing without effort against a little more

than one gravity.

"The message sent," he said coolly, "will be 'Temporarily electrical

failure. All under control.'" With that he knelt down in the narrow

space between the crew-chairs and the instrument board.

"If that fool tries to jump me, Ryd, use the gun." His hands started

to grope at the under panels of the control board, purposefully but

without haste. "I'm going to disconnect the central fuse."

"You'll never touch it," said Arliess with a gasp. "I'm shorting the

coil--_now!_"

Ryd had, in a dazed automatism, lifted the gun. It was heavy and

unsteady in his gloved right hand. He stared with eyes out of focus and

with a sense of nightmare; death was coming and he wanted to live, had

to stop it somehow, anyhow, _now_--

Then all at once the gun steadied in his hand, burned hot as it spat

its crisping thunderbolt. The cabin shook to the blast.

And the weapon slipped from Ryd's hand. He drew in air, sharp with

ozone, in short sobbing gasps, and cowered in his padded seat, shaking

uncontrollably. But he was alive, still alive.

Arliess crouched half in and half out of his seat. He brought up the

pistol which he had snatched almost as it fell, trained it across the

motionless bundle between them on the floor. Mury was dead, as dead as

many another dreamer whose human tools have turned in his hands.

The astrogator snapped, "Take the strobophone sender and call _Algol_.

Tell them--tell them--"

"He'd have killed us all," gasped Ryd, cringing.

He choked off as the astrogator lashed out open-handed, knocking him to

the floor. The young man stood for a moment gazing down on him, hands

clenched at his sides; then--

"You rat!" he snarled. "You filthy little _rat_!"

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: Transcriber's Note: Missing text due to printer's error.]