It was something of an advantage not to be wearing a helmet. Even with the best of acoustical systems, hearing inside a helmet tended to be distorted and dimmed. The men couldn"t hear him as well as he could hear them. And since they couldn"t hear themselves too well, they made a little more noise than he did.
A s.p.a.ce boot came into view around a big rock, and Wayne aimed his needle-beam at the spot where the man"s head would appear.
When the head came around the rock, Wayne fired. The man dropped instantly. _Sorry, friend_, Wayne apologized mentally. _Two down.
Fifty-seven to go._ The odds were still pretty heavy.
He knew he had to move quickly now; the others had seen the man drop, and by now they should have a pretty good idea exactly where Wayne was.
He picked up a rock and lobbed it over a nearby boulder, then started moving cat-like in the other direction. He climbed up onto another boulder and watched two men move away from him. They were stepping warily, their beam guns in their hands. Wayne wiped away a bead of perspiration, aimed carefully, and squeezed the firing stud twice.
_Four down. Fifty-five to go._
A moment later, something hissed near his ear. Without waiting, he spun and rolled off the boulder, landing cat-like on his feet. Another crewman was standing on top of a nearby boulder. Wayne began to sweat; this pursuit seemed to be indefinitely prolonged, and it was beginning to look unlikely that he could avoid them forever.
He had dropped his pistol during the fall; it was wedged between a couple of rocks several feet away.
He heard someone call: "I got him. He fell off the rock. We"ll take him back down below."
Then another voice--ominously. "He won"t mind. He"ll be glad we did it for him--afterwards."
"I"ll go get him," said the first voice. The man stepped around the side of the boulder--just in time to have a hard-pitched rock come thunking into his midsection.
"Oof!" he grunted, took a couple of steps backwards, and collapsed.
_Five down. Fifty-four to go._ It could go on forever this way.
"What"s the matter?" asked the man who had replied to the first one with those chilling words.
"Nothing," said Wayne, in a fair imitation of the prostrate crewman"s voice. "He"s heavy. Come help me."
Then he reached down and picked up the fallen man"s beam gun. He took careful aim.
When the sixth man stepped around the rock, he fired. The beam went wide of the mark, slowing the other down, and Wayne charged forward. He pounded two swift punches into the amazed crewman, who responded with a woozy, wild blow. Wayne ducked and let the fist glide past his ear, then came in hard with a solid body-blow and let the man sag to the ground.
He took a deep breath.
_Six down and only fifty-three to go._
He crawled back to the edge of the precipice and peered down into the valley. There was no one to be seen. It was obvious that Colonel Petersen was still enforcing the six-man rule.
As he watched, he saw the airlock door open. A s.p.a.cesuited figure scrambled down the ladder and sprinted across the deadly sand of the valley floor.
It was Sherri! Wayne held his breath, expecting at any moment that one of the little monsters beneath the sand would sink its vicious needle upward into Sherri"s foot. But her stride never faltered.
As she neared the precipice, another figure appeared at the airlock door and took aim with a gun.
Wayne thumbed his own needle-beam pistol up to full and fired hastily at the distant figure. At that distance, even the full beam would only stun. The figure collapsed backwards into the airlock, and Wayne grinned in satisfaction.
_Seven down. Fifty-two to go._
He kept an eye on the airlock door and a finger on his firing stud, waiting to see if anyone else would come out. No one else did.
As soon as Sherri was safely up to the top of the precipice, Wayne ran to meet her.
"Sherri! What the devil did you come out here for?"
"I had to see you," she said, panting for breath. "If you"ll come back to the ship before they beam you down, we can prove to Colonel Petersen that you"re all right. We can show them that the Masters--"
She realized suddenly what she said and uttered a little gasp. She had her pistol out before the surprised Wayne could move.
He stared coldly at the pistol, thinking bitterly that this was a h.e.l.l of a way for it all to finish. "So they got you too," he said. "That little display at the airlock was a phony. You were sent out here to lure me back into the ship. Just another Judas."
She nodded slowly. "That"s right," she said. "We all have to go to the Masters. It is--it--is--is--"
Her eyes glazed, and she swayed on her feet. The pistol wavered and swung in a feeble spiral, no longer pointed at Wayne. Gently, he took it from her nerveless fingers and caught her supple body as she fell.
He wiped his forehead dry. Up above, the sun was climbing toward the top of the sky, and its beams raked the planet below, pouring down heat.
He glanced at his wrist.w.a.tch while waiting for his nerves to stop tingling. Sherri must have been the last one--the drug must have taken effect at last, and not a moment too soon. He decided to wait another half hour before he tried to get into the s.p.a.ceship, just the same.
The huge globe of the _Lord Nelson_ stood forlornly in the center of the valley. The airlock door stayed open; no one tried to close it.
Wayne"s mouth was growing dry; his tongue felt like sandpaper.
Nevertheless, he forced himself to sit quietly, watching the ship closely for the full half hour, before he picked up Sherri, tied his rope around her waist, and lowered her to the valley floor. Then he wandered around the rocks, collecting the six unconscious men, and did the same for them.
He carried them all, one by one, across the sand, burning a path before him with the needle beam.
Long before he had finished his task, the sand was churning loathsomely with the needles of hundreds and thousands of the monstrous little beasts. They were trying frantically to bring down the being that was so effectively thwarting their plans, jabbing viciously with their upthrust beaks. The expanse of sand that was the valley looked like a pincushion, with the writhing needles ploughing through the ground one after another. Wayne kept the orifice of his beam pistol hot as he cut his way back and forth from the base of the cliff to the ship.
When he had dumped the seven unconscious ones all inside the airlock, he closed the outer door and opened the inner one. There was not a sound from within.
_Fifty-nine down_, he thought, _and none to go_.
He entered the ship and dashed down the winding staircase to the water purifiers to change the water in the reservoir tanks. Thirsty as he was, he was not going to take a drink until the water had been cleared of the knockout drug he had dropped into the tanks.
After that came the laborious job of getting everyone in the ship strapped into their bunks for the takeoff. It took the better part of an hour to get all sixty of them up--they had fallen all over the ship--and nestled in the acceleration cradles. When the job was done, he went to the main control room and set the autopilot to lift the s.p.a.ceship high into the ionosphere.
Then, sighting carefully on the valley far below, he dropped a flare bomb.
"Goodbye, little monsters," he said exultantly.
For a short s.p.a.ce of time, nothing happened. Then the viewplate was filled with a deadly blue-white glare. Unlike an ordinary atomic bomb, the flare bomb would not explode violently; it simply burned, sending out a brilliant flare of deadly radiation that would crisp all life dozens of feet below the ground.
He watched the radiation blazing below. Then it began to die down, and when the glare cleared away, all was quiet below.