Morton asked: "Then you would be satisfied, Kent, if we put him in the cage?"
Kent considered, finally: "Yes. If four inches of micro-steel can"t hold him, we"d better give him the ship."
Coeurl followed the men as they went out into the corridor. He trotted docilely along as Morton unmistakably motioned him through a door he had not hitherto seen. He found himself in a square, solidmetal room. The door clanged metallically behind him; he felt the flow of power as the electric lock clicked home.
His lips parted in a grimace of hate, as he realized the trap, but he gave no other outward reaction. It occurred to him that he had progressed a long way from the sunk-into-primitiveness creature who, a few hours before, had gone incoherent with fear in an elevator cage. Now, a thousand memories of his powers were reawakened in his brain; ten thousand cunnings were, after ages of disuse, once again part of his very being.
He sat quite still for a moment on the short, heavy haunches into which his body tapered, his ear tendrils examining his surroundings. Finally, he lay down, his eyes glowing with contemptuous fire. The fools! The poor fools!
It was about an hour later when he heard the man-Smith-fumbling overhead. Vibrations poured upon him, and for just an instant he was startled. He leaped to his feet in pure terror-and then realized that the vibrationswere vibrations, not atomic explosions. Somebody was taking pictures of the inside of his body.
He crouched down again, but his ear tendrils vibrated, and he thought contemptuously: the silly fool would be surprised when he tried to develop those pictures.
After a while the man went away, and for a long time there were noises of men doing things far away.
That, too, died away slowly.
Coeurl lay waiting, as he felt the silence creep over the ship. In the long ago, before the dawn of immortality, the coeurls, too, had slept at night; and the memory of it had been revived the day before when he saw some of the men dozing. At last, the vibration of two pairs of feet, pacing, pacing endlessly, was the only human-made frequency that throbbed on his ear tendrils.
Tensely, he listened to the two watchmen. The first one walked slowly past the cage door. Then about thirty feet behind him came the second. Coeurl sensed the alertness of these men; knew that he could never surprise either while they walked separately. It meant-he must be doubly careful!
Fifteen minutes, and they came again. The moment they were past, he switched his sense from their vibrations to a vastly higher range. The pulsating violence of the atomic engines stammered its soft story to his brain. The electric dynamos hummed their m.u.f.fled song of pure power. He felt the whisper of that flow through the wires in the walls of his cage, and through the electric lock of his door. He forced his quivering body into straining immobility, his senses seeking, searching, to tune in on that sibilant tempest of energy. Suddenly, his ear tendrils vibrated in harmony-he caught the surging charge into shrillness of that rippling force wave.
There was a sharp click of metal on metal. With a gentle touch of one tentacle, Coeurl pushed open the door, and glided out into the dully gleaming corridor. For just a moment he felt contempt, a glow of superiority, as he thought of the stupid creatures who dared to match their wit against a coeurl. And in that moment, he suddenly thought of other coeurls. A queer, exultant sense of race pounded through his being; the driving hate of centuries of ruthless compet.i.tion yielded reluctantly before pride of kinship with the future rulers of all s.p.a.ce.
Suddenly, he felt weighed down by his limitations, his need for other coeurls, his aloneness-one againsta hundred, with the stake all eternity; the starry universe itself beckoned his rapacious, vaulting ambition.
If he failed, there would never be a second chance-no time to revive long-rotted machinery, and attempt to solve the secret of s.p.a.ce travel.
He padded along on tensed paws-through the salon-into the next corridor-and came to the first bedroom door. It stood half open. One swift flow of synchronized muscles, one swiftly lashing tentacle that caught the unresisting throat of the sleeping man, crushing it; and the lifeless head rolled crazily, the body twitched once.
Seven bedrooms; seven dead men. It was the seventh taste of murder that brought a sudden return of l.u.s.t, a pure, unbounded desire to kill, return of a millennium-old habit of destroying everything containing the precious id.
As the twelfth man slipped convulsively into death, Coeurl emerged abruptly from the sensuous joy of the kill to the sound of footsteps.
They were not near-that was what brought wave after wave of fright swirling into the chaos that suddenly became his brain.
The watchmen were coming slowly along the corridor toward the door of the cage where he had been imprisoned. In a moment, the first man would see the open door-and sound the alarm.
Coeurl caught at the vanishing remnants of his reason. With frantic speed, careless now of accidental sounds, he raced-along the corridor with its bedroom doors-through the salon. He emerged into the next corridor, cringing in awful antic.i.p.ation of the atomic flame he expected would stab into his face.
The two men were together, standing side by side. For one single instant, Coeurl could scarcely believe his tremendous good luck. Like a fool the second had come running when he saw the other stop before the open door. They looked up, paralyzed, before the nightmare of claws and tentacles, the ferocious cat head and hate-filled eyes.
The first man went for his gun, but the second, physically frozen before the doom he saw, uttered a shriek, a shrill cry of horror that floated along the corridors-and ended in a curious gargle, as Coeurl flung the two corpses with one irresistible motion the full length of the corridor. He didn"t want the dead bodies found near the cage. That was his one hope.
Shaking in every nerve and muscle, conscious of the terrible error he had made, unable to think coherently, he plunged into the cage. The door clicked softly shut behind him. Power flowed once more through the electric lock.
He crouched tensely, simulating sleep, as he heard the rush of many feet, caught the vibration of excited voices. He knew when somebody actuated the cage audioscope and looked in. A few moments now, and the other bodies would be discovered.
"Siedel gone!" Morton said numbly. "What are we going to do without Siedel? And Breckenridge! And Coulter and- Horrible!" He covered his face with his hands, but only for an instant. He looked up grimly, his heavy chin outthrust as he stared into the stern faces that surrounded him. "If anybody"s got so much as a germ of an idea, bring it out."
"s.p.a.ce madness!"
"I"ve thought of that. But there hasn"t been a case of a man going mad for fifty years. Dr. Eggert will test everybody, of course, and right now he"s looking at the bodies with that possibility in mind."
As he finished, he saw the doctor coming through the door. Men crowded aside to make way for him.
"I heard you, commander," Dr. Eggert said, "and I think I can say right now that the s.p.a.ce-madness theory is out. The throats of these men have been squeezed to a jelly. No human being could have exerted such enormous strength without using a machine."
Morton saw that the doctor"s eyes kept looking down the corridor, and he shook his head and groaned: "It"s no use suspecting p.u.s.s.y, doctor. He"s in his cage, pacing up and down. Obviously heard the racket and- Man alive! You can"t suspect him. That cage was built to hold literallyanything -four inches of micro-steel-and there"s not a scratch on the door. Kent, even you won"t say, "Kill him on suspicion,"
because there can"t be any suspicion, unless there"s a new science here, beyond anything we can imagine-"
"On the contrary," said Smith flatly, "we have all the evidence we need. I used the telefluor on him-you know the arrangement we have on top of the cage-and tried to take some pictures. They just blurred.
p.u.s.s.y jumped when the telefluor was turned on, as if he felt the vibrations.
"You all know what Gourlay said before? This beast can apparently receive and send vibrations of any lengths. The way he dominated the power of Kent"s gun is final proof of his special ability to interfere with energy."
"What in the name of all h.e.l.ls have we got here?" one of the men groaned. "Why, if he can control that power, and send it out in any vibrations, there"s nothing to stop him killing all of us."
"Which proves," snapped Morton, "that he isn"t invincible, or he would have done it long ago."
Very deliberately, he walked over to the mechanism that controlled the prison cage.
"You"re not going to open the door!" Kent gasped, reaching for his gun.
"No, but if I pull this switch, electricity will flow through the floor, and electrocute whatever"s inside.
We"ve never had to use this before, so you had probably forgotten about it."
He jerked the switch hard over. Blue fire flashed from the metal, and a bank of fuses above his head exploded with a single bang.
Morton frowned. "That"s funny. Those fuses shouldn"t have blown! Well, we can"t even look in, now.
That wrecked the audios, too."
Smith said: "If he could interfere with the electric lock, enough to open the door, then he probably probed every possible danger and was ready to interfere when you threw that switch." "At least, it proves he"s vulnerable to our energies!" Morton smiled grimly. "Because he rendered them harmless. The important thing is, we"ve got him behind four inches of the toughest of metal. At the worst we can open the door and ray him to death. But first, I think we"ll try to use the telefluor power cable-"
A commotion from inside the cage interrupted his words. A heavy body crashed against a wall, followed by a dull thump.
"He knows what we were trying to do!" Smith grunted to Morton. "And I"ll bet it"s a very sick p.u.s.s.y in there. What a fool he was to go back into that cage and does he realize it!"
The tension was relaxing; men were smiling nervously, and there was even a ripple of humorless laughter at the picture Smith drew of the monster"s discomfiture.
"What I"d like to know," said Pennons, the engineer, "is, why did the telefluor meter dial jump and waver at full power when p.u.s.s.y made that noise? It"s right under my nose here, and the dial jumped like a house afire!"
There was silence both without and within the cage, then Morton said: "It may mean he"s coming out.
Back, everybody, and keep your guns ready. p.u.s.s.y was a fool to think he could conquer a hundred men, but he"s by far the most formidable creature in the galactic system. He may come out of that door, rather than die like a rat in a trap. And he"s just tough enough to take some of us with him-if we"re not careful."
The men back slowly in a solid body; and somebody said: "That"s funny. I thought I heard the elevator."
"Elevator!" Morton echoed. "Are you sure, man?"
"Just for a moment I was!" The man, a member of the crew, hesitated. "We were all shuffling our feet-"
"Take somebody with you, and go look. Bring whoever dared to run off back here-"
There was a jar, a horrible jerk, as the whole gigantic body of the ship careened under them. Morton was flung to the floor with a violence that stunned him. He fought back to consciousness, aware of the other men lying all around him. He shouted: "Who the devil started those engines!"
The agonizing acceleration continued; his feet dragged with awful exertion, as he fumbled with the nearest audioscope, and punched the engine-room number. The picture that flooded onto the screen brought a deep bellow to his lips: "It"s p.u.s.s.y! He"s in the engine room-and we"re heading straight out into s.p.a.ce."
The screen went black even as he spoke, and he could see no more.
It was Morton who first staggered across the salon floor to the supply room where the s.p.a.cesuits were kept. After fumbling almost blindly into his own suit, he cut the effects of the body-torturing acceleration, and brought suits to the semiconscious men on the floor. In a few moments, other men were a.s.sisting him; and then it was only a matter of minutes before everybody was clad in metalite, with anti-acceleration motors running at half power. It was Morton then who, after first looking into the cage, opened the door and stood, silent as the others who crowded about him, to stare at the gaping hole in the rear wall. The hole was a frightful thing of jagged edges and horribly bent metal, and it opened upon another corridor.
"I"ll swear," whispered Pennons, "that it"s impossible. The ten-ton hammer in the machine shops couldn"t more than dent four inches of micro with one blow-and we only heard one. It would take at least a minute for an atomic disintegrator to do the job. Morton, this is a super-being."
Morton saw that Smith was examining the break in the wall. The biologist looked up. "If only Breckinridge weren"t dead! We need a metallurgist to explain this. Look!"
He touched the broken edge of the metal. A piece crumbled in his finger and slithered away in a fine shower of dust to the floor. Morton noticed for the first time that there was a little pile of metallic debris and dust.
"You"ve hit it." Morton nodded. "No miracle of strength here. The monster merely used his special powers to interfere with the electronic tensions holding the metal together. That would account, too, for the drain on the telefluor power cable that Pennons noticed. The thing used the power with his body as a transforming medium, smashed through the wall, ran down the corridor to the elevator shaft, and so down to the engine room."
"In the meantime, commander," Kent said quietly, "we are faced with a super-being in control of the ship, completely dominating the engine room and its almost unlimited power, and in possession of the best part of the machine shops."
Morton felt the silence, while the men pondered the chemist"s words. Their anxiety was a tangible thing that lay heavily upon their faces; in every expression was the growing realization that here was the ultimate situation in their lives; their very existence was at stake and perhaps much more. Morton voiced the thought in everybody"s mind: "Suppose he wins. He"s utterly ruthless, and he probably sees galactic power within his grasp."
"Kent is wrong," barked the chief navigator. "The thing doesn"t dominate the engine room. We"ve still got the control room, and that gives usfirst control of all the machines. You fellows may not know the mechanical set-up we have; but, though he can eventually disconnect us, we can cut off all the switches in the engine roomnow . Commander, why didn"t you just shut off the power instead of putting us into s.p.a.cesuits? At the very least you could have adjusted the ship to the acceleration."
"For two reasons," Morton answered. "Individually, we"re safer within the force fields of our s.p.a.cesuits.
And we can"t afford to give up our advantages in panicky moves."
"Advantages! What other advantages have we got?"
"We know things about him," Morton replied. "And right now, we"re going to make a test. Pennons, detail five men to each of the four approaches to the engine room. Take atomic disintegrators to blast through the big doors. They"re all shut, I noticed. He"s locked himself in.
"Selenski, you go up to the control room and shut off everything except the drive engines. Gear them to the master switch, and shut them off all at once. One thing, though-leave the acceleration on full blast.
No anti-acceleration must be applied to the ship. Understand?" "Aye, sir!" The pilot saluted.
"And report to me through the communicators if any of the machines start to run again." He faced the men. "I"m going to lead the main approach. Kent, you take No. 2; Smith, No. 3, and Pennons, No. 4.
We"re going to find out right now if we"re dealing with unlimited science, or a creature limited like the rest of us. I"ll bet on the second possibility."
Morton had an empty sense of walking endlessly, as he moved, a giant of a man in his transparent s.p.a.ce armor, along the glistening metal tube that was the main corridor of the engine-room floor. Reason told him the creature had already shown feet of clay, yet the feeling that here was an invincible being persisted.
He spoke into the communicator: "It"s not use trying to sneak up on him. He can probably hear a pin drop. So just wheel up your units. He hasn"t been in that engine room long enough to do anything.
"As I"ve said, this is largely a test attack. In the first place, we could never forgive ourselves if we didn"t try to conquer him now, before he"s had time to prepare against us. But, aside from the possibility that we can destroy him immediately, I have a theory.
"The idea goes something like this: Those doors are built to withstand accidental atomic explosions, and it will take fifteen minutes for the atomic disintegrators to smash them. During that period the monster will have no power. True, the drive will be on, but that"s straight atomic explosion. My theory is, he can"t touch stuff like that; and in a few minutes you"ll see what I mean-I hope."
His voice was suddenly crisp: "Ready, Selenski?"
"Aye, ready."
"Then cut the master switch."
The corridor-the whole ship, Morton knew-was abruptly plunged into darkness. Morton clicked on the dazzling light of his s.p.a.cesuit; the other men did the same, their faces pale and drawn.
"Blast!" Morton barked into his communicator.
The mobile units throbbed; and then pure atomic flame ravened out and poured upon the hard metal of the door. The first molten droplet rolled reluctantly, not down, but up the door. The second was more normal. It followed a shaky downward course. The third rolled sideways-for this was pure force, not subject to gravitation. Other drops followed until a dozen streams trickled sedately yet unevenly in every direction-streams of h.e.l.lish, sparkling fire, bright as fairy gems, alive with the coruscating fury of atoms suddenly tortured, and running blindly, crazy with pain.
The minutes ate at time like a slow acid. At last Morton asked huskily: "Selenski?"
"Nothing yet, commander."
Morton half whispered: "But he must be doing something. He can"t be just waiting in there like acornered rat. Selenski?"
"Nothing, commander."
Seven minutes, eight minutes, then twelve.
"Commander!" It was Selenski"s voice, taut. "He"s got the electric dynamo running."
Morton drew a deep breath, and heard one of his men say: "That"s funny. We can"t get any deeper. Boss, take a look at this."
Morton looked. The little scintillating streams had frozen rigid. The ferocity of the disintegrators vented in vain against metal grown suddenly invulnerable.
Morton sighed. "Our test is over. Leave two men guarding every corridor. The others come up to the control room."
He seated himself a few minutes later before the ma.s.sive control keyboard. "So far as I"m concerned the test was a success. We know that of all the machines in the engine room, the most important to the monster was the electric dynamo. He must have worked in a frenzy of terror while we were at the doors."