Pucky's Grestest Hour

by Perry Rhodan

  And now Bell personally received the reports of confirmation in which each single station reported the time the first repeat broadcast had been run.

  While busy going through them, he was called by Allan D. Mercant. “I’ve already spoken with John Marshall. He’s just as astonished as I am. Pucky must really be on Venus now!”

  “So what does he want there?” asked Bell, who in that moment was not at all able to evaluate single bits of news for a general perspective.

  “What can Pucky want on Venus? My guess is that he’s got it in his head to lay hold of Thomas Cardif and bring him to Terrania,” said Mercant.

  Bell knew Pucky better than the Solar Marshal. The thickset, red-haired man shook his head. “No, I don’t think so, Mercant, but...” Bell’s sudden start could not be missed. “Would you tell me again just what distance Pucky had to spring across to get to the surface of Venus?”

  The answer came. Bell responded with a counterquestion. “Are you sure you heard that figure correctly? And Pucky sprang without a spacesuit? Mercant, I don’t want to cast doubt on your faculties but don’t you think all this sounds a little fantastic?”

  “Fantastic or not, sir, just ordering the captain of the Don-4 to make a short-transition inside the system is unbelievable enough. The structural disturbances brought about such a confusion in any measurements being made then of time or distance that none of our figures for that period of time agree.”

  “The stations will take care of that,” said Bell, brushing aside any concern for the side-effects. “Me, I’m more interested in what that darned rodent is really up to. Does the Chief know about Pucky’s unauthorized little jaunt to Venus yet?”

  “No, not yet. But I’m going to go give him a report now.”

  “I’ll do that for you, Mercant,” said Bell quickly. “Will you call me when you hear some more news, Solar Marshal?”

  “Of course, sir,” said Mercant, and switched off. He was convinced that for the time being Perry Rhodan would hear nothing from Bell about Pucky’s actions. If there was anyone who could always be found trying to protect the mouse-beaver, it was Reginald Bell.

  * * * *

  There was not even the slightest sound as the mouse-beaver rematerialized in the corridor leading to Cardif’s cabin aboard the Cokaz 1. Swiftly he looked from right to left. The wide deck of the cylindrical ship was brightly lit but deserted. There was a door behind the mutant. Lettering on the door indicated it was an entrance to a storeroom.

  Pucky was a classic example of laziness. He did not like to walk and instead preferred to use teleportation. Now he was even too lazy to open the door by muscle power. He brought his telekinesis into play and as if by magic the door came open slightly. Pucky disappeared with tripping steps into the room.

  The illumination was on here, too, but the room was an average-sized storeroom filled about two-thirds of the way with goods. Curious as the mouse-beaver was, he was interested in the contents of the plastic containers.

  Teleportation brought him to the highest peak of the goods pile. From there he looked to the rear of the storeroom—and cried out in surprise. He shuddered at the site of the stack of bombs, hidden behind the cover of the plasticontainers in the forward part of the room.

  “And to think people say the Galactic Traders deal mainly in crepe rubber, shirt buttons, patent medicine and knee warmers—and when you finally do get a look at the way things really are, you find enough bombs to blow off half a planet! Just wait, Cokaze, you aren’t going to get any fun out of these bombs!”

  The mouse-beaver stood like a small human on top of the high pile of wares. The movements of his forepaws imitated human gestures. Playacting was Pucky’s delight; playing was his favorite activity, although in his view he had much too little chance to spend time in play. But here he had a fine opportunity offering itself to him.

  He told himself: where there are bombs, detonators can’t be far away. A bomb without a detonating mechanism was scrap iron.

  The bombs would become scrap iron.

  Then he heard a noise behind him. The door, which he had closed, was being opened from outside. At the same time, Pucky picked up the thoughts of two Springers. He also perceived brainwave patterns that at first left him at a loss to account for them. Then he realized they were distorted positronic vibrations emanating from robots.

  Instantly, Pucky ducked down from his high lookout point behind a plasticontainer. He cared less about what the two Springers were saying and more about what he learned from reading their minds, and what he found out caused him to expose his incisor tooth in a grin.

  Patriarch Cokaze had ordered his men to take a third of the bomb supply along with the appertaining detonators to the loading hatch so that the dangerous things could be divided in the next few hours among the ships of his fleet that would be flying alongside for loading one after the other.

  Pucky now heard a Springer say in broad Interkosmo: “I think our master wants to force the Terrans into giving him the trading deal by threatening to drop fusion bombs everywhere.”

  The Galactic Traders’ robots began to remove the bombs’ camouflage by taking away the plasticontainers that stood in front of them. Pucky saw that the time had come for him to leave before a Springer even suspected his presence.

  Partly because of his playful nature, the mouse-beaver was a daring but nonetheless wily strategist who was not inclined to run unnecessary risks. He had learned by reading the minds of the two Galactic Traders where the detonators were stored. Relationships and locations aboard Cokaze’s cylindrical spacer were as familiar to him as the layout of an Arkon-type ship. The manufacture of these ships, mass production on a vast scale, made all ships look alike as peas in a pod.

  When he teleported himself two decks below, Pucky minimized his risk by levitating himself to the ceiling as soon as he materialized.

  There he hung while an unsuspecting Springer stood below him supervising the activity of three work-robots who were packing heavy detonators in special cushioned plastic holders.

  While his telekinetic abilities held him floating near the ceiling, Pucky considered how the detonators might best be rendered harmless.

  Force was a means he could not and did not want to make use of but wasn’t the most primitive way usually the best way to success?

  Pucky brought his hypnotic ability into play. It struck a completely unsuspecting Galactic Trader who was not at all surprised when he suddenly gave his three work robots the order to unpack the already peaked fusion-bomb detonators and put them back in the two large containers.

  It was a labor requiring only a few minutes.

  Pucky, hanging to the ceiling as though glued there, grinned with his single incisor tooth.

  Then the hypnotized Springer received his second order.

  Each robot picked up a box of detonators and left the room, which otherwise would have been sealed off by three barriers. Close behind followed the hypnotized Trader, while the third robot closed the door behind them and reactivated the barriers. No one took notice of a shadow about a meter long and shaped like a gigantic mouse.

  Pucky rematerialized in front of the large loading hatch and waited for two robots carrying two boxes of detonators and for the Springer.

  He was prepared for any eventuality, watching out constantly for other Springers on whom he would have to use his hypnotic power. However, there was not even the slightest disturbance. And then the Springer himself worked the hatch, opening the door into the airlock. The robots with their boxes made their way inside.

  “Faster” Pucky ordered the Springer, who was completely under a hypnotic trance. The mouse-beaver had not forgotten that the opening of the inner airlock hatch would be signaled up in the control room by a warning light or buzzer.

  Pucky put his telepathy into action.

  Control room checkout!

  As yet, the warning signal had not been noticed.

  Then, with all the air pumped out of the airlock, the outer ha
tch opened.

  Looking at the video controls the Springer was holding, Pucky watched the robots hurtling the boxes of fusion detonators into open space.

  But the containers and their dangerous contents were not completely free of the ship. The cylindrical ship Cokaz 1 was surrounded by field screens like any other spaceship.

  Then Pucky learned by telepathic means that the alarm had been sounded in the Cokaz 1 control room. The mouse-beaver looked up at the Springer, who stood motionless next to him with a stupid expression on his face and reacted neither to the alarm nor to anything else.

  The alarm had been the cue for the outer hatch to close at once. Pucky remained only for a few more Seconds, the time he needed in which to carry relentlessly to its end his plan to destroy the fusion bomb detonators.

  His powerful telekinetic energies extended themselves, reaching for the two boxes hurtling toward the Cokaz 1’s field screens, and threw them against the screens with unimaginable force.

  The field screens, designed to protect the cylindrical ship from collision with asteroids of small dimensions, reacted normally to the impact of two containers. Only the fields could not know what was in the plastic boxes. The field screen started to convert the striking mass into gas and the detonators were set off in the process. The field screens, strong enough to bear up under the impact of tremendous thermorays and disintegrator beams, were strained to their limit by the atomic reaction suddenly unleashed in extremely confined space.

  Two small, brilliantly shining masses of light appeared near the Cokaz 1, expanding wildly to all sides.

  Confusion ran rampant in the Cokaz 1 control room, taking with it even the patriarch who by chance happened to be present. From the radar came a fearful cry that the instruments were failing. Light from the panorama screen glared blindingly as the two containers outside met atomic destructions. No one had recognized what had been thrown out of the Cokaz 1. Alarms sounded throughout the entire ship.

  One of the many storming their way to the control room was Thomas Cardif.

  “Get out!” he heard the patriarch shout.

  Four or five Springers left the control room in full flight But not Thomas Cardif.

  “Get out of here, Terran!” the clan chieftain roared directly at Cardif.

  In that second Thomas Cardif was an Arkonide. A hand gesture on his part was enough to remind the patriarch that Cardif’s mother had been an Arkonide noblewoman.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Cardif had asked the question, not Cokaze.

  Pucky was no longer at the loading hatch. He was hiding in an out-of-the-way cabin aboard the Cokaz 1 and listening telepathically to what was being said in the cylindrical spacer’s control room.

  “Are all Galactic Traders so nervous?” mocked Thomas Cardif when he had not been able to get a clear answer out of Cokaze. “In that case I can only recommend studying at the Solar Space Academy. There they would break you of your habit of running around like a khortli with its wings cut off when a catastrophe occurs. My God, how long will it take you to pull yourself back together?”

  The patriarch stared at the young man in anger that bordered on hatred. He used an Arkonide insult that brought the blood into Cardif’s face. In his first flush of anger, Cardif fully meant to draw his beamers and shoot Cokaze on the spot but then self-control and reason won out.

  Pucky observed events almost first hand from his hiding place.

  “Thanks for the insult, Springer!” said Thomas Cardif icily. “I can’t expect anything else as a deserter. But have you reassembled your senses finally?”

  “It was not an attack,” declared the Springer on duty at the radar. “It wasn’t even something that came from outside. I think I saw two boxes on the screen float past...”

  “And you’re only now telling me?” Cokaze stormed at him. “Two boxes, you say? Indeed two...”

  “Yes, sire, two of them, and in my judgment they came from the big loading hatch.”

  “Come with me, Arkonide!” With that the old patriarch ran like a young man past Thomas Cardif and left the control room.

  Pucky crouched unmoving in his hideout and grinned in contentment. His little game was becoming more enjoyable all the time and when he thought of the now harmless bombs stowed away in a storeroom three decks below he would have liked nothing better than to have whistled aloud in sheer joy.

  But even so, he kept in close contact with Cokaze and Thomas Cardif. The patriarch’s suspicion was the correct one: he was afraid for his fusion bomb detonators.

  And then Springer and deserter had reached the thrice-protected room in which the detonators had been stored.

  “Empty! Empty... by all the gods, empty! It can’t be! Where are Fogggi and his three robots? Foggzi... Foggzi...”

  But Foggzi was not able to hear the man calling for him. He was still in a state of hypnosis and stood motionless in front of the large loading hatch. His eyes stared unseeing at the inner hatchdoor. Behind it waited the two work robots, as stubbornly loyal to their orders as only positronic creations can be.

  A few minutes later Foggzi and his odd state were discovered. The news reached the patriarch. Short of breath from his unaccustomed running. he went down to the loading hatch. Foggzi’s condition was a mystery to him.

  Then Thomas Cardif took the patriarch to one side.

  The hidden Pucky lost his grin.

  At that moment Thomas Cardif was informing the Springer clan chief that one of Perry Rhodan’s mutants must be on board the Cokaz 1.

  Cokaze did not even think of laughing at Thomas Cardif’s suggestion. “Then we have to find him, Arkonide!” he said decisively.

  “May I inquire as to what you had in mind with your fusion detonators, Springer?” Thomas Cardif asked quietly.

  “I wanted to offer Rhodan a choice: either fusion bombs falling on Terra, Venus and Mars or my clan getting its trade monopoly. But that probably doesn’t please you, does it, Terran?” Cokaze hissed at Cardif when he saw his grim expression.

  “No, Springer! Rhodan can’t be gotten with such means. You Galactic Traders are fools when you turn your thoughts to the Terrans. You still don’t know that race very well. The human race is the most tenacious and stubborn race in the entire universe!”

  “So why don’t you stay with them if you’re going to praise them so highly?” demanded Cokaze, partly terrified and partly angry.

  “Do you want me to tell you the whole story all over again, patriarch? Have you forgotten that Perry Rhodan is the murderer of my mother?”

  “Oh, enough of that senseless rumor!” Cokaze told him irritably. “Which one of those mutants do you think is on board my Cokaz 1?”

  “Look for him yourself!” answered Thomas Cardif, greatly disappointed. “If you think I’m pursuing a figment of my imagination, why are you acting as if you’re on my side? Don’t forget who my mother was and remember that you’re only a Galactic Trader, Cokaze!”

  The Arkonide was again standing before the Springer. And once more the Galactic Trader bent to Arkonide arrogance. A young man born to lead others, only due to his youth not quite ready, now stood tall in front of the old and experienced Cokaze and looked at him as though he were looking at a servant.

  “Don’t pour more liquid than you can drink, Arkonide,” warned the patriarch idiomatically.

  All this Pucky learned directly with the help of his telepathy.

  It could not frighten him to learn that people were searching for him. Venus was not far away. One spring would be enough to teleport him to Venus.

  What else was there for him to do aboard the Cokaz 1?

  Nothing!

  The Chief had forbidden bringing Thomas Cardif to Earth by force and Pucky was careful not to go against Rhodan’s orders.

  He concentrated and then sprang—back to Venus.

  5/ MUTANTS IN ACTION

  Materializing out of nothing, Pucky suddenly stood in front of Perry Rhodan four hours before the debate in Parliame
nt.

  “What do you want here, Pucky?” Rhodan asked in astonishment, for Bell had not informed him of Pucky’s flight to Venus. “And why do you look like that? Are you sick?”

  Pucky, who was informal with everyone and seemed not to be in awe of even Rhodan, slid into the nearest empty chair.

  “I’m not sick, Perry, only a little tired and that’ll go away soon. I just came back from Cokaze’s ship. That guy was going to drop fusion bombs on the Earth, Mars and Venus if you didn’t give him the trade monopoly.

  “But I spoiled his fun. I got rid of all his detonators...”

  That was the moment in which Perry Rhodan started to feel suspicious. “Who sent you to Venus and then to the Cokaz 1, Pucky? Marshall, perhaps?”

  “Nobody, chief. I...”

  “What gave you the idea of going off on your own in a situation like the present, Lt. Puck?”

  “Perry, please, don’t use that tone of voice to me,” Pucky said, beginning to beg. “When you drop the ‘y’, from my name, I know I’m in for it. It was all for you that I risked my neck and did everything I could...”

  Rhodan’s grey eyes began to light up dangerously. “Lt. Puck, it does not please me that recently you’ve been taking more and more liberties than belong to the rightful privileges of a lieutenant in the Mutant Corps...”

  “Please, Perry,” Pucky interrupted, driven on by the last ounce of desperation. “Can’t you talk to me without being so formal? Chief, I’ve read Thomas’ thoughts! The boy fully believes that you sent Thora to Arkon against the advice of the doctors even though she was deathly sick and...”

  Pucky had no chance to finish the sentence.

  Rhodan had suddenly reached out and pulled the little mouse-beaver up close.

  “What did you say? What...”

  Pucky did not even make an attempt to free himself. “Yes,” he said fearlessly, “he believes just what that evil rumor says about you.”

  “Well?” asked Perry sharply, still holding tightly to the mouse-beaver.

  “Well...?” the mouse-beaver echoed, his high-pitched voice sounding exasperated. “You can’t judge someone who acts sincerely, even though his beliefs are wrong, the same way you judge somebody who acts out of evil intent!”