by Earl
By the third day the itching and tingling became intense, and at night Guyon was tortured in his sleep by an endless dream of a horrible trek across beds of shining coals. By the sixth day Cleve’s mind snapped under the strain and it took all of Guyon’s waning strength to keep him from killing himself. He was finally quieted and put to bed. But for days after that he babbled like a child and seemed to have lost all cognizance of where or who he was. Stella wept often.
One day when the girl re-entered the hut after having been out, Guyon met her at the door, looking at her sternly.
“What did you throw in that empty train-car?”
Stella tried to deny any such thing, then broke down and admitted that from the first day the men had been without the Protection Salt, she had thrown her pills away.
“I don’t want to live after you and Cleve are gone!” she sobbed wildly. “I’d rather die than live with the man who murdered you both!”
And Guyon comforted her in his arms as Cleve was no longer able to. She needed comforting. “Brave girl!” murdered Guyon. “Brave girl, and wonderful!”
IT WAS the tenth day of their existence without the life preserving Protection Salt.
Cleve, strangely, had come out of his mind affliction and was once again normal, although in a state of deathly melancholy.
Four more days of life! Four short days. And Guyon’s eyes gleamed while he tapped the tattoo of his right arm with the fingers of his left. Stella saw and wondered. She did not know how desperately he had been thinking—and that gleam in his eyes marked the culmination of his efforts.
Then Guyon called them together, talked excitedly, eagerly. A new hope, a new spirit was born in them. Forgotten was the misery of heat, stiflement, prickling. A plan had come to lighten their leaden hearts.
When the Mercurian came with the daily pill for Stella, two silent, determined men assaulted him. Guyon’s strong fingers cut off his cries and they left him on the floor dead. Rapidly, without a word, Guyon took the gravi-belt from the body and substituted it for his own.
He tested it, leaping to the roof with the slightest reflex of his feet. The gravi-belt for a Mercurian was adjusted to extreme lightness to duplicate the small gravity of Mercury. Guyon was even lighter now than he would have been on Ganymede. His upward leaps would have terrific range.
When the night shift of Mercurians streamed out of their large living quarters, and the returning shift disappeared within to indulge in rest, three figures moved with the tide. They stepped in the dense shadows at the rear of the steel headquarters of The Master, where the flood lights sent no prying beams. They whispered together a moment, then two of the figures crept silently toward the space-ship hangar.
Guyon watched till they were safely hidden in the shadow of the hangar. In his hand he had the steel leg of one of the beds in the hut. It had taken many hours for the two men to finally detach it from its frame. Its end was hard, angular and sharp.
Guyon looked around, took a deep breath, then worked his way to the front of the building, to a point just below the metal dome which housed the radium dis-gun. That dome was made of sheet aluminum. And sheet aluminum was soft.
Lightened to a mere child’s weight by the Mercurian gravi-belt, Guyon’s muscles propelled his body upward in a mighty leap. He fell back twice before his free hand caught at the edge of the rampart. Then a bit of effort pulled him to its narrow vantage. He worked his way to the separation of the halves of the bi-valvular dome and began scraping madly with the steel instrument.
The aluminum yielded easily to the steel and came away in thin shavings and filings. An hour later Guyon had scraped through a circle of metal. A few ringing blows that he deadened with a piece of cloth, and the piece fell inward. Exultantly he reached an arm through the hole and felt around for the lever that he had seen the scientist use to swing the dome halves apart. For a moment he was panic-stricken as his fingers failed to find the handle.
Then he suppressed an exclamation of triumph. He had it!
Now came the crucial moment. He would have to work fast. The down swing of the dome halves might register its movement below in the building somehow. He would have to leap in and carry out his plan as rapidly as possible.
He looked over at the hangar. He could not see his companions, but knew they were there waiting in fearful anxiety. For this could end in only one of two ways—victory or death!
Guyon jerked over the lever and pulled his arm out almost simultaneously. Silently, ponderously, the dome sections sank to the rampart level. Guyon leaped to the dis-gun, gasping in anxious haste.
He wheeled it toward the rampart and sighted at the hangar’s front wall. He pressed the button. Cleve and Stella were safe, as prearranged, at the back end. The steel front of the hangar dissolved into a rosy cloud and Guyon released the button. Even as he did so, he saw Cleve and Stella dash into the opened end of the hangar like frightened rabbits.
GUYON looked quickly around. The busy Mercurians of the night shift, far away at the other end of the valley, had noticed nothing. He began to think there would be no resistance at all, when several Mercurians leaped out from the door below, shooting at him with hissing pistols. Fortune was with Guyon. Their aim was bad in the gloom and in a moment Guyon swung the easily-operated dis-gun at them and flicked them to mists. He had watched Castor carefully that other time he had been in this dome chamber. The operation of the gun had impressed itself indelibly on his mind.
Guyon waited on guard for more of the enemy, but none came. He began sweating impatiently. Was Cleve having trouble with the space ship? He shouldn’t have, for he was experienced at their standard controls.
Then Guyon breathed a sigh of relief. The space ship, Castor’s own, shot out of the disintegrated front gap of the hangar and zoomed to the waiting man. When the ship hung just above his head—suspended by anti-gravity forces—Stella’s anxious face peered down at him from the open lower lock. Guyon heaved the dis-gun up with Herculean effort and willing hands pulled it up into the ship. Guyon leaped in.
“Now we’ve got him!” he shouted. “Here, Cleve, help me set the gun so that its spout points downward through the lock.”
“The Master!” gasped Stella. “Where is he? What has he done?”
“Not a thing!” returned Guyon. “Waiting for our next move, I think. Well, he’ll get it right away. We’ll ray down his walls and trap him like a rat.”
Just as Guyon prepared to send the ray of destruction on the building, a loud voice was heard. It came from an aperture that opened in the side of the wall over which the ship hung.
“Turn on your radio!”
Stella snapped the switch and the suave, untroubled voice of Castor reverberated through the cabin.
“Fools! What are you doing?”
“We’re ending your reign of power, Castor!” cried Guyon back. “We’ve got the dis-gun in the ship and are going to ray you to death, as you deserve!”
The confident laugh of the scientist rang out. “Impossible! The beam won’t do it. My rooms are insulated against its effect!”
“We’ll see about that!” shot back Guyon grimly. But three white faces looked at one another. Was it the hopeless truth?
“Wait!” came the voice of Castor, and Guyon thought he detected a slight note of fear. “Guyon, listen to me. I am impregnable, but I have a proposition to make. Although I am safe, you are in a position to do a lot of damage with that gun you have in your hands. So if you will land the ship at the door and surrender it, I’ll promise you immunity from harm from now on. I will give you Protection Salt, and after the great conquest of the Solar System, I’ll preserve your neutrality to the end of your natural lives. I swear it! I am offering this only to save the valley from the destruction you could engineer.”
Cleve and Stella looked at Guyon in bewilderment. It was a strange problem. Time was ticking by.
Guyon snapped off the radio and turned to them. Hurriedly he spoke, “It’s a trick—a bluff. I don’t think
he’s impregnable and he wants us down there so he can switch the paralyzing ray on us or shoot us.” He seemed to be talking to himself as much as to them.
“Before we accept any such proposition,” cried Guyon, throwing the radio switch again, “we will try and see how invulnerable you are. I will count ten and then turn on the ray. If you are bluffing, you still have a chance to save your life by coming out and surrendering.”
A suggestion of an exclamation came from the scientist, whether of fright or derision Guyon could not determine. But he counted. As he came to “nine”, all the lights in the valley suddenly went out and it became pitch dark.
“Quick, the searchlight!” cried Guyon. “And keep it centered on the door below.”
Cleve swung the beam downward.
“There he goes!” gasped Stella. “He just ran out!”
“Back!” yelled Guyon. “Send the ship back, for your life!”
Hardly had Cleve shot the craft a hundred yards backward when the steel house flew apart, with the accompaniment of a thunderous concussion. Pieces of steel hammered against the hull of the ship.
“Quick now,” said Guyon, “keep the beam just ahead of the ship and send it in the direction he ran.”
As the ship crawled slowly forward, away from the debris of the bombed building, they heard behind them the concerted moan of thousands of frightened Mercurians and Jovians, who knew no reason for the failure of the lights and the awful explosion that had rocked the floor of the valley.
But Castor could not be found. He had escaped in the darkness. “No use looking for him in the dark,” decided Guyon. “But we’ll find him in the morning. He can’t escape from the valley any more than we could. This night will be a taste of his own medicine, for he knows we have the upper hand now.”
“We must get him!” hissed Cleve. “I won’t feel that we—or the System—are safe until I see him die!”
Guyon smiled grimly as he patted the sleek outlines of the dis-gun. “At dawn,” he promised.
CHAPTER FOUR
The End of the Radium Master
WORN out by the excitement and their own physical condition, they were glad to lie down and rest for the short night hours, though they could not sleep. Strange sounds were heard from the black pit of the valley as their ship was suspended a thousand feet above. Shrill imprecations from Mercurian tongues were intermingled with the hoarse, angry grunts of Jovians. Out of curiosity, Guyon switched on the searchlight beam and vaguely made out a tangle of green and black bodies struggling fiercely.
“The Jovians are revolting!” whispered Stella. “The Master’s dream empire is crumbling at the core.”
All night long the sounds of vicious fighting went on. The battle upset many of the tables at one end of the valley and bowls of glowing radium solution were spilled. Agonized screams arose from luckless Mercurians who were splashed with the fiery, flesh-searing liquid. The struggle spread to every corner of the darksome valley. A growing conviction came to Guyon that maddened, revengeful Jovians were pouring into the valley from outside, to help their enslaved-fellows to complete the massacre of the hated Mercurian slave-drivers.
Castor was somewhere down there in that holocaust of shrieking blood-madness. What was he doing? Where hiding?
Guyon’s eyes gleamed thoughtfully. Suddenly he sprang erect with a sharp exclamation. “By God, those Jovians can see in the dark!” he grunted.
“They can!” exulted Cleve. “Looks like they’re going to finish our job for us—killing off the Mercurians.”
But Guyon seemed suddenly to have gone mad. “They’ll find Castor!” he raved. “Damn them, they’ll kill him! And I wanted to reserve that pleasure for myself!”
He jumped to the controls and spun the ship down, just over the heads of the milling combatants. Frantically, as though his life depended on it, he swept the searchlight beam around, searching. The days and weeks of torture, grinding hopelessness, and sharp misery under the renegade scientist’s cruel thumb had come to a head, and Guyon felt that only one thing could atone for all that—the death of Castor at his own hands!
But the scientist was not found till the red haze of dawn lit up the valley. Then they saw him. crouching behind a half ruined steel wall of what had been his stronghold, a trembling, cringing creature. He no longer resembled the regal, commanding figure of power he had once been. He was only a spindly-legged, tottering old man, weak and senile. Evidently he had barely escaped with his life from the vengeful hands that had torn off all his clothes and bruised his body. Only the chain-mail had saved him from being torn to pieces.
Startled, they landed the ship near him. Approaching, they found him digging with already bleeding hands, a vacant stare in his eyes. The would-be emperor of the Solar System was no more, except as a babbling, mindless idiot. He showed no recognition when they confronted them.
“Castor!” Guyon cried. “Castor, don’t you know us?”
“Must dig,” mumbled the creature. “Much radium buried here—precious—must get it—radium—power—”
He was bleeding from a hundred bruises beneath the blood-soaked chain-mail. The supergravity was slowly bending that back that had once been so arrogantly straight and stiff. His gravi-belt was gone. They saw he was close to the end. Even as they were about to help him to the ship, out of common pity, he crumpled to the ground, gasping fitfully.
A moment later his eyes opened, green eyes that had formerly been so venomous, but were now pale and tired. Recognition flooded them. They were fixed on Guyon.
“Guyon of Ganymede,” he gasped out. “You won after all. And I’m glad—now. It was an insane dream—my dream of empire—tyranny. I realized that, through the black, hideous night!”
He gulped, went on brokenly. “Guyon, you must finish your work—destroy all in valley—Mercurians. And I leave a legacy of radium!”
He groaned, with the death-rattle in his throat. “Guyon, one more thing. Let them remember me as a scientist, not as—what you saw me—”
A new sort of madness had sprung into the dying man’s eyes, a passionate madness that came from the bottom of his scientist’s soul. “Promise me, Guyon—a scientist—”
Guyon nodded and the green eyes closed, the body stiffened. Castor was one with eternity.
IT WAS the next day that the lone ship soared away from the valley. Cleve looked back. It was bare, desolate. The dis-ray had done its work well. Cleve shuddered a bit. It had not been pleasant to hunt down the few remaining Mercurians, screeching in fear, trying to escape the inexorable ray from above as it turned everything to rosy mists. But they had been merciless—no one of the Mercurians must be left alive of that insidious cabal.
Only the Jovians had been spared. They had been driven out of the valley.
Then Cleve’s mind reeled again as he thought of the precious cargo in the hold—a part of the radium that had been stored in the underground vault. They would come back for the rest, or more likely the Interworld Council would take care of it; some other time. Right now they wanted to get away from the horrors of Jupiter and walk once more on gentler, quieter planets.
“That,” Cleve remarked, “is the end of the Radium Master’s mad dream!”
As the other two made no answer, he turned to see what had come upon them. His eyes widened momentarily. Then he grinned and turned away.
“And the beginning of a radium romance!” he said to himself.
THE END
THE LITTLE PEOPLE
Never must the Big People know that we exist! Such was the tenet of the Little People, but Atho and Koro broke the law
THE view from the window, in line with Paul Scott’s eye, included a grand sweep of the low, wooded Catskills. A chill spring sun and a morning haze combined to lend an air of mystery, enchantment. One could imagine strange things in hidden grottoes out there.
“Did you sleep well, dear?” asked Helena, his fiancee, pouring a steaming cup of coffee.
“Not so well,” Scott confessed, r
unning a hand through his tousled black hair. “I’m not used to this mountain quiet, away from the city. Or else it was the rat I heard.” He sniffed appreciatively at the beverage’s aroma. “Mm, nothing like a cup of hot Java on a snappy morning.”
“Rat?”
Dr. Asa Bolton snapped the word, the first since his gruff morning greeting. He frowned a little at his young guest. “Hasn’t been any for a year, since I brought the cat. Imagination, young man.”
“I don’t think so,” returned Scott cheerfully unruffled at the older man’s scathing tone. “I heard a scurrying sound, along about three o’clock, in my room. Typically rat-like. I did imagine something, though—was sniffing around my clothes. I struck a match but saw nothing.”
“Naturally. There was no rat at all.” Dr. Bolton could be crusty, even insulting at times.
“Another thing,” said Scott, his even disposition fading a trifle. “I heard Tommy padding around. You can’t fool a cat. He was stalking prey. Later, I heard him pounce on or at something. Evidently he missed. I heard him footpad out of my room. I finally fell asleep.”
“You dreamed it all.” Dr. Bolton grinned coldly. “You won’t enjoy your stay up here if you imagine rats, snakes and spiders like those from the city always do when they spend a few days in the country—”
“The eggs and bacon are getting cold, Dad,” Helena interposed. “What a silly discussion in the first place, for two grown men to carry on!”
“No rat!” muttered Dr. Bolton single-mindedly. “As for Tommy—”
“By the way, where is Tommy?” Helena darted her eyes about in surprise. “He’s usually begging around the breakfast table.”
