by Don Wilcox
Ten slaves could not be everywhere at once, and that is why Bob and Kay were able to slip back to the Yellow Jacket. They had hurried back to alert Steeple to the danger. They found that Steeple was gone. The Yellow Jacket, anchored as securely as possible, was left unguarded.
Before they had time to gather their wits together, Bob and Kay looked out to see the tragedy of the canvas sack being hurled out into the sunlight and blasted to hell. With feelings of horror they guessed what had happened.
A moment later Clip reached them, white and breathless, and confirmed their worst suspicions.
Clip had been spying and had seen the dwarf Mogarr hide the money box and pocket the key. Clip had left off eavesdropping while the queen was putting the pressure on Randy, to try to survey the hiding place of the money from the outside. He had come back in time to see the slaves marching out into the sunlight with the canvas bag, and had picked up enough of their conversation with the queen to learn that the unconscious body of Randy was being disposed of.
The rest they had seen.
“They claim they could turn the guns on this ship, and I don’t doubt it.”
“Any minute now.”
“It won’t happen till she’s had a chance at you,” Clip said. “I heard enough to know that she had her eye on both you and Randy. That’s how Randy got in bad. She tried to get sweet on him and he just plain knocked her ears down.”
“Poor guy,” Kay breathed through her stifled sobs. “He seemed to know there was tragedy ahead for him.”
“All the money in the mints couldn’t be worth it,” Bob said, holding her close. She breathed deep with courage, then, and began to pull herself together.
“If we had Steeple we could pull away this minute,” Bob said. “Money or no money.”
“We’re not defeated yet, Bob,” Kay said. “If a woman’s wits can be of any service—”
“You’re still fighting, aren’t you, Kay, in spite of what’s happened.” Bob drew a deep breath. “All right, if you have a plan that doesn’t run too great a risk, let’s act fast.”
“What was your own plan, Bob?”
“By now she’s looking for us, I would guess. She’s mad because we’ve walked out of her parlor, but she thinks she has us on the run. She’ll not turn her guns on this ship just yet. She’d like a chance to try me out first.”
“So—”
“So I could go in and stall for time, while you and Clip beat a trail out around this junk heap and start moving the surface wreckage. It’s light as a feather, and if you, Kay, can stall the guards off with pistols, Clip can dig like a dog after a hidden bone. I’ll not take a false move off of the queen. After what’s happened to Randy, believe me, I’ll put a ray through her heart if she gets any notion about loading me into a sack.” Kay nodded. “Your plan and mine are almost identical, except that you and I should trade places. You go with Clip and start digging. You’ll do better than I at that. And I’ll go back into the parlor and stall the queen.”
“You wouldn’t be safe. She’d—”
“She’d do nothing but listen, because I’m going in to tell her you’re in love with her. I’ll tell her that you and I have quarreled, that I’m furious with you, that you and I are finished.”
“You think she’ll listen?”
“No woman in the world can resist that kind of talk, queen or peasant. Believe me, I’ll be safe long enough for you to find Steeple. Find the money if you can, and we’ll all meet back at the ship. How soon?”
“Fifty-six minutes,” Bob said. “That’ll be one complete rotation for this ball of wreckage.”
Queen Dezeeta and her dwarfed prime minister with their six-slave escort marched back into their luxurious quarters in a spirit of triumph.
The slaves took their positions at the doors or returned to their normal tasks. The dispatching of Randy Chalmers had been all in the day’s work.
Dezeeta was not surprised to find that her other guests had walked out. They might or might not know what had happened; it made no difference to her. Her one passion now was to win over the other man.
“I think he won’t be long coming back.”
“You’ve talked with him already,” Mogarr reminded her.
“There was nothing final about our talk. Even if we quarreled, he was extremely attractive. Unfortunately, I took him to be a government agent. I was mistaken.”
“You were downright burned up.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that expression.” Dezeeta glanced at her bandaged half-arm.
“You’re lucky to be alive, Your Majesty, after what happened not too many days ago. If I hadn’t come to your rescue with a quick amputation, you would have been burned up.”
“All right, gloat!” Dezeeta said. She turned her back to him. He had climbed up on the back of the chair to try to impress her with his taunting lips. She hated him, but it was true, he had quelled the rebellion of the slaves that had threatened her rule, and she supposed she would have to go on acting grateful. What she needed was a man—a real man like that fellow Bob. If she could possess him, yet keep him securely under her thumb—ah, that was the dream of many a queen down through history, wasn’t it?
Until now she had not allowed any such well-built, fully developed man to remain alive on her planet. There was always the fear that such a person would try to usurp her power. And so she had spared the lives only of those who were crippled or deformed, or so hurt by illness that they offered no threat. And yet even they in their infirmities had banded together and threatened her.
A freak circumstance had given their rebellion its deadliest effect. The memory of it horrified her. It had cost her an arm. True, it had been, in a way, her own doing. The slaves, once they had cornered her, had told her she possessed an infirmity of her own. They told her that certain Venus foods, those rich delicacies upon which she constantly feasted, had made her inflammable.
Absurd, she had said.
They had dared her to touch her fingers with a lighted match. She had sneered at their grotesque mockery and had applied a blaze to her fingertips. The hand had begun to burn. She doused it in water, but it kept burning. She couldn’t extinguish it. The slaves had looked on, then, not in glee but with simple curiosity at first, later with pity. At once they had seized her and made ready to hack off her arm. Mogarr had come to the rescue, after a fashion. With the aid of a local anesthetic, he had performed a swift amputation and hurled the blazing forearm out into the air.
To this hour it was still circling around the planet, still blazing, a grim reminder.
She bitterly recalled the details of this crisis. Remarkably enough, the rebellion of the slaves had ended with the arm-burning incident. The deformed and crippled had gone back to their stations quietly. She was one of them now.
“All right, gloat,” she repeated to Mogarr. “But don’t be reminding me that I’m burned up. The expression isn’t becoming.”
“Sorry,” said the little prime minister. He had moved across to the door that led into the big parlor. “Your visitor has returned, Your Majesty.”
“I thought so. Is he alone?”
“It’s the she. She’s brought some packages.”
“Well. Surprise for the queen, no doubt,” Dezeeta said sarcastically. “I don’t think she’ll be here long.”
Queen Dezeeta assumed her best regal manner and walked in to confront Kay. “You must have had a very good reason for coming back to us this way.”
The girl spoke in a lifeless monotone, studying the red rug at her feet, occasionally looking up. Dezeeta presently offered her a chair. She found the girl’s words extremely flattering. For several minutes Dezeeta listened with absorbed attention.
“I see,” Dezeeta said finally. “You’re really through with him, aren’t you.”
“I’m through with love altogether,” Kay said coldly.
“Yes, I don’t blame you. But with Bob, it was simply a case of your not being suited.”
“I’m no
t blaming Bob. But our quarrel was too bitter for me ever to forget. And then—”
“Then I came into the picture?” Dezeeta prompted.
“Yes. I could see plainly enough what happened to him when you two met. He tried to disguise his feelings. His quarrel with you was a sham, though you would hardly know it.”
“A coincidence,” Dezeeta said, quick to seize a way out of her former embarrassment. “No one would guess that the harsh things I said to him about being a government agent were just my way of putting him to a test. So you say he really fell—”
“I’m sure you’d like to know some of his little peculiarities.”
Later the girl began to unwrap the packages. Dresses. Finery she had purchased on Venus when she had been looking forward to her own happiness. And now there was so little left to live for.
“I’m offering them to you for a price.”
The dresses were gorgeous creations. Dezeeta had often felt her own poverty in this one respect; for seldom out of the masses of beachcomber wealth that floated into her realm did she pick up the sort of wardrobe she might have chosen on a trip to one of the great planets. She hardly heard the girl’s words, she was so entranced with this find.
“I’m offering them for a price,” Kay repeated.
“Price?” Dezeeta sniffed. “What’s your price?”
“Something that has little value to you, since you have everything.”
“Name it.”
“Two billion dollars. The currency in a certain black metal box you’ve taken in.”
“Why, you damned highway robber!”
“They’d look beautiful on you. Bob hasn’t seen me wear them.”
Dezeeta called Mogarr. “That box you were putting away earlier, Mogarr, bring it here.”
Mogarr brought it in a moment later, muttering that he thought it would be empty, it was so light; besides, it had the look of something that had been discarded by space bandits. The red and white seals on it were slit.
“Open it,” Dezeeta commanded. Kay leaned forward. Mogarr opened the box. It was empty.
Kay gave an astonished “Oh!” and hastily gathered up her dresses, packing them away. Dezeeta, having ordered Mogarr to take the empty box away, now placed a restraining hand on Kay’s wrist.
“You needn’t put them away.”
“I’ll take them back to the Yellow Jacket!” Kay said.
“They might be destroyed there, you know. I’ll thank you to leave them here—your wardrobe and your man—”
“They weren’t a gift. The price was two billion.”
“A queen doesn’t have to buy. I’ll take them, please.” Dezeeta reached for the boxes in her most queenly manner.
Kay rose and faced her. “You don’t leave me much to live for, do you?”
“I thought of that, too. I think we can manage to release you from the burdens of your drab existence right away.” Dezeeta rang for Mogarr and six slaves.
Bob and Clip had skipped out over the rolling, tumbling landscape and gone to work like beavers. They discovered, as soon as they began tossing up a dust of floating objects, that two slaves meant to make trouble for them. They had no time for argument. Clip slipped about so that he popped up from an unexpected position and told them his pistol meant business.
The two slaves backed away, at the same time calling some sort of signal for help. Bob spotted slave number three in the act of taking an aim at Clip. “Down, Clip.”
Clip fell. Bob darted for the nearest cover, blasting a series of shots from his ray pistol. Slave number three fell dead. The first two tried to rush in. Clip hurled a slab of steel that collided with them. They meant to shoot it out, and they went down shooting.
Clip took their weapons for good measure. “That’s three dead, Bob.”
“That leaves seven, and the queen and the dwarf.”
“If we can pick them off one at a time. we’ll even up the score,” Clip exulted. “We’ve got a fighting chance. There’s still four of us.”
“Three. Unless Steeple shows up we can count him lost.”
“Yeah, Steeple. What do you think?”
“They probably tortured him for information, and blasted him out into space from the blind side of the planet,” Bob said glumly. “If they’ve got him imprisoned somewhere in this junk heap, I don’t know how in the devil we’d ever find him.”
They worked uninterrupted for several minutes, and their digging efforts were rewarded with what might prove a short cut to their goal. They found a tunnel. It had a well-worn look as the sunlight sent long rays into it.
“Look, Clip. There’s another one. That’s at least eleven.”
Bob pointed to the farther shadows where the figure of a slave darted away. The sun just caught the purple of his abbreviated costume and the gleaming gold of his legs as he bolted out of sight.
“We’d better take it easy. They know these paths, and the advantages are all theirs. Now that we’re really getting into this, we may find many more. Just when we thought we had them all placed.”
They moved forward cautiously.
Clip’s sense of direction was good. From his earlier surveys he was dead certain that the path to the left must lead down to the exit from the embedded luxury liner.
“Then the box of currency is bound to be this way.”
“Unless they’ve already carted it off,” Clip said.
Wreckage and refuse had made the interior more solid than Bob had guessed. These paths had surely been here for years; they were like solid earth. Yet the luxury liner was at the center of things, proving that the whole mass had grown together out of space drift.
Clip ran back to the surface to make sure the coast was clear, and scrambled back to Bob breathlessly. “One of the slaves is over at our ship, trying to get in.”
“He couldn’t do it, could he?”
“He was working at the air locks. I didn’t wait to see.”
“It’s locked. Come on, we’ll make a run for the box and then get out of here.”
They found the subterranean air locks at the dead end of the tunnel. Here was the wall of metal that formed the outside of the queen’s palace. They shone a light, and saw the dust print that had been made by the box. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere around.
“A damn wild goose chase,” Bob muttered. “They had only to unlock from the inside and pull the box back in.”
“Shall I try from the inside, or stay here and let you—”
The kid was well nerved, Bob thought; yes, he had the good background of baseball in the city park, of teamwork. And his faith in Bob was an inspiration.
“Our time’s practically gone,” Bob said. “We’ll get back to Kay the quickest way.”
They hurried along a shortcut tunnel that one of the slaves had taken. Why, Clip asked, had Bob spoken of him as slave Number eleven?
“He was one I hadn’t seen before.”
“You mean you remember all their lost arms and legs?”
“Don’t ask me to count off,” Bob said, “but this was one that appeared to have no physical afflictions. So I knew I hadn’t seen him before.”
The slave they were speaking of was the one whom Clip had seen at the entrance of the Yellow Jacket, apparently, for that was where they saw him now. The Yellow Jacket and its surroundings were passing into the shadow of night, but the purple flash of the slave garb and the quick swing of the bright golden arm holding a deadly pistol gave Bob an instant’s warning.
“He sees us! He’s going to shoot!” Clip’s words were lost in the exchange of zipping flashes.
The golden-skinned slave tumbled backward, and the weapon swung out of his hand and bounced weightlessly down the side of the ship.
“You got him!” Clip cried. “A phenomenal shot!”
“Yes, Clip. He may not be dead. You take charge of him while I go for Kay. Watch everything.”
Bounding, bouncing, literally flying into the guarded room, Bob stopped short in time to get the
full benefit of an interesting sight. Kay was holding a pistol on the queen and Mogarr, just daring them to try to stop her. She was backing away—and then Bob saw the slave who was creeping up, arm upraised, clutching an instrument with a bright needle-shaped point.
Zing! Bob shot him down. Kay sidestepped and the swing of the needle barely missed her. Three guards whirled, shooting wildly. Bob cut them with his pistol. Their twisted forms fell to the floor.
Even so, the queen tried to stop him with a bluff. “You’re being heroic to the last, aren’t you!” She started toward him, smiling like a gay hostess at a party. “Beautiful shooting, my hero. Trying to make the girl think you’ve come to rescue her! Well, Bob, you can drop the pretense. She knows you’re in love with me.”
“Like I’m in love with rattlesnakes,” Bob snarled. “Get away from those signals. You’ll get no answers. I’ve scattered your slaves all over the place.”
“You wild-eyed murderer!”
“Including the able-bodied one who meant to make off with our ship.”
“Able-bodied?”
“Now give us the money box or you’ll crumple to the floor, all of you!”
The dwarf, lips quivering, clung to the top of a chair protesting. “It’s empty. There’s nothing in it.
Some space bandit got to it first. The seals had been slit.”
Kay said hastily, “He’s right, Bob. They never found anything in it.” Holding guns on them, Bob ushered her out. In the darkness of the planet’s night they made their way to the Yellow Jacket. Clip was ready for them, cutting loose the moorings.
“Quick, Clip. Here’s the key. They’ll get to their big guns as fast as they can. Any sign of Steeple yet?”
“Dead,” Clip said. “That’s Steeple—that slave that began shooting at us from these airlocks.”
By the dim light Bob and Kay examined the golden-skinned figure in the purple trunks and sash.
“Looks like he belonged here,” Bob muttered.
