The Saturnian relaxation terminal was small, crowded, and permeated with the odors of cheap dilitis syrup and rank tobaccos. The spaceship pilots who lounged there without insignia on their begrimed and tattered uniforms were men of unsavory reputations. Two-thirds of them were blackguards, thieves, and murderers. The rest had displayed white feathers in the black, frigid gulfs between the planets.
Virtually everyone in the terminal knew Ross by reputation. The young American was a senior lieutenant in the trans-Saturnian division of the Interplanetary Police Patrol. Tall, lean, weather-bronzed, with clear grey eyes and sharply molded features, he had assumed an ingenious disguise which protected him from the wrath of his enemies.
He was clad in a soiled and shabby space-pilot’s uniform of black rubberized cloth. His rust-colored solar boots were caked with the yellow clay of the Titan mine settlements, and the mesh-wire helmet which dangled by a thin strap from his shoulder was tarnished and misshapen. He had smeared his features with black engine grease and deliberately assumed an expression of drooling idiocy.
The picture he presented was a familiar one. He looked in all respects like a hard-bitten miner from the little Saturnian satellite Titan, hopelessly drunk on dilitis syrup.
Ross knew most of the reveling spacemen. There were murderers in the terminal the law couldn’t touch because of imbecile immunity treaties or lack of legal evidence. There were men there who had endured imprisonment in the Martian penal camps, but who were out on parole now and openly scornful of the Interplanetary Police.
The nations of Earth were constantly at loggerheads as to the most effective method of policing the planets, and the Patrol had the difficult task of enforcing a code of interplanetary law which was moth-eaten, and as variegated as a patchwork quilt. Through the big and little holes in it, big and little scoundrels could wriggle with impunity.
But Ross was determined that a certain scoundrel should not wriggle through. So far luck had favored him. No one had recognized him, and sitting at a metal table a few feet from where he was standing was the blackguard in question.
Justin Nichols’ pale and shadow-haunted face was set in grim lines as he drained dilitis through a thin glass tube and watched the carousing spacemen at adjoining tables. He was entirely alone. Most of the other outlaws had their arms about the slim waists of dancing girls as they swayed drunkenly above the tables.
Still fingering his blast pistol, Ross crossed suddenly to Nichols’ table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Justin Nichols started. His eyes, boring into those of the Patrol officer’s, widened abruptly in recognition and alarm. With an oath, he started to rise.
“Sit down, Nichols,” Ross said. “Pretend you’re glad to see me.”
He tapped his blast weapon bolster significantly.
“Pretend, Nichols. If you make one suspicious move, I’ll sear you!”
Nichols subsided in his chair and sat staring sullenly into the hard, level eyes of the Patrol lieutenant. A dull flush suffused his cheeks.
“You can get up now, Nichols.” Ross smiled grimly. “Walk slowly toward the door and keep remembering what I told you.”
Reluctantly, Nichols obeyed. Ross’s nervousness increased as they passed within inches of ruffians who were killers by instinct and choice. They were still in the midst of the tables near the center of the terminal when a slim, frail girl appeared in the doorway.
A mechanic’s lounge suit draped her slender form. Her skin was radiantly fair; her features indescribably beautiful. Her flowing, copper-colored hair flamed in the glow of the cold light lamps as she slipped swiftly through the doorway and stood for an instant in the shadow of the pylons, staring at Ross and the other.
Ross was so intent on his captive that he did not perceive her agitated features or that she was breathing fast. His inattentiveness nearly cost him his life. The girl suddenly raised her arm and pointed at him.
“That’s Ross, of the Interplanetary!” she exclaimed. Then her voice rose hysterically. “He’s been spying on us! Stop him, someone! Stop him—”
Her warning had a galvanic effect on the dilitis-drunk habitués of the terminal. At a dozen tables, sinister figures stiffened in swift fury. Ross caught a frightening glimpse of brutal, leering faces aflame with hate. Men to whom the spilling of blood was casually instinctive leaped to their feet with fierce oaths.
Ross was taken so completely by surprise that for an instant he stood without movement. Then he whirled, whipped out his blast pistol, and sent a searing, hissing cylinder of ruby-red flame spurting toward the ceiling of the terminal.
The cylinder pierced the cold-light lamps with a positron blast that knocked the little building from roof to floor. Trillions upon trillions of massed subatomic projectiles crashed against the insulated lamp mounts high overhead and cascaded in spreading sheets of hissing, sputtering energy down the terminal’s quaking walls.
There ensued a deafening detonation as the fragments of the cold-light lamps fell in glowing showers between the tables. The fragments spun about on the floor in a mad dervish dance for an instant. Hundreds of tiny pinpoints of light were lashed into quivering activity by the energy thrust of disorganized and escaping electrons. Then the firefly pageant dimmed, vanished. Utter darkness engulfed the terminal.
The dancing girls screamed as the darkness descended. Feet scraped on the corrugated metal floor. There was a volley of oaths and the crash of tables overturning. Ross retreated a pace, his blast weapon gripped tightly in his right hand. In the darkness, it was hard to distinguish between sounds; still harder to move swiftly in a straight line.
On all sides infuriated killers were seeking him out. He could hear the swift paddings of their feet all about him. The door was a faint, glimmering square of violet light. Hands clutched at him as he suddenly reversed his direction and started toward it.
For several yards he encountered no impediment. Then he stumbled into a resistant bulk that swore violently and lashed out at him. Luckily the fist of the ruffian missed his jaw by a narrow margin. Ross caught his assailant about the waist, lifted him into the air, and crashed him violently backward against a pylon. Then he lunged forward again.
He was within three yards of the doorway when he tripped on an overturned chair and went sprawling across the floor. He rose swiftly, but before he could get his body moving again, fists thudded against his ribs. Swiftly he whirled, leaped backward, and flailed the air with the massive, flaring muzzle of his blast pistol.
He heard a sickening crunch as slashing metal thudded against a human skull. In ghastly silence, the dimly outlined form of his assailant swayed, then crashed to the floor.
Immediately another ruffian blocked his path. Ross raised his knee and rammed it into a quivering stomach. The opposing bulk melted away with a groan of pain and rage. The next instant Ross was through the portal and out in the clear, oxygenated air under a canopy of skyflame.
High above his head, the immense crystal dome of the Saturnian skyport shone frostily beneath heaven-spanning rings of bright, swarming meteors. Mile-long oxygen cylinders turned slowly on both sides of him as he sped along a pedestrian airlane toward the spaceship terminal at the far extremity of the dome. From jets in the lateral sections of the huge, black cylinders, the life-sustaining air spurted in continuous blasts and circulated freely throughout the length and breadth of the skyport.
The Saturnian skyport was the largest in the Solar System. Under the meteor-girdled skies it shone with a luster as silvery and resplendent as the Earth-moon’s sheen, or the glowing face of heaven-climbing Titan. Its rounded tower was a tiny pinpoint of bright glory between a Charybdis of swirling detritus and a Scylla of towering granite. Colossally behind it loomed the stupendous crags and buttressed ledges of desolate mountains. Before it there stretched to flame-wrapped horizons a bleak, wind-lashed desert of pulverized lava.
Neither the mountains, which surpassed the mightiest of Earth-moon’s peaks in magnitude, nor the bleak, forbidding desert-land w
ere suitable abodes for the life of Earth. Deadly methane and ammonia gases surged on the tainted air, and the far horizons were lurid with the light of perpetually erupting volcanoes.
Within the skyport the enormous, mile-long cylinders preserved a balanced atmospheric pressure under a dome of palely opalescent cyclisite crystal. Inside the great structure, the bleak, grim, and terrible Saturnian wastelands impinged visually on the senses, but their menace was illusionary so long as the skyport resisted the assaults of storm and soilquake.
At one end of the skyport clustered the relaxation terminals, little glittering domes within the huge mother dome. At the other were the bright cobalt glass berths of huge space transports and tiny solo craft no bigger than the stratosphere planes which darkened all the skies on distant Earth.
Ross was certain that Nichols had taken advantage of the darkness and confusion in the terminal to slip out ahead of him and make for the spaceship berths. Nichols’ little ship was moored next to the eighty-ton transport Ganymede, on one of the public take-off slides used by solo craft.
Across the bleak, interplanetary voids from far-off Jupiter Ross had pursued Nichols’ craft. On arriving at the great dome, he had zoomed his own little vessel into a neighboring berth and swiftly departed on a round of the relaxation terminals in quest of his elusive quarry.
As he raced over the sloping skyway, he cursed the slim, frail girl who had betrayed him to the rogues in the terminal. He did not know who she was. He had never seen her before. But he cursed her as he sped until his breath was coming in wheezing gasps.
All about him now, immense hulks towered. He saw the silvery and resplendent bulk of the thousand-meter titan of the spaceways Erubus, and the Martian armored cruiser Klatan, with her oblong triple-ports reflecting the skygleam of a thousand little moons. He moved swiftly beneath frowning, dark expanses of metal, passed through blue shadows which flickered like the lashing reflections cast by comets’ tails on the mist-shrouds of the larger planets, and emerged at last on the wide, central platform at the base of the public runways.
The platform glowed dimly in the opalescent light of immense meteor belts and swift-circling little moons. Ross stopped an instant to regain his breath, then ascended swiftly over foot-mounts cut in the metal to the tiered runways above; the runways supported the little solo craft of adventurer pilots and independent miners from the Titan ore concessions.
At last Ross reached the take-off slide where he had left Nichols’ vessel. Gasping for breath, he stood staring in bitter chagrin at an empty expanse of shining metal. The little craft was gone! Breathing curses, he turned and ascended swiftly to his own small craft, which rested on the tier above.
A young man of eighteen was standing beside Ross’s gleaming vessel. He wore a mechanic’s lounge suit and short solar boots. An ultraviolet ray-shield hid the upper part of his white face. His jaw was bruised and swollen, and blood oozed from a cut on his mouth. He staggered a little as Ross came toward him.
“So you tried to stop him, eh? Good lad!”
The youth nodded.
“I fought him till he knocked me down,” he said. “The girl helped him. She’s a she-devil, sir.”
Ross’s eyes lit up.
“A girl, eh? The same girl, I’ll wager. Get inside, Bob. We’re going after them.”
CHAPTER II
The Death Ray
Five Earth-minutes later, Ross’s little vessel vibrated from bow to stern; then it crawled steadily down the runway in a snail-like glide. Moving scarcely a foot a second, it zoomed upward toward the summit of the dome.
As it neared the airlocks it bisected a photoelectric beam which automatically set the massive ejection mechanism in motion. The little ship was swiftly drawn into a compartment devoid of air, held suspended an instant in vacuum, and then shunted outward into the sub-zero, methane-tainted atmosphere beyond the skyport.
As the airlock closed behind the tiny craft, the whirring rotoform propellers which had lifted it from the runway ceased to function and the freshly-banked infra-atomic blast engines in its basal compartments exploded with a roar. The initial acceleration had not exceeded a few thousand feet a minute. But now its speed was increased enormously. Up from the volcanon-reddened crust of the ringed planet the little vehicle shot. Its velocity steadily mounted till the outer plates grew red, then white-hot.
Within the heat-resisting inner shell of the incredibly speeding vessel, Ross sat staring out through an observation window of inches-thick quartz at a titanic blue arc shot with gold. This bright inner ring of Saturn, composed of millions of tiny asteroids, was half a million miles in circumference. In the firmament beyond it, six of Saturn’s ten moons hung pendulously suspended, two green, three yellow, and one a blood-red ruby against the diffuse glory of the far-flung constellations.
Within five minutes, the vessel had attained an altitude of one hundred miles. Ross was sitting before a control board grimly manipulating dials and levers when young Robert Brooke entered the pilot chamber. He crossed swiftly to Ross’s side.
“I’ve located them in the telescopic receptor,” he exclaimed. “They’re heading for Hyperion!”
Ross swung about in his metal pilot’s chair, his face suddenly tense and incredulous.
“Good God!” he muttered. “Are they mad? I’d rather land blind in some foul, black bog on Rhea or Japetus. Even if they slip away from us in the dense surface fogs, they’ll find hell waiting when they step out through the gravity ports.”
Brooke nodded grimly. He had read about Hyperion in the navigator’s almanac. It was the backwater moon of the system. It had sufficient density to retain oxygen, but the air was so tainted with deadly carbon monoxide gas you couldn’t breathe it without a Dulo filter. Under the fog blanket, there was a scummy surface film of nasty, malignant life. Corrosive spores, flame-tongued leech-weeds. The last exploring party had landed there blind in 2078. Six months later, a Martian rescue crew had picked up three survivors.
Three haggard, gibbering skeletons, with shriveled flesh gangrening from uncauterized leech-weed abrasions. The little moon was a kind of vegetable inferno, a veritable hell-garden where alien forms of life flourished noxiously in an atmosphere impregnated with death.
“If we follow them to the moon’s surface, we may crash in the fog,” said the youth apprehensively. “I thought—I thought we could try to reach them with the Sillo-beam. I synchronized the S-tube range with the visual field in the receptor screen.”
Ross glanced at him sharply. “Took a lot on your shoulders, didn’t you?” he exclaimed. “Are you afraid to land on Hyperion?”
Brooke bit his lips, reddened.
“I think I understand,” Ross laughed. “A girl, eh?”
The youth nodded.
“We are to be married next month. In Auriga City, Venus. I have no insurance papers, and if anything should happen to me—” His lips set grimly,
Ross descended from the pilot’s seat and gripped his arm.
“All right, Bob. I understand. Just take my place now. Watch the pressure gages. If the gravity stabilizer slips a millimeter, regrade it.”
The youth nodded and climbed into the pilot’s seat, while Ross slipped swiftly from the little chamber. He moved down a narrow corridor and, descending a spiral stairway in the depths of the vessel, emerged into the compartment which contained the telescopic receptor screen and the switchboard which controlled the long-range Sillo-beams.
On the green-lit visual screen, bright images flickered. The screen was vertically suspended between terminus joints in the summit of a massive electrothermal pillar which rose obliquely from the floor of the compartment. The flickering images were conveyed by heat-wave transformation from a powerful reflecting telescope in the vessel’s prow.
The images were very bright and clear because there was little loss of light in the nearly gasless stratosphere five hundred miles above the planet’s surface. Ross crossed to the image screen and studied it intently. Brooke had located
the fleeting space ship with competence and accuracy. Near the center of the screen, the mist-enveloped disc of Hyperion shone with reflected meteor light. A little distance from the rim of the dully-illumined moon was a tiny black midge-shape gyrating in the tenuous pressure-drifts of an airless ether.
Ross studied the tiny, cigar-shaped vessel for an instant with set lips. Then he stepped to the illuminated switchboard which controlled the Sillo-beams. If luck favored him, he could stop that fleeing vehicle dead in space. The Sillo-tube could throw a paralyzing ray of magnetically energized light twenty thousand miles across empty ether. The light would envelop the little craft in a blinding shell of force and hold it immovably suspended above the mist-enshrouded satellite.
Ross grasped a small, black dial, twirled it about between his fingers. Five Sillovolts of energy flowed into the Sillo-tube; then ten, then fifteen. The vessel vibrated as the great, space-piercing beam streamed outward from its hull toward the tiny fly-speck of matter thousands of miles away.
Swiftly Ross returned to the receptor screen; stared anxiously. Relief flooded his being when he perceived that the beam had found its mark. With deadly accuracy it had streamed across space and enveloped the fleeing vessel. He had scored a hit!
Nichols’ ship was now utterly motionless in space. Ross wiped moisture from his forehead; laughed loudly in relief and exultation.
“Good lad,” he muttered, addressing the wall in lieu of young Brooke, but thinking of Brooke. “You figured the range to a T! We’ve got Nichols! We’ve got the little vixen who’s with him! We’ve got them both. We’ve—”
Suddenly he gasped. Out from the little vessel near Hyperion there shot a swift beam of blinding purple light. A Sillo-beam, in blasting concentration! The hue was unmistakable.
Ross’s eyes dilated in terror. With a cry he recoiled from the screen, as though even the image of such a beam could maim and kill. As he did so, the little craft rolled sickeningly. There was a clang of tortured metal. All the lights on the Sillo-beam chamber flickered, dimmed.
The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 151
