The paranoia was becoming a thousand times more pronounced as he went on to list his own achievements.
"Then, step by step, I went on to fight back at the communities which had betrayed me. Here and there I found a survivor drifting on wrecked ships, so I took them into my laboratories, and I altered them a little, as they a millennia ago had altered me."
Greg felt a shudder running down his spine as he wondered what kind of mark the ancient society had made upon the asteroid man. Confined as he was by the pressure on his neck, he flexed his muscles a little to try to restore the cramped circulation. Something that might have been the ghost of a laugh flickered across to him from the shadows.
"No use you trying to escape," said the asteroid man. "No use at all. You're one of the most helpless prisoners anywhere in the universe at the moment. The strands of that net are made from anatomically condensed material, thousands of times stronger than steel. You'll never cut it and you'll never break it."
"How did that moron of yours manage to cut it then?" asked Greg.
"Oh, that's equally simple," said the asteroid man. "His knife is one of the things that is capable of dealing with those strands, for it is itself made of atomically condensed hardness. Nature is very often extravagant. I have merely done away with the spaces between the electrons, neutrons and the nucleus. I have compounded far more atoms than there should be into a very limited space. The net appears comparatively light to you. It is actually far heavier than any other substance of the same volume in the universe; it has a higher specific gravity than anything else of equal size anywhere." The enormity of the scientific procedure involved drew an admiring whistle from Greg.
"But surely you could undo this net? You don't have to wait until your disciple—or whatever it is—comes along with his knife?"
"I could dissolve the strands of that net," said the asteroid man, "with as much ease as a fire can dissolve butter."
"I don't believe you," said Greg. "You may be able to condense it, but you can't dissolve it as easily, surely. Nothing and nobody could do that."
"Are you trying to trick me with some puerile device?" said the asteroid man. "Do you think that I, Ultimus, the new god of the universe, would be taken in by anything as savage and barbaric as an appeal to my vanity?"
"No. I'm simply saying that you couldn't undo what you've done. You might have a scientific power to set off an avalanche to blow the top off a mountain, but you couldn't put it back. Any fool can destroy—it's the man who can create. Anybody can tie a man up in a net made of unbreakable thread, but not anybody could break that unbreakable thread. That's the real test of intelligence, to be able to reverse an action that you've carried out."
"Do you really think so?" asked the asteroid man. He's biting, thought Greg.
"Well you can argue round if you like, but I shan't be very inclined to believe these tales of your so-called superlative power unless you can prove to me that what you've done you can undo."
"Come closer," said the asteroid man, "and see if you can do something besides talk."
By dint of much heaving and rolling, Greg inched his way nearer to the platform with the brilliant lights.
"That's close enough," said the asteroid creature. "Now you wish to see me dissolve the net."
The underground chamber was electric with suspense, tense with pent-up hates and fears and emotions. Greg could feel the atmosphere as surely as though his hands were across the terminals of some great dynamo. His breath seemed to freeze inside his lungs. His heart stopped beating. He hoped that his eyes, the expression of his face, would not betray him. He tried to freeze it into a mask. He had never been a good poker player. He hoped he could do something now; something that would be good enough to fool the supreme, yet evil, intelligence.
The asteroid man leaned further back into the shadows and moved a hand toward Greg. The hand held a glowing, circular object, like a small orb of pure, incandescent light. It was almost like the symbol of power itself.
"Dissolve," said the asteroid man slowly. His fingers seemed to squeeze the orbs. Its color changed from a brilliant white to dull red, from red to orange, from orange to yellow. Greg watched the fantastic rainbow tints replacing one another, almost too fast for the eye to follow. From yellow to green, then to a brilliant emerald. The emerald deepened into a turquoise, and the turquoise into a pure sapphire blue. The blue in turn gave way to a deep indigo, and that in turn to violet.
The glowing, gleaming, glittering orb ceased to emit light and became so black that the outstretched hand in the shadows seemed to be full of nothingness. The black seemed to play strange tricks with Masterson's eyes. It apparently reflected no light at all, almost as though the asteroid man could read his thoughts.
"Yes, I can do that, too. You're looking at a genuine black body. It reflects no light, no heat. A scientific marvel which lesser minds have been seeking for ages, to me, it is as simple as a child's toy."
The black body remained like a squirming ball of nothingness in the asteroid man's hand; then suddenly it flared a brilliant blinding luminescence again, glittering like a thousand magnesium flares condensed and crystallized into one solid mass.
"You will now find that the net will break as easily as string or cotton," said the asteroid man.
Greg gave a mighty heave. The net snapped.
For a second he could hardly believe that he was free. His first instinct was to reach for his gun and blast this creature into a black, lost eternity where it belonged. He remembered just in time that the gun wouldn't fire.
"I hope you're not contemplating anything foolish—my servants are very close if I need them, and, besides, I have all sorts of interesting surprises for anybody who is foolish enough to attempt any physical violence upon my person."
Greg was mentally measuring the distance between himself and the door. He threw a hand up to shade his eyes and backed away a little as though the brilliance of the light were hurting it. He had gained two steps before the asteroid man's voice cracked out like a whiplash:
"Don't try and escape; you could get no further than the labyrinth, and that is well patrolled. I should give orders for you to be brought in dead next time."
Greg could well believe that. He was a step further forward now he had got free of the net, but was it going to avail him anything?
He wanted something to distract the asteroid man's attention. He had two guns. He could spare one; besides they were no more than dead weight as they were at the moment with that force field in operation. That nullifying beam preventing them from exploding.
"You have shown me a great deal of your science," he said quietly and calmly. "I should like to show you a little of mine now. Or rather, I would like to begin by showing you something and then asking you to explain how your nullifier ray works. I think it's the greatest technological achievement I've ever encountered. It's masterly, brilliant." He was playing on the other's paranoia, in the same way that a skillful violinist plays on a horse-hair and resin and turns vibration into glorious sound.
"Here." He put his hand slowly and carefully down toward the holster and removed the gun slowly, and reversed it as though he were about to hand it to the asteroid man. "You fire it and explain to me why it will work when you wish it to and not when you don't."
The asteroid man leaned forward a trifle further out of the shadows. Every muscle in Greg's arms was as tense as a steel spring. The creature's hand was reaching out for the gun butt nonchalantly, a gesture full of affectation.
"I will condescend to examine it—" began the creature, and the steel spring that was Greg Masterson uncoiled!
The gun left his hand with the speed of a striking snake. The asteroid man gave a sudden choking cry and threw up his arm to defend his face. As he did so he lurched forward, and Grew saw what he meant by the "mark of the criminal." He saw then, for a fleeting moment, what that prehistoric society had done to the asteroid man, millennia ago. And as he saw, he understood something of the hatred t
hat was in the creature's heart. The blood seemed to freeze in his veins. The hairs on the nape of his neck stood suddenly upright. He felt like a dog in the presence of some weird psychic power. He knew—and the knowledge aged him ten years in as many seconds. Never in his life had he seen such a hideous, unbelievable disfigurement as that which had been wrought on this unhappy creature.
He saw, but he didn't stay. The asteroid man was off his balance, slightly stunned by the gun which had landed in his chest. In less than a second he would have recovered and been thinking again. That ice-cool deadly brain of his would be planning new, devilish devices in which to entrap Greg Masterson, and Greg had no intention of being trapped any more. He turned and sprinted for the heavy door.
"Blast you!" shrieked the asteroid man, in a sudden uncontrollable outburst of passion. "You'll suffer for this!"
By the time he had finished screaming, Greg had reached the door. The handle was almost unbelievably heavy in his grasp; he put his shoulder to it and wrenched with the strength born of desperation. Just for a second he thought it wasn't going to open; he thought that all was lost. And then, with a sudden unexpectedness that almost threw him off balance, the door moved, the handles swung up in his hand, and he was free.
He slammed the door behind him and began moving down the corridor. Every instinct in him wanted to run, but he dared not run. And every time he let his mind wander by so much as a fraction from the passage in front of him, his subconscious kept throwing up mental images of the asteroid man's face, and its dreadful, soul-destroying secret. The thought was too much. The shock, the effort, the battle of wits and the sudden dramatic escape were too much for any man's nervous system. Greg leaned against the wall and was nervously, violently, noisily sick…
Then he felt better. He knew that the vision of the face of the asteroid man would haunt him to the end of his days—be that only a half second, or half a century, away.
CHAPTER XI
Rotherson crouched over the controls with a happy smile playing over his strong lips. He was happy because he was really doing something at last, instead of planning things for other people to do. He felt as thought he had come home after a long exile. He was mentally happier than he had been for a long, long time. The years of administrative routine had seemed like a nightmare. Every sheaf of paper on his desk, every file on his shelf, every memo that he had filed, every speech that he had drafted had been another fetter in the chain…
The chain held him down to routine clerical work, held him down to his position as a figurehead.
He didn't want to be a figurehead, nor did he want to be administrative or manipulative machinery for defense. General Rotherson was a soldier, a soldier to the core. If he had a part to play in society, he wanted to be the man in the front line, not the man in G.H.Q.
It had been an unprecedented step which he had taken, but he had no regrets.
Jonga felt very much the same, though for a different reason. He had not endured all the soul-destroying years that had made Rotherson suddenly rebel. His impetuosity was the impetuosity of youth…
He was full of fire, enthusiasm. He was wild and reckless and he, too, had suddenly found his real niche. He was at home on board the ship!
Krull, quieter by comparison, the most mature of the entire party, was still rather undecided. Not for him the overwhelming enthusiasm which action produced in his colleagues. He was a far more objective, contemplative type of man, and his brain worked rather more slowly than the others, but a great deal more thoroughly. Krull hated jumping in feet first, but when somebody else jumped and dragged him in along with them, he was the first to examine the position, and analyze the new environment in which he found himself.
The girl Dolores was the epitomization of the "dumb blonde." She was quite a simple soul in her way, and yet, for all that, not without the ability to think. She could chatter for hours about irrelevancies, but her real greatness lay in her almost unbelievable strength which lurked behind those feminine shoulders. It was hard to believe that she could have seized any one of her companions with one hand and thrown him clean through the beryllium wall. She could have taken a six-inch metal girder and bent it over her knee with the same ease that a man could snap a twig. It was fantastic to think that such colossal strength lay behind so smooth an exterior. In her way, Krull decided she was quite attractive, but it would need another Jupitrean colonist to stand any chance of courting her. One over-amorous embrace, and a man's back would snap as a wax candle snaps in cold weather. One over-affectionate kiss, and Dolores's boy friend would find himself without a head, albeit unintentionally. Krull found himself feeling sorry for her, for that strange mixture which made up the Jupitrean girl. Woman and yet not woman. Muscle man, and yet, in her own way, softly feminine.
She looked perfectly normal, yet she was more unnatural than the most garish freak in the sideshow. Thinking about it, Krull felt suddenly, strangely sad.
"How far do you think we've gotten?" asked the young radio operator suddenly. The strong fingers of General Rotherson tapped over the computer keys. And he handed the course chart across to the youngest member of the expedition.
"We're making good time," said the radio operator. Krull looked at him and again felt something akin to sadness; he experienced a great deal of sympathy for the boy. He could understand the ingenuousness behind the lad's outwardly calm exterior. He was a boy, nothing more than a boy, and he had so much to learn; and he had so far to go. Krull wondered whether he would ever have the chance to get there…
It made him think of that hackneyed, stereotyped character in the fifty-cent Westerns that he still enjoyed reading. What ever-green favorites they were, he thought. He found himself looking at the boy's back as he bent over the radio set. He thought of the mind that lurked under the curly brown hair… he was like the eternal younger brother. The little chap always got shot, trying to do something that was beyond him, in the Western… He was a perpetually tragic character. Krull had the feeling that if anything went wrong with the ship, he would gallantly stand by his ship to the last, like the boy in "Casablanca" who stood "upon the burning deck" while his ship went down around him, or the young messenger lad who died bringing the message to Napoleon. He was that type of boy; the heart and the bravery inside him were too big for the slim, youthful body. The ideals and the hopes were vaster and wider and nobler than that young, inexperienced mind was capable of dealing with. The fine spirit of adventurous ardor lurked behind a too-fragile exterior.
Krull wondered why he himself felt these strange feelings of foreboding.
Must be getting old, he thought, old and philosophical. Why, I must be fifteen years younger than the general, and by thunder, look at him! As happy as a schoolboy. He looked again at that sturdy iron grey beard, and that ferocious bristling moustache that characterized Rotherson's powerful features, and decided that Rotherson's profile was a mixture of weakness and strength. There was still about him that boyish quality which marked the young radio operator. Krull felt, in a sense, that he was the only man on board. The only man who had really been affected by life. The only man who understood the meaning behind things. The only one who had allowed experience to mature him. He did another quick mental survey of his companions…
Jonga was strong as a man; a man in years, a man in name, a man in ability yet filled with wild impetuousness.
The general almost in his second childhood, was giving way to youthful enthusiasms. Life had hammered at him and he had hammered back. He had refused to mature. He had tried to keep a young heart inside an aging body.
He looked at the girl, dumb and feminine, strange and lonely. Not knowing why she came. Just obeying orders. Just doing a job. Just on hand, in case her weird wild talent of supernormal strength should be needed for anything. If she could have converted her strength into horsepower, she would almost have been able to drive the ship as well as the rocket. Krull allowed the ghost of a smile to twist across his weathered countenance. His deep thoughtful
eyes were old. He felt old. He felt as a man feels who had read too many stories, and seen too many plays, and met too many people. It was not the cheap sophistication of the cynical hero of current TV plays that lurked in Krull. He was not cynical and hard-bitten; he was just a man with rather more understanding of his fellows than the rest of us. He tried to bring his mind back to the business in hand. They were flying the ship on a fool's errand. They were looking for a vortex in space that probably didn't exist. They were looking for an asteroid that had been there one minute and hadn't the next. Five ships had gone out on the same expedition and disappeared. It just didn't seem to make any sense.
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