Life Hunt

by Perry Rhodan

  The laboratory was brilliant in the flooding light. Relays clicked gently, reels of computer tape spun and boiling liquids pulsed through transparent tubing.

  The girl mutant stopped behind the once more solid door.

  Three robots sat observing the progress of an experiment. Alarms went off in Laury's mind. Which one of the three was the Watcher?

  Her hand slipped into her pocket. Her fingers closed firmly around the butt of her ray-pistol while she glanced from one robot to another, looking in vain for some distinguishing characteristic that would identify the Watcher. Still standing hidden behind the door, she heard their metal joints creak softly and she watched their almost human movements.

  She had to go past all three! The serum lay behind them.

  How could I have forgotten the tuning fork? She demanded reproachfully of herself, remembering what effort it had cost her to make a G sharp tuning fork on the equipment in X-p's maintenance department.

  Suddenly she thought she was seeing Rodrigo's face before her and hearing him say once more "...but tomorrow I'll not be receiving any injection of life-giving elixir. Instead, I shall have to breathe of a vapour that will precipitate an immediate advance of old age! The Ara who told me of this amidst all his smiles had accomplished the same feat with Nara, the Mongolian. When they came for her, she was young and happy, but upon her return, she had become an ancient hag, her mind quite gone."

  Laury walked past the mechanical men. They did not even look up.

  Half turning, the mutant stretched her hand out to the large capsule. As her fingers closed around it, she noticed the sign next to it and read the few words written there: 'Hutwasd-c8-0.75 Cudd...'

  Hutwasd, a creature more or less humanoid in appearance except for its monstrous head, was also an inmate of the Ara zoo. Because of his high intelligence, the Aras had classified him on Level C3, the same rank as Rodrigo. And 0.75 Cudd was about 3ccs.

  There was more but Laury was not able to read it—one of the robots had turned its head towards her! The Watcher!

  An aperture on its flat metal forehead opened briefly, revealing a fluorescent lens focused directly on Laury.

  The alarm went off in the X-p Security Central but that was not the worst of it. Laury's picture was transmitted there, as well, and within minutes every Ara in the gigantic research complex knew that the Arkonide girl Arga Silm had been observed in the act of stealing the most secret serum of all.

  The shot from her ray-pistol at the robot was a reflex action. The beam melted its positronic unit and Laury Marten had to spring lightly to one side as the mechman collapsed and fell to the floor. The serum-capsule was secure in her hand.

  Was that the alarm howling so insanely?

  Laury's next gun-burst blasted the videophone. She glanced at the ceiling, then placed the capsule in her inner pocket. She hastened back to the door, climbed on top of a cabinet standing there and dissolved the molecular bond of the ceiling above her. She reached through, took hold of the solid edges of the disintegrative field and pulled herself up.

  A very old Ara stood in front of her, trembling in every limb. His comprehension had been well nigh-shattered by seeing a girl crawl up through the floor of his laboratory. She stood up and aimed her weapon at him.

  "Turn around!" she ordered in a tone that would tolerate no nonsense. Then she leaped atop a table and climbed from there to a cabinet. She again made a portion of the ceiling impalpable and slipped through it.

  This time she emerged to face Sagala, who had been lured from the adjoining room by some noise she had made coming in. Laury Marten had met the Director of the Galactic Zoo only once before and the words they exchanged on that occasion had been few.

  Sagala gasped for air when Laury trained the raypistol on him. She was now the ice-cool, resourceful and skilled Rhodan agent. "Sagala," she said to the zoo director, who ranked above even Man Regg in rank and power, "you will help me get out of this building—unless you would like to die right now!"

  Sagala said nothing. Nor did he move. He could only stare at the young girl with the gun.

  The alarm still sounded throughout X-p. A warning was broadcast over the intercom from the Security Central: "All exits are blocked by battle-robots! Anyone attempting to leave X-p will be destroyed!"

  I Laury's voice was almost friendly when she again addressed Sagala: "Will you be so kind as to accompany me to the next exit? I'd feel ever so much safer if you were with me! Please, Sagala!"

  The threat of her weapon left him no choice. But, as he went past her to the door, he hissed: "You won't get far, Arkonide spy!"

  The place in the floor Laury had come through had sunk rather deeply and Sagala doubted if it would hold his weight. When he turned and looked back at the young girl, he went pale.

  At the door, his face again lost all its color. Laury had just warned him: "Sagala, I'll shoot before you can give any alarm!"

  He did not suspect that she had read his mind but her warning and threat had robbed him of all his courage. Trembling from cowardice, he stepped out into the hall. Laury followed close behind.

  • • •

  John Marshall was jolted out of a deep sleep when, Laury Marten's telepathic message struck him at full concentration. What did she have to tell him?

  Flight clear through the zoo? Who was with her Duke Rodrigo de Berceo? What had happened? At that moment X-p was alarming the entire planet and mobilizing the zoo's guardians, the terrible froghs!

  "I couldn't leave him in the lurch, John. We're heading now in a south-southwest direction and are going to try to lose ourselves with the vehicle somewhere in the desert..."

  With an oath, John Marshall sprang out of bed and into his clothes. Although his departure resembled a mad rush to escape, he did not lose his self-control. When he thought of Laury Marten, however, he began to boil internally. What was wrong with that girl? Had she fallen in love with Rodrigo de Berceo? That was something he only now realized.

  "She's gone crazy!" he exclaimed. It made him feel a little better, at least, to say that, but it did nothing to alter the fact that the whole Ara planet was being alarmed and that an entire world was pursuing Laury Marten and Rodrigo de Berceo.

  John Marshall would have been even angrier had he known just how Laury Marten had left X-p.

  She and Sagala had hardly reached X-p's ground floor when three battle-robots and a dozen excited Aras suddenly appeared at the entrance to an antigrav lift.

  "Here she is!" Sagala had cried in ultimate desperation, believing his outburst would mean his death at the hands of the Arkonide girl behind him.

  But there was no Arkonide girl behind him any longer—Laury Marten had used her disintegrative power to force her way through the walls of X-p. Through laboratories and their furnishings she ran—seeming like a ghost to the many Aras who saw her emerge from one wall, dash through a room and disappear into the opposite wall.

  She came out into the open far from the guarded exits. The starlight allowed her to find a vehicle quickly and with it she raced through the Galactic Zoo to the place where four people had been kept behind energy barriers like animals for four centuries.

  Agzt the frogh, swaying in euphoria, turned off the energy barrier when Laury and her car shot through. In the whirl of his unwholesome rapture, the serpent-monster failed to realize that he had just committed suicide. Froghs well aware of the general alarm came from all sides and saw with their sharp night vision that one of the zoo's inmates was climbing into Laury's vehicle. They also saw how the escape had been made possible and Agzt's life ended at the hands of his fellows.

  Meanwhile, Laury Marten, with Rodrigo at her side, accelerated the vehicle to the limit and struck south-southwest, attempting to leave the zoo and reach the desert.

  • • •

  Never before had the Trulan spaceport seemed so far away as it did to John Marshall that night. After what seemed like an endless ride on the public transport, he reached the spaceport station. He hurried
out of the express car and leaped into the antigravitor. Once on the ground, he mingled with the crowds of people and human-like intelligences, trying to make his haste seem less conspicuous.

  His small spacer, which Otznam had only recently delivered to Trulan from Rohun's cylindrical Springer ship, stood at the other end of the plaza.

  Marshall went down into the underground transport system, which crisscrossed the spaceport at various levels beneath its surface and provided the quickest and safest means for passengers and crews to reach their spaceships.

  Marshall, one of Perry Rhodan's oldest mutants, became somewhat more relaxed—as long as he did not think about Laury Marten's inexplicable action.

  He was not disturbed by the fact that she had fallen in love with Rodrigo. After all, what could be more human? But Laury had told him only during her emergency telepathic message—and that was something he did not understand.

  That was a breach of trust! Nothing else! And what else might she still have kept secret from him?

  At the end of the transport tube he found himself alone. He left the antigrav lift after making sure of his isolation. Only the center of the spaceport and the three gigantic shipyards where even the largest spaceships could be repaired had been artificially lit; the rest of the spaceport lay shrouded in darkness.

  John Marshall wiped the sweat from his brow. Even during the middle of the night, Tolimon was a hot world and the slightest exertion was tortuous.

  Unseen and unhindered, he reached his small spacer, which even under a suspicious examination still looked like nothing more than a mere tourist vehicle. In reality, it was almost exactly what Rohun had exaggeratedly said it was: a pocket-sized battleship. It was an ultra-swift and heavily armed spacecraft capable of flying as easily and precisely through thick atmosphere as through empty space.

  The propulsion unit idled. Radar, radio... all the equipment functioned. John Marshall looked at his watch: in five minutes he could take off.

  Then three micro-loudspeakers rebroadcast some of the radio traffic in the air—all hell was loose on Tolimon!

  Radar confirmed it. Every police craft on Tolimon was airborne and streaking south-southwest.

  And John Marshall had to fly into that horde of searching ships, find Laury Marten and her Rodrigo before the Aras did, take them on board and then make a run for it.

  The last five minutes of warm-up time were over!

  Muttering an imprecation, John Marshall took off, flying on a mission that did not promise even a 1% chance of success to either him or Laury Marten.

  • • •

  "Rodrigo, put the sword away! You're making me nervous with that toy of yours!" said Laury Marten energetically to the man at her side for the third time while she raced the land-going vehicle at top speed through the desolate gravel desert.

  Now she was making a turn on a steep slope, curving sharply to the left to avoid a wide gorge. The manoeuvre brought them almost automatically closer to the froghs approaching in pursuit from the south. The endurance of the intelligent serpent-monsters terrified her; she had long known that unless John Marshall came to help, she and Rodrigo would sooner or later fall into the grasping claw hands of the fearsome zoo guardians. The froghs kept up their inhuman pace, drawing inexorably nearer all the time!

  "Hold on, Rodrigo!" Laury cried.

  The son of a Spanish Grandee and an Aztec princess had spent 400 years in an energy cage and in that time he had only come in direct contact with the technology of the Arkon worlds once. He must have regarded the vehicle as a work of the Devil.

  He did not hold on! He reacted too late. When Laury braked and threw the vehicle into an impossibly tight turn to avoid hitting a rock outcropping in their path, Rodrigo's head was wrenched forward. He did not hear Laury Marten's fear-filled cry—"Rodrigo!?"

  He hung unconscious in his seat harness. His head was bowed, swinging limply to and fro.

  The night passed and day broke over Tolimon. Along with the grey dawn came Marshall's telepathic call.

  She was to give him her position! But Laury Marten had no idea where in the desert she was.

  Then she sped the vehicle into a narrow valley. The weathered mountains came together here, making a gully out of the valley—and a few hundred yards ahead she spotted a pale blue ray perpendicular to the valley floor, its deadly energy blasting the sheer rock into gas!

  Aras! Police ships!

  Now the search from the air for the fugitives had narrowed itself down considerably.

  But... the deadly beam was enough of an energy source that John Marshall would surely be able to locate it with his equipment!

  While her vehicle braked, slipping in the gravel and coming perilously close to the rocky walls of the gully, she was still calm enough to telepathically describe the Ara ship's attack to John Marshall.

  "I've got him!" Marshall called back.

  Seconds later, a tiny sun blazed over Tolimon's gravel desert. In its flame dissolved the Ara ship whose pale blue ray had missed Laury's vehicle by only a few hundred feet.

  Out of the brilliance in the sky shot John Marshall's spacer. It made its way into the narrow valley, flew over the still molten rock and landed no more than 50 feet from Laury Marten. Then Marshall was standing in the small hatchway, waving excitedly for Laury Marten to hurry up.

  The unconscious Duke de Berceo was too heavy a load for her. Marshall jumped from the hatch, ran over, grabbed the unconscious man out of the girl's arms and in the next moment shouted: "Get away!"

  Fifty feet behind them his small spacecraft disappeared in a cloud of gas. A hungry energy beam had struck the space from the grey morning sky and now it was going for Laury's vehicle. The beam touched it—a low hiss, a burst of light and smoke... and nothing remained.

  Nothing more than three people, two of them running for their lives in the direction from which the froghs were coming!

  9/ RHODAN TO THE RESCUE

  Three days later...

  "Come on!" shouted John Marshall to Laury Marten and Rodrigo. "The froghs are still right behind us! That one was just the third and..."

  Then he saw the terror in Laury's eyes. He whirled around—and what he saw took his breath away.

  Froghs were coming from three directions at once, nearing their victims at incredible speed!

  Then Duke Rodrigo de Berceo swiftly drew his sword and ran towards an attacking frogh!

  "The fool!" raged Marshall and then fired his raypistols, felling foe after foe.

  But the fifth and final frogh was still alive and it was towards this one Rodrigo dashed. John and Laury did not dare shoot for fear of hitting Rodrigo.

  "Come back!" shouted Marshall in frantic desperation.

  But it was too late!

  Marshall closed his eyes. He had no wish to witness the Duke's bloody death. Next to him, Laury screamed shrilly. But wait—what was she screaming?

  "He's stabbing again...!"

  And then John Marshall could not believe his eyes. Duke Rodrigo de Berceo, born in 1652 in Mexico, was proving in battle with a frogh that he was the best swordsman of the 17th Century!

  The giant body of the snake-monstrosity twisted about—it bellowed something—and pulled up the first third of its body. Its first eight or 10 legs buckled and it fell on its side, never to move again.

  "Is he crazy?" Marshall had gasped as he watched how Duke Rodrigo de Berceo had neared the creature, then leaped backwards to avoid the frogh's snapping mouth. And that had been the last voluntary movement the vanquished serpent-monster ever made.

  John Marshall looked at Laury Marten, observing her happy expression. "If the Duke," he said, "can adapt to our technology with the same speed, enthusiasm and courage he takes to sword fighting, Laury, then we might still have a chance of getting out of this alive. But..." He looked more closely at Laury Marten. "Why have you been constantly digging through your inner pocket?" he demanded angrily. The three days of running, thirst torturing them at every step, continual bat
tles with the froghs—all this had taken its toll of any good humor in the little party.

  "What's in my pocket, Marshall? This here!" With that she pulled out the capsule of life-prolonging serum.

  John Marshall stared first at the glass cylinder, then at the girl mutant. By this time Rodrigo had rejoined them and then Marshall burst out: "And you're only now telling me this? My God, Laury! With this we've reached half our goal already! How could you have forgotten to tell me?"

  She replaced the capsule carefully and said: "But I did tell you that I had found the location of the room where the Aras kept some of the serum..."

  "...But only now do you tell me that you've got it, Laury! There's a difference!"

  Here Rodrigo felt himself forced into the role of Laury's protector. He solemnly declared that, "When we're back in Mexico, Laury will lead a respectable life at the castle of my ancestors. She will be honored by all the court ladies and pages, admired by..."

  "Poor fellow..." interrupted John Marshall, shaking his head. "We have to go on. If we haven't found any water by this evening, we've had it!"

  • • •

  Evening had passed. Night had fallen. Of water... not a trace.

  The desolate mountains radiated back the day's heat. The air was hot and dry. The wind was no relief for it was just as hot and dry, blowing with it streams of dust.

  Three people staggered through a gully, worked their slow, difficult way up a hill and stumbled down the other side. They fell, picked themselves up and began to see hallucinations. They screamed inarticulately.

  Tolimon was on the offensive! Its wild and bleak desert was crueler and more ruthless than all the froghs and Aras.

  Laury was the first to stop and sink to the ground. Then Rodrigo collapsed. When Marshall turned to find out why no one was following him any longer, his strength vanished as well.

  Thirst drove them mad and parched their lips and inflamed their eyes.