CHAPTER XV
Through the Tempest
STORM raged over nighted Saturnopolis. Dazzling sheets of weird light seared across the sky, and thunder bawled hoarsely like a hubbub of giants. Torrents of rain and of big hailstones battered the dark metropolis. This was one of the periodic 'satellite storms'which occur whenever three or more of the ringed planet's moons are in conjunction, exerting their combined gravitational pull to set up tidal disturbances in the deep atmosphere.
The great citadel of the dictator loomed vague and black in the tempest, its windows shining with blue light. Even night and storm could not lessen the intense activity that was going on in this nerve-center of the League of Cold Worlds, as Hasna Trask and her lieutenants drew up their final plans for the greatest, conquest in history.
Deep down in the dungeon below the citadel, the roar of the raging storm was muted to a deep, continuous rumbling. And down here in the blue-lit cell, Joan Thorn was working feverishly.
She was hitching her chair across the floor, an inch at a time, by throwing her body forward in her leather bonds. Slowly, she was edging toward the chairs of her two sleeping comrades.
'Got to make it tonight or never!' Thorn's psychophone was droning. 'They'll read my plan from the record when they next take and examine it. We've got to make it before then—' Thorn's face was haggard, her eyes burning with a febrile light. Her brain had conceived a desperate hope of escape.
Days and nights had passed since Jen Cheerly had sailed for Erebus, with Lann Cain her prisoner. How many days and nights, Thorn could not estimate exactly. Time had become a blur to her as she and her comrades sat bound here beneath the psychophones.
Thorn had felt her mind cracking from strain as the hours and days dragged She had almost felt that if she had known what Trask wanted to know, the nature of the Alliance's secret weapon, she would have told it. She had been glad then they did not know it.
Most agonizing of all in those blurred hours had been the thought of Cheerly, on her way to far Erebus with Lann. The Uranian would come back with the radite. But she would not bring Lann back, once all his possible usefulness was ended!
Tonight, an hour before, Trask's women had removed from the Planeteers’ psychophones the spools of tape which contained the record of their thoughts for the last day and night. New spools had been inserted and the women had left. It had been then that Thorn's feverish mind had suddenly conceived her crazy plan of escape.
As she thought of the plan, the psychophone had spoken it and the recorder had transcribed it. And so Thorn knew that she must put the plan into effect before the record was examined again, or her plan would be read from the record and forestalled:
Thorn, convulsively rocking her chair forward, prayed inwardly that the rumble of the storm would keep the two guards out in the corridor from hearing. She inched on, her chair moving slowly, the thin black wires that connected her skull to the psychophone above, slowly lengthening out. Finally Thorn had got her chair close to those in which Gunda Welk and Sua Av were sleeping exhaustedly.
'Gunda!' Thorn whispered fiercely. 'Wake up!'
'The big Mercurian slowly opened bleared, red-rimmed eyes. Sua Av also awoke, yawning. Their psychophones started droning their awakening thoughts.
'Gunda, I want you to tip your chair over to bring your head down on my chair,' Thorn whispered. 'Then maybe you can chew through one of these leather straps that bind my arms.'
'What good would that do?' said Gunda with dull hopelessness, 'Even if we all three got free of our bonds, we couldn't get out of this cell—not with the door bolted by a wave-lock.'
'I've an idea that might get us out!' Thorn said feverishly. 'It's a chance—our only one!'
'Try it, Gunda!' urged Sua Av,' wide awake now.
With no hope in her face, Gunda Welk obeyed. She rocked back and forth in her chair until it tipped forward, her head coming down against Thorn's lap. Hitching painfully sidewise, the big Mercurian got her teeth into one of Thorn's leather arm-straps.
They heard her jaws working as she bit into the tough Jovian leather. Their psychophones continued to drone on, uttering their varying thoughts. But the rumble of the raging storm above was loud enough to keep the guards in the corridor from hearing.
Thorn felt the strap Gunda was chewing weaken. She tensed her arm in a fierce effort. The strap broke!
Quickly, Thorn unbuckled the other straps that held her. She tipped Gunda's chair back to normal position. Then she reached around and with numbed fingers found the tiny, needle-like electrode at the back of her skull, and gently pulled it out. She felt her scalp close over the minute incision. Her psychophone went silent.
Thorn got to her feet. She staggered, her numbed limbs buckling under her at first. Then she steadied, and unbuckled the straps that held Sua Av and the Mercurian to their chairs.
'Don't disconnect your psychophones yet!' she warned them. 'If the guards outside happened to notice that all our psychophones were dead, they'd suspect something at once.'
'Now what?' Sua Av whispered. 'How can we get out of this cell without a wave-key to operate the lock?'
'Yes, what's your idea?' Gunda asked hoarsely.
'It came to me as I watched them changing spools in the psychophones tonight,' Thorn muttered. 'I shut my mind off it till after they'd gone, so they wouldn't hear.'
She was taking down from its mounting the psychophone that for so many days had blared her thoughts. With quivering fingers, she began dissembling the intricate little machine. Tubes and coils and condensers came from it, as she rapidly took it apart.
'There are enough parts here,' she muttered feverishly. 'If I can just remember enough of my tech-school training.'
Thorn began putting certain parts of the mechanism back together again, in a totally different hook-up. The tiny atomic generator that furnished power, the transformers and rectifiers—and then she worked long upon rewiring an 'alternator,' connecting it electrically to a mistress modulator tube.
An hour passed, and another. The hubbub of storm was even louder from above. The droning of the other two Planeteers’ psychophones was almost inaudible through the roar.
Thorn finally straightened, holding the compact rebuilt mechanism in trembling hands. Her face was dripping.
,' Now for it!' she whispered shakily to the other two Planeteers. She advanced with the little machine to the locked door.
'You've rebuilt the psychophone parts into a wave-projector?' Sua Av whispered, staring. 'To use as a wave-key?'
'It won't work,' Gunda muttered. 'It may project waves, but you don't know the secret frequency that will operate this lock. It might be any one of countless possible frequencies.'
But Thorn only nodded.
'I thought of that!' she said hoarsely. 'I built an automatic modulator into the thing. It will start projecting waves of frequency down in the sixteenth octave, and run up to the forty-fifth, by steps of twenty vibrations each. You know all wave-locks are keyed in those octaves, for above them you get heat radiations.'
'It might work,' Sua Av agreed. 'Most locks have an error-margin of ten vibrations per second, so your automatic step-ups ought to overlap all frequencies in those octaves.'
Thorn was already at the door. She held the end of her little makeshift projector against the inertrum door just inside the wave-lock. She was counting on the high power of her vibrations to penetrate the inertrum from inside, and reach the lock.
The little projector hummed as she touched its switch. Invisible waves were shooting from it into the lock, changing frequency by 20-vibration jumps each fraction of a second.
In a moment came a click from the wave-lock! The bolt had drawn back, as the right frequency released the lock.
'By heaven, it worked!' Gunda Welk exclaimed hoarsely, her eyes lighting with wild hope now.
Thorn peered tautly out through the door-grating. The two SP guards on duty were standing a few yards down the corridor, evidently discussing the storm that roared a
bove.
Gunda and Sua Av now removed the needlelike electrodes of the psychophones from the tiny incisions, at the back of their skulls. They staggered stiffly from the chairs to Thorn's side, as she gently opened the unlocked door.
One of the SP women, seeing the cell door open from the corner of her eye, yelled and reached for her atom-pistol.
'Get them!' Thorn shouted hoarsely, lunging out.
The charging Planeteers reached the two Saturnians before they could level the weapons they had drawn. Thorn grabbed the atom-pistol of one of the green women, and twisted fiercely.
The Saturnian suddenly let go of the gun and jumped back, clawing a pocket-audio from her jacket. She shouted wildly into the little instrument.
'Dungeon-guards calling for help! The prisoners are—'
Thorn brought the atom-pistol down on the woman's head, and she sank with a groan. Gunda and Sua Av had already knocked out the other guard, and the Mercurian had her gun.
'That call will bring guards down here at once!' Thorn cried. 'Quick—the drain by which we got in here! It's our one chance now to get to the space-ship court!'
They ran down the short dungeon corridor to the place where the drain opened. The inertrum bars had been reset in new cement to repair the drain-grating, Thorn saw instantly.
She leveled her gun and triggered rapidly. The bursting flares of blinding energy burned away the new cement, again freeing the inertrum bars. As Gunda Welk bent and tore loose the bars, Thorn heard over the roar of the storm a rush of running feet.
'They're coming!' she cried, and leaped headfirst down into the narrow tube. The others followed her.
Thorn writhed down the cramped pipe with frantic haste, ahead of the Mercurian and Venusian. She heard distant yells as soldiers burst into the dungeon which they had just quit.
In a moment Thorn emerged head first into the place where the five citadel drains converged into one big tube. Water was rushing down here, flowing down through three of the pipes that drained courts open to the raging storm.
'This is the drain that leads up to the space-ship court!' she cried, scrambling into the right-hand pipe.
As she crawled at the head of her comrades up this different pipe, icy floods of water from above smashed unceasingly into her face. The drain was almost full of down rushing water. Blinded, gasping, she fought upward through the tube until she glimpsed the grating above, outlined against terrific red lightning flares.
Thorn drew her gun and fired up at the grating through the rushing water. The whizzing flare of bursting atom-shells above was almost drowned by another appalling burst of scarlet lightning, accompanied by a tremendous shock of thunder.
She pushed on upward through the streaming water. Her hands found the bars of this grating, loose where their ends had been exposed by burning away of the cement. With a convulsive effort, Thorn pushed the bars upward and scrambled up into the court.
The full fury of the tremendous Saturnian storm beat upon her in this open court. Rattling showers of big hailstones crackled like musketry, torrents of icy rain smashing down upon her from the black sky. Gunda and Sua Av were scrambling up out of the drain to her side.
Blinding red. lightning arced across the heavens in awful, burning splendor, and showed Thorn two small space-cruisers parked near the center of the court. It also showed her that a troop of guards was running hastily out from the other side of the court.
'They've guessed we'd make for these ships. Come on before they cut us off!' she yelled hoarsely to her comrades.
They plunged forward. The crimson lightning died, and in the succeeding thick blackness, the whole citadel rocked wildly about them to the deafening shock of thunder.
The Planeteers collided with a wet metal wall in the darkness. The side of one of the ships! Then another fizzing flare of fiery lightning showed Thorn the ship door, a few feet away.
She pushed the unsealed door inward, and fell rather than jumped inside. As the other two Planeteers leaped in after her, through the bellowing thunder came a shout of voices.
Atom-shells flicked into the inertrum wall of the ship and exploded in bright little bomb-bursts of light. The guards running across the court toward them were shooting.
'Seal the door, Gunda!' Thorn yelled wildly. 'I'll take his up!'
She pitched forward in darkness toward the control-room, Sua Av at her heels. She heard the door grinding shut as she pawed frantically for the controls, standardized in all ships.
More atom-shells flared outside. By their glare, Thorn found the injector lever and pulled it frantically. The power-chamber of the little ship burst into a roar,
The panel-lights sprang on as Sua Av found the switch, Thorn leaping to the firing-keys. Her fingers flashed down.
With a nerve-shattering roar of all keel tubes blasting, the little cruiser shot almost vertically upward, rising on spuming fire-jets out of the big court at the heart of the citadel.
Thorn cut in all stern tubes, and the little ship screamed up on a steep slant through the raging storm. Rocked by buffeting bursts of thunder, lit by the dancing flares of red lightning, it roared up across storm-swept Saturnopolis with dizzying speed.
Sua Av had the oxygenators throbbing by now. Gunda Welk came staggering into the control-room, fighting the terrific acceleration pressure. Up through the storm they climbed till they were above the tempest, the roar of air outside now fading away.
The Three Planeteers For All Page 24
