The Affair of the Brains by Anthony Gilmore (read an ebook week txt) 📗

get to the ship through those guards! And if you did, you couldn't run it yourself—and pick us up!"

Carse turned, his face white with cold passion. "When will you learn to obey me implicitly?" he said harshly—and crept on.

Old Leithgow trusted his friend a little more. "Get your suit on, Friday," he said gently, and slipped into his own. The negro, ashamed, followed his example; then both were flat on the ground, back to back, sniping—Leithgow also—as best they could under such conditions at the groups of men who now were bellying ever nearer from three directions.

The Hawk's plan might well have appeared hair-brained to one who did not know the man, and what he was capable of accomplishing under pressure. The very first step in this plan required the destroying of the three outflanking guards between him and the space-ship.

As so often in the great adventurer's career, he was lucky. The unthinking have always admitted his luck, but never seen that he forced it—forced it by doing the unexpected—attacking when he was attacked. He was doing that now. The three coolie-guards in his way must have known who he was, so their alarm at finding themselves, the attackers, attacked, will account for their making a move of poor strategy. Instead of scattering and defending the open entrance-port of the space-ship from a short distance, they in their alarm made haste to get inside to defend it from there. The interior was the best place to defend the ship—if they had already been inside—for they could lie in the inner darkness and sweep the open port when the Hawk entered.

But to try to pass through the port—that was bad judgment. It was only necessary for Carse to hold bead on it and fire when they passed in line.

This was the present "luck" of the adventurer. He might have sniped the guards anyway, but he had it easier. From fifty yards away, prone and carefully sighting, he took the three lives that had been so viciously, so subversively altered by Ku Sui.

A moment later, the way cleared, he was inside the ship—and his space-suit lay on the ground outside.

Rapidly the three groups of guards closed in on Leithgow and Friday. The two men made their advance as uncomfortable as possible, but they could do no accurate shooting at such difficult targets as crawling men, from within the cramped interiors of their cumbrous suits. Not even Friday, who was a crack shot. They could not hold out long—nor did they expect to.

They had been too occupied to notice what had become of Carse. Within their suits all was silence; they heard neither their friend's shots as he struck down the three coolies nor their own. Quick glances at the ship's open port revealed no one; nothing. Probably, they thought, the Hawk was dead. Even if he were not, they would soon be. A matter of a minute. Maybe two. Their suits were still intact, but they could not remain so much longer. Ku Sui had this time ordered them destroyed.

And now half a dozen coolies were leaving the ring tightening around them and creeping to the Scorpion as additional guards....

It was then, in those last few seconds, with death staring them in the face, that Friday did a magnificent thing. It happened that Carse saw him do it as the adventurer jumped out of the Scorpion again and with frantic speed slipped into the space-suit he had left waiting. Friday stood straight up, a hundred feet from the enemy—a great bloated monster in his padded suit—and charged. Leithgow and the Hawk heard, by their suit helmet-radios, his battle yell of defiance, but the coolies did not. All silent, apparently, he rushed them—slowly, because of his hampering suit—his ray-gun spitting orange contempt—and other pencils of fiery death passing him narrowly by.

And then, while he still charged, the rays stopped stabbing past him, and he saw the faces of the coolie-guards turn upward. So surprised was the expression on their faces, that he turned and looked too—and saw the Scorpion, her entrance ports still open, forty feet off the ground and rising with swift acceleration.

Faster and faster she rose; all ray-guns were silenced before her astounding ascent. Higher and higher—faster and faster—till with a stunning, ear-deafening crash she struck the great dome and was through.

Then came chaos.

A huge, jagged gash marked the ship's passage, and through this the air inside the dome poured with cyclonic force, snatching into in maelstrom everything unfastened within the dome and hurling it crazily into space. For seconds the flood rushed out, a visible thing, gray from the soil which it scooped up; and while its fury lasted every building on the asteroid quivered and groaned from the terrific strain.

And where, a moment before, men had stood—two white men and a black, and a score of coolie-guards—there was now nothing save the flat rock under the gaping hole. The upper soil had been ripped out and flung forth like a concealing veil around the bodies that had gone with it....

For an interval Hawk Carse knew nothing. He had ceased to live, it seemed, and was soaring through Eternity. He never knew how much time passed before his numbed senses began to return and he became aware of weight and of a furious roaring in his head.

He was moving forward at blinding speed. Something kept flashing before him—a wide stream of ruddy orange light: his dazed brain could connect it with nothing he had ever known. Soon the orange stream settled into spasmodic bursts, pitch blackness filling the intervals; and when it came more slowly he saw that it was in reality the vast flaming ball of Jupiter, streaking across the line of vision as he tumbled over and over, head over heels—free in space!

The realization helped his return to alertness. As the wild tumbling motion gradually ceased, and Jupiter tended to stay more and more under his feet, he peered around through his face-plate. To one side he glimpsed two grotesque, bulky figures, one half of them limned glaringly against the blackness of space by the near-by planet's light. He saw other figures, too, spread out in a scattered fringe—figures of men in smocks, dead and bloated and white.

They were the coolies, these last, and the other two were of course Leithgow and Friday. But had they survived the outrush of air? Carse felt in his left glove for the suit's gravity control lever; found it and tentatively moved it. His acceleration slowly increased. He brought the lever part-way back. Then, into the microphone encased inside the helmet, he called:

"Leithgow! Leithgow! Can you hear me? Friday!"

The radio broadcast his words. Soon welcome answers came in Eliot Leithgow's tired voice and the negro's emphatic bass.

"Maneuver together," Carse instructed them. "We must lock arms and stay close."

Slowly, clumsily, the three monstrous figures made toward each other, and presently they were reunited in a close group. Carse pointed an arm into the face of Jupiter where there hung poised a gleaming globe of white, dappled with dark splotches.

"Satellite III," he said, "—our goal. And we'll get there without interruption now that Ku Sui, his laboratory, his coordinated brains, are destroyed.... You are very quiet, Eliot. Aren't you happy at our success?"

"I am very tired," the old scientist said. "Oh, but we'll sleep and feast and game when we get back to my hidden lab on Three—won't we!"

"Chicken for me!" exclaimed Friday. "Even at twenty dollars a can!"

"Your shoulder, Carse—how is it?" asked the Master Scientist solicitously. "And how did you ever get out of that space-ship in time, after you had given it such an acceleration?"

There was a tired smile in the adventurer's voice when he replied:

"My shoulder—a trifle. I have a dozen such burns. But my feet still hurt from the twenty-foot drop I took out of the Scorpion. I had to get out: the shock of the crash would have killed me.

"But I've been looking for the asteroid," he went on—and interrupted himself. "By the horn of the phanti!" he exclaimed in amazement. "Look, Eliot! That explains it all!"

His whole body was tilted back to allow him to look upward. Friday and the Master Scientist followed his startled gaze, and they too gaped in wonder.

For there was nothing above or around them—no dwindling fragment of rock—no sign of any asteroid: only the eternal stars.

"Yes," said Eliot Leithgow slowly, "that explains it all...."

"It explains what?" asked Friday, staring. "And where is the asteroid?"

"It's up there," the Hawk replied. "Don't you see now, Eclipse, why no one's ever found it; why we could hunt forever for it and hunt in vain? Ku Sui made his whole asteroid invisible!"

End of Project Gutenberg's The Affair of the Brains, by Anthony Gilmore