Chapter IV

Hawthorne had been doctoring the thermostats. In the heated room the highly volatile _quintol_-base fuel started swiftly to vaporize. O'Dea felt his head beginning to reel as the acrid fumes filled his lungs. His eyes burned.

But the effect on the Centaur was greater. He became rigid and turned even more glassy-eyed. He swayed and for a tense second seemed about to fall over. Then his eyes focussed with a desperate effort, almost sobered by fear.

"_Quintol!_" He raised the whip. "Not oshygen!"

He lost his footing as Hawthorne banked the ship. Ordinarily this would have been no strain on his Centaur sense of balance. But the _quintol_ was too much for him. He crashed to the floor. When he picked himself up, he stood for a few seconds, stiff as rigor mortis, then he pitched down again on his face.

O'Dea unwrapped himself from a chenille curtain. He rubbed his head and stared at the prostrate Centaur.

"What a skinful! He looks almost as bad as you, Paul! Must be something he ate. Let's dump him through the lock and hurry back to Earth."

"Get into a space suit and stow the fuel away," growled Hawthorne. "I'll chain this critter up and we'll take him home with us. But first, we'll leave a souvenir to those Centaurs on Avignon!"

The fuel stowed in the tanks, O'Dea climbed back into the ship and pulled at his space suit fastenings. He looked happily at the well-manacled Centaur, still in a drunken stupor.

"The air is better now," he observed. "Let's get on our way back to Earth and--hey! What're you up to?"

Hawthorne was ripping the flowery seat covers and soft curtains from their fastenings, piling them near the airlock. When they were all gathered, he shoved them out and watched happily through the vision plate as they floated away from the ship.

O'Dea grinned. "You're cooking with _quintol_, at that. The boys would never let us forget it if we came home furnished like that!"

Hawthorne grunted and pulled at Morguma's manacles. He went back to the telescope, studied space ahead for a while. Then he nodded, satisfied.

"That one should do," he mused.

"Should do what?" O'Dea wondered.

"That big rock ahead should be a good farewell gift to the Centaurs. We'll fly over their camp, and--"

A knowing smile was on Hawthorne's lips as he nosed up on a tiny asteroid. When they came close enough, the asteroid proved to be bigger than the ship.

Gradually, they trapped it in the seizure beams. Hawthorne fought grimly against inertia. The asteroid began to pull ahead of its orbit, and finally it was under full control of their engines.

* * * * *

Space was clear all the way back to Avignon. No Centaur ships were off the ground--there was nothing to challenge them. Hawthorne blasted straight for the valley of Centaur ships.

The motors strained, overheated, with the huge asteroid they lugged. When they entered the atmosphere, the vessel dropped almost like a dead weight.

O'Dea looked worried.

"That big factory, Paul. That's the best objective, and you're way off from it. Bear right--"

"Small game!" Hawthorne leered, a superior smile on his lips. "Just do what I said--keep your fingers one inch above the release key and push down fast when I give the word!"

O'Dea stared into the valley below. They were falling fast and the huge chunk of rock almost cut off the vision. But they were moving forward as well as down, and the long lines of Centaur ships and factories were being left far behind. O'Dea shook his head, fingered with one hand some of his bruises.

Then his eyes widened. Dead ahead and coming up fast to meet them, was a mountain. From a pit in its narrow tip rose a trickle of smoke.

"Get ready!" Hawthorne shouted.

O'Dea could almost see into the crater. He held his sweating palm ready.

"Now!"

Before Hawthorne finished barking the command, O'Dea's hand shot down, releasing the seizure beams. The ship catapulted skyward as the weight was suddenly dropped. The pilot fought the pounding rockets. When it was under control, Hawthorne circled back over the valley.

They stared at the mass of earth that tumbled down the mountain side in a gathering avalanche. Their asteroid plunged bouncing into the valley below, shaking the entire volcano each time it hit. New avalanches started in its wake.

Then the volcano exploded.

A thousand feet of rocky cone disappeared in a fiery murderous cloud. Flaming lava and flying rock filled the air for miles. Hawthorne worked frantically for altitude as molten crimson streamers of hell streaked skyward.

In Avignon's stratosphere, they looked down through the glaring lava that hid the valley.

An anguished voice broke in:

"Oh I cannot believe it of you!"

And Morguma started to cry.

O'Dea pulled the pilot's chair to one side, reached into an opening in the floor beneath it. He drew forth two bundles of clothing. The two men stripped off their greasy coveralls, put on the clean clothes.

Morguma stared unbelievingly at the crisp olive green uniforms of Earth's space force. The grimy faces of Hawthorne and O'Dea grinned happily from under the jaunty caps. On the shoulders of each were the twin platinum bars of space captains.

"Spies! Oh you unnatural men, to bite the very hand that fed you--"

"--and cracked the whip," O'Dea finished sharply. "If you want to be technical, we were in uniform all the time--those coveralls are regulation work clothes. And all is fair in love and war, you know. We came to Centauri on a reconnaissance job, and ran into some luck."

He sighed happily, turned his eyes to the portrait above the control board.

Hawthorne chuckled. He was reading a thin tape that ran through his fingers.

"I have the ethertype machine running," he said. "News from Earth. And look at the very first item!"

He passed it over. O'Dea's grin disappeared as he read. He growled at the tape, flung it from him.

"So she married a rocket hand while my back was turned! Well--"

He frowned for a moment. Then his shoulders rose and fell in a carefree shrug.

"I go bigger for blondes, anyway. First thing I'm going to do after we report is head for Lidice, Venus, and go on the biggest tear in the history of the space guard. That'll be--"

There was a faintly disturbed look in Paul Hawthorne's eyes. But he soothed his conscience with the thought that O'Dea would be just as well off without Mercedes. So he saw no reason to tell Captain Lance O'Dea that he had typed out the story on the ethertype himself. Because all is fair in love as well as in war.

And Captain Paul Hawthorne was in love with Mercedes, too.