Chapter IV

It was not more than three minutes later that young Arliess began to twitch and mutter under the neuromuscular impact of a cc. of arterially-injected _vitalin_. The Fleet doctor straightened and returned his small, bright needle to its velvet-lined case, snapping it shut hurriedly.

"He'll recover consciousness within a very few minutes. You'll be wanting to be on your way, no doubt...."

When the doctor had escaped gratefully from the _Shahrazad's_ topsy-turvy gravity, Mury gave power to the overdrive, sent the ship swinging back into a course for the point of intersection with the flight of the power projectile. The great curve that had taken them off the planet had placed them now almost directly in front of that hurtling objective; _Shahrazad_, still slowly gathering additional momentum, would be overtaken by the cargo shell at the moment that she reached a velocity practically equal with its own.

To ensure that, Mury's long, skillful fingers twirled a vernier, finely adjusting the fuel flow into the disintegration chambers behind the after bulkhead, and with it the volume of steam which, smashed to atoms, was hurled at stupendous velocity from the driving jets to propel the rocket ship. An acceleration just a trifle under one gravity--the calculator clicked out its results down to six decimals. The gyroscopes locked the towship in its new groove in space.

Yet Arliess jerked ineffectually in his clamps, cried out thickly. His eyes came stickily open behind their square goggles. He sat stiff and still for a long minute.

Ryd underwent a considerable egoflation in his contempt for this other man's defeat. It had been long since he had known the savage joy of winning.

Arliess said weakly, raising both hands to press flat against his temples, "Where--are we?" The same words Ryd had whimpered not so long ago.

Mury turned slightly to look at the astrogator out of the corners of his eyes. He said deliberately, "We're past. Inspection's over, and--thanks largely to you, Yet Arliess, we're clear."

The young man sat for a moment with head buried in his hands. Then he looked up and out toward the motionless star fields that glittered ahead.

"So?" he said bitterly. "What next? Are you going to try to steal the power shell? And if so, where are you going to escape to? I suppose you realize that you'd have to scoot right out of the System to even get clear of the _Algol's_ guns--and there are four other Earth dreadnaughts in planetary space alone?"

Arliess' words, coldly confident of a victory that would be death for him, chilled Ryd. But he took heart from Mury's jeering laughter.

"Do you think I'd have come this far if I had feared your dreadnaughts? _They'll_ have enough to think of before the next twenty-four hours are past, when they are hurled in battle against all the power of Mars!"

Arliess stiffened. "Are you crazy? There's no war in the air. A year ago, yes, perhaps--but now, with the treaties signed and trade resuming--"

"And Earth," snapped Mury, "sold for that very trade into the hands of the Martian overlords. No, war is preferable--and we'll have war, now."

"You talk," said Arliess in a curiously flat voice, "as if the choice of courses rested in your hands."

"It does. Or rather, it will--so soon as I hold in these hands the weapon of the power projectile."

* * * * *

Mury's voice became orotund. His hands rested lightly on the pilot's controls before him and he gazed into space-darkness as if toward an invisible dawn. "When a Terrestial city goes skyward in one terrific blast of disintegration--When Pi Mesa and Dynamopolis vanish together from the face of Earth in a warningless holocaust--Then Earth will realize the truth, if only through deception."

Ryd's veins were trickling ice water instead of warm blood, and his nerve centers were paralyzed. It was too big for him, and his courage was gone again.

Mury talked on, and his voice was that of one sincerely and earnestly trying to convince:

"Earth's government has made peace with the Martians, but the instinct of the people infallibly distrusts the treacherous rival world. Why not--since Mars is indeed ready and avid to topple Earth from her old place as the mother-planet, mistress of the System? Mars, with twice Earth's area and five times the sunlight to drive his heliodynes--Mars with his robot millions and his human oligarchy athirst for power and glory, intoxicated with the strength of a new, raw, rich world. Only if we fight now can we escape domination. I am going to strike the blow that will wake Earth to battle, and bring her at last through pain and repentance to her age-old greatness!"

_Shahrazad_ hurtled steadily on before the long hydrogen flares of her afterdrive, and three men sat behind her controls--and their triumph and fear and hate might have been strong enough to reach out beyond the metal shell and form an auro, not so bright but more fiercely potent, about the rushing ship.

Then young Arliess said through his teeth, "You know damn well it won't work."

"It will," said the Panclast, preternaturally calm, while his eyes were watchful on the slowly shifting dials. Somewhere behind them in bleak space sixty tons of concentrated hell was creeping up.

"You can't deceive a whole planet," exclaimed Arliess rapidly, desperately. "You can't plunge them into a war that will cost a hundred million lives, that will wreck the cities and the commerce of the whole System. There hasn't been war for seventy years ... between Earth and Mars, never...." His voice trailed off and he gasped for breath as if the cabin had grown stifling.

"It is almost done," said Mury solemnly. With the words he cut off the afterdrive. Silence fell clublike, mind-numbing after the pounding of the rockets.

Arliess spoke again, with all the feeling washed out of his voice. "Where do you and your pal come out on this?" he demanded carefully. "You don't think you can get away with this, do you, even if you succeed in blowing up Dynamopolis?"

"There are some things I can't reveal even now, slight as are the chances of failure," said Mury smoothly. "We won't be caught, though; I can tell you that surely. And you'll accompany us to our destination. It would be best if you did so willingly." Ryd thought he knew what was implicit in the Panclast's words. There would be some hiding-place maintained by the secret power of We. In Antarctica, perhaps, as rumor whispered. Ryd clung hard to his new faith in Mury, and was warmed by it. He dreamed.... Perhaps, he, Ryd, in some new world to come from chaos....

* * * * *

Mury thumbed a stud; the sidethrust of the starboard drive made the counterpoised seats tilt far to the left. Then, as they drifted in free flight again: "Perhaps, since you have heard the truth, Arliess, you would like to join our cause. Secret now, it will soon be victorious over all Earth ... a cause of glory which will have its heroes...."

The astrogator gazed stonily ahead. "You may be right," he said stiffly, strangely. "But right on wrong, you're mad. Mad with power."

The other laughed softly. "That's very true. It is a little heady. The power that will rock any planet--power indeed!"

All at once the stars were darkened. From overhead as the ship was oriented, a long black shape, picked out by patterned lights, drove past and dwindled into the flaming constellations. The power shell had arrived. Words were at an end.

Instead, there roared out the mighty voices of the after tubes. The sustained forward leap of the ship took breath from their bodies. But the colored lights came slipping back out of the starfields, their pattern expanding swiftly as seconds passed. As suddenly as he had accelerated, Mury closed the throttle, cut in the foredrive, and started braking his speed. Then, with delicate spurts of power from all the rockets, he brought the _Shahrazad's_ speed and course to parallel that of the great projectile which coasted effortlessly through space less than a mile away.

In the weightless pause, Mury said quietly to the astrogator: "The magnet controls are before you, Arliess. Would it be too much strain on your conscience to operate them now?"

The board had been built for efficiency; of the minor duties aboard the vessel, communications was assigned to the engineer, control of the powerful grapples to the astrogator, on the theory that while intership communication might be needed simultaneously with the use of the magnets, the plotting of the course would not so coincide. The strobophones and radio--the latter dead and lightless at the moment--fronted Ryd as he fidgeted in the engineer's place.

Arliess had delayed a moment. Now he answered harshly, "All right. What do you want?"

"I was sure you would see.... Your cooperation won't be difficult. The magnet rheostat is already stopped at the safety maximum for the fuel we're going to handle. Give them all full power, then." Ryd knew vaguely that too powerful magnetic fields upset delicate atomic balances, had in fact caused the great Tenebris disaster of 803 on Venus--a match-sputter, that, compared to what would soon hit North America--

Woodenly, Arliess gave the magnets power. Unseen, his hands curled themselves tensely inside his sweat-slippery rubberized gloves; he was dangerously near hysteria. His keen, youthful imagination could see all too clearly into the near future. Over half of Earth, the skies would be red; there would be storm and earthquake, mountains splitting, rivers in flood, the fires of new volcanoes.

_Shahrazad_ picked up speed again, swinging in to intercept the power cylinder in its constant flight. She forged forward on bright wings of flame, a small, squat ship of Fate, not a part but a target. [1]rest on her broad plated back.

"Half magnets," said Mury shortly, firing another bank of tubes to correct his course. Still robot-like, Arliess obeyed. His right hand obeyed. But his left snaked very slowly off the dash, under the detector box at his elbow, captured a dangling wire. Then--bend this way, bend that way, bend this way--

The last power-thrust died. Inch by inch, _Shahrazad_ and the fuel shell drifted together in their parallel courses. "Full magnets," ordered Mury, and the drift accelerated. For two long, waiting minutes it continued; then the towship lurched slightly, like a boat meeting a long swell, and the great masses met with a prolonged grinding of curving steel on stegosauric plates of iron. A moment while they settled solidly together and clung, locked; then the rockets roared once more to life and _Shahrazad_ surged ahead evenly. To the greatly-overpowered towship, the mere sixty tons of the loaded cargo shell made little or no difference.

Mury sat bolt upright in his universal chair. His face was masked and serene, but the straight line of his head and neck was eloquent. His hand, resting lightly on the controls, was that of Zeus, gripping a thunderbolt.

Slowly, without speaking, he drove the ship's nose upward--upward as they were leveled off, but in reality downward, for gradually from overhead the great black curve of a planet's dark limb crept down, shutting out the stars. Then its sunlit side burst into sight and the pallid glare came flooding through the great nose window to make the glow-lamps needless.

It was Earth, and somewhere on that great globe, where the distorted shape of North America sprawled through half a dark hemisphere, was Pi Mesa. For this ship of Fate, not a port but a grim target.

Then Yet Arliess' voice fell hard and deadly on that triumphant moment.

"Mury. Cut the drive!"

Mury's attention snapped to the astrogator. Even so with the back of his head to Ryd, the latter could see the slow tensing of his spare body, the sudden immobility that took him. Ryd froze.

"You'd better think twice, Arliess," said Mury in a low, brittle tone.

"Cut the drive," ordered Arliess again. "This is journey's end, Mury. If you don't cut it now, we'll all die."

* * * * *

Ryd inched forward in his seat; his fingers, numbed as if the cold of sheer space had crept into the cabin, found the release. Then he was able to see Arliess, hunched forward close to his control board. One hand clenched over the magnet rheostat; but something had gone wrong. The astrogator had bent the synthyl handle out and away from its contacts; and now something gleamed half-hidden in his hand. Its ends were almost touching the inner contact of the switch handle and the minimum-resistance tap of the rheostat coil--a short piece of bared silver wire, whose placing between those contacts would send current leaping through the shortened circuit and pouring full into the magnet coils. It would envelop _Shahrazad_ and power cylinder in a field of great intensity--but of brief duration, a fractional instant before the equilibrium of the stored atoms toppled and towship and cargo shell, together like one, vanished in one exploding flame, brighter than the Sun.

This was the end. Mury was beaten, and of course he, Ryd, was beaten too. For keeps, this time. With maudlin self-pity, he saw himself as one caught and singled out for destruction by the gods in the machine.

"Cut the drive," repeated Arliess for the third time.

Still the Panclast did not move, and his face betrayed none of what he must feel of the terrible irony by which a bit of wire, a short circuit, could wreck the plan that was to have shaken a planet. He said without stirring, "You can't use bluff on me, Arliess."

"I know that and I'm not bluffing," said young Arliess, pale to the lips, with burning eyes. "I know your type, Mury. The monomaniac. You're not afraid of dying, but you are afraid when the success of your mission is threatened. But you can forget those plans now. We're going to stop, flash a distress signal."

"I never meant we should escape the final crash of the power shell," said Mury. "Escape was needless to the plan, and to die in such a cause.... But I'll make you a bargain now, Arliess. I'll let you parachute to safety when we're in the atmosphere, if you'll swear to reveal nothing. Otherwise--perhaps you are aware of the power of--_We_."

Arliess' grin was savage. "Don't try to frighten me with children's boogie-men. I know that such an organization exists, and I knew one of their members once--a poor, starved gutter-rat without principles or courage or anything but a vicious wish to kick the world that had kicked him. No, Mury, _you're_ something else again."

"I've explained my aims to you, Arliess. I have no private wrongs to avenge. I have acted because all history urges Earth and Mars to the death grapple; I have been an agent of history. You, not I, are the madman if you try to stand in the way."

Arliess laughed shortly. "I hold the final argument, though.... _Cut the drive!_"