Chapter VI

And so he rushed, his oxygen carefully adjusted, out through the massive main-city-lock almost on the heels of Onupari's helmeted men, and they, for the greater part drunken and stumbling blindly along, heeded him not.

The rockets were coming from Kaa, out of Kaa flashing flames in the night! But they would be far too late! Onward he ran, his heart screaming protest against the violence of his pace, an endless mile across the desert waste.

Onupari's men were streaming up the gleaming aluminum plated ramp now, pouring into the bowels of the ship resting on the ways. Frederix drove forward, a disrupter clenched in his right hand, leaped towards the ramp, yards behind the last man.

And Meevo, thin, haughty Meevo, stood before him, recognition dawning in his wide, cruel eyes, hand reaching for a disrupter. Frederix heard the faint purring of the warming atomics. The Vron in his way! He must reach the controls, wreck them, even though his life be in forfeit!

He brought the gun up even as Meevo whipped out his.

Frederix fired first--right into that glassite helmet--red burst of flame, blood spurting out of a jugular vein severed from nothingness; the Vron's decapitated body crumpled.

But the lock crashed shut, and a man loomed within a lighted gun turret.

The atomics were hissing more loudly now, the intense wave of heat driving Frederix back. A leader flashed past him, fabricating an ionized path for the incredible bolt of lightning which crashed nearby, sucking him into the very heart of a stunning thunderclap.

He regained his feet unsteadily, tried to run on, intent on escaping the roaring atomics ere they blasted him with their dispersed fury.

He stumbled, went down, and his mad eyes saw the outdistanced robot coming towards him. A lightning leader flashed, smiting the metallic automaton squarely in the fuel compartment--_the radium compartment_--fusing the whole into a blinding, white hot, leaping electrical aura which strung itself out in a roaring, seething, zigzagging finger _which leaped backwards along that ionized pathway towards the ship_!

A tiny voice keened above that mad tumult, shrilling out of that gutted, wrecked automaton:

"_We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!_"

Even as that plaintive, laughing voice cut across the prostrate, half-blinded man's brain, so spoke more mightily the thunder of the atomics, flinging the mighty hull up the ways into the illimitable starshine. His nerve centers revolted. The agonizing white of afterjets initially super-charged; then that excruciatingly painful splash of furious lightning intermeshed and blazing in supernal glory on the ship's side.

The very roof of the heavens seemed to cleave in twain. The universe became one crazy, all encompassing roar; the skies were a livid, screaming wave of white, brain singeing, ear bursting agony.

Frederix was blasted end over end, his bones snapping like matchwood, intolerable pain crushing in on him--

Vibration upon mad vibration. Reverberation of hell thunder. Pain--unutterable, endless voids of swimming pain--

Consciousness remained. Sound--crushing sound.

And, at length, silence.

* * * * *

The man tried to drag his broken, throbbing, bleeding body from beneath the debris of the hangars against which he had been thrown, which had sheltered him from the highest fury of that unleashed cargo of _seedrona_, set aspark by the short circuit caused by the disrupting blast of unnatural lightning, radium transformed into flame.

Frederix looked up into the blackness and strained to see beyond it. A faint, almost ironic smile crossed his pain wracked, bleeding lips. Gone, the minions of those who sought to subjugate a system--gone, the deadly cargo which, treated and compressed, would have destroyed the spacestations and laid the World bare to conquest.

And, Oh God! at what price to him? _What price, indeed?_

But he, what did he matter? He was only a means to the end. The plot was known now. Back on Earth, here on Mars, in all the other solarian havens of life, the Vrons of Centauri would meet defeat; for Solarians would believe him now with Del Andres by his side. Andres who knew the Vrons of Centauri for the strange, changeable, domineering creatures that they were, Andres who called him friend and in whose great heart only friendship was left--aye, they would believe him well!

When he heard the murmuring of rockets out of Kaa, he was thinking many things: of what the strange life form he had come to know by the lowly name of "Monk" had done--truly the workings of something far greater than man striving for universal betterment. He thought of the earnestness, the striving, the sense of honor and glory and all that is good.

In essence, what had it been? A consciousness born of the basic fabric of the universe, electricity however strange the form. Something come out of seemingly nowhere to aid a race in its moment of greatest blindness, of greatest need. Come to render a queer, heroic, supernal sacrifice.

And now, despite the living, shuddering pain within him, a smile twisted his lips. He was thinking of a little voice whispering a very virile tune as it went down into death. He was thinking that even something akin to a god, in its most serious workings for good, might find time to know laughter.

And he was wishing that that intelligence had not been consumed by the blessed flame of martyrdom. He was wondering what aid it might have given in those moments not far hence when the Armada would come blasting out of the void between the stars.