Collected short fiction, p.405
Collected Short Fiction, page 405
“Men.” Scan-tapped another hairy finger. “I had my crew, and contacts with various groups—drug runners, labor racketeers, organizers of various disaffected elements. I formed them into a disciplined secret party, the Iron Watch.”
Scarr touched an emblem on his coat: a snake twined about the arms of an inverted Maltese cross.
“Weapons,” he went on. “I employed research men. They developed a peculiarly virulent strain of the Mercurian lightning death—and a perfect antitoxin for it.” Scarr grinned unpleasantly. “You, as a physician, are doubtless familiar with the lightning death.”
DR. BULL’S rosy face had turned pale, and he tried to stop his teeth from chattering. The lightning death was the frightful disease that had denied the mineral riches of the hot planet to all save the one man in thousands who possessed a natural immunity to the virus—the fortunate few who showed a negative reaction to killed cultures could demand fabulous wages from Mercury Mines, Inc.
The preliminary symptoms were curiously slight—often no more than a mild headache. But death, invariably following exposure by six to twenty hours, caused by acute encephalitis, was as frightfully sudden as it was certain. Medicine had found no cure. Ships leaving Mercury were elaborately sterilized, returning employees of the mining company held in a long quarantine.
Dr. Bull began to feel that Scarr was going to be an extremely unpleasant ally.
“A peculiarly efficient weapon for breaking morale,” commented the grinning pirate. “Because the victims seldom reveal themselves, and they can’t be identified. Every man suspects that every other will kill him with a touch.
“That weapon, of course,” he added, “is in addition to the guns at the Appenine Base, those of the Valiant, your own batteries on Taurus, and the armament in various Patrol arsenals on Earth—but I’m getting ahead of myself.”
Dr. Bull swayed in the little seat before the staring iconosopes. He watched the screen, with wide and glassy eyes.
“There’s no need to complete the catalog,” Scarr told him. “But your old friend Batson is supplying the military skill—when a man is for sale, Bull, the best offer takes him.”
Dr. Bull rubbed his eyes. “Batson?” he whispered. “Commander-Batson?” In his mind he saw the Appenine Base. The barracks and magazines hewn deep into the Moon. The concealed observatories and range-finders. The armored elevator-turrets, with their great torpedo tubes and the biggest rifles ever forged. “Batson didn’t give up the base?”
“The base, and the Valiant, too. The members of the Iron Watch were immunized against the lightning death. When the Valiant had landed for supplies, we released the virus through the ventilators of both the ship and the fort. Most of the men died in their sleep. Batson’s men, with reenforcements that I marched through a secret tunnel from the Syndicate mines, took care of the rest.”
The impact of Scarr’s eyes was suddenly terrible.
“We had three prime objectives, Bull.” His voice was restrained and hard. “The base. The Valiant. You can guess the third?”
Speechless, Dr. Bull nodded.
“Taurus is vital to our plan,” the pirate told him. “First, because of its strategic military importance, with your guns commanding the Moon and the Earth and passage between them. But the vital item is TAU.
“The main transmitters at the base and aboard were sabotaged before we could take them. Control of TAU is essential, to coordinate our several secret organizations on Earth, and for the broadcast of scientific propaganda to check resistance on Earth and prevent any hostile action from the other planets.”
Scarr’s grin was ferocious.
“You understand, therefore, that I’ve got to have Taurus—intact!”
Dr. Bull’s round face was pale, but his eyes had a calculating glint. He asked shrewdly:
“What’s in it for me?”
“Your life,” the pirate told him. “So long as you are useful to me. I won’t fail, Bull. The Iron Watch is everywhere. Nearly ten thousand important men will be seized, shot, or bombed, when I give the order over TAU.” His clenched fist rose, in an alarming salute. “If you aren’t with me—
“I’M AGAINST you.” Dr. Bull nodded uneasily, and licked his pale lips. “Taurus is mine, Scarr. I’ve fought the IMA and the ICC and the patrol, for it. If”—he gulped noisily—“if that’s your best offer—I’ll fight you, too.”
The pirate grinned. “You can’t fight. I’ll give you thirty seconds.”
“I don’t need thirty seconds.” Dr. Bull stood up before the iconoscopes, trembling in the bright uniform. “If you aren’t moving out of my territorial space in thirty seconds, my forts will open fire.”
Grinning, unalarmed, Scarr’s face faded from the screen.
Dr. Bull snatched up a telephone, called his commander. “Berg!” His voice was cracked and breathless. “The Valiant is in the hands of pirates. Open fire with all your guns.”
“Yes, Dr. Bull.”
But the commander’s voice sounded flat and strained. Dr. Bull suddenly wondered if the Iron Watch had organized men on Taurus also—agents could have come, among the flood of visitors; some of the officers had always spent too much in the casinos.
Apprehensively, Dr. Bull picked up the telephone again. It was dead. He dropped it, listening for the great guns. All the planetoid would tremble to their stunning recoil. But they failed to fire.
He hurried back to the telescope, found the Valiant again. Sliding down against the stars, it was so huge that a small part of it filled the field of the instrument. Dr. Bull, stared in cold fascination at the ominous details of a jutting turret.
Still the forts didn’t fire.
Dr. Bull snatched up another telephone. He shouted into it, cursed, screamed. No response. He remembered that Scarr’s first principle of attack was to secure communications. Cold fear trickled down his spine.
He snapped on a convenient telescreen. That was all right. The armored world-ship of the Planeteer careered across the screen. The black-bearded hero leveled his trusty ion-guns against the traitorous IMA officials and their unholy allies, the octopus-men from the invading comet.
The film was still running, and TAU was intact—because Scarr wanted it intact. But the studio and transmitter were already isolated from the rest of Taurus. And, for all Dr. Bull knew, there might be members of the Iron Watch among the engineers or the actors and musicians in the tower itself—suddenly he regretted that his employees had not been a little more generously paid.
Increasingly agitated, Dr. Bull ran out into the terrace garden. The westering Sun struck with the same cool brightness from the purple-black sky, yet it seemed to the trembling little doctor that a deadly night had already fallen. He peered up into the blackness, but his naked eye could not find the Valiant.
He shrank from a fragrant breath that passed his face. The very air might already be poisoned, for all he knew, with the invisible virus of the lightning death. Even Vera Frame might have been a carrier—few victims of the insidious disease ever admitted or even realized its attack, before death struck.
Taurus supported almost the largest and certainly the most profitable hospital in the system. Above the green bright convexity of the gardens, Dr. Bull could see the white spires rising. He shivered. In a few hours the staff and the patients might all be dead—all save the immunized members of the Iron Watch.
Dr. Bull mopped at his pink forehead. Other disasters were equally possible. A single freak shot from the Valiant, or one act of sabotage by a trusted engineer, could stop the gravity generators—let air and all movables whiff outward in an instant puff of doom.
III
THE cool windless air shuddered to a heavy detonation. For one relieved instant, Dr. Bull thought that at last the forts had opened fire. In a moment, however, he realized that the explosion was in the direction of the space-port.
Apprehensively, he peered eastward across the green bulge of the golf links—Taurus had the most interesting links in the system, as TAU often informed possible visitors, because every drive carried beyond the horizon.
No more than a thousand feet away, the space-port was out of sight, below the curve. Dr. Bull could see nothing unusual. But the tiny planet quivered to a second blast. Probably, he thought, a rocket-shell. An auto-rifle chattered briefly. He heard the ominous purr of a demobilizer pellet-gun. Hoarse strained voices echoed faintly.
Open fighting, at the port!
Dr. Bull retreated nervously from the parapet that surrounded the roof, and tried to guess what had happened. The port was guarded by the Special Planeteers, a company of forty men, picked to impress visitors with their physiques and discipline. The Iron Watch must have tried to seize the port—striking, again, at communications.
But the Special Planeteers were fighting back!
Dr. Bull ran back into his penthouse office, and tried to call the port. The instrument was still dead. The Iron Watch, he supposed, had already seized the telephone office.
Aimlessly frantic, he ran back out on the terrace. The rattle of shots was nearer. In a moment he saw men coming into view, along the near horizon. He made out the silver and green of the Special Planeteers.
That was lean young Lieutenant Carstairs, commanding the retreat, taking skilful advantage of clumps of vegetation, the hazards of the golf course, and the very curve of Taurus. Dr. Bull tried to count the men with him. They seemed alarmingly few.
Brrram!
A Planeteer with an auto-rifle had climbed to the tip of a mossy projection of the stony core of Taurus, to cover the withdrawal of his comrades. The miniature peak dissolved into dust, from the blast of another titanite-loaded rocket shell.
The violent detonation jarred the roof, made Dr. Bull bite his tongue. His hands were shaking, and he felt ill. His own exposed position terrified him, but he had to see what was going on. He dropped on his knees, peered through the red blades of the potted Martian bayonet lilies.
Beyond the ragged shell-crater, he saw the rocket squad. Two crouched men running with their deadly bright projectiles. Another with the flimsy-looking firing scaffold. The corporal silently gesturing. They wore the plain silver of the fortress garrisons. Traitors.
They stopped on a green, swiftly mounted and loaded the tripod.
Dr. Bull wanted to stand up and scream a warning to Carstairs. But fear chained him, until the intense blue needle of an iron-beam stabbed from the edge of a sand trap. The shattering, deafening explosion left a black pit where the green had been. Nothing was left of the rocket squad.
THE ion-gunner checked the pursuit.
Carstairs, with a little group of men, came running along the walk from green number one. He left a rifleman in a clump of flaming hibiscus. Dr. Bull stumbled into the elevator, dropped to meet him at the tower’s entrance.
“Treason, sir,” the lean young officer answered Dr. Bull’s voiceless question. He was muddy and panting, and red showed through a torn silver sleeve. “General Berg tried to arrest me and disarm the Special Planeteers. “Before we smelled a rat, he had the port surrounded. And eleven of the Specials held the arsenal and the control tower. Berg tried to buy us. Nothing to do but fight our way out, sir. Lost sixteen, sir. That leaves thirteen men, fit for duty. Your orders, sir?”
Dr. Bull swallowed and caught his breath.
“Good work, Lieutenant,” he said hoarsely. “We’ll hold the tower. I don’t think they’ll shell it, because they want TAU intact. It was planned for defense. The windows are lamanite. Steel shutters, with gun ports. An arsenal in the basement—here’s the key.”
Dr. Bull dropped the key. Carstairs picked it up, with steady, red-dripping fingers.
“Very good, sir. I’ll put men at the windows, and on the roof.”
Muddy, breathless men came in by twos and threes. One had a shoulder wound. Another limped. The thirteenth never came. Dr. Bull returned to the roof with Carstairs and four riflemen. The officer walked out to station his men on the parapeted terrace.
“They’ll have us surrounded,” he warned. “Keep your heads down, and shoot anything that moves. We can hold them off until—”
Dr. Bull heard the thin whine of a bullet, and the young lieutenant dropped beside the scarlet lilies. The hole in his forehead seemed very small, but it took no professional skill to tell that he was dead.
Stunned, Dr. Bull peered stupidly after the diminishing hum—probably the bullet still exceeded the planetoid’s velocity of escape; it would fly on, forever, across the black gulf of space.
He was sick and lonely. He had depended on the loyal, fearless efficiency of Carstairs. The loss left him staggered, helpless. In that moment, he realized the utter ruthlessness of the Iron Watch, the full desperation of the situation.
“Keep your heads down.” In a dull stupid voice, he repeated the dead man’s words. “Shoot anything that moves. We can hold them off, until—”
Until what? Suddenly Dr. Bull became aware of his own exposed position, and retreated toward the observatory dome.
Until night fell, perhaps, and the enemy assaulted by darkness? Until another traitor struck? Until the Valiant landed, with her thousands of the Iron Watch? Or until—
Dr. Bull refused to think of that most ghastly possibility.
STARING with unseeing eyes at the dead man, he suddenly remembered his scarlet-and-silver. The full burden was on him, now. His plump shoulders squared manfully to bear it.
“Take your places,” he told the riflemen. “Watch the hospital—your lieutenant was shot from there. Hold out, men. TAU is the key to the whole situation. Defending it, you are defending your jobs and your homes and your families, Taurus and Earth, everything that matters.”
Two men with auto-rifles began sniping at the hospital windows. Dr. Bull brought a rug out of his office and spread it over Carstairs. He tried not to flinch when a bullet sang by his ear. Fighting courage was good, but only a fool took needless risks. The Audacity of his slogan had never been physical.
Sweat made him clammy. His brain ran in aimless circles, like a trapped thing. It was already impossible to reach his yacht at the port—even if he had been willing to abandon the reward of a lifetime of Imagination, Audacity, and Victory. But the tower was a prison, as well as a citadel.
His pink hands came up, to fight off a smothering claustrophobia. That sense of buried isolation was broken, to his immense relief, by the sudden buzz of the telephone, back in his office.
“Dr. Bull?” It was General Berg. The formal courtesy in the flat rasping voice was infuriating. “I’m calling you, sir, by Commander Scarr’s order.”
“Damned Judas!” he gasped. “What do you want?”
“The commander is giving you an opportunity to surrender, sir. March your men out of the tower, unarmed. Leave the telecast equipment undamaged. Scarr will let you leave Taurus with your yacht, as many people as you want to take, and a million dollars.”
Dr. Bull tried to swallow his anger. “Berg,” he said hoarsely, “I’ll make you another proposition. Go back to your duty. Open fire on the cruiser. And I’ll give you and every man with you a million dollars a head—”
The flat voice cut in grimly: “What’s your answer, sir?”
“Scarr will have it,” the little doctor shouted, “inside of two minutes.”
He slammed the telephone down violently. He was trembling, ill with fear. But Taurus was his private paradise. He couldn’t give it up. Audacity, he breathed. Still he had a card to play.
Crouching out of view from the hospital, he climbed the steps to the observatory. His pulse was hammering. His fingers were numb and awkward, so that he could scarcely manipulate the controls. But he found the Valiant again, a black and deadly monster creeping down across the silver web of space.
His stiff fingers hastily slid open a concealed panel in the mount, to reveal another set of controls. For the instrument in the observatory was more than a telescope. The big lens and the oculars swung out of the way. Motors hummed quietly. A long thick cylinder of shining metal rose smoothly from under the floor, slipped into the empty tube.
If the Valiant had been the patrol’s answer to Dr. Bull’s twin forts, this was his secret answer to the Valiant. The telescope could be innocently pointed at any approaching space craft, but this cylinder was a torpedo.
A unique torpedo. It had cost as much as a warship. A robot-pilot steered it. The geodesic drive would give it velocity enough to evade any defense, to penetrate any armor. It was loaded with ten tons of titanite.
The finder telescopes, beside the big tube, functioned as parts of an intricate calculating range-finder. Dr. Bull brought the tiny, divided image of the cruiser together. He centered the cross hairs over the power room of the Valiant—he had paid Batson a high price for her plans. He set and started the silent robot-pilot.
Now—
For a moment, however, with his finger trembling on the key, Dr. Bull hesitated. His throat was dry, and blood roared in his ears. There was still time to surrender.
His white-bearded jaw set stubbornly. This battle was to the death. Imagination, Audacity, Victory—
He punched the key.
IV
WITH a sigh of displaced air, the gleaming spindle was gone. Dr. Bull wet his lips, and watched the image of the target. He saw a tiny flash of incandescence, precisely where he had aimed. A second later, a jet of white flame mushroomed from the hole in that armored flank—evidence of the cataclysm within the vessel’s bowels.
Dr. Bull lingered no longer. He flung himself out of the observatory, tumbled down the steps, rolled into the shelter of the farther parapet. Retaliation came before he had caught his breath.
A rocket-shell came bellowing from the hospital roof. The observatory erupted like a volcano. The impact of eight ounces of exploding titanite struck Dr. Bull, like the fall of a gigantic, obliterating hand.
. . . Then he was lying on the long desk in his office, under where the dome had been—plaster littered the floor, but the bomb-proof ceiling had held. He moved feebly, stifled a groan. Adhesive and bandage covered minor contusions. Something throbbed in his head, like the slow roll of a muffled, distant drum.
Scarr touched an emblem on his coat: a snake twined about the arms of an inverted Maltese cross.
“Weapons,” he went on. “I employed research men. They developed a peculiarly virulent strain of the Mercurian lightning death—and a perfect antitoxin for it.” Scarr grinned unpleasantly. “You, as a physician, are doubtless familiar with the lightning death.”
DR. BULL’S rosy face had turned pale, and he tried to stop his teeth from chattering. The lightning death was the frightful disease that had denied the mineral riches of the hot planet to all save the one man in thousands who possessed a natural immunity to the virus—the fortunate few who showed a negative reaction to killed cultures could demand fabulous wages from Mercury Mines, Inc.
The preliminary symptoms were curiously slight—often no more than a mild headache. But death, invariably following exposure by six to twenty hours, caused by acute encephalitis, was as frightfully sudden as it was certain. Medicine had found no cure. Ships leaving Mercury were elaborately sterilized, returning employees of the mining company held in a long quarantine.
Dr. Bull began to feel that Scarr was going to be an extremely unpleasant ally.
“A peculiarly efficient weapon for breaking morale,” commented the grinning pirate. “Because the victims seldom reveal themselves, and they can’t be identified. Every man suspects that every other will kill him with a touch.
“That weapon, of course,” he added, “is in addition to the guns at the Appenine Base, those of the Valiant, your own batteries on Taurus, and the armament in various Patrol arsenals on Earth—but I’m getting ahead of myself.”
Dr. Bull swayed in the little seat before the staring iconosopes. He watched the screen, with wide and glassy eyes.
“There’s no need to complete the catalog,” Scarr told him. “But your old friend Batson is supplying the military skill—when a man is for sale, Bull, the best offer takes him.”
Dr. Bull rubbed his eyes. “Batson?” he whispered. “Commander-Batson?” In his mind he saw the Appenine Base. The barracks and magazines hewn deep into the Moon. The concealed observatories and range-finders. The armored elevator-turrets, with their great torpedo tubes and the biggest rifles ever forged. “Batson didn’t give up the base?”
“The base, and the Valiant, too. The members of the Iron Watch were immunized against the lightning death. When the Valiant had landed for supplies, we released the virus through the ventilators of both the ship and the fort. Most of the men died in their sleep. Batson’s men, with reenforcements that I marched through a secret tunnel from the Syndicate mines, took care of the rest.”
The impact of Scarr’s eyes was suddenly terrible.
“We had three prime objectives, Bull.” His voice was restrained and hard. “The base. The Valiant. You can guess the third?”
Speechless, Dr. Bull nodded.
“Taurus is vital to our plan,” the pirate told him. “First, because of its strategic military importance, with your guns commanding the Moon and the Earth and passage between them. But the vital item is TAU.
“The main transmitters at the base and aboard were sabotaged before we could take them. Control of TAU is essential, to coordinate our several secret organizations on Earth, and for the broadcast of scientific propaganda to check resistance on Earth and prevent any hostile action from the other planets.”
Scarr’s grin was ferocious.
“You understand, therefore, that I’ve got to have Taurus—intact!”
Dr. Bull’s round face was pale, but his eyes had a calculating glint. He asked shrewdly:
“What’s in it for me?”
“Your life,” the pirate told him. “So long as you are useful to me. I won’t fail, Bull. The Iron Watch is everywhere. Nearly ten thousand important men will be seized, shot, or bombed, when I give the order over TAU.” His clenched fist rose, in an alarming salute. “If you aren’t with me—
“I’M AGAINST you.” Dr. Bull nodded uneasily, and licked his pale lips. “Taurus is mine, Scarr. I’ve fought the IMA and the ICC and the patrol, for it. If”—he gulped noisily—“if that’s your best offer—I’ll fight you, too.”
The pirate grinned. “You can’t fight. I’ll give you thirty seconds.”
“I don’t need thirty seconds.” Dr. Bull stood up before the iconoscopes, trembling in the bright uniform. “If you aren’t moving out of my territorial space in thirty seconds, my forts will open fire.”
Grinning, unalarmed, Scarr’s face faded from the screen.
Dr. Bull snatched up a telephone, called his commander. “Berg!” His voice was cracked and breathless. “The Valiant is in the hands of pirates. Open fire with all your guns.”
“Yes, Dr. Bull.”
But the commander’s voice sounded flat and strained. Dr. Bull suddenly wondered if the Iron Watch had organized men on Taurus also—agents could have come, among the flood of visitors; some of the officers had always spent too much in the casinos.
Apprehensively, Dr. Bull picked up the telephone again. It was dead. He dropped it, listening for the great guns. All the planetoid would tremble to their stunning recoil. But they failed to fire.
He hurried back to the telescope, found the Valiant again. Sliding down against the stars, it was so huge that a small part of it filled the field of the instrument. Dr. Bull, stared in cold fascination at the ominous details of a jutting turret.
Still the forts didn’t fire.
Dr. Bull snatched up another telephone. He shouted into it, cursed, screamed. No response. He remembered that Scarr’s first principle of attack was to secure communications. Cold fear trickled down his spine.
He snapped on a convenient telescreen. That was all right. The armored world-ship of the Planeteer careered across the screen. The black-bearded hero leveled his trusty ion-guns against the traitorous IMA officials and their unholy allies, the octopus-men from the invading comet.
The film was still running, and TAU was intact—because Scarr wanted it intact. But the studio and transmitter were already isolated from the rest of Taurus. And, for all Dr. Bull knew, there might be members of the Iron Watch among the engineers or the actors and musicians in the tower itself—suddenly he regretted that his employees had not been a little more generously paid.
Increasingly agitated, Dr. Bull ran out into the terrace garden. The westering Sun struck with the same cool brightness from the purple-black sky, yet it seemed to the trembling little doctor that a deadly night had already fallen. He peered up into the blackness, but his naked eye could not find the Valiant.
He shrank from a fragrant breath that passed his face. The very air might already be poisoned, for all he knew, with the invisible virus of the lightning death. Even Vera Frame might have been a carrier—few victims of the insidious disease ever admitted or even realized its attack, before death struck.
Taurus supported almost the largest and certainly the most profitable hospital in the system. Above the green bright convexity of the gardens, Dr. Bull could see the white spires rising. He shivered. In a few hours the staff and the patients might all be dead—all save the immunized members of the Iron Watch.
Dr. Bull mopped at his pink forehead. Other disasters were equally possible. A single freak shot from the Valiant, or one act of sabotage by a trusted engineer, could stop the gravity generators—let air and all movables whiff outward in an instant puff of doom.
III
THE cool windless air shuddered to a heavy detonation. For one relieved instant, Dr. Bull thought that at last the forts had opened fire. In a moment, however, he realized that the explosion was in the direction of the space-port.
Apprehensively, he peered eastward across the green bulge of the golf links—Taurus had the most interesting links in the system, as TAU often informed possible visitors, because every drive carried beyond the horizon.
No more than a thousand feet away, the space-port was out of sight, below the curve. Dr. Bull could see nothing unusual. But the tiny planet quivered to a second blast. Probably, he thought, a rocket-shell. An auto-rifle chattered briefly. He heard the ominous purr of a demobilizer pellet-gun. Hoarse strained voices echoed faintly.
Open fighting, at the port!
Dr. Bull retreated nervously from the parapet that surrounded the roof, and tried to guess what had happened. The port was guarded by the Special Planeteers, a company of forty men, picked to impress visitors with their physiques and discipline. The Iron Watch must have tried to seize the port—striking, again, at communications.
But the Special Planeteers were fighting back!
Dr. Bull ran back into his penthouse office, and tried to call the port. The instrument was still dead. The Iron Watch, he supposed, had already seized the telephone office.
Aimlessly frantic, he ran back out on the terrace. The rattle of shots was nearer. In a moment he saw men coming into view, along the near horizon. He made out the silver and green of the Special Planeteers.
That was lean young Lieutenant Carstairs, commanding the retreat, taking skilful advantage of clumps of vegetation, the hazards of the golf course, and the very curve of Taurus. Dr. Bull tried to count the men with him. They seemed alarmingly few.
Brrram!
A Planeteer with an auto-rifle had climbed to the tip of a mossy projection of the stony core of Taurus, to cover the withdrawal of his comrades. The miniature peak dissolved into dust, from the blast of another titanite-loaded rocket shell.
The violent detonation jarred the roof, made Dr. Bull bite his tongue. His hands were shaking, and he felt ill. His own exposed position terrified him, but he had to see what was going on. He dropped on his knees, peered through the red blades of the potted Martian bayonet lilies.
Beyond the ragged shell-crater, he saw the rocket squad. Two crouched men running with their deadly bright projectiles. Another with the flimsy-looking firing scaffold. The corporal silently gesturing. They wore the plain silver of the fortress garrisons. Traitors.
They stopped on a green, swiftly mounted and loaded the tripod.
Dr. Bull wanted to stand up and scream a warning to Carstairs. But fear chained him, until the intense blue needle of an iron-beam stabbed from the edge of a sand trap. The shattering, deafening explosion left a black pit where the green had been. Nothing was left of the rocket squad.
THE ion-gunner checked the pursuit.
Carstairs, with a little group of men, came running along the walk from green number one. He left a rifleman in a clump of flaming hibiscus. Dr. Bull stumbled into the elevator, dropped to meet him at the tower’s entrance.
“Treason, sir,” the lean young officer answered Dr. Bull’s voiceless question. He was muddy and panting, and red showed through a torn silver sleeve. “General Berg tried to arrest me and disarm the Special Planeteers. “Before we smelled a rat, he had the port surrounded. And eleven of the Specials held the arsenal and the control tower. Berg tried to buy us. Nothing to do but fight our way out, sir. Lost sixteen, sir. That leaves thirteen men, fit for duty. Your orders, sir?”
Dr. Bull swallowed and caught his breath.
“Good work, Lieutenant,” he said hoarsely. “We’ll hold the tower. I don’t think they’ll shell it, because they want TAU intact. It was planned for defense. The windows are lamanite. Steel shutters, with gun ports. An arsenal in the basement—here’s the key.”
Dr. Bull dropped the key. Carstairs picked it up, with steady, red-dripping fingers.
“Very good, sir. I’ll put men at the windows, and on the roof.”
Muddy, breathless men came in by twos and threes. One had a shoulder wound. Another limped. The thirteenth never came. Dr. Bull returned to the roof with Carstairs and four riflemen. The officer walked out to station his men on the parapeted terrace.
“They’ll have us surrounded,” he warned. “Keep your heads down, and shoot anything that moves. We can hold them off until—”
Dr. Bull heard the thin whine of a bullet, and the young lieutenant dropped beside the scarlet lilies. The hole in his forehead seemed very small, but it took no professional skill to tell that he was dead.
Stunned, Dr. Bull peered stupidly after the diminishing hum—probably the bullet still exceeded the planetoid’s velocity of escape; it would fly on, forever, across the black gulf of space.
He was sick and lonely. He had depended on the loyal, fearless efficiency of Carstairs. The loss left him staggered, helpless. In that moment, he realized the utter ruthlessness of the Iron Watch, the full desperation of the situation.
“Keep your heads down.” In a dull stupid voice, he repeated the dead man’s words. “Shoot anything that moves. We can hold them off, until—”
Until what? Suddenly Dr. Bull became aware of his own exposed position, and retreated toward the observatory dome.
Until night fell, perhaps, and the enemy assaulted by darkness? Until another traitor struck? Until the Valiant landed, with her thousands of the Iron Watch? Or until—
Dr. Bull refused to think of that most ghastly possibility.
STARING with unseeing eyes at the dead man, he suddenly remembered his scarlet-and-silver. The full burden was on him, now. His plump shoulders squared manfully to bear it.
“Take your places,” he told the riflemen. “Watch the hospital—your lieutenant was shot from there. Hold out, men. TAU is the key to the whole situation. Defending it, you are defending your jobs and your homes and your families, Taurus and Earth, everything that matters.”
Two men with auto-rifles began sniping at the hospital windows. Dr. Bull brought a rug out of his office and spread it over Carstairs. He tried not to flinch when a bullet sang by his ear. Fighting courage was good, but only a fool took needless risks. The Audacity of his slogan had never been physical.
Sweat made him clammy. His brain ran in aimless circles, like a trapped thing. It was already impossible to reach his yacht at the port—even if he had been willing to abandon the reward of a lifetime of Imagination, Audacity, and Victory. But the tower was a prison, as well as a citadel.
His pink hands came up, to fight off a smothering claustrophobia. That sense of buried isolation was broken, to his immense relief, by the sudden buzz of the telephone, back in his office.
“Dr. Bull?” It was General Berg. The formal courtesy in the flat rasping voice was infuriating. “I’m calling you, sir, by Commander Scarr’s order.”
“Damned Judas!” he gasped. “What do you want?”
“The commander is giving you an opportunity to surrender, sir. March your men out of the tower, unarmed. Leave the telecast equipment undamaged. Scarr will let you leave Taurus with your yacht, as many people as you want to take, and a million dollars.”
Dr. Bull tried to swallow his anger. “Berg,” he said hoarsely, “I’ll make you another proposition. Go back to your duty. Open fire on the cruiser. And I’ll give you and every man with you a million dollars a head—”
The flat voice cut in grimly: “What’s your answer, sir?”
“Scarr will have it,” the little doctor shouted, “inside of two minutes.”
He slammed the telephone down violently. He was trembling, ill with fear. But Taurus was his private paradise. He couldn’t give it up. Audacity, he breathed. Still he had a card to play.
Crouching out of view from the hospital, he climbed the steps to the observatory. His pulse was hammering. His fingers were numb and awkward, so that he could scarcely manipulate the controls. But he found the Valiant again, a black and deadly monster creeping down across the silver web of space.
His stiff fingers hastily slid open a concealed panel in the mount, to reveal another set of controls. For the instrument in the observatory was more than a telescope. The big lens and the oculars swung out of the way. Motors hummed quietly. A long thick cylinder of shining metal rose smoothly from under the floor, slipped into the empty tube.
If the Valiant had been the patrol’s answer to Dr. Bull’s twin forts, this was his secret answer to the Valiant. The telescope could be innocently pointed at any approaching space craft, but this cylinder was a torpedo.
A unique torpedo. It had cost as much as a warship. A robot-pilot steered it. The geodesic drive would give it velocity enough to evade any defense, to penetrate any armor. It was loaded with ten tons of titanite.
The finder telescopes, beside the big tube, functioned as parts of an intricate calculating range-finder. Dr. Bull brought the tiny, divided image of the cruiser together. He centered the cross hairs over the power room of the Valiant—he had paid Batson a high price for her plans. He set and started the silent robot-pilot.
Now—
For a moment, however, with his finger trembling on the key, Dr. Bull hesitated. His throat was dry, and blood roared in his ears. There was still time to surrender.
His white-bearded jaw set stubbornly. This battle was to the death. Imagination, Audacity, Victory—
He punched the key.
IV
WITH a sigh of displaced air, the gleaming spindle was gone. Dr. Bull wet his lips, and watched the image of the target. He saw a tiny flash of incandescence, precisely where he had aimed. A second later, a jet of white flame mushroomed from the hole in that armored flank—evidence of the cataclysm within the vessel’s bowels.
Dr. Bull lingered no longer. He flung himself out of the observatory, tumbled down the steps, rolled into the shelter of the farther parapet. Retaliation came before he had caught his breath.
A rocket-shell came bellowing from the hospital roof. The observatory erupted like a volcano. The impact of eight ounces of exploding titanite struck Dr. Bull, like the fall of a gigantic, obliterating hand.
. . . Then he was lying on the long desk in his office, under where the dome had been—plaster littered the floor, but the bomb-proof ceiling had held. He moved feebly, stifled a groan. Adhesive and bandage covered minor contusions. Something throbbed in his head, like the slow roll of a muffled, distant drum.
