Part 18

Down out of the clear sky came the Terran Patrol in battle formation. With the precision that spoke volumes, the space pattern flowed from the closed cylinder to a lenticular disk and the massed ships of the task force sped across the city at fifty thousand feet.

"They've come for you!"

"No," swore Guy.

"They'll not get you!"

"We'd best give him," argued the other. "They'll fire!"

"They're firing."

"No, they're not," said Guy. "That's signaling."

"Either signaling or poor marksmanship," said the captor. "Nothing's hit."

"Terra doesn't miss," said Guy.

From the ringed emplacements, the vortex projectors vomited their toroids. Upward went the pattern of vortexes, and the Patrol broke formation in an effort to elude the whirling toroids.

"Did you?" asked Charalas, coming up behind.

"Send for them? No."

"Your story is true?"

"I swear it!"

"Then what of them?"

The pattern of toroidal vortices went up and up, and caught Terran ships, passed on, and left the Terran ships to fall inert. Pressor beams cradled the falling ships and lowered them to ground. The rest of the Terran Patrol drove inward on a slant, with the turreted AutoMacs blazing purple at the snouts and the invisible beams cutting flaring furrows across the city.

Another toroid went up before them, and pilots fought their controls to divert the ships. The slow-moving vortex hovered, and the high-velocity ships arrowed through the vortex in spite of the pilots. More pressor beams caught the inert ships.

Torpedoes started to burst in the city, and with each explosion a building leaped skyward in a mass of flame and dropped in ruin. The sky crisscrossed with flaring beams, and the vortex projectors spewed forth again and again, filling the air with death.

The Patrol drove high, hovered. They fenced with MacMillans on automatic, and then fled precipitately as a super-sized toroid formed and raced upwards.

"Beat 'em off."

Guy nodded.

Then he turned and slugged his nearest captor. He took the man's MacMillan and faced the rest. "I'm leaving," he snarled.

He backed carefully away, keeping his back against the building. A movement caught his eye, and Guy's quick hand dropped an Ertinian from a high window. With the diversion, the other policeman reached for his MacMillan, and Guy blasted the hand as it grabbed, and then drilled the man behind him for trying to reach forward for it.

"I'm not fooling," snarled Guy. "And I'll take hostage. Charalas, come along!"

"Me?" asked the aged man, stalling for time.

"You--and jump!" yelled Guy, sniping a swift shot at his feet. Guy reached the parked police flier, pushed Charalas in, and then took off on a screaming zoom upwards.

A MacMillan flared and missed, a vortex rolled upwards too slow by half, another MacMillan missed, and then Guy was off and far away and free once more. He grinned. They'd left him his personal thought-beam instrument. They'd find it hard to run him down when he could read their minds. He turned the gain a little lower so that they couldn't read his, and he wondered whether the more powerful instrument would really be destroyed now.

* * * * *

An hour later, along near the ocean's edge, Guy dropped the flier. "Charalas," he said, offering a hand, "I'm sorry."

"You're in a real mess," said the neuro-surgeon.

"I know--but what's Ertene going to do now?"

He snapped on the flier-radio and caught Thomakein in the act of speaking: "--obviously came at the call of the impostor. He was a high official in the Patrol, and was working undercover here. People of Ertene, we must reply! We may not hold up our heads until this insult has been repaid. We now have a fine space fleet, thanks to the vortex and the pressors, and the Terrans. Never could we have built such a fleet here on Ertene; but it is now ours."

Guy growled and snapped Thomakein off.

"What are your plans?" asked Charalas.

"I'm going to drop you off here. Then I'm going somewhere."

"Where?"

"That's it. I don't know where. I'm barred from everything but Mars--I might try there."

"You loved Ertene, didn't you?" asked Charalas.

Guy nodded. "Until I found out how blind they are. A fine thing! They give credence to a plotter because his accuser is not of Ertene. And this last--I hate them and him!"

"This last?"

"Thomakein dropped the barrier so that the Terrans would come to investigate. He planned it all--and got his fleet ready-made."

"They came to fight--"

"They wouldn't have come if Thomakein hadn't started it all. Blame whom you will, but Thomakein saw his plan start when he found me alive in the _Mardinex_. My life has been just a pusharound for Thomakein for nine years."

"You think Ertene will win?"

"Thomakein may be highly successful for a long time--but Terra will win," said Guy. "Remember, Charalas, when you strike a rat, the rat bites back. That slaughter of Terrans back there is just nasty enough to make Terra completely mad. It happened before, on Mephisto III, and when we cooled down to the mere screaming point, there wasn't a living thing on Mephisto proper. Berserk, is the word for angry Terrans, Charalas. And I say Beware."

"And you?"

"Me, I'd like to push something around. I'm getting sick of being a pawn. I've reached the last straw, Charalas, and something's going to be crowned. That utter murder of Terrans just about broke me, and if I break completely, I'll take after Ertene single-handed."

"Slaughter?" asked Charalas.

"It was downright murder. If I only had an army."

"That's not murder. Ertene seldom kills."

"Look, Charalas, I'm in no mood for foolishness. I saw those ships come down after the vortex hit them. Terrans do not scare stiff, Charalas, they fight to the last."

"I know, but the vortex does not kill."

"The ... vortex ... does ... not ... kill?" repeated Maynard dully.

"No."

"It doesn't kill?" came the dazed repeat again.

"No. The vortex slows the life processes to almost zero, but not quite. Several, repeated exposures will kill, of course, but two or three aren't too dangerous to healthy people."

"What do they do to recover them?"

"Heat lamps, massage, and a shot of cuperenalin."

"I've got my army then," said Guy quietly. "I've got my army!" His voice repeated the phrase, and his tone crescendoed from stunned quietness to an exultant roar. "_I've got my men!_"

"I don't understand," said Charalas.

"I don't expect you to," smiled Guy. "Below here, in the ocean, is my spacecraft. I'm leaving Ertene--but I'll be back. Oh, will I be back! Terra needs some Ertinian love of leisure, and Ertene needs some of Terra's ambition. As a team, they should get on fine!"

"What are you going to do?" asked Charalas in alarm.

"Terra pushed me around for trying to protect Ertene. Ertene shoved me out for being Terran. They're both blindly unreasonable. I'm going to play Kilkenny cats, Charalas."

"Play what?"

"The Kilkenny cats were tied by the tails and hung over a line. They clawed each other to death. I'm going to break up this balance of power in Sol, with Mars and Terra always running the main show, by hanging Ertene in an orbit. Then there'll be three to treat with, plus the minority on Venus, and they'll all be standing around with their hands in one another's pockets. Mars will have to come off of her high horse or lose her shirt when Terra and Ertene get together, and Terra will have to listen to Mars if and when Ertene takes a notion to let Mars into confidence. Ertene will have to play baseball with both Terra and Mars or the Solarians will gang up in spite of themselves. And eventually there'll be less isolationism around Sol, and we'll all be better off. I'm going out to get me enough people to do the job--and now I know where to get 'em!"

Guy grinned at Charalas, stepped to the high bluff over the ocean, and dived.

* * * * *

The _Loki_ emerged from the ocean an hour later. It went high and arrowed into the sky, and it was out of sight in seconds. Charalas wondered if followers would come, certainly the detectors would be running full power and would catch this ship and register it as nonconforming to the licensed ships of Ertene.

But the followers did not come, and Charalas realized that Guy Maynard was once a high officer in the Terran Patrol, and that he was more than familiar with the technical details of such a small craft. Charalas grinned, and wondered which one of Ertene's destroyed ships was now being detected in action again, and not being recorded because of matrices that eliminated unwanted alarms.

But Charalas wondered most about Guy's future plans. How and what was he going to do--and alone, too!

"Also unarmed," added Guy to himself. "Nice to know you, Charalas. And if you'll wonder about me for a week, I'll appreciate it. Bet the Ertinian land forces are on the prod right now--and you'll be found directly. No matter, I can take care of Guy Maynard from here."

Guy nosed the _Loki_ cautiously toward the moon of Ertene. Their synthetic sun, dimming a bit now that the unbounded energy-intake was cut, shone full and bright upon one side, and Guy wasted precious minutes circling to the dark side.

It was mostly wasteland, yet Guy went die-straight to the half-concealed emplacement.

With callousness born of necessity, Guy rammed the dome and the _Loki_ was flung away in the out-rush of air. Guy set his grapples, and literally tore the building apart, brick by brick, and then hooked onto the great vortex projector and lifted it high into the sky. He returned for the power equipment and took that also. He thanked his lucky star that the _Loki_ was a Terran ship and not one of the less agile Ertinian jobs. The fact that it was fitted with everything but a set of turret-mounted MacMillans made Guy jump up and down in glee. He recalled the game of hide-and-seek of a couple of years ago, and knew that the _Loki_ could take it.

He set the _Loki_ down on a barren plain on the side away from Ertene, and donned space garb. Welding the vortex projector on the top of the _Loki_ made a strange-looking spacecraft, but streamlining was unimportant in space anyway. He hooked girder after girder on the huge parabolic reflector, welding them securely to his hull. He fitted the supply cables with air-tight bushings through the walls, and then spent several hours fitting up a series of relays to a thumb-button on the pilot's levers.

His detector rang as he was finishing, and Guy poked the drive control without waiting to see the nature of the approaching ship.

He grinned as he arrowed away from Ertene, because he knew that no matter whose ship it was, it was against him. They'd given him the time he needed, and if he managed to get through the next phase, they would never be able to stop him again. No one would ever collect the price that was upon his head--a double price, one in Solar coin, one in Ertinian.

His detector rang again, and Guy saw a small Terran ship approaching. Its turrets jerked forward, and Guy's thumb hit the button. The _Loki_ bucked to avoid the discharge of the AutoMacs, but the velocity of the Terran was too high to swerve. It ran into the floating vortex and went dead, at full velocity, on and on into the nothing of the sky. It was picked up later by Ertinians, who added it to their captured fleet.

And Guy, knowing that his life might control the future of billions of lives, hardened. Friend or foe, all must fall before him until he had reached the end of this phase of his life. If he fell, the Solar System itself might never recover from the outcome of his failure.

For Maynard, knowing his Terrans, his Martians, and also his Ertinians, could have pointed out the moves of the next five years on the fingers of his hand--and no one alive could have denied him.

* * * * *

From ten thousand miles above, Guy looked at Mephisto III. "Two or three aren't dangerous," muttered Guy, repeating Charalas' statement. "Please God it be three with no danger, for they will have had two!"

His thumb pressed the button, and the vortex formed, whirled, and then went racing forward in a boiling toroid of energy. It spread as it went, widening swiftly and encompassing the entire moon before it wrapped itself about the ground, closing like a monstrous blanket on the far side in curlers of lightnings and fire. The vortex died, and Mephisto III was again lifeless. Guy dropped quickly, and landed the _Loki_ on the same spaceport that he had created from the hard ground years ago. He looked about him at the supplies and the ships lying mute, and shuddered at the bodies that lie a-sprawl. Then he smiled wryly and apologized mentally. There were but few of the big guns of the Terran Patrol present--but they would be a good nucleus.

For now, though, Guy had work to do.

XXI.

Maynard looked at the ground, and wondered. It was cold--deathly cold--in spite of the years of the barrier-input. Cold enough to give him hope.

Guy set his crowbar into the grave and pried. The dirt came out in lumps--the same lumps blasted long ago to create the shallow trench. The white wrappings were not soiled; the ground was frozen hard enough to prevent bits of grime from working their way into the soft cloth. The body was stiff and utterly cold beneath the wrappings, and it was more like carrying a log than a human being. But Guy took the exhumed one to the _Loki_, removed the white wrappings, and snapped on the battery of heat lamps.

Losses made the air grow unbearably hot in the little cabin, but Guy worked woodenly and did not notice. He forced himself to this. The handling of a corpse--for until it showed the sign of life it was a corpse--made Guy's stomach crawl and made his hands feel as though they never would be clean again. Time and again he looked away to keep from screaming aloud.

And when it came time to insert the needle containing superenalin into the body, Guy's fingers went cold and insensitive. The needle did not slide in the way it should, it entered with that dead feeling similar to cutting dead flesh with a dull knife. It sickened him, and after emergence, when the tiny droplet of blood did not come, it brought on that nausea again.

Massage! It was a gruesome thing, this fondling and stroking of cold, stiff limbs. The heat seemed to be doing no good, for Guy could discern no softening of the joints. They creaked and cracked as he moved the arms and legs, and it worried him because he knew the brittleness of frozen flesh. Was he breaking bone and flesh deep within this body?

More--was it worth it?

Guy's mind recoiled and rejected the horror that he felt. This body was no stranger to him. Alive, physical contact would not have been distasteful. Now that it was dead, why did he feel horror?

Alive, it might have fought him because of the liberties he was taking; with no objections to his ministrations possible, why did he feel horror and fear?

It struck Guy as insanely funny and he laughed uproariously. The cabin rocked to the sound of his laughter, and as he stopped, the echo reminded him of the cackle of an idiot. He stopped with indrawn breath, shook his head, and returned to his task.

The body moved perceptibly, and Guy recoiled from the table with the same feeling of horror and fear. This was too much like awakening the dead.

A gasp of indrawn breath came, and the body choked on the volume of air that entered the lungs. Color returned to the cheeks, and the eyes opened, fluttered, and then looked at Guy full and open.

The lips parted.

"Guy!"

"Joan! You're all right?"

"Of course--shouldn't I be?"

"But--"

"That toroid in the sky--what was it?"

"It came from Mephisto."

"Then it is not dangerous?"

"Not when you understand it."

Joan snorted. "If that's the best they can do--we'll lick them easy."

Guy nodded foolishly. How was he going to tell Joan the whole story in short of a lifetime?

She looked around. "This isn't the _Orionad_. Why did you bring me here?"

"I ... we--"

"Guy!" she came from the table, put her hands on his shoulders, and looked up into his face. "It's been long, hasn't it?"

He nodded.

She searched his face understandingly, comprehended the suffering and worry there, and said: "Tell me."

* * * * *

It came then, all in a burst of words. The entire tale from start to finish with nothing withheld. It took an hour solid, and when Guy finished, Joan looked up and asked:

"You're still going on?"

He nodded, but asked: "Should I?"

"You must. First off, Guy, you are a man alone. That might be fine for you, but life demands that you do your utmost to progress. You know what will happen."

"Ertene and Terra will fight. Ertene will fight to join the System as ruling planet, and Terra will fight to haul Ertene in by brute force. Eventually, Terra will win, partly, and subdue Ertene. Ertene will reply by swerving outward again, and try to continue on the roaming, nomad life. As a last measure, Ertene will hit Sol with a vortex. That will set things off--how, I do not know. Nova, perhaps. Instability, definitely. Or Ertene will hit Terra with a vortex. At any rate, super-vortexes will be hurled back and forth, and Ertene--if she isn't a black ruin--will go on through space with no man alive. Sol will continue to run as a dead, sterile system.

"So long as they are permitted to fight, complete ruin will be the outcome. I must ... I MUST prevent that."

"You must," agreed Joan. "You must be ruthless and calloused. You mustn't hesitate to kill and maim--though it sounds against all nature. Ertene must be chastened--and Ertene must be brought into the System! To let Ertene go will constitute a constant threat to Sol--no constant, but lasting for a hundred years. So long as Ertene can hurl a vortex at Sol, we are endangered. Ertene must be immobilized, and placed under the same necessities--those of keeping Sol alive and stable. Terra must be taught to accept Ertene as an equal.

"And since a three-world system must become interwoven to remain, Terra, Ertene, and Mars will lose their isolationism. But it's your job, Guy. You're the only man who understands. You are the only man who can bring a balance of power to bear. Take it and knit a new system!"

"You'll help?"

Joan smiled. "Naturally." She lifted herself on tiptoe and held him close. "I've always wanted to help, Guy. Anything you say--name it!"

Guy choked.

"You've"--and Guy recalled years ago when Joan said the same words to him--"been lonely, Guy."

Years of loneliness and yearning and heartbreak expended themselves in a matter of minutes, and the long, bitter years dropped away, bringing them right up to the present moment. Then the future promised briefly before they broke apart. They regretted the break, though something unspoken made them stop; they could not seek the future with so much to be done in the present: They must cross this bridge first.

* * * * *

Gradually, the scene took on a busy appearance. Men in suits bustled around the ships, and they rang with the sound of repair and servicing. And across the plain there came a steady stream of men carrying white-swathed bodies, and when six came in, twelve left to continue the work. With progressingly larger numbers at work, the stream of men entering the huge, squat building became a double line, a triple line, and then a sixfold line. Other buildings opened, and the stream continued to expand.

Projectors and turret-mounted MacMillans roved the sky and the detectors went out to their extreme limit.

Technicians worked over Guy's thought-beam, and produced a large one for each ship in the small group. Maynard's fleet would be knit with thought-communications, and no interference would cause them to lose control. Other technicians toyed with the vortex projectors, and though Guy saw no more success here than on Ertene, the amount of activity was higher by far, and in a few weeks the Terrans had passed the most advanced researches of the Ertinians.

A convoy of Terran ships approached, and Guy merely smiled.

"I've been expecting them. Go get 'em, Harrison!"

"Right. They're replacements for this gang?"

"Were."

"Why don't we wake up the gang that was here when you came?"

"You know that. I can't trust 'em. I brought you fellows back--at least you owe me your lives."

"I'll argue that point when I get back. Ships, supplies, and men! We need 'em!"

The little fleet sped out to contact the larger convoy. Unlike the usual Terran procedure, Maynard's fleet spread wide apart, and waited in the dark of space, behind barriers.

It would have been slaughter again. This convoy expected to find its own men awaiting supply and materials. Instead, the vortex projectors spewed.

Out they rolled, and the barriers went down as they passed. Turreted MacMillans whirled, and the invisible energies laced the sky. Torpedoes winked in gouts of flame and the interferers chopped the communications band into uselessness. Maynard's ships fired a second series before the first reached the Terrans, and the Terrans, fighting their own velocity, rolled into the whirling toroids firing their AutoMacs to the last.

Ships rained out of the sky in flaming ruin, cut bright arcs in the sky, and died.

And then it was all over. Massacre it would have been if the vortex projectors had been deadly. The Terran convoy was not prepared to meet a powerful fleet, and it succumbed in a matter of seconds.

Cradling pressors lowered the Terran ships to ground, and Maynard's men took possession.

"Well?" asked Harrison. "Have we got what it takes?"

"Not enough," said Guy glumly. "There was one constellation craft in that bunch--the _Leoniad_. It's a creaky old crate that uses co-ordinator fire in the turrets instead of autosyncs. Her torpedo tubes are rusty, her generator room reeks, and her drive is one of those constantly variable affairs that never settles down to a smooth run. The _Leoniad_ is a derelict, as far as I'm concerned. The smaller stuff is fine business, though I doubt that they could stand up to a half dozen constellations. We'll fit the old tub up, though, and use her. She's all we have in that class."

"Any chance of getting more?"

"Might raid Ertene. I think it might be easy--Ertene is none too sharp invasionwise. They're armed to the teeth with vortex jobs, though."

"Vortexes aren't deadly."

"A local anaesthetic would be a killer-weapon if you could numb up a man's trigger finger only," grinned Guy. "Might as well be dead as sleeping it off on Ertene."

"I get you. How about raiding Sahara Base?"

"We might duck their mounted stuff. I wish I knew what they are doing with the vortex projectors."

"Let's wake up the commanding officer of the convoy and ask. He'd know."

"Good idea," said Maynard, and gave the order over the phone.

* * * * *

Eventually, the man was brought in. He was indignant, defeated, angry, and anxious about his future in turns, and his emotions changed from one to the other swiftly. He was Sector Commander Neville.

"What is the meaning of this outrage?" he asked. "I know you. You're the renegade, Maynard."

"Stop it!" exploded Harrison. "He is Guy Maynard, and a better man than you and I, Neville."

"You, too, must have turned pirate, commander."

"I'm no pirate. What I'm doing is by sheer choice. Wait until you hear his story, and you may wish to join us."

"Never."

"Never say 'never'," grinned Harrison. "It shows how much you don't know about everything--especially human nature."

"Look, Neville, I want to know what Terra is doing with the vortex gun."

"I'll never tell you."