Part 3

Norman smiled. "What if I don't come back? What if I pull out and radio Earth for help?"

Keren returned his smile, her eyes like a moonless night. "If you don't come back, I'll kill the Earth girl inside." She threw back her head, hair swirling at her pale throat like the flow of black oil. "Now kiss me--and go."

It was a choice; Keren's life or Dorothy's. If he got the ship and Keren ran for the woods, his guns would have to find _her_ before they turned on the house. Then he could bargain with Sade by radio. "I'll owe you a thousand kisses," he said, opened the door, and darted out into the sunlight. Then it was raining red heat as liquid fire spurted around his pounding legs.

A bare twenty yards ahead, the cruiser waited, glinting silver in the sun. His pants leg caught fire and he could feel its blistering heat, fanned by the wind, as he streaked across the gravel.

Then he saw it too late. A sheen of crimson in the air. Streaks of red, painted on nothing. _Johnny's blood!_ Flame from the guns behind him sizzled on the invisible glass as Norman, unable to check the piston power of his legs, crashed into the invisible wall of what had been Johnny's prison. His forehead hit the glass with a hollow ring. Clutching the wall with both hands, he slid down to the gravel and into darkness for his second failure that afternoon.

Roughly, they dragged him back to the house. But he wasn't out. Through the searing pain in his head he had fought back to consciousness as the patrolmen touched him. His mind limped through the pain, trying to figure out what to do now as they dragged him into the big front room and dropped him on the floor.

"Imbeciles! Careless fools!"

The voice opened Norman's eyes, banished the throbbing in his head as he struggled to his feet. But the two patrolmen locked his arms behind him.

"How did he get out!" The fat man glared from Norman to the patrolmen. Swart stood beside him.

"There were only two keys to that room," Swart suggested.

Sade's florid face paled, then his button eyes flickered with the cold cruelty of a wild animal. "Find Keren," he said softly. "Bring her to my laboratory."

Rick's eyes showed helpless fury as his arms tightened in the patrolmen's grasp. "Keren had nothing to do with it," he said. "I picked the lock."

Sade reached out and slapped his face repeatedly with his open palm. Hands clamped behind him, Norman took it, barely feeling the stinging blows, their impact light under the impact of what he saw.

"Yes! It's real!" Sade halted his slapping and, laughing like a fiend, rolled up his sleeves. He held his hands up close before Norman's eyes. Norman shuddered, staring at Sade's right hand. Slightly smaller, ghastly white but firm, where the stump of Sade's right arm had been was now flesh. Blood coursed through the bulging veins, a pale hand extended pudgy fingers.

* * * * *

Sade howled with laughter as Norman drew back from the thing as from a snake. "It's real!" Sade shouted, gleefully. "Flesh and blood! I have two hands now!" Exultantly, he held his clenched fists before Norman's white face. "In these hands I shall hold the pulse of the universe, to let it throb or halt at my will. I shall be neither king nor dictator--I shall be a god! The power of life and death in the universe is mine!"

Lifting his gaze from the hands, Norman met the fat man's eyes coldly. "How'd you do this, Sade?"

Sade's laughter dwindled to a greasy smile. "After seeing what the power of Vulcan did to your friend, perhaps it is fitting that you should see this power in reverse." He nodded at the patrolmen. "Bring him along."

In an arm-lock on both sides, Norman was dragged down the same corridor where he had followed Keren in his futile attempt to escape. They halted at a door at its far end. Sade opened the door and Norman was shoved in.

The place was white-walled and bare, like a hospital room but without the usual furniture. On a four-legged platform in the center of the room lay a large porcelain cylinder, like a chamber used for sterilizing surgical instruments, but the surface of the cylinder was smooth, without gadgets, only a heavily bolted cap at one end. Sade patted the cylinder as a sculptor might admire the work of his chisel. "This holds what John Gordon sought and what you seek now to save his life," he smirked. "This container holds fluid from Vulcan's Fountains of Youth!"

Standing before the cylinder, Norman's mind's eye searched the situation for some chance of escape. Here was what he had come so far to obtain and he was powerless to take it. But perhaps it wasn't time; there was much he needed to know.

"Vulcan's power is a radiation," Sade said, "but not from the Sun. It's a liquid under the ground, like Earthian oil--a radioactive element such as science has only found traces of in the cosmic rays. More powerful than radium, it exudes an exciter to growth--a living force."

"How'd you discover it without being affected by it?" Norman asked.

"Your friend Gordon was the guinea pig," the Mercurian said. Norman kept still. "After we took him and his cruiser when he entered the Protection Zone, we came here immediately. Working in space suits until my technicians on Mercury discovered an immunization, we brought Vulcan's strange liquid in like an oil gusher. The effect of the pure liquid is instantaneous; its effects on the surface of the ground outside are greatly diluted. While we built this house round the well, we watched Vulcan's milder effects on your friend in the glass cage."

Norman's jaw paled, but he kept his head. "How did Johnny get off the planet after he escaped?"

"Fool!" Sade laughed. "He didn't escape. We could stay and watch him every minute--that's why we left the automatic camera to record his reactions. He did contrive to get out of the cage but when we found him in the jungle we simply took him off the planet and dropped him in space in a life boat where he'd be picked up." Sade laughed again. "Did you think I didn't know he built two ships with counteractives! John Gordon's return was merely a message to you--to come here in that other ship. Now we have the only counteractives in existence. Vulcan is an utterly impregnable fortress. No army in the universe can interrupt my plans."

Norman realized that everything Sade said was true. No power could approach Vulcan without a counteractive. "What are your plans, Sade?"

The fat man held up his new right arm, his small eyes glowing. "My technicians obtained for me the hand-bud of an unborn child. It was embedded in the stump of my right arm." He stared at his hand stretched its white fingers, his thick lips smiling. "With but a brief exposure of my arm to a spray of Vulcan's liquid in full strength, I _grew_ the hand of a thirty-year-old man!" He banged the cylinder with his fist. "What would happen if I sprayed this life-death fluid in a city street! It can be placed in a shell and fired from a gun. I have here a _Force_ that can cause the most horrible of wounds--quick decay. It can utterly destroy or immediately heal. How I use this power depends upon how quickly the governments of the universe submit to my wishes in a new stellar order."

But Norman had a question stronger than his hopelessness at what he'd just heard. "Could this liquid help John Gordon now?"

Instead of replying, Sade smiled. He stepped over to one of the room's blank walls and pressed a small button. A wide panel slid back revealing several tiers of wire cages containing monkeys, rabbits, and white rats. Sade scooped a plump slick rat out of its cage and and closed the panel again. Walking back to the cylinder, he slapped the helpless creature's head against his wrist and stunned it. Then, drawing a flat shelf from the cylinder's platform, he dropped the unconscious rat on it and threw the heavy bolts on the cylinder's cap.

* * * * *

Inside the thick-walled container, Norman discovered, were neatly coiled tubes hanging on pegs. Sade grabbed one of the small hoses, pulled it out and squeezed a button on the little nozzle. A fine, blood-red spray hissed from the nozzle and he directed the red mist upon the limp body of the white rat. The damp liquid had barely touched the rat's fur when instantly its small face wrinkled, its fur grew coarse and thin and it assumed the appearance of a very old animal.

Still smiling, Sade glanced at Norman's troubled gaze, then shut off the hose, stuck it back in the cylinder and drew out another. The spray that dampened the rat this time was light pink. The rat's coarse coat thickened, its sides swelled before Norman's eyes and youth was born anew in the little animal's very brain as it leaped to its feet and scurried around the shelf with all the energy of fresh strength.

"It's like many poisons," Sade said. "Full strength, its effect is death. Greatly diluted--with mere water--its miracles make it an elixir supreme...."

The door opened to Keren, followed by Dorothy and Swart. Keren's poise little hinted she'd plotted Sade's death less than an hour ago. Dorothy had removed her space suit; her eyes were red from crying. Keren took a cigarette from her loose blouse. "You sent for me, Sade?"

The Mercurian's eyes were like a rattlesnake's as he held out his two hands for her to see. "I have these now," he said softly. "Soon I shall have every world at my command. Will you marry me?"

The dark-haired woman lit her cigarette calmly, her hand steady. "Yes," she answered simply.

Sade laughed. "You say yes now because your life is at stake--because you tried to aid the Earthman. But for that you won't lose your life, Keren. You will lose something you value more than your life, Keren. You will lose--your beauty. Get a rope, Swart."

Keren flicked her cigarette into Sade's face. Quick as a whip, her hand entered the throat of her blouse. Norman saw the glint of naked metal flash in an arc toward Sade's chest. Dorothy gasped.

The silver dagger sank into Sade's chest just over his heart. The fat man staggered back. But before he could fall, Swart acted, as quick as a ferret, clipped Keren's chin, and as she crumpled silently to the floor, he caught the gasping Mercurian and eased him down.

From Sade's chest blood spurted higher than the dagger's hilt as Swart yanked one of the hoses from the cylinder and directed its crimson spray on Sade's wound. Slowly, Swart drew out the dagger's sticky blade in the spray. When the dagger was out of Sade's chest there was no visible sign of a wound. Sade opened his eyes and looked up at them.

"What shall I do with her?" Swart said.

Sade got to his feet. He stood there, panting a moment. "The rope," he said. Swart pushed a wall button, extracted a length of cord from a panel compartment and returned. "Tie her to the cylinder," Sade hissed, "and tie the nozzle of the hose in her hair."

In a moment, the unconscious Keren was hanging by her backward-bent arms from the cylinder. The cord was tight from her wrists, around the cylinder and under to her slim ankles. In her hair was fixed the slowly oozing hose. A rivulet of red trickled down her smooth cheek.

"What about these two?" Swart said, motioning toward Norman and Dorothy.

"While we go to repair the new counteractive ship which Mr. Norman so kindly brought us," Sade said, "we can leave him and his girl in the glass cage."

As they were marched across the field, Norman remembered Johnny's face on the hospital pillow--tragic, old. Now, in the green beauty of this time-thundering world, this same fate reached for them as it was caressing Keren's cheek in the white-walled room in the tower. Norman put his arm around Dorothy's shoulder.

She drew away. "You deserted me for Keren once. Worry about her now, not me."

Swart grinned. "You can argue that out while you grow old together," he said. The patrolman who had come out with them picked up a metal ladder beside the invisible wall and leaned it against the rim of the glass. Then, smiling, he walked back and grabbed the collar of Dorothy's coveralls. "We sealed up the chinks to keep 'em from pulling the same trick Gordon did but hadn't we better strip 'em to make sure?"

Norman's fists tightened but he felt the barrel of Swart's pistol dig into his side. Then, on a quick thought, he drew a half-empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket. "Leave her alone, Swart. We haven't anything to escape with. Take these cigarettes for our clothes."

The dark man's hand snatched them greedily. "I don't know why I don't take both." But he stepped away from the ladder and waved his pistol at them. "All right. Get in there. In ten seconds I'm shooting."

* * * * *

Norman followed Dorothy up the rungs of the ladder, climbed around her and--as Swart raised his gun menacingly--hung on the rim of the glass and dropped the twenty feet to the gravel inside their prison. Dorothy climbed over and dropped into his waiting arms.

As the patrolman took the ladder down, Sade and the other red-uniformed gorilla left the house and walked toward them across the field. They came up and halted before the glass, staring in at them and laughing. Dorothy stood beside Norman and he took her hand tightly.

"When they leave we'll start to work," he whispered. "We've got to get you out of here quick."

"Why only me?"

He told her about Keren's hypodermic work. "But first you've got to believe me," he said. "I didn't desert you when I left with Keren. It was our only chance to escape. I was coming back for you. You've got to believe me." He turned and took her shoulders in his hands, looking into her blue eyes.

She bit her lips, staring at him. Then, "I don't want to believe anything else."

Norman squeezed her shoulders, then glanced up to see Sade and his men walking toward the cruiser, leaving the house deserted except for Keren chained to a doom of unspeakable horror inside. The cruiser leaped from the field and floated past them over the jungle. Eying the high rim of the glass wall, Norman waited until the ship disappeared over the horizon, then backed against the glass quickly and held out his hand.

"Quick!" he told Dorothy. "Stand on my shoulders and try jumping!"

Dorothy placed one small foot into his hand and swung up to his shoulders. Norman raised to his tiptoes--every inch counted. "Jump! High!"

Her fingertips missed the rim of the glass two full feet and clawing the slick surface, she slid back down into Norman's arms. "Try again! We've got to get you out of here!"

Again and again she placed her foot in Norman's hand, swung up, leaped high--and fell back again, her forehead bruised from bumping the glass, her fingernails broken.

"You'll never make it," Norman said wearily. "We've got to think of something else." Hammering his fist into his palm, he started pacing the wall. Suddenly he dropped to his knees and started clawing the gravel. But he hadn't dug six inches when he scraped against concrete. Several different holes proved the ring of glass rested on what had been a refueling platform. "Sade would have thought of that."

He started pacing the wall again, running his hand around the smooth glass. There _had_ to be a way out! The glass had been the pilot-room shell of a ship, its tapering nose sliced off. He thought of trying to rock it back and forth to turn it over. But the glass weighed tons.

He turned and stared at Dorothy helplessly. She had scratched her finger in one of her falls. Proving again that only her body had grown, she immediately stuck her finger in her mouth upon the discovery of the scratch. Norman's brain seethed. He couldn't let this girl die here.

Now, he realized, he faced the same problem that had been Johnny's. And he knew what withering shadow would claim Dorothy's lips if he failed. Vulcan was a hell of priceless, fleeing moments; each heartbeat a drum sounding a sickening doom of decay. Each tick of his watch was the footfall of death one step closer. The invisible terror that hovered over Vulcan was beyond the grasp of imagination--but it was real! As real as Keren's pale face under that trickle of red horror, as real as Dorothy's fresh loveliness which would soon be eaten away--unless he could get her away from here.

Neither he nor Dorothy had any metal with which he might attempt Johnny's mad feat. Standing there, looking about the enclosure, Norman's heart beat quicker with each second as each second took its unseen toll upon the girl who was his responsibility. Looking at her golden hair glinting in the sunlight, Norman suddenly realized she was more than a responsibility.... Quickly he turned away.

IV

The glass was thick, perfectly clear. Only its glimmer in the sun said they were imprisoned. Beyond the field, the ever dying and growing jungle undulated like a green sea. Just outside the glass, the ladder lay on the gravel where the patrolman had dropped it--within arm's reach and it might as well have been light years away.

"Look!" Dorothy cried. "The scratch on my finger's already healed." She held up her finger and there was no mark on it. Vulcan's power was working, building a life then to tear it down. Each soul-wringing second created beauty, clear blue-eyed, honey-haired beauty--to transform it as swiftly into ugliness....

It was the first time in Norman's eventful life that he had ever stared defeat in the face. He had met death before and he had been in some pretty tight spots but always there had been some way out. Not here. There was no possible way to climb a twenty-foot wall of perpendicular oil-slick glass.

"I'm afraid I've failed you, Dorothy," he said. In his mind now was only the thought of something he must _not_ do. He couldn't allow her to go through the horror he had seen on Johnny's gray face. After two hours, when he saw the first gray hair--he looked down at his hands. They were his only weapons against a longer torture. Could he kill Dorothy with his own hands...?

"Well," Dorothy broke in on his thoughts. "Sade wins; and when we go, the whole universe is next." Her voice was a full octave lower than Norman had first heard it when she appeared at his galley door.

Norman walked over and stood before her. "Whatever happens," he said, "I want you to know this--that I've fallen in love with you. You're the bravest woman I've ever known and the most beautiful. That combination usually doesn't go together."

She looked up at him with very blue and serious eyes. "I've been in love with you for a long time," she said. "Ever since I first saw your picture in the paper. That's why I came with you."

Her words were cut off by Norman's lips. Then quickly he left her and walked back to the glass, staring out at the wind-whipped jungle. Why wait? Why go through this torture any longer? Get it over with now!

"Gods of the universe, forgive me," he whispered and turned to take her throat in his hands.

Light flashed across his face. It was Dorothy's mirror. She held it, smoothing her sun-burnished hair. A thought burst into his consciousness like a butterfly from a cocoon.

He jumped over and snatched the mirror from her hand, ripped his watch from his wrist and flipped off the crystal with his thumbnail, letting the watch drop to the ground.

"What're you doing!"

He didn't bother to answer. His pulse was liquid fire as he held the watch crystal close to the glass wall with one hand and focused the rays of the sun into it with the mirror. A thin curl of smoke rose from the jungle across the field. Then where the smoke had been an orange flame licked up from the dry grass. He dropped the mirror and the watch crystal and grabbed Dorothy close to him in the center of their prison, holding her tightly.

"Why! Why!"

"You'll see!"

* * * * *

Lashed by the wind, the fire spread like a flood. A blast of smoke engulfed the glass obscuring their view with its swirling whiteness. Then bits of flaming ashes dotted the smoke as the flames found new fuel in the rotted trees. Standing there, holding Dorothy in his arms, Norman saw the glass around them slowly darken. Quickly, as the wind brought the increasing heat upon them, the glass turned black and all he could see was the wild smoke rolling across the hole at the top of their stifling cage. He felt Dorothy coughing. Heat swam in the blackness about them.

Then almost as suddenly as it had begun, the wind swept the smoke away and Norman tore himself away from Dorothy and sprang to the glass wall. Without waiting till the glass lightened, he ran his hand across its blistering surface. When the thermal quality of the glass permitted the passage of light and the sight of the smoldering forest across the field, Norman was half way up the slick side, climbing like a ladder the bulging ridges that encircled the glass at its invisible seams.

As Dorothy stared at him, unbelieving, he vaulted over the rim and jolted with stinging feet to the hot gravel outside. The metal ladder was like a live coal in his hands but he barely felt it as he threw it against the wall and ran up it like a squirrel. Sitting on the cooling rim, he drew the ladder up after him and dropped it inside for Dorothy.

Soon they were streaking across the steaming gravel toward the house, Dorothy's hair streaming in the smoky wind.

Norman burst into the big front room with Dorothy behind him. Their running feet were loud in the silent house as they sped down the corridor, Norman dreading what he would find tied to the cylinder where they had left Keren. "You don't want to see this," he said, halting at the closed door. "Try these other doors and find a gun. Sade may be back any moment!"

Dorothy obediently turned away as he went in and the sight that met his eyes was to figure in many a future nightmare. Half way between the door and the cylinder, Keren lay on the floor, more like some hideous reptile than a human being, staring up at him, her eyes two black holes, hate alive in them, the only life in what was left of her face.

Norman stepped over and picked her up, his fingers recoiling from the touch of leathern skin and bone. Her luxurious hair had vanished leaving a skull, cracked skin tight across her cheek bones. The rope that had held her to the cylinder had slipped from her shrunken wrists and how she had crawled this far, Norman couldn't tell.

He carried her to the cylinder, opened the heavy cap and drew out the small hose that Sade had used to restore to youth the white rat. Quickly, he sprayed the pink liquid upon her face and body--a treatment that was to rewrite all of medical science. Her cheeks swelled again to the form of a living face and like a trick of superimposed motion picture work, before his eyes Keren's skeletal structure became covered again with firm, rounded flesh, and on her head wispy black threads appeared and extended again into a silken sable mass.

To save the spark of life that remained with Johnny, Norman knew he had to get this material back to Earth now; which meant a finish fight for a space ship. "Are you strong enough now? We've got to ambush Sade."

It was an effort for Keren to reorganize her forgotten coordinations which enabled her to speak. Her lips moved soundlessly as he carried her to the door and down the passage. He explained quickly how he and Dorothy had escaped.

"There are guns in the tower," she managed to whisper as they entered the front room.

Dorothy stood at the door with two jet rifles, peering out at the still deserted field. "I found these in their bedroom," she said, handing Norman one of the guns. "Is she all right? I thought--"