He grimaced uncomfortably and added, “Get in there fast, fella, but watch the approach! There couldn’t be any heavy armament on that yacht, but U-1’s come up with little miracles before this. Maybe that Ceetal was lucky the guy never got back to Lycanno to talk to him. It’s where he was pointed, all right.”
“Headquarters is now babbling emotional congratulations,” the robot reported, rather coldly. “They also say two Vegan destroyers will be able to reach the yacht within six hours.”
“That’s nice!” Iliff nodded. “Get just a few more holes punched in you, and we could use those to tow you in.”
Enclosed in a steel bubble of suit-armor, he presently propelled himself to the lock. The strange ship, still some five minutes’ flight away in fact, appeared to be lying motionless at point-blank range in the port-screens—bow and flanks sparkling with the multiple pinpoint glitter of the freezer field which had wrapped itself around her like a blanket of ravenous, fiery leeches. Any ripple or thrust of power of which she was capable would be instantly absorbed now and dissipated into space; she was effectively immobilized and would remain so for hours.
“But the field’s not flaring,” Iliff said. He ran his tongue gently over his lips. “That guy does know his stuff! He’s managed to insulate his power sources and he’s sitting there betting we won’t blast the ship but come over and try to pry him out. The trouble is, he’s right.”
The robot spoke then, for the first time since it had scattered the freezer field in the yacht’s path. “Iliff,” it stated impersonally and somewhat formally, “regulations do not permit you to attempt the boarding of a hostile spaceship under such suicidal conditions. I am therefore authorized—”
The voice broke off, on a note of almost human surprise. Iliff had not shifted his eyes from the port-screen below him. After a while, he said dryly:
“It was against regulations when I tinkered with your impulses till I found the set that would let you interfere with me for my own good. You’ve been without that set for years, big boy—except when you were being overhauled.”
“It was a foolish thing to do,” the robot answered. “I was given no power to act against your decisions, even when they included suicide, if they were justified in the circumstances that formed them. That is not the case here. You should either wait for the destroyers to come up or else let me blast U-1 and the yacht together, without any further regard for the fate of the Interstellar operative—though she is undoubtedly of some importance to civilization.”
“Galactic Zones thinks so,” Iliff nodded. “They’d much rather she stays alive.”
“Obviously, that cannot compare with the importance of destroying U-1 the instant the chance is offered. As chief of the Ghant Spacers, his murders were counted, literally, by planetary systems. If you permit his escape now, you give him the opportunity to resume that career.”
“I haven’t the slightest intention of permitting his escape,” Iliff objected mildly.
“My responses are limited,” the robot reminded him. “Within those limits I surpass you, of course, but beyond them I need your guidance. If you force an entry for yourself into that ship, you may logically expect to die, and because of the telepathic block around it I shall not be aware of your death. You cannot be certain then that I shall be able to prevent a mind such as that of U-1 from effecting his escape before the destroyers get here.”
Iliff snarled, suddenly white and shaking. He checked himself with difficulty, drew a long, slow breath. “I’m scared of the guy!” he complained, somewhat startled himself by his reaction. “And you’re not making me feel any better. Now quit giving good advice, and just listen for a change!”
He went on carefully:
“The Lannai’s quite possibly dead. But if she isn’t, U-1 isn’t likely to kill her now until he finds out what we’re after. Even for him, it’s a pretty desperate mess—he’ll figure we’re Vegan, so he won’t even try to dicker. But he’ll also figure that as long as we think she’s alive, we’ll be just a little more cautious about how we strike at him.
“So it’s worth taking a chance on trying to get her out of there. And here’s what you do. In the first place, don’t under any circumstances get any closer than medium beaming range to that crate. Then, just before I reach the yacht, you’re to put a tractor on its forward spacelock and haul it open. That will let me in close to the control room, and that’s where U-1’s got to be.
“Once I’m inside, the telepath block will, of course, keep me from communicating. If the block goes down suddenly and I start giving you orders from in there, ignore them! The chances are I’ll be talking for U-1. You understand that—I’m giving you an order now to ignore any subsequent orders until you’ve taken me back aboard again?”
“I understand.”
“Good. Whatever happens, you’re to circle that yacht for twenty minutes after I enter, and at the exact end of that time you’re to blast it. If Pagadan or I, or both of us, get out before the time is up, that’s fine. But don’t pick us up, or let us come aboard, or pay any attention to any instructions we give you until you’ve burned the yacht. If U-1 is able to control us, it’s not going to do him any good. If he comes out himself—with or without us, in a lifeboat or armor—you blast him instantly, of course. Lab would like to study that brain all right, but this is one time I can’t oblige them. You’ve got all that?”
“I’ve got it, yes.”
“Then can you think of any other trick he might pull to get out of the squeeze?”
The robot was silent a moment. “No,” it said then. “I can’t. But U-1 probably could.”
“Yes, he probably could,” Iliff admitted thoughtfully. “But not in twenty minutes—and it will be less than that, because he’s going to be a terribly occupied little pirate part of the time, and a pretty shaky one, if nothing else, the rest of it. I may not be able to take him, but I’m sure going to make his head swim!”
* * *
It was going wrong before it started—but it was better not to think of that.
Actually, of course, he had never listed the entering of a hostile ship held by an experienced and desperate spacer among his favorite games. The powers that hurled a sliver of sub-steel alloys among the stars at dizzying multiples of the speed of light could be only too easily rearranged into a variety of appalling traps for any intruder.
U-1, naturally, knew every trick in the book and how to improve on it. On the other hand, he’d been given no particular reason to expect interception until he caught and blocked their telepath-beam—unless he had managed, in that space of time, to break down the Lannai’s mind-shields without killing her, which seemed a next to impossible feat even for him.
The chances were, then, that the spacer had been aware of pursuit for considerably less than an hour, and that wasn’t time enough to become really well prepared to receive a boarding party—or so Iliff hoped.
The bad part of it was that it was taking a full four minutes in his armor to bridge the gap between the motionless, glittering yacht and the robot, which had now begun circling it at medium range. That was a quite unavoidable safety measure for the operation as a whole—and actually U-1 should not be able to strike at him by any conceivable means before he was inside the yacht itself. But his brief outburst on the ship was the clearest possible warning that his emotional control had dropped suddenly, and inexplicably, to a point just this side of sanity.
He’d lived with normal fear for years—that was another thing; but only once before had he known a sensation comparable to this awareness of swirling, white-hot pools of unholy terror—held back from his mind now by the thinnest of brittle crusts. That had been long ago, in Lab-controlled training tests.
He knew better, however, than to try to probe into that sort of phenomenon just now. If he did, the probability was that it would spill full over him at about the moment he was getting his attack under way—which would be, rather definitely, fatal.
But there were other methods of emotional control, simple but generally effective, which might help steady him over the seconds remaining:
There was, for example, the undeniably satisfying reflection that not only had the major disaster of a Ceetal-dominated galaxy been practically averted almost as soon as it was recognized, but that in the same operation—a bonus from Lady Luck!—the long, long hunt for one of civilization’s most ruthless enemies was coming to an unexpectedly sudden end. Like the avenging power of Vega personified was the deadly machine behind him, guided by a mind which was both more and less than his own, as it traced its graceful geometrical paths about the doomed yacht. Each completed circle would presently indicate that exactly one more minute had passed of the twenty which were the utmost remaining of U-1’s life.