But Harding should have a recharger. Harold slid back slowly off the desk and turned towards Harding’s body.
And there, coming towards him in a soft heavy rush across the littered office, clutching a thick metal spike in one human-looking hand, was McNulty.
Harold slipped back behind the desk. McNulty lunged across the desk with the spike, then lumbered around it; and as he came on, his big shape seemed to be blurring oddly from moment to moment. Then a hard deep droning noise swelled in the air, and Harold knew the Rilf’s thorax was spewing out its store of toziens.
The purpose was immediately obvious. The toziens couldn’t touch him, but they provided a distraction. In an instant Harold seemed enclosed in roaring thunders, and the office had turned into something seen through a shifting syrupy liquid. McNulty, in addition, hardly needed help. He was clumsy but strong and fast; his broad white face kept looming up distortedly in the tozien screen near Harold. For a nightmarish minute or two, it was all Harold could do to keep some sizable piece of office equipment between the Rilf and himself. McNulty didn’t give him a chance to get near Ruse’s or Harding’s guns. Then finally McNulty stumbled on a broken chair and fell; and with the tozien storm whirling about him, Harold managed to wrench the spike away from the Rilf. As McNulty came back up on his feet, he moved in, the spike gripped in both hands, and rammed it deep into what, if McNulty had been human, would have been McNulty’s abdomen. He had no idea where McNulty’s vital organs were or what they were like, but the spike reached one of them. McNulty’s mouth stretched wide. If he made any sound, it was lost in the droning uproar. His big body swayed left and right; then he went down heavily on his back and lay still, the spike’s handle sticking up out of him. His eyes remained open.
Harold leaned back for an instant against the edge of a desk, gasping for breath. The toziens still boiled around, sounding like a swarm of gigantic metallic insects, but they seemed to have drawn away a little; he began to see the office more clearly. Then one of them appeared suddenly on McNulty’s chest. It stayed there, quivering. Another appeared, and another. In a minute, McNulty’s body was covered with them, clustering, shifting about, like flies gathering thick on carrion. Harold’s skin crawled as he watched them. They were specialized cells produced by the Rilf body, pliable or steel-hard and razor-edged, depending on what they were doing. McNulty’s remote ancestor had been a hunting animal, too awkward perhaps to overtake nimble prey, which had evolved a method of detaching sections of itself to carry out the kill, not unlike the hawks men had trained on old Earth to hunt on sight. McNulty still had been able to use his toziens in that manner, releasing one or more under an inhibition which impelled them to return to him after bringing down a specific victim. Their use by the thousands for uninhibited wholesale slaughter evidently had been a more recent Rilf development, perhaps not attained until they had acquired a civilization and scientific methods. Under those conditions, the toziens ranged over an area of a dozen miles, destroying whatever life they found for almost fifty hours, until their furious energy was exhausted and they died.
Harding had been carrying a recharger, and Harold replenished his guns with it before placing it in his pocket. He looked over once more at McNulty’s body, motionless under its glittering blanket, and left the office by the door opposite to the one through which he had entered. Not all the toziens had returned to McNulty. An unidentifiable number still darted about, and some stayed near Harold, attracted by his motion. He knew it because they weren’t inaudible now but continued to make droning or whiffing sounds as they had during McNulty’s attack. Perhaps McNulty’s death was having an effect on their life processes. At any rate, they no longer seemed to have any particular interest in him.
Limping a little because of the charge he’d stopped in his heel, he followed the narrow passage beyond the door to another doorway. There, at the bottom of a short flight of steps, the brightly lit deserted control room whispered and hummed. Harold hurried down the steps, looked around.
He found the space lock controls almost immediately. And they were a puzzler. The instruments indicated that the lock was open to its fullest extent. But the screen view of the landing area showed only the skiff standing there, and the screen view of the force-field sections containing the space lock showed it wasn’t activated, was shut tight. He shifted the controls quickly back and forth. There was no change in the screens. He scowled at the indicators, left them at the shut and secured mark, turned to other instruments nearby, began manipulating them.
In a minute, he had the answer. He sat down at a console, heard himself make a short laughing sound. No wonder Jake Hiskey had worked so furiously to break through into the hidden passages leading into the interior of the asteroid. For every practical purpose, the control room was dead. Power was here, the gadgetry appeared to be operating. But it did and could do nothing. None of it. Nothing at all.
He drew a long slow breath, looked up at the ceiling.
“Is somebody listening?” he asked aloud. “Can you see me here?”
* * *
There was a momentary excited babble of voices, male and female. Elisabeth? He discovered the speaker then, ten feet away. “Elisabeth?” he asked, a sudden rawness in his throat.
“Yes, I’m here, Harold. We’re all here!” Elisabeth’s voice told him. “Harold, we couldn’t see you. We didn’t know what was happening out—”
“The scanners, Mr. Gage.” That was Alston. “The scanning circuits in that section have been shorted. We were afraid of drawing attention to you by speaking. And—”
“I understand,” Harold said. “Better let me talk first because this thing isn’t finished. Captain Hiskey and the men he smuggled down here from the ship are dead. So is McNulty—the Rilf. But McNulty’s weapon isn’t dead and should stay effective for the next two days—make it two and a half, to be safe. You can’t come into this section before then, and you can’t go anywhere else on the asteroid where it might have spread. It can’t hurt me, but any of you would be killed immediately.”
“Just what is this biological weapon?” Alston’s voice asked.
Harold told him briefly about the toziens, added, “You may have thrown up those screen barriers about this section fast enough to trap them here. But if you didn’t, they’re all over the surface of the asteroid. And if they’re given an opening anywhere, they’ll come pouring down into it.”
“Fortunately,” Alston said, “they have been trapped in the space lock section. Thanks to your prompt warning, Mr. Gage.”
“What makes you sure?”
“They were registering on biological sensing devices covering that section until the scanners went off. The impressions were difficult to define but match your description. Every section of the asteroid is compartmentalized by energy screens at present, and no similar impressions have been obtained elsewhere. Nevertheless, we shall take no chances. We’ll remain sealed off from the surface for the next sixty hours.”
“You seem to have an override on the instruments here,” Harold said.
“An automatic override,” Alston acknowledged. “It cuts in when the asteroid shifts to emergency status. The possibility of a successful raid always had to be considered. So there is an interior control room.”
Harold sighed. Jake Hiskey and McNulty, he thought, hadn’t been alone in underestimating these people. Well, let’s get the mess cleaned up . . . “You’ve asked the SP to do something about the Prideful Sue?”
“Yes,” Alston said. “They’ll be here within a few hours.”
Tozien whirring dipped past Harold’s face, moved off. “She has heavier armament than they might expect,” he said. “Eight men and another Rilf on board. Our gunnery isn’t the worst. But tell them to give her a chance.”
“I’ll do that. And I’ll advise the police to take precautions.”
“Yes, they should. There’s one more thing then. We guided a Rilf ship here and left it outside Earthsystem. It’s manned by more than half a hundred Rilfs. We’ve been negotiating to have them take a hand for pay in Earth’s miniwars. They may still try to go ahead with the deal. I think they should be turned back.”
“Where is that ship now?” Alston sounded startled.
“No fixed position. But it should be moving into Earthsystem to rendezvous on your orbit. If the SP look for it, they’ll find it.”
Alston began to reply, but his voice blurred out for Harold. Almost as he’d stopped speaking, something had slammed into his back, below his right shoulder blade. The impact threw him out of the chair. He went on down to the floor, rolled over, twisting, on his left side, stopped, and had one of the guns in his right hand, pointed up.