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‘Pull yourselves together, then. Act unconcerned, casual; particularly when we get to the Administration Building. Talk about the weather—or, better yet, about the honeymoon you are going to take on Chickladoria.’
Thus there was nothing visibly unusual about the group of three which strolled into the building and into Graves’ private office. The fat man raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m taking them to the private laboratory,’ Fairchild said, as he touched the yellow button and led the two toward the private elevator. ‘Frankly, young folks, I am a scared—yes, a badly scared man.”
This statement, so true and yet so misleading, resolved the young couple’s inchoate doubts. Entirely unsuspectingly, they followed the Senior Radiationist into the elevator and, after it had stopped, along a corridor. They paused as he unlocked and opened a door; they stepped unquestioningly into the room at his gesture. He did not, however, follow them in. Instead, the heavy metal slab slammed shut, cutting off Jackie’s piercing shriek of fear.
‘You might as well cut out the racket,’ came from a speaker in the steel ceiling of the room. ‘Nobody can hear you but me.”
‘But Mr. Graves, I thought … Dr. Fairchild told us … we were going to tell him about…’
‘You’re going to tell nobody nothing. You saw too much and know too much, that’s all.’
‘Oh, that’s it!’ Ryder’s mind reeled as some part of the actual significance of what he had seen struck home. ‘But listen! Jackie didn’t see anything—she had her eyes shut all the time —and doesn’t know anything. You don’t want to have the murder of such a girl as she is on your mind, I know. Let her go and she’ll never say a word—we’ll both swear to it—or you could…’
‘Why? Just because she’s got a face and a shape?’ The fat man sneered. ‘No soap, Junior. She’s not that much of a …’ He broke off as Fairchild entered his office.
‘Well, how about it? How bad is it?’ Graves demanded.
‘Not bad at all. Everything’s under control.’
‘Listen, doctor!’ Ryder pleaded. ‘Surely you don’t want to murder Jackie here in cold blood? I was just suggesting to Graves that he could get a therapist…’
‘Save your breath,’ Fairchild ordered. ‘We have important
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things to think about. You two die.’
‘But why?’ Ryder cried. He could as yet perceive only a fraction of the tremendous truth. ‘I tell you, it’s …’
‘We’ll let you guess,” said Fairchild.
Shock upon shock had been too much for the girl’s overstrained nerves. She fainted quietly and Ryder eased her down to the cold steel floor.
‘Can’t you give her a better cell than this?’ he protested then. ‘There’s no … it isn’t decent!’
‘You’ll find food and water, and that’s enough.’ Graves laughed coarsely. ‘You won’t live long, so don’t worry about conveniences. But keep still. If you want to know what’s going on, you can listen, but one more word out of you and I cut the circuit. Go ahead, Doc, with what you were going to say.’
‘There was a fault in the rock. Very small, but a little of the finest smoke seeped through. Barney must have been a sniffer before to be able to smell the trace of the stuff that was drifting down the hill. I’m having the whole cave tested with a leak-detector and sealed bottle-tight. The record can stand it that Barney—he was a snake-tender, you know—died of snake-bite. That’s almost the truth, too, by the way.’
‘Fair enough. Now, how about these two?’
‘Um … m. We’ve got to hold the risk at absolute minimum.’ Fairchild pondered briefly. ‘We can’t disintegrate them this month, that’s sure. They’ve got to be found dead, and our books are full. We’ll have to keep them alive—where they are now is as good a place as any—for a week.’
‘Why alive? We’ve kept stiffs in cold storage before now.”
‘Too chancey. Dead tissues change too much. You weren’t courting investigation then; now we are. We’ve got to keep our noses clean. How about this? They couldn’t wait any longer and got married today. You, big-hearted philanthropist that you are, told them they could take their two weeks vacation now for a honeymoon—you’d square it with their department heads. They come back in about ten days, to get settled; go up the valley to see the vortex; and out. Anything in that set-up we can’t fake a cover for.’
‘It looks perfect to me. We’ll let ’em enjoy life for ten days, right where they are now. Hear that, Ryder?’
‘Yes, you pot-bellied …’
The fat man snapped a switch.
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It is not necessary to go into the details of the imprisonment. Doggedly and skillfully though he tried, Ryder could open up no avenue of escape or of communication; and Jacqueline, facing the inevitability of death, steadied down to meet it. She was a woman. In minor crises she had shrieked and had hidden her face and had fainted: but in this ultimate one she drew from the depths of her woman’s soul not only the power to overcome her own weakness, but also an extra something with which to sustain and fortify her man.
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4: ‘Storm’ Cloud on Deka
In the vortex control laboratory on Tellus, Cloud had just gone into Philip Strong’s office.
‘No trouble?’ the Lensman asked, after greetings had been exchanged.
‘Uh-huh. Simple as blowing out a match. You quit worrying about me long ago, didn’t you?”
‘Pretty much, except for the impossibility of training anybody else to do it. We’re still working on that angle, though. You’re looking fit.’
He was. He carried no scars—the Phillips treatment had taken care of that. His face looked young and keen; his hard-schooled, resilient body was in surprisingly fine condition for that of a , man crowding forty so nearly. He no longer wore his psychic trauma visibly; it no longer obtruded itself between him and those with whom he worked; but in his own mind he was sure that it still was, and always would be, there. But the Lensman, studying him narrowly—and, if the truth must be known, using his Lens as well—was not sure, and was well content.
‘Not bad for an old man, Phil. I could whip a wildcat, and spot him one bite and two scratches. But what I came in here for, as you may have suspected, is—where do I go from here? Spica or Rigel or Canopus? They’re the worst, aren’t they?’
‘Rigel’s is probably the worst in property damage and urgency. Before we decide, though, I wish you’d take a good look at this data from Dekanore III. See if you see what I do.’
‘Huh? Dekanore III?’ Cloud was surprised. ‘No trouble there, is there? They’ve only got one, and it’s ‘way down in Class Z somewhere.’
‘Two now. It’s the new one I’m talking about. It’s acting funny—damned funny.’
Cloud went through the data, brow furrowed in concentration; then sketched three charts and frowned,
‘I see what you mean. “Damned funny” is right. The toxicity is too steady, but at the same time the composition of the effluvium is too varied. Inconsistent. However, there’s no real attempt at a gamma analysis—nowhere near enough data for one—this could be right; they’re so utterly unpredictable. The
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observers were inexperienced, I take it, with medical and chemical bias?”
‘Check. That’s the way I read it.’
‘Well, I’ll say this much—I never saw a gamma chart that would accept half of this stuff, and I can’t even imagine what the sigma curve would look like. Boss, what say I skip over there and get us a full reading on that baby before she goes orthodox —or, should I say, orthodoxly unorthodox?’
‘However you say it, that’s my thought exactly; and we have a good exuse for giving it priority. It’s killing more people than all three of the bad ones together.’
‘If I can’t fix the toxicity with exciters I’ll throw a solid cordon around it to keep people away. I won’t blow it out, though, until I find out why it’s acting so—if it is. Clear ether, chief, I’m practically there!’
It did not take long to load Cloud’s flitter aboard a Dekanore-bound liner. Half-way there however, an alarm rang out and the dread word ‘Pirates!’ resounded through the ship.
Consternation reigned, for organized piracy had disappeared with the fall of the Council of Boskone. Furthermore, this was not in any sense a treasure ship; she was an ordinary passenger liner.
She had had little enough warning—her communications officer had sent out only a part of his first distress call when the blanketing interference jammed his channels. The pirate— a first-class superdreadnought—flashed up and a visual beam drove in.
‘Go inert,’ came the terse command. ‘We’re coming aboard.’
‘Are you completely crazy?’ The liner’s captain was surprised and disgusted, rather than alarmed. ‘If not, you’ve got the wrong ship. Everything aboard—including any ransom you could get for our passenger list—wouldn’t pay your expenses.”