Shiro and his bride were, for Earthmen, very fast indeed. Their chairs, too, flew away
from the table the merest instant after the invaders appeared and both took off in low,
flat dives.
Lotus struck her man with her left shoulder; and, using flawlessly the momentum of her
mass and speed, swung him around and put her small but very hard knee exactly
where it would do the most good. Then, as he doubled over in agony, she put her left
arm around his head, seized her left wrist with her right hand, and twisted with all the
strength of arms, shoulders, torso and legs-and the man’s neck broke with a snap
audible throughout the room.
And Shiro took care of his man with equal dexterity, precision, and speed; and of the
invaders, then there were none.
Seaton was a microsecond slower than either the Osnomians or the two Japanese; but
he was fast enough to see what was happening, take in the fact that the forces already
engaged were enough to handle the six hoodlums and, in mid-flight, divert his leap
toward the remote-control headset. He was blindingly certain of one thing: It was Marc
DuQuesne who had unleashed these killers on them. And he was equally certain of that
fact’s consequence: The truce was off. DuQuesne was to be destroyed.
Wherefore what happened next astonished him even more than if it had occurred at
another time.
A strident roar of klaxons filled the room. It was the loudest sound any human had ever
heard-without permanent damage; it was calculated to come right up to the threshold of
destruction. There was to be no chance that anyone would fail to hear this particular
signal.
His hand on the headset, Seaton paused. The bodies of the six gunmen had not yet all
reached the floor, but the other Skylarkers were staring too. They had never expected
to hear that sound except in test.
It was the dire warning that they were under attack massive attack-attack on a scale
and of a persistence that they had never expected to encounter in real combat, with
whatever forces.
For that klaxon warning meant that under the fierce. impact of the enemy weapons now
so suddenly and mercilessly beating down on them the life of the Valeron’s defensive
screens was to be measured only in seconds-and very few of them!
“Yipe!” he yelled then. “Control-room fast!” His voice of course went unheard in the
clamor of the horns; but his yelling had been purely reflexive, anyway. While uttering
the first syllable he was energizing beams of force that hurtled all eight of the party
through ultra-high-speed locks that snapped open in front of them and crashed shut
behind them-down into the neutral-gray chamber at the base of the giant Brain.
Seaton rammed his head into his master controller and began furiously but accurately
to think . . . and as he sat there, face harsh and white and strained, a vast structure of
inoson, interlaced with the heaviest fields of force generable by the Valeron’s mighty
engines, came into being around the Brain and the other absolutely vital components of
the worldlet’s core.
After a few minutes of fantastic effort Seaton sighed gustily and tried to grin. “We’re
holding ’em and we’re getting away,” he said. “But I bad to let ’em whittle us down to
just about a nub before I could spare power enough to grab a lunch off of them while
they were getting a square meal off of us.”
He spoke the exact truth. The attack had been so incredibly violent that in order to
counter it he had had to apply the full power of the, Valeron, designed to protect a
surface of over three million square kilometers, to an area of less than thirty thousand.
“But what was it, Dick?” Dorothy shrieked. “What could it have been-possibly?”
“I don’t know. But you realize, don’t you, that it was two separate, unrelated attacks?
Not one?”
“Why, I . . . I don’t think I realize anything yet.”
“Those guns were Colts,” Seaton said, flatly. “Forty-fives. Made in the U.S.A. So that
part of it was DuQuesne’s doing. He wanted-still wants-the Valeron. Bad. But those
super-energy super-weapons were definitely something else -as sure as God made
apples. No possible ship could put that much stuff out, let alone DuQuesne’s Capital D.
So the question rises and asks itself-”
“Just a minute, Dick!” Crane broke in. “Even granting so extraordinary a coincidence as
two separate attacks-”
“Coincidence, hell!” Seaton snarled. “There is no such thing. And why postulate an
impossibility when you’ve got Blackie DuQuesne? He sucked me in, as sure as hell’s a
mantrap-you can bet your case buck on that. And he outfoxed himself doing it, for all
the tea in China!”
“What do you mean, Dick?” Dorothy demanded. “How could he have?”
“Plain as the nose on . . . plainer! He got it from somewhere, the son of a-” Seaton bit
the noun savagely off–probably from Klazmon, that Galaxy DW-427-LU up ahead there
that we were heading for is full of bad Indians. So he honeyed up to the Jelmi, got that
fourth-dimensional gadget off of them and tried to kill us with it. And he would have
succeeded, except for the pure luck of our having lowered our gravity so drastically on
account of Dunark and Sitar.”
“I see,” Crane said. “And the Indians jumped us when he pulled the trigger-perhaps
attracted by his use of the ,gadget’.”
“That’s my guess, anyway,” Seaton admitted. “DuQuesne thought he was allowing
plenty of leeway in both time and space for his operation. But he wasn’t. He had no
more idea than we did, Mart, that any such forces as those could possibly be delivered
at such extreme range. And one simple, easy lie-the coordinates of the Llurdan galaxy-
was all he had to tell me and defend against my probe.”
DuQuesne’s attention was wrenched from his timer by a glare of light from a visiplate.
He glanced at it, his jaw dropping in surprise; then his hands flashed to the controls of
his fourth-dimensional transmitter and his six men appeared-four of them gruesomely
headless. For a moment all six stood stiffly upright; then, as the supporting forces
vanished, all six bodies slumped bonelessly to the floor.
DuQuesne, after making quickly sure that the two were in fact as dead as were the four,
shrugged his shoulders and flipped the bodies out into deep space. Then, donning
practically opaque goggles, he studied the incandescently glaring plate-to see that the
Skylark of Yaleron now looked like a minor sun.
Involuntarily he caught his breath. The Valeron’s screens were failing-failing fast.
Course after course, including her mighty zones of force, her every defensive layer was
flaring into and through the violet and going black.
DuQuesne clenched his fists; set his teeth so hard that his jaw-muscles stood out in
bands and lumps. Anything to put out that much of that kind of stuff would have to be
vast indeed. Incredibly vast. Nothing could be that big-nothing even pertaining, as far as
DuQuesne knew, to any civilization or culture of the known universe.
Relaxing a little, he assembled a working projection, but before sending it out he
paused in thought.
Seaton hadn’t attacked; he wasn’t the type to. He wouldn’t have, even if he could have
done so at that range. So the strangers, whoever or whatever they might be, were the
aggressors, with a capital “A.” Guilty of unprovoked and reasonless aggression;
aggression in the first degree. So what Tammon had told him about that galaxy being
dominated by “inimical life-forms” was the understatement of the year. And he,
DuQuesne himself, had triggered the attack; the fact that it had followed his own attack
so nearly instantly made that a certainty. How had he triggered it? Almost certainly by
the use of the fourth-dimensional transmitter . . .
But how? He didn’t know and he couldn’t guess . . . and at the moment it didn’t make a
lick of difference. He hadn’t used any sixth-order stuff since then and he sure wouldn’t
use any now for a good while. If he did anything at all, he’d pussyfoot it, but good. He
didn’t want any part of anything that could manhandle the Skylark of Valeron like that.
His Capital D was small enough and far enough back-he hoped!-to avoid detection. No
he wouldn’t do a single damn thing except look on.
Fascinated, DuQuesne stared into the brilliance of his plate. All the Valeron’s screens
were down now. Even the ultra-powerful innermost zone-the wall shield itself, the last
line of defense of the bare synthetic of the worldlet’s outer skin-was going fast. Huge
black areas appeared, but they were black only momentarily. Such was the power of
that incredible assault that thousands of tons of inoson flared in an instant into ragingly
incandescent vapor; literally exploding; exploding with such inconceivable violence as to