“I’m sure I can-I’ll do anything to help us, or you, get away from this horrible . . .” Her voice ceased as Roger broke
the ether-wall of her apartment and walked towards the divan, upon which she crouched in wide-eyed, helpless,
trembling terror.
“Get ready, Bradley!” Costigan directed tersely. “He left Clio’s ether-wall off, so that any abnormal signals would
be relayed to him from his desk-he knows that there’s no chance of anyone disturbing him in that room. But I’m
holding a beam on that switch, so that the wall is on, full strength. No matter what we do now, he can’t get a roam-
ing. I’ll have to hold the beam exactly in place, though, so you’ll have to do the dirty work. Tear out that red wire and
kill those two guards. You know how to kill a robot” don’t you?”
“Yes-break his eye-lenses and his ear-drums and he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and send out distress calls . . . Got
’em both. Now what?”
“Open my door-the shield switch is to the right.” Costigan’s door flew open and the Triplanetary captain leaped into
the room.
“Now for our armor!” he cried.
“Not yet!” snapped Costigan. He was standing rigid, goggled eyes staring immovably at a spot on the ceiling. “I can’t
move a millimeter until you’ve closed Clio’s ether wall switch. If I take this ray off it for a second we’re sunk. Five
floors up, straight ahead down a corridor fourth door on right. When you’re at the switch you’ll feel my ray on your
watch. Snap it up!”
“Right,” and the captain leaped away at a pace to be equaled by few men of half his years.
Soon he was hack, and after Costigan had tested the ether-wall of the “bridal suite” to make sure that no warning
signal from his desk or his servants could reach Roger within it, the two officers hurried away towards the room in
which their space-armor was.
“Too bad they don’t wear uniforms,” panted Bradley”
short of breath from the many flights of stairs. “Might have helped some as disguise.”
“I doubt it-with so many robots around, they’ve probably got signals that we couldn’t understand anyway. If we meet
anybody it’ll mean a battle. Hold it!” Peering through walls with his spy-ray, Costigan had seen two men
approaching, blocking an intersecting corridor into which they must turn. “Two of ’em, a man and a robot-the
robot’s on your side. We’ll wait here, right at the corner when they round it take ’em!’ and Costigan put away his
goggles in readiness for strife.
All unsuspecting, the two pirates came into view, and as they appeared the two officers struck. Costigan, on the in-
side, drove a short, hard right blow into the human pirate’s abdomen. The fiercely-driven fist sank to the wrist into
the soft tissues and the stricken man collapsed. But even as the blow landed Costigan had seen that there was a third
enemy, following close behind the two he had been watching, a pirate who was even then training a ray projector
upon him. Reacting automatically, Costigan swung his unconscious opponent around in front of him” so that it was
into an enemy’s body that the vicious ray tore, and not into his own. Crouching down into the smallest possible
compass, he straightened out with the lashing force of a mighty steel spring, hurling the corpse straight at the
flaming mouth of the projector. The weapon crashed to the floor and dead pirate and living went down in a heap.
Upon that heap Costigan hurled himself, feeling for the pirate’s throat. But the fellow had wriggled clear, and
countered with a gouging thrust that would have torn out the eyes of a slower man, following it up instantly with a
savage kick for the groin. No automaton this, geared and set to perform certain fixed duties with mechanical
precision, but a lithe, strong man in hard training, fighting with every foul trick known to his murderous ilk.
But Costigan was no tyro in the art of dirty fighting. Few indeed were the maiming tricks of foul combat unknown
to even the rank and file of the highly efficient under-cover branch of the Triplanetary Service; and Costigan, a
Sector Chief, knew them all. Not for pleasure” sportsmanship, nor million-dollar purses did those secret agents
use Nature’s weapons. They came to grips only when it could not possibly be avoided” but when they were forced to
fight in that fashion they went in with but one grim purpose-to kill, and to kill in the shortest possible space of
time. Thus it was that Costigan’s opening soon came. The pirate launched a vicious coup de sabot, which Costigan
avoided by a lightning shift. It was a slight shift” barely enough to make the kicker miss, and two powerful hands
closed upon that flying foot in midair like the sprung jaws of a bear-trap. Closed and twisted viciously, in the same
fleeting instant. There was a shriek” smothered as a heavy boot crashed to its carefully predetermined mark-the
pirate was out, definitely and permanently.
The struggle had lasted scarcely ten seconds, coming to its close just as Bradley finished blinding and deafening
the robot. Costigan picked up the projector, again donned his spy-ray goggles, and the two hurried on.
“Nice work, Chief-it must be a gift to rough-house the way you do,” Bradley exclaimed. “That’s why you took the
live one?”
“Practice helps some, too-I’ve been in brawls before” and I’m a lot younger and maybe a bit faster than you are,”
Costigan explained briefly, penetrant gaze rigidly to the fore as they ran along one corridor after another.
Several more guards, both living and mechanical” were encountered on the way, but they were not permitted to
offer any opposition. Costigan saw them first. In the furious beam of the projector of the dead pirate they were
driven into nothingness, and the two officers sped on to the room which Costigan had located from afar. The three
suits of Triplanetary space armor had been locked up in a cabinet; a cabinet whose doors Costigan literally blew off
with a blast of force rather than consume time in tracing the power leads.
“I feel like something now!” Costigan, once more encased in his own armor, heaved a great sigh of relief.
“Rough-and-tumble’s all right with one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won’t have any too
much stuff as it is. We’ve got to take Clio’s suit along we’ll carry it down to the door of the power room” drop it
there, and pick it up on the way back.”
Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode towards the power plant-the very heart of the im-
mense fortress of space. Guards were encountered, and captains-officers who signaled frantically to their chief,
since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted
silence-but the enemy beams were impotent against the ether walls of that armor; and the pirates, without armor in
the security of their own planetoid as they were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons. As
they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio’s voice raised in her first and last appeal, an
appeal wrung from her against her will by the extremity of her position.
“Conway! Hurry! His eyes-they’re tearing me apart! Hurry, dear!” In the horror-filled tones both men read
clearly-however inaccurately-the girl’s dire extremity. Each saw plainly a happy, carefree young Earth-girl, upon
her first trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall with an over-brained, under-conscienced human machine -a
superintelligent, but lecherous and unmoral mechanism of flesh and blood, acknowledging no authority, ruled by
nothing save his own scientific drivings and the almost equally powerful urges of his desires and passions! She
must have fought with every resource at her command. She must have wept and pleaded, stormed and raged” feigned
submission and played for time-and her torment had not touched in the slightest degree the merciless and gloating
brain of the being who called himself Roger. Now his tantalizing, ruthless cat-play would be done, the horrible
grey-brown face would be close to hers-she wailed her final despairing message to Costigan and attacked that
hideous face with the fury of a tigress.
Costigan bit off a bitter imprecation. “Hold him just a second longer, sweetheart!” he cried, and the power room
door vanished.
Through the great room the two Lewistons swept at full aperture and at maximum power, two rapidly-opening fans
of death and destruction. Here and there a guard” more rapid than his fellows, trained a futile projector-a projector
whose magazine exploded at the touch of that frightful field of force, liberating instantaneously its thousands upon
thousands of kilowatt-hours of stored-up energy.
Through the delicately adjusted, complex mechanisms the destroying beams tore. At their touch armatures burned
out, high-tension leads volatilized in crashing, high-voltage arcs” masses of metal smoked and burned in the path of