“And you didn’t mention them at all,” Seaton countered.
“Naturally not,” with a jerk of his head in the direction his daughter had taken. “How did it really go, boys?”
“Wonderful, really—” Dick began to enthuse.
“You tell me, Martin.”
“In the main, very well. Of course this was a very short flight, but we found nothing wrong with the engines or their controls; we are fairly certain that no major alterations will be necessary. The optical system needs some more work; the attractors and repellors are not at all what they should be in either accuracy or delicacy. The rifles work perfectly. The air-purifiers do not remove all odors, but the air after purification is safe to breathe and physiologically adequate. The water-recovery system does not work at all—it delivers sewage.”
“Well, that’s not too serious, with all the water you carry.”
“No, but it malfunctions so grossly that some mistake was made—obviously. It should be easy to find and to fix. For a thing so new, we both are very well satisfied with its performance.”
“You’re ready for Steel, then? I don’t know what they’ll do when they find out that you don’t intend to do anything with “Old Crip,” but they’ll do something.”
“I hope they blow their stacks,” Seaton said, grimly. “We’re ready for ’em, with a lot of stuff they never heard of and won’t like a little bit. Give us four or five days to straighten out the bugs Mart told you about—then let ’em do anything they want to.”
Chapter 11
THE AFTERNOON following the home-coming of the Skylark, Season and Dorothy returned from a long horseback ride in the park. After Seaton had mounted his motorcycle, Dorothy turned toward a bench in the shade of an old elm to watch a game of tennis on the court next door. Scarcely had she seated herself when a great copper-plated ball landed directly in front of her. A heavy steel door snapped open and a powerful figure clad in leather leaped out. The man’s face and eyes were covered by his helmet flaps and amber goggles.
Dorothy leaped to her feet with a shriek—Seaton had just left her and this spaceship was far too small to be the Skylark—it was the counterpart of “Old Crip,” which, she knew, could never fly. As these thoughts raced through her she screamed again and turned in flight; but the stranger caught her in three strides and she found herself helpless in a pair of arms as strong as Seaton’s.
Picking her up lightly, DuQuesne carried her over the lawn to his spaceship. Dorothy screamed wildly as she found that her fiercest struggles made no impression on her captor. Her clawing nails glanced harmlessly off the glass and leather of his helmet; her teeth were equally ineffective against his leather coat.
With the girl in his arms DuQuesne stepped into the vessel. The door clanged shut behind them. Dorothy caught a glimpse of another woman, tied tightly into one of the side seats.
“Tie her feet, Perkins,” DuQuesne ordered, holding her around the body so that her feet extended straight out in front of him. “She’s a fighting wildcat.”
As Perkins threw one end of a small rope around her ankles Dorothy doubted up her knees, drawing her feet as far away from him as she could. He stepped up carelessly and reached out to grasp her ankles. She straightened out viciously, driving her riding-boots into the pit of his stomach with all her strength.
It was a true solar-plexus blow; and, completely knocked out, Perkins staggered backward against the instrument-board. His outflung arm pushed the power lever out to its last notch, throwing full current through the bar, which was pointed straight up as it had been when they made their landing.
There was the creak of fabricated steel stressed almost to its limit as the vessel shot upward with a stupendous velocity, and only the ultra-protective and super-resilient properties of the floor saved their lives as they were thrown flat upon it by the awful force of their acceleration.
The maddened spaceship tore through the thin layer of the earth’s atmosphere in instants—it was through it and into the almost-perfect vacuum of interplanetary space before the thick steel hull was even warmed through.
Dorothy lay flat upon her back, just as she had fallen, unable even to move her arms, gaining each breath by a terrible effort. Perkins was a huddled heap under the instrument board. The other captive, Brookings’ ex-secretary, was in somewhat better case, as her bonds had snapped and she was lying in optimum position in one of the seats—forced into that position and held there, as the designer of those seats had intended. She, like Dorothy, was gasping for breath, her straining muscles barely able to force air into her lungs because of the paralyzing weight of her chest.
DuQuesne alone was able to move, and it required all of his Herculean strength to creep and crawl, snakelike, toward the instrument board. Finally, attaining his goal, he summoned all his strength to grasp, not the controlling lever, which he knew was beyond his reach, but a cutout switch only a couple of feet above his head. With a series of convulsive movements he fought his way up, first until he was crouching on elbows and knees, then into a squatting position. Then, placing his left hand under his right, he made a last supreme effort. Perspiration streamed from his face; his muscles stood out in ridges visible even under the heavy leather of his coat; his lips parted in a snarl over his locked teeth as he threw every ounce of his powerful body into an effort to force his right hand up to that switch. His hand approached it slowly—closed over it—pulled it out.
The result was startling. With the terrific power instantly cut off, and with not even the ordinary force of gravity to counteract the force DuQuesne was exerting, his own muscular effort hurled him upward, toward the center of the ship and against the instrument board. The switch, still in his grasp, was again closed. His shoulder crashed against the knobs which controlled the direction of the power bar, swinging it through a wide arc. As the ship darted off in the new direction with all its former acceleration he was hurled back against the board, tearing one end loose from its supports and falling unconscious to the floor on the other side. After what seemed like an eternity, Dorothy and the other girl felt their senses slowly leave them.
With its four unconscious passengers the ship hurtled through empty space, its already inconceivable velocity being augmented every second by a quantity almost equal to the velocity of light—driven furiously onward by the prodigious power of the disintegrating copper bar.
Seaton had gone only a short distance from his sweetheart’s home when, over the purring of his engine, he thought he heard Dorothy scream. He did not wait to make sure, but whirled his machine around and its purring changed to a bellowing roar as he opened the throttle. Gravel flew under skidding wheels as he made the turn into the Vaneman grounds at suicidal speed. He arrived at the scene just in time to see the door of the spaceship close. Before he could reach it the vessel disappeared, with nothing to mark its departure except a violent whirl of grass and sod, uprooted and carried high into the air by the vacuum of its wake. To the excited tennis players and the screaming mother of the abducted girl it seemed as though the great metal ball had vanished utterly. Only Seaton traced the line of debris in the air and saw, for a fraction of an instant, an infinitesimal black dot in the sky before it disappeared.
Interrupting the clamor of the young people, each of whom was trying to tell him what had happened, he spoke to Mrs. Vaneman rapidly but gently. “Mother, Dottie’s all right. Steel’s got her, but they won’t keep her long. Don’t worry, we’ll get her back. It may be a week or it may take a year; but we’ll bring her back!”
He leaped upon his motorcycle and shattered all speed laws on the way to Crane’s house.
“Mart!” he yelled. “They’ve got Dottie, in a ship made from our plans. Let’s go!”
“Slow down—don’t go off half-cocked. What do you plan?”
“Plan! Just chase ’em. and kill ’em!”
“Which way did they go, and when?”
“Straight up. Full power. Twenty minutes ago.”
“Too long ago. Straight up has moved five degrees. They may have covered a million miles, or they may have come down only a few miles away. Sit down and think—use your brain.”
Seaton sat down and pulled out his pipe, fighting for self-possession. Then he jumped up and ran into his room, coming back with an object compass whose needle pointed upward.
“DuQuesne did it?” he cried, exultantly. “This is still looking right at him. Now let’s go, and snap it up!”