“Could be . . . but . . .”
While the Kondalian prince was still standing, undecided, a call for help came in. A freight-plane was being pursued by a karlon a few hundred miles away.
“Now’s your time to study one, Dunark !” Seaton exclaimed. “Well drag him in here—get your scientists out here!”
The Skylark reached the monster before it reached the freighter. Seaton focused the attractor and threw on power, jerking the beast upward and backward. As it saw the puny size of the Skylark it opened its cavernous mouth and rushed to attack. Seaton, not wishing to have his ship stripped of repellors, turned them on. The monster was hurled backward to the point of equilibrium of the two forces, where it hung helpless, struggling frantically.
Seaton towed the captive back to the field. By judicious pushing and pulling, and by using every attractor and repellor the Skylark mounted, the three Earthmen finally managed to hold that monstrous body flat on the ground; but not even with the help of Dunark’s vessel could all of the terrible tentacles be pinned down. The scientists studied the creature as well as they could, from battleships and from heavily armored tanks.
“I wish we could kill it without blowing it to bits,” said Dunark, via radio. “Do you know of any way of doing it?”
“No—except maybe poison. And since we don’t know what would poison it, and couldn’t make it if we did, I don’t see much chance. Maybe we can tire him out, though, and find out where he lives.”
After the scholars had learned all they could, Seaton yanked the animal a few miles into the air and shut off the forces holding it. There was a crash and the karlon, knowing that this apparently insignificant vessel was its master, shot away in headlong flight.
“What was that noise, Dick?” Crane asked.
“I don’t know—a new one on me. Probably we cracked a few of his plates,” Seaton replied, as he drove the Skylark after the monster.
Pitted for the first time in its life against an antagonist who could both outfly and outfight it, the karlon put everything it had into its giant wings. It flew back over the city of Kondalek, over the outlying country, and out over the ocean. As they neared the Mardonalian border a fleet of warships came up to meet the monster; and Seaton, not wanting to let the enemy see the rejuvenated Skylark too closely, jerked the captive high into the air. It headed for the ocean in a perpendicular dive. Seaton focused an object-compass upon it.
“Go to it, sport,” he said. “We’ll follow you clear to the bottom, if you want to go that far!”
There was a tremendous double splash as pursued and pursuer struck the water. Dorothy gasped, seized a hand-hold, and shut both eyes; but she could scarcely feel the shock, so tremendous was the strength of the Skylark’s new hull and so enormous the power that drove her. Seaton turned on his searchlights and closed in. Deeper and deeper the quarry dove; it became clear that the thing was just as much at home in the water as it was in the air.
The lights revealed strange forms of life, among which were staring-eyed fishes, floundering blindly in the unaccustomed glare. As the karlon bored still deeper the living things became scarcer; but the Earthmen still saw from time to time the living nightmares that inhabited the oppressive depths of those strange seas. Continuing downward, the karlon went clear to the bottom and stopped there, stirring up a murk of ooze.
“How deep are we, Mart?”
“Something under four miles. No fine figures yet.”
“Of course not. Strain gauges okay?”
“Scarcely moved off their zeroes.”
“Ha! Good news, even though I knew—with my mind—that they wouldn’t. With our steel hull they’d’ve been ‘way tip in the red. Wonderful stuff, this arenak. Well, it looks as though he wants to sit it out here and we won’t find out anything that way. Come on, sport, let’s go somewhere else!” Spaceship and karlon went straight up—fast.
On reaching the surface, the monster decided to grab altitude, and went so high that Seaton was amazed.
“I wouldn’t have believed that such a thing could possibly fly in air so thin!” he exclaimed.
“It is thin up here,” Crane said. “Four point one six pounds per square inch.”
“This is his ceiling, I guess. Wonder what he’ll do next?”
As if in answer the karlon dived toward the lowlands of Kondal, a swampy region lush with poisonous vegetation and inhabited only by venomous reptiles. As it approached the surface Seaton slowed the Skylark down, remarking, “He’ll have to flatten out pretty quick or he’ll bust something.”
But it did not flatten out. Diving all out, it struck the morass head-first and disappeared.
Astonished at such an un-looked-for development, Seaton brought the Skylark to a halt and stabbed downward with the full power of the attractor. The first stab brought up nothing but a pillar of muck; the second, one wing and one arm; the third, the whole animal—fighting as savagely as ever.
Seaton eased the attractor’s grip. “If he digs in here again we’ll follow him.”
“Will the ship stand it?” DuQuesne asked.
“She’ll stand anything. But you’d better all hang on. I don’t know whether there’ll be much of a jar or not”
There was scarcely any jar at all. After the Skylark had been pulling herself downward, quite effortlessly, for something over one minute, Seaton glanced across at Crane; who was sitting still at his board doing nothing at all except smiling quietly to himself.
“What’re you grinning about, you Cheshire cat?”
“Just wondering what you came down here for and what you’re going to prove. These instruments are lying, unanimously and enthusiastically. Plastic flow, you know, not fluid.”
“Oh . . . uh-huh, check. No lights, radar, or . . . We could build a sounder, though, or a velocitometer.”
“There are quite a few things we can do, if you think it worth while to take the time.”
“It isn’t, of course.”
After a few minutes more, Seaton again hauled the monster to the surface and into the air. Again it attacked, with unabated fury.
“Well, that’s about enough of that, I guess. Apparently he isn’t going home—unless his home was down there in the mud, which I can’t quite believe. We can’t waste much more time, so you might as well put him away.”
The Mark Five struck; the ground rocked and heaved under the concussion.
“Hey, I just thought of something!” Seaton exclaimed. “We could have taken him out and set him into an orbit around the planet. Without air, water, or food he’d die sometime—I think. Then they’d have a perfect specimen to study”
“Why, Dick, what a horrible idea!” Dorothy’s eyes flashed as she turned on him. “You wouldn’t want even such a monster as that to die that way!”
“No, I guess I wouldn’t really. He’s a game fighter. So we’ll let Dunark do it sometime, if he wants to.”
The Skylark reached the palace dock just before fourth-meal, and while they were all eating Dunark told Seaton that the copper plant would be in production in a few hours, and that the first finished bar would roll at point thirty-four—in other words, immediately after the first-meal of the following “day”.
“Fine!” Seaton exclaimed. “You’ll be ready in the Kondal. Take the first eight bars and be on your way. F-f-f-f-t! There goes Mardonale!”
“Impossible, as you already know, if you think a little.”
“Oh . . . I see . . . the Code. I wouldn’t want you to break it, of course . . . but couldn’t it be . . . say, stretched just enough to cover a situation like this, which has never come up before?”
“It can not,” Dunark said, stiffly.
“But s’pose . . . Pardon me, Dunark. Ignorance—I never really scanned it before. You’re right. I’ll play ball.”
“Smatter, Dick?” Dorothy whispered into his ear. “What did you do to him? I thought he was going to blow his top.”
“I said something I should have known better than to say,” he replied, loudly enough so that Dunark, too, could hear. “Also, I shouldn’t have told you the schedule I had in mind. It’s been changed. The Skylark gets her copper first, then the Kondal. And Dunark doesn’t leave until we do. Why, I don’t know, anymore than Dunark can figure out, with all he got from my mind, why you and I insist on wearing clothes. A matter of code.”
“But, just that little extra time wouldn’t make any difference, would it?”
“One chance in a million, maybe, with the bars rolling off the line so fast—no, after all this time, half an hour more won’t make any difference. I suppose your men are loading the platinum, Dunark.”
“Yes. They’re filling Number Three storeroom full.”