Chapter X

Stealthily Deanne picked her way from shadow to shadow toward the smooth walled depression, her feet scarcely touching the planetoid's riven surface in the slight gravity. Yards from it, she got to her stomach and crawled to the lip, peered over.

Every muscle in her body went tense as she saw the hidden hatch at the crater's bottom sliding soundlessly closed.

As she had thought, the crater wall was artificially magnetized, and in a half crouch, clinging to the deepest shadow cast by the grotesque ball of Jupiter above her, she edged her way downward. She reached the spot where the camouflaged hatch had closed, and, again prone, waited.

There was only the space of seconds before the round slab of metal began opening! She tensed, and with her helmet touching the ground, heard the sound of heavy footsteps climbing upward, making the hollow, clanging sounds of space boots on metallic ladder rungs.

A space helmet suddenly thrust itself above the opening, and for a frozen second, she could see the man's face. It was not Jon's! There was a look of stunned surprise upon it for that timeless moment, and Deanne knew even as she moved that it was this space between seconds or never at all.

With all the strength in her body she swung her right leg, swung the heavy toe of her spaceboot straight at the man's face plate!

He tried vainly to dodge, to drop downward to safety. Had Deanne waited a heartbeat longer she would have missed. She felt the terrible impact as her boot hit squarely, shattered the thin plastiglass of the helmet, went through it to strike flesh and bone.

Instinctively her eyes went shut tight as the man inside the ruptured suit virtually exploded.

But there was no time to think of what she'd done, to wonder if this was murder or the duty of warfare: the man was dead. Half in, half out of the yawning hatchway, sprawled like a bloody puppet, his weapons still in their holsters at his sides. She took them. And even in the light gravity of Callisto, it took nearly all the strength she could summon and all her courage to haul the limp thing that had been a man all the way out of the gaping shaft and then push it, over and over, away from her, away from the hatch that had already begun to automatically swing downward.

She squirmed quickly beneath it, found the ladder rungs with her boots, and then clung to the slender ladder in the sudden darkness without moving, her muscles trembling at the edge of panic. To misjudge now was to fall hideously through blackness to certain destruction only God knew how abysmally far below.

Then somehow she steeled herself. Made her legs move mechanically; found the next rung below. And then the next and the next.

* * * * *

The red blindness of exhaustion under the blaze of desert suns flooded over his numbed brain in a dark backwash of pain, and with it were all the past tortures of Prokyman stockades and the hopeless defeat that had lain at the fringe of every movement of his life; Jon Kane could not see and could hear only weirdly distorted sounds for he was, if not yet dead, then close to death, and only through some freak of neural reaction, not quite beyond the threshold of consciousness. But he had not spoken. And now that power was quite lost to him.

But he could still somehow feel the animal presence of his torturers, ringed tight around him yet in the tiny, glaring cubicle of polished steel; there was new pain in his shattered face, and he knew it was the freezing carbon dioxide spray designed to shock him back to full consciousness. But now it was only a new pain.

There was the voice of Haine.

"Hurry up, get him around. If he cashes in before we get anything out of him Stine'll blow a connection. That's a man who hates to lose on an investment."

"Didn't invest much. Didn't risk much either, if you ask me. What else was that broken down tank good for anyway? I say kill the--"

"Get him around and shut up."

The freezing pain again. But the darkness held.

New sounds. Stine.

"What have you been trying to do, kill him outright? How much have you gotten?"

"Nothing yet, sir. He's either the craziest man in the universe or the toughest. Or else he doesn't know anything."

"Nonsense! The things this man knows can put us all in the shade, and don't you forget it! But if we don't find out just how much his people still know--or don't know--it'll be your necks as well as mine! They realize there's somebody else besides themselves in Space, now."

The darkness seemed to be lifting a little; the numbness seemed to be thawing from his brain, and the pain became more agonizingly acute.

"We'll try again, sir--"

"Never mind. There's a better use for this fellow than killing him by inches. Perhaps he places little value on his own life, but when it comes to those of a few billion people. Yes. Haine, do you think you could wreck a Geejay?"

"Wreck a--" There was the sound of hoarse breathing from a half dozen men, and Jon felt something stir inside him, but it was as though he were a thing disconnected from his physical body; that he no longer had power of decision over it. "--sure, I guess so. A double-A in reverse! Haw! Where?"

"Canis Major, Proky system, if that's where he's from."

"Don't look like a Prokyman to me."

"Never mind that. Could you do the job so that the ITA couldn't repair it? And I mean NOT AT ALL?"

"Hell, sir, one of our E-blasters would do that much--"

"I have a feeling that one very simple way to gain our end, Haine, would be through the use of our E-blasters against every ship the ITA possesses--and just what do you suppose that would leave us? This fellow here wasn't so far wrong, you know, when he pointed out what would happen in the event the ITA were suddenly destroyed. We'd be left with a universe full of the screaming meemies. We'd be on top, but on top of the biggest booby hatch you ever saw! If we're going to do ourselves any good, we leave the ITA in one piece. The only difference being, we tell them what to do!"

"Now ain't that nice of us, to just walk in like that without firing a charge--"

"I'm doing the thinking around here, Johnson!"

"It's a cinch you ain't doing much of the shooting! Letting fancy-brains, here, tell you--"

Jon heard the sudden sound of bone crunching against bone; there was a choked yelp of pain, and the sound of a man falling heavily. Then Stine was talking again, softly.

"Anyone else here who prefers muscle to brain power?"

"Sir--Johnson's--you--"

"Bury him later, and listen to me now! I want the Gravity-Justifier in Procyon smashed so that the Tinkers can't do a thing with it--but so that _he can_! Do you understand, Haine?"

"I can smash it up so that _we_ couldn't put it back together in a million years."

"You'll be responsible. Let's get this man aboard the _New World_ and be ready to up-ship within an hour. We're going to have our cake, gentlemen, and eat it, too! Unless, of course, our friend Kane, here, will be able to watch ten billion people die as an entire planetary system breaks up, and do nothing about it! All right, let's get going!"

And then there was the sound of another man coming into the already crowded cubicle.

"Senator Stine, sir! Look what we found coming down the ladder! And in a shooting mood, too! I'll need a new space rig--"

"JON!"

"Well! The ITA hasn't lost much time! She looks a little bit white, doesn't she, Thurston? And seems to know our friend, here! Gentlemen, I think things are going to work out rather well...."

And that was the moment that Jon Kane returned to full consciousness, and full pain.

But he kept his eyes shut, his voice silent.

* * * * *

The banks of viewscreens in the _New World's_ NIC room reflected a kaleidoscope of horror as no man had seen horror before, and as only a man of Kane's century could understand it. To the uninitiated observer of an earlier time whose entire life experience had been within the narrow confines of a single planet, the softly glowing spheres in the screens would have seemed remote things; untouchable, and of only speculative interest. The interest may have been heightened slightly by the sudden rifts that appeared in the surfaces of some, or by the peculiarly undulating ocean masses that seemed bent on erasing the land masses of others.

But to Jon, securely shackled to an ackseat as was Deanne beside him, the screens showed an impending wave of death and destruction on a scale that bordered on the unthinkable.

Procyon I and II were already torn near the point of total break-up; III, IV and V, because of their greater masses, were trembling with a slower rhythm, but the close-up screens showed their largest cities had already begun to crumble. Their streets were clogged with both dead and living, and the gaping mouths of panic stricken faces were eerily silent.

The six outer planets had not yet felt their first tremors, but they had begun to enter subtly-altered orbital paths, and whole continents were unnaturally bathed in the hellish light of twin suns that spewed great, flaming masses of their life-stuff with unchecked abandon into the infinite well of the void.

The largest screen showed a wide, wafer-thin disc floating with an inhuman serenity in the blackness, its flat plane tipped gently to the ecliptic, its surface crawling with tiny ant-like creatures that were men. Hovering above it was a glistening, pencil-shaped object from which more men came, their tiny forms followed by irregularly shaped masses, weightless on the invisible tow-lines.

"Not doing much good, are they, Kane?"

The big man hulked above him, beefy face florid but split with a relaxed, confident grin. Jon broke his long silence.

"Starn has told you he would surrender! Why can't you accept it, and then I promise you I'll--"

"You'll do what? You'd pull everything in the book and you know it, Kane, and we'd end up having to kill you or be killed ourselves. And if you were to die." Jon turned his glance toward Deanne, saw her shudder, then turn her eyes away from the screens, bitter defeat mingled tightly with the tears in them. "And anyway," Stine was saying, "Starn's not the boss anymore! And what good d'you think it's going to do me to push over a has-been? B-Haaq is the one who's calling their plays now, Kane. And B-Haaq is the boy who wants to fight! Too bad you didn't kill him when you had the chance! Look at him out there! Trying to tell me he can fix it, or anything I can do to it! Telling me if I move this ship in a mile closer he'll blow me out of Space! Oh, brother--"

"He could, Stine," Jon said. And the big man whirled.

"With those antiquated pop guns he carries? Don't try to make me angry, Kane. He's going to sweat it out there until he and his whole damn crew drops. And then I'm sending you in! By that time things'll be so bad I'll _know_ I can trust you. You're the type, Kane! Fight like hell up to the last second, and then comes the noble, heroic sacrifice part. Oh, you'll do the job, all night after you've sat here watching long enough!"

Jon bit his lip, watched the big man stalk back and forth before the wide banks of screens.

"I could beat him in less time than it takes to tell it with E-blasters!" Stine was saying. "But they say there's a better way of winning arguments than with guns, don't they, Master Kane? Slaves are always more valuable than corpses, for one thing, and for another, I think people ought to know that Martin Stine has more to his string than guns alone! Yes...." His broad back was to both Jon and Deanne, now, and he was staring out through a wide port into the gem-studded blackness, and his words were for his own ears. "They will know who is a technician and who is not! The ITA is weak with age--and the weak become the slaves, and the strong become the masters! They shall see."

"Stine, you're a fool!"

The big man turned, faced Jon, and his big face blanched in sudden anger, and then the color flooded back to it and he laughed.

"Stine, do you know what B-Haaq will do when he realizes that he has failed? When he realizes that the woman who spurned him and the man who deserted his ranks are aboard this ship? Do you know what he'll do rather than knuckle under to you? He's the same kind of man you are, Stine. He'll come gunning with everything he's got! You'll be a seive before you know what hit you ... and for once I'll be glad to see B-Haaq take a trick!"

He heard Deanne gasp, could almost feel the trembling of her body.

"That's enough out of you, Kane, or there'll be a couple dozen more bandages on that honest face of yours! If that puppy even turns his nose toward me, I'll show him what real guns are! And let him sweat out there without his engines for awhile!"

"You only think you will! You haven't the faintest idea of what alloy the Tinkers build their ships, and you know it! And it's going to be fun watching you find out."

"If they use the tin they use to fix everything else."

"They may be stupid, Stine, but they've been around quite awhile."

"All right, so you know what alloy their hulls are built of! So my batteries of electro-cannon will--"

"Bounce off like a flashlantern beam, Stine. But I guess you'll want to wait and see for yourself. And if I know B-Haaq, you'll get the chance!"

And suddenly Stine was towering over him again. Jon winced at the vicious slap that landed squarely on his misshapen face.

"You'll tell me the alloy! Do you hear me?" A slap harder than the first. "Do you understand, Kane?"

Jon felt blood trickle down his chin.

"I'll not tell you a thing, Stine. Not about the alloy, or even how to rig your guns to beat it."

The next blow was with Stine's closed fist. Jon's head snapped back viciously, and he held on by sheer will to consciousness. He tensed for another blow. It did not come. And suddenly, Stine's voice was a calm, almost silky thing, barely loud enough for Jon to hear.

"A pity," he was saying, "that your man is so defiant a fellow, Lenantech. I almost imagine that even after the risk you took to save his hide, he'd watch your pretty face be beaten to a pulp rather than tell me the things I'd like to know! That's the way with these noble fellows, you know. Of course, a girl's face isn't everything. But, I suppose that he'd even--"

"Stine, you wouldn't dare!"

"Care to try me, Master Kane?"

"Damn you, Stine--"

The big man clenched his right fist, raised it, and Jon watched Deanne's face whiten, saw the silent plea in her eyes in the quick glance she gave him. But her taut lips did not move.

"You had better speak, Kane--"

"All right! All right, I'll rig your guns for you!"

"And you'd better hurry! Unless my screens are out of order, your precious ten billion Prokymen haven't too much time left."

Jon looked at the screens again, and he knew his horror was reflected in his swollen face. Something writhed sickeningly inside him and he looked at the screen in which the Geejay swung. B-Haaq and his men were at last leaving it! Leaving it, giving up.

But he said nothing as Stine summoned Haine from in-ship, and kept his silence as the squat, burly man unshackled him while Stine held a hand weapon at Deanne's head.

"I'll need her to help," he bit out then. "On your guns, as well as on the Justifier. She's worked on double-A's before."

"She stays, Kane!"

"Very well, she stays. But if this outfit can't get the Geejay fixed either, people won't be too impressed, will they. I say I need her, Stine. That thing out there is too badly wrecked even for me, now, alone. But it's up to you. I'll rig your guns."

"All right, Kane! All right. The woman goes with you. But she stays right here until you've done a job on my batteries!"

"You win, I'm not arguing. Let's get it over with."

Haine led him out of the NIC room, and he could feel Deanne's accusing eyes at his back. She hated him now. He knew it.