XX.
An hour passed in silence. Then Harabond held up a hand and Guy turned the instrument off. "So," he said to the Council, "you see that my interest is for Ertene!"
"A man who is capable of developing an instrument such as this," said Harabond, "is more than capable of distorting its output to his own purpose!"
"But thought—" said Guy.
Harabond shook his head. "To think that Thomakein would plot this way against Ertene is unbelievable. Were this charge brought by an Ertinian, we might consider it valid. There is too much at stake to believe a Terran, whose word has proven to be none too good."
"Use this thing for yourself," Guy directed. "Put technicians on it, build several and prove that you cannot distort its output. Then believe me."
"An instrument such as this would deprive all of us of our sacred privacy. I direct that it be destroyed and that no research be permitted along these lines," said Harabond. "As for the incredible story I see—or was directed to witness—at the operation of this machine, I can only shake my head. I reiterate, any man possessing genius enough to build an instrument like this is more than capable of making it perform to his will. Therefore its evidence will not be allowed. And, furthermore, the Terran, Guy Maynard, will be charged with the murder of Elanane!"
"But—!"
"Take him away!"
Guy was marched from the room before the same policemen that he had summoned to bring Thomakein. As they passed the portal, Charalas entered, shook his head in puzzlement and asked Thomakein what was this all about?
"An incredible impersonation," said Thomakein, "plus the loss of a loved leader," Guy heard him explaining as the door closed behind them.
Halfway across the rotunda between the buildings, the whine of sirens climbed up the scale and shook the very ground with their power. It was a frightening sound, and the men clinging to Guy's arms let go to look around in wonder.
Guy might have run, but he was too stunned and bitter to react properly. The very gall of Thomakein! The utter blindness of the Council!
Guy envisioned the end of Guy Maynard's unhappy life at the end of a rope—or according to the Ertinian plan of painless removal. He went limp and beaten. He was licked. He was a poor pawn, and all that he could do to sway the lives of worlds was to push in futility and fall below them when they refused to move. It would have been better—
"Terrans!"
"The Space Patrol!"
"You summoned them!" snarled one captor.
"No—"
"Liar!"
"I swear not."
"We believe not!"
Down out of the clear sky came the Terran Patrol in battle formation. With the precision that spoke volumes, the space pattern flowed from the closed cylinder to a lenticular disk and the massed ships of the task force sped across the city at fifty thousand feet.
"They've come for you!"
"No," swore Guy.
"They'll not get you!"
"We'd best give him," argued the other. "They'll fire!"
"They're firing."
"No, they're not," said Guy. "That's signaling."
"Either signaling or poor marksmanship," said the captor. "Nothing's hit."
"Terra doesn't miss," said Guy.
From the ringed emplacements, the vortex projectors vomited their toroids. Upward went the pattern of vortexes, and the Patrol broke formation in an effort to elude the whirling toroids.
"Did you?" asked Charalas, coming up behind.
"Send for them? No."
"Your story is true?"
"I swear it!"
"Then what of them?"
The pattern of toroidal vortices went up and up, and caught Terran ships, passed on, and left the Terran ships to fall inert. Pressor beams cradled the falling ships and lowered them to ground. The rest of the Terran Patrol drove inward on a slant, with the turreted AutoMacs blazing purple at the snouts and the invisible beams cutting flaring furrows across the city.
Another toroid went up before them, and pilots fought their controls to divert the ships. The slow-moving vortex hovered, and the high-velocity ships arrowed through the vortex in spite of the pilots. More pressor beams caught the inert ships.
Torpedoes started to burst in the city, and with each explosion a building leaped skyward in a mass of flame and dropped in ruin. The sky crisscrossed with flaring beams, and the vortex projectors spewed forth again and again, filling the air with death.
The Patrol drove high, hovered. They fenced with MacMillans on automatic, and then fled precipitately as a super-sized toroid formed and raced upwards.
"Beat 'em off."
Guy nodded.
Then he turned and slugged his nearest captor. He took the man's MacMillan and faced the rest. "I'm leaving," he snarled.
He backed carefully away, keeping his back against the building. A movement caught his eye, and Guy's quick hand dropped an Ertinian from a high window. With the diversion, the other policeman reached for his MacMillan, and Guy blasted the hand as it grabbed, and then drilled the man behind him for trying to reach forward for it.
"I'm not fooling," snarled Guy. "And I'll take hostage. Charalas, come along!"
"Me?" asked the aged man, stalling for time.
"You—and jump!" yelled Guy, sniping a swift shot at his feet. Guy reached the parked police flier, pushed Charalas in, and then took off on a screaming zoom upwards.
A MacMillan flared and missed, a vortex rolled upwards too slow by half, another MacMillan missed, and then Guy was off and far away and free once more. He grinned. They'd left him his personal thought-beam instrument. They'd find it hard to run him down when he could read their minds. He turned the gain a little lower so that they couldn't read his, and he wondered whether the more powerful instrument would really be destroyed now.
An hour later, along near the ocean's edge, Guy dropped the flier. "Charalas," he said, offering a hand, "I'm sorry."
"You're in a real mess," said the neuro-surgeon.
"I know—but what's Ertene going to do now?"
He snapped on the flier-radio and caught Thomakein in the act of speaking: "—obviously came at the call of the impostor. He was a high official in the Patrol, and was working undercover here. People of Ertene, we must reply! We may not hold up our heads until this insult has been repaid. We now have a fine space fleet, thanks to the vortex and the pressors, and the Terrans. Never could we have built such a fleet here on Ertene; but it is now ours."
Guy growled and snapped Thomakein off.
"What are your plans?" asked Charalas.
"I'm going to drop you off here. Then I'm going somewhere."
"Where?"
"That's it. I don't know where. I'm barred from everything but Mars—I might try there."
"You loved Ertene, didn't you?" asked Charalas.
Guy nodded. "Until I found out how blind they are. A fine thing! They give credence to a plotter because his accuser is not of Ertene. And this last—I hate them and him!"
"This last?"
"Thomakein dropped the barrier so that the Terrans would come to investigate. He planned it all—and got his fleet ready-made."
"They came to fight—"
"They wouldn't have come if Thomakein hadn't started it all. Blame whom you will, but Thomakein saw his plan start when he found me alive in the Mardinex. My life has been just a pusharound for Thomakein for nine years."
"You think Ertene will win?"
"Thomakein may be highly successful for a long time—but Terra will win," said Guy. "Remember, Charalas, when you strike a rat, the rat bites back. That slaughter of Terrans back there is just nasty enough to make Terra completely mad. It happened before, on Mephisto III, and when we cooled down to the mere screaming point, there wasn't a living thing on Mephisto proper. Berserk, is the word for angry Terrans, Charalas. And I say Beware."
"And you?"
"Me, I'd like to push something around. I'm getting sick of being a pawn. I've reached the last straw, Charalas, and something's going to be crowned. That utter murder of Terrans just about broke me, and if I break completely, I'll take after Ertene single-handed."
"Slaughter?" asked Charalas.
"It was downright murder. If I only had an army."
"That's not murder. Ertene seldom kills."
"Look, Charalas, I'm in no mood for foolishness. I saw those ships come down after the vortex hit them. Terrans do not scare stiff, Charalas, they fight to the last."
"I know, but the vortex does not kill."
"The ... vortex ... does ... not ... kill?" repeated Maynard dully.
"No."
"It doesn't kill?" came the dazed repeat again.
"No. The vortex slows the life processes to almost zero, but not quite. Several, repeated exposures will kill, of course, but two or three aren't too dangerous to healthy people."
"What do they do to recover them?"
"Heat lamps, massage, and a shot of cuperenalin."
"I've got my army then," said Guy quietly. "I've got my army!" His voice repeated the phrase, and his tone crescendoed from stunned quietness to an exultant roar. "I've got my men!"
"I don't understand," said Charalas.
"I don't expect you to," smiled Guy. "Below here, in the ocean, is my spacecraft. I'm leaving Ertene—but I'll be back. Oh, will I be back! Terra needs some Ertinian love of leisure, and Ertene needs some of Terra's ambition. As a team, they should get on fine!"
"What are you going to do?" asked Charalas in alarm.
"Terra pushed me around for trying to protect Ertene. Ertene shoved me out for being Terran. They're both blindly unreasonable. I'm going to play Kilkenny cats, Charalas."
"Play what?"
"The Kilkenny cats were tied by the tails and hung over a line. They clawed each other to death. I'm going to break up this balance of power in Sol, with Mars and Terra always running the main show, by hanging Ertene in an orbit. Then there'll be three to treat with, plus the minority on Venus, and they'll all be standing around with their hands in one another's pockets. Mars will have to come off of her high horse or lose her shirt when Terra and Ertene get together, and Terra will have to listen to Mars if and when Ertene takes a notion to let Mars into confidence. Ertene will have to play baseball with both Terra and Mars or the Solarians will gang up in spite of themselves. And eventually there'll be less isolationism around Sol, and we'll all be better off. I'm going out to get me enough people to do the job—and now I know where to get 'em!"
Guy grinned at Charalas, stepped to the high bluff over the ocean, and dived.
The Loki emerged from the ocean an hour later. It went high and arrowed into the sky, and it was out of sight in seconds. Charalas wondered if followers would come, certainly the detectors would be running full power and would catch this ship and register it as nonconforming to the licensed ships of Ertene.
But the followers did not come, and Charalas realized that Guy Maynard was once a high officer in the Terran Patrol, and that he was more than familiar with the technical details of such a small craft. Charalas grinned, and wondered which one of Ertene's destroyed ships was now being detected in action again, and not being recorded because of matrices that eliminated unwanted alarms.
But Charalas wondered most about Guy's future plans. How and what was he going to do—and alone, too!
"Also unarmed," added Guy to himself. "Nice to know you, Charalas. And if you'll wonder about me for a week, I'll appreciate it. Bet the Ertinian land forces are on the prod right now—and you'll be found directly. No matter, I can take care of Guy Maynard from here."
Guy nosed the Loki cautiously toward the moon of Ertene. Their synthetic sun, dimming a bit now that the unbounded energy-intake was cut, shone full and bright upon one side, and Guy wasted precious minutes circling to the dark side.
It was mostly wasteland, yet Guy went die-straight to the half-concealed emplacement.
With callousness born of necessity, Guy rammed the dome and the Loki was flung away in the out-rush of air. Guy set his grapples, and literally tore the building apart, brick by brick, and then hooked onto the great vortex projector and lifted it high into the sky. He returned for the power equipment and took that also. He thanked his lucky star that the Loki was a Terran ship and not one of the less agile Ertinian jobs. The fact that it was fitted with everything but a set of turret-mounted MacMillans made Guy jump up and down in glee. He recalled the game of hide-and-seek of a couple of years ago, and knew that the Loki could take it.
He set the Loki down on a barren plain on the side away from Ertene, and donned space garb. Welding the vortex projector on the top of the Loki made a strange-looking spacecraft, but streamlining was unimportant in space anyway. He hooked girder after girder on the huge parabolic reflector, welding them securely to his hull. He fitted the supply cables with air-tight bushings through the walls, and then spent several hours fitting up a series of relays to a thumb-button on the pilot's levers.
His detector rang as he was finishing, and Guy poked the drive control without waiting to see the nature of the approaching ship.
He grinned as he arrowed away from Ertene, because he knew that no matter whose ship it was, it was against him. They'd given him the time he needed, and if he managed to get through the next phase, they would never be able to stop him again. No one would ever collect the price that was upon his head—a double price, one in Solar coin, one in Ertinian.
His detector rang again, and Guy saw a small Terran ship approaching. Its turrets jerked forward, and Guy's thumb hit the button. The Loki bucked to avoid the discharge of the AutoMacs, but the velocity of the Terran was too high to swerve. It ran into the floating vortex and went dead, at full velocity, on and on into the nothing of the sky. It was picked up later by Ertinians, who added it to their captured fleet.
And Guy, knowing that his life might control the future of billions of lives, hardened. Friend or foe, all must fall before him until he had reached the end of this phase of his life. If he fell, the Solar System itself might never recover from the outcome of his failure.
For Maynard, knowing his Terrans, his Martians, and also his Ertinians, could have pointed out the moves of the next five years on the fingers of his hand—and no one alive could have denied him.
From ten thousand miles above, Guy looked at Mephisto III. "Two or three aren't dangerous," muttered Guy, repeating Charalas' statement. "Please God it be three with no danger, for they will have had two!"
His thumb pressed the button, and the vortex formed, whirled, and then went racing forward in a boiling toroid of energy. It spread as it went, widening swiftly and encompassing the entire moon before it wrapped itself about the ground, closing like a monstrous blanket on the far side in curlers of lightnings and fire. The vortex died, and Mephisto III was again lifeless. Guy dropped quickly, and landed the Loki on the same spaceport that he had created from the hard ground years ago. He looked about him at the supplies and the ships lying mute, and shuddered at the bodies that lie a-sprawl. Then he smiled wryly and apologized mentally. There were but few of the big guns of the Terran Patrol present—but they would be a good nucleus.
For now, though, Guy had work to do.
