CHAPTER XIV
Escape
As Borisu's hand depressed the fateful button, a sort of sick paralysis seemed to fall upon almost everyone in the control turret. It was as though all realized that a moment hence in one brief, blinding flame would vanish all for which a lifetime of struggle had been spent. Joy and sorrow, happiness and care ... hope, love, ambition ... all these were to merge as one in the final erasing of life's futile slate.
Even Borisu, high-minded a patriot as he proclaimed himself to be, stood stricken by the irrevocable enormity of what he had done. Mad laughter froze on his lips, panic glazed his eyes, and the hand which held the threatening Haemholtz faltered and dropped to his side.
And in that moment Warren roared, "Now, Gary!Get him!"
Gary dove across the room, his shoulders crashing the little man to the floor as his hands wrenched and tore the ray pistol from Borisu's grasp.
And the sudden death they had been led to expect?
Nothing happened.
No blinding flame engulfed them. No cascade of heat crushed theLibertyto a blob of molten metal. The gallant ship rode mightily, smoothly, evenly, the hum of its hypatomics a reassuring sound in their ears.
And now the tables were turned, for Muldoon and O'Day had leaped to Lane's assistance. Already Flick had snatched the skittering pistol from the floor, while Lark's strong arms encircled the raging Magogean, locking him in a vise. Meanwhile Warren, lurching to his feet, had charged to the controls, glanced swiftly at the vision plate, made a few swift corrections in their course. Now he turned, grinning.
"Made it," he cried relievedly. "I figured we might. Just in time, though. There's Sirius off the port bow. Too close for comfort."
"B-but," faltered Nora. "What did you do, Hugh? I thought we were headed for certain death? Even the Jovians warned us that if the controls were tampered with—"
"That's right," admitted Warren cheerfully. "But the Jovians were thinking only of theirowndrive. They didn't take all the factors into consideration.Thisslimy rascal—" He jerked his head toward the impotently fuming Quisling locked in O'Day's arms—"reset the quadridimensional stops to plunge us into the heart of Sirius. And it would have worked, too, had that been our only means of propulsion.
"But it occurred to me that if we could get the hypos working, adding theLiberty'snormal acceleration to the space-twisting speed of the Jovian drive, we might put enough distance between ourselves and Sirius to save our necks.
"And—" He shrugged—"it worked. That's all."
"Hugh," said Gary, "you're terrific."
"Me? No, just plain lucky. I was only playing a hunch. But I figured we had everything to gain and nothing to lose."
"He's a violet," snorted O'Day. "A modest, shrinking violet. Stop playing coy, skipper. That was one of the neatest bits of mental astrogation I've ever seen."
Warren said uncomfortably, "Comets to you, sailor. You could have done the same thing yourself."
"Sure. If I'd thought of it."
"Anyone who can handle a spaceship like you can—"
"In," acknowledged Lark O'Day, "my own back yard; our own little solar system. But when it comes to figuring intergalactic calculus with a quadridimensional drive as a factor—" He shook his head admiringly—"you're the boy for my money."
Muldoon's fingers were itching on the butt of the Haemholtz. He glanced at the silent Borisu, then longingly at his weapon.
"When the Mutual Admiration Society adjourns," he said, "what are we going to do with our lethal little pal? You want I should take him out somewhere and play punchboard on him with this?"
Gary Lane said grimly, "Murder in cold blood isn't ordinarily my dish, but it seems to me that inthiscase it isn't so much a case of murder as it is fitting retribution. I'm in favor of—"
But Dr. Bryant said, "No, Gary. We can't do that."
"Why not? He's got it coming to him."
"I agree with you perfectly. But now that we have reached Sirius we may have need of him."
"Need ofhim?" exploded Muldoon.
"Yes. For one thing we already know the Magogean language is unlike any used in our universe. We will have need of an interpreter. Another thing you must remember is that so long as we hold him unharmed aboard theLibertywe hold as hostage one whom we know to be a person of importance among his own people."
Lark O'Day said bluntly, "I'm agin it. I was raised in a hard school, I know. But one thing I learned long ago was that the best way to get rid of an enemy is—get rid of him!"
And Dr. Kang, too, added quietly, "It is not wise to spare an enemy like this; one who has already attempted not once but many times to destroy us. It is written, 'Who dallies with the wasp will feel its sting.'"
Neither Muldoon nor Gary appeared to think highly of Dr. Bryant's clemency. But surprisingly it was the skipper who came to Dr. Bryant's support.
Warren said soberly, "What you say about Anjers'—Borisu's—treachery is quite true. Nevertheless,wehave no right to pass judgment upon him. The thing to do is hold him in protective custody, take him back to Earth with us when we go, and there let him stand judgment before a properly constituted court. Law and order must be upheld."
O'Day laughed curtly. "There speaks the Space Patrolman. Once a cop, always a cop, eh, Warren?"
Warren flushed. "Maybe so. But that's the way I feel about it."
And the one-time pirate shrugged. "Okay, skipper. It's your ship. Save him it is. But—" He glared distastefully at the Magogean—"it's a good thing for you, buster, that we're aboard theLibertyand not theBlack Star...."
So Borisu was taken away and placed under lock and key in theLiberty'sbrig. And later the leaders of the expedition gathered once more in the control turret of theLibertyas Hugh Warren, with his instruments, struggled to set a true and proper course for the ship.
"It's baffling," he confessed ruefully after futile consultation with his azimuth chart and astrogation table. "I can't seem to orient myself at all. There are no constant bodies to set a course by. Or, rather, there are plenty of known bodies—but they don'tlookright. Nothing looks right!"
"What do you mean?"
"Why, just that. Everything's cockeyed. Out of proportion. Here, see for yourself—"
Warren touched the stud which activated the vision plate. On the fore-lens screen was enmirrored that segment of space which lay before theLiberty.
As one, the company's eyes opened wide at the curious picture which lay exposed to their views. Star-strewn heavens sprawled before them, yes; but no such spangled jet as might be seen from Earth or any of Earth's sister planets. There, stars were dim, small specks, faintly aglitter in unfathomable distance. Stars had diversity of size ... this one was great, that other small. Stars clustered in recognizable patterns. Here a portion of the sky was filled with their tinsel sprinkling; elsewhere might be a patch of sparse-strewn midnight black. Thus the heavens as seen from Earth.
But not so was space as seen fromthisvantage point. For, viewing their surroundings through the vision plate, it seemed as if they swam through a sea of radiant light where every star was a beacon, each planet a steadfast buoy of glowing color. And in this gleaming pattern was a regularity, an orthodoxy as painstaking as if some master craftsman had allocated each glowing sphere with precise care.
Regularly discernible against the omnipresent back-drop of space were the solar galaxies, each a complete entity, aloof, removed from its fellows and confined to its own definite segment of space. Some galaxies were younger than others. One formed a whirlpool nebula. Another, giving birth to worlds, was a gleaming, egg-shaped blob of gold. Still elder universes had achieved secure and permanent balance.
But in certain things they were all alike. Each dominated its own sector of space without encroachment on a neighbor. And each parent star was very nearly equal in size to every other.
It was, in short, the mathematician's dream: the perfect achievement of theoretical stellar mechanics. A universe balanced in absolute stasis, with each galaxy arranged in contrapuntal adjacence to each other.
"But this—" said Flick Muldoon wildly—"thiscan't be the Sirian system! This isn't any part of the universe we knew!"
Young Dr. Lane nodded soberly. "Yes, Flick, it is. This, at last, is thetrueuniverse. The real and constant universe we theorized might exist when first we took those photographs on Luna. We are looking, as no man has looked for countless years, upon the true 'bubble universe' of which our solar system was once a part."
"But—" asked Nora—"our solar systemnow?"
Warren had been twisting the vision lens. Now he halted its periscopic movement at a space sector behind theLiberty. "I think," he said dubiously, "thatmay be the universe from which we came. Gary—?"
Gary looked and nodded. Sharp against the dazzling brilliance of the true universe was a strange blot, a circular well, a cone-shaped funnel of blackness carven through the bright surroundings. And deep and far, where the end of this funnel faded into unfathomable distances, was a single, tiny, pin-prick of light glimmering faintly.
"Yes," he said, "that is—must be—it. That tiny star is Sol. The one diminishing unit in all the constant universe. And that funnel is the path of the cosmic rays, the cone through which Magog's ultrawave cannon is beaming its lethal radiation upon our little system."
"Gad!" gritted Lark O'Day. "What a vengeance! What a punishment to mete on an innocent people! We must stop those scoundrels, Gary! If we only knew where to find them—"
"We do," Gary pointed out. "As Earth is thefarend of the funnel, the planet from which the raysemanatemust be Magog."
"Right as rain," declared Hugh Warren. "And, Gary, I've got it spotted now. It's that second planet over there, the blue one. Hello, below there! Bud!" he shouted into the audio. "Accelerate the hypos to max. And tell the men to stand by for any emergency. We're approaching our destination."
"A.X. to max it is, sir!" came back the reply.
And the whining sound of the hypatomic motors heightened as theLiberty, its goal in sight, leaped through unworldly space like a bow-sped silver arrow.
It was as they neared Magog that Gary Lane experienced a final qualm of misgiving. Dim memory stirred him. He recalled a remark the man they had known as Dr. Anjers had made on Jupiter.
"It is ridiculous to think of us, tiny mites that we are, daring to attack the people of a universe so infinitely greater than ours that we will be as dust motes beneath their crushing heels," Borisu had said.
At that time he had still been pretending allegiance with his companions. Which did not alter the fact that there might be truth to his claim. The Earthmen, born of a contracted planet, might be a hundred, a thousand times smaller than the enemy whose homeland they were approaching. Appraising the size of Magog from this distance, Gary could not tell. Size is relative, and in this Great Outer Universe there was no commensurable object by which the spacefarers might judge their own stature.
But Dr. Kang disabused him of this thought the moment Gary ventured it.
"No, no my friend. You need entertain no fears on that account. Just as the Magogean, Borisu was similar in size to us on Earth, so on Magog will our height correspond to that of the natives."
"But if we come from a planet which has been dwindling for untold years—"
"That does not matter, my boy. You forget, we are now in the real or 'static' universe. Moreover we came here through a space warp, traveling with a speed which exceeds that of light. Elementary astrophysics will tell you that any object exceeding the speed of light attains infinite mass. Therefore we may safely assume that during our period of translation from the inner to the outer universe theLibertyand all of us aboard the ship expanded to a size comparable to this universe which now surrounds us."
"Expanded?" grunted Lark O'Day. "But I don't feel any different."
"Naturally not. For you are as perfectly attuned to this greater universe as you were formerly to our own contracted solar system."
"But," demurred Gary, "Anjers—I mean Borisu—himself said—"
Dr. Kang smiled quietly. "Borisu madeseveralparadoxical remarks. He also showed an appalling lack of comprehension of the hypatomic drive. Moreover, on several occasions he failed rather pitifully to accomplish a mission he had every opportunity of achieving.
"All of which leads me to believe, my friend, that—his boasting to the contrary—he's not so brilliant a genius as he believes himself. Nor is his race so scientifically advanced as he considers it. In at least several respects we have already discovered their knowledge to be inferior to ours. Let us hope we can maintain our superiority, and bring about the end we desire."
"By golly, that's right!" muttered Muldoon. "Borisu never struckmeas being any master mind. And headmittedhis race didn't know the secret of spaceflight."
"Excuse me," interrupted Dr. Kang. "At one time they did not. But they must know that secret now."
"Why?"
"How else could Dr. Boris Anjers have reached Earth to serve as an espionage agent for his people? We are forced to assume this Magogean surveillance of the solar system is a regular thing, with new appointees assuming their duties periodically. Borisu intimated he was but one of many. Obviously, therefore, the Magogeans have mastered not only spaceflight but faster-than-light travel. As well as the ability to diminish their own bodily size at will. At any rate, we shall know in a little while."
Warren's voice interrupted him. The skipper was seated at the controls. "You've got part of your answer now, Doc."
"What do you mean, Captain?"
"About spaceflight. The Magogeanshavegot ships. Because here comes a flock of them right now."
O'Day's eyes lighted. Restless for action, he had been chafing impatiently ever since they sighted Magog. Now his moment had come. He sprang to his feet.
"Man the guns! We'll teach those scoundrels—"
"Wait," advised Dr. Kang. "Not so swiftly. Let us try every peaceful means to win them over first. Dr. Bryant—where is Dr. Bryant?"
"Below," said Muldoon. "He went below a little while ago. I don't think the old man feels so good. He looked sort of funny. Kind of a sick expression around his mouth. And his eyes were glazed, like he was sort of dopey, or something."
"Well, let us send for him. We will need his advice. And bring Borisu from his cell, too. We must attempt to communicate with the Magogeans by radio. We will need Borisu to interpret for us."
Lieutenant MacDonald said, "Yes sir. Right away, sir," and hurried from the room.
Warren, closely scanning the vision plate, muttered, "Six ... eight ... a dozen of them. If they're friendly, all right. But if they're hostile—"
"You have turned on the force-shield?" asked Dr. Kang.
"No, but I'll do it now." The skipper pushed the black button. "Thatshould take care of any tricks they try to pull. Say—" His voice broke in a sudden exclamation of astonishment. "Say,that'sfunny! Where didthatcome from?"
"That? What?" demanded Gary.
"Why—why, it looked like a life skiff. Matter of fact it looked like one of theLiberty'sauxiliary craft. It just scooted across the vision plate for a minute and then—I'll try to pick it up again."
Warren twisted the scanning device deftly, succeeded in centering it upon the foremost of the approaching Magogean spacecraft. He leaned forward, studying intently the scene revealed.
"By God, itisa life skiff! But what's it doing this far out in space? And where did it come from?"
He got his answer, but from an unexpected source. For suddenly the audio crackled into activity. The voice of Lieutenant MacDonald came to them from midships.
"Captain! Captain Warren!"
"Yes? Yes, what is it?"
"It—it's Professor Bryant, sir."
"Bryant? What about him?"
"He's lying in the brig ... unconscious!"
"You mean—you mean Borisu attacked him? Seize the traitor! Bring him here immediately."
MacDonald's voice was anguished. "I can't, sir. That's what I'm trying to tell you. The cell door is open ... one of our auxiliary craft has been stolen from its cradle ... and Borisu—has escaped!"