Dwells there a thing in all of spaceWithout a smile to light its face?Intellect: Puck's dwelling place?"What fools we mortals be!"
Dwells there a thing in all of spaceWithout a smile to light its face?Intellect: Puck's dwelling place?"What fools we mortals be!"
Dwells there a thing in all of space
Without a smile to light its face?
Intellect: Puck's dwelling place?
"What fools we mortals be!"
Ahead he saw an enormous Geissler tube sign flashing alternately with neon's bright red and argon's blue:
THE SPACASINODine & Dance—Floorshow ToniteJoy Rikki & Martian Madcaps
and simultaneously, he heard voices and the double tread of footsteps down a cross street. The robot slipped intelligently into the shadow of an ornate doorway and he followed.
Coarse voices—the voices of space-hardened men:
"We gotta git Manuel out to the ship. 'S been loaded since sundown. What'll the Envoy think? Cripes, we're behind schedule now—'most a day!"
"You git 'im out! Ain't I tried? Y'know 'ow 'e is when 'e gits drunk! Give the blighter a bevy of chorines to dance in front of 'im and some vod-vil stuff and the blinkin' fool will set there all the bloomin' night 'e will, if 'e's anywheres near tight, an 'ell itself won't move 'im!"
... The voices became inaudible—
Inspiration came to Hunter Frederix then. It was a futile, vain hope. It was a desperate gamble and Death held the odds; but an hour's delay might mean success. Andres would soon be conscious; the rockets would flash out of Botrodus.
A wild plan flashed across his brain, and then a pure thought which held in it understanding and acknowledgment—understanding of one man's weakness and acknowledgment of another's genius.
He looked down at the robot, saw the photocellular eyes turned upwards to his face. Despite the seriousness of it all, he smiled crookedly as he caught the automaton up in his arms and hurried across to a doorway marked plainly "Stage Door—No Loiterers!"
The door opened as he crossed the photo-electric eye on the threshold, and he came upon a hectic scene: a sweating, cigar-chewing manager upbraiding a group of voluptuous chorines.
"Listen, girls, please can't you think up a new routine? This fellow's a madman when he's drunk and he might take it in his cranium to tear the joint apart. How's about that Starshine Sequence?"
Frederix shouldered his way brusquely through the surprised throng, ignoring the angry remarks which came as his metal suit brushed bare arms and backs. No time for pardons now; seconds meant life or death—
"Hey, Mac!" he said by way of introduction. "Could you use an act?"
The irate manager surveyed the big, purposeful man inside the oxysuit, grinned and said:
"Listen, Goldilocks, whatcha think this is—a bearded man's convention?"
"Never mind about the customers!" the engineer burst in repartee, smiling though his heart was grim. "I've a trained, talking Ganymedean ape here. I'll give you an act that'll knock 'em wild if you'll announce me now and give me a dressing room for about ten minutes. Oke?"
A system was hanging on the balance in the weighing of a few, short, seemingly lightly-spoken words—the future of many kindred races sprung from a common sun who labored now under greatest stress—And the grinning manager must have sensed the aura of seriousness and power about the unshaven man and his strange companion, for his face grew sober.
"What's the act like, pal?"
"Ever hear the 'Saga-of-Sal'?"
"I've heardofit!"
"Tonight you'll hearit!"
Frederix's heart was beating with the power surges of a liquid-rocket's blast as he hurried into the dressing room, completely removed his helmet, splashed on fiery pseudo-pirate make-up, darkened his golden beard, and then turned his attention to the stoic robot.
Time flew with the beating of his heart. Removing the robot's system of speech, he set the disks awhirl, loosening the bolts which held the 144 common units of enunciation in a fixed order. Transcribing his reedy falsetto onto the disks, remembering some of the great poem, extemporizing with his natural flair for poetry, he recited some of the choicest lines; then locked the enunciator unit and lay the robot aside with an air of confidence and satisfaction.
Carefully he obliterated with make-up any distinguishing signs on the government suit; then hurried out into the wings, the monkey-thing scurrying before—
(The rockets are coming from Kaa, from Kaa,Out of Kaa flashing flames in the night.)
(The rockets are coming from Kaa, from Kaa,Out of Kaa flashing flames in the night.)
(The rockets are coming from Kaa, from Kaa,
Out of Kaa flashing flames in the night.)
All spacemen have heard the "Saga-of-Sal," repeated from expedition quarters on Pluto into the English colony in Mercury's twilight zone, Sal, the throaty torch-singer from dear old Boston at the very sound of whose magic voice the maharajahs of Mars went into ecstasy and who spurned them all to marry a blue midget from Callisto.
Conceived by some long-dead bard with the virile, full style of a Kipling, it had been handed from mouth to mouth, every minstrel singing it differently; but none of them ever had cause to sing it quite like Hunter Frederix and his futuristic concept of a vaudeville stooge did that wild night in the Spacasino while he waited, his life hanging on a thread, anticipating momentary recognition, praying for the sound of rockets out of Kaa.
The automaton scampered out in advance and a howl of laughter shook the terra cotta walls. Frederix glimpsed Manuel Onupari rising from a drink-laden table beyond the arc-lamps, a reluctant scowl on his black-jowled, evil face as he argued vehemently with a Vron who was plainly encouraging the renegade's men to take their leader to the waiting ship.
But at the sound of applause, Onupari shook himself free and sank back into his seat, exploding in drunken laughter, calling for more wine.
(Out of Kaa flashing flames in the night—)
(Out of Kaa flashing flames in the night—)
(Out of Kaa flashing flames in the night—)
A sigh of relief on his lips, Frederix looked down at that pink, bewhiskered face, unspeakably comical, unspeakably innocent as they swung into the Saga, holding its cues while the crowd roared, giving them full punch under the sensitive direction of the electrical life which seemed to know so much of all things.
"I will take my atomic and sweep through the starsAnd chase all the girlies from Pluto to Mars;I'm a knight with a steed which belches out flame;I'm a whooper, by golly, Vamose is my name!"Monk is my partner—he rides on my knee!He flirts with them girlies, what a grand sight to see!From Callisto to Luna, from mountain to shoreWe still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!"
"I will take my atomic and sweep through the starsAnd chase all the girlies from Pluto to Mars;I'm a knight with a steed which belches out flame;I'm a whooper, by golly, Vamose is my name!
"I will take my atomic and sweep through the stars
And chase all the girlies from Pluto to Mars;
I'm a knight with a steed which belches out flame;
I'm a whooper, by golly, Vamose is my name!
"Monk is my partner—he rides on my knee!He flirts with them girlies, what a grand sight to see!From Callisto to Luna, from mountain to shoreWe still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!"
"Monk is my partner—he rides on my knee!
He flirts with them girlies, what a grand sight to see!
From Callisto to Luna, from mountain to shore
We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!"
Whereupon they swung into an animated recital of how they, privateers ranging the void, had heard Sal broadcasting from a Martian station, and, unutterably fascinated by her siren's call, landed only to be turned over to the Service since she was a Service dame, and to sit in a jail cell and watch her say I do to that Callistan blue midget in a magnificent jail house wedding for dear old publicity's sake! What a wild, uproarious yarn that was; what shouting, whistling, stomping arose in that semi-barbaric place!
And the minutes were fleeing—and the miles behind the ships plunging onward—
Mad thunder of applause broken by an equally mad roar. Meevo, pale, wild-eyed, bursting into the club, crying out:
"Onupari! Planes riding the beam in from Kaa—two hundred miles away! Come on, you drunken fool!" And Meevo jerked the drunken commander to his unsteady feet, slapped his face with an insane violence, threw him into the arms of some less-drunken men and rushed them and his fellow Vron out into the night.
They were coming!Coming, yes, but fifteen endless minutes away! Half that time would see Onupari's powerful ship standing out into cosmic space!
And the native impetuosity of Hunter Frederix could not fail to come. Heated thoughts surged through his brain. His hand strayed to the guns at his side and then he had flung the helmet on to his suit, clamped it down and was gone from the Spacasino like a flash. "Monk," the robot-extraordinary, tried in vain to match his madly-plunging steps.
VI
And so he rushed, his oxygen carefully adjusted, out through the massive main-city-lock almost on the heels of Onupari's helmeted men, and they, for the greater part drunken and stumbling blindly along, heeded him not.
The rockets were coming from Kaa, out of Kaa flashing flames in the night! But they would be far too late! Onward he ran, his heart screaming protest against the violence of his pace, an endless mile across the desert waste.
Onupari's men were streaming up the gleaming aluminum plated ramp now, pouring into the bowels of the ship resting on the ways. Frederix drove forward, a disrupter clenched in his right hand, leaped towards the ramp, yards behind the last man.
And Meevo, thin, haughty Meevo, stood before him, recognition dawning in his wide, cruel eyes, hand reaching for a disrupter. Frederix heard the faint purring of the warming atomics. The Vron in his way! He must reach the controls, wreck them, even though his life be in forfeit!
He brought the gun up even as Meevo whipped out his.
Frederix fired first—right into that glassite helmet—red burst of flame, blood spurting out of a jugular vein severed from nothingness; the Vron's decapitated body crumpled.
But the lock crashed shut, and a man loomed within a lighted gun turret.
The atomics were hissing more loudly now, the intense wave of heat driving Frederix back. A leader flashed past him, fabricating an ionized path for the incredible bolt of lightning which crashed nearby, sucking him into the very heart of a stunning thunderclap.
He regained his feet unsteadily, tried to run on, intent on escaping the roaring atomics ere they blasted him with their dispersed fury.
He stumbled, went down, and his mad eyes saw the outdistanced robot coming towards him. A lightning leader flashed, smiting the metallic automaton squarely in the fuel compartment—the radium compartment—fusing the whole into a blinding, white hot, leaping electrical aura which strung itself out in a roaring, seething, zigzagging fingerwhich leaped backwards along that ionized pathway towards the ship!
In a glory of pyrotechnic thunder the ship was off—but in seeking revenge the captain made one mistake!
In a glory of pyrotechnic thunder the ship was off—but in seeking revenge the captain made one mistake!
In a glory of pyrotechnic thunder the ship was off—but in seeking revenge the captain made one mistake!
A tiny voice keened above that mad tumult, shrilling out of that gutted, wrecked automaton:
"We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!"
"We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!"
"We still are a-whoopin'; may the rockets roar!"
Even as that plaintive, laughing voice cut across the prostrate, half-blinded man's brain, so spoke more mightily the thunder of the atomics, flinging the mighty hull up the ways into the illimitable starshine. His nerve centers revolted. The agonizing white of afterjets initially super-charged; then that excruciatingly painful splash of furious lightning intermeshed and blazing in supernal glory on the ship's side.
The very roof of the heavens seemed to cleave in twain. The universe became one crazy, all encompassing roar; the skies were a livid, screaming wave of white, brain singeing, ear bursting agony.
Frederix was blasted end over end, his bones snapping like matchwood, intolerable pain crushing in on him—
Vibration upon mad vibration. Reverberation of hell thunder. Pain—unutterable, endless voids of swimming pain—
Consciousness remained. Sound—crushing sound.
And, at length, silence.
The man tried to drag his broken, throbbing, bleeding body from beneath the debris of the hangars against which he had been thrown, which had sheltered him from the highest fury of that unleashed cargo ofseedrona, set aspark by the short circuit caused by the disrupting blast of unnatural lightning, radium transformed into flame.
Frederix looked up into the blackness and strained to see beyond it. A faint, almost ironic smile crossed his pain wracked, bleeding lips. Gone, the minions of those who sought to subjugate a system—gone, the deadly cargo which, treated and compressed, would have destroyed the spacestations and laid the World bare to conquest.
And, Oh God! at what price to him?What price, indeed?
But he, what did he matter? He was only a means to the end. The plot was known now. Back on Earth, here on Mars, in all the other solarian havens of life, the Vrons of Centauri would meet defeat; for Solarians would believe him now with Del Andres by his side. Andres who knew the Vrons of Centauri for the strange, changeable, domineering creatures that they were, Andres who called him friend and in whose great heart only friendship was left—aye, they would believe him well!
When he heard the murmuring of rockets out of Kaa, he was thinking many things: of what the strange life form he had come to know by the lowly name of "Monk" had done—truly the workings of something far greater than man striving for universal betterment. He thought of the earnestness, the striving, the sense of honor and glory and all that is good.
In essence, what had it been? A consciousness born of the basic fabric of the universe, electricity however strange the form. Something come out of seemingly nowhere to aid a race in its moment of greatest blindness, of greatest need. Come to render a queer, heroic, supernal sacrifice.
And now, despite the living, shuddering pain within him, a smile twisted his lips. He was thinking of a little voice whispering a very virile tune as it went down into death. He was thinking that even something akin to a god, in its most serious workings for good, might find time to know laughter.
And he was wishing that that intelligence had not been consumed by the blessed flame of martyrdom. He was wondering what aid it might have given in those moments not far hence when the Armada would come blasting out of the void between the stars.