The wall was solid again.
Simultaneous with that parabolite wall shutting in my face, three disturbing thoughts occurred to me: One, Baxter didn't have the Amnesty; Snow did! Probably in that catch-all handbag of hers. Two, if the Ancients could float me and Snow and the Space Scouts about like so much helium, why the hell didn't they just de-localize Baxter into a snake pit or something? And three, if physical contact was impossible between the races, how in heaven's name did they gimmick the Brain back on Earth? Which was also, come to think of it, moving awfully fast in relation to their liaison-point with the geocentric point of the universe!
A very baffled man, I began feeling my way down the tunnel toward that mighty roar of underground waters. The light paled and grew gray as I moved away from the parabolite wall. Then I was in darkness, feeling the bare stone with my fingers as I stepped carefully toward the increasing volume of ragged sound.
Then the wall curved away from my outstretched fingertips, and I knew I stood at the brink of that precarious arch of rock. There was nothing but blackness there, now.
"Clatclit!" I hollered over the boom of the river waters. "Clatclit, it's me, Jery!"
The rush of the boiling rapids was too great, however. It thundered by and swept the faint vibration of my voice along with it into that enormous well to my right.
Then I remembered Clatclit's manner of instruction to that hay-bale beast, what seemed like ages ago, out on the craggy Martian hillside. I put hooked thumb and forefinger into my mouth, and let off a piercing whistle.
Ahead of me in the darkness there was a glimmering of visibility, and then a feeble pink taillight waggled slowly up and down, far back beyond the other end of the bridge. Clatclit wasn't chancing moving as close to the death-dealing spray as before.
However, though a more powerful beam had been necessary to see by when I'd been moving into darkness, the pale glow was sufficient for the return trip. All I needed was a beacon, something to sight upon, so I wouldn't go astray in my slow crawl across that slippery curve of rock. Yes, crawl. This trip, I negotiated the arch on hands and knees.
And then I was across and hurrying down the corridor to the bend around which Clatclit shivered and waited. He stood up from his slouch against the wall, from which weary stance he'd been waving me onward with his taillight.
"Wow!" I said, catching dim sight of him in the weak glow of his water-pitted trylon. The sharp ruby glint was missing from his erstwhile pyramidic facets; now they looked dull crimson, and ropy, like taffy that has congealed after boiling over and dribbling down the side of the saucepan. "Does it hurt?" I asked, feeling partially responsible.
Side-to-side motion.
"It bothers you in some way, though, is that it?"
Nod.
"How?" I asked, unable to think of a yes-no question.
Clatclit pointed to my wrist, shook his head, pointed to my wrist again, and gestured upward, then nodded.
"Time. No ... other time. Uh ... Earth?"
Headshake. He rose on tiptoe and pointed up again.
"Beyond Earth. The sun!"
Nod.
"You mean that at this time, it doesn't bother you. But it will later, when you need the scales for absorbing sunlight?"
A very weary nod.
"Damn, that's rough. Will they grow back again?"
Pause. Nod. Tiptoe point. Three taps on wrist. Shrug.
"Yes. When the sun makes three times—In three days' time?"
Nod. Wrist-tap. Hands clasped to belly. Disgusted shrug.
"But in the meantime, you go hungry, sort of?"
Nod. Then, the social amenities taken care of, Clatclit pointed to me, to the ground, and looked questioningly.
"The Ancients have decided I'm to bump off Baxter," I said. "Then they'll release Snow and the boys. Not before."
Clatclit stared at me a moment, placed a hand on my shoulder, and shook his head, like a sympathetic friend. Then he took his claws and made a tugging, struggling motion with them, as though trying to tear something which wouldn't give. He followed it up with an incongruously comic coin-flipping motion to the back of his hand. It was his devious way of expressing the slang phrase, "Tough luck."
"You said it," I muttered. "Come on, though. The less time I leave Snow with the blob of black sparklers, the better. I've got to get to the spaceport."
Clatclit nodded and began his lumbering waddle off into the labyrinth. The Ancients probably expected me to book passage on the next Earth flight, to assassinate Baxter. They didn't know he was sitting right in their laps, in the Security sector of the field. It was just as well. I didn't relish the possibility of my elimination if they knew he was right where a sugarfoot could blast him as well as anybody.
As I trailed Clatclit up the wearisome slope that was taking us to the surface, I did some heavy thinking. The Ancients, before Earthmen first landed on Mars, probably had wandered about the planet freely, on the surface, living in their dwellings of parabolite, using their artifacts of the same impervious mineral. Then Earth, that paradoxically peace-loving and war-making planet, lands colonists. The Ancients, just from plain discretion, hide themselves and observe these unwelcome newcomers. Once it becomes clear to them that there is a potential menace from Baxter—who is no young chicken, having been in power before the first landing—they stay hidden, and start scheming to get rid of this guy who can jolt them out of their liaison.
I pondered over that bit. The Ancient had said that Baxter intended doing it by detonating a portion of their contact-material. Hell, they must mean parabolite! What other substance in the solar system was so alien to—
And with that thought, I suddenly knew the secret of that apparently impervious mineral's strength. No wonder it could not be destroyed! It was only in existence in our skimpy three dimensions in a fractional way. One-fourth of it was always present in the Ancients' world, since it couldn'tfitinto our universe in its entirety. And that meant not only one-fourth of its apparent mass, but one-fourth of even its atomic structure!
Even the collapsers, working on subatomic particles, were at a disadvantage. You can't nudge an electron out of orbit if it isn't actually fixed in that orbit. Three-quarters of those four-dimensional electrons were always cushioned by that elusive final segment that lay outside our universe. So trying to destroy parabolite by force was in the same class as trying to shatter a rubber ball with a hammer; a rubber ball which was hanging from an elastic cord, in fact! It just gave into the other dimension and rebounded frisky as ever.
"Boy," I thought, "this is going to put the skids under that scientific theory about parabolite's imperviousness. Parabolic molecules, ha! Well, it was a good theory while it lasted; it fit the known facts, at least. Hell, the stuff even has the wrong name! It ought to be called Elasto-plast, or some such euphonic label."
Clatclit paused in his climb up the tunnel slope, and turned a querying stare on me.
"Was I talking aloud?" I asked.
Curious nod.
"Sorry, it's nothing," I said, indicating that he should proceed with our journey. "Just the salesman in me coming to life. You can't have public interest without catchy trade-names. Once an ad man, always an ad man."
Clatclit looked positively bewildered.
"Sorry. Business talk," I explained.
He shrugged and continued his upward climb, with me tagging after the bobbing pink taillight.
As secure as the maximum-security Security prison was supposed to be, we got in with no trouble. The planet must be a regular yarn-ball of those rocky tubes. If you know the layout, you can apparently get anywhere from anywhere.
Our only excursion from the steady upward climb had been a brief stop-off in one of those fungus-lighted rooms. Clatclit picked up my collapser and returned it to me.
I felt infinitely more confidant of success with its thick golden handle jutting out of my holster once more. Perhaps I could just find Baxter, sneak a bolt into his face, and scurry off into the labyrinth on Clatclit's heels.
I knew, even as I thought it, that I wouldn't be able to just blast him like that. I'd probably have to face up to him, pull an "All right, pardner—draw!" sort of sentence on him, and then pray that I was faster. It was unthinkable for me to act in any other manner. The give-a-guy-a-chance instinct was part of our national heritage, something called the code of the West, handed down to us by pioneer forefathers.
The method of ingress to the building was simplicity itself. The tunnel we'd been negotiating came to an abrupt end at a wall of granite slabs such as had buttressed my prison cell. I reached for the collapser, but Clatclit laid a restraining claw on my hand.
I watched, curious, as he put his left ear-orifice to the wall and listened intently. Then, seeming satisfied, he put his hands on the biggest slab of granite and pushed.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then the slab began to pivot about some central axis, and a one-foot gap was exposed on either side of its bulk. Beyond the open spaces, bright fluorescent tubing lighted a grim prison corridor.
"Isn't there an easier way to the spaceport?" I said.
A prison meant guards, and guards meant collapsers, and collapsers meant, possibly, good-by Jery Delvin.
But Clatclit shrugged, pointed into the tunnel, and made zig-zag motions with both hands, all the while shaking his head in weary disgust.
"There is, but it'd take forever to get there, huh?" I interpreted. He nodded. Oh well.
Clatclit leading the way, we sidled through the right-hand gap, then he pressed the mammoth stone back into place.
"You're coming with me all the way?" I asked, surprised. Somehow, I'd thought his guideship ended at the same place the tunnel did.
Clatclit nodded vigorously.
"Is it that the Ancients don't trust me?"
Headshake.
"You have nothing better to do?"
Negative.
"Okay, I'll bite. Why?"
Clatclit stepped toward me, placed a hand on my shoulder, then placed his free hand over my heart, moved it over his own, held up two fingers and crossed them.
"Because we're friends," I said softly.
Clatclit nodded.
It took us an hour to locate Baxter. Clatclit showed no signs of surprise when I did not go to the ticket office and book a passage for Earth. Apparently, not being in on the finer points of the Ancients' scheme, he found no wild incongruity in my being brought all the way from Earth to obliterate a man who could just as easily have been dispatched by a sugarfoot. Or else, through some extrasensory awareness, something born of our friendship, he knew that imparting the location of Baxter to the Ancients might well mean my death.
Whatever his reasons, Clatclit simply followed me in my progress through the prison dungeon which, thanks to its completely escape-proof stone-corked cells, was left without guards. We went up into the more well-appointed section of the building, the warmly plastic-decorated halls that were open to the public who passed through the Security inspection when entering or leaving the planet. It was good business to hide the grimmer realities from colonists or casual tourists.
And those who learned about the dungeons were never in a position to pass the word around. Your first view of a Security dungeon was usually your last view of anything.
The public part of the building had too many people in it to suit me. Even if I could get by the flight officials and robo-scanners unchallenged, Clatclit couldn't. The building was rigidly off-limits to extraterrestrials.
So we went up the outside.
Built against, and a good ways into, the high hills that surrounded the town, the building was easy prey for anyone who cared to clamber up the rocky slopes from which it jutted and climb through a window. These slopes were lighted, but not patrolled. After all, under ordinary circumstances, no one in his right mind would try sneaking into an IS stronghold!
Baxter, as it turned out, was seated at a desk not unlike his own back on Earth, in the very office where I'd been last interrogated by the team of Charlie and Foster. He was staring into space, and smoking a cigar, the solitary incandescent lamp on his desk making his ice-white mane of hair a sort of angelic aurora about that pleasantly rubicund face. It was like seeing Satan sporting a good-conduct medal.
Clatclit and I were crouched outside the window, on a narrow ledge we'd reached from the slope. To my intense interest, lying before Baxter, in the glaring circle of lamplight, was the black shirt I'd been wearing when I was rescued by Clatclit, the shirt which had been towed off by that hay-bale to obviate Baxter's being able to track the route of my flight.
I was about to whisper a question about the shirt to Clatclit, when Baxter turned partway about in his chair, and started to stub out the cigar in a black onyx ashtray. The question stuck in my throat, as I caught sight of Baxter's breast.
On a silver chain about his throat, he wore the Amnesty!
Something was very definitely wrong.
Until that moment when Baxter turned, I'd been certain that the Amnesty was in Snow's possession. And now here it was, gleaming in bright red and bronze against the front of his crisp black linen blouse.
The sight of it twanged a chord in my mind, and I crouched there on that narrow ledge, trying to grasp the fleeting thread of thought. The Amnesty was exactly the same color as that parabolite wall down in the tunnels, the barrier to the lair of the Ancients. Was it a coincidence that this token of power was designed to match in shade and intensity of color that unearthly mineral of another dimension?
A queer notion began to take root in my mind. Baxter had given me the Amnesty before I set off to find the missing boys. Or had he? Was that the Amnesty I'd carried, or a copy, a perfect duplicate constructed not of metal, but the impervious mineral.
My brain was spinning as little unimportant facts suddenly burgeoned and grew, and took on terrible significance. According to our science, parabolite was invulnerable to all tools, and could not be worked or shaped. Yet the Martian had said to me that Baxter possessed the means to disengage the fragile bond that linked the two dimensions by—The truth came home to me with an icy shock.
By detonating a portion of their contact-material! And the Amnesty, my Amnesty, was that material. I looked past Baxter to the black blouse, its lining sparkling beneath the incandescent lamplight with thousands of tiny metal filaments, and then I knew at last Baxter's monstrous plan.
Cold fury welled up inside me. I could easily, at that moment, have leveled my collapser at him and flashed him out of existence with no more feeling than that engendered by crushing a gnat between finger and thumb. My hand was sliding back toward that cold metal handle jutting from my holster, when there came an interruption.
The door before Baxter's desk opened, and Charlie and Foster came in. Clatclit and I ducked back from the pane, and listened, holding our breaths.
"About time!" Baxter growled. "Since you two are alone, I assume this was another wild goose chase!"
His fist slammed down atop the crumpled shirt, and I caught his meaning. Apparently, when they'd discovered my cell empty, they'd tracked my trail by whatever electronic device followed up the location of that rigged garment, and had been led miles astray in the Martian desert, finding only the empty blouse at the end of their quest.
"Yes and no, sir," Charlie said. "It's—it's the weirdest thing."
"Well? What?" Baxter snapped angrily.
Charlie, while replying, was unhitching a sort of tanklike apparatus from his back, from which a flexible tube ran into the end of the pistol at his belt. With the surprise of sudden memory, I recognized one of the weapons of the earlier settlers at Marsport: a sugarfoot-repelling water pistol, with three-gallon ammunition tanks.
"We got out the pack, sir, when we returned."
"Yes, yes," Baxter interrupted violently. "You took the dogs and trailed Delvin by scent from his cell. Fine. But did you find him!"
"We had trouble, sir. It was outside the crater, and the dogs needed air-booster muzzles, which cut down their sense of smell. And the trail was spread way out, too, as if Delvin had only touched the ground every thirty feet or so!"
I remembered Clatclit's bounding transportation from the cell, and had to smile. The dogs must have been starting and stopping every five minutes over that sporadic trail.
Baxter, at the end of his patience, flattened both hands on the desktop, and grated, spacing his words for emphasis, "Did you find him?"
Charlie exchanged a look with Foster, then hung his head. "No, sir, we didn't."
"Lost the trail, I suppose," Baxter growled.
"No, we kept at it, all right," Charlie said. "It took us underground, into the lava tunnels and grottos. We even found a cot where he'd been sleeping."
I stared at Clatclit. They'd done better than I thought possible. Clatclit tilted his head to one side and shrugged. It meant the same thing in both our languages.
"Of course, you idiot!" Baxter said, with disgust. "It's obvious he had help from the sugarfeet. I'd have guessed that the moment I saw the intervals of his trail! What else but a man carried by a sugarfoot could travel in bounds like that?"
"Gravity here's only half that of Earth," Charlie protested weakly.
"Even so," Baxter muttered, "only an Olympic champ could make leaps like that! You've seen Delvin. Did you really think that gawky frame of his had such galvanic energy?"
I could resent his slurs later. Right now, I wanted to find out just how damned far those guys had tracked me.
"But we finally came to a bridge, over an underground river, sir. At the end of the tunnel beyond it, the trail came to a dead end, in front of a whole damned wall of parabolite. And something about that wall scared hell out of the dogs, too! They were whining, high up the scale, like they do when there's something wrong, and growling at that wall, sir."
Halfway through Charlie's discourse, I had jerked my head around to stare a baffled question at Clatclit. Where, I was about to ask him, were you when the posse scuttled by?
But he'd already anticipated the question, and I watched as he pointed to himself, then made a serpentine forward-stab with his hand, then an up-down-and-around motion with his palms over his torso.
"You scooted up the tunnel for a brisk toweling?" I said.
A firm nod.
I couldn't blame him. After all, Snow and I were gone for a spell. No reason for him to stand there and melt with the water already beading his candy-coated hide. So that meant that Charlie and Foster were outside the wall while Snow and I were in council with the Martian. I found I was glad Clatclit hadn't been there to spot them. Because if he had been, and they had those water guns, I'd have found nothing but a sticky puddle where I'd left a friend. If, indeed, I'd been able to get back that far.
Baxter's voice interrupted my thoughts. "And so," he said, mockingly bitter, "you return once again, empty-handed!"
"Not quite, sir," said Foster, stepping forward and setting a trim plastic rectangle on end atop the desk. "We found this just outside that wall."
It was Snow's handbag. Probably she'd dropped it in her initial fright when that wall had gaped open before us. I hadn't noticed it then, because I'd been pretty shaken, too. And when I made my ungracious exit from the Martian's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't den, the handbag was already gone, on its way up to Baxter via Foster.
Apparently Clatclit had known a shorter route to the IS building than the IS men did.
Baxter had the bag in his hands, now, staring at it with the first faint flush of elation coming into his face. "But this must be that girl's bag! The one who stole that other Amnesty!"
It hit me like a blow in the stomach. Of course! Baxter had had no idea that I was with Snow. Not until now. And he knew Snow had that Amnesty, the one he planned to use to blow the Martians out of our dimension. And now he knew where she was: deep in the rock of the planet, with a virtual bomb on a chain about her neck!
He didn't need his gimmicked blouse any longer, the one he was going to use to track me until I was in the chamber of the Ancients. That had been his plan, of course. The Amnesty was a remote-controlled bomb, which I, as his dupe, was to have worn during my search for the boys. Baxter, knowing that I'd find them, and the Ancients with them, had suggested that I wear that blouse so that he could trail me into their lair. Then the flick of a switch, and Jery Delvin would be blasted to shreds, while the Martians found themselves stranded forever in immovable Location.
And yet I was still puzzled. How could he have known that I'd find them? I decided not to vaporize him just yet. I had a few points to clear up, or go out of my mind wondering about for the rest of my days.
I unholstered the collapser, slid the window open with one hand, and swung my legs over the sill.
"Good evening, gentlemen," I said.
They didn't seem very glad to see me.
Charlie and Foster stood stiffly before the desk, watching me warily as I completed my clamber into the room. Their eyes widened a fraction as Clatclit sprang lightly in after me, but that was all. Baxter, however, had lifted one eyebrow, and was appraising me carefully, as if trying to gauge the intensity of my emotions. No one said a word for a minute, while Clatclit shut the window and came to stand a bit behind me, to my right, leaving the show to me.
Baxter found his voice first. When he spoke, it was in the casual friendly tone he'd used at our first meeting, his inflection giving no sign that I had him covered by the most deadly weapon in the solar system.
"Since I am still alive," he said dryly, "I can only assume that you want to see me about something before I die, else you would have blasted me through that window."
"That's very accurate," I said grimly. "If you'll tell your men to be seated, and to keep their hands where I can watch them, I'll lower this barrel a bit. I wouldn't want an accidental finger twitch to terminate our conversation."
Charlie and Foster, white-faced, looked at Baxter. He gave a curt nod, and they sat down. I stayed back from the desk, keeping my back against the wall beside Clatclit. I didn't want anyone else coming in and sneaking up behind me. Baxter swung slightly about in his chair to face me, then laced his fingers on his knees.
"Now that we're settled," he said, "what can I do for you, Mister Delvin?"
"Baxter," I said, "I just came from seeing one of the Ancients. He and I had a long talk."
Baxter never flickered an eyelash. He just nodded and waited politely for me to continue.
"It seems you are a menace to them. They stand in the way of your ambition, and must be destroyed. However, the Ancients, even with their extra dimension, don't seem to have any increase in brain power. Their evaluation of your intentions is without doubt the correct one, but as to their interpretation of your motives, they're full of hot air."
A slight smile of grudging approval appeared on his round face. "Very good, Mister Delvin. Well thought out. Tell me, just what do they think I'm after?"
"According to them, you want to be the visible kingpin of the tri-planet civilizations, instead of just running things from behind the scenes. For a while, I thought it made sense, too. But then it occurred to me that this puppet-control of our worlds is just the sort of position that would appeal to you, Baxter. You'd enjoy being the secret master of Venus, Earth and Mars. I could imagine you chuckling to yourself, delighting in being an apparent public servant, and saying to yourself, 'The fools; if they only knew—' Am I right?"
Baxter's smile grew broader. "In substance, yes. I do rather like being the kingpin incognito, as it were. But go on, you were about to make a point."
"Well, if that were the case, then the Ancients wouldn't have to be destroyed, sent back to their dimension forever. You'd be suited by the status quo. Alien beings on Mars would just be alien beings on a Mars which you still controlled. So there's got to be something more that you want. You have all the power I know of, right now. So there can be only one thing left for you to want: some power I don't know of."
"I must congratulate you on your perspicacity," he said. "Yes, there is something more, Mister Delvin. That much I will tell you. But as to what it is—" He spread his hands. "I don't see that it's your concern."
"You—" I said, then paused. His insouciance was not in keeping with his situation. Therefore, the situation was not the one which I thought it was. "You're pretty chipper," I said, "for a man held at collapser-point."
"Oh? Am I being chipper?" he said, all raised eyebrows and facetious wonder. "I hadn't noticed."
"You fool," I said softly.
Baxter's amiable smile vanished and a hard light came into his eyes. "What do you mean?" he said, through clenched teeth.
"I mean," I said gently, but with deadly earnest, "that the Brain back on Earth selected me because of my mental abilities. I mean, Baxter, that I can figure things out faster than you can dream them up."
"The Brain picked you," he said coldly, "because it was rigged by the Ancients. And for no other reason."
I nodded. "And the Ancients rigged it to pick the man most likely to succeed in your destruction."
Baxter was suddenly silent. He watched me intently.
I lounged against the wall, waving the muzzle of the collapser up and down slowly. "Let me clue you in to my reasoning, Baxter old man," I grinned. "This is a collapser. It is in working order. You do not fear it. Ergo, you have some protection from it. I would deduce that you are at present wearing a shield of some sort. A shield which you have kept secret from everyone but yourself and the inventor, who is probably long since dead, if I know your approach to things."
Charlie and Foster turned and looked at him, their eyes bugging out in surprise. Till that moment, they'd thought their weapon invincible against anything.
"You astound me," Baxter said, admiringly. "But there's something you don't know about the shield. It protects not bydeflection, but byreflection."
"I could have gotten that part figured out, too, if I just allowed my mind to wander a bit through the paths yours seems to prefer. Nice work. Not only are you protected, but your assailant is himself destroyed."
"And so, Mister Delvin," Baxter smiled, starting to get up from his chair to come and disarm me.
"And so," I said, "nothing!"
Baxter stopped on hearing the easy confidence of my voice. He hesitated, looked at me.
"You shouldn't have kept it a secret," I said, smiling. "Charlie and Foster, here, are therefore quite vulnerable to the ray." It was rewarding to see their increased pallor. "So, you guys," I addressed them, "unless you want to go out in a blaze of blue sparks, how about tying this silly old man to his chair?"
They faltered only the fraction of an instant, and then they had a furious, cursing Baxter neatly hooked at ankles and wrists to his chair with their security-manacles.
"All right," Baxter growled deep in his throat, when they had been gun-gestured back to their places. "You are clever, Delvin! So what happens now? Do you beat me to death with your fists, or what?"
"If necessary," I said. A brief flicker of fear went across his face. "But so far as I'm concerned, destroying you need not mean physical dissolution. I don't care so much about Baxter the man as I do about Baxter the kingpin. To keep my end of the bargain, I can simply report what I know to the World Congress, and have you stashed away where you can never carry out any of your totalitarian schemes."
The normal ruddiness of Baxter's face was superseded by a sickly gray. "You can't—" he said, then stopped. At the moment, it was quite apparent that I could.
"And as for your big secret power," I said, calmly and without boasting, "it took me about two seconds' brainwork to guess what it is."
Baxter just sat and smoldered, his mouth clamped shut.
"The Ancients," I said, "live in Location, with a capitalL. I've already experienced a demonstration of their logistic powers. They had me bobbing around like a balloon down in their weird little cavern. And they were also able, not so long ago, to manipulate the workings of the International Cybernetics Brain across a void millions of miles wide. That, by me, shows one power which any would-be dictator would give a hell of a lot to get ahold of: teleportation."
Baxter stared at me in furious amazement.
"But," I went on, "there seemed to be a couple of details which didn't jibe, if that were the case. If they could manage control over cosmic distances so easily, why should they go to the trouble of getting a man, me, to bump you off? Why not simply teleport you into something fatal? That would be the easier method. But they didn't do it. Therefore, for some reason, they couldn't. Well then, Jery, I thought to myself, what could the reason be? In their dimension, that of ultimate Place, or Location, distances have no meanings. Everything in creation is Here. So what held them up? What kept them from snatching you? Obviously, only one thing could, Baxter: the contact-material, parabolite."
He kept his features rigid, but sweat was beading his brow. It gleamed like diamonds in the lamplight.
"It seems that the Ancients can only control areas where their contact-material is present. Until the mineral was found by Earth scientists, that place was on Mars only. Then some of the material was taken back to Earth, for museums, for analysis, and even for paperweights and such. My guess is that one of the technicians who runs the Brain has a hunk of the stuff on his desk, right?"
Baxter narrowed his eyes, then relaxed and nodded. "Yes. As soon as I figured out the Brain had been gimmicked, I went there to check. I had it removed immediately. Then I refed the data into the Brain, and found the name of the man who should have been sent here to destroy the Ancients."
I nodded. "Your own. Philip Baxter. Which is why you sped up here so damned fast after I arrived. And also why you had to toss me into a cell. One thing eludes me, though. What gave you the hint that the Brain might have been rigged?"
Baxter smiled wearily. "Your loss of the Amnesty. When these idiots here called me, my first reaction was to chew them out and to have you released. It was only after talking to you that it dawned on me that you seemed ill-equipped for the task I had in mind. I got to wondering about the Brain, then. That's when I went over to see for myself, and found the parabolite."
I nodded again. "Yes. In their cavernful of the stuff, they could float me all over the place. When some of the stuff was near the Brain, they could control that. But nothing else. Nothing that was not in the presence of the mineral. That is, excepting one part of the mineral: the chunk that comprises the false Amnesty. Something had to happen to that hunk of it. Something that simultaneously rendered that piece out of their control, and told them that you were a menace to their existence in this dimension."
"If you think I'll tell you that—" he said angrily.
"No need to. I've figured out that one, too. When I first figured out just what parabolite was, I compared it to a rubber ball on an elastic cord. Trying to destroy it by force was impossible. It just bounced and swung into the cushion of its fourth dimension. But, sticking with the analogue, what happens if the rubber ball is attacked from all sides simultaneously? It has nowhere to go, then. And, I asked myself, what could attack parabolite from even its extra dimension? What, except another piece of parabolite? Oh, not in the frictive way, like diamond cutting diamond. You still controlled only three of the dimensions using that method. And it had been tried already by scientists and found useless. So you had to attack it on the no-dimensional level. Since the three forms of matter—solid, liquid and gas—all must exist with height, breadth and depth, you had to use the only thing in our universe that we have besides matter: energy. Fire? No, heat had been tried already. Atomic dissolution? A bit better, perhaps; a battery of collapsers, working on the subatomic level, had managed to destroy a fraction of a gram of the stuff, simply from the laws ofchanceencounters with parabolite molecules in the fourth dimension. A ray as powerful as the collapser-ray undoubtedly accidentally gets generated in an extra dimension, but only in the most minor way, not nearly enough for your purpose."
"And what," Baxter asked between tautened lips, "is my purpose?"
"Since your rule-the-worlds dream necessitates the ability to teleport your agents wherever you please, you must have parabolite wherever you please. This in turn necessitates pulverizing the mineral down to its very molecules, and sowing it into the atmosphere of the three planets. Then you will be free to take complete command. The hitch, of course, is that the pulverization of parabolite would engender, as the Ancient put it, a jolt. A jolt which would unlatch Location from our dimension, sending the Ancients off forever. They didn't like the idea, and so they set out to destroy you."
Baxter's jaw, during the last part of my narrative, had gone slack, and he stared at me idiotically. I had to grin.
"Yes, I know what suffering you're going through at this moment, Baxter old boy. 'All for nothing,' you're telling yourself. If you had only known, huh?"
"You—you mean," he licked his dry lips and stared at me, horribly upset, "that all I had to do to be rid of the Ancients was to go ahead with my scheme? Simply pulverizing a hunk of that stuff would have sent them off?"
I nodded, ironically. "Yes. No need to rig a bomb, to send me seeking them, to try and set this bomb off in their midst. You could have set it off right back on Earth, and been just as rid of them."
"No need," he repeated dully. Then, suddenly alert; "Set it off? How did you know?"
"It was the only form of energy that hadn't been tried," I said, with a shrug. "Self-energy. Back on Earth, you ran that disc of parabolite through a hot atomic pile, and it became intensely radioactive, since the deadly emanations of the pile are even less than subatomic, and have no dimensions. Then a shielding coating of nullifying gamma plasm, the same stuff we use to keep our rocket chambers from dosing the passengers with deadly rays, and neat nickel plate over that. Emboss it with the seal of the World President, lacquer it in the colors of IS, and you have a neat, but incredibly potent, little fission bomb."
"And how could I set this off?" Baxter sneered. "Aren't you forgetting that the parabolite's at less than a critical mass?"
"Same way the old H-bomb worked," I said. "Under the gamma plasm, beside the radioactive parabolite, you have an atomic bullet, the kind the foot soldiers used in the Third World War. As for tracking it and detonating it, you must have a refinement of the tracking stuff you had in that blouse of mine. As the old H-bomb was triggered by an atomic bomb, so the parabolite, even at less than critical mass, could be triggered by the remotely-detonated atomic bullet. You planned to blow up the Ancients, and me with them, Baxter. Then you could go ahead and set off similar bombs, one each on Venus, Earth and Mars. The fallout would stay with the planets forever, even after losing its potency. And you could teleport your agents anywhere you chose."
"And the Ancients?" said Baxter.
"They reasoned out your intentions when you made that chunk of parabolite radioactive. Why do that unless you intended detonating it? But the very act of making it fissionable somehow took the teleportation-whammy out of it. They couldn't use it to snatch you, even when you were near it. Probably, since it seems the only likely reason, they couldn't use it because it was too atomically hot for them to work with." I was finished. I waited.
"Mister Delvin," said Baxter, after a long moment. "What do you intend to do, now?"
"Keep you in cuffs," I said. "Send an emergency call to the World Congress. See you corked into one of your own granite cells. With the air supply turned on, however. Though I wouldn't mind you having an hour or two of what I went through the other night."
"And," Baxter turned his head and nodded toward the handbag on the desk, "what about her?"
"She was being held conditional to my removing you as a menace," I said. "Consider yourself removed."
Baxter smiled. "And if the Ancients are not satisfied? What if they still desire my death, not simply my imprisonment?"
I thought it over. "In that case, I'd be forced to comply with their wishes."
To his credit, this unexpected statement on my part only stopped his tongue for a moment. He immediately tried a new approach. "And if the Ancients decide to destroy her anyhow?"
"Why should they?" I said, less sure of myself.
He cocked his head to one side, watching me. "No," he shook his head, "now I think of it, they wouldn't destroy her. They'd hold her captivity over your head, forcing you to return so that they might destroy you."
"Me?" I said, startled.
"Surely you can see why?" he went on smoothly. "After all, why were they out to destroy me, Mister Delvin?"
"Because you knew—" I said, then halted, stunned.
"—How to destroy them," Baxter finished for me. "The selfsame information which you now possess. What do you think your chances are for survival now?"
My guard wavered in that fleeting moment of realization. I caught the flicker of movement just a second too late.
Charlie, out of my thoughts for an instant, had whipped his collapser out of his holster and brought it to bear on me.
But even before I could bring my own weapon up in a futile attempt at a duel which would have resulted in probably two fatalities, iron-hard claws gripped my shoulder and I was carried hurtling to the floor by Clatclit's full weight on my back. To the floor just behind Baxter's chair.
Charlie, spinning about to keep me in range, touched the trigger. There was a shriek. A shriek that died the split second in which it was born, and then my world disappeared in a blinding shower of blue-white sparks.
When Clatclit and I got up again, Charlie and Foster were missing, along with most of the corridor wall. Baxter was just standing up from the lopped-off remnants of his chair, the manacles at his wrists and ankles having been dissolved by the bolt which could not destroy him.
The bolt had rebounded from his shielding force to destroy its perpetrator, Charlie, and Foster, the hapless bystander.
Before I could toss aside my useless weapon and attack him barehanded, Baxter had yanked up another weapon from the floor. It was one of the old-fashioned water guns, its flexible hose running back to tanks filled with gallons of sugarfoot-destructive fluid.
"If you place any value on the existence of this creature who has just saved your life, Delvin, you will hand over that weapon to me at once."
Clatclit looked at me. I sighed, and tossed the collapser to Baxter. What the hell, it wouldn't work on him, anyhow.
"And now," said Baxter, dropping the water weapon and covering us with the one which was deadly to both our hides, "I am going to need your help."
"Well, this is a switch!" I remarked. "The kingpin needs a hand!"
"It is a comedown," Baxter said wryly, "but you see, my late agent's fatal heroics have had a distressing side effect."
"Oh?" I said, looking about the shards of room that were still extant on the corridor side. "I don't see anything."
"That," Baxter remarked, "is precisely the point, Mister Delvin. A moment or two ago, not three yards to the left of where those fools were sitting—no, don't bother looking, there's only empty space there now—there was a small sending set. I brought it all the way from Earth with me. In fact, that is the reason I was sitting in this room tonight. Had my agents reported to my satisfaction that you were present among the Ancients, I should have used that set to detonate the atomic bullet in the false Amnesty. However—"
"Your trigger went bye-bye," I finished. "Need I say I am elated?"
"I take it the woman, the one wearing the false Amnesty, means something to you?" Baxter said. "The Ancients seemed to set some store in her captivity's coercive power over you."
"She does," I admitted. "Which is why I'm happy you no longer possess the means to set that damned thing off."
I had no particular love for the Ancients, but I didn't much like the thought of Snow being blasted into radioactive rubble.
"Well, then, if you desire to save her, you and your friend are going to guide me down to that cavern where they dwell, and—"
Footsteps pounded down the corridor, and then a squad of armed guards came into view. They saw Baxter and halted, and their leader stepped forward.
"Sir," he said, "Our detectors reported a collapser being—" his gaze, forgetful of military deportment, took a second to wander bug-eyed over the more truncated sections of the room, "—being used in this vicinity."
"Congratulations," Baxter remarked sarcastically. "Your eyes might give you the selfsame information, corporal. One has been used. I have the situation in hand, however. You may take your men and go."
"Yes, sir," the young man said, obviously fighting an urge to break protocol and ask what the hell happened.
"Oh! And corporal," Baxter said, as the boy began to organize his squad.
"Sir?"
"You might scratch Myers and Gibson off the payroll list. Send their families the usual telegrams of condolence."
The corporal's eyes bugged even more so, and he swallowed noisily before mumbling "Yes, sir" again and departing.
"That was pretty callous, even from you," I said, as the sounds of their footsteps dwindled and disappeared.
"Not callous at all. Efficient."
"Callous."
Baxter shrugged. "In any case, come along you two. The sooner I rid myself of these Ancients, the better."
There was nothing else we could do. Dejectedly, Clatclit began moving off in his lumbering lope toward the staircase. I followed, no cheerier than he. Baxter brought up the rear. So far as I could see, in selecting me as the tool of Baxter's destruction, the Ancients had made the error of their four-dimensional lives!
Then, almost all the way down to the main floor, I heard the murmur of voices. We were nearing the terminal lobby, the point where passengers were checked on and off the planet. As we turned at the landing, I saw that the lobby was filled with a throng of people, some of them patiently answering questions of the flight-listing robots, others having baggage weighed, and still others engaging off-duty pilots and technicians in casual conversation. It was a normal enough scene, one to be found in any rocket terminal on Earth or off it.
But there was something wrong about it. I slowed my descent of the stairs and tried to place the uncertainty, the queasy foreboding I felt centering about my heart.
Then I had it. There were no women present. Not one woman could I see in that apparently casual group of passengers. And there was a quiver of tingling tension in the air, a very palpable sensation of mental concentration trembling on the brink of action.
Baxter sensed it too. I could feel his own progress slowing behind me on the stairs. "What—?" he said.
Then it happened. At the far end of the immense room, one of the security guards let out a cry. I shot my gaze toward the sound, and saw that a man beside him had yanked his collapser from his holster. Other guards came alert all over the place, and they started toward the man on a run. And they were all of them neatly tripped, shoved, and clubbed, while a brilliant crackle of free electrons sealed the fate of the first guard.
The Neo-Martian revolution was starting. Some of the guards managed to get shots off before they were overcome by weight of numbers. People vanished in blinding flares of energy, amid shouts of fierce rage from their companions.
"There's one!" someone shouted, and a clump of these desperate insurgents turned toward the stairs, where Clatclit and I stood. They were looking past us, at Baxter.
Then the Security Chief fired the collapser in his hand, the humming bolt of dissolving-power buzzing right past my ear. But he hadn't fired at the men below. He'd fired directly at the fluorescent fixture that glowed in the center of the ceiling. Suddenly, the flash that marked its passage was the only lighting in that room. Then the cascade of sparks died, and we were standing in blackness.
I grabbed Clatclit's arm, hoping we could make a break for freedom in the dark, but Baxter had out-thought me there, too.
Another throbbing beam of energy from behind us, and the floor was gone before our feet, leaving a dizzy drop into emptiness, then even the view of the abyss faded as the sparks of energy died. I stifled a cry of alarm in my throat as Baxter's free hand flattened itself on my back and shoved.
I staggered forward, and my foot came down on air. Then, my grip on Clatclit's arm throwing him off balance, we plunged into the empty space.
Somehow, writhing in midfall, Clatclit got his hard-scaled arms about me, and he took the brunt of the landing on powerful legs and tail. My left arm was numb from shoulder to elbow. I must have struck it on the floor of the room below the lobby when we landed.
Another thump told me that Baxter had arrived, too. He did better than we did. After all, he was expecting a fall when he took off from that sliced-off brink. In another moment, he'd prodded us out into the corridor of that first floor under ground level, where the lights were still working. Then, taking a step back, he blasted away the flooring of that room, too, to discourage anyone from following the way we'd come. Incongruously, as he came back out, he shut the door.
"Afraid they'll grab at the knob on the way down?" I said, rubbing my injured arm.
"Neatness," said Baxter, not to be outdone, "is a virtue."
"Come on, come on," Baxter said impatiently, waving the muzzle of the collapser at us. "Can we get to the labyrinth from here?"
"Why bother, now?" I said, jerking a thumb toward the lobby above us. "Way things look, you won't have any empire to come back to, even if you do knock off the Ancients."
"A minor skirmish like this cannot but fail in its purpose," said Baxter. "On my return, I fully expect to see the sky filled with Security ships from Earth, leisurely razing the entire city."
"Won't that be rather difficult to write off as 'Unserviceable,' even the way you keep inventory?" I needled.
"Move!" said Baxter, beyond patience.
Clatclit and I moved. We went back down the long ramp that led toward the dungeons. At gunpoint or not, I called back over my shoulder, "By the way, just what do you intend doing when we arrive at the ogre's castle? I should think that it was the last place you'd want to be found. Kind of like telling off a lion while your head's in his mouth."
Far off behind us, there was a growing shout of voices. Apparently, the rebels had managed to negotiate what was left of the stairway and were hot on our trail.
"Faster!" said Baxter, quite unnecessarily. I was in no mood to test whether or not the rebels checked one's ideology before blasting away. A disintegrated bystander is beyond apology. So we went faster.
We reached the dungeon level, and Clatclit proceeded to shove open that movable section of wall. Baxter raised his eyebrows in surprise, but then simply gun-motioned us through the gap. We went, and he followed a moment later. I watched with amusement as he tried vainly to shove that granite mass back into place. I don't know exactly what sugarfeet use for muscles, but it beats what we've got.
Angrily, Baxter stepped back against the curved wall of the tunnel, and said, "You! Move that back. We don't want them following us in here."
Clatclit moved over to obey, while I remarked, "Why not? Maybe they'll get lost. It'll save your city-razing ships a little collapser-power."
Baxter ignored my statement, and simply waited until Clatclit had moved back beside me, his taillight going on pyrotechnically as the moving granite cut us off from the light in the dungeon corridor.
Then we were once again moving down that frozen-lava slope toward the deeply hidden lair of the Ancients.
As we moved along, side by side, with Baxter coming relentlessly after us, Clatclit's hands started working furiously. He flicked an index finger toward me, then toward himself. Then he put the heels of his hands together and, after a brief waggling of the fingertips, clamped his hands into fists, and made that serpentine forward jab with one hand. He was asking, in his pantomimic way, if he and I, under cover of sudden blinkout of his taillight, might scoot off into the labyrinth and escape Baxter.
I held up a forefinger and waggled it left and right in a signal of "Better not, chum."
He put his palms up, fingers flipping open in a mute "Why not?"
I curled the fingers of my right hand into the palm, then pointed the index finger forward, and lifted my thumb up; an antique Earth gesture dating back to the times when hand guns had fanning hammers on them. I spun the muzzle of this simulated weapon up, down, and every which way, to indicate to Clatclit that Baxter might manage, through sheer blind blasting, to polish us off before we got very far.
Clatclit slammed his right fist into his left palm in a furious symbol of an exasperated "Damn!"
"What are you two plotting up there?" Baxter demanded suddenly.
"We were discussing the futility of a lights-out scurry for cover, since that weapon of yours would slice right through these tunnels," I said, deciding the truth was the best way to avoid suspicious repercussions. "If your bolt didn't get us, the falling ceiling might."
"I'm glad you're using your intelligence, Delvin," Baxter answered. Then: "Why are we stopping?"
"Because," I said, halting where Clatclit had suddenly paused in his forward motion, "that thunder you hear is the reason the Ancients never find themselves neck-deep in the sugarfeet. An impassable river is up ahead."
"Impassable?" Baxter scowled.
"Not for us, but for Clatclit, here," I said. "He can't even go around this corner without risking deadly corrosion. And, in case you didn't notice back in your office, he's had a pretty nasty exposure already."
"Nevertheless," said Baxter, "I must insist that he either accompany us, or be destroyed right here."
"What!" I said, appalled. "You can't ask him to do that! He wouldn't last any longer than you would in boiling oil!"
"I certainly do not intend to leave him here," Baxter snapped. "He might alert others of his kind, and—"
"And what?" I growled. "You could fend off a million of them with that weapon of yours."
"And risk the ceiling falling in on my head?" Baxter said. "No, Delvin, I'm not about to take that chance."
"And just how," I said savagely, "did that peanut brain of yours plan on your getting out of here without him?"
Baxter paused, his gun hand wavering.
"Because if he melts in the river, or is vaporized right here and now, you will be stuck without a light. Stuck in a rock-hard maze that you couldn't negotiate alone if you had a light."
Baxter just stared, thinking furiously.
"Of course," I went on, "you could simply aim that thing upward, and disintegrate your way out. But that, too, might make the ceiling fall in. And if it didn't, you'd have the small difficulty of climbing the glass-sided well you'd created. Climbing, by the way, into the Martian desert, where there is no air, no water, and very little heat. You'd be dessicated, suffocated, and a popsicle to boot!"
"I—I could very easily slant the bolt into Marsport," Baxter blustered. "I could climb the slope easily enough, and there'd be fresh air waiting for me, too."
"Yeah," I mocked, folding my arms. "Fresh air and a city full of insurgent Baxter-haters. Assuming, of course, that you didn't strike an underground stream in the process, and get washed away into the depths of the planet when your hold-off stance with the collapser tired you out, when you'd completely dissipated the charge."
"I—" Baxter said, desperately nervous.
"And also assuming," I continued, "that you know in which direction Marsport is, chum! Of course, you could swing that thing in a full circle of slant-blasts toward the surface, but then that would make the ceiling fall in, wouldn't it, once you'd cut away all supports."
Baxter trembled with impotent rage, but his gun's muzzle was finally slumped all the way toward the floor of the tunnel. He was beaten, and he knew it.
And that's when I jumped him.
My still-working right arm shot down and gripped his right wrist, a very awkward stance to take, but my left arm was still weak and useless from my fall. But Clatclit moved in, then, his rocky talons sinking like so many fangs into Baxter's right arm, all three of us a writhing tangle on the tunnel floor, each of us frantically aware that the gun had better not emit any bolts while an arm, leg or tail flailed in front of it.
Baxter shrieked with fear and rage as those steely fingers took hold. I think he was too upset otherwise to feel the pain.
And then a bolt buzzed blindingly into the tunnel, and as we all three flattened ourselves and waited for the ceiling to come crashing down, it spattered into nothingness against the wall.
We sat up, staring at the spot where the so-called invincible bolt had simply been dissipated, all of us looking pretty silly, flat on our bottoms, leaning back on our hands on that curved stone surface, momentarily losing sight of our belligerent behavior of a moment before.
"The wall!" I said, first to realize the significance. But I couldn't go on. Baxter finished for me.
"It's parabolite!" he cried.
Then my eyes were dazzled by the blaze of light that suddenly materialized all around us, and my stomach turned over sickeningly as I realized that the converse was probably true: We had just materialized inside the dazzling light!
We were, all three of us, within the metallic-shimmering chamber of the ancient Martians.
"Well done, Jery Delvin," said a familiar voice, and then the light before us trembled and warped, and I was looking into the disconcerting triple face of the Ancient again.
I was not, however, in the mood for compliments.
"Where is my woman?" I said peremptorily.
"On your departure, she expressed a desire to inquire further into the health of her sibling," said the Martian. "She is even now with him and his companions."
"In that cage?" I cried angrily.
"I assure you she is—"
"Kindly forego the lecture on metabolic stasis and raise the damned thing, will you?" I interrupted.
The Martian warped and sparkled in a dizzying movement that I could only interpret as a shrug, and then the huge parabolite cage came rising up from that not-quite-there flooring.
"Jery!"
"Snow, baby!"
We clung to each other awkwardly, and our lips met between the columnar bars. I pulled back and called, "Can't you open this thing up, now?"
"Your mission is not quite accomplished, Jery Delvin," said the Martian. "The man Philip Baxter is within our realm, but as yet undestroyed."
"You mean I've still got to—"
"As told you repeatedly: Physical contact between our races is impossible, Jery Delvin."
"Hey, what about that?" I said. "After I left here, I got to wondering how, if what you just said is true, you people were able to manipulate the Brain to select me."
"The Brain of which you speak works on a principle of force-fields, generated by induction coils. We simply placed the right counterforces in the right places. No actual contact was necessary."
"Well, damn it," I said, after a glance back at Baxter and Clatclit, who were staring bewilderedly toward the source of the voice, "can't you just keep him here? He's bound to perish from lack of food, or water, or—"
"Jery Delvin, the metabolic stasis which I have already mentioned to you is not something we used specially for these boys. It is a necessary contingent of our world. Where there is absolute Location, there is absolutely no change of the sort you mentioned."
I gave up. "All right, all right. I won't argue the point. If you could get at him, I guess you would. Not a chance of dropping him down a hole, or something, though?"
"By the very nature of our world, hazardous localizing is an impossibility. Our universe possesses a self-regulatory locale-control that obviates the contingency of perilous placement of an individual."
"Their universe has what?" Snow asked me, her blue-violet eyes wide.
"A built-in safety feature," I muttered. "It figures, now that I think of it. If Location is absolute, it is One. That means that it's either all-safe, or all-dangerous. It can't have a bit of one thing and a bit another. Which means that I'm still carrying the ball."
"Correction," said Baxter, behind me, "you have fumbled."
I looked back at him. He had the collapser in his hand yet, despite our space-warping materialization in the cavern. And the muzzle was pointed right at Snow's breast, at the Amnesty.
"Jery!" she cried, hanging onto my arm.
"Baxter!" I yelled, stepping in front of her and flattening myself against the bars. "Give us a chance! If that damned thing triggers the parabolite, you'll go with us!"
"How little you know, Delvin," Baxter smiled. "There are any number of features of this other dimension which even your fantastic intellect has not guessed. Did it never occur to you to wonder just where I'd learned the construction of a teleportation machine?"
"I—I'd assumed you learned it somehow from the Ancients," I said. "Before they realized you intended their destruction."
"I take my hat off to you," said Baxter, with a slight nod of grudging admiration. "I didn't realize you'd thought things out quite that far."
"Hell, it was the only way you could have learned," I said. "But what's it got to do with—"
"With the fission-bomb?" Baxter said, smiling. "Why, only everything. You see, Delvin, teleported matter, in order to bypass distance, must travel in the place where there is no distance: the fourth dimension. And so, the brunt of the blast will be absorbed by the Ancients, not by me."
I heard the Martian gasp. Apparently, they weren't aware of this fact. It was more than just displacement they faced, it was death.
"Your agents," I temporized, "they'd then be using a system that transported them via radioactive chaos!"
Baxter shook his head. "Since the transfer is an instantaneous one, I rather doubt that they'd absorb any roentgens to speak of."
That seemed to be that. He was set to fire, and I was all out of arguments. And my stance between Snow and that ray-pistol was only a fleeting protection. She'd go about one second after I did.
Then, behind me in the cage, I heard a movement, and Snow gave a little cry. I jerked my head about.
Ted, with more sense than his sister, had simply taken the Amnesty from about her throat and flung it away. All of us followed its flight with dazzled eyes.
Baxter swung up the barrel of the collapser and fired. And in the same instant, the spinning disc halted, and then dodged out of the trajectory of the bolt.
The Martian was protecting himself in the only way he could: Changing the parabolite-bomb's location.
I crouched involuntarily, clutching Snow's hand through the bars, as the life-and-death contest went on. The tiny disc of destruction flitted here, there and everywhere, in a dizzying erratic course, while Baxter kept the trigger of the collapser depressed tightly, and slashed wildly in the eye-dazzling light of that place with the pulsing beam.
I wasn't in favor of the Ancients, exactly, but I was bound and determined to halt Baxter's reckless blasting with that gun, one flick of whose ray would disintegrate me, Snow or Clatclit, not to mention the frightened huddle of small boys in that cage. And there was one way to halt him.
"At him!" I cried to the Martian. "He won't fire if it's anywhere near himself!"
He must have heard me. The disc skidded to a wobbly halt, and then it dove like an eagle toward Baxter in a swift, graceful line. A straight line.
"ZIG-ZAG, YOU IMBECILE!" I yelled, an instant too late.
Even the poorest shot can track an object moving toward or away from him. Baxter's collapser caught the descending disc a good twenty yards before it got to him.
My eyes clamped shut against the monstrous blaze of heat and light. Then, Snow's hand tightly gripped in mine, I was enveloped in inky blackness, with nothing but empty air beneath the soles of my boots. And falling.