THE LIGHTNING'S COURSE

The song pulsed in a vibrant, ominous cadence through the streets of nightclad Certagarni, clashed against the glassite atmosphere—retaining walls of the ancient Martian city, and penetrated faintly into a dimly lighted room of the Earth Embassy where the two earthmen sat smoking, listening.

One of them spoke in a hoarse whisper which cut out above the dull, endless drone of discontented voices like the scream of a tortured soul:

"God, if it would only break! Flame across a world—battles to be fought and won!"

"And lost, Del Andres!" came the other's calm voice. "If this revolt does come, it'll be so big that we'll never stamp it down without the Legion!" His slender fingers rose to caress thoughtfully a close-cropped, golden beard.

A twisted, bitter smile played on Del Andres' full, sensitive lips. Strange pain was etched on his dark, handsome face and in the black pools of his eyes flame burned. He remained silent.

"What are you thinking about, Del?"

"Battle—and death! War like we had in Alpha Centauri. A blaze of conquest like the Fall of Kackijakaala. What else is there to live for?"

"There are many things!"

"Not any more, Frederix. The years have been too cruel." The dark eyes were staring out into the night, thrusting aside the enfolding curtain of a dozen decades and many trillion miles of outer space. "Oh, why did I stay here fooling around with robots when I could have gone out to Sirius with the Legion—to battle, to glory?"

"Because you're needed here. Hear those voices! Of what are they singing? Revolt, of course. And why? Because they think earthmen are wholly to blame for the loss of control of their industry and commerce!"

"Aren't they?" blazed Andres. "We think we're always right, we of Earth. Because we were the first to conquer space we think we should rule its farthest bounds, cosmic policeman, arbitrator of all internal strife from here to the ultimate!

"We went out to Centauri over a century ago, brought the Vrons out of subjugation beneath the Dwares, gave them freedom after tying up all kinds of trade agreements for our benefit; and then skipped over to Lalande and fixed everything according to our scale of values. And now Sirius!

"Here in our own system what goes on? I need not mention the names of the men who are undermining and usurping the greatest Martian institutions. Earthmen all!

"Mars has as much a right to freedom and monopoly on its own civilization as Earth on hers. Because a few greedy men spread tyranny through Certagarni, the Thyles, Botrodus, Zabirnza and other regions, they blame all of Earth. Neither you nor I can say they're wrong!"

"It's deeper than that, Del. The Vrons of Centauri have as great a hand in it as Wilcox, Onupari and the other earthmen here. You'll find—"

"Bosh!" snapped Andres, and then that smouldering flame was in his eyes again, something that leaped to the lure of the far places and spoke of the meteoric winds that blow between the worlds. His deep, resonant voice grew strained, lingered on his words:

"I wonder—"

The purring of a bell insinuated itself above the dull droning without. Hunter Frederix arose, switched on the televisorphone.

"Hello, Dave," he addressed the face on the video, "what's up?"

"Plenty, Hunt. Just received a teletype from Kaa. Revolt has broken out all over Botrodus. Captain Adelbert Andres is commanded to report immediately to eleventh division Kaa to command the defense squadrons. Signed by old 'Zipper' Taine himself. And, Hunt, something is screwy in the air over here. The old man's on a hot jet over something or other. Better get over here quick!"

"O.K., brother Cravens! Del will break a speed record getting to Kaa; he has the old battle itch worse than ever. I'll be over to the Station as soon as my gyro'll make it. Sounds like all hell is about to break in the city!"

"So? Well, you'd—So long!" Cravens broke off abruptly, and they could see him whirl away from the transmitter as the videos died.

Snapping off the T V P, Hunter Frederix turned and said slowly, regretfully:

"Well, this is it!"

A smile lightninged across Andres' face.

"It's about time! This inactivity was killing me!"

"Be careful; the best of luck and all that; and may you come back in one piece!"

"One live piece, Frederix!" he mocked, and his dark face, tanned by long exposure to Centauri's blazing binary sun, set forth the fierce glint in his eyes and sudden, bitter pain on his lips. "Thank God it matters to some one—"

"It matters to the world," Frederix said softly. "After all the Legion is ten light years away, and the Defense Squadrons must keep our system at peace!"

"Just keep believing that we will. Faith helps a lot sometimes."

Their hands clasped warmly.

"So I'm checking out. If you get near Botrodus, drop in at the Rendezvous; I'll be there if I'm off duty. You see, I've a new robot to show you—something I can't understand myself—powered by radium; and I know it has intelligence!"

"O.K., Del. And I may be in sooner than you think. When Dave Cravens gets the jitters something pretty powerful is giving them to him!"

"Good old Dave. He was with me at Kackijakaala, helped me at the robot controls—but you know about that. Ask him to tell you about the time we were surrounded at Travarga."

"He has!"

"Well. Oh, hell, Hunt, goodbye!" Andres whirled lithely, and with long strides left the room.

"So long!" Frederix called after him; then turned, swept a mass of Starcharts into the safe, locked it, and turned towards the tiny landing outside where rested his one man gyrotomic ... towards the beginning of a strange destiny which would weave together the fates of worlds and stars, and bring to him knowledge of greatness such as man had never known before.

II

Swiftly the gyrotomic sped beneath the vaulted ceiling of Certagarni, using the air propellers and gyrovanes as local ordinances demanded for the sake of air conservation, slanting above streets thronging with gesticulating, chanting men wearing the bizarre native dress of old Mars.

It was no impersonal, cursory glance which Frederix gave that tense mob; rather was it a careful, searching observation. Here and there his keen gray eyes discerned Centaurians, tall, slender men, haranguing the natives. More uneasy grew his anxious heart. Had his words to Andres contained more of the truth than he had realized?

Beating down through the thick glassite ceiling, clearly audible above the faint purr of his motors, he heard the roar of many gyrotomics, flashed a glance upward and glimpsed an hundredfold of blasts flashing to the east towards Kaa. With revolt so imminent here, had the Station ships been ordered to Botrodus?

Out into the clear cold Martian night through a photocell-actuated lock he raced, his atomics red-flaring now, towards the Spacestation.

Ten miles out the great towering structure housing mighty positron guns (anti-spacecraft batteries) rose in the blackness. Dropping down low, he slipped into a small lock behind the hangars and clambered forth beneath the vaulted roof.

The tall, blond man paused for a moment, listening for the familiar sounds of men playing poker with virile blasphemy over in Barracks, but, save for the hum of generators in the power plant, all was deathly still.

Strange, he thought, that all the men should go to Kaa, even the mechanics, draftsmen and ordinance men!

He turned uneasily towards the lighted Communications office, finding it deserted. Now where was Cravens? He should be here at the teletypes, T V P's and radios. He wouldn't have gone to Kaa nor deserted his post wilfully.

Advancing to the silent teletype machine Frederix saw that it was cut off all circuits save the direct Certagarni-Calidao band. What he read on the page brought a mounting fury into his brain:

The messages were dated scarcely ten minutes before. They must have been completed directly after Cravens had called the Embassy. But who had sent the first and received the second? There was only one Vron at Certagarni. It couldn't be he; he was loyal to the Legion.

Perplexedly Frederix turned towards the inner room. Simultaneously a voice cut across the silence:

"Looking for someone, Lieutenant?"

Slowly he turned to confront Captain Meevo of the Defense Squadron—Meevo of whom he had thought but seconds past.

"Yes, sir. What does this mean? Where are the men?"

Meevo's thin, haughty face twisted cruelly. "The men have been taken care of; and this means that the old regime is going out; that a new race shall rule all of this system when the Legion returns from Sirius!"

"A new race?"

"Yes. Mine, the Vrons, true blood of Alpha Centauri—"

Frederix could sense again the mystic alien strength of this man who had joined the Legion years ago during the Liberation; that subtle magnetism at which he had so often wondered, which kept him now from plunging recklessly into that leveled weapon.

"And just how do you propose doing this?"

"First, internal revolt, the rekindling of the old fires of worldly and national prejudice by a few well-ordered murders and the wholesale destruction of the spacestations. Even now my good friend Manuel Onupari has a ship waiting in Calidao, waiting to be loaded with seedrona from Jethe's munitions plant which will blast every station on Earth. Tomorrow night we will put that ship into its orbit.

"But you shall only see the beginning here, Frederix. Now be so kind as to go out to the control turret."

Slowly the young ordnance engineer turned and walked out through the glassite tunnel to the turret overlooking the fortress. His heart was hammering madly and his slender hands nervously clenching and unclenching. He forced himself to speak:

"And this Advent. What of that?"

"Three years ago an Armada left Centauri, two thousand light ships armed, as you earthmen say, to the teeth. Three more years and they will be here; and a system ruined by internal revolt will lie helpless for conquest!"

"God!" burst Frederix.

"Call on your God, Earthman, and I will call on mine to speed those mighty ships!"

Frederix forced himself to stop that mad desire to whirl about, to charge Meevo with bare hands. For that would be certain, horrible death with burning disruption in his vitals.

Now he glimpsed Captain Marlin's huddled, ray-ribboned body lying near the smashed controls within the tower. Close by Lieutenant Gorman lay in hideous death.

Strange thoughts passed through his brain. Why did not Meevo, schooled in slaughter, slay him, too?

But Meevo merely motioned him to enter the room; he did so, then the frail, haughty Vron said slowly, relishing the situation with an alien humor which the other could not understand:

"You've about fifteen minutes, Frederix. Fifteen minutes to realize the fact that you'll be blown to bits. When the station goes, Certagarni will revolt; in a few weeks, as the other stations go, Mars will fall completely into chaos.

"A few months and Onupari shall have lain waste the Earth stations. It's too bad you must miss it all; but you must! So I'm locking you in here where you can view the glorious beginning. This room has been the sanctum sanctorum of these two dead gentlemen; I've no doubt you'll be unable to solve the diallock's combination. It will give you something to pass the moments away with. So, goodbye, Earthman. May your ancestors welcome you with wine and tribulation!"

With that alien idiom uttered, the Vron stepped outside. The great durite door crashed shut, the diallock whirled.

A moment later a small gyrotomic blasted into the night sky and moved swiftly into the northeast towards distant Calidao.

Frederix heard the purring of the electric clock, turned his gaze towards it, and the second hand going 'round, swiftly. He tried the door, turned back into the room. Glassite-durite walls faced him, transparent but comprised of the hardest alloy in the system.

Flicking on a desk lamp, he rummaged around the room. No weapons, no tools.... And the minutes were fleeing—ten minutes more—nine!

And then his eyes fell on a portable cathode ray oscillograph, and inspiration lighted up his rugged, bearded face!

The door was locked by a high frequency radio wave diallock, the most delicate and most burglar proof lock in the system. Its shielded exterior made it invulnerable to the most advanced instruments of a modern Raffles; but its unshielded inner side—

Quickly he plugged in the oscillograph on A.C., brought it to the door, adjusted the wires from the jack-top binding posts to the terminal of the lock, stepped up the anode voltage, cut in the sweep circuit and paused for a long moment to still the quivering of his hand as he reached for the diallock.

His eyes were glued to the greenish fluorescence of the slow-screen tube as he started twirling the combination. Waves pulsed evenly across the grid. And then they jerked almost unnoticeably; a wave-plate had fallen into position! He changed the diallock's direction back slowly. Another variance in the oscillation. Back, again!

The clock purring, purring, and somewhere another clock ticking the doom of the station away.

His whole body was trembling as he made the final turn and was breathlessly rewarded with the sight of a higher frequency wave pulsing smoothly across the tube. The door fell silently open. The clock said a minute to the zero hour!

He raced across the roof, full in the flare of a swirling beacon. Of course he did not see the crawling, bleeding body in the darkness near the radio-room's door, did not hear the hoarse, feeble cry:

"Oh, God, not Frederix!"

He blasted his ship out through the automatic lock at full speed. Seconds later his radio receiver burst into life:

"Calling KBM, Kaa. This is Cravens at Certagarni. Meevo and Frederix killed all the men; sent the squadron to attack Kaa. Station will blow into Hell within a minute. Oh, God, get them—Captain Meevo and Lieutenant Hunter Frederix—traitors! The Cen—"

The weak, quavering voice died away.

The night turned to crimson flame. Boom! A vast concussion shook the earth, the sky. Frederix fought the bucking controls. Behind, the spacestation's defenses were debris spouting into the upper air, and livid, leaping fire cast macabre patterns upon the distant vaults of Certagarni.

He sat in the cushioned seat, stunned by the immensity of the deed and by the startling denunciation he had heard as Cravens, with whom he had conversed so much, Cravens who had made the trio of Andres, Frederix and himself rich indeed in the folklore of the stars—Cravens had named him traitor!

Dave had even taken his transmitter to overhaul the day before. Consequently he could not contact Kaa or Del and protest his innocence, warn them of the awful fullness of the Vron plot, of the Armada. He would probably be shot down should he stumble upon the aerial battle which would soon be waged over Botrodus since Cravens had warned Kaa, the key station there.

As if in attendance upon his thoughts, his open receiver burst, amid general static:

"KBM calling all ships. Apprehend all suspicious craft approaching Botrodus; engage if they refuse to give proper clearance. Meevo—Frederix—if you hear my voice, understand that you will be given no quarter—"

Suddenly another carrier wave whined into the wavelength; Andres' angry voice broke in:

"Blake, you damned fool, Frederix had nothing to do with this!"

"Captain Andres, unless you have absolute proof, please get off the band—"

Silence. Heartbreaking silence. KBM took up again, vainly calling Calidao.

Frederix looked at his directional finder. He was heading for Kaa at nearly a thousand m.p.h. If he changed his course a few degrees and headed for Andres' Rendezvous on the Kaa-Calidao airline, he could call KBM and straighten the matter out. Quickly he made the necessary alterations....

The bitter chill of the Martian night cut through the ship's hull. Locking the robot controls, Frederix slipped on a beryl-durite oxysuit, locked the glassite helmet in place and turned on the thermo-electric unit.

Straight out across the Hargoan Swamps he flew, towards the Rendezvous. And he thought of the past, back before his birth when Andres, as legend ran, had come back from far places, from a memorable battle in Alpha Centauri's vast system, wounded in body, and, his legion buddies whispered, in heart. Aye, even in soul. Rumor had it that he had loved with all the native fire and enthusiasm that were his—fighter extraordinary, D'Artagnan of the Legion. Had loved and lost and something within him had died.

He had for a while lived a hermitary existence in an old Martian ruin on a narrow, arid, mountainous strip cutting across Hargo; but combat, strife, adventure called—

Reenlistment. Out to Lalande 21,185; for Centauri was in peace. Battle after hellborn battle until that lesser and nearer Lalande had found a newbirth of freedom.

But Andres had not embarked upon the twelve-year journey across the 8.4 light years to Sirius in the Legion's stellatomics. He had told Frederix that the day might come when Sol would need him more. And so he remained with the Solarian Defense, clinging to that ancient estate—his Rendezvous where he held communion with his memories and with the ghosts of those who had fallen beside and before his blazing guns—haunting it when on Mars and off duty....

Far to the south Frederix caught the fierce glare of disrupters, of jets flaming in the black, starshot night as furious combat raged. Del, too, was probably there, deep in the bloody game which was his life now—

Onward, onward.

Dawn shot up, breaking with all the suddenness of Martian day. To his right Frederix glimpsed a ship bearing down upon him—a Certagarni ship, named doubtless by a Vron-minded Martian.

Suddenly the savage whine of other atomics crescendoed from above. From the corner of his eye Frederix caught the crimson splurge of a master disrupter from the nose of an insanely-plunging blue ship—a Kaa ship!

A red finger burned across his right wing, tearing it cleanly free; the ship whipstalled, hung like a stricken, one-winged bird and whirled into a dizzy, whipping spin. Grimly he wrestled with the useless controls, tried to avert the crash, flung his eyes upwards towards the victor, and a scream sundered his lips:

"DEL!" A useless scream, killed by the higher keening of wind and unleashed jets.

The craft careened erratically into the swamp, down through infinitely intermeshed trees which broke the velocity of its fall, and crashed sickeningly into the frozen mire.

Miraculously Frederix retained consciousness and tore his bruised, throbbing body from the shattered cabin, plunged to the slippery ground and screamed madly, flinging his helmet open:

"Del! Del! Oh, God! Come back!" But the atomics screamed as Andres whirled towards the other Certagarni ship and, embattled, fled into the distances towards Kaa.

He dragged himself weakly from the frozen, broken ice, reeling in dizziness. Blood was spurting from his nostrils, his breath was shot and rasping in the frigid, ozone-tainted atmosphere. Feebly he fumbled for his helmet catch, closing it after an eternity, and collapsed on a nearby hummock, gulping in the oxygen which meant life.

He looked at the crumpled, broken ship. Something man had built, gone the way of all his creations. And why? Because of man's savagery, man's impetuosity, man's searching after the vain chimera of glory—

Rising, he stumbled into the north, towards the Rendezvous and, beyond, Calidao, Onupari, and that upon which the future freedom of Earth depended—the seedrona in the vaults of Jethe.

At length he dropped in utter exhaustion. The noonday sun shone upon his inert body near the foothills of a low-lying mountain range.

Long hours later he awoke, incredibly refreshed, and scrambled upward to the highest summit of the range. A cry of exultation burst from his lips. Before him was a tiny valley on whose farther side clung a huge, rocky pile which only a Martian—or Andres and his kin who had beheld the insane architecture of the hither stars—might call an abode of man.

The Rendezvous—Del Andres' Rendezvous, at last!

III

Darkly red and ominous, the old pile seemed untenanted when first its bloody portico spread beneath his swiftly questing feet. Fantastic, ponderous arches topping offset, fluted columns; weirdly carven facades. An architect's nightmare; a surrealistic concept of a palace in Hades; but house ne'er seemed so welcoming to a lone man against a world.

Silence broken only by the faint, thin whisper of a rising wind sweeping red dust through the trellises about the time-scarred walls, indicative of a simoon in the offing.

Advancing to the great door, he rapped sharply, then tried the latch. To his surprise it yielded. Entering the vestibule, he opened his helmet to a revivifying blast of oxygen fresh from the automatic ozone transformers, and called. The echo of his voice alone came back.

He found the library dustless and orderly. Trophies hung on the walls: mounted heads and bodies of creatures slain beneath alien suns, ghastly travesties on solarian mammals, creatures envisioned in dreams. Weapons from the far places, taken (as the labels read) at the siege of Kackijakaala in Alpha Centauri, six years distant by the fastest stellatomic.

How old, then, was Del Andres the magnificent? Man's allotted span, increased by the elimination of all disease, covers but a hundred and fifty years; yet Andres had seen and fought those years away within the vast systems of Centauri and Lalande, and he seemed still a young man, by appearance no older than Frederix's thirty years.

Aye, there were mysteries about Del Andres—rumors about a Vron princess far across space, years ago as time runs.

Intuitively Frederix moved to luxurious draperies hanging on the walls, moved them aside and a sigh came from his parted lips. The sheer, glorious, breath-taking beauty of the picture revealed stunned him! Third-dimensional it seemed, tinted with an ethereal loveliness, the supreme glory of womankind—

Haughtiness, perhaps, but the haughtiness that breeds the hope of conquest that would be rich, indeed, in its fulfillment.

He released the drapes and turned aside with a cry in his heart. Only now did he fully realize the fatalistic spirit which drove Del Andres: the devil-may-care fearlessness, the sheer recklessness, the constant hoping, perhaps, for death.

Small wonder that Hunter Frederix left that shrine and quested inward, saddened immeasurably by what he had seen and what he had so suddenly realized. For he had seen, in that moment, into the hidden recesses of a great man's soul.

The dining salle opened before him, seemingly converted into a species of chambre-des-horreurs since robot parts were strewn all over the place: limbs, wires, sockets, photocells, small atomic motors. Robot control was a hobby of Andres—a robot of his making had, at Kackijakaala, entered and opened the gates of the fortress at which the Legion had hammered futilely for months on end in conquering the Dwares of Centauri and bringing peace and prosperity to the system's many races—prosperity and the ultimate hope of cosmic conquest!

He crossed the sill, started hurriedly towards a radio cabinet in the far corner. Simultaneously a door nearby fell silently open and what he saw caused, at first, a smile to flash across his bearded face.

Into the room came a tiny form, probably three feet tall, hairy and chubby like a Ganymedean monkey, its face a delicate pink, its large eyes an innocent baby-blue, dominating a pudgy simian face. A robot, no less—the robot about which Del had talked—whose comical aspect was not at all in keeping with the grim menace of a paralysis-pellet gun in one manual extremity and a disrupter in the other! Its thick lips parted and a reproduction of Andres' voice said:

"Don't move or I shall be forced to shoot. You will kindly remain as you are until Del Andres returns!" Whereupon the litany continued rapidly in Lalandean and Centaurian and abated.

Frederix stood frozen in his tracks, his smile gone now. He'd heard of automatic robots before, guarding bleak, desolate outposts in the still watches of extra-terrestrial nights whose weapons would be automatically discharged should anything change the visual pattern on their photocells during or after the warning.

The suspense was maddening. A radio transmitter and receiver stood scant feet away, and he dared not move to reach them—the means of calling Kaa, of sending angry ships swarming at Calidao, for perhaps (a perhaps that was maddening in its import)—perhaps Onupari had not swept into the void with his cargo of death.

Andres had spoken of some intelligence manifest in the robot's actions. Might it then understand if he spoke to it?

"I am Hunter Frederix, Del Andres' friend," he said softly, scarcely moving his lips. The robot remained motionless, irresponsive. Was it merely the sparking of relays or had he described a gleam of something else in those mechanical eyes?

He talked on, explaining the entire situation. Abruptly, amazingly, the automaton sheathed its weapons.

Frederix turned towards the radio, astounded by what he had seen, striving to give the exhibition of understanding some explanation which did not admit of a created mentality; then, without, he heard the jetting of a landing gyrotomic.

A warm, excited cry cut the silence of the old mansion:

"Hunt! I thought you'd come here! Oh, I knew Dave was wrong!"

Del Andres rushed into the room, his dark face agleam, his strong arms outstretched in welcome greeting.

Frederix caught his hands, crushed them and said nothing.

"We captured a Vron, learned that they have sent an Armada—"

"I know," Frederix said simply.

"Oh, I knew they'd come!" Andres raced on. "I warned the Legion years ago; but they knew more than I who lived with the Vrons at Centauri, who—well, it doesn't matter! What matters is that I know them for what they are: cruel, domineering, the greatest actors in the universe; and when they want something—power or love or gold, it doesn't matter which for their fancies change in a moment—nothing will stop their mad rush towards that goal—" Suddenly he was staring into the shadowed room whence he had come and there was bitterness in his dark eyes—the bitterness of cruel and undimmed memories.

"But they must be stopped!" Frederix cried.

"We'll stop them!" whispered Andres, his strong, white teeth bared almost wolfishly. "The Legion can't get back in time; but we've worlds to defend, Hunt, and the courage to defend them. But why did Dave Cravens name you traitor?"

He could talk now. He could empty his bursting heart. Swiftly he recounted everything from those dangerous moments in Certagarni to the present.

"We'll win through!" Andres cried, his great hands strong and encouraging on Frederix's shoulders. "We'll get the Kaa ships to Calidao; we'll wireless Earth; we'll curb it now while it's not too late! Their armada is years away; much can be done ere it comes!

"Why, we've already downed the Certagarni squadron and reestablished control there and in Botrodus!"

That supreme confidence banished the hopeless resignation in Frederix's heart, buoyed him up and gave him newborn hope.

Andres was smiling, reaching into the young engineer's open helmet to grasp his golden beard in iron fingers, to tug at it playfully.

"Getting gray, fella! Must've happened when I shot you down!"

That broke the strain. They grinned boyishly at each other; then Del spun on his heel, walked to the radio cabinet, and simultaneously a carbon copy of his own voice cried in mockery:

"Don't move a muscle or I shall be forced to shoot."

He started to turn; the robot's unsheathed pellet gun coughed and Del toppled over against the transmitter, smashing the bared, delicate condensers into nothingness as he dropped into paralysis.

Frederix stood stunned. "No ... no ..." he murmured; and then he was leaping forward, tears of rage and futility in his eyes, to lift Del to a nearby couch, to call to him incoherently.

He looked then to the robot standing silently nearby. The curses on his lips were never uttered, for flooding into his mind came a strong feeling of sorrow, regret, and the automaton was extending the weapons to him grip foremost, as though their surrender might repair the damage done!

He tried to fight off the thoughts which thronged the threshold of his mind then. He tried to think of Del and of Onupari and his death cargo, of hellish death rushing across the light years towards Sol; but instead he could think only of the things Del had told him of creating this robot, powering it with a full gram of radium, releasing intelligence.

That there was intelligence here, he did no longer question. A reasoning intellect which had forbade slaying him and now had done this inexplicable thing. Or did it have complete control of the robot's form? Had it acted of its own accord or had the robot's relays automatically caused this dilemma? That final thought brought a counter-thought, a clear and sorrowing affirmation!

But how could he credit anything existing independent of a flesh and blood body as having intelligence? Must not every life form remain an insoluble psychophysical being?

And yet—is not the basis of all things electrical? Life and all that pertains to it and the universe? Why not, then, a pure, radioactive intelligence? Could it not have arisen by evolving degrees from the complexity of atomic fluctuations finding genesis in the pitted core of Pallas—where Andres, prospecting to pass empty days away, had found it—a sentient consciousness born in cosmic loneliness out of the very fabric of the universe? Had not One Other thus found genesis?

The weird new wonder of it strong within him, Frederix looked down at Andres, silent, immovable on the couch. A strange little smile played on sensitive, parted lips beneath the thin black mustache. Frederix wondered if he dreamed—

Spinning around to the radio, he discovered that to repair it would take hours. Yet he must call Kaa, summon the Service men, and depart in Del's ship for Calidao, on the slim chance that Onupari might still be there and that he might stay the take-off.

Atomics moaning above. He rushed to the window. Five ships V-ed into the south, magnificent against a dust-darkened sky, flashing swiftly out of sight under full power. Service ships, so near and yet so far!

Of course, the ship! Del's ship would have radio equipment. He rushed out on the impulse, his breath coming fast within his helmet.

Snapping on the transmitter, he called quickly into the microphone:

"Frederix calling KBM, Kaa. Calling KBM...."

QRM snapped through his receiver, born of those lowering skies over Botrodus, one of those rare but violent sandstorms come to disrupt radio communication.

Now a calm official voice answered, badly distorted by atmospheric disturbance:

"KBM to Frederix. What (brrrrrt) ... message?"

"Andres is paralyzed at the Rendezvous. Send a doctor. Send all available ships to Calidao—"

"Andres paralyzed.... Rendezvous.... Repeat ... mess ... can't...."

Frederix repeated grimly, persistently, but Kaa kept calling:

"KBM ... do not get ... repeat ... K ... rrrrrrrr...."

And then QRM blotted even that out.

Disgustedly he turned towards the port and the grim old mansion looming large in the cold, storm-born dusk, and hesitated. The message had gotten through. They at least knew Andres' condition and position; they would doubtless come plunging to the Rendezvous. He must leave a message!

Moments later he returned to the ship, a disrupter and a freshly-charged paralysis-pellet gun buckled at his waist. Before him scurried the automaton, its tragi-comic simian face turned back to him as if exhorting him to greater speed.

Gently, awesomely, almost reverently (for is not reverence born in recognition of the mighty and the mystic unknown which man cannot quite understand?), he handed the monkey-like thing into the cabin and followed.

Blasting off, he set a Mercator course, with all due corrections, for Calidao. Soon he outflew the fringes of the storm and then night fell like a finely-stitched widow's veil, the stars danced crazily as the air cooled, and he was alone in the darkness, roaring at full speed towards Calidao. Alone, aye, save for the weird little robot standing by his side, whatever life it possessed recording his every movement.

Gloom and hope held thrall in his soul. Things had seemed soluble with Andres smiling and pledging his support. Now he had weapons and a ship and a strong feeling that Onupari was still in Calidao, but—he was alone! Del was not here to help him. Still, he did have weapons. He might—

Aye, gloom was fighting a losing battle. A transcendental confidence was stirring his breast—and yet he wondered if it were not telepathic hypnosis finding genesis in the mind of the alien life which was close beside him? What were the limits of its intellect? What aid might it give? He did not dare to even wonder.

IV

Calidao, city of mystic intrigue, cosmopolitan city where Solarian, Centaurian and Lalandean hold daily intercourse, bartering in lives and souls, and in treasures and alien lore whose origin and significance shall remain forever hidden in the womb of time—

Thither flashed Frederix in the dead of night, riding the radio beam in from the direction of Kaa. Starshine alone and what light the almost indetectable moons gave illumined the semi-somnolent cosmopolis. Along the main artery, famed Space Boulevard, the varicolored lights of night clubs blazed up through the glassite vaults; the spaceport, a mile and more out of town, shone in a wavering splendour of swirling beacons, pointing white, stabbing fingers into the dark, and the whole was flooded intermittently with brightest green as the great concentration of spacelamps flashed a mighty, guiding column upward and outward to whatever craft might move across the firmament.

Frederix drove down low over the port, searching for sight of a large black freighter marked with Onupari's famous (and infamous) boxed-star insignia. Just as he was rewarded by a glimpse of it lying in the ways, just as exultation swept in a warm tide over him, a blindingly-crimson blast seared up from beneath, cutting a great gap in the left wing, waving futilely after him as he careened into the night, his tortured sight seeping slowly back, trying desperately to keep the crippled ship awing.

He realized that the Calidaoan Vrons and sympathizers bought with golden coins, promises of greatness, and freedom from the "Anarchy of Earth," had indeed taken dictatorial possession of Calidao and were guarding well the ship of Onupari which would bring death to the Double World.

Opening the purring atomics wide, he swept in a wide arc far out over the wastes and back to the farther side of the city, and, cutting in the infra-red viewplates, glided to a swift albeit unsteady landing on the verge of the encircling desert.

He hesitated, but the robot, dropping to the ground, led him unerringly to a small lock opening on one of the back streets. Pausing in the darkness, Frederix peered through the glassite wall.

A young Martian policeman stood smoking thoughtfully beneath a carbon arc, handsome and proudly erect in his bright, apparently-new uniform, quite alone in this narrow thoroughfare.

Frederix's hand dropped to the disrupter, shifted to the needle-gun, and, opening the lock slowly, he aimed and pressed the trigger. Leaping within, he caught the paralyzed youth, lowering him into the shadows of a nearby doorway.

A surge of commendation beat in his brain—praise for his choice of weapons. For why should one so young and handsome die? Why should any of Sol's disillusioned billions die because of a few greedy men who had rushed into a band which would damn the entire system unless someone revealed their duplicity, which had already precipitated all manner of internal strife? Violence would avail naught; they must be shown the plain truth of it so that they might live and be free!

The robot hurried away now, turned swiftly in a high-arched tunnel which intersected the street, and led Frederix to the fantastically carven front of a large mansion whose portal had been but recently blasted asunder. Over that shattered door was the crest of Jethe the munitions baron, and within the room—

Nausea seized Frederix's stomach. Hoary-haired Jethe, dealer in power for peace or war, was sprawled across a paper-strewn table in terrible death, his wizened face and body ribboned into one horrible mess of blood and gore, sliced by a disrupter, signature no doubt of Meevo or Onupari—

Dizzy with the sheer bestiality of the scene but driven by some manner of apprehension, Frederix threaded his way through the debris to an all-wave radio clinging on the farther wall, snapped the switch and dialed to the Kaa frequency.

A message was coming through, clear now, proof that the sandstorm had subsided and skies were clear. Frederix recognized the cold emotionless voice of Blake, the Kaa chief operator.

"... the message you've found may ring true, but in the light of Cravens' message from Certagarni, proving Frederix to be in league with anti-service factions, we find that we cannot send ships to a possible trap in Calidao until you've learned from Andres what's really behind all this. Please inform us of any developments. Off!"

Oh, the blind fools! They had found Andres and the message but would do nothing until the paralytic spell had worn away! And Onupari must have been in this room hours before; his ship, prepared for flight, must have long been loaded! He left the place of death at a run.

The tiny monkey-thing led the way toward Space Boulevard, and into the engineer's mind an encouraging thought came. Onupari has not left! And Frederix raged inwardly against the callousness, the bloodlust of that fat, swarthy renegade whom he had seen so many times glossing over crimes charged to him by the Embassy.

The freighter had not taken off yet; the thunder of its atomics would have been easily heard. He might yet—what? If the Service men—If—

As if they, trying to resuscitate an unconscious man almost an hour's flight away, could come in time!

V

Ahead he saw an enormous Geissler tube sign flashing alternately with neon's bright red and argon's blue:

THE SPACASINO
Dine & Dance—Floorshow Tonite
Joy 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 heard of it!"

"Tonight you'll hear it!"

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—

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.

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.

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 finger which 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!

A tiny voice keened above that mad tumult, shrilling out of that gutted, wrecked automaton:

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 of seedrona, 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.