Chapter 15: Specimens

Only too well founded was Costigan’s conviction that the submarine of the deep-sea fishes had not been able to prevail against Nerado’s formidable engines of destruction. For days the Nevian lifeboat with its three Terrestrial passengers hurtled through the interstellar void without incident, but finally the operative’s fears were realized--his far flung detector screens reacted; upon his observation plate they could see Nerado’s mammoth space-ship, in full pursuit of its fleeing lifeboat!

“On your toes, folks--it won’t be long now!” Costigan called, and Bradley and Clio hurried into the tiny control room.

Armor donned and tested, the three Terrestrials stared into the observation plates, watching the rapidly-enlarging picture of the Nevian space-ship. Nerado had traced them and was following them, and such was the power of the great vessel that the now inconceivable velocity of the lifeboat was the veriest crawl in comparison to that of the pursuing cruiser.

“And we’ve hardly started to cover the distance back to Tellus. Of course you couldn’t get in touch with anybody yet?” Bradley stated, rather than asked.

“I kept trying, of course, until they blanketed my wave, but all negative. Thousands of times too far for my transmitter. Our only hope of reaching anybody was the mighty slim chance that our super-ship might be prowling around out here already, but it isn’t, of course. Here they are!”

Reaching out to the control panel, Costigan viciously shot out against the great vessel wave after wave of lethal vibrations, under whose fiercely clinging impacts the Nevian defensive screens flared white; but, strangely enough, their own screens did not radiate. As if contemptuous of any weapons the lifeboat might wield, the mother ship simply defended herself from the attacking beams, in much the same fashion as a wildcat mother wards off the claws and teeth of her spitting, snarling kitten who is resenting a touch of needed maternal discipline.

“They probably wouldn’t fight us, at that,” Clio first understood the situation. “This is their own lifeboat, and they want us alive, you know.”

“There’s one more thing we can try--hang on!” Costigan snapped, as he released his screens and threw all his power into one enormous pressor beam.

The three were thrown to the floor and held there by an awful weight as the lifeboat darted away at the stupendous acceleration of the beam’s reaction against the unimaginable mass of the Nevian sky-rover; but the flight was of short duration. Along that pressor beam there crept a dull red rod of energy, which surrounded the fugitive shell and brought it slowly to a halt. Furiously then Costigan set and reset his controls, launching his every driving force and his every weapon, but no beam could penetrate that red murk, and the lifeboat remained motionless in space. No, not motionless--the red rod was shortening, drawing the truant craft back toward the launching port from which she had so hopefully emerged a few days before. Back and back it was drawn; Costigan’s utmost efforts futile to affect by a hair’s breadth its line of motion. Through the open port the boat slipped neatly, and as it came to a halt in its original position within the multi-layered skin of the monster, the prisoners heard the heavy doors clang shut behind them, one after another.

And then sheets of blue fire snapped and crackled about the three suits of Triplanetary armor--the two large human figures and the small ones were outlined starkly in blinding blue flame.

“That’s the first thing that has come off according to schedule.” Costigan laughed, a short, fierce bark. “That is their paralyzing ray, we’ve got it stopped cold, and we’ve each got enough iron to hold it forever.”

“But it looks as though the best we can do is a stalemate,” Bradley argued. “Even if they can’t paralyze us, we can’t hurt them, and we are heading back for Nevia.”

“I think Nerado will come in for a conference, and we’ll be able to make terms of some kind. He must know what these Lewistons will do, and he knows that we’ll get a chance to use them, some way or other, before he gets to us again,” Costigan asserted, confidently--but again he was wrong.

The door opened, and through it there waddled, rolled, or crawled a metal-clad monstrosity--a thing with wheels, legs and writhing tentacles of jointed bronze; a thing possessed of defensive screens sufficiently powerful to absorb the full blast of the Triplanetary projectors without effort. Three brazen tentacles reached out through the ravening beams of the Lewistons, smashed them to bits, and wrapped themselves in unbreakable shackles about the armored forms of the three human beings. Through the door the machine or creature carried its helpless load, and out into and along a main corridor. And soon the three Terrestrials, without arms, without armor, and almost without clothing, were standing in the control room, again facing the calm and unmoved Nerado. To the surprise of the impetuous Costigan, the Nevian commander was entirely without rancor.