Chapter 12: Out Under the Dome

Within the well of darkness rang the metallic reverberations from the battering on the four doors all around. The fluid nothingness was a place of fear. Its nerve-shattering, mind-confusing bedlam might have come from the fantastic anvils of some giant, malevolent blacksmith.

The Hawk’s curt voice cut through imperatively:

“Keep your heads. We’ll have a light in a second. Light of a sort.”

He threw the switch by the side of the chamber of brains.

Seconds passed, and where was darkness grew a faint glow. The switch had operated; the current, probably from the device’s own batteries, was there! Quickly and steadily the liquid within the case took on its self-originating glow, until the midnight laboratory was faintly washed with the delicate rosy light. The wires emerged in their complexity as before, and then the brains, all gruesome and naked in their cradles of unnatural life.

Around the internally-lit case were the three besieged Earthlings, half in blackness, the light from the front making ghastly shadows on their faces. Acolites at some sorcerer’s rite they looked, with the long inky patches that left them to dissolve formlessly against the far walls of the room.

Grotesque in the operating garments he wore, his bald head shining in the eery light, Eliot Leithgow approached the microphone Dr. Ku had used to communicate with his pathetic subjects. He looked down at the brains, at the wires which threaded the pans they lay in, at the narrow gray tubes that pulsed with blood--or whatever might be the fluid used in its stead. All mechanical was the apparatus--all of metal and other cunningly fashioned man-made materials--all but the brains...

To the old Master Scientist there came a vision of five human figures, rising specterlike from the case they were entombed in; straight, proud young figures, two of them; two others old, like himself, and the fifth a gnarled hunchback. Very different were they, each from each other, but each face had its mark of genius; and each face, to Eliot Leithgow, was warm and smiling, for these five men were friends...

So he saw them in vision...

“Another switch has to be thrown to talk with them, Carse,” he said. The Hawk indicated one inquiringly. Leithgow nodded. “Yes. That was it.” The switch went over.

He steadied himself and said into the speaking grille:

“I am Eliot Leithgow--Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. Once you knew me. Professors Geinst, Estapp and Norman, Dr. Swanson and Master Scientist Cram--do you remember me? Do you remember how once we worked together; how, long ago on our Earth, we were friends? Do you remember your old colleague, Leithgow?”

He stopped, deeply shaken. In seconds his mind sped back through the years to those five men as he had last seen them--and to two women he had met, calm-faced as their husband-scientists ... God forbid those women should ever learn of this!

Carse watched his old comrade closely, fearful of the strain this was on him.

Then came a cold, thin, mechanical voice.

“Yes, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. I remember you well.”

The scientist strove to keep level his voice as he continued:

“Two friends and I are trapped here. Dr. Ku Sui desires my brain. He wishes to add it to--” He stammered, halted; then burst out: “If it would help you in any way, I’d give it gladly! But it couldn’t, I know; it would only aid his power-mad schemes. So my friends and I must escape. And we can see now no way!

“You can hear that noise? It’s very loud; men are outside each door, battering at them, and soon they must break through. How can we escape? Do you know of a way, out of your knowledge of conditions here? Will you tell me, old colleagues?”

He waited.

Fifty feet away from this scene, and missing almost all of it, was Friday. From his post at the panel he kept throwing fearful looks at the nearest door, which was shuddering and clanging and threatening any moment to be wrenched off its hinges. A good thing--he was thinking--that the doors were of stout metal. When one did go he would get five or six of the soulless devils before they brought him down.

Carse waited tensely for the response--if one there was to be. His ears were throbbing in unison with the regular crash of rams on metal, but his eyes never left the convoluted mounds of intelligent matter so fantastically featured by the internal radiance of the life-giving liquid. Impossible, it seemed, that thoughts were stirring inside those gruesome things...

“Please hurry!” he said in a low voice; and Leithgow repeated desperately:

“How can we escape? Please be quick!”

Then the miracle of mechanism and matter functioned and again gave forth the cold voice of the living dead.

“It is my disposition to help you, Eliot Leithgow. On a shelf under one of the tables in this room you will find a portable heat-ray. Melt a hole in the ceiling and go out through the roof.”

“Then what can we do?”

“In lockers behind the table there are space-suits, hanging ready for emergencies. Don them and leave through one of the asteroid’s port-locks.”

“Ask if the ports are sealed,” Carse interjected instantly.

Leithgow asked the question.

“Yes,” replied the unhuman voice. “But twice four to the right will open any of them.”

The Master Scientist wiped his brow. Though trembling under the strain of conversing with this machine on which his life depended, he did not overlook a single point.

“But the asteroid’s gravital pull would hold us close to it,” he said. “Is there a way of breaking free from it?”