Chapter 2: The Cable of Menace

It was dark when we gained the deck; as dark as it had been when I first regained consciousness. Captain Crane was attending to that problem, however. As Koto and I floundered with the gun on the slippery telargeium plates of the outer hull, I heard her moving about. Then she uttered a cry of relief, and there came a faint click. Instantly the darkness all about--the clinging noisome darkness of Orcon at night--was shattered.

The blessed rays of our one good lighting dynamo were loosed!

I saw the girl standing braced beside a stanchion, staring over the ship’s side.

“Come on, Koto!” I snapped.

I am no fighting man by trade. Nevertheless, there was a kind of instinct which told me to get the gun set up at any point of vantage along the ship’s side. And Koto understood.

“There,” he breathed after but a few seconds, and from the experienced way in which he touched the disintegration-release trigger with his one good hand, I knew we were ready.

The flier was still moving, slowly and smoothly. She seemed to be half lifted, half drawn by some colossal force. I leaned far out over the rail.

A long, slender, but apparently indestructible cable had been affixed to our stern by means of a metal plate at its end which I guessed to be magnetic. I saw that the cable vanished under lashing waves which broke on a not distant shore, and that we were being drawn irresistibly toward the waves.

The light from the deck brought out dazzling scintillations from a beach composed of gigantic crystal pebbles as large as ostrich eggs. On the beach and grouped thickly all about our hull, swarmed a legion of creatures which--

Well, they were the brood of Orcon. They were the creatures who had given Ludwig Leider refuge and allied themselves with him in his attempt to make trouble for Earth. And they were half-bird, half-human! Their faces, bodies, arms, and legs were human. But they had wings! Translucent, membranous structures, almost gauzy, which stretched out from their shoulders like bat’s wings. And their skins, as they surged about in the beams of our light, gleamed a bright orange color, and about their heads waved frilled antennae which were evidently used as extra tactile organs to supplement the human hands. I could see instantly that the Orconites possessed a high degree of intelligence. Of all the queer breeds that interplanetary travel and exploration had produced, this was the queerest.

I swung to Koto, who was crouching beside the gun.

“Get rid of that cable before we go under!” I exclaimed.

I had already guessed that the plate which held the cable to our stern was magnetic. It was easy to see that the cable had been fastened there by the Orconites and that our ship and ourselves might be drawn to destruction. I flung myself over to Koto’s side to help him with the gun.

The howling wind which had been at a lull as we reached the deck, broke loose again, and, as a gust hit us, Koto, gun, and I were all but swept overboard. The winged legion overside gave loud cries and braced themselves against the gusts. I saw Virginia Crane clinging desperately to her stanchion beside the light switches.

“More light if you have it!” I screamed to her against the wind.

Then Koto and I got the gun going.

My first feeling was one of intense relief. As the thing went off under our hands, and I knew from a faint trembling and a low hiss that the weapon was functioning perfectly, I felt thankful indeed for the instinct which had made me get the gun on deck. It could be only a matter of seconds now until a whole section of the metallic cable was disintegrated completely and until our ship was free.

Breathlessly I watched the greenish atomic stream play along the bright length of the cable of death, and, as Koto and I steadied the gun together, I knew he shared my relief. Despite the howling of the wind, the yells of the Orconites, the continued slow movement of the ship, and the hideous churning of the waves astern, I laughed to myself.

“Doctor Weeks!”

I saw that Captain Crane had gone aft to watch the effects of our fire.

“All right,” I bellowed. “What--”

“Nothing is happening back here! Your gun! What’s the matter with it?”

I was too startled to answer otherwise than I did.

“Nothing’s the matter with it. What’s the matter with you?”

But the next instant I knew she was right.

“My God, Doctor!” Koto cried, and I knew he had leaped to the same conclusion I had.

Suddenly I brushed Koto’s hands away from the gun, and myself directed it so that its ray cut straight across one whole group of the queer creatures on the beach. Then I cursed.

Instead of being cut down, broken like so many blades of grass, not one of the creatures showed that the ray had touched them at all. They only uttered tremendous hoarse sounds that might have been laughter.

I stood up.

“Koto, Leider’s found means of protecting both raw materials and living beings against the atomic gun!”

Captain Crane was beside us now, and I saw that she did not need to be told of the disaster. As Koto turned away from the gun, I thought of LeConte below. When the waves closed in on us, he would be caught like a rat.

The shriek of the wind and the crash of waves grew louder. I felt upon my face the sting of spray from the aqueous solution of which the lashing sea at our stern was composed. The cable held, and the ship continued to move. We were barely a hundred yards away from the shore.

All at once, though, a string of both chemical and physical formulae--the last thing a man would expect to think of in such a position--flashed into my mind.

“Here, wait a minute,” I thought. “If Leider’s done this thing, it means--it must mean--that he’s juggled his atomic structures through production in terrific quantities of the quondarium light which I theorized about last year! But he can’t have done that without playing hell with the action of magnetic forces from beginning to end! I believe if we take the gun aft and direct it at--”