Battle on Venus

“You dirty little schemer, you helped them escape!” roared Senilde.

“They’ve taken my chariot, and my telescope was in it!”

He raged aloud about the spilt and lost (as he thought) elixir, about his imprisonment, and about the loss of Mara— it appeared he’d planned to have her for himself. But the thing which made him see the deepest red, the thing he harped on continually, was the loss of his new toy—the telescope.

“George broke the bargain!” he shouted. “ ‘Switch off the war and you can have the telescope,’ he said. You heard him, Leep. And now he’s taken the telescope back. Very well, then—he can have the war back. And what a war it’ll be this time! I’ll blow the whole planet apart!”

He stamped his way to the stairs.

Leep was disturbed. He, too, had made a bargain of a kind—offered escape to Earth for Mara and George. If the war was unleashed again, the spaceship would be destroyed before they could reach it.

He scrambled up and pursued Senilde, calling, vainly: “Wait!”

He overtook the fat man laboring up the stairs and grabbed his shoulders. And made a discovery, which he reflected upon as he went hurtling backwards down the stairs. Immortality was not protection against the force of Senilde’s electric repellant.

Senilde turned, glaring down at him, and aimed his pistol.

“Meddler! Conniver! Interfering fool!”

Zip! A radio-active needle darted into Leep’s chest as he lay at the foot of the stairs. This time he felt nothing. He got to his feet. Senilde’s eyes became large with surprise.

Zip! Zip! Two more needles ineffectually found their target. Leep said, with controlled urgency: “You can’t kill me, Senilde. We’re on equal footing now, so let us discuss the matter rationally. Don’t start the war again. I promise I’ll get your telescope back for you somehow.”

Senilde frothed at the mouth. “You stole my elixir! You stole it! Don’t talk to me of promises. I want to hear no more promises. Oh, how I’ve been deceived!”

He continued up the stairs, groaning with self-pity.

“An old man like me—lied to, robbed, knocked down, imprisoned, betrayed on every side…”

Leep started after him again, but Senilde reached the top of the stairs and flicked a wall switch, still moaning with anguish. The stairs snapped together into one steep, smooth incline. Leep slipped back to the bottom. By the time he’d found another route to the upper floor, Senilde was secure within the Chinese puzzle box of the control room.

And already the sounds of war were beginning to thunder from the distances. Leep squatted in the passage and tried to peer with his mind into the secrets of the hidden panels and false walls. Perversely, his ungovernable faculty showed him instead the camouflaged exit door in one wall to the steel room, where the elixir had been preserved. It even revealed to him the combination of the lock, which had eluded Senilde’s failing memory for many hours before at last he remembered it, and released himself.

But, obstinately, it refused to give him even a hint of the way into the control room. For it was subject to the basic psychological Law of Reversed Effort. Leep realized that he was trying too hard and defeating his own wish. He must relax and let the faculty take its own wayward course…

Yes, instead, he kept wondering: supposing I do find the way in. I still can’t restrain Senilde. I can’t even touch him. I can’t end what he’s begun. I can’t end what I’ve begun.

He felt a flicker of apprehension. There could be no turning back now. He’d set his foot on a road which led on forever. And ever. And ever…

It was afternoon. The war chariot was trundling across a typical Venusian plain. George had found the telescope where Senilde had left it, in an open compartment, and employed it continually, hoping to spot the ship somewhere ahead.

Mara was up there with him now. Suddenly, she said: “Listen.”

They both listened. Gradually rising above the throb of the engine and the clanking of treads was a booming hum.

“Planes!” George exclaimed. “The war’s begun again. Senilde must have gotten free.”