Dark Benediction

“The next one takes the transmitter,” he bellowed. “Stay back.”

Hulgruv roared a command. “Take him! If you can’t, let the trap spring!”

Roki stooped over him and brought the pistol butt crashing against his skull, meaning only to silence him. It was a mistake; he had forgotten about the structure of the Solarian skull. He put his foot on Hulgruv’s neck and jerked. The butt came free with a wet cluck. He raced to the doorway and pressed himself against the wall to listen. The crewmen were apparently having a parley at the far end of the corridor. He waited for the next signal.

When it came, he dropped to the floor—to furnish an unexpected sort of target—and snaked into view. He shot twice at three figures a dozen yards away. The answering fire did something to the side of his face, blurring his vision. Another shot sprayed him with flakes from the deck. One crewman was down. The others backed through a door at the end of the corridor. They slammed it and a pressure seal tightened with a rubbery sound.

Roki climbed to his feet and slipped toward a doorway from which he heard the click of the auxiliary key. He felt certain someone was there besides Daleth. But when he risked a quick glance around the corner, he saw only the girl. She sat at a small desk, her hand frozen to the key, her eyes staring dazedly at nothing. He started to speak, then realized what was wrong. Hypnosis! Or a hypnotic drug. She sensed nothing but the key beneath her fingers, waiting for the next challenge.

The door was only half-open. He could see no one, but there had been another man; of that he was certain. Thoughtfully he took aim at the plastic door panel and fired. A gun skidded toward Daleth’s desk. A heavy body sprawled across the floor.

The girl started. The dull daze left her face, to be re-placed with wide-eyed shock. She clasped her hands to her cheeks and whimpered. A challenge bleated from the radio.

“Answer!” he bellowed.

Her hand shot to the key and just in time. But she seemed about to faint.

“Stay on it!” he barked, and dashed back to the control room. The crewmen had locked themselves aft of the bulkhead, and had started the ventilator fans. Roki heard their whine, then caught the faint odor of gas. His eyes were burning and he sneezed spasmodically.

“Surrender immediately, manthing!” blared the intercom.

Roki looked around, then darted toward the controls. He threw a damping voltage on the drive tubes, defocused the ion streams, and threw the reactors to full emission. The random shower of high-speed particles would spray toward the focusing coils, scatter like deflected buckshot, and loose a blast of hard X-radiation as they peppered the walls of the reaction chambers. Within a few seconds, if the walls failed to melt, the crewmen back of the bulkhead should recognize the possibility of being quickly fried by the radiant inferno.

The tear gas was choking him. From the next compartment, he could hear Daleth coughing and moaning. How could she hear the signals for her own weeping? He tried to watch the corridor and the reaction-chamber temperature at the same time. The needle crept toward the danger-point. An explosion could result, if the walls failed to melt.

Suddenly the voice of the intercom again: “Shut it off, you fool! You’ll destroy the ship.”

He said nothing, but waited in tense silence, watching the other end of the corridor. Suddenly the ventilator fans died. Then the bulkhead door opened a crack, and paused.

“Throw out your weapon first!” he barked.

A gun fell through the crack and to the floor. A Solarian slipped through, sneezed, and rubbed his eyes. “Turn around and back down the corridor.”

The crewman obeyed slowly. Roki stood a few feet behind him, using him for a shield while the others emerged. The fight was gone out of them. It was strange, he thought; they were willing to risk the danger of the Idiot’s C-drive, but they couldn’t stand being locked up with a runaway reactor. They could see death coming then. He throttled back the reactors, and prodded the men toward the storage rooms. There was only one door that suggested a lockup. He halted the prisoners in the hallway and tried the bolt.

“Not in there, manthing!” growled one of the Solarians. “Why not?”

“There are—”

A muffled wail from within the compartment interrupted the explanation. It was the cry of a child. His hand trembled on the bolt.

“They are wild, and we are weaponless,” pleaded the Solarian.

“How many are in there?”

“Four adults, three children.”

Roki paused. “There’s nowhere else to put you. One of you—you there—go inside, and we’ll see what happens.”

The man shook his head stubbornly in refusal. Roki repeated the order. Again the man refused. The predator, unarmed, was afraid of its prey. The Cophian aimed low and calmly shot him through the leg.

“Throw him inside,” he ordered tonelessly.

With ill-concealed fright for their own safety, the other two lifted their screaming comrade. Roki swung open the door and caught a brief glimpse of several human shadows in the gloom. Then the Solarian was thrown through the doorway and the bolt snapped closed.

At first there was silence, then a bull-roar from some angry throat. Stamping feet—then the Solarian’s shriek—and a body was being dashed against the inside walls while several savage voices roared approval. The two remaining crewmen stood in stunned silence.

“Doesn’t work so well, does it?” Roki murmured with ruthless unconcern.

After a brief search, he found a closet to lock them in, and went to relieve Dalcth at the key. When the last signal came, at the end of the four hours, she was asleep from exhaustion. And curled up on the floor, she looked less like a tough little frontier urchin than a frightened bedraggled kitten. He grinned at her for a moment, then went back to inspect the damage to the briefly overloaded reactors. It was not as bad as it might have been. He worked for two hours, replacing fused focusing sections. The jets would carry them home.

The Idiot was left drifting in space to await the coming of a repair ship. And Daleth was not anxious to fly it back alone. Roki set the Solarian vessel on a course with a variable. C-level, so that no Sol ship could track them without warp lockers. As far as Roki was concerned the job was done. He had a shipful of evidence and two live Solarians who could be forced to confirm it.

“What will they do about it?” Daleth asked as the captured ship jetted them back toward the Sixty-Star Cluster. “Crush the Solarian race immediately.”

“I thought we were supposed to keep hands-off non-human races?”

“We are, unless they try to exploit human beings. That is automatically an act of war. But I imagine an Ultimatum will bring a surrender. They can’t fight without warp lockers.”

“What will happen on Earth when they do surrender?” Roki turned to grin. “Go ask the human Earthers. Climb in their cage.”

She shuddered, and murmured, “Some day—they’ll be a civilized race again, won’t they?”

He sobered, and stared thoughtfully at the star-lanced cosmos. “Theirs is the past, Daleth. Theirs is the glory of having founded the race of man. They sent us into space. They gave the galaxy to man—in the beginning. We would do well to let them alone.”

He watched her for a moment. She had lost cockiness, temporarily.

“Stop grinning at me like that!” she snapped.

Roki went to feed the Solarian captives: canned cabbage.

Big Joe and the Nth Generation

A THIEF, HE was about to die like a thief.

He hung from the post by his wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintly on his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowly as he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, he hung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists.