The last monster on the platform reached to grab Jonnie.
Ten!
Jonnie struck with the kill-club and smashed the Psychlo’s helmet.
The reaching talons tore his sleeve. He struck again.
He leaped to the back of Windsplitter.
“Run!”
Someone on the control porch had come out with a blast rifle but did not dare shoot.
The humming wires were building up to crescendo.
Jonnie was off the platform and racing up the hill to the cage. His watch said forty-two seconds left to go. He had never known time to flow so slowly! Or so fast!
He had not gone to Psychlo.
But blast rifles were waiting to cut him down.
He had already switched the remote control box he had recovered so as to shut off the current to the bars. He had gotten out the metal severing tool so he could slash off the girls’ collars.
Windsplitter plunged to a halt before the cage door. Jonnie threw himself off the horse.
He paused for an instant.
The cage door was open! The wood barrier was torn aside!
Where were the girls? Their effects were all here.
Not up? There was a mound under the robes. Ah, they must still be asleep.
He rushed in, metal tool ready to cut the collars, shouting their names.
No motions in the robes.
He threw the furs aside.
He was staring at the corpse of Char. It lay on its back and the stainless steel knife he had given Chrissie was sticking out of Char’s middle.
He had no time for speculation. He was out of the cage, staring about. Old Pork and Dancer were not there. Could it be possible the girls had actually killed Char and escaped? Not likely! Not with this remote box in Terl’s possession.
Seconds were ticking away. Blast rifles were waiting.
He leaped on Windsplitter and dashed for the edge of the bluff. They started a small avalanche as they halted halfway down the slope.
Jonnie sprang off and made sure they were covered from sight.
The humming came to top crescendo. The strange quiver was in the air. He recognized the feeling.
The shipment had shimmered and vanished from the platform!
4
Now would come the usual minor recoil that followed a semiannual firing.
Jonnie counted the seconds. He was panting heavily from his sprint. Windsplitter beside him was blowing, trembling.
Suddenly the ground shook. The air was rent with a splintering crash. A flash lit the sky.
Recoil? Sounded more like the place had blown up!
Jonnie scrambled to the top of the cliff and peered over the edge.
Too much recoil!
By fuse, the nuclear weapons should not have gone off on Psychlo for another ten seconds.
The operations dome was still in the air, flames geysering from it.
The network of wires around the platform was melting.
Machines in the area were sent skidding. Psychlo operators were tumbled to the earth.
Wild, aura-like, sheet lightning bloomed over the transshipment scene!
The compound domes were rocked but seemed intact.
The concussion was racketing across the plains.
It was too soon for the bombs to go off on Psychlo. What had happened? Had they missed their target and landed their lethal cargo on some nearer space? Did this mean Psychlo armament from the home planet could still appear in the sky and crush them?
But right now the question was: had this messed up their assault plans?
He looked anxiously toward the row of battle planes. The instant after recoil was their cue.
He looked toward the nearby ravines. Scot teams in camouflage radiation dress were due to sprint out of cover and take position with their weapons.
That recoil might also be radioactive, and here he was with no radiation battle suit.
Yay! There went the battle planes! Sixteen of them had been manned, each with a pilot and copilot. They had hidden in the planes all night. Keys to them had been placed on each seat.
Up soared the battle planes! A blasting, combined roar of heavy motors. Thirty-two Scot pilots and copilots.
Fifteen planes peeled off and darted at hypersonic toward their destinations. One plane for each distant minesite on the planet. The mission was to batter and destroy them and prevent a counterattack here. One plane to act as air cover for this central minesite. Radio silence was the watchword. No warning!
Jonnie looked at the remaining planes on the ground to see whether they had been battered. He noted they were a bit turned. They seemed all right. . . .
Wait! Something was wrong. There should be four planes left there. They only had thirty-two pilots and copilots. But there were three planes left, not four!
He raised himself above the cliff edge again and swept the scene.
And there it was.
The whole side wall of the morgue had been battered out, and the coffin with which it had been done lay in the rubble!
Terl had somehow come to life and hammered his way out of the morgue.
Jonnie looked up.
Where there should have been one battle plane up there for this minesite, there were two!
Jonnie grabbed for Windsplitter. Something was wrong. The horse had gone lame in its plunge down the cliff. It was three hundred yards to those planes.
With a glare at the sky, Jonnie was running down the hill, putting all his strength into it.
A blast rifle spat at him from the compound. He raced on through a cloud of dirt.
Where were the assault teams? Had they been knocked flat?
Racing, Jonnie headed for the nearest battle plane, shots streaking the air about him. More blast rifles were firing from the compound.
He got to the plane door and got it half open. A blast rifle shot slammed it shut. He dove under the plane and went in the other door.
The key. The key! Where had Angus put this plane’s key? He was scrambling through the edges of the seats. The recoil jolt had jarred the key off the seat. A blast rifle splattered a shot onto the windscreen. There was the key! On the floor!
The instant before he touched the starters, he heard the chunk of a bazooka go. Then the flailing chatter of assault rifles.
The motors barked and he raced his hands over the console. The plane flashed upward to two thousand feet.
He caught a glimpse of the attack groups moving in. Two bazooka teams. Four assault rifle parties. They had been protected in the ravines in which they had crouched all night, covered with antiheat shields.
Jonnie flipped on the viewscreens. Where was Terl?
5
A few miles to the north, Terl and the minesite cover plane were engaged in a dance of battle.
Jonnie slammed his battle plane toward the two ships. Suddenly they moved farther north. One plane was running away to the north. The other took off in pursuit. Two Scots running away? No! Jonnie suddenly understood what was happening. It was a trick! Terl was pretending to run away to lure the Scots into a trap maneuver.
Radio silence. Damn radio silence!
The Scots fell for it.
Before Jonnie could get there, Terl had looped back and deadly fingers of flame were raking the Scots’ ship.
The target flamed! It roared toward the ground.
Two men ejected, right and left, from the burning plane. Their jet packs smoked as they bit and arrested their falls. They were sailing some distance apart.
If Jonnie could get behind Terl while he was still concentrating on the plane . . . yes! Terl dove to shoot one of the pilots, unable to resist a sadistic touch.
The pilot was hit and spun back upward.
Jonnie was right behind Terl. He pressed his gun trips and the artillery blasters knifed into the ship.
Then abruptly Terl’s plane was gone!
A quick glance at the viewscreens. Terl was above him.
But Terl didn’t shoot.<
br />
Abruptly Jonnie realized that Terl was going to ignore him and try to get back to the compound and shoot up the ground troops.
The keynote of Psychlo battle tactics was outguessing with a plane’s keyboard. The planes could dart so quickly and at such changing speeds that one had to divine what the other would do and do it first.
Jonnie snapped his battle plane in front of Terl’s. For an instant he could see the face-masked Psychlo through the armored windscreen. It was Terl. A madly efficient Terl, a Terl who for all his insanity was a past master at flying and a top marksman. Jonnie wondered whether he could match this maniac.
Terl went to the right. Jonnie had outguessed him and gone the same direction. Terl went farther right. Jonnie had outguessed him and was in front of him with ready firing guns.
Terl went up. Jonnie’s hands on the keyboard did not outguess him and Terl was almost able to dart past and return to rake the compound assault teams. Jonnie corrected and almost rammed Terl from below.
Why hadn’t he battered the monster’s head off in the morgue? But there had been no time.
Terl went low to the right, then to the left, then to the right. Rhythmical. Easy to predict. Jonnie was in front of him every time.
Too late, Jonnie realized it was a trap. The fourth time, Terl’s guns were firing at the place Jonnie was about to be. Only the slip of a finger on a key saved him from being blasted out of the sky.
Abruptly Terl seemed to abandon his effort to get through to the compound. He headed straight north.
Down below, the burning plane sent up soaring piles of black smoke.
Was this another Terl trick? Luring him off?
Ears blasted by the scream of tortured motors, Jonnie swept his eyes across his viewscreens. Where was Terl going and why? With a sudden hunch he flipped on a heat detection screen.
Chrissie and Pattie, riding to the north! Their horses’ bellies to the ground as they raced along.
Leverage. Jonnie suddenly realized Terl was trying to get back his leverage! If he could recover his hostages he might bring pressure on Jonnie.
Jonnie flipped open the local command radio. Sure enough—Terl’s voice!
“If you don’t go down there and land, animal, I’ll kill them both.”
Terl was right ahead of him, dropping down to about four thousand feet.
Jonnie hit his keys. He estimated exactly where Terl would be.
Jonnie’s battle plane slammed into the back of Terl’s. Jonnie closed the switch for the magnetic grips. The skids of his plane locked to the back of Terl’s.
Half-deafened by the thud of contact, Jonnie stepped up his speed control to hypersonic. His motors shrieked. He punched in coordinates to compare with six feet underground directly below them.
He glanced over the side to see that the riders were clear of that spot. They were.
The motors of both ships were screaming in discord, fighting against one another in howling dissonance. They jerked and wrestled in the sky, suspended in space. The motors began to get hot. Very shortly they would burn and explode.
Jonnie reached back for the jet packs. The straps had already been shortened. He shrugged into it. He made sure he still had Terl’s belt gun.
He took one final glance at the keyboard. Locked in. Six feet underground, directly below, four thousand feet down, speed control at hypersonic.
Jonnie dove out the plane door. The air bit at him as he plummeted down.
His jets barked alive and the descent slowed. By swinging his legs, he went up to a higher altitude.
He looked at the locked and fighting ships.
He had expected that Terl would bail out. The outcome was inevitable. The ships would explode. He was counting on Terl’s having no belt gun, and he intended to hunt him down in a jet pack or on the ground. But Terl didn’t bail out. Jonnie could see him battering away at his control console.
Jonnie, holding in space with his backpack jets, had the sickening feeling he had made a mistake. Terl, after all, knew Psychlo tactics backward.
What Terl was doing in that jerking, fighting mess where one ship’s motors fought the other’s, was trying to outguess the settings of the plane that rode his back. If he could, both motors would agree. Possibly, then, a quick roll and reversal of the settings would throw the other ship off his back.
The smoke from those conflicting motors was already beginning to rise in the battle plane Jonnie had bailed out of.
Suddenly, Terl got the combination! Both ships’ motors smoothed into shrieking agreement.
But Jonnie’s combination was straight down and six feet under, hypersonic.
At an abrupt two thousand miles an hour, both ships hurtled toward the earth.
In an instant, Terl apparently realized that this set of console coordinates was sudden death.
Jonnie could see him in the cabin, moving urgently.
With only five hundred feet to go, Terl frantically punched in the reverse combination. His ship motors went into a fighting howl.
The inertia of the mass carried it down to within twenty feet of the ground before the descent halted.
But the force on the hot motors was too great for them to overcome.
Both ships burst into an orange ball of fire!
Terl’s body hurtled out of the door and struck rolling.
The ships struck!
With a swing of his legs Jonnie headed downward into a dive. With a thumb on the jet pack throttle, he guided himself to land about a hundred feet from the fiercely flaming wreck.
Terl was still rolling.
6
Jonnie shed his jet backpack. It was almost expended anyway. Not taking his eyes from Terl, he drew the belt gun and slid off its safety.
Terl had been on fire for a moment. He was not now. He had rolled it out in the damp spring grass. He was fifty feet away. He was lying motionless. He had a breathe-mask on.
Jonnie approached cautiously. This was a very treacherous beast. He walked within forty feet. Thirty feet. Terl was just lying there, inert.
A statement Robert the Fox had made drifted through Jonnie’s head: “Plan well, but when battle is joined, expect the unexpected! And cope with it!” Terl’s escape had scrambled their plans. The compound down there was without air cover. The Lord alone knew what was going on. The sound of gunfire was rattling and thudding in the distance. The mutter of flames came from the burning planes nearby.
Jonnie didn’t look. He had his eyes on Terl, watchful. He stopped. Twenty-five feet was close enough. He could not quite see through the faceplate. Terl was singed. There was some dried green blood on his jacket.
Suddenly Terl’s hand blurred and a small gun appeared in it like magic.
Jonnie dropped at the first hint of motion and fired.
There was a flash as Terl’s gun exploded in his paw. Then he was up and starting to run.
There were questions Jonnie wanted answered. His first snap shot had been lucky and had hit the gun. He drew a careful bead on Terl’s right leg. “Here’s one for the horses,” flashed through his head. He fired.
The leg buckled and Terl went down. The foot stayed twisted in the wrong direction.
Jonnie walked over to where the exploded gun lay. It was a very slim weapon. Was this what was called an “assassin gun”?
Terl was lying there, motionless.
“Quit shamming, Terl,” said Jonnie.
Terl suddenly laughed and sat up.
“Why didn’t you die in the morgue?”
“Animal,” said Terl, putting his foot right way to, but carefully sitting quiet under the menace of the gun twenty feet away, “I can hold my breath for four minutes!”
He was too cheerful. His leg was bleeding through his pants. He was singed. But he was too cheerful. Jonnie knew there was something else. He backed up.
Moving so that he could keep Terl in view out of the corner of his eye, he glanced around the plain. The compound was behind them, possibly twenty miles. Gunfire
was coming faintly from that direction. He knew he should make some effort to help them.
Where were the girls? Probably they had gone on. No! There they were! Jonnie hadn’t expected that. They were coming back. Riding at a slow trot, cautiously, they were coming back. They were about a mile away.
It hit Jonnie suddenly. The shock of not finding them in the cage, the fear that they were still in that holocaust down there, had stayed suspended. He was swept by a tide of relief. They were all right!
Jonnie waved his arm to signal them to come on in.
Still alert to Terl, Jonnie scanned farther afield. One of the pilots that had bailed out had come in this direction. He peered. Yes! There was somebody moving about four miles to the south—hard to see due to camouflage dress—but a trained eye such as Jonnie’s detected by the motion of things, not only by contrasts.
Terl was laughing again. “You’ll never get away with it, animal. Psychlo will be into this place in a swarm!”
Jonnie didn’t answer. He waved the girls in. The horses were shying as they came around the burning wreck. Chrissie was mounted on Old Pork, Pattie on Dancer. The horses weren’t blowing, so their earlier riding must not have been so fast.
The girls were unable to believe it was Jonnie. Chrissie stayed mounted, some distance away. She was ghastly pale. Her neck was raw red from the collar now gone. “Jonnie? Is that you, Jonnie?” He looked different in the blue clothing. Pattie had no doubts. She sprang from the back of Dancer and raced to Jonnie and put her arms around his waist, her hair coming up to his pocket. “See? See?” she was shouting back to Chrissie. “I told you Jonnie would come! I told you and told you!”
Chrissie was sitting her horse and crying.
“You got the monster!” said Pattie, excited, pointing at Terl.
“Don’t get between me and him,” said Jonnie, caressing her hair but holding the gun on Terl. He should be at the compound; he must not dally here.
Jonnie didn’t want the girls near him in case Terl moved. He had a sudden idea. “Chrissie! Look down to the south there about four miles.”
Chrissie took a grip on herself and wiped her eyes. Jonnie wanted her to do something. She looked. She tried to speak, then cleared her throat and tried again. “Yes, Jonnie.” She looked harder. “It’s something moving.”
“It’s a friend,” said Jonnie. “Ride down there as fast as you can whip up Old Pork and bring him back here!”