16. THE CHLORANS

While much work had been done on a personal gravity control, to provide for the comfort of such visitors as Dunark and Sitar, it was still in the design stage when the Skylark of Valeron neared Galaxy DW-427-LU. Wherefore, when the Skylarkers sat down to dinner that evening in the Seatons’ dining room that room was almost forty per cent undergrav. And wherefore, when DuQuesne’s six hired killers fired practically as one, all six bullets went harmlessly high.

For, at low gravity, two facts of marksmanship — unknown to or not considered by either DuQuesne or any of his men — became dominant. First, a pistol expert compensates automatically for the weight of his weapon. Second, the more expert the marksman, the more automatic this compensation is.

And one shot each was all those would-be killers had. Dunark and Sitar as has been said, went armed even to bed; and Osnomian reflexes were and are the fastest possessed by any known race of man. Each of their machine pistols clicked twice and four American hoodlums died, liquescent brains and comminuted skulls spattering abroad, before they could do anything more than begin to bring their guns back down into line for their second shots.

The other two gangsters also died; if not as quickly or as messily, just as dead. For Shiro and his bride were, for Earthmen, very fast indeed. Their chairs, too, flew away from the table the merest instant after the invaders appeared and both took off in low, flat dives.

Lotus struck her man with her left shoulder; and, using flawlessly the momentum of her mass and speed, swung him around and put her small but very hard knee exactly where it would do the most good. Then, as he doubled over in agony, she put her left arm around his head, seized her left wrist with her right hand, and twisted with all the strength of arms, shoulders, torso and legs — and the man’s neck broke with a snap audible throughout the room.

And Shiro took care of his man with equal dexterity, precision, and speed; and of the invaders, then there were none.

Seaton was a microsecond slower than either the Osnomians or the two Japanese; but he was fast enough to see what was happening, take in the fact that the forces already engaged were enough to handle the six hoodlums and, in mid-flight, divert his leap toward the remote-control headset. He was blindingly certain of one thing: It was Marc DuQuesne who had unleashed these killers on them. And he was equally certain of that fact’s consequence: The truce was off. DuQuesne was to be destroyed.

Wherefore what happened next astonished him even more than if it had occurred at another time.

A strident roar of klaxons filled the room. It was the loudest sound any human had ever heard — without permanent damage; it was calculated to come right up to the threshold of destruction. There was to be no chance that anyone would fail to hear this particular signal.

His hand on the headset, Seaton paused. The bodies of the six gunmen had not yet all reached the floor, but the other Skylarkers were staring too. They had never expected to hear that sound except in test.

It was the dire warning that they were under attack massive attack — attack on a scale and of a persistence that they had never expected to encounter in real combat, with whatever forces.

For that klaxon warning meant that under the fierce impact of the enemy weapons now so suddenly and mercilessly beating down on them the life of the Valeron’s defensive screens was to be measured only in seconds — and very few of them!

“Yipe!” he yelled then. “Control-room fast!” His voice of course went unheard in the clamor of the horns; but his yelling had been purely reflexive, anyway. While uttering the first syllable he was energizing beams of force that hurtled all eight of the party through ultra-high-speed locks that snapped open in front of them and crashed shut behind them — down into the neutral-gray chamber at the base of the giant Brain.

Seaton rammed his head into his master controller and began furiously but accurately to think… and as he sat there, face harsh and white and strained, a vast structure of inoson, interlaced with the heaviest fields of force generable by the Valeron’s mighty engines, came into being around the Brain and the other absolutely vital components of the worldlet’s core.

After a few minutes of fantastic effort Seaton sighed gustily and tried to grin. “We’re holding ’em and we’re getting away,” he said. “But I had to let ’em whittle us down to just about a nub before I could spare power enough to grab a lunch off of them while they were getting a square meal off of us.”

He spoke the exact truth. The attack had been so incredibly violent that in order to counter it he had had to apply the full power of the Valeron, designed to protect a surface of over three million square kilometers, to an area of less than thirty thousand.

“But what was it, Dick?” Dorothy shrieked. “What could it have been possibly?”

“I don’t know. But you realize, don’t you, that it was two separate, unrelated attacks? Not one?”

“Why, I… I don’t think I realize anything yet.”

“Those guns were Colts,” Seaton said, flatly. “Forty-fives. Made in the U.S.A. So that part of it was DuQuesne’s doing. He wanted — still wants — the Valeron. Bad. But those super-energy super-weapons were definitely something else — as sure as God made apples. No possible ship could put that much stuff out, let alone DuQuesne’s Capital D. So the question rises and asks itself—”

“Just a minute, Dick!” Crane broke in. “Even granting so extraordinary a coincidence as two separate attacks—”

“Coincidence, hell!” Seaton snarled. “There is no such thing. And why postulate an impossibility when you’ve got Blackie DuQuesne? He sucked me in, as sure as hell’s a mantrap — you can bet your case buck on that. And he outfoxed himself doing it, for all the tea in China!”

“What do you mean, Dick?” Dorothy demanded. “How could he have?”

“Plain as the nose on… plainer! He got it from somewhere, the son of a—” Seaton bit the noun savagely off — “probably from Klazmon, that Galaxy DW-427-LU up ahead there that we were heading for is full of bad Indians. So he honeyed up to the Jelmi, got that fourth-dimensional gadget off of them and tried to kill us with it. And he would have succeeded, except for the pure luck of our having lowered our gravity so drastically on account of Dunark and Sitar.”

“I see,” Crane said. “And the Indians jumped us when he pulled the trigger — perhaps attracted by his use of the ‘gadget’.”

“That’s my guess, anyway,” Seaton admitted. “DuQuesne thought he was allowing plenty of leeway in both time and space for his operation. But he wasn’t. He had no more idea than we did, Mart, that any such forces as those could possibly be delivered at such extreme range. And one simple, easy lie — the coordinates of the Llurdan galaxy — was all he had to tell me and defend against my probe.”

DuQuesne’s attention was wrenched from his timer by a glare of light from a visiplate.

He glanced at it, his jaw dropping in surprise; then his hands flashed to the controls of his fourth-dimensional transmitter and his six men appeared — four of them gruesomely headless. For a moment all six stood stiffly upright; then, as the supporting forces vanished, all six bodies slumped bonelessly to the floor.

DuQuesne, after making quickly sure that the two were in fact as dead as were the four, shrugged his shoulders and flipped the bodies out into deep space. Then, donning practically opaque goggles, he studied the incandescently glaring plate — to see that the Skylark of Valeron now looked like a minor sun.

Involuntarily he caught his breath. The Valeron’s screens were failing — failing fast.