Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/60

60 "There's a surer way than that, Dane."

"What's that?"

"I'll show you," Kris said.

Dane heard him moving, but it did not occur to him what was happening until the Ionian was upon him. He came about with a startled yell. Kris' fist hit him solidly behind the ear. Blackness came into Dane's mind. His last remembrance was of crawling painfully to his knees and being struck down again. After that he lay still.

Kris had to work fast. He locked the controls and found a space suit. Laboriously, he got the Earth-man into the suit and carried him to the air-lock. He opened the inner door, put Dane into the tube, and re-locked it. His hand closed on the release lever.

"Good-bye, my friend!" he whispered. "Be good to her!"

The lever came down. Dane floated away in the bulky suit. Jupiter's gravity immedaitelyimmediately [sic] laid hold on him and he began to fall

Kris planted himself before the controls. He called Vanz/

"Pick up Cabot, Vanz. I had to trim my ballast!"

He watched the Valiant change its course. Then he went after East Bayard. Like a hornet, he dived upon him. Time and again the Earth-ship barely evaded his blind rushes. Then Bayard must have seen the warship hurtling deeper into the chasm, for he left it and turned upon the auxiliary. Immediately the tiny craft was pulling away from him. Bayard notched up his rockets a point.

They were traveling at terrific speed when the red walls loomed up ahead of them. Kris kept on, straight at them. Bayard clung to his tail, firing incessantly. At the last minute, the shadow-man flattened away and skirted the walls. But the Leader was a match for him, in courage. His own ship skimmed perilously close to the pure concentrate. It was that very courage that Kris had counted on.

Without warning, his ship swerved. Bayard could not realize what was happening when the Ionian headed straight at the wall. He had learned much about the red crystals from Benchley's notes, but one of the things he had not learned was the terrible explosive power of the concentrate.

Kris' ship dug into the wall, almost burying itself with its forward drive. For a split-second, nothing happened. Then the wall, for a section twenty miles long, belched outward as by volcanic action. Flames seared the air and heated to incandescence the ship in their midst. Smoke rolled forth in black billows. Great chunks of concentrate the size of hummocks were tossed aloft. One of those giant rocks struck the pursuit amidships. Against the boulder it splattered as a drop of molten solder splatters on a cement floor.

For the space of ten minutes there was violence and destruction. Then the last of the stones tumbled into the black core of the crater, and silence dwelt again in the Great Red Spot.

Out of the bedlam rose a single, silver ship. The Valiant had caught Dane Cabot on one of its loading doors and taken him in. Moving faster by the minute, the big warship headed home.

HE happiest day of Dane's life was when he went back to work as an ordinary chemist. With the Ionian colony established and The Hundred's undercover agents dragged out in the open, normalcy came back to the United Americas. But Dane refused a position of any kind in governing the new democracy.

"No more politics for me!" he told Margo. They were sitting on the porch