Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/96

Rh kaks were gathered in the living quarters. He could hear the wild confusion of crackling that went on down there, and the smashing of furniture and the breaking of bottles. They were probably having a hell of a time on Grimes' Venusian whisky.

Passing the level on which the ray turbines were stationed, Claude saw sickly that they had been utterly smashed by the krickaks. He had feared, yet expected that. The crackling grew louder. He was but a few yards from the living quarters. The first krickak appeared at the bottom of the stairs, just three steps away.

Claude fired the atomic rifle from his hip, straight into the krickak's face. There was a shower of sparks. Then other round heads appeared at the doorway. Claude fired rapidly, efficiently, his mind a blaze of fury. The faces showered sparks, fell back.

Claude stepped into the living quarters. He hurled his first electro-handbomb at a group of some fifteen krickaks milling about in the far corner of the room. The explosion was terrific. Somehow the walls withstood it. Claude was hurled to the floor by the force of the shock. Then he was crawling to his feet, rifle still at his hip, firing again and again at the now terrified creatures. Sparks showered everywhere.

Those who could were swarming toward the airlocks through which they entered. The jam there gave Claude time to pick off each krickak like a clay duck. None got out.

And in the smoke and sparks and horrible confusion, Claude Kelvin, no longer an ascetic young man, looked eagerly about the room for another krickak to kill. There were none.

Claude dropped his rifle, his electro-handbombs. He grabbed the thin tendril-like arms of four of the creatures and dragged their inert bodies up the spiral staircase.

He dropped them on the landing where the useless ray turbines stood. Then, with the grim unseeing stare of a man under hypnosis, he went to work. His brain was bare of all but one thought. The beams had to be there for the liner.

UB-LIEUTENANT MacQUALES was naturally dumbfounded when he arrived at the rayhouse on Asteroid Eighty some four days later. The place was a scene of incredible confusion and chaos. And young Claude Kelvin, tattered, smoke-streaked, and delirious from overwork and hunger, was incoherently unable to explain much.

But the rayhouse was operating. Its beams were flashing with consistent and surprising strength. And officer Grimes, with a wound that could only have been inflicted by a krickak, was also beyond anything but delirious babbling.

There was also an extremely peculiar odor about, and absolutely no krickaks except the two found beside the ray turbines. The odor was of burning electrical matter—almost fleshy—and Venusian whisky.

It wasn't until later that young Claude Kelvin explained that the electrically powered bodies of the krickaks—soaked in whisky—had provided excellent, sparking, dynamos to replace the turbines they’d destroyed, and had kept the ray beams sweeping forth from the towers and out into the space lanes.

As officer Grimes put it, after he and Claude had buried the hatchet at his bedside,

"The kid knew nothing at all about sociology, but boy what a whiz at bio-chemistry!"*

IT'S BIG