Citadel of Darkness

The wavering green lines of the mass detector told me that there was a planet ahead where no planet ought to be, and my skin started to crawl. I checked the star-guide a second time, running down the tight-packed printed columns with deliberate care.

Karen’s soft hand brushed lightly across my shoulder, and I glanced up. “The guide doesn’t say anything about planets in this sector of space,” I told her.

“Have you checked the coordinates?”

I nodded grimly. “I’ve checked everything. There’s a planet out ahead, approximately two light-months from us. And you know what it has to be.”

Her fingers dug tightly into my neckmuscles.

“It can’t be anything else. There’s no star within sight, none supposed to be here, and yet the mass detector’s popping like sixty. The only answer is a wandering sunless world—and there’s only one of those.”

“It’s Lanargon,” she said simply. “Lanargon. The marauder world.”

I turned away and busied myself over the control panel. My fingers flew lightly over the computer levers, and microrelays clicked and buzzed behind the green plexilite screen.

After a moment, Karen said, “What are you doing?”

“Setting up a landing orbit,” I told her without looking up. “As long as we’re here, we might as well investigate. We can’t pass up a chance like this.”

I expected opposition, but I was surprised. All she said was, “How soon before we land?” No nervousness, no hesitation. She looked a lot cooler than I felt as I went about the job of preparing for our landing on Lanargon, the galaxy’s most dreaded—and most mysterious—planet.

It was in the year 3159 that the Terran colony on Faubia III was wiped out by armed attack, and word came to the universe that war was with us again. The worlds of mankind looked at each other in suspicion and fear. Five centuries of galactic amity had brought about the feeling that armed strife was a buried relic of antiquity—and then, without warning, came the attack on Faubia III.

There were universal denials. A year later, Metagol II was sacked by unknown invaders, and later the same year Vescalor IX, the universe’s greatest source of antivirotic drugs, was conquered.

The circumstances were the same each time. An army of tall men in black spacesuits would descend suddenly upon the unsuspecting planet, destroying its capital, seize control of the planet’s leaders, and carry off plunder. Then, mysteriously as they came, they would depart, always taking many prisoners with them.

The attacks continued. The marauders struck seemingly at random here and there across the face of the galaxy. Trantor was hit in 3163, Vornak IV three years after that. In 3175, Earth itself was subjected to a raid.

The universe recoiled in terror. The Multiworld Federation searched desperately for the answer—and found it. It made us no more comfortable to learn that the marauders were aliens from some far island universe who rode their sunless planet like a giant spaceship, who had crossed the great gulf of space that separated their galaxy from ours and now, under cloak of their virtual invisibility, travelled through our group of worlds, burning, pillaging, and looting as they went.

We were helpless against an invader we could not see. And now, possibly for the first time, someone had taken Lanargon by surprise. The marauder world had crossed our orbit as we returned to Earth from Rigel VI, and it lay squarely in our path, wrapped in its cloak of darkness out there in the eternal black of space.

I watched its bulk grow on the mass detector, and wiped away a trickle of perspiration that had started to crawl down my forehead. Two people—a man and a woman—against a world of the deadliest killers ever known.

As an Earthman, as a member of the Multiworld Federation, it was my duty to aid in Lanargon’s destruction. And I had an idea for doing it.

I locked the ship into automatic, watched the computer buzz twice to confirm that it had taken control, and got up. Karen was still standing behind me. Her face was pale and drawn; all the color seemed to have left it, though her eyes glowed with courage.

She reached out and took my hand as I stepped away from the controls. I folded her hand in both of mine, and squeezed.

“It has to be done, doesn’t it” she asked softly.

I nodded, thinking of the home that awaited us on Earth, the friends, the children. Heroes don’t have to be born; sometimes they’re made by a trajectory-line charted between two worlds.

“It has to be done,” I said. I drew her close. For all I knew, it was going to be the last time.

Our ship taxied in slowly, spiralling around Lanargon in ever-narrowing circles. I could see it plainly now from the viewport, a rough, ugly-looking, barren world, boasting not even the drifts of snow that would be a frozen atmosphere. Lanargon was just a ball of rock, seen dimly in the starlight. Great leaping mountains sprang up like dragon’s teeth from the rocky plains beneath. There was no sign of life. None.

I glanced over at Karen, who was strapped securely in her acceleration cradle at my side. She was smiling.

“We’ll be there soon,” I said.

“Good. This suspense is starting to get me. I’d like to get down there and get it over with—whatever it is we’re going to do.”

“I’ve got bad news for you, if you’re in a hurry,” I said. “We may need months before we get through.”

“Why? What will happen?”

“We’re going to tell the universe about Lanargon,” I said. “Where it is, where it may be going, how to come get it. We’re in a pretty empty part of space, though. Even by subradio, it may take weeks before we get within range of some other world.”

“You mean we’re going to stay on Lanargon until you make radio contact with some other planet?”

I nodded. “We’re going to turn ourselves into living signal buoys. We’re going to ride on Lanargon like fleas on a gorilla’s back for a while. I hope they don’t notice us, and just keep on moving until they come close enough to some inhabited planet for us to get out an SOS.”

“And then?”

“Then we get out of here as fast as we can, and wait for the Multiworld Fleet to home in on the coordinates we’ve given and blast Lanargon to the fate it so thoroughly deserves,” I said. “The only problem is staying unfound long enough to give the message. At the moment, we’re well out of range of anyone who could pick it up.”

I leaned back and moistened my dry lips. “Hold tight, kid. We’re almost there.”

Within the hour, we had approached Lanargon’s surface and were hovering no more than a hundred miles above, moving into the final stage of our landing. Minutes later, our ship dropped gently down and touched ground.

I was the first one up, and was half into my spacesuit before Karen had climbed out of her acceleration cradle. She followed me into the airlock when she was ready, and together we stepped outside.

It was a dead world. Perhaps it once had had a sun and an atmosphere and the warmth of life, but now it was but the corpse of a planet—inhabited, who know where, by the merciless aliens who had terrorized the universe.

“It’s—its the most horrible place I’ve ever seen,” Karen said, as we stood together at the base of the ship, looking around at the planet that would be our hone until we made contact with some inhabited world.

“That’s the only word for it,” I agreed. I almost shivered, though I was fully protected from the cold by my spacesuit. We could see—dimly, by the faint glow of the sprinkling of stars above—a few miles of the planet’s surface, and it was hardly a cheering sight. Lanargon was a slagheap, a vast desert of twisted lava forced into tortured convolutions, of ageless rocks and jutting mountains, stony and bleak.

“I hope it’s over quickly,” Karen said.

“I hope so too. Let’s go back in and send out the SOS—suppose we beam it five times a day until we get response—and then start exploring a little. I’d like to know just where the aliens are.”

“Underground, maybe,” Karen suggested. “Or in a domed city hidden somewhere in those awful mountains.”

“That’s probably it,” I said, nodding.

We returned to the ship and started the message on its way, announcing that we had discovered Lanargon accidentally, had landed, and would remain here acting as a signal-beacon until contacted by a member of the Multiworld Federation.

I snapped off the transmitter when we were through. “That should do it,” I said. “Now we’ll just have to wait, and keep sending it, and wait some more. One of these days we’ll get a reply, and we’ll tell them exactly how to go about getting to Lanargon and blasting it out of the skies. Then our job’s done.”

Karen frowned. “What if the aliens discover what we’re doing, and set out to find us?”

“No use thinking about it, honey. We’ll just have to sit here quietly and hope we’re not noticed by the wrong people. It won’t be fun, but what else can we do?”

“It’s like sitting on the rim of a live volcano,” Karen said. “And taking bets on when the top will blow off.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go outside and do some exploring. For all we know, we’ve landed right next door to an alien city.”

I stood up and led the way. I knew some exercise would loosen her tight-stretched nerves a little.

I stared for a moment at the dreary stretch of slag and needle-edged rocks. “You go to the left,” I said. “I’ll go the other way, and we’ll see what this place looks like.”

“Sounds good enough,” Karen said. She started to move off toward the towering mountain that looked down at the ship from the left, while I made my way over the heaps of rock to the cliff at the right.

I kept up a running conversation with her over the suitphones as we went.

“How’s it look from there?” I asked.

“Pretty much the same,” she said. “There’s a long plain, and then this mountain. Twenty-five, thirty thousand feet high, I’d say. I can’t see the top of it.”

“Nice,” I said. “Things are dull here. The cliff looks down on a valley, and there’s a sign of something that might have been a river once, before Lanargon tore loose from its sun. But there’s no sign of life anywhere.”

“Do you think this might be the wrong place? Some other dark planet that no one knows about?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, as I scaled up a jagged precipice and heaved myself onto a small plateau. “They’re probably all on the other side of this planet. It’s a big place, you know. I’m sure that—”

I stopped, chilled, and whirled at the sound of the terrible scream that ripped through my suitphones at that moment. I paused, not knowing in which direction I should run, and then, as Karen’s scream burst forth again, I began to race wildly through the twisting outcrops toward her.

“Mike! Mike! They’re here!”

“I’m coming,” I told her, and kept on running. A moment later, the ship came into sight, and I passed it and headed in the direction Karen had taken. It led through a dropping path into the plain that approached the mountain, and I dashed out toward her.

I saw her a moment later. She was standing on the top of a rock outcrop about ten feet high, kicking savagely at ten or twelve space-suited figures who were attempting to climb up and reach her. We had found the planet—but its inhabitants had gotten to us first.

I leaped forward and shouted my encouragement as I came. The next minute, I was at the base of the plateau, piling into the gang of aliens. They were husky, sturdy creatures, humanoid in shape, clad in dark spacesuits that made them almost invisible in the faint starlight.

I dragged one of them away from the path leading to the top of the plateau and crashed my gloved fist into his stomach. He bounded back without showing that the blow had hurt him, and made a signal to the others.

Immediately they split into two groups, working with calm, cold efficiency. Five or six of them continued to try to reach Karen, and the rest turned on me. I found myself surrounded by half a dozen aliens.

I struck out at the first one and saw him go reeling into the arms of one of his comrades, but then another hit me a stunning blow from behind. I staggered forward, felt another fist drive into my stomach. The flexible material of my suit yielded, and I gasped for breath.

Pulling away, I caught one alien by the arm and swung him down, but two more hit me at once. A gloved hand bashed into the yielding plastic of my face mask, and I went flying down on my back. I felt someone pommeling me viciously for a few moments, and then I stopped feeling anything.

When I awoke, Karen and the ship and the aliens were gone, and I was alone on the plain, sprawled out with my arms wrapped fondly around a small boulder that I had been using as a pillow.

The aliens had seen us, had come, had taken Karen, and had left for—where? What had they done with Karen? I hurled the questions at myself, angry for having allowed us to separate even for the moment.

I picked myself up, and took a few unsteady trial steps. I ached all over from my beating, but I managed to shake off the dizziness and keep on going. I had to find Karen, wherever she was, get her back to Earth somehow. I didn’t know how I was going to do it.

Lanargon was a big planet. There was no light to guide me. And the ship was gone.

Evidently they had left me for dead and taken Karen and the ship back to wherever it was they had come from. I started walking, not knowing and not caring which direction I might be heading in, simply putting one foot after another in the blind energy of complete despair. I headed down the long sweeping plain, walking nowhere on this world of perpetual nightfall, a dull pain throbbing all over my body.

I don’t have any idea how long I walked before the light appeared. All I know is I had been marching mechanically without so much as noticing where I was going, moving up one outcrop and down the next—and then, I became conscious of a glimmer of light in the distance. It was faint, but impossible to mistake against the inky Lanargon bleakness.

Suddenly I returned to life. I started to trot animatedly toward the source of light, hoping wildly it might be a signal beam of some sort sent up by Karen. As I drew near, though, I discovered what it was.

It was a small party of aliens, gathered together at the edge of a sprawling range of low-lying hills. There were about five of them, and in their midst was a portable generator which threw off just enough light to illuminate their camp. I guessed that they were another party out searching for us who were not aware that the other group had already achieved its mission.

I approached them in a wide semi-circle, swinging around from the left so I would be above them on the foothills. I could see now that they had a small vehicle of some sort, and that they were dismantling their camp and loading the equipment they had with them into the vehicle. I revised my earlier guess; this was a search-party who knew that the quarry had been snared, and which was preparing to return to home base.

I drew closer to them, close enough now to see that they were nearing the end of their task. I would have to move quickly.

I made my way down the side of the hill, deciding which one of the aliens was to be my victim. By the time I was on the plain, I had my man. He was busy about a hundred feet away, dismantling a wireless transmitter of some sort. The groundcar cut him off from the other four neatly. But I had to get him the first time; any struggle and I’d find myself fighting off all five of them within an instant.

I picked up a jagged triangular rock and squeezed it lovingly as I edged across the plain. The alien was bending over, doing something to the base of the transmitter.

After glancing around to make sure I was unobserved, I raised my hand high and brought the rock down against the back of the alien’s head. He fell forward without a sound and sprawled out grotesquely on the transmitter.

“Sleep tight,” I murmured, as I dragged him further into the shadows. Working quickly, I peeled his spacesuit from him, tossed the body to one side—what it looked like, in the airless void that was Lanargon’s cloak, was stomach-turning—and stepped smoothly into the suit, pulling it on over my own. The aliens were big men; I was able to fit, suit and all, into the alien suit without trouble.

I returned to the transmitter and pulled it free of the ground. Another of the aliens appeared and waved to me, as if signalling that I should hurry up. I waved back, picked up the transmitter, and walked over to join the group.

They were about to get into their vehicle as I drew near. I kept my head down, didn’t say anything, and climbed aboard, dragging the transmitter up with me. I stood in the corner of the car as it sped over the ground, holding my breath and hoping against hope that none of them would say anything to me.

None of them did. And, some twenty minutes later, the crys-tal dome of a huge city appeared in view. It arched high above the plain, and within I could see the busyness of a great city—the home of the marauders.

The car sped through the airlock and into the domed city. My breath left me as I contemplated the magnitude of the alien city, by far the largest dome in the universe. It must have contained a population of millions or of tens of millions.

As we moved rapidly deeper into the city, I heard my companions behind me slipping out of their spacesuits. In a moment, they stood revealed—tall, muscular humanoids whose chief alien distinction was the network of fine blue veins criss-crossing the golden skin of their hard, cold faces, and the two sinewy tentacles which sprouted from their sides just below their arms.

I began to sweat. No doubt they would wonder shortly why I was remaining in my suit now that we were inside the city. I couldn’t very well explain that if I removed the suit, my own spacesuit would be revealed beneath.

I felt a rough hand on my shoulder—and then, immensely more horrible, something which was not a hand spun me around. I faced one of the aliens, looked straight into the cold eyes of one of the creatures of Lanargon.

He snapped something at me, two short sentences in a harsh-sounding, unfamiliar language. I glared blankly at him, and he repeated his question.

Again I made no reply, and he peered closely, staring into the misty faceglass of my spacesuit. He must have seen what he was looking for, because a moment later he had called two of his companions over to see me. I heard them discussing the situation excitedly.

Apparently they didn’t know what to make of my presence. A live Earthman somehow smuggled into their car? It bewildered them, just for a split second.

A split second was just enough. I smashed a fist into the nearest alien just as he had made up his mind to grab me, and sent him pirouetting back against his two friends. They wobbled around in the speedily-moving truck for a couple of seconds, and I lifted the transmitter I had brought in and hurled it at them.

They bounced back against the wall. A fourth alien appeared and I felt the cold grip of his tentacle for a moment. I slashed out with the side of my hand and knocked the tentacle away. Then I had opened the door of the car, and, without looking at the ground below, leaped out.

I hit the ground as it came up to meet me. My spaceboots absorbed most of the shock, but it still rippled through me like a junior-grade lightning bolt as I hit. I sank to my knees for a second, then elbowed up and started to run.

I was free and at large—in the domed city of the Lanargon marauders. Somewhere in this sprawling citadel was Karen. I began to run down a side street, as an alarm sounded somewhere behind me.

It was a completely alien city. I crouched in a pit of shadows beneath a building of dizzying height and looked around, struck by the utter strangeness of the sunless city.

The dome reached high into the airless sky, and outside it I could see the blank wall of space. The buildings were delicate, airy things, with networks of web hanging from one to the next. I saw aliens crawling over these webs spider-fashion to get from one building to another.

The air seemed warm—at least, the aliens I saw moving through the streets were dressed skimpily—and the many spiky trees with blue leaves glittering in the brightness of the air were thriving as if it were a tropical climate.

The buildings were arranged in concentric circles, I saw; apparently they radiated outward from the atomic pile that would undoubtedly be the heart of such a dome. It was a giant, incredible, artificial city, probably built with the slave labor of the millions of prisoners taken during the years of Lanargon raids.

I was safe so long as I remained crouching where I was. But I knew I would never rescue Karen that way, though.

The first step was to find a weapon. I noticed that the aliens of both sexes went about armed, and that seemed my easiest chance. I edged out of my hiding place and moved toward the street, waiting for a pedestrian to come by alone.

It took three nerve-wracking minutes—and when one came, it was a female. She was over six feet tall, with a magnificent body only nominally covered by her brief clothing, and strapped to her hip was a gem-studded blaster. I stepped out behind her as she went past.

“I hate to do this to a lady,” I said apologetically, as I clubbed down on the back of her neck and grabbed the blaster from its holster in the same motion. She started to crumple before I had the gun out.

I hauled her back into the shadows and left her lying there. I still had no idea where to go, but now I was armed. The blaster was an efficient and murderous-looking weapon, and I wouldn’t have to rely on my fists alone any longer.

I strapped on the blaster and glanced warily around. No one in sight. I knew I’d look tremendously conspicuous in this spacesuit, but I would have to chance it. I’d look even more conspicuous walking around without it.

Karen was here someplace, I told myself—but I realized I had only a fool’s chance of finding her. I was ready to give her up for lost, if I could carry out a bigger project: that of getting to the atomic reactor that was the core of this city and destroying it. I felt completely nerveless. I had a job, and I was going to do it. Life without Karen wouldn’t mean much any more—but I could redeem it if I could take all of Lanargon with us.

I walked inward, toward the center of the city.

People stared curiously at me, wondering why I was wearing a spacesuit, no doubt, but no one said anything. I continued trudging along the yielding permoplast streets, and after a block or two I found what I was looking for—a Lanargon slave.

He was obviously an Earthman, in his early thirties, which meant he had been grabbed in the raid of 3175. He was wearing only a loincloth, no blaster, and so his slave status was apparent.

I followed him for about thirty paces, until we reached the corner. Then I edged in behind him and said quietly, “Turn left at this corner, will you?”

He glanced back, saw what must have been an imposing spacesuited figure, and obeyed without questioning. “Who are you?” he asked when we had rounded the corner.

“An Earthman,” I said. “You can help me.”

Quickly I explained the course of events from the time Lanargon first had showed up in the mass detector to Karen’s kidnapping.

“I’ve heard about that,” he said. “I saw the girl and the ship arrive.”

“Where are they?” I asked immediately.

“The girl’s been taken to the Central Temple. I’m a slave there. The ship’s been brought into the dome too, and it’s not far from the Temple either. The Lanargon scientists want to study it and see if they’re missing any wrinkles.”

“What Temple? What are they going to do to Karen?”

The slave looked at me pityingly for a long moment. “The Temple is the place all the power of the dome comes from. The aliens worship it as a shrine. They’re going to sacrifice your wife to their god. Their god’s a pool of live radiation.”

“What?”

He nodded. “They do it every year, usually with a female slave. I heard them talking. I’m in the High Priest’s retinue, and I found about it. The ceremony’s scheduled to take place this afternoon.”

I gripped his hand. “Fellow, I don’t even know your name, but I love you. Can you get me there? We don’t have much time.” I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I was going to do something. I was sure of that.

He glanced uneasily up and down the street. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “This hellhole deserves to be blasted wide open. And I think I see the man who’s going to do it.”

He led me along at a rapid pace toward the heart of the city. After a while, I saw a huge conical building loom up before me. And—outside it—was my ship!

“There it is!” I said. “That must be the Temple.”

“That’s right. And your ship. Now, if there were only some way of finding your wife and getting clear—”

I looked at him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “There are thousands, maybe millions of you slaves on Lanargon. Innocent people. Suppose I do succeed? Suppose I blasted the dome down? You’d all die.”

The slave smiled bitterly. “Don’t get guilt-feelings over that,” he said. He lifted his arm and showed me a metallic bulge along his side. “See this? It’s a compact transistor wave-generator embedded in my flesh. Removing it means death. And if we get further than a dozen miles from the Dome, it kills us automatically. It’s very efficient—and it means that no slave can ever leave Lanargon alive.”

The enormity of it chilled me. “That helps to keep you in line neatly, doesn’t it?” I said.

He nodded. “They can also kill us within the city. If a slave steps out of line, it’s the easiest thing to raise the frequency generated by this device to a lethal pitch. They’ll allow a slave to go almost anywhere, because he can’t possibly do any harm—not when his life can be snuffed out by any master in an instant.”

A sudden burst of thought illuminated my mind. “If that’s true, I think I know how I can carry this thing off. Let’s go someplace where I can get out of all these spacesuits and into a slave’s loincloth!”

The slave—his name was Dave Andrews—took me to his quarters, a miserable room not far from the Temple. There, I stripped out of both spacesuits and donned one of his loincloths.

“You look a little pale,” he commented. “But otherwise I guess you can pass, if no one looks too closely for the generator that isn’t planted in your side.”

I looked ruefully at my discarded blaster. “I’m going to feel lonely without that thing on my hip.”

Andrews shrugged. “No slave would dare carry one. You’ll just have to do without until this is all over.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get going. The sacrifice should be starting soon, shouldn’t it?” The image of Karen’s body plummeting into a lake of neutrons drifted into my mind, and I winced.

“Within the hour,” he said.

Together we crossed the plaza that led to the massive Temple. No one seemed to notice us; apparently slaves were utterly beneath contempt in Lanargon. At the Temple door, a cross-hatched alien face confronted us, saw that we were slaves, and let us through.

“I’ll have to help out at the ceremony,” Andrews said. “You can come along. It’ll give you your chance of getting close to the High Priest. And remember the way you came. You’ll have to get out of here and into your ship later.”

“Don’t worry,” I said stolidly. “I’ll manage. I’ve never wanted to destroy anything so much before in my life.”

We entered an elevator which was already occupied by a gigantic alien in luminescent yellow robes. I saw Andrews bend and touch his forehead to the floor without a moment’s hesitation, and, much as it went against the grain, I did the same.

“The High Priest,” he explained softly.

I nodded. I had guessed as much.

We rode the elevator to the sixty-first floor. As we got out, the priest said, “Bring the sacrifice to the Hall of the God, slaves.”

We bowed again, and turned off down a long aisle. My heart leaped as Andrews entered a room guarded by two aliens and said, “High Priest requests delivery of the sacrifice to the Hall of the God.”

One of the aliens nodded curtly and pointed toward an inner door. Andrews opened it and said quickly, “Prisoner, we have come to take you to the God.” He stepped inside and clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling the cry than broke from her as she recognized me in the guise of a slave.

We closed the door, shutting out the alien guards.

“Karen,” I said.

Andrews turned away and I folded her in my arms. She was quivering from anxiety and terror, though I saw her making an effort to recover her nerves. She couldn’t. I didn’t blame her as she broke down and started to sob.

A gong sounded loudly.

Gently, Andrews said, “We’ll have to go.”

“Mike? Mike—are they going to do this thing to me?”

I looked at her. She was wearing what was probably the sacrificial gown, a clinging, translucent thing through which I could easily see her naked body beneath. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get us out of it.”

We led her along the hall, Andrews grasping one arm and I the other, while one of the alien guards walked before us and one behind. We walked for what seemed to be miles through the temple building, until we reached a door some twenty feet high. It swung open as we approached.

I gasped. We stood at the entrance to a great amphitheatre, with an immense dais and rows of seats stretching off into the misty distance. And—between the dais and the seats—there was an open pit that seemed to reach down into the bowels of the planet. I looked down and reeled dizzily at the sight of that bright lake of radiation hundreds of feet below—the lake into which Karen’s naked body was soon to be hurled.

“You lead her up there,” Andrews whispered to me. “Give her to the High Priest. From there it’s up to you. I’m going to go back and get an elevator ready in case you do get out of it alive. Move as fast as you can when you get away.”

I nodded imperceptibly and marched forward with Karen. The great hall was filled—packed with row on row of uncountable aliens, sitting in quiet anticipation of the sacrifice to be performed before their eyes. Television cameras blinked down like unmoving eyes, telling me that the rest of the aliens were undoubtedly watching too.

I saw the robed figure of the High Priest, stark and majestic on the dais. He was intoning prayers to which the aliens responded antiphonally. A gong sounded repeatedly somewhere in the distance, and flames licked up from the abyss below.

He gestured for the sacrifice to be brought forward. I tightened my grip on Karen’s arm and started to walk up the long row of steps that led to the dais. The chanting of the multitude rose to an agonizing volume, a savage beat of barbaric fury echoing round and round the great hall.

I was at the heart of it now—the center of life of the race that set itself against all mankind. I clenched and unclenched my fists in anticipation as I traversed the long span of steps.

I handed over Karen. The priest took her and in one swift motion ripped away her thin gown, revealing her naked to the crowd. She began to cry. I muttered a silent curse. Hatred was a red haze before my eyes.

He took her in his giant hands and grasped her around the waist with those two slimy tentacles. The gong sounded furiously, and he responded to it with booming incantations. He lifted Karen’s unprotesting body high over his head, prepared to hurl it into the open abyss—

And I charged forward and snatched her from him just as he was about to release her. We stood there, he and I, on the dais, while a shocked multitude waited for him to strike me dead.

I saw him lower his arm to his side and press a button in his robe—presumably the button that would activate the death-dealing device embedded in my body. Only I wore no such thing. He stared at me in an agony of exasperation as I unbelievably refused to die.

Then I advanced toward him. No one dared move. He bellowed something, and guards broke from their lethargy and started racing up the dais—but it was a long way to go.

He shouted and leaped at me. I felt his powerful hands encircling me and shoving me toward the abyss. I broke loose, hearing Karen’s screaming as a dim noise in the background, and shoved backward. He reeled and groped for the blaster at his side. Before he could use it, I dropkicked it from his hand and sent it flying in a gleaming arc up, out, and into the pit.

He turned in utter dismay and watched it disappear. His face was a mask of despair and sheer horror. The guards were drawing near us, now.

I moved in close and unleashed a barrage of punches. He countered with wild swipes of his tentacles. I could hear Karen yelling clearly now, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

With coolness born of complete desperation, I reached out and seized him around the waist. I strained to lift the three-hundred pound body from the ground, pulled, yanked, and heaved him high out over the abyss, a pinwheeling figure of arms and legs and tentacles. He screamed all the way down.

I turned and saw Karen crouching behind me, scooped her up, and we began to run. “This way!” I heard a slave cry, and he pushed the guard nearest him down into the abyss as well. A moment later he had crumpled into death himself, but he had saved us—whoever he was. We plunged through the door and out into the corridor.

Everywhere we saw slaves battling with the alien masters. They were dying, of course—as fast as the aliens could kill them—but they were clearing a path to the elevator for us. Andrews was waiting there.

Tears were in his eyes. “Great,” he said, “Wonderful! But now get into your ship and get out of here fast!”

We made our way through a confused mob of aliens and slaves. The stunned aliens seemed helpless with their High Priest dead. We pushed through them, the three of us, and cut through to the ship. We paused for a moment at the base of the catwalk. I glanced at Andrews.

“I’m not coming,” he said, forestalling my question. “There’s no point to it. I’m a dead man the second I leave the Dome. Go on—get going.”

“We’ll never forget you,” I said. I boosted Karen up the catwalk and followed behind her. We made it inside safely, and the hatch clanged closed.

“Get into your acceleration cradle,” I shouted, and leaped for the control panel. I set up a manual pattern for blastoff.

Out the viewport I could see the aliens coming to life, moving toward us in a mighty horde. I finished fumbling with the controls and heaved downward on the blasting stud just as a couple of them began to scale the fins of the ship.

The ship leaped skyward in an instant. In three seconds, we burst through the dome and out into space. Acceleration hit me like a gigantic fist, and I slumped over and blacked out.

The next thing I knew Karen was bending over me and lifting me to my feet. “We’re safe,” she said.

I rubbed my head and nodded. “And we took them all with us. It must have been something down there when the ship broke through the dome and sent their atmosphere whipping out into space. It’s a lousy way to die—but they deserved it. All but those poor slaves. They were dead either way, though.”

“Come look out the port,” Karen said.

I did. I stared down at the bright, boiling radioactive fury that lit up the blackness of space where the dark planet should have been.

“It must have been that blaster,” I said after a long pause. “The one I kicked into the radiation lake. When it reached the reactor at the bottom, it must have blown the roof off.”

“They must have been destroyed in an instant.”

I looked at the beacon outside the viewport. “It’s the end of the dark planet,” I said slowly. “We’ve touched off a chain reaction that will last forever.”

“Forever,” she repeated. “It’s all over now.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever forget Lanargon,” I said. “But I’d like to know what the galaxy’s astronomers are going to say when they notice a brand-new sun in this part of the cosmos.”

“They’ll have all sorts of wild guesses. But we can tell them the right answer, can’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. I glanced once more at the fissioning hell that had been Lanargon, shuddered, and set our course for Earth.