Space Captain

IX

The spaceboats landed within hundreds of yards of each other under a leaden sky. They'd made practically all their descent on the far side of the planet, where radar would not have spotted them, even were radar in use by this world's pirate population. It wasn't, but Trent wouldn't risk it being turned on for some accidental reason. Then they'd come in low and barely skimmed mountain tops with valleys in between sometimes filled with smoke. Finally they went down really low over the acid sea. Once, only hundreds of feet above the water, they passed a place where the circle of a volcano's crater rose only a little higher than the waves. It was like an atoll, with its lagoon hundreds of feet below sea-level and filled with surging lava instead of sea. From several places in the crater rim, sea-water cascades leaped down into the depression, and turned to steam before they struck.

The three spaceboats left it behind. Trent kept in touch with his followers by lightphone, invented by the inventor of the telephone itself. It was used mostly for ship-to-ship and ship-to-office communications in spaceports, where there was already enough interference. But it worked well enough here, except once when they were driving through a giant cloud of condensed steam blowing across the water from some submarine source of heat.

Trent let his small squadron down lower and lower when land appeared ahead. In the end they flashed across an almost circular harbor with an extremely narrow exit to the sea. There was vegetation here, sparse and with that starveling appearance of all living things desperately surviving against great odds.

The spaceboats landed, kicking up clouds of volcanic ash. Trent's followers disembarked. The air smelled strongly of sulphur-fumes. Where there was volcanic activity on such a scale, there would be sulfur in every breath a man drew. One man sneezed. Another, and another.

"Use your masks," commanded Trent. "They'll take care of matters for a while. We'll probably get used to it. Now, look here!"

He spread out the enlarged copies the mate had made of the pictured descent of the Cytheria. The landing party crowded around to see. They were an extraordinary group to look at. Most of them would have made an ordinary citizen uneasy if he'd encountered them in some dark alley. There were tall men and short ones, and bulky ones and spare ones. But each had the indefinable air of men accustomed to take care of themselves. And they had a comfortable confidence in Trent.

Trent traced out items on the space photos.

"Here's the Cytheria," he observed, "heading down to this spot. It's a sort of a pothole of a valley with mountains almost all around it. Here and here you'll see things that look like spires of stone. They aren't. They're ships."

Men crowded closer, staring over each other's shoulders to see the pointed-out objects.

"I've counted," said Trent, "and there are thirty-odd of them, counting the Cytheria. She landed by rocket with her Lawlor drive to help, of course. In this photo she's not yet aground. In this one she is. Here's the blast-area her rockets burned away when she hovered to land gently. See?"

There were murmurings of assent. Trent's crewmen took turns looking closely. They appeared much more piratical than pirates would. Every man had two shaped-charge satchel bombs, dangling from his hips, and there were grenades in their belts and bandoliers of cartridges across their shoulders. Every man had automatic pistols and a rifle.

"The point," said Trent, "is that where she landed her rockets burned away what green stuff there was. There are seven other ships—they look like pointed rocks—with burnt-away places around them. There's no burnt area around the rest. You see what that means?"

They waited to hear. It was not that they couldn't think, but they were content to let him do their thinking for them. A man sneezed. He'd taken off his gas-mask. He put it back on.

"When a ship's landed on rockets," Trent pointed out, "it stands in a scorched place. If it doesn't take off again, after a while the green stuff grows back. There are twenty odd of them with the green stuff returned. They've been aground a long time, some of them maybe years."

A burly man grunted. He had a scar on his cheek.

"They brought 'em here after they captured 'em," he said confidently. "They looted 'em as they felt like it. Then they left 'em where they were."

Trent nodded.

"Which means," he explained, "that we aren't up against the crews of thirty pirate ships. Those twenty-odd ships are carcasses, brought here to be rifled and then left to rust. And not all the lately landed ships are pirates, either. Some of them were brought in lately to be stripped. We may be up against odds of two or even three to one, but not more. And we'll have surprise on our side. We shouldn't have too much trouble."

Grins went around the group. Nobody spoke, which was a good sign. Nobody needed to assure himself of his own courage.

"Now, here's our route," said Trent. "Like this."

He traced it out. He'd picked it out carefully. It could be followed easily enough by day, of course, but for night guidance he'd mentally marked down where for a mile or two they'd trudge along the seashore, and farther where an active volcano should throw a glow against the sky, and another place—

"We want to hit them just before sunrise," said Trent. "We'll be able to take a rest, I think, just this side of where we'll find them. So… let's go!"

In minutes he was leading his file of nearly thirty men away from the landing place. The spaceboats were partly covered by the ash in which they'd landed. Judging direction by the landmarks he noted, and thereby establishing a bearing for the sun, he headed toward the planet's south. He was, of course, as much burdened and as well-armed as any of his men. He led them across a rocky ridge and down on the other side again. There he found a patch of flowers. They were, as it later developed, the only blooms he was to see on the third planet out from Kress. They were utterly white, and very large, and somehow they looked artificial. They made one think of death.

The skies were somehow smoky, and the sun seemed redder than when seen from space. The air had the smell of sulphur, of which a very, very minute quantity seemed able to get through the gas masks, but in time they seemed to become used to it. After the first hour or two it became rare for anyone to wear his mask more than half the time. But the sulfur smell was annoying. It came from the volcanoes, of course.

They tramped, and rested, and tramped again. There were places where spindling, somehow skeleton-like trees with white bark and extravagantly spreading branches struggled to attain a height of seven or eight feet. There were other places where thready green plants—but the green was not quite of vegetation brought from Earth—covered the ground so that men's boots crushed them and left clear trails where the plants had been.

They saw no animals. It was not to be doubted that animals existed, of course. Trent himself more than once saw tiny movements out of the corner of his eyes, but he didn't actually glimpse anything to be called an animal. Near sundown, though, they waded through a small brook—Trent tasted its water and it had a bare taste of rotten eggs in it, but it was drinkable—and they saw things that would probably be considered fish. And a mile or so farther on a small thing with many legs ran away from them with a clattering sound. It was more like a crab than any other familiar creature, but one doesn't usually think of a crab as an animal.

When the sun set in smoky redness, they were marching beside an oily, sulfur-scented sea. The beach was volcanic ash. There were giant mountains far away which poured out thick smoke and formed inky clouds which were blots against the sunset sky.

Night fell, and the smell of the sea made all of them keep their masks on for a great deal of the time. Those who didn't, sneezed. Trent turned on the space-phone he'd removed from a suit of space armor. He listened. If there were any communications going on, he'd hear it. He could have heard if the Yarrow's mate tried to reach him from the ship. But he heard no voices nor any other sound in the space-phones.

There were things to hear when he took off the ear pieces, though. Noises that he'd become accustomed to were suddenly loud and distinct. The landing party was resting where they were, a thousand feet above the sea, when there came a deep, deep bass rumbling underground. Now, paying close heed to such things, Trent could detect occasional tremors in the rock he rested on. And suddenly he heard a strange, rumbling sound to seaward. It came nearer. It became a bellow and then a roaring and a more-than-thunderous shout.

The sea rose below them. A volcanic tidal wave hurled itself against the shoreline. The noise was ear-shattering. It meant utterly irresistible power and thousands of millions of tons of sulfur-smelling seawater flinging itself against the land.

It subsided. For a long, long time there were trickling, pouring, washing sounds from the rocks between the landing party and the sea. The water the tidal wave had flung upon the land was running back. The smell of the ocean was overpowering. If Trent and his followers had been in the way of that monstrous ocean movement, they'd not be alive now.

"There's always something going on, isn't there?" said Trent in a dry voice. "We might as well carry on."

He led the landing party on through the night. They marched, and they stumbled, and now and again Trent looked at his watch. Then they rested for ten minutes. They saw glowings in the sky, and the ground rumbled underfoot, and now and then there were perceptible tremors. And time passed, and the stars moved westward in the smoky sky. But miles passed, too. And at long, long last they went down a ravine. They'd been so long in the darkness that starlight was now enough for them to pick their way by.

The pirate rendezvous had been inspiredly chosen. There were mountains on nearly every hand, but these seemed not to be volcanoes. Their edge against the stars spoke of an upheaval so gigantic that instead of a mountain, a mountain range resulted. The pirate's ships stood in a remarkably flat valley-bottom between rows of peaks. There was a partial gap to the southward, though, and very many miles away something seemed to explode. The sound of a racking detonation arrived, turned to deepest bass by the distance. The ground shook, and then a flame appeared. But instead of rising it flowed downward. It was incandescent lava pouring down a distant mountain flank. Even so many miles away, it cast a faint light into the valley, and the silent, upright ships of space were outlined by it.

Trent said very quietly,

"I showed you the ships you're to work on. You can be certain in the dark by feeling the ground. If there's something on the order of grass underfoot, that's wrong. The ones you want have only ashes under them. Get set. I'll give you time. When my first bomb goes off, go ahead!"

He moved away in the dimmest of possible starshine with a single companion, the burly man with the scarred cheek. His other followers separated. Then for a long, long time there were no noises that could be attributed to them. The far-away mountain exploded again. White-hot rocks rose above its top, fire-bombs flung skyward by the titanic forces at work yonder. There were flickerings of light where the pirate ships stood upright. The intermittent glare of the eruption reached so far.

Trent and the scar-faced man went quietly through the night. It was not likely that the tumult in the distance was unusual. This world was in a state of vulcanism such as seems always to occur on third-orbit planets of type G suns, just as all such worlds are denser for their size than their sister-planets. The pirates who'd chosen this spot for their base must have accumulated the looted ships during a considerable period of time. They'd be familiar with such phenomena as went on now. Those who were asleep would hardly stir. There would not be many awake an hour before sunrise. Discipline would be of the slackest among pirates, anyhow. Secure in their hiding-place, they couldn't be made to keep a conscientious watch except against their prisoners. And the captives would most likely have been put into a looted ship whose locks and cargo doors could be welded shut. Imprisoned so, they could find their own food, and attend to their own necessities, and if they happened to run out of food and water in those hulks, there was neither any way to ask nor any hope in asking for food from the pirates.

Trent found a ship with only ashes around its bottom. He and the burly man conferred in whispers. Trent set a satchel bomb in place. When it went off it should blow one of the ship's three landing-fins to scrap-metal. The ship could not stay upright on two supports. It would topple. And then they could take further action. The explosion of the first bomb would be the signal for the rest of his spacemen to begin their work. It had not been pictured to them as high or noble adventure and they wouldn't act that way. They'd make no dramatic gestures. But they would feel a fine zest, some part of which would come of acting as a team under a leader like Trent. This was quite independent of any prospects of profit. They followed Trent. It was even more satisfying than that brawl outside the spaceport on Sira.

There were many stars shining in a smoky sky. There were distant, muted explosions on a diminished scale. Trent set the timer on the satchel bomb. He and his companion drew off.

Seconds passed. The satchel bomb went off. Its shaped charge flashed blue-white and made a detonation sound so sharp and savage that it was like a blow on the chest. Then, very sedately and with a certain enormous leisureliness, the hull of this spaceship leaned. The first second it leaned only a little. But it gathered speed as it fell.

Before it had fallen a quarter of the way, other blue-white flashes began. Like super-super photographer's strobe-lights, they illuminated all the valley and the mountainsides about it. It would have been an impressive sight had the flashes been continuous. Twelve spaceships, pointing toward the sky, formed an indefinite group. Seven of them leaned and fell. They struck each other. They struck still-upright other ships. They crumpled, or they bent, or they went down in straightforward crashes that made the ground jump when they landed. And all this happened in the fraction of a minute.

There was a curious stillness for a moment. The lesser explosions of the mountain to southward increased. They became practically continuous. They sounded like a faraway cannonade, but no man in this generation had ever heard a cannonade save in recordings of ancient warfare. The fallen ships made strange small squeakings as vibrations of the ground helped them to settle in more stable relationships to each other.

Somebody bawled, "Cap'n! Cap'n Trent!"

Trent did not answer. He made his way toward the voice. Twice, as he went past fallen ships, and once under a vast cylinder which had fallen across another, he heard batterings. Men had been wakened by the falling of their ships. Those who did not die then hysterically tried to escape. But there were many who were actually trapped. A good and considerable number had been killed. And whatever might happen to Trent and his landing party, these strained, twisted, racked and not infrequently torn-open ships could never be taken to space again by the pirates who'd brought them here. For one thing, they'd have to be raised to vertical positions. Equipment for that purpose couldn't be improvised.

The voice bawled again, "Cap'n! Cap'n Trent!"

It was very near. Trent said, "What's the trouble?"

"Cap'n," said the voice anxiously, "we knocked down a ship, and it land of split open, and there's a woman in it!"

Then a grenade went off a little distance away. A rifle cracked. A man screamed. There were other sounds of combat.

From a distance great enough to let all the grounded ships be seen at once, there would have appeared to be very little activity of any sort. There were the occasional cracklings of firearms. They made tiny sparks. Now and again—rarely, now—there were explosions of other sorts. They made flashes. Sometimes they were satchel bombs. More often they were grenades.

Trent said shakily, "Marian! You're all right? The others—"

Marian said in a queer voice, as if she still couldn't believe in what had happened, "They put us… hostages in that ship and welded up the ports. They'd ruined the engines and the drive. They told us if the Cytheria didn't bring back… agreement to their terms they'd… bring us out and… make pictures of… of what happened to us… before we died. And they'd send those tapes with word that they'd take more prisoners and… do the same unless—"

Trent's throat was dry and seemed to be trying to shut to strangle him. At the same time his voice was thick and furry with hatred.

"I said are you all right? All of you?"

"We're quite all right," said Marian unsteadily, "only we… don't quite believe it."

There were eight or ten women and three men released from a welded-shut ship-hull by its fall. Strangely enough, as prisoners waiting to be the victims of carefully photographed atrocity, they had been made afraid by the recurrent minor shocks and tremors of this valley. Instead of staying in the cabins and accommodations of the ship's bow, they'd huddled in its sternmost part, nearest to the ground. The bow of a ship would be hundreds of feet high and it could have a completely destructive fall. But the stern section could only overturn. This ship had been toppled because it was lately landed and the ground was scorched beneath it. The prisoners in it, being merely shaken up by their trivial fall, had crawled out of a lock door twisted open despite its welding. They'd come out expecting to be recaptured or murdered. They'd had no hope to urge them; only fear. But Trent's men were not inclined to kill women. They'd bawled for him when the freed prisoners were discovered.

"Stay here," he commanded fiercely. "Guard them until we clean up the mess!"

He went away again. There was still darkness everywhere, but to the east an infinitely faint, rosy fading of the sky began. A rifle on automatic fire spat spiteful sparks to the left. Trent went to it. A grenade exploded farther on.

"What's going on?" he demanded. He was filled with remarkable emotions. Marian was again out of a predicament in which the folly of other men had involved her. He and he alone had proved capable of action to get her out. He was succeeding. "What's going on?" he demanded almost genially.

A member of the Yarrow's crew spat with great deliberation.

"Some characters in this ship here are tryin' to get out. Three-four got out. We bagged 'em. Now the others are hollerin' crazy-like. They want to know who's shooting."

"Tell them Santa Claus," said Trent. "Why not a grenade?"

He moved away. He heard the grenade explode behind him. Something huge loomed before him and overhead. It was the nose of a fallen ship. He heard sounds from inside it. Its control room viewports, or some of them, had been smashed in its fall. Now a loud speaker incredibly gave out speech from inside there. A savage, half-hysterical voice raged; "Somehow somebody's landed here! Get to the Jocunda! Fight your way here and make it fast!"

Somewhere in the valley an occupied pirate ship hadn't toppled. Somewhere a freebooter remained upright, and in some manner it had become aware that the noises outside it were not distant detonations but nearby bombs. It called to what other ships contained their crews. To a great degree that call was bound to be futile. But Trent found a specific object for his hatred. This ship would be in a sense the headquarters ship of the pirates of the Pleiads. It remained aground; it had stayed aground so long that green stuff grew about its base. It would have been kept provided with fuel and air-stores, ready to be used for escape should such a thing unthinkably be needed. Now it called on all pirates not trapped or disabled to join it. Most of them wouldn't hear it. Space-phone units would mostly have been shattered by the long fall of the fated ships' bows. Of those who survived, such as Trent had heard, most would be found in crushed and empty control rooms. Men in a ship that had fallen crashing from the vertical would either be dead, or they'd be injured, or they'd be trying frantically to get out to the sulfur-smelling out-of-doors.

But there were some who'd probably gotten their warning before Trent overheard the message. If he'd kept his personal space-phone turned on, he'd have known. More, the Yarrow's mate, aloft with those gigantic boulders which should have been a moon, would have heard the hysterical command. He'd be worried, but at least he'd know that the landing party was aground and was in action against the pirates.

The redness to the east grew brighter. Trent saw a man running crazily. He was not armed as the members of the landing party were. He was in flight. He passed behind a hulk that half an hour earlier had been a spaceship at least capable of lifting to the sky. He came out, running toward a group of still and silent ships standing on green-covered ground. Somewhere a rifle racketed in automatic fire. The running man collapsed. Trent growled. He headed in that direction.

Another man. Two others. They'd been warned by space-phone, but they didn't attempt to fight. They ran like deer toward the spires which were landed and looted and rusted space craft. A rifle cracked on one-shot fire. It cracked again, and again. One man fell all of a heap, his arms flailing. The solitary rifle began again.

Trent couldn't stop it, so he stood still, straining his eyes in the slowly, slowly increasing crimson light to see which of the presumable hulks they fled toward. That one mustn't lift off. It mustn't!

A running man fell. More than one rifle concentrated on the last man afoot. They made popping sounds. He began to zigzag crazily. He knew that the bullets whining past were aimed at him. He must have known that several men were shooting in the zestful competition of a sporting event.

He fell, and rolled over and over, and lay still. But Trent had identified the supposed hulk which had been his hope of refuge. He began to gather men for an assault upon it. There was a woeful lack of satchel bombs. Most of them had been used to admirable effect. He started toward the group of abandoned ships, of which one must be called the Jocunda and contained at least some of the pirates who a half-hour since had snored in their sins while Trent and his men came down into the valley.

There were flames. Monstrous flames spurted out from beneath a rusting hull. That would be the Jocunda. She rose from the ground, spouting hellfire. The flames were blue-white and so intense that for long moments the increasing ruddy light of dawn seemed whitened. With its Lawlor drive giving all possible help to its rockets, it crawled, then climbed, then seemed to fall toward the smoky heavens overhead. Trent watched it bitterly as it dwindled to a speck which in the red light of sunrise looked like a ruby in the sky.

Then he switched on his space-phone. He began to call, "Calling Yarrow! Calling Yarrow! Trent calling Yarrow!"

Almost instantly the mate's voice came back. It sounded relieved.

"Come in, Captain! I've been hearing some fancy stuff from aground there. 'You all right?"

"Yes. Some mopping up, but, is McHinny's gadget set for use?"

"Yes, sir. All set."

"There's a ship coming up," said Trent. "It got away. Tell him to try his gadget on it. He claims it'll work on a Lawlor drive too, now. If it doesn't, use our two coils to blow their overdrive."

"Yes, sir! Anything else?"

"Nothing," said Trent.

Now, and it seemed very suddenly, the sun rose in splendor, with the sky a vivid crimson until past the zenith. All the mountain flanks glowed a ruddy color, and the valley of the pirate base was filled with multiple reflections of the rosy glare.

Again there seemed little activity of any sort. But Trent walked leisurely back to what activity there was. He picked up half a dozen men. He led them into a toppled ship. He and they made full use of their training and their rehearsals of combat tactics in the recesses and corridors and the corners of the less-visited parts of a spaceship. When they came out—they'd entered by a cargo door, but they came out through an airlock—they brought three injured men and they left others behind who would need burial later.

They went into a second ship. There were two shots from inside this one. A third. Trent was satisfied with the quality of their behavior. In his presence they felt some embarrassment about looting. He left them and put a second group of six to work on other ships.

Presently he came back to Marian. She looked tensely composed, but her eyes brightened when she saw him. She took off a space helmet a Hecla-salvage man had brought out of a ship. The former prisoners were all supplied and the man of the Hecla salvage operation looked at once complacent because of their gratitude and gloomy because he'd missed his full share of the fighting.

"I think," said Trent, "that we're doing all right. Do you know of any other prisoners?"

"We… were told there were some," said Marian. "They're welded in one of those hulks. They're waiting as we were… to be killed if the Cytheria didn't bring back acceptance of the pirates' terms."

Trent nodded to his followers.

"Take a torch, if you can find one," he ordered, "and look over those ships. Any that are welded shut, cut open and let the people out. Of course there may be one or two pirates left. Use your own judgement."

The group of Yarrow and Hecla-salvage hands went briskly and hopefully away. They would find prisoners in not less than three of the twenty-some still-standing ships. They'd be unaware of what had happened in the valley since just before sunrise. They'd be terrified when called on, believing it a summons to atrocity and murder. And they would be hysterically grateful when they found out it was not.

Then the space-phone dangling from Trent's neck made noises.

"Calling Captain Trent! Calling Captain Trent! Yarrow calling Captain Trent!"

Trent answered, and the mate's voice sounded exultant to a degree Trent had never heard before.

"The gadget worked, Captain! It worked! McHinny worked it himself, with the rising ship in plain view and rising right past us. She cut her rockets and flicked into overdrive and we hit the overdrive button with McHinny at the gadget in the fraction of a second afterward! And she popped back out to normal space! She's still rising, but she can't accelerate any more! Her drive and her overdrive are both blown out and she's losing velocity! She'll go up a while longer, and then she'll fall back! I figure she'll hit somewhere in mid-ocean in two hours and a half. But she'll be half-way melted down when she hits, and what's left will never come up again!"

"I don't suppose it will," agreed Trent. "All right. Very nice work! I'll call you back later."

He turned to Marian. She looked at him with warm eyes. He said, "There's a lot of stuff to attend to. We have to make sure about mopping up any pirates who may still be loose. I don't think there'll be many. Then we have to get the prisoners organized, taking care of their own food and so on. There are more than a hundred of them. And we have to find out if any pirate ship is still out cruising. I don't think there will be, but the Yarrow can blow the drive of any other ship in space, with two overdrive coils in parallel. We don't have to worry about them!"

It was not exactly the sort of speech a man would be expected to make under the circumstances. It was very businesslike. In fact, he was talking business.

"Then," he said, frowning thoughtfully, "I have to post salvage-claim notices on the ships here. I have to make a formal claim that each one has been made available for recovery and repair by my actions, in my chartered ship—I've salvage rights—and my men in my employ. Actually, I can sell these ships where they are, the purchasers to come and repair and remove them. I may do so if I need funds. But most of them will be salvaged like the Hecla was, and I'll claim salvage on each as I did on the Hecla."

She listened. But her expression became uncertain. It was even puzzled. She looked at him, uncomprehending.

"You asked me," said Trent somehow formally, "to come and talk to your business agent and to you on Sira. I said I'd try, and then I lifted off without doing so. I should apologize."

She looked genuinely bewildered.

"But… but that doesn't matter!" she protested. "I—"

"I still have those things to attend to," said Trent. His tone was rueful. "But—"

"But—"

"But then I'll be heading for Loren," he told her. "I'll have to arrange for other ships to come and pick up all the extra people. I… I'll be very glad if you'll come on the Yarrow when I head for Loren. I can take a few other passengers. You can pick them out, if you like. And… ah… I won't have business demands on my time between here and Loren."

She stared at him.

"In fact," said Captain Trent, and now he was embarrassed, "in fact I… find that I… well… would like very much to have you as my guest on the Yarrow. I like the way you… react to emergencies. I'd like to be… better acquainted. I've never faced this… situation before and I don't know how to say what I mean. I certainly haven't managed to do it so far!"

Marian's expression changed. From seeming bewildered, she looked suddenly and pleasantly understanding.

"But, I think you did!" She smiled at him. "I think you said it beautifully! I'd… like to say the same thing as well as you did. Will you pretend that I have?"

Trent looked at once acutely uncomfortable and very much relieved.

"We'll talk it over on the way to Loren."

Then he turned away. Marian smiled after him. And she didn't look in the least puzzled. She smiled very confidently.

On the way to Loren, McHinny insisted that he wanted to show Trent how beautifully his for-the-third-time reconstructed pirate-frustrator worked. He explained that a part he'd used in building the unit for the Yarrow had required a certain amount of induction. The idea was that current flowing from the bus-bars to the capacitors had resistance to overcome in the first microseconds of current flow. Therefore the capacitors charged gradually, without overload of the current cables. But the manufactured article in the Yarrow's unit had been defective. With no inductive resistance to control the current going into the gadget, it amounted to a short-circuit. The gadget had blown every time. It couldn't be avoided.

But on the way to the pirate base, said McHinny truculently, the possibility had occurred to him. He'd installed another induction unit in his gadget. And consequently he'd destroyed the one pirate which would otherwise have escaped. Trent opened his mouth to make a correction. The fleeing pirate ship wouldn't have escaped. The mate had orders to blow it with the Yarrow's overdrive if McHinny's gadget didn't work. But then Trent shrugged. It didn't matter.

Now McHinny wanted to show Trent how it worked. Trent took Marian to watch. McHinny swelled with importance and the confidence natural to genius. He threw the charging switch.

And the gadget blew itself to hell and gone.