9 THE LAST BATTLE. OR IS IT?

After an unmeasurable amount of time John crept feebly back to consciousness. His head felt as though it had been caught in a destruction derby, and for quite a while, all he could do was lie there quietly and not even moan because even moaning hurt. Finally, with great reluctance he forced one eye open, then the other, and discovered that he was lying in the aisle of the plane staring up at the ceiling. Hesitantly he raised reluctant fingers to his bruised skull and touched it, which did not feel nice at all, and brought them away bloodstained. Shot to death! was his first thought, but, since he was still alive and not paralyzed, he realized that was not true. It appeared that one bullet at least had grazed his skull, he hoped without fracturing it, and had rendered him unconscious.

Bullet! When he realized what this meant full memory returned in a flash, and he groped, groaning, for the communicator from his pocket. For some unfathomable reason Chuck had shot him and escaped with the cheddite projector. The red button meant OK, so he stayed away from that one and played a tune of despair upon all the others since things definitely were not OK.

A shrill squeaking sound and a guttural growl reached his ears, and instantly, despite the triphammer of pain it produced in his head, he was on his feet and facing this new menace, hands outstretched in the judo killer position. The eerie sounds were coming from the direction of the control cabin, so crouched in the judo defense position, he stalked there on wary tiptoes, ready for anything. Though he lowered his guard, settled onto his heels, and gaped when he saw what it was that had disturbed him.

Jerry Courteney lay on the cabin floor writhing like a snake. He was on his back, his eyes closed, his fists clenched, growling like a dog, and gritting his teeth at the same time to make the chalk-on-blackboard squeaking sound. For a long moment John gazed at his writhing friend in wide-eyed astonishment, then, through the tortured synapses of his beat-up brain came the first glimmerings of understanding.

"The Lortonoi, who else!" he ejaculated, then groped in his pocket for one of the mind shields the Garnishee had given him. Kneeling, he slipped it into place on Jerry's head. The results were incredibly dramatic. Jerry instantly stopped writhing and growling, and his body relaxed, and he opened his eyes and smiled.

"Wow," he breathed, "gone at last."

"Was something trying to get into your mind and control you?" John queried.

"Brother, you are not just whistling 'Dixie'! Insidious mental tentacles of some hideously repulsive alien life form were attempting to take over my body – but I fought back! The hardest battle of my entire career. I couldn't throw them out, and finally, they must have decided they could not win because they settled for just dropping me down on the deck and closing my eyes. I was struggling away when all of a sudden they left, poof, just like that!"

"The mind shield. I put it on your head so they couldn't get through to you."

"That's pretty good, John. You wouldn't like to tell me where you got a gadget like that, would you?"

"It's a long story but first-"

"Death to the aliens!" Jerry shouted, leaping to his feet.

"Three cheers for the red, white, and blue!" He seized up the oxyhydrogen torch, lit it to flaring life and dived to the attack toward the Garnishee who were crowding into the cabin. John gave him a quick karate chop to the wrist as he went by, so the torch dropped, then another quick hack on the kidneys, which paralyzed him and dropped him back to the deck again.

"Traitor!" Jerry growled at John when he knelt to turn off the torch and struggled to raise his hands to throttle his former companion. Two more lightning karate chops paralyzed his arms as well, so John could reason with him.

"It's a complicated story, I tried to tell you, but part of it is good, like look there, see who has come to take care of you."

"Sally! Alive!" Jerry gasped as the girl pushed through the tentacles and hurried to his side. "It is indeed a miracle."

Her tender arms embraced him, and they kissed, and John writhed like a willow in the wind burned by the hot fires of jealousy, for he too, now, had to admit that, like the others, he was head over heels in love with this slim girl. He forced his eyes away from this painful necking scene and faced Slug-Togath, who had led his noisome followers as they crowded into the plane.

"Here is what I think happened," John told the alien prime minister. "The Lortonoi must have been very suspicious when Sally and I both 'vanished' mentally, and they may have gotten their wind up and had a bug in their ear."

"What do their digestion and their hearing have to do with it?" Slug-Togath asked in puzzlement.

"Will you kindly shut up and let me finish? Fearing that their dark secret had been discovered, they launched a mental attack on Chuck and Jerry here in the plane. Jerry fought back with every fiber of his being, and the most they could do was hold him down mentally while they worked their plan. But, somehow, they took over Chuck's brain. They made him grab the cheddite projector and light out of here on the double. That's when I showed up, so they made him shoot me, or at least try to. He is a crack shot, so I should be dead, but since I am not, it seems he still has a measure of control and was able to deflect their aim. Once I went down he escaped with the cheddite projector and, if you will pardon my saying so, shouldn't we be taking off after him instead of standing around beating our gums?"

There was a thunder of heavy feet as the Garnishee rushed for the door. Slug-Togath stayed behind and issued incomprehensible orders in a strange tongue through a hand communicator.

"The attack has begun," he announced. "We have hurled our entire remaining forces against the fort. Pray to Great Cacodyl that we succeed before their reinforcements arrive."

"Let me shake your tentacle," Jerry said, now recovered, striding forward. "Sally has told me everything, and I'm glad to have you on our side. I'm sorry about, you know, wiping out almost all your ancient and intelligent race. . ."

"Fortunes of war, we shall not speak of it again. Ahh, I have a message!" The communicator blurbled and bleeped. "The walls have been breached, we are inside the fort, the attack is succeeding, though, of course, not without an incredible loss of life on both sides. Wait! What is this? Something has happened. The advance guard reports a hideous alien life form has been spotted – that must be your friend, Chuck – they are closing in but 'preprabishkom!' he is escaping!"

They rushed to the windows and had their first view of the battle. Half the fort was in ruins, and flames guttered through the rest. Bodies, of friend and foe alike, littered the landscape, which was also a junkyard of wrecked war vehicles.

"There he goes!" Slug-Togath shouted, pointing a quivering tentacle.

From the ruined fort there slowly rose up a strange flying vehicle. Shells exploded around it, but miraculously, it escaped and rose even higher in the merciless glare of the piercing Garnishee searchlights. It was a steam-driven ornithopter held aloft by four pairs of great flapping black wings. Smoke gushed from the chimney, and the wings thrashed and beat strongly as the flying machine gathered speed and rushed toward the horizon.

"Strap in, everyone," Jerry shouted, diving for the controls. "We're going after him!"

They barely had time to find their seats before the great bulk of the Pleasantville Eagle was roaring down the improvised runway and hurling itself into the air.

"I have it on the radar," John announced. "It looks like he's heading due north."

"I feared that," Slug-Togath said gloomily, but would not elucidate.

"We'll catch up with them quickly enough," Jerry said assuredly. "That wing-flapping gadget can't outfly this baby."

But Jerry's prediction was brought to naught, for as soon as the ornithopter had reached sufficient altitude and speed, a built-in ramjet fired, and the wings were retracted, and the now jet-powered aircraft sizzled north above the speed of sound. It was all that the 747 could do, throttles wide open, to keep the alien vessel on the edge of the radarscope.

"They have to come down some time," Jerry said, grimly. "And when they do, we'll be there."

Onwards they raced in this race to save a race, a man, a world, possibly the entire inhabited galaxy, and soon dawn rushed upon them and, yes, their quarry was visible as a dark spot against the eternal snowfields that hurtled by below.

"What in tarnation is he doing up here at the North Pole?" Jerry asked puzzledly. "Does anyone live up here?"

"Not to our knowledge," Slug-Togath answered grimly.

"But we have our suspicions. It seems that during all the centuries of eternal warfare upon this planet we have never known where the secret base is from which the Lortonoi operate with their mental powers. We have had suspicions and have raided certain areas, but we feel now that these were, how do you say it, blue herrings to throw us off-"

"Red," Jerry said. "We say red."

"Blue reds to throw us off-"

"Herrings, not reds, you got it wrong-"

"Look, do you mind if I finish the story and we save the goddamn language lesson for later?" Slug-Togath snapped irritably, undoubtedly fatigued and out of sorts because of the destruction of most of his millennia-old race. "For the last few centuries we have come to suspect one certain inaccessible location at the North Pole, an extinct volcano named Mount Krisco, and plans were being drawn up for a secret attack."

"The escaping ornithopter-jet is losing speed and dropping!" John called out, hunched over the radar screen.

"It's going down, and it looks like it is heading toward that mountain, the big one that looks like an extinct volcano."

"Mount Krisco." Slug-Togath sighed.

"Is he committing suicide?" Sally screeched as the ornithopter-jet dived straight at the side of the mountain.

"Would he were," Slug-Togath intoned grimly. "I realize you will be put out by the death of your friend, but this is as nothing to one who has lost almost his entire race, and it would mean the destruction of the cheddite projector which would keep it out of the hands – if they have hands – of the Lortonoi. No, too bad, such a happy course is not possible."

At the very last instant a great slab of the solid mountain swung back to reveal a black opening in the stone cliff. The 747 dived to follow, but long before they were close, the secret entrance had closed again so that they had to veer off.

"I'll land on that ice sheet there," Jerry said. "We'll follow him into the secret hideout."

Meanwhile, Sally, who was more than a little rumpled after being kidnapped, dragged through tunnels and that kind of thing, decided she ought to freshen up or at least comb the tangles out of her hair. Unthinkingly she picked up her comb and took the mind shield from her head. Instantly, she was a different person. A look of malevolent cunning swept across her features and painted them with an evil grin while her tongue darted in and out like a snake's. With her fingers clenching and unclenching like talons she sidled across the cabin and, in a lightning-quick motion seized the submachine gun and flicked off the safety.

"This is the end for all of you," she snarled in a voice rich with venom. "Look upon your deaths, and let me revel in your expressions of horrified shock before I press the trigger and send this plane with all aboard crashing into the Artic wastes."

"Sally – have you gone mad?" Jerry cried out, flicking on the automatic pilot and jumping to his feet.

"No!" Slug-Togath called out and put out a tentacle to stop him. "That is not Sally talking. I recognize the voice as one of the Lortonoi. She must have lost her mind shield."

"Very acute thinking, Garnishee swine." Sally laughed in the alien voice of the thing that had possessed her. "But soon you will think no more. We now have the secret of the cheddite projector and no longer need waste our time on your backward planet. The galaxy is ours!"

With these last shouted words she pressed hard on the trigger, and ravening bullets screamed from the muzzle of the gun. But quick as she had been, Slug-Togath was quicker. He hurled his trunklike body into the path of the bullets, then tore the weapon from her hand, imprisoning her instantly with many tentacles.

"You're hurt," Jerry called out. "Shot a dozen times at least!"

"Please do not concern yourself for my physical condition. We Garnishee are very tough and almost bulletproof, and the few slugs that penetrated will be absorbed by my body chemistry in a matter of days."

"Too late, too late!" Sally rasped in a hoarse voice and began to laugh madly.

"What does she, I mean it, mean?"

"There is your answer," Slug-Togath pointed. "The Lortonoi are fleeing our planet, escaping with the galaxy's most important secret."

Even as he spoke, there was a rumble from the extinct volcano and a flare of fire and a plume of smoke. But this was no simple eruption, a plain matter of lava and poison gas, but something far more important. With a thunderous roar a great spaceship hurled itself into the air from the mouth of the volcano and sped skyward. Faster and faster it went, shrinking to a tiny dot and then finally vanishing completely.

"They have escaped," Slug-Togath sighed, and his tentacles went limp. Sally dropped to the floor, and John put her mind shield back on.

"Well, let's not worry too much, gang," Jerry said, looking for the bright side of the disaster. "They won't hurt Chuck, not as long as he is of value to them, and we'll go after them and get him back safe and sound, just you wait and see."

"How will you do that?" Slug-Togath asked.

"Simplicity itself. The old Pleasantville Eagle here is a tough old bird and already has logged a lot of hours in space. We'll fix her up for operation in a vacuum, as well as atmosphere, slap together another cheddite projector and go after him."

"A really great idea," John said raising one eyebrow sardonically. "But just how are you going to go about building this projector?"

"Well. First get some cheddar cheese and put it into. . ." His voice ran down like a tired phonograph record, and he gaped into silence.

"Good thinking, old buddy," John said, still sardonically. "All we need is a hunk of cheese to build the projector, a certain kind of cheese. But that cheese is back on Earth, and in order to get to Earth we are going to need a projector that we need the cheese for, or do you read me? In my humble American-German-Russian opinion we are up the creek without a paddle."