Planet in Peril

VIII. The Thing That Would Not Die

With the swiftness and agility of an acrobat, Star sprang backwards, thrusting Phath behind him with one arm while whipping his proton needle from its worn holster with the other hand. He aimed the powerful handgun directly at the center of the ungainly monster's broad chest and harshly commanded it to halt.

"Freeze in your tracks, or I'll fire!" he snapped.

The creature—a blurred and ghostly apparition in the murk—ignored the warning and shuffled forward, grisly paws still extended to sear and maim. The hackles rose at the nape of the tall redhead's neck—he could actually hear the crackle and sizzle of the shimmering waves of heat that arose from those four-fingered paws. They must have burned with white-hot temperatures ... in fact, he could feel the heat from them against his face, like desert sunshine.

He depressed the firing stud. The prong of the needier glowed with green lambent force. A blazing spear of emerald fire lanced from the energy weapon—to catch the Fire Troll full in the center of its shieldlike chest.

But the bolt, which could have burnt a hole through armor steel and would have slaughtered the largest beast that ever stalked the surface of this world or any other—rebounded harmlessly from the Troll's scaly hide!

Star could hardly believe his eyes, but he retreated a swift step or two, and fired again—this time smack in that scowling beaked face. The second bolt from his proton needle proved as ineffective as the first had been.

An icy tingle went crawling down the spine of the red-headed adventurer. He had done battle with men and monsters on many worlds before now, but always he had relied upon his energy weapons—which had never failed him before.

"Oh, Yakdar's iridium intestines—the cursed thing just won't die," moaned the Venusian at his side. Phath shared the primitive superstitions of his low swamp ancestors, Star Pirate knew, but it was heartening to see that, even though he was half-crazed with terror, the Venusian stubbornly stood his ground. He had his own guns in his hands and was loosing bolt after bolt of green fire at the oncoming monster.

His needlers, too, failed to so much as slow down the lurching, shuffling advance of the gigantic thing. Proton-fire exploded from the scaly chest in showers of crackling emerald sparks that sizzled when they fell to the wet mud underfoot.

Star whirled, grabbed Phath's shoulder—

"No good! Run for it—!" he rapped. The two pelted from the scene: much as it went against their grain to run from any adversary, when you can't kill the thing you're fighting, discretion certainly becomes the better part of valor.

Back at the Jolly Roger, the two relaxed and Phath poured himself a strong drink of fiery liquor. "First time I found anything a needier couldn't kill," muttered the Venusian. He seemed to take the Troll's failure to fall almost as a personal affront.

Star didn't reply: he was busy at the keyboard, tapping into the archives of Computer Central. Obtaining the answers to a few key questions that had occurred to him, the daredevil of the spaceways went to the viewscreen, tuned it to the view outside their trim little speedster, and stared thoughtfully out upon the night.

That next morning, Father Langston was somewhat surprised to find Commissioner Hardrock's runabout parked before the Temple of the Sun, and the commissioner himself desiring entrance, with two officers in two. The solar priest led them into an office where he kept his files and other papers, but before he could do more than exchange polite civilities with Hardrock, other uninvited guests began to arrive. Among these were the Governor himself, Star Pirate and his Venusian sidekick, Phath.

"I've called you all together here because a few things have come up that need clarification," said the redhead. "Father Langston, before you 'saw the light,' as you put it, you were a mineralogist in the employ of Mercury Metals—isn't that right?"

"Yes, certainly," murmured the tall priest, looking puzzled as to where this line of questioning was leading to.

"More specifically, you were asked to look into rumors that a large bed of precious heavy metals or some other rare mineral existed underneath the foundations of Belt City itself—am I still correct?"

"Yes, sir ..."

"You took core samples, and whatever else it is mineralogists do when they are searching for buried metals, but you found nothing of any particular value—is that correct?" The priest nodded.

Star handed the Governor a fax from the archives of Computer Central. Governor Kirkland studied it bewilderedly.

"It says here that the testing laboratories on Venus examined some core samples from a Dr. Langston on—" he read off the date "—and reported back to him that the samples consisted of almost entirely pure ... uranium!"

There was a stunned silence. Hardrock blinked slowly. The tall priest flushed but said nothing. The two officers Hardrock had brought with him at Star's request unobtrusively loosened their proton needlers in their holsters.

"That date coincides, I believe, with the date of the termination of your investigation of the strata beneath Belt City," said Star, and it was not a question.

Langston bit his lip but made no response.

Suddenly, the redheaded adventurer's questions took a totally different tack.

"When you were at college, you studied subelectronics as well as mineralogy," he stated. "You proved to be quite a prodigy in both areas—in fact, while in your early twenties you took out a couple patents in force field technology. Your knowledge of field technics probably came in handy when you went into mineralogy, came to Mercury, and began work—often under hazardous conditions, and then only with the aid of heat-shields, which are a refinement of general force fields, designed to repel radiant energy."

Langston remained unspeaking, but a droplet of perspiration ran down his brow and his fine, intelligent eyes were bright and wary—like the eyes of a forest animal caught in a hopeless trap.

"Heat-shields are heterodyning electromagnetic fields which employ a part of the energy spectrum similar to the frequencies of the molecular binding-force that hold atoms together," Star continued. "We're talking of the so-called 'strong force,' which happens to be the most powerful force in the physical universe. To repel heat, the field operates in a bubble around the wearer of the field projector. It was not too difficult for a scientist of your cleverness to redesign the heat-shield so that it could repel and negate the bolts from energy weapons, such as the proton needle—whose beams are, after all, only heat."

Phath looked stupefied; Hardrock was staring unbelievingly at Star.

His mouth hung open.

"Your refinement of a mode whereby at whichever part of the wearer a needier was fired, the mini-computer built into the shield projector calculates the target point and focuses the full power of the screen at that point. Or screens, I should say. When we locate the place where you hide your Mardi Gras monster costume, I suspect we'll find, not one, but probably five field projectors, micro-miniaturized, built into the humped back and extraordinarily deep chest of the costume—"

Phath muttered an imprecation to his tribal deity, and said: "But, Star—the burning paws—how did he work that trick?"

The Pirate grinned that irrepressible boyish grin of his.

"That's the simplest thing of all, a mesh heating-grid concealed just beneath the thin but non-flammable outer skin of the palms. Try sticking your hand against the heating gride of a microwave cooker sometime, if you want to learn how the so-called 'Fire Troll' murdered his victims!"

"And this whole ... monstrous plot ... was concocted to serve what purpose?" croaked the Governor hoarsely.

Star sobered. "The uranium field beneath Belt City has to be the largest, most extensive and most valuable ever found. Worth enough to make multiple murder a cheap price to pay. Langston hoped to panic the populace, drive them into flight to other colonies or immigration off-planet, leaving Belt City empty and deserted. He would then, as a 'friend' of the Mercurian natives, who belonged to his phony church, claim the land and become, most likely, the richest man that ever lived."

"'A consummation devoutly to be wished,'" said Langston suddenly, and in a queerly childish voice. Then, shockingly, he giggled, and turned on them eyes from which all intelligence had vanished, leaving bland idiocy in its place.

Hardrock turned gray and cursed under his breath; the Governor turned his face away, looking sick. Star beckoned to the two officers standing by the door.

"I think he'll go quietly," said the redhead. "But take no chances with him!"

"Right, sir!" snapped one of the men crisply. They hustled Langston to his feet, focused a tangle-field on him which held his arms immobilized, and led him from the Temple.

"Got a question," said Hardrock. "If there is so much uranium ore beneath the city, why didn't our geigerscopes detect it before all this happened?"

"Because right above the uranium ore is a very thick layer of lead and cadmium, the two heavy metals which insulate against uranium radiation," explained Star.

"Devils of Darkside! How did you find out that?" demanded the commissioner. Star shrugged, assuming a bland expression.

"From the lab report on the core sample, of course," he said. "When you drill deep enough to hit the uranium, you have to pass through the layers of lead and cadmium. A 'plug' of those two metals was part of the core sample ..."

Within the hour, the Jolly Roger rose atop a column of atomic fire and was soon hurtling through space at breakneck velocities, for Haven and home. Having skipped breakfast, except for hasty cups of coffee, Star and his pal relaxed in their little breakfast nook and dawled over steaming hot scrambled eggs, crisp Venusian sausages, fresh-baked bread with Earthside butter, and pots of luscious pod-fruit preserves from the fertile canal-belts of Mars.

"What put you onto Langston in the first place, chief?" queried Phath. "I thought you rather liked the guy."

"I did," admitted the redhead. "When we first talked he was amiable and open and friendly, not knowing who I was. Then he saw the afternoon newsfax and realized I was a dangerous adversary and had to be removed. The timing was too exact, and Langston was the only one we talked to who didn't already know who I was, as did the Governor, Coimnissioner Hardrock, and that fat Uranian, Aardh, who runs the Golden Horseshoe ..."

While they lazily talked over the delicious breakfast Phath had prepared, the Jolly Roger flashed down the spaceways, en route to a host of new and exciting adventures.