"I feel like something now!" Costigan, once more encased in his own armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along--we'll carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it up after we've wrecked the works."

Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode toward the room which housed the pulsating heart of the immense fortress of space. Guards were encountered, and captains--officers who signaled frantically to their chief, since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted silence--but the enemy beams were impotent against the mighty ether-walls of that armor; and the pirates, without armor in the security of their own planet as they were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons. As they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio's voice raised in her first and last appeal, an appeal wrung from her against her will by the extremity of her position.

"Conway! Hurry! Oh, hurry! I can't last much longer--good-bye, dear!" In the horror-filled tones both men read clearly the girl's dire extremity. Each saw plainly a happy, care-free young earth girl, upon her first trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall with an over-brained, under-conscienced human machine--a super-intelligent but lecherous and unmoral mechanism of flesh and blood, acknowledging no authority, ruled by nothing save his own scientific drivings and the almost equally powerful urges of his desires and passions! She had fought with every resource at her command. She had wept and pleaded, she had stormed and raged, she had feigned submission and had played for time--and her torment had not touched in the slightest degree the merciless and gloating brain of the being who called himself Roger. Now his tantalizing, ruthless cat-play was done, the horrible gray-brown face was close to hers--she wailed her final despairing message to Costigan and attacked that hideous face with the fury of a tigress.

Costigan bit off a bitter imprecation. "Hold him just a second longer, sweetheart!" he cried, and the power room door vanished.

Through the great room the two Lewistons swept at full aperture and at maximum power, two rapidly opening fans of death and destruction. Here and there a guard, more rapid than his fellows, trained a futile projector--a projector whose magazine exploded at the touch of that 

 Prev. P 22/136 next