Title: Outpost on Io
Author: Brackett, Leigh
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Outpost on Io" ***


                             OUTPOST ON IO

                           By LEIGH BRACKETT

                  In a crystalline death lay the only
                  release for those prisoners of that
                  Ionian hell-outpost. Yet MacVickers
                   and the men had to escape--for to
                  remain meant the conquering of the
                 Solar System by the inhuman Europans.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Winter 1942.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


MacVickers stopped at the brink of the dark round shaft.

It was cold, and he was stark naked except for the silver collar welded
around his neck. But it was more than cold that made him shiver and
clamp his long bony jaw.

He didn't know what the shaft was for, or where it led. But he had a
sudden feeling that once he went down he was down for good.

The small, round metal platform rocked uneasily under his feet. Beyond
the railing, as far as MacVickers could see to the short curve of Io's
horizon, there was mud. Thin, slimy blue-green mud.

The shaft went down under the mud. MacVickers looked at it. He licked
dry lips, and his grey-green eyes, narrow and hot in his gaunt dark
face, flashed a desperate look at the small flyer from which he had
just been taken.

It bobbed on the heaving mud, mocking him. The eight-foot Europan guard
standing between it and MacVickers made a slow weaving motion with his
tentacles.

MacVickers studied the Europan with the hating eyes of a wolf in
a trap. His smooth black body had a dull sheen of red under the
Jupiter-light. There was no back nor front to him, no face. Only the
four long rubbery legs, the roundish body, and the tentacles in a
waving crown above.

MacVickers bared white, uneven teeth. His big bony fists clenched. He
took one step toward the Europan.

A tentacle flicked out, daintily, and touched the silver collar at the
Earthman's throat. Raw electric current, generated in the Europan's
body, struck into him, a shuddering, blinding agony surging down his
spine.

He stumbled backward, and his foot went off into emptiness. He twisted
blindly, catching the opposite side of the shaft, and hung there,
groping with his foot for the ladder rungs, cursing in a harsh,
toneless voice.

The tentacle struck out again, with swift, exquisite skill. Three times
like a red-hot lash across his face, and twice, harder, across his
hands. Then it touched the collar again.

[Illustration: _The tentacle reached out again, with swift exquisite
skill. Raw agony filling his body, MacVickers retched and fell
backward._]

MacVickers retched and let go. He fell jarringly down the ladder,
managed to break his fall onto the metal floor below, and crouched
there, sick and furious and afraid.

The hatch cover clanged down over him like the falling hammer of doom.

       *       *       *       *       *

MacVickers dropped into a circular room thirty feet across, floored and
walled with metal and badly lighted. The roof was of thick glassite
plates. Through them, very clearly, MacVickers could see four Europan
guards, watching.

"They're always there," said the Venusian softly. "You'll come to love
them, stranger."

There were men standing around the ladder foot, thirteen of them, with
the Venusian. Earthmen, Martians, Venusians, pale, stark naked, smeared
with a blue-green stain. Their muscles stood out sharp on their gaunt
bodies, their silver collars a mocking note of richness.

Deep, deep, inside himself, MacVickers shivered. His nostrils wrinkled.
There was fear in the room. The smell of it, the shudder of it in the
air. Fear that was familiar and accustomed, lying in uneasy sleep, but
ready to awake.

There were other men, four or five of them, back in the shadows by
the wall bunks. They didn't speak, nor come out.

He took a deep breath and said steadily, "I'm Chris MacVickers.
Deep-space trader out of Terra. They caught me trying to get through
the Asteroid lines."

Their eyes glistened at him, looking from him to something behind
them that he couldn't see. They were waiting, and there was something
ghoulish in it.

The Venusian said sharply, "Tough luck, MacVickers. I'm Loris, late of
the Venusian Guard. Introduce yourselves, boys."

They did, in jerky detached voices, their eyes sliding from him to the
hidden something. Loris drew a little closer, and one of the Earthmen
in the group came toward him.

"I'm Pendleton," he said. "The _Starfish_. Remember?"

MacVickers stared at him. The furrows deepened in his craggy face. He
said, "My God!" very softly, and not as a curse. "Pendleton!"

The man grinned wryly. He was English, the ravaged ghost of the big,
ruddy, jovial spaceman MacVickers remembered.

"Quite a change, eh? Well, perhaps we're lucky, MacVickers. We shan't
have to see the smash."

MacVickers' head dropped forward. "Then you saw it coming, too?"

Loris made a little bitter laugh that was almost a sob. All the
desperate boyish humor was gone from his face, leaving it old and grim.

"Who hasn't? I've been here--God knows. An eternity. But even before my
ship was taken, we knew it. We can't build spaceships as fast as their
Jovium destroys them. When they break through the Asteroid line...."

Pendleton's quiet voice was grave. "Mars is old and tired and torn
with famine. Venus is young, but her courage is undisciplined. Her
barbarians aren't suited to mechanized warfare. And Earth...." He
sighed. "Perhaps if we hadn't fought so much among ourselves...."

MacVickers said harshly, "It wouldn't make much difference. When a man
has a weapon that causes metal to explode its own atoms, it doesn't
make any difference what you stack up against him."

He shook his craggy head impatiently. "What is this place? What are you
doing here? The Jovies just brought me here and dumped me in without a
word of explanation."

Pendleton shrugged. "We, too. There's a pit below, full of machinery.
We work it, but we're not told why. Of course, we do a lot of guessing."

"Guessing!" The word rose sharp on the thick hot air. A man burst out
of the group and stood swaying with the restless motion of the floor.
He was a swart Low-Canal Martian. His yellow cat-eyes glittered in his
hatch-face, and his thin ropy muscles twitched.

"I'll tell you what this place is, Earthman. It's a hell! And we're
caught in it. Trapped, for the rest of our lives." He turned on
Pendleton. "It's your fault. We were in a neutral port. We might have
been safe. But you had to get back...."

"Janu!" Pendleton's voice cracked like a whip. The Martian went silent,
watching him. There was more than hate in his yellow eyes. _Dando_,
the beginning of the trap-madness. MacVickers had seen it in men who
couldn't stand the confinement of a deep-space voyage.

The Englishman said quietly, "Janu was my glory-hole foreman. He rather
holds this against me."

The Martian snarled, and then coughed. The cough became a paroxysm. He
stumbled away, grey-faced and twitching, bent almost double.

"It's the heat," said Loris, "and the damp. Poor devil."

       *       *       *       *       *

MacVickers thought of the air of Mars, cold and dry and pure. The floor
rocked under him. Eyes, with the queer waiting shine to them, slid
furtively to the hidden thing behind the standing men.

The hot wet air lay on his lungs. He sweated. There was a stir of
nausea in him and the lights swirled. He shut his jaw hard.

He said, "What did Janu mean, the rest of our natural lives? They'll
let us go when the war's over--if there's anything left to go to."

There was a tight little silence. And then, from the shadows against
the wall, there came a brittle, whispering laugh.

"The war? They let us go before that!"

The group parted. MacVickers had a brief glimpse of a huge man crouched
in a strange position on the floor. Then he couldn't see anything but
the shape that came slowly out into the light.

It moved with a stiff, tottering gait, and its naked feet made a dry
clicking sound on the metal floor. MacVickers' hand closed hard on the
ladder behind him.

It had been a man, an Earthman. His body was still tall, his features
still fine. But there was a film over him, a pale blue-green sheathe
that glistened dully.

He thrust out an arm, with a hand on it like a hand carved in
aquamarine. "Touch it," he whispered.

MacVickers touched it. It was quite hard, and warm only with the heat
of the air. MacVickers' grey-green eyes met the sunken, sheathed eyes
of the Earthman. His body hurt with the effort to control it.

"When we can no longer move," the whispering voice said, "they take
us up the shaft and throw us over, into the mud. That's why you're
here--because we were one man short."

MacVickers put his hand back on the ladder rung. "How long?"

"About three Earth months."

He looked at the blue-green stain that smeared them all. The color of
the mud. His hands sweated on the ladder rung. "What is it?"

"Something in the mud. A radioactivity, I think. It seems to turn the
carbon in human flesh to a crystalline form. You become a living jewel.
It's painless. But it's...." He didn't finish.

Beads of sweat stood on MacVickers' forehead. The men standing watching
him smiled a little. There was motion behind them. Loris and Pendleton
stiffened, and their eyes met.

MacVickers said steadily, "I don't understand. The mud's outside."

Loris said, with a queer, hurried urgency, "You will. It's almost time
for the other shift...."

He broke off. Men scattered suddenly, crouching back in a rough circle,
grinning with feral nervousness. The room was suddenly quiet.

The crouching man had risen. He stood with his huge corded legs wide
apart, swaying with the swaying of the floor, his round head sunk
between ridges of muscle, studying the Earthman out of pale, flat eyes.

Loris put his old, bitter boy's face close to MacVickers. His whisper
was almost inaudible.

"Birek. He's boss here. He's mad. Don't fight him."


                                  II

MacVickers' grey-green eyes narrowed. He didn't move. Birek breathed in
slow, deep sighs. He was a Venusian, a coal-swamper from his size and
pallor and the filthy-white hair clubbed in his neck.

He shimmered, very faintly in the dim light. The first jewel-crust was
forming across his skin.

Knife-sharp and startling across the silence, a round hatch-cover in
the floor clashed open. Sweat broke cold on MacVickers. Men began to
come out of the hole, just at the edge of his vision. Naked, dirty men
with silver collars.

They had been talking, cursing, jostling. The first ones saw Birek and
stopped, and the silence trickled back down the shaft. It was utterly
quiet again, except for the harsh straining of lungs against the hot,
wet air and the soft sounds of naked men climbing the ladder.

The cords ridged on MacVickers' jaw. He shifted his balance slightly,
away from the ladder. He could see the faces thrust forward in the dim
light, eager, waiting.

Shining eyes, shining teeth, cheek-bones shining with sweat.
Frightened, suffering men, watching another man fear and suffer, and
being glad about it.

Birek moved forward, slowly. His eyes held a pale glitter, like distant
ice, and his lips smiled.

"I prayed," he said softly. "I was answered. You, new man! Get down on
your belly."

Loris grinned at Birek, but there was no humor in his eyes. He had
drawn a little away from MacVickers. He said carelessly:

"There's no time for that now, Birek. It's our shift. They'll be
burning us if we don't go."

Birek repeated, "Down on your belly," not looking at Loris.

A vein began to throb on MacVickers' forehead. He looked slight, almost
small against the Venusian's huge bulk.

He said quietly, "I'm not looking for trouble.

"Then get down."

"Sorry," said MacVickers. "Not today."

Pendleton's voice cracked out sharply. "Let him alone, Birek! You men,
down the ladder! They're going for the shockers."

MacVickers was aware of movement overhead, beyond the glass roof. Men
began to drop slowly, reluctantly, down the ladder. There was sweat on
Pendleton's forehead and Loris' face was as grey as his eyes.

Birek said hoarsely, "Down! Grovel! Then you can go."

"No." The ladder was beyond Birek. There was no way past him.

Loris said, in a swift harsh whisper, "Get down, MacVickers. For God's
sake get down, and then come on!"

MacVickers shook his head stubbornly. The giant smiled. There was
something horribly wrong about that smile. It was the smile of a man in
agony when he feels the anaesthetic taking hold. Peaceful, and happy.

He struck out, startlingly fast for such a big man. MacVickers shrank
aside. The fist grazed past his head, tearing his ear. He crouched and
went in, trying for a fast body-blow and a sidestep.

He'd forgotten the glimmering sheathe. His fist struck Birek on the
mark, and it was like striking glass that didn't shatter. The pain shot
up his arm, numbing, slowing, sickening. Blood spattered out from his
knuckles.

Birek's right swept in, across the side of his head.

MacVickers went down, on his right side. Birek put a foot in the small
of his back. "Down," he said. "Grovel."

MacVickers twisted under the foot, snarling. He brought up his own
feet, viciously, with all his strength. The pain of impact made him
whimper, but Birek staggered back, thrown off balance.

There was no sign of hurt in his face. He stood there, looking down at
MacVickers. Suddenly, shockingly, he was crying. He made no sound. He
didn't move. But the tears ran out of his eyes.

A deep, slow shudder shook MacVickers. He said softly, "There's no
pain, is there?"

Birek didn't speak. The tears glistened over the faint, hard film on
his cheeks. MacVickers got up slowly. The furrows were deep and harsh
in his face and his lips were white.

Loris pulled at him. Somewhere Pendleton's voice was yelling, "Hurry!
Hurry, _please_!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The guards were doing something overhead. There was a faint crackling
sound, a flicker of sparks in a circle around the top of the wall.
Shivering, tingling pain swept through MacVickers from the silver
collar at his throat.

Men began to whisper and curse. Loris clawed at him, shoved him down
the ladder, kicked his face to make him hurry. The pain abated.

MacVickers looked up. The great corded legs of Birek were coming down,
the soles of the feet making a faint, hard sound on the rungs.

The hatch closed overhead. The voice of the dying Earthman came dry and
soft over his shoulder.

"Here's where you'll work until you die. How do you like it?"

MacVickers turned, scowling. It was hot. The room above was cool by
comparison. The air was thick and sluggish with the reek of heated oil
and metal. It was a big space, running clear to the curving wall, but
the effect was of stifling, cramped confinement.

Machinery crammed the place, roaring and hissing and clattering,
running in a circuit from huge intake pumps through meaningless bulking
shapes to a forced-air outlet, with oil-pumps between them.

The pumps brought mud into a broad sluice, and the blue-green stain of
it was everywhere.

There were two glassite control boxes high on the walls, each with a
black, tentacled Europan. About five feet overhead was a system of
metal catwalks giving complete coverage of the floor area. There were
Europans on the walks, too, eight of them, patrolling steadily.

Their sleek, featureless bodies were safe from contact with the mud.
They carried heavy plastic tubes in their tentacles, and there were
heavy-duty shockers mounted at every intersection.

MacVickers grinned dourly. "Trustful lot."

"Very." Pendleton nudged him over toward a drive motor attached to some
kind of a centrifugal separator. Loris and the blue-sheathed Earthman
followed, with Birek coming slowly behind him.

MacVickers said, "What's all this for?"

Pendleton shook his head. "We don't know. But we have an idea that
Jovium comes from the mud."

"Jovium!" MacVickers' grey-green eyes began to grow hot. "The stuff
that's winning this war for them. The metal destroyer!"

"We're not sure, of course." Pendleton's infinitely weary eyes turned
across the stretch of greasy metal deck to the end of the circuit. "But
look there. What does that suggest to you?"

The huge pipe of the forced-air ejector ran along the deck there behind
a screen of heavy metal mesh. Just above it, enclosed behind three
thicknesses of glassite, was a duct leading upward. The duct, from the
inordinate size of its supports and its color, was pure lead.

Lead. Lead pipe, lead armor. Radiations that changed living men into
half-living diamonds. Nobody knew what Jovium was or where it came
from--only it did.

But scientists on the three besieged worlds thought it was probably an
isotope of some powerful radioactive metal, perhaps uranium, capable of
setting up a violent progressive breakdown in metallic atoms.

"If," said MacVickers softly, "the pipe were lined with plastic....
Blue mud! I've traded through these moons, and the only other deposit
of that mud is a saucepanful on J-XI! This must be their only source."

Loris shoved an oil can at him. "What difference does it make?" he said
savagely.

MacVickers took the can without seeing it. "They store it up there,
then, in the space between the inner wall and the outer. If somebody
could get up there and set the stuff off...."

Pendleton's mouth twisted. "Can you see any way?"

He looked. Guards and shockers, charged ladders and metal screens. No
weapons, no place to conceal them anyway. He said doggedly:

"But if someone could escape and get word back.... This contraption
is a potential bomb big enough to blow Io out of space! The experts
think it only takes a fraction of a gram of the pure stuff to power a
disintegrator shell."

There was a pulse beating hard under his jaw and his grey-green eyes
were bright.

Loris said, "Escape." He said it as though it were the most infinitely
beautiful word in existence, and as though it burned his mouth.

"Escape," whispered the man with the shimmering, deadly sheathe of
aquamarine. "There is no escape but--this."

       *       *       *       *       *

MacVickers said, into the silence that followed, "I'm going to try. One
thing or the other, I'm going to try."

Pendleton's incredibly tired eyes looked at the livid burns on
MacVickers' face. "It's been tried. And it's no use."

Birek moved suddenly out of his queer, dazed stillness. He looked up
and made a hoarse sound in his throat. MacVickers caught a flicker
of motion overhead, but he didn't pay attention to it. He went on,
speaking quietly in a flat, level voice.

"There's a war on. We're all in it. Soldiers, civilians, and kings, the
big fellows and the little ones. When I got my master's ticket, they
told me a man's duty wasn't done until his ship was cradled or he was
dead.

"My ship's gone. But I haven't died, yet."

Pendleton's broad, gaunt shoulders drooped. He turned his head away.
Loris' face was a death-mask carved from grey bone. He said, almost
inaudibly:

"Shut up, damn you. Shut up."

The movement was closer overhead, ominously close. The men scattered
across the pit had stopped working, watching MacVickers with
glistening, burning eyes across hot oil-filmed metal.

MacVickers said harshly, "I know what's wrong with you. You were broken
before you came, thinking the smash was coming and it was no use."

Pendleton whispered, "You don't know, the things they do to you."

Stiff and dry out of the Earthman's aquamarine mask, came the words,
"You'll learn. There's no hope, MacVickers, and the men have all they
can bear without pain.

"If you bring them more suffering, MacVickers, they'll kill you."

Heat. Oil and reeking metal, and white stiff faces filmed with sweat.
Eyes shining, hot and glittering with fear. Rocking floor and sucking
pumps and a clutching nausea in his belly. Birek, standing straight and
still, watching him. Watching. Everybody, watching.

MacVickers put his hand flat on the engine-housing beside him. "There's
more to it than duty," he said softly, and smiled, without humor, the
vertical lines deep in his cheeks. His gaunt Celtic head had a grim
beauty.

His voice rang clear across the roar of the machines. "I'm Christopher
Rory MacVickers. I'm the most important thing in the universe. And if I
have to give my life, it'll not be without return on the value of it!"

Janu the Martian, away on the other side of the pit, made a shrill
wailing cry. Loris and Pendleton flinched away like dogs afraid of the
whip, looking upward.

MacVickers glimpsed a dark tentacled shape on the catwalk above, just
before the shattering electricity coursed through him. He screamed,
once. And then Birek moved.

He struck Loris and Pendleton and the blue-sheathed Earthman out of the
way like children. His left leg took MacVickers behind the knees in the
same instant that his right hand pushed MacVickers' face.

MacVickers fell heavily on his back, screaming at the contact of the
metal floor. Then Birek sprawled over him, shielding his body with the
bulk of his own.

The awful shocking pain was lessened. Lying there, looking up into
Birek's pale eyes, MacVickers made his twitching lips say, "Why?"

Birek smiled. "The current doesn't hurt much any more. And I want you
for myself--to break."

MacVickers drew a deep, shuddering breath and smiled back, the lines
deep in his lean cheeks.

       *       *       *       *       *

He had no clear memories of that shift. Heat and motion and strangling
air, and Janu coughing with a terrible, steady rhythm, his own hands
trying to guide the oil can. Toward the end of the time he fainted, and
it was Birek who carried him up the ladder.

He had no way of knowing how long after that he came to. There was
no time in that little hell. The first thing he noticed, with the
hair-trigger senses of a man trained to ships, that the motion of the
room was different.

He sat up straight on the bunk where Birek had laid him. "The tidal
wave," he said, over a quick stab of fear. "What...."

"We ride it out," said Loris bitterly. "We always have."

MacVickers knew the Jovian Moons pretty well. Remembering the
tremendous tides and winds caused by the gravitational pull of Jupiter,
he shuddered. There was no solid earth on Io, nothing but mud. And the
extraction plant, from the feel of it, was a hollow bell sunk under it,
perfectly free.

It had to be free. No mooring cable made could stand the pull of a
Jupiter-tide.

"One thing about it," said Pendleton with quiet viciousness. "It makes
the bloody Jovies seasick."

Janu the Martian made a cracked, harsh laugh. "So they keep a weak
current on us all the time." His hatchet-face was drawn, his yellow
cat-eyes lambent in the dim light.

The men sprawled on their bunks, not talking much. Birek sat on the
end of his, watching MacVickers with his pale still eyes. There was a
tightness in the room.

It was coming. They were going to break him now, before he hurt them.
Break him, or kill him.

MacVickers wiped the sweat from his face and said, "I'm thirsty."

Pendleton pointed to a thing like a horse-trough against the bulkhead.
His eyes were tired and very sad. Loris was scowling at his stained and
faintly filmed feet.

There wasn't much water in the trough. What there was was brackish and
greasy. MacVickers drank and splashed some on his face and body. He saw
that he was already stained with the mud. It wouldn't wash off.

The dying Earthman whispered, "There is food also."

MacVickers looked at the basket of spongy synthetic food, and shook his
head.

The floor dipped and swung. There was a frightening, playful violence
about it, like the first soft taps of a tiger's paw. Loris looked up at
the glass roof with the black shapes beyond.

"They get the pure air," he said. "Our ventilator pipes are only a few
inches wide, lest we crawl up through them."

Pendleton said, rather loudly, "The swine breathe through the skin, you
know. All their sense organs, sight and hearing...."

"Shut up," snarled Janu. "Stop talking for time."

The sprawled men on the bunks drew themselves slowly tight, breathing
hard and deep in anticipation. And Birek rose.

MacVickers faced them, Birek and the rest. There was no lift in his
heart. He was cold and sodden, like a chuted ox watching the pole-axe
fall. He said, with a bitter, savage quiet,

"You're a lot of bloody cowards. You, Birek. You're scared of the death
creeping over you, and the only way you can forget the fear is to make
someone else suffer.

"It's the same with all of you. You have to trample me down to your own
level, break me for the sake of your souls as much as your bodies."

He looked at the numbers of them, at Birek's huge impervious bulk and
his great fists. He touched his silver collar, remembering the agony of
the shock through it.

"And I will break. You know that, damn you."

He gave back three paces and set his feet. "All right. Come on, Birek.
Let's get it over with."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Venusian came toward him across the heaving floor. Loris still
looked at his feet and Pendleton's eyes were agonized. MacVickers wiped
his hands across his buttocks. The palms were filmed and slick with oil
from the can he had handled.

There was no use to fight. Birek was twice his size, and he couldn't
be hurt anyway. The diamond-sheathe even screened off the worst of the
electric current, being a non-conductor.

That gave the dying men an advantage. But even if they had spirit
enough left by that time to try anything, the hatches were still locked
tight by air-pressure and the sheer numbers of their suffering mates
would pull them down. Also, the Jovies were as strong as four men.

Non-conductor. Sheathed skin. Birek's shoulders tensing for the first
blow. Sweat trying to break through the film of oil on his palms, the
slippery feel of his hands as he clenched them.

Birek's fist lashed out. MacVickers dodged under it, looking for an
opening, dreading the useless agony of impact. The bell lurched wildly.

A guard moved abruptly overhead. The motion caught MacVickers' eye.
Something screamed sharply in his head: Pendleton's voice saying, "They
breathe through the skin. All their sense organs...."

He sensed rather than saw Birek's fist coming. He twisted, enough to
take the worst of it on his shoulder. It knocked him halfway across the
deck. And then the current came on.

It was weak, but it made him jerk and twitch. He scrambled up on
the pitching deck and started to speak. Birek was coming again,
leisurely, smiling. Then, quite suddenly, the hatch cover clanged
open, signalling the change of the shifts. MacVickers stood still for
a second. Then he laughed, a queer little chuckle, and made a rush for
the hatch.


                                  III

He went down it with Birek's hand brushing past his head. Men yelled
and cursed. He trampled on them ruthlessly. The ones lower down fell
off the ladder to avoid his feet.

There was a clamor up above. Hands grabbed at him. He lashed out,
kicking and butting. His rush carried him through and out across the
pit, toward the space between the end points of the horseshoe circuit.

He slowed down, then. The guards had noticed the scuffle. But it seemed
to be only the shift changing, and MacVickers looked like a man going
peacefully for oil.

Peacefully. The blood thundered in his head, he was cold, and the skin
of his back crawled. Men shoved and swore back by the ladder. He went
on, not too fast, fighting the electric shiver in his brain.

Fuel and lubricating oils were brought up, presumably from tanks in
a still lower level, by big pressure pumps. All three sets of pumps,
intake, outlet, and oil, worked off the same compressed-air unit.

He set the lubricating-oil pump going and rattled cans into place. The
men of his shift were straggling out from the ladder, twitching from
the light current, scared, angry, but uncertain.

There was a subtle change in the attitude of the Europan guards.
Their movements were sluggish, faintly uncertain. MacVickers grinned
viciously. Seasick. They'd be sicker--if they didn't get him too soon.

The surging pitch of the bell was getting worse. The tide was rising,
and the mud was playing with the bell like a child throwing a ball.
Nausea began to clutch at MacVickers' stomach.

The pressure-gage on the pump was rising. He let it rise, praying, his
grey-green eyes hot and bright. Going with the motion of the deck, he
sprawled over against the intake pumps.

He spun the wheel on the pressure-control as far as it would go. A
light wrench, chained so that it could not be thrown, lay at his feet.
He picked it up, his hand jerking and tingling, and began to work at
the air-pipe coupling.

Hands gripped his shoulder suddenly, slewing him around. The yellow
eyes of Janu the Martian glared into his.

"What are you doing here, Earthman? This is my station."

Then he saw the pressure gauge. He let out a keening wail, cut short
by the crunch of MacVickers' fist on his mouth. MacVickers whirled and
swung the wrench.

The loose coupling gave. Air burst whistling from the pipe, and the
rhythm of the pumps began to break.

But Janu's cry had done it. Men were pelting toward him, and the guards
were closing in overhead.

MacVickers flung himself bodily on the short hose of the oil-pump.

Birek, Loris, Pendleton, the dying Earthman, the hard faces behind
them. The guards were manning the shockers. Up in the control boxes
black tentacles were flashing across banks of switches. He had to work
fast, before they cut the pressure.

Birek was ahead of the others, very close. MacVickers gave him the
oil-stream full in the face. It blinded him. Then the nearest shocker
came on, focussed expertly on MacVickers.

He shut his teeth hard, whimpering through them, and turned the hard
forced stream of oil into the hoarsely shrieking blast from the open
pipe.

Oil sprayed up in a heavy, blinding fog. Burning, shuddering agony
shook MacVickers, but he held his hose, his feet braced wide, praying
to stand up long enough.

The catwalks were hidden in the oily mist. The ventilating blowers
caught it, thrusting it across the whole space. MacVickers yelled
through it, his voice hardly recognizable as human.

"You, out there! All of you. This is your chance. Are you going to take
it?"

Something fell, close by, with a heavy thrashing thud. Something black
and tentacled and writhing, covered with a dull film.

MacVickers laughed, and the laughter was less human than the voice.

"Cowards!" he cried. "All right. I'll do it all myself."

Somebody yelled, "They're dying. Look!" There was another heavy thud.
The hot strangling fog roiled with hidden motion. MacVickers gasped and
retched and shuddered helplessly. He was going to drop the hose in a
minute. He was going to fall down and scream.

If they stepped the power up one more notch, he was going to fall down
and die. Only they were dying too, and forgetting about power.

It seemed a static eternity to MacVickers, but it had all happened in
the space of a dozen heartbeats. There were yells and shouts and a sort
of animal tumult in the thick haze. Suddenly Pendleton's voice rang out
of it.

"MacVickers! I'm with you, man! You others, listen. He's giving us the
break we needed. Don't let him down!"

And Janu screamed, "No! He's killed the guards, but there are more.
They'll fry us from the control boxes if we help him."

The pressure was dropping in the pipe as the power cut out. There was a
last hiss, a spurt of oily spray, then silence. MacVickers dropped the
hose.

Janu's voice went on, sharp and harsh with fear. "They'll fry us, I
tell you. We'll lie here and jerk and scream until we're crazy. I'm
going to die. I know it. But I won't go through that, for nothing! I'm
going back by the ladder and pray they won't notice me."

More sounds, more tumult. Men suddenly torn between hope and abject
terror. MacVickers said wearily into the fog,

"If you help me, we can win the war for our worlds. Destroy this bell,
start the Jovium working, destroy Io--victory for us. And if you don't,
I hope you fry here and in Hell afterward."

They wavered. MacVickers could hear their painful breathing, ragged
with the emotion in them. Some of them started toward the sound of
Pendleton's voice.

Janu made an eerie wauling sound, like a hurt cat, and went for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

MacVickers started to help, but the current froze him to the metal
floor. He strained, feeling his nerves, his brain dissolving in a
shuddering fire. He knew why the others had broken so soon. The current
did things to you, inside.

He couldn't see what was happening. The heavy mist choked his eyes, his
throat, his nostrils. The pitching of the bell was a nightmare thing.
Men thrashed and struggled and cursed.

So he had killed the guards. So what. There were still the control
boxes. If they didn't rush them before the oil settled, they wouldn't
have a chance.

Why not give up? Let himself dissolve into the blackness he was
fighting off?

A great pale shape came striding through the mist toward him. Birek.
This was it, then. Well, he'd had his moment of fun. His fists came up
in a bland, instinctive gesture.

Birek laughed. The current made him jerk only a little, in his thin
diamond sheathe. He bunched his shoulders and reached out.

MacVickers felt himself ripped clear of the floor. In a second he was
out of focus of the shocker and the pain was gone. He came nearest to
fainting then, but Birek's huge hand shook him by the hair and Birek's
voice shouted,

"Tell 'em, little man! Tell 'em it's better to die quick, now, than go
mad with fear."

"Come on!" yelled Pendleton. "Here's our chance to show we're still
men. Hurry up, you sons!"

MacVickers looked at the Venusian's face. The terrible frozen fear
was gone from his eyes. He wanted to die, now, quickly, fighting for
vengeance.

The gray, pinched face of Loris loomed abruptly out of the fog. It was
suddenly young again, and the smile was genuine. He said,

"Let's teach 'em to mind, Birek. MacVickers, I...." He shook his head,
looking away. "You know."

"I know. Hurry up with it."

Pendleton's voice burst out of the fog, triumphantly. Janu crouched on
the heaving deck, bleeding and whimpering. MacVickers yelled,

"Who's with me? We're going to take the control boxes. Who wants to be
a hero?"

Birek laughed and threw him bodily up onto the catwalk overhead. Most
of the men came forward then. The three or four that were left looked
at the Martian and followed.

Birek helped them up onto the catwalk. They were moving, now. It took
only a few seconds. MacVickers divided them into two groups.

"You men that are sheathed go first, to help block the charge. It'll
be your job to take the Jovies out of the way. Quick, before this fog
settles enough so they can see to focus on us."

They split up, running along the walk that connected with the control
boxes, hurdling the bodies of Jovians suffocated in oil. Presently the
glassite door loomed before them.

Birek and the dying Earthman led MacVickers' party. The Venusian
wrenched open the door. And MacVickers felt his heart stop.

There were three Europans instead of one. The guards had come down from
above.

"Get them out here," he said. "Out into the oil."

A wave of shuddering agony tossed through him. The Jovies were using
their powerful hand-tubes. Only the glassite walls partially protected
them.

The fog began to whip past him. He groaned, thinking that it was going.
And then he put his head in his hands and wept with incredulous,
thankful joy.

The oily mist was being sucked into the box by powerful ventilators.
MacVickers remembered Loris saying, "They get the pure air. Our
ventilator tubes are only a few inches wide."

He laughed. The bell swooped sickeningly. Somewhere off in the fog he
heard screams and shouts and Pendleton's voice roaring triumph.

He thought, "We never could have done it if the tide hadn't come and
made the Jovies seasick."

He laughed again. It tickled him that seasickness should lose a war.


                                  IV

They went in and up the ladders into the sealed storage space next the
convict quarters. There was a huge cylinder of lead suspended over the
mouth of the duct from the extractor.

"They must collect the stuff when they bring oil and supplies," said
Loris. "Well, MacVickers, what happens to us now?"

MacVickers looked at them, the lines deep in his face. "We all
agree, don't we, that there's no hope of escape? If we wait until
the next supply ship comes and try to take it, we lose the chance of
doing--well, call it our duty if you want to. That is, to wreck their
only source of the explosive that's winning the war for them.

"I think you know," he added, "what our chances of taking that ship
would be, without offensive weapons or any protection against theirs.
It would only mean a return to this slavery, if they didn't kill us all
outright."

His grey-green eyes were somber, deeply bright.

"It comes down to this. Shall we turn this bell into a disintegrator
bomb, setting the Jovium free to destroy its own and every other
metallic atom in the mud, or shall we gamble our worlds on the slim
chance of saving our necks?"

Loris looked down at the deck and said softly, "Why should we worry
about our necks, MacVickers? You've saved our souls."

"Agreed, then, all you men?"

Birek looked them over. "The man who refuses will have no neck to
save," he said.

There was no disagreement.

MacVickers turned to the leaden cylinder. It was fixed to the duct by a
plastic-lined, lead-sheathed collar. There was an arrangement whereby a
plug could be driven into the open mouth of the filled cylinder without
spilling a grain of the stuff.

MacVickers reached up and loosed the apparatus that held the cylinder
upright. It fell over with a shattering crash. A palely glowing powder
puffed out, settling over the adjacent metal.

MacVickers had one second of terror. An eerie bluish light grew,
throwing faces into strong relief. Pendleton, praying silently. Loris,
smiling. The blue-sheathed Earthman with closed eyes, his face a mask
of peace. The others, facing a death they understood and welcomed. All
of them, thinking of three little worlds that could go on living their
own lives.

Birek grinned at him. "I'm glad you ran away," he whispered.

MacVickers grinned back.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Outpost on Io" ***

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