"Comet-gas! You can't scare me!" "I can't? That's nice."

"Who'd want to shoot the whole wad at once? One at a time; one day apart. Tomorrow morning I seal New York s.p.a.ceport so tight a c.o.c.kroach can't get in or out."

"And we'll open it. Here's your one and only warning. Before we send our freight-copters in..."

Just how do you think you'll get any copters off the ground?"

"Wait and see. Before a copter lofts we'll come in on the ground. East on Carter Avenue. Through Gate Twelve. Along Way Twelve to the Cygnus. I'm telling you this because I don't want our machines to kill anybody. They'll be fully automatic, so programmed that we won't be able to stop them ourselves. Hence any goons along that designated route who can't get out of the way in time will be committing suicide. If you shoot down any of our copters your gun-crews will be killed. That is all."

"Hot-dog!" Grimes gloated. "Drawing us a map-handing it to us on a platted What you'll run into along.."

Miss Champion flipped a switch and the screen went blank.

Carter Avenue became a very busy street. The biggest and heaviest trucks available, loaded to capacity with broken concrete and rock, were jammed into that avenue, blocking it solidly-pavement, parkway, and sidewalk-from building wall to building wall for one full mile. Riflemen with magnums sat at windows; fifty-caliber machine-guns and forty-millimeter quick-firing rifles peered down from roofs; anti-tank weapons of all kinds commanded every yard of that soon-to-be-disputed mile.

Grimes and his strategists had expected a fleet of heavy tanks. What appeared, however, exceeded their expectations by ten raised to a power. They were-in a way-tanks; but tanks of a size, type, and heft never before seen on Earth. There were only two of them; but each one was twenty feet high, sixty feet wide, and a hundred and eighty feet long. They were not going fast, but when they reached the barricade, side by side and a couple of feet apart, they did not even pause. Both front ends reared up as one, but they did not climb very high. Under that terrific tonnage the blocking trucks were crushed flat; the steel of their structures and the concrete and stone of their loads subsided noisily to form a compacted ma.s.s only a few feet thick.

Guns of all calibers yammered and thundered, but there was nothing to shoot at except blankly invulnerable expanses of immensely thick high-alloy armor-plate. Flames-throwers, flammable gels, and incendiaries were of no avail. Inside those monstrosities there was nothing of life, nor anything to be harmed by any ordinary heat. Nor did those monstrous tanks fight back-then. Gate Twelve was narrower than the avenue; its anchorages were eight-foot-square pillars of reenforced concrete. Nevertheless the two super-tanks did not slow down; and, after they had pa.s.sed, the places where those hugely ma.s.sive abutments had been were scarcely to be distinguished from the rest of the scarred and beaten way.

Suddenly there was a terrific explosion, followed by horizontal sheets of fiercely-driven pulverized pavement and soil. Then another, and fifteen more. But not even the heaviest mines could stop those land-going superdreadnoughts. They wallowed a little in the craters, but that was all. They were simply too big and too heavy and too stable to lift or to tip over; their belly armor was twelve inches thick and was b.u.t.tressed and braced internally to withstand anything short of atomic energy. Nor could their treads be blown; since all that was exposed to blast were their stubby, sharply pyramidal, immensely strong driving teeth.

Along Way Twelve the strike-breakers rumbled, and up to GalMet's subs.p.a.cer Cygnus. They stopped. A GalMet copper began to descend, to pick up its load of copper. There was a blast of anti-aircraft fire. The copper disintegrated in air.

This time, however, GalMet struck back. Gun-ports snapped open along the nearer behemoth's grim side and a dozen one-hundred-five-millimeter sh.e.l.ls lobbed in high arcs across the few hundreds of yards of intervening distance. They exploded, and a few parts recognizable as arms, legs, and heads, together with uncountable grisly sc.r.a.ps of flesh and bone, were mingled with the shattered remains of the anti-aircraft battery.

That ended it.

In Maynard's conference room this time there were, in addition to the GalMet men, Lansing and DuPuy of Warner Oil, Hatfield and Spehn of Interstellar, and seven other men. With Grimes and his minions, were, as before, Deissner and Wilson of WestHem.

Secretary of Labor Deissner looked once at the fourteen men seated at Maynard's table and his ruddy complexion paled.

"Have you had enough, Grimes, or do you want to go the route?" Maynard asked. "You may be able to hold your Drivers after this one beating, but one more will plow you under."

"You're murderers now and you'll hang!" Grimes snarled.

"What will you use for law, fat-head?"

"To h.e.l.l with law. I've got WestHem's law in my pants pocket and you'll hang higher than..."

"Close your fat mouth, Tony," Deissner said, bruskly. "With WarnOil, InStell, and all the labor of the outplanets in on this, it may be a little..." He paused.

"You're wrong, Deissner, it'll be much worse," Smith sneered. "Your computations will all have to be recomputed."

After a short silence Maynard said, "Mr. Secretary; besides Warn Oil and InStell, I see that you recognize the presidents of the seven largest organizations of the Planetsmen. Mr. Bryce, President of the Metalsmen, has something to say."

And fiery little Bryce said it. "This Committee of Seven, of which I am the chairman, represents the Planetsmen, the organized production and service personnel of the ninety five planets of the Galactic Federation. Our present trip has two purposes. First, here on Galmetia, to tell you Tellurians that the organized personnel of the planets-not the nut-planets, you will note, but the planets-will not support the purely Tellurian inst.i.tution of serf labor. We do no featherbedding and we will not support the practice anywhere. We welcome any innovation that will produce more goods or services at lower cost by using our brains more and our muscles less.

"Our second objective is to let the people of Tellus know that there is plenty of room on the planets for any of them who want to advance by using their brains and their abilities instead of being coddled, protected, and imprisoned from the cradle to the grave."

There was a moment of tense silence; then Maynard said, "That was very well put, Egbert; thanks. Now, Grimes, as to your having WestHem s law in your pants pocket. You haven't, but the hoodlums, gangsters, and racketeers who are your bosses do have it in theirs. We Galaxians-the combined personnel and capital of the planets-know exactly what WestHem's law is: a hood-bossed, hood-riddled mob of abysmally corrupt snolly- gosters. We also know that static, greedy capital is as bad as-yes, even worse than-serf labor. Therefore we Galaxians have formed a new government, the Galactic Federation; that, among other things, will not-I repeat, NOT -permit any spiral of inflation."

But some inflation is now necessary!" Deissner protested.

"It is not. We're not asking you; we're telling you. If you do not stabilize the dollar we will stabilize it for you." "Delusions of grandeur, eh? How do you think you can?"

"By isolating Earth until the resulting panic puts the dollar back where it belongs. Earth can't stand a blockade. The planets can, and would much rather have a complete severance from Earth than have a dollar that will not mail a letter from one town to the next. Hence we of the Galactic Federation hereby serve notice upon the governments and upon the peoples of Earth: it will be either a stable dollar or a strict blockade of every item of commerce except food. Take your choice."

"Serve notice!" Deissner gasped. "Surely you don't mean... you can't possibly mean..."

"We do mean. Just that." Maynard smiled; a thin, cold smile. "This has not been a secret meeting. You tell 'em, Steve."

And Stevens Spehn, Executive Vice-President of vast Interstellar, told them. "This whole conference has been on every channel, line, wavelength and station that InStell operates-ether and subether, radio and teevee, tri-di and flat, in black-and-white and in color." And Miss Champion flipped her switch.

Chapter 9 RHENIA FOUR.

Far out in deep s.p.a.ce although the Procyon was, her communications officers monitored all four of the most important channels, and everything that came in on "I-S One" was taped off. Thus, even though the "Battle of New York s.p.a.ceport" and the conference that followed it took place in the middle of the starship's "night", both were played in full on the regular morning news program. So was one solid hour of bi-partisan and extremely heated discussion by the big-name commentators of Earth.

To say that this news created a sensation is the understatement of the month. Nor was sentiment entirely in favor of GalMet, even though all the men aboard except Deston, and many of the women, were salaried employees and the whole expedition was on MetEngeDesDes business.

"Shocking!" "Outrageous!" "Cold-blooded murder!" "Who murdered first?" "Land-mines, Seventy fives, and Bofors!" "Shot down the copter and killed everybody aboard!"

"But they should have settled the strike!" "GalMet was utterly lawless!"

"I suppose it's lawful to use land-mines and antiaircraft guns and make a full-war-scale battlefield inside New York City?"

And so on.

The top echelon was, of course, solidly in favor of Maynard, and Captain Jones summed up their att.i.tude very neatly when he said, "What the hoodlums are bellyaching about is that they were out-guessed, out-thunk, and outgunned in the ratio of a hundred and five millimeters to seventy five."

"But listen," Bernice said. "Do you think, Babe, that there were any men aboard that copper?"

"One gets you a thousand there weren't. Maynard didn't say there were any."

"He didn't say there weren't any, either," Barbara argued, "like he did for the tanks. What makes you so sure?"

"He knew what was going to happen-he let them think it was manned, probably as a deterrent-so you can paste it in your Easter bonnet, pet, that the only brains aboard that copper were tapes."

Time wore on; the strife on Earth, which did not flare into the news again, was just about forgotten. Deston found several enormous deposits of copper. He found all the other most-wanted metals except rhenium in quant.i.ty sufficient to supply even the most extravagant demand. But of rhenium he still found only insignificant traces.

Each tremendous deposit of metal had been reported as soon as it was found. Crew after crew had been sent out. Plant after plant had been built; each one of which would be not only immensely profitable, but also of inestimable benefit to humanity as a whole, since all those highly important metals would soon be on the market at a mere fraction of their former high prices.

Still rhenium did not appear. "I don't believe there is any such d.a.m.n thing, anywhere in the whole galaxy," Deston said, over and over, but he did not give up.

The starship bored along on its hugely helical course, deeper and deeper into unexplored s.p.a.ce toward the Center. Until, after weeks of futile seeking, Deston did find rhenium. After a quick once-over, without waiting to get close enough to the planet for the physical scientists to make any kind of survey, he called Galmetia and Miss Champion.

"Hi, Doris!" he greeted her happily. "I've got some good news for you at last. We found it."

"Oh? Rhenium? In quant.i.ty? How wonderful!"

"Yes. Oodles and gobs of it. All anybody and everybody can ever use. So how about busting in on the Chief Squeeze, huh?"

To Deston's surprise, since he had always had instant access to Maynard, the girl hesitated, tapping her teeth with a pencil. "I... just... don't... know." Indecision, in one of the top FirSecs of all s.p.a.ce, was an amazing thing indeed. "He's all tied up with Plastics, Synthos, Pharmics, and half a dozen others, and he told me..."

"Okay, skip it and give me a buzz. It's been here for a couple of billion years, anyway, so another hour or..."

"That's what you think. Usually, Babe-practically always-he gives me my head, but this time he swore he'd shoot me right through the brain and hang my carca.s.s out of the window on a hook if I cut in on him with anything whatever or anybody whoever until this brawl is over... but I know d.a.m.n well he'll boil me in oil if I hold this up for even a minute... Well, I think I'd rather be shot. Wouldn't you?"

"It'd be quicker, anyway."

"Well, a girl can die only once." She shrugged her shapely shoulders and cut Deston in.

"What the h.e.l.l, Champion!" Maynard blazed; then, as he saw what was on the screen, his expression and att.i.tude changed completely. "Okay. Tell you-know-who to roll. Cut."

Deston's image flipped back onto Miss Champion's screen and breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Believe me, Babe, that was one bra.s.s-bound toughie to guess."

"Check. But you're a smartie, doll, or you wouldn't be holding that fort. So let's get you-know-who and tell her to cut her gravs, huh?"

"Cutting her shoulder-straps would be enough. B-z-z-zz-zzt! She'd take off without an anti-grav, let alone a ship."

She's been taking it big?"

"'Immense' would be a much better word... Doctor Byrd, they have found your rhenium. Here's Mister Deston."

It was evident that "The Byrd" had been fighting with someone and was still in a vicious mood. When she saw Deston, however, her stormy face cleared and she became instantly the keen, competent executive. "Have you really found some?" she demanded. "Enough of it to make a fully-automated plant pay out?"

"Well, since the stuff runs well over twenty billion metric tons to the cubic kilometer and it's here by the hundreds of cubic kilometers in solid ma.s.ses, what do you think?"

"Oh my G.o.d! What's the planet like? A stinker, as expected?"

"All of that. No survey yet, but it's vicious. Several gees. Super-dense atmosphere, probably bad. No listing for it or anything like it-mountains and mesas of solid metal. You'll need personal armor, anti-grays, skyhooks -the works. Pretty much like theory, from this distance. Closer up, it may get worse."

"Everything anybody has suggested is aboard. But Deston; they tell me you're Top Dog on this. Is it actually true that the sky's the limit? And that I'm running it without interference?"

"Not even the sky is the limit on this one. No limit. Yes, except in matters of policy, you are the Complete Push."

She glanced at Miss Champion, who said, "if Mr. Deston says so, it is so; he has over-riding authority in this. In two minutes you will be handed an unlimited authorization, Doctor Byrd-the first one I ever heard of.

"Oh, wonderful! Thanks a million, both of you! Now if you'll transfer him over here, Miss Cham..." Deston's image appeared upon Byrd's screen, "... pionthanks. Mr. Deston, if you'll give Astrogation, here, the coords, well..." A hand phone rang; she s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. "Byrd... Yes, Lew, good news. At last, thank G.o.d, they've found our rhenium and we're jetting. Activate the whole project. Get Crew One aboard the Rhene as though the devil was on your tail with a pitchfork... I know it's sudden, but G.o.d d.a.m.n it, what did you expect?... You've all been under notice for a month to be ready to blast off on fifteen minutes' notice... Me? I'll be aboard and ready in ten minutes!"

Wherefore it was not long until the giant starship Rhene joined the Procyon in orbit around the forbidding planet Rhenia Four; in such an orbit as to remain always directly above a tiny valley surrounded by torn and jagged bare-metal-and-rock mountains; and Cecily Byrd came aboard the exploring vessel.

"I'm very glad to meet you in the flesh, Doctor Byrd," Deston said, and as soon as she was out of her s.p.a.ce-suit they shook hands cordially.

"Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" She giggled infectiously. "You'll never know how glad I am to be here." There was nothing sullen or morose or venomous about her now; she was eager, friendly, and intense. "And no formality, Babe. I'm Curly' to my friends."

"Okay, Curly-now meet the gang. My wife, Bobby Prime Brain, and his wife, Stella... This planet is a tough baby; a prime stinker."

"So I gathered, and the more you find out about it the tougher and stinkier it gets. We've fabricated all the stuff you suggested, for which thanks, by the way, so, unless there have been new developments in the last couple of hours, I'll go back and well go down. Okay?"

"Okay except for an added feature. Here and I are going along as safety factors. We have built-in danger alarms."

"Oh? Oh, yes, I remember now. Welcome to our city." Aboard the Rhene, Deston said, "But as chief of the party, Curly, you ought to stay up here, don't you think?"

"Huh?" The woman's whole body stiffened. "As chief of the party, buster, I'm the best man on it. What would you do? Stay home?"

"Okay," and preparations went on.

Extreme precautions were necessary, for this was a fantastic planet indeed. In size it was about the same as Earth, but its surface gravity was almost four times Earth's. Its atmosphere, which was at a pressure of over forty pounds to the square inch, was mostly xenon, with some krypton, argon, and nitrogen, with less than seven percent by volume of oxygen. Its rivers were few and small, as were its lakes. Its three oceans combined would not equal the Atlantic in area, and what was dissolved in those oceans no one knew. The sun Rhenia was a Cla.s.s B7 horror, so big and so hot that Rhenia Four, although twice as far away from Rhenia as Mars is from Sol, was as hot as Mars is cold. Even at lat.i.tude fifty north, where the starships were, and at an alt.i.tude of over fifteen thousand feet, at which the floor of the little valley was, the noon temperature in the shade was well over forty degrees Centigrade.

And there was life. Just what kind of life it was, none of the biologists could even guess. They had been arguing ever since arrival, but they hadn't settled a thing. There were things of various shapes and sizes that might or might not be a.n.a.logous to the gra.s.ses, shrubs, and trees of the Tellus-Type planets; but no one could say whether they were vegetable, mineral, or metalo-organic in nature. There were things that ran and leaped and fought; and things that flew and fought-all of which moved with the fantastic speed and violence concomitant with near-four gees-but if they were animals they were entirely unlike any animals ever before seen by man.

No one aboard the Procyon had even tried to land, of course. They didn't have the equipment; and besides, it was "Curly" Byrd's oyster and she had repeatedly threatened mayhem upon the person of anyone who tried to open it before she got there.

The personal armor of the landing party-or rather, the observation party, since they did not intend to land was built of heavy gauge high-alloy steel, and each suit was equipped with drivers and with anti-gravs. Their craft was much more like a bathyscaphe than a s.p.a.ce-to-ground vehicle. Its walls were two inches of hard alloy; its ports were five inches of fused silica. It could, everyone agreed, take anything that Rhenia Four could dish out. In view of that agreement, Cecily had protested against wearing armor of proof inside the shuttle, but Deston had put his foot down there. Something might happen.

Counting the pilot, five persons composed the party. Director Byrd and a.s.sistant Director Leyton were completely encased. Deston and Jones, however, had left their hands bare, as each was carrying a .475 semi-automatic rifle. Magnums, these, of tremendous slugging power; and all their cartridges-each gunner had three extra fifty-round drums-were loaded with armor-piercers, not soft-nosed stuff. They went down, talking animatedly and peering eagerly, until two silent inner alarms went off at once.

"Hold it!" Jones yelled, and Deston's even louder command was, "High it at max, fly-boy!"

The craft darted upward, but even at full blast she was not fast enough to escape from a horde of flying things that looked something like wildcats' heads mounted on owls' bodies, but vastly larger than either. They attacked viciously; their terrible teeth and even more terrible talons tearing inches-deep gouges into the shuttle's hard, tough armor. As the little vessel shot upward, however, higher and higher into the ever-thinning atmos- phere, the things began to drop away-they did have to breathe.

Several of them, however, stayed on. They had dug holes clear through the armor; out of which the shuttle's air was whistling. The creatures were breathing ship's air-and liking it!-and were working with ferocious speed and power and with appalling efficiency.

Deston and Jones began shooting as soon as the first two openings were large enough to shoot through, but even those powerful weapons-the hardest-hitting shoulder-guns built-were shockingly ineffective. Both monsters had their heads inside the ship and were coming in fast. The others had dropped away for lack of air.

"Hercules" Jones, big enough and strong enough to handle even a .475 as though it were a .30-30, put fifty hard-nosed bullets against one spot of his monsters head and thus succeeded in battering that head so badly out of shape that the creature died before gaining entrance. Died and hung there, half in and half out.

But Deston, although supremely willing, simply did not have the weight and sheer brute strength to take that brutal magnum's recoil and hold it steady on one point. Thus when his drum was empty the creature was still coming. It was dying, however, almost dead, because of the awful pounding it had taken and because there was almost no air at all left in the shuttle.

Both men were changing drums, but they were a few seconds late. The thing had life enough left so that as it came through the wall and fell to the floor it made one convulsive flop, and in its dying convulsions it sank one set of talons into Cecily Byrd's thigh and the other into the calf of Lewis Leyton's leg. The woman shrieked once and, for the first time in her life, fainted dead away. The man swore sulphurously.

By this time they were almost back to the Rhene. The landing craft was taken aboard and a team of surgeons tried for a few minutes to get those incredible talons out of the steel and the flesh; then for a few minutes more they tried to amputate those equally incredible feet. Then they anesthetized both victims and carried the inseparable trio into the machine-shop; where burly mechanics ground the beast's legs in two with high-speed neotride wheels and, using tools designed to handle high-tensile bar stock, curled those ghastly hooks back out of flesh and armor. Thence and finally to the sick-bay, where the doctors put everything they could think of into those deep, but not ordinarily dangerous, wounds.

As soon as the doctors became fairly sure that no alien germs were at work in the human flesh, Deston strode up to Cecily's bed.

"'We'll get one thing straight right now, Curly," he said. "I'm all done suggesting; I'm telling you. You don't go down there again until I say so."

She straightened up angrily; she was not too sore to fight. "Think again, buster. We're on the job now, not at HQ. It's my job and I'll run it any way I d.a.m.n well please."

"At HQ or anywhere else, my curly-haired friend, my authority over-rides on matters of policy and this is a matter of policy. You'll take it and you'll like it." "Over-rides, h.e.l.l! I'll..."

"You'll nothing!" he snapped. "Did you ever get socked on the jaw hard enough to lay you out stiff for fifteen minutes?"