The Randall Garrett MEGAPACK®. Randall Garrett

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СКАЧАТЬ his nose pouring blood, Wayne’s antagonist charged in. His eyes burned with the strange flame that had been gleaming in Boggs’s face out on the desert in the valley. He ploughed into Wayne’s stomach with a savage blow that rocked Wayne back.

      He grunted and drove back with a flurry of blows. The other aimed a wild blow at Wayne’s head; Wayne seized the wrist as the arm flew past his ear, and twisted, hard. The medic flipped through the air and came to rest against the wall with a brief crunching impact. He moaned and then lapsed into silence.

      * * * *

      Quickly, Wayne grabbed the gun off the floor and planted his back to the wall, looking around for new antagonists. But there was evidently no one left who cared to tangle with him, and the four medics strewn out on the floor didn’t seem to have much fight left in them.

      Wayne crossed the room in a couple of strides and bolted the door. Then he walked over to the box of sand. If it contained what he suspected—

      He stepped over to the lab bench and picked out a long steel support rod from the equipment drawer. He placed the rod gently against the sand, and pushed downward, hard. There was a tinny scream, and a six-inch needle shot up instantly through the surface.

      “Just what I thought,” Wayne murmured. “Can you talk, you nasty little brute?” He prodded into the sand—more viciously this time. There was a flurry of sand, and the football-shaped thing came to the surface, clashing its teeth and screaming shrilly.

      Wayne cursed. Then he turned the needle gun back up to full power and calmly burned the thing to a crisp. An odor of singed flesh drifted up from the ashes on the sand.

      * * * *

      He stooped and fumbled in Stevelman’s pocket, pulling out a ring of keys.

      “They better be the right ones,” he told the unconscious medic. Holstering the needle gun, he walked over to the medical stores cabinet, hoping that the things he needed would be inside. He knew exactly what he was facing now, and what he would have to do.

      He checked over the labels, peering through the neatly-arranged racks for the substance he was searching for.

      Finally he picked a large plastine container filled with a white, crystalline powder. Then he selected a couple of bottles filled with a clear, faintly yellow liquid, and took a hypodermic gun from the rack. He relocked the cabinet.

      Suddenly a knock sounded. He stiffened, sucked in his breath, and turned to face the door.

      “Who’s there?” he asked cautiously, trying to counterfeit Stevelman’s voice.

      “Harrenburg,” said a rumbling voice. “I’m on guard duty. Heard some noise coming from in there a while back, and thought I’d look in. Everything all right, Dr. Stevelman? I mean—”

      “Everything’s fine, Harrenburg,” Wayne said, imitating the medic’s thin, dry voice. “We’re running some tests on Captain Wayne. They’re pretty complicated affairs, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt again.”

      “Sure, sir,” the guard said. “Just a routine check, sir. Colonel Petersen’s orders. Sorry if I’ve caused any trouble, sir.”

      “That’s all right,” Wayne said. “Just go away and let us continue, will you?”

      There was the sound of the guard’s footsteps retreating down the corridor. Wayne counted to ten and turned back to the things he had taken from the cabinet.

      The bottles of liquid and the hypo gun went into his belt pouch. He tucked the big bottle of white powder under his left arm and cautiously unbolted and opened the door. There was no sign of anyone in the corridor. Good, he thought. It was a lucky thing Harrenburg had blundered along just then, and not two minutes later.

      He stepped outside the Medic Section and locked the door behind him with the key he’d taken from Stevelman. After turning the needle gun back to low power again in order to keep from killing anyone, he started on tiptoe toward the stairway that led into the bowels of the ship.

      After about ten paces, he saw a shadow on the stairway, and cowered in a dark recess while two crewmen passed, talking volubly. Once they were gone, he came out and continued on his way.

      It took quite a while to get where he was going, since it involved hiding and ducking two or three more times along the way, but he finally reached the big compartment where the water repurifiers were. He climbed up the ladder to the top of the reserve tank, opened the hatch, and emptied the contents of the jar into the ship’s water supply.

      “That ought to do it,” he said to himself. Smiling, he carefully smashed the jar and dropped the fragments down the waste chute. He surveyed his handiwork for a moment, then turned and headed back.

      He hadn’t been seen going down, and he didn’t want to be seen going out. If anyone even suspected that he had tampered with the water supply, all they would have to do would be to run the water through the purifiers. That would undo everything Wayne had been carefully preparing.

      * * * *

      He made his way safely back up to the main deck and headed through the quiet ship toward the airlock. He wasn’t so lucky this time; a guard saw him.

      “Where you goin’, Captain?” the guard demanded, starting to lift his gun. “Seems to me you ought to be in the brig, and—”

      Wayne made no reply. He brought his gun up in a rapid motion and beamed the man down. The guard toppled, a hurt expression on his face.

      Wayne raced to the airlock. He didn’t bother with a spacesuit—not now, when he knew that the air was perfectly harmless outside. He opened the inner door, closed it, and opened the outer door.

      Then, grinning gleefully, he pressed the button that would start the pumping cycle. The outer door started to close automatically, and Wayne just barely managed to get outside and onto the ladder before it clanged shut. As soon as the great hatch had sealed itself, the pumps started exhausting the air from the airlock. No one could open the doors until the pumping cycle was over.

      He climbed down the ladder and began walking over toward the western wall. He would have to keep away from the ship for a while, and the rocks were as good a place as any to hide out.

      * * * *

      It was dark. Fomalhaut had set, leaving the moonless planet in utter blackness, broken only by the cold gleam of the stars. The lights streaming from the portholes of the Lord Nelson gave a small degree of illumination to the valley.

      The valley. It was spread out before him, calm and peaceful, rippling dunes of sand curling out toward the mountains. The valley, he knew, was a betrayer—calm and quiet above, alive with an army of hideous vermin a few feet below its surface.

      He started to walk, and moistened his lips. He knew he was going to get awfully thirsty in the next few hours, but there was not the slightest help for it. There hadn’t been any way to carry water from the ship.

      “I can wait,” he told himself. He stared back at the circular bulk of the Lord Nelson behind him, and his fingers trembled a little. He had known, when he joined the Corps, that space was full of traps like this one—but this was the first time he had actually experienced anything like this. It was foul.

      Something СКАЧАТЬ