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.