Old Giles Habibula is too old, Jay, too ill and lame, to be running through black and filthy rat-holes on his knees, and dancing up and down flimsy little ladders in the dark.
He’s no mortal monkey!”
Yet he had slipped over the edge in a moment; he was already tumbling down the dark ladder, the others behind him, punctuating his phrases with the gasps of his panting breath.
“A floor!” he wheezed presently.
“Ah, it’s all up now, I’m afraid.
I’ve struck bottom.
No way out but tiny pipes a rat himself couldn’t creep through.”
They explored with anxious, bleeding fingers, but found no branching passage large enough for a man to enter.
“We should have turned left,” Jay Kalam said.
“We must go back,” John Star cried.
“If we hurry, perhaps we can beat them.”
Now ahead, he rushed back up the ladder.
He reached the horizontal shaft, and plunged down it, reckless of bumps and bruises.
Hal Samdu kept close at his heels, Jay Kalam not far behind.
Giles Habibula, heaving and gasping frantically, called out from far in the rear:
“For dear life’s sake, you can’t abandon poor old Giles!
Wait for me, lad!
Jay, Hal, you can’t leave an old comrade alone, to be starved and tortured and done to his death!
Wait just a second, for poor, lame and suffering old Giles Habibula to snatch a breath of blessed air.”
John Star saw the white flicker of a pocket light-tube on the wall ahead; again he heard voices.
The pursuing guards, then, were just approaching the intersection.
He scrambled desperately to reach it first.
The light flashed briefly, out of the intersecting tube, to strike the wall.
He oriented himself by it, and waited, crouched behind the angle, breathing quietly as he could.
Hal Samdu came up behind, and he cautioned the giant to silence with a pressure of his foot.
Far back, he heard Giles Habibula’s plaintive appeal:
“Just one blessed second! For life’s own sweet sake!
Ah, a poor old soldier, sick and crippled, imprisoned and unjustly sentenced to a wicked traitor’s death, deserted by his comrades and caught like a dying rat in this stinking hole———”
The light flashed again, close now.
The leading man came out of the side tunnel.
John Star caught his groping arm, and hauled him around the metal corner, into deadly combat.
A fight in utter darkness, for the dropped light-tube went out.
A savage battle; the unknown guard fought for his life, John Star for more than his.
And brief; it was over before the next man in line could reach the cross-passage.
The Legion Academy had trained John Star. He knew every weak point of the human machine.
He knew the twist that snaps a bone, the jab that pulps a nerve, the shift that kills an opponent with his own fighting strength.
He was light, but the Legion training had made him hard and quick and sure enough to fight the Legion, now.
The other man tried first to use the heavy little proton gun in his right hand, and found that his wrist was broken.
With his left hand, then, he struck into the darkness, and his own blow hurled him against the wall of the shaft.
He twisted back, tried to butt, and broke his neck.
That was all.
When the next man flashed his light, to see how the battle went, John Star had the proton gun the first had dropped, pointed ready down the tube.
A thin, searing jet of pure electricity, the proton blast fused metal, ignited combustibles, electrocuted flesh.
It was a narrow, killing sword of intense violet incandescence—not quite a toy!
A matter of split seconds.
The other men had similar weapons, also ready. But they must have held themselves a moment, must have waited to aim.
John Star did not delay.
And five men died in the shaft, the three foremost by direct, searing contact with the ray, the two others electrocuted by current conducted through ionized air—the proton gun was not a toy; and John
Star pulled hard on the lever, to exhaust all the energy of the cell on one terrific blast. The bunding violet flame went out. There was darkness in the shaft again. Stygian, complete. Silence. The pungence of ozone in the air, from the action of the ray. The acrid smell of seared flesh and smoldering cloth.
Such swift spilling of life sickened John Star.