They ran up the accommodation ladder.
Lieutenant Nana stared after them with narrowed red eyes, and muttered something to his men about the drums.
They all retreated toward the long metal building—with a haste that was ominous.
The air-lock was sealed.
Levers flicked down under John Star’s fingers.
Blue flame should have screamed from the rockets, to send them plunging spaceward—but the Purple Dream lay dead!
Puzzled and dismayed, he tried the firing keys again—and nothing happened.
“We’re somehow—stuck!”
Incredulous, he scanned the dials.
“Magnetism!” he exclaimed.
“Look at the indicators!
A terrific field. But how———? The ship is non-magnetic.
I don’t see———”
“A magnetic trap,” said Jay Kalam.
“Our friend Nana has somehow got magnets rigged, somewhere close to the ship.
Our hull is non-magnetic; but still the field holds the rocket-firing mechanism and the geodynes, out of control.
He’s trying to hold us, until the ships get here, and———”
“Then,” broke in John Star, “we must stop their dynamos.”
“Hal,” Jay Kalam spoke into his telephone, “destroy the building.”
The tongue of roaring violet flame reached again from the shining needle.
It swept the long, low metal building from end to end, and left it a flattened tangle of smoking metal and broken brick, flung off its foundations by the sheer thrust of the blast.
“Now!”
Again John Star tried the rockets; again only silence answered.
“The magnets still hold us.
The dynamos must be underground, where our blast didn’t reach them.”
“I can, then!” cried John Star.
“Open the lock.”
He snatched two hand proton guns, besides the two in his belt already and darted out of the bridge-room.
“Wait!” called Jay Kalam.
“What———?”
But he was akeady gone; Jay Kalam touched the controls to open the valve for him.
He dropped to the field, ran across to the smoking wreck of the long building, and searched the bare foundations until he found the stair, a shaft hewn through dark rock and strata of old ice.
Down the steps he plunged, proton guns hi his hands, leaping stray fragments of still-glowing metal.
A hundred feet below, in the cold crust of Cerberus, a heavy metal door loomed in front of him.
He turned a proton-blast on it, at full force.
It flashed incandescent, sagged, caved in.
He leaped over it, into a long, dun-lit hall.
He heard the drum of machinery ahead, the hum of dynamos; but another door stopped him.
He tried the gun and it was dead—exhausted by that first full blast.
Before he could level another, a violet lance stabbed at him from a tiny wicket.
Alert, he flung his body under that blade of killing fire, flat on his stomach.
Even though he escaped the searing ray, the conducted shock of it numbed him.
But his own blast answered at the same instant, and the glowing wreck of the door was flung back upon the man behind it.
On his feet at once, though his shoulder was blistered and throbbing, he sprang for the door, tossing away his discharged gun and snatching the two from his belt.
A square room was before him, rock-hewn, great dynamos humming in the center of it.
Five men stood about it in attitudes of pet-rifled dismay, only Lieutenant Nana’s hand groping mechanically for his weapon.
Both John Star’s guns flamed—at the generators.
Unarmed now, but sure the dynamos were wrecked, he flung his discharged guns hi Nana’s sullen, blinking, yellow-stubbled face, and ran back down the hall and up the stair, hoping surprise would give him time to get back aboard.
It did.
The air-lock clanged again.