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Several brigand ships were sure to be somewhere in the vicinity, and one might easily intrude, destroying the hairbreadth balance in Carse's favor.... There was peril on every side. The Hawk considered that it would be wise to make provision against the odds proving too great.
Then a narrow cone was along the corridor, a blinding orange streak. Instantly, with a rasp of thunder, it was gone, and the air was stifling. The Hawk was untouched; Friday, too, he saw. The bolt had been taken by the door and one of the door's two halves was ajar! At once Hawk Carse acted. "Inside!" he yelled, then was through, the negro right behind. Carse's eyes swept the laboratory.
Helsa, Lady Carse's new maid, witnessed this prank; and, not daring to laugh at the moment, made up for this by telling the story to her acquaintance, the widow, when sent for the children at night. "That will never do," Annie declared. "Harm may come of it, but no good." And this set her thinking.
"Perhaps not; but we do not expect all that we have dealings with to be people of sense." "No, indeed! Nobody need ever look for sense in Lord Carse, for one. Well! I am so glad you never were afraid of me; and I am sure, moreover, that you love me: you are so kind to me!" "I do," said Annie, smiling in reply to the wistful gaze. Lady Carse's eyes filled with tears. "Good night!
The party were so interested in the anecdotes belonging to Lady Carse's season of retreat, that they did not observe, sheltered as they were in eastern caves, that a storm was coming up from the west one of the tempests which frequently rise from that quarter in the winter season, and break over the Western Islands. The children were aware of it before their parents.
Three peering faces suddenly were in Hawk Carse's line of vision ahead: three ray-guns were settling on him.
A minute later its passengers were in the laboratory of the Master Scientist. Dr. Ku Sui took in the arrangements made in the laboratory with a swift glance, and then his eyes went to a door that opened in the opposite wall and to the slight, smock-garbed figure that came through it. He smiled. "Ah, Master Leithgow! A return visit, you see. At Captain Carse's invitation.
Had Ku Sui preceded him through the emergency exit, his shape should be visible somewhere, etched by the sunlight. There was no sign of him. Carse's eyes dropped to the asteroid. He saw it already miles below, a breath-taking celestial object, a second sun, brilliant and increasingly brilliant as it diminished over the watery plain waiting to receive it.
And so they went below again, down the spider ladder into the corridor. There was nothing else to do: the guards, ever watchful, pressed close behind. But a tattoo of alarm was beating in Hawk Carse's brain. Eliot Leithgow again the hint of something ominous to be aimed at him, Carse, for the extraction of information he alone possessed: the whereabouts of his elderly friend the Master Scientist.
The asteroid was plunging free to Earth, and the rate of its uncontrolled plunge was second by second mounting tremendously; but Carse's power-fall quickly enabled him to overtake it. As the dome swooped up in front of him, and the sunlight washed briefly over its desolate buildings, he looked hard for a shape moving amongst them, without success. Doubtless the Eurasian was well inside by now.
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