United States or Jersey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The television lenses on the tower would have picked him out in any case, if Kreynborg had repaired the screen. He went boldly up to the rocket-ship. "Kreynborg!" he called. "Kreynborg!" He felt himself being surveyed. A door came open. Kreynborg stood chuckling at him with a pocket-gun in his hand. "Ha! Just in time, my friend! I haff been fery busy.
He seized a chair, crashed it frenziedly into the television screen, and had switched on the G.C. phone when there was a roar of fury from Kreynborg. Instantly there was the spitting sound of a pocket-gun and in the red room the racking crash of a hexynitrate pellet. Nothing can stand the instant crash of hexynitrate. Its concussion-wave is a single pulsation of the air.
You shall watch der progress of romance between me and Sylva. Throw away der club!" The pocket-gun came up. Thorn threw away the club. "What do you want, if two billion's not enough?" "Amusement," said Kreynborg jovially. "I shall be bored in this inner dome, waiting for der air fleet to starfe. I wish amusement. And I shall get it. Come inside!"
At last he was successful, and now he walked calmly across the room and bent over the motionless Kreynborg. "Skull fractured," he said grimly. "All right, Sylva." He went through the narrow doorway beyond, picking up the pocket-gun as he went. There was a noise of whining machinery. Now Thorn was emptying pellets into the mechanism that controlled the dome of force. There was a crashing of glass.
Williams, dismounting, was bending over his companion Overland, who had suddenly slipped from the saddle. "Where's he punctured?" queried Bud Light. Williams examined the prostrate man. "Kind of low down, and in the side. 'T ain't bad, but it's bad enough. Got any whiskey?" "You bet! I got a pocket-gun here. Swiped it in the saloon." And Pars Long handed a flask to Williams.
You amuse me and you haff already been useful, but I shall haff no hesitation in killing you. You are Thorn Hardt. My name is Kreynborg. How do you do?" "Where's my friend?" demanded Thorn savagely. "Where is she?" "Der lady friendt? There!" The whiskered man pointed negligently with the pocket-gun. "I gafe her a bunk to slumber in." There was a niche in the wall, which Thorn had not seen.
He raced toward her, expecting every second to hear the spitting of Kreynborg's pocket-gun. With the continuous-fire stud down, the little gun would shoot itself empty in forty-five seconds, during which time Kreynborg could play it upon him like a hose that spouted death. But Thorn had done the hundred yards in eleven seconds, years before. He bettered his record now.
Kreynborg was using a pocket-gun, one of those small terrible weapons which shoot a projectile barely larger than the graphite of a lead pencil, but loaded with a fraction of a milligram of hexynitrate. Two hundred charges would feed automatically into the bore as the trigger was pressed. Thorn gazed desperately about for weapons. There was nothing in sight.
Sheer anguish twisted him. And the room filled with a hearty bellow of laughter. The monstrous whiskered man had turned about and was shaking with merriment. He picked up a pocket-gun from beside him and turned off a switch at his elbow. Thorn's muscles were freed. "Go back, my friendt," boomed the same voice that had come from a speaker the night before. "Go to der couch.
A sudden surge of flying craft appeared on the television screen. The grounded fleet of the United Nations was taking to the air again. In the narrow, two-mile strip between the two domes of force it swirled up and up.... Kreynborg frowned. "Now, what is der idea of that?" he demanded. He moved closer to the screen. The pocket-gun was left behind, five feet from his finger-tips.
Word Of The Day