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A subtler weapon, worthy of your fine will." As he spoke, Carse saw the Eurasian's green eyes narrow, and in the pause that followed he knew that the swift, trained mind behind those eyes was working. What would it evolve? What move? And those Chinese words, uttered out by the port-lock what would they result in, and when? Dr.
Carse placed them all in the rear seats of the car's compartment, Ban facing them with drawn raygun. Then with a hum from its generators the car raised, wheeled, slid forward, until through the large port-lock, and swooped down to the lake. Dr. Ku Sui watched everything with an interest he did not attempt to disguise.
Still not speaking, he glided to the rear port-lock, Leithgow and Friday running alongside and attempting to dissuade him from the dangerous pursuit. Their words were wasted. Carse gave them only a faint smile and a few directions. "Keep the ship as close as you can without danger. No, Eclipse; I'm going by myself; there's no need to risk two.
A shuffle of feet brought his gaze up to the port-lock entrance. Friday, stripped to shorts, a sweat-glistening ebony giant, stood there. Shaking the drops of steaming perspiration from his face, he reported: "All finished, suh got the Star Devil in the jungle where you said to hide her. An' now what? You still figurin' on keepin' that date with Dr. Ku in this ship?" Carse nodded, absently.
He tested the controls, found them responsive, then pressed a button set apart from the others: and the huge port-lock door set in the farther wall of the hangar slid smoothly open, revealing a metal chamber similar to that of the ship port-lock on Ku Sui's asteroid. But whereas the chamber of the asteroid's port-lock was for vacuum-atmosphere, this was for water-atmosphere.
At last Ban's mental cursings stopped. His straining ears had caught a sound. It was quickly repeated, and again and again the heavy, grating noise of metal on metal. The boots of space-suits on the metal floor of the port-lock. They had arrived!
The only figure visible there was that which lay sprawled face-downward on the ground close to the inner door of the port-lock. The figure seemed to have been stricken down in sudden death. It was clad in the trim yellow smock of a coolie of Ku Sui. It was limp, its arms and legs spreadeagled, and it lay there as mute evidence that the dome of the asteroid had been attacked.
As for his getting into our ship, he entered from behind, through the after port-lock, while we were looking for his ship on the visi-screen. I don't understand yet why we could not see his craft. It's too much to suppose he could make it invisible. Paint, perhaps, or camouflage. He might have a way of preventing, from a distance, the registering of his ship on our screen.
Using his infra-red device, Carse brought the car in neatly through the ship-size port-lock of the dome, and sped it across to the central building, to land lightly beside one of the wings. Debarking, he ran down the wing's passage and in a few seconds was back in the asteroid's control room.
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