The Plasma Monster Read online

  "Get into them!" ordered Rhodan. "Helmets sealed. And check your air supplies, gentlemen!"

  While they were still getting into the heavy suits, the space door closed and half a minute later the Burma rose up with thundering engines. Thanks to its super powerful propulsion system it was capable of reaching the speed of light within a few minutes.

  Only Rhodan knew the flight's destination. Mercant could guess but he wasn't too sure. Naturally the first to lose patience was Bell.

  "Perry, will you let loose and give us some information?" he grumbled, punctuating his question with a yawn.

  "We're flying to the Condor where we'll transfer over to it but there we'll also stay inside the airlock and we'll land at Soisy-sur-Seine."

  "Susie who? Who's that, a female doctor?" Bell had no idea of what was going on, nor did the others except for Mercant and Walt Ballin.

  At this time, however, Pucky made a probe into Mercant's mind and so found out that a town near Paris was involved. He immediately chirped over his helmet transceiver: "Fatso, you were probably pretty skimpy on your geography studies in school. Soisy-sur-Seine is a small, town near Paris, not the name of a doctor— although I'd prefer to fly to any doctor who could give me back my natural good looks! I look a mess and you're no better, Tubby!"

  "So what are we supposed to do in this Swozzy sur Seine, Perry?" asked Bell, deciding to pass up any comment on Pucky's aspersions concerning his geographical ignorance. "And why not go into the ship instead of being cramped inside the airlock?"

  "The answer to your last question should be obvious," replied Rhodan with a slight edge to his voice. "The plasma monster hasn't attacked any crew member of the Burma yet because it hasn't had a chance to get in. We certainly can't be responsible for bringing the beast on board with us. There's also no sickness on the Condor. We could spare ourselves a transfer to the Condor if the commander,

  Lt. Brisby, had any battle experience."

  "What?!" Bell's voice rumbled inside his helmet. "What the devil's going on?"

  Rhodan answered calmly. "Just a vague suspicion, Reg... as frail and

  opalescent as a soap bubble. This town, Soisy-sur-Seine, with 45,000 inhabitants, does not contain a single plasma victim. Can you conceive of that? I can't!"

  "Alright, so?"

  "To answer that question is why we're here."

  "With two State Class spaceships?"

  "Their fire power may not be heavy enough at all. It might have been better to come in battleships."

  "Jumping galaxies!" exclaimed Pucky, equally surprised. "What is going on?" His probe toward Rhodan's mind had been stopped by the latter's mental screen.

  "Just a wild guess—a flimsy hope. That's why we won't land in front of the town. We'll jump!"

  Shortly after that they transferred over to the Condor which had left its orbit to rendezvous with the Burma. And again the seven of them remained within the two airlock hatches and communicated over their helmet radios. Only then did Rhodan reveal the direction of his thoughts.

  He finished with the remark: "Prof. Degen, the chief medico on medi-ship 3, is the one who started me to putting two and two together."

  "And did he know that there were only healthy humans in this little French town, Perry?" Normally the optimist, Bell still sounded pessimistic.

  "No, the seven of us know it, as of a short time ago," answered Rhodan, yawning again. It was impossible to resist these urges to yawn and any attempt to suppress them was a useless waste of energy.

  "But how come you didn't take the doctors into conference before the takeoff, Perry? Your whole plan is the groundless idea of a layman because you don't know that much about medicine!"

  "Which I won't argue with, old buddy. But knowledge of that kind isn't always the decisive factor. What's important is to do the right thing at the right time and it's my guess that we might be able to uncover something in Soisy-sur-Seine that's important for all humanity. Why do you think there are no plasma victims in Soisy-sur-Seine? Why shouldn't there be? Maybe this isn't quite so groundless, after all!"

  "So where are we supposed to look for something when we don't even know what to look for?" Bell still wasn't in favor of Rhodan's present action.

  "We'll leave that to John Marshall and Pucky, my friend!" Rhodan's reply was sharp so that even Bell realized his questions were superfluous.

  When they made their jump at an altitude of 10,000 meters over Soisy-sur-Seine and fell through the darkness of the night, they formed a chain. Each one in his spacesuit was a small independent spaceship. Each suit provided a defense screen, a propulsion system and certain speed capabilities. The micro-generators threw maximum power into their collision screens while their antigravs functioned at half their intensity. But when the altimeters marked 300 meters the

  antigravs went on full. All seven landed as lightly as feathers.

  "Switch on your deflectors!" Rhodan ordered over his radio.

  In spite of the darkness of the night they took the extra precaution to make themselves invisible by use of the deflector-field generators. They were satisfied to put up with the inconvenience of not being able to see each other when they turned on their searchlights.

  They were three km from the outskirts of Soisy-sur-Seine. Telepath John Marshall and Pucky went to "work". They attempted to detect any alien thought-streams that might give them a clue.

  "Nothing," said John Marshall after a good quarter of an hour.

  Pucky was silent though normally he was the most talkative.

  A vehicle with bright headlights was coming along the express highway. Its lights beamed far ahead into the night. The car was racing at high speed. The driver must have been very familiar with the road. At a distance of one km it swept past the men who stood in the open countryside and waited to see if Pucky could discover anything.

  "Chief! There's an Ara in that hotrod!" Pucky's chirping voice trembled with excitement. "I'm making a jump! Marshall, keep in contact with me!" With his last word he teleported.

  In a few moments Marshall spoke up. "Pucky's crazy. He's sitting on top of the car, heading for town... Now it's passing the main square... making a turn... third street to the right. Pucky thinks it's an arterial road. The car is accelerating... wow, how that little devil can cuss! He can hardly hang on... maybe going to teleport. No, he's staying. The car's slowing down, turning into a private driveway. Robot security here. Wait—now I can't understand him. What kind of nonsense is that? What's he thinking of gingerbread for at a time like this? A small gingerbread castle... Four Aras! Three of them waiting for the car... another coming out of the house. All of them disguised as Terrans..."

  Marshall had reported all this bit by bit, with various pauses in between.

  "Ras Tschubai." Rhodan spoke to the African teleporter. "Go and cover Pucky and watch out that the little rascal doesn't take too many chances. Under no

  circumstances are the Aras to know how close we are on their trail."

  "OK, sir!"

  Then Ras Tschubai also disappeared. Marshall was also in contact with him but he was not able to communicate with him telepathically as he could with Pucky.

  "Let's take off, gentlemen. Marshall, you lead the way!" was Rhodan's next order.

  Forming a chain again, they rose from the ground and flew toward the small community at an altitude of 100 meters. The street lamps were working and the main square was easily located. There were only a few lights burning in the houses. Soisy-sur-Seine was still asleep.

  Without any detours Marshall led them directly to the objective where the two teleporters and the Aras were located. The small castle was surrounded by a park where they landed in a garden among flowering bushes. The men were still enveloped in their deflector fields.

  "Marshall, what are the other two doing now?" asked Rhodan. But before the telepath could answer, he added: "Let's open our helmets and cut off the radio and the deflectors."

  They opened their helmets to the cool but humid night air
. About 200 meters away a light was burning in the portal of the castle. A car was standing in front of it, which was doubtlessly the one they had seen racing down the highway.

  "Sir, our two teleporters are inside the place—and it's swarming with the galactic medicos! According to Pucky they're talking about the plasma plague...

  Sir, they're laughing about it!"

  "But not for long!" growled Bell menacingly.

  "Just for once keep your mouth shut!" Rhodan snapped at his companion.

  "Marshall, call Pucky and Tschubai back here!"

  In the next second the two teleporters were beside them.

  "Helmets open. Deflectors and radios off. We don't want them to trace..."

  But the Aras had already tracked them. Marshall interrupted his chief. "Sir, the Aras are launching a robot attack! We have to get out of here! They have us right in their tracking beam!"

  At the first warning Rhodan had switched on his high-powered minicom and now he called into it: "Pigeons sighted! Hawks come in!"

  It was a coded signal that caused the Aras some frustration. By the time they comprehended the double meaning of the words, the Burma and the Condor were over the castle.

  In the next moment the Ara attack was opened. Arkonide fighter robots shot at them with every weapon available to them but the only thing they hit with their long-range energy beams was a small part of the garden area. Before the first shot the six Terrans and Pucky hurtled up vertically into the dark night sky.

  But then Pucky disappeared again. Allan D. Mercant was next to last in the flying chain and he noticed his sudden absence as the final link in their line. However, the mouse-beaver's objective soon became apparent.

  Five Arkonide combat robots, each weighing a ton or more, shot heavenward as though jet-propelled. The positronic monsters could not grasp what was happening to them and so they fired aimlessly in their desperation, shooting in all directions. At first the weapon rays were seen sweeping about in brilliant colors but then they thinned and grew pale.

  When the raybeams became barely perceptible lines of light, Pucky released them from his telekinetic forces. Accompanied by a shrieking of wind around them they fell from a height of several 100 meters and crashed to the ground. They bored holes in the park-like garden like unignited aerial bombs.

  "Sir, the Aras are blowing up the castle!"

  John Marshall's warning came a few seconds too late. The earth seemed to rise upward. The small castle that had, stood on the outskirts of Soisy-sur-Seine for 400 years was suddenly shattered by a blast of fire, followed by a nuclear thunderbolt that shot a ragged jet of flame up into the night.

  The six Terrans could thank the automatic function of their protective screening for the fact that, they were not killed immediately by the blast of radioactivity but the relatively weak antigrav systems could do little against these unleashed atomic forces. When the first shockwave hit them they were swept away over the town like withered leaves and the chain they had formed with their hands was ripped apart.

  Walt Ballin, who had only seen such things as this on television, believed that his last hour had come. Since he had not been trained in the Solar Space Academy, in his confusion he forgot which control buttons on his suit were for what. Erroneously he turned up his crash screen generator to maximum and cut off his antigrav. He only realized at the last moment that he was no longer flying along with the raging blast of the winds and that instead he was dropping downward like a stone. A new shockwave was all that saved him from being shattered against the ground. The crash screen let him just slip over the ridge of a roof; a chimney also failed to present a deadly obstacle as he glanced against it but it served to divert his course and thus to reduce his velocity to some degree. Then when he plunged from the roof gable into the top of a fruit tree, his crash screen was strong enough to protect him from the branches. Yet within the screen itself he was jolted too severely to one side, which caused him to lose consciousness.

  Pucky had only heard the rumbling of the atomic blast but hadn't seen it. A second prior to the catastrophe he had teleported, attracted by certain mental impulses that were emanating from under the ground.

  Now he was blinking out of his cunning mouse eyes while holding a disintegrator gun in his right hand and an impulse blaster in the other. Both weapons were aimed at three Aras. These galactic medics were not wearing plastic disguises to make them look like Terrans.

  "That's the Pucky creature!" cried one of the Aras and he tried to reach the weapon at his belt.

  But in vain. He lost his footing and flew like a ball to the ceiling. Pucky unleashed his telekinetic powers as he brought the Ara crashing to the floor again, where he lay half-unconscious, unable to move. The other two were pressed into a comer, also lying on the floor under such telekinetic pressure that they couldn't move a limb.

  Then Pucky sensed danger. He detected an emanation of incomprehensible thoughts. However, since his first experience with robots this kind of impulses was nothing new to him anymore. And if there was one intelligent being in the Solar Imperium that robots couldn't face up to it was Pucky the mouse-beaver!

  Swiftly he took out his hypno-gun and played a full beam on the overpowered galactic medics and a second later he vanished in thin air. The next thing he knew, he was in some sort of subterranean installation of the Aras. By some means as yet unknown these aliens had managed to come to Earth undetected. They had disguised themselves as Terrans and settled on the outskirts of Soisy-sur-Seine.

  In the moment of his rematerialization, however, he let slip a startled exclamation which came within a hair of costing him his life. He had landed in a vast laboratory which was swarming with robots. Not all of them were robomedics programmed to supervise the processes of manufacture here. Two combat robots were only four steps away from Pucky but fortunately they were programmed for reaction in the presence of Arkonides, Springers and Terrans, not to a creature who was three feet tall and looked like an overgrown mouse.

  "Phew!" squeaked Pucky in alarm as he realized the kind of metallic monsters he was facing and he jumped again.

  The raybeam of the first alerted robot only melted the plastic flooring where Pucky had just been standing. The fighter machine didn't have a chance to fire a second shot because it was melted down with its companion under Pucky's disintegrator fire. He had landed only a meter or so behind them.

  "Pagdor, what's going on back there?" He heard a voice call out in Arkonide. It came from the other end of the gigantic laboratory and processing room. Pucky was just beginning to concentrate on his next jump, which was to bring him close to the excited Ara who had called out, when all of a sudden Ras Tschubai appeared before him.

  Tschubai spoke before the mouse-beaver could say a word. "Help me to find the Chief and the others, Pucky!" he exclaimed urgently.

  The little one did not stop to ask how the African had located him. "Let's scram!" was all he said and he disappeared with his companion in a jump to the surface.

  Their automatic spacesuits responded instantly to the high radiation in the atmosphere and closed their helmets. Where the small castle had stood for the past 400 years was a vast yawning crater. The park had also disappeared and the outskirts of Soisy-sur-Seine were ablaze. The heatwave from the nuclear blast had set the houses on fire. Although spared by the plasma monster the little town was now in danger of being gutted by flames.

  "Ras, I have contact with the Boss, Fatso and Mercant but I can't find John or the newsman. Here, take my hand and off we go!"

  They jumped. They found Rhodan, Bell and Mercant standing by the wall of a machine works of some kind. Pucky heard Bell's voice in his helmet phones.

  "Ras and I are here!" the mouse-beaver announced.

  "Pucky, we're missing Marshall and Ballin!"

  "Later, Perry!" Pucky interrupted him. "Guess what? The Aras have set up a giant medical production plant, 500 meters underground. Everything's going full blast down there! We'd better get busy before these Super
Sawbones blow up the whole thing! Then this town will switch from no plasma to no people!"

  "Well, there you have it, gentlemen!" was all that Rhodan said.

  Instead it was the usually taciturn Mercant who commented, "Sir, I'm beginning to see how all this fits together and I can also see how Prof. Degen's remarks brought you to suspect this."

  Rhodan and Bell both got a grip on Pucky's spacesuit. Allan D. Mercant put his arms over Ras Tschubai's shoulders.

  "Jump!" signaled the mouse-beaver, whereupon the two teleporters brought their three companions into the subterranean fabrication plant of the Galactic

  Medical Masters.

  But they landed in a hornets' nest!

  Eight Arkon robo-fighters literally charged toward them, followed by eleven Aras who were smart enough to take cover behind the powerful machines.

  "You bunch of bolts!" chirped Pucky and his mouse eyes flashed a menacing challenge at the robots. He didn't wait for an order from Rhodan. "Ras, let's get the robots from overhead—come on!"

  They disappeared from behind the big cooler housing where Rhodan and his companions had taken cover and they landed just under the ceiling in a maze of tubular conduits of various sizes. The mouse-beaver was faster than the African since here his smallness was an advantage. The eleven Aras were unaware of his presence above them until he gave them a full-power blast from his shock-gun. The master medics crashed to the floor as though struck by lightning. One of them, not quite incapacitated, attempted to raise his weapon and fire at the top of the cooler.

  But Pucky won the draw.

  The positronically operated fighter robots were not aware of the disaster behind them. In the first hail of fire from overhead, five of the ponderous Titans were destroyed in the energy beams of both disintegrators and impulse blasters. But it alerted the remaining three as to the location of their nemesis.

  They came to a stop and as their turret heads rotated to the rear they failed to see Rhodan come out from hiding. He braced himself while facing them head on, firing freely with a disintegrator in either hand. A fraction of a second later, Bell went into action, just in time to eliminate the Colossus that was taking aim at Pucky.