Menace of the Mutant Master Read online

  Nyssen was scared; but he regained his composure after a couple of seconds. On the outside, however, he gave the appearance of being close to a nervous breakdown. He mumbled softly a jumbled-up sentence with a distraught air. His liaison man, who had been ordered by Rhodan to stay at a distance of some 20 miles and be in constant telecommunication with Nyssen, had a great deal of trouble trying to make any sense out of his words.

  "... Hotel, Gate of the Heavenly Birds, ... room two, one, one, seven ... two men ... took me prisoner!"

  The two intruders were standing about nine feet away from Nyssen. The active part of his microphone had been inserted into the skin of his throat in order to pick up the slightest movements of his larynx. There was a good chance that the two men would not understand what he was murmuring. Nyssen did his best to produce a lot of saliva, letting it drip in a thin thread out of the left corner of his mouth. This made him truly look like a crazed man who had been shocked out of his wits.

  One of the men approached. He was grinning. "What's all the fuss about? We aren't going to harm you!"

  "What do you want?" stammered Nyssen.

  The man pointed at Michikai's body. "Deliver this man here and invite you to a come along on a ride."

  "N... n... o...!" protested Nyssen loudly. "I don't want to!"

  "Shut up, you fool! We saw how you finished off that poor guy here, you get it?" And he pointed once more at Michikai. "You should thank us that we haven't called in the police but've offered to take you along with us instead."

  "Where to?" asked Nyssen, frightened.

  "You'll find out in time. —Do you have any weapons?"

  "No... I mean yes, I do!"And he pointed to his left shoulder. They were bound to find the heavy neutron raygun sooner or later, regardless of whether he told them about it or not.

  The man stepped behind him and reached under Nyssen's left armpit. He undid the strap of the gun-holster and with great interest examined the heavy weapon.

  "It's O.K. now!" he said after he had finished frisking Nyssen. "Let's leave!"

  His companion opened the door and stepped out in the hallway. Nyssen started to move. They passed by the desk clerk who didn't notice that anything out of the ordinary was going on. Unchallenged, the two men and Nyssen reached the car that had brought them to the hotel. The driver started the engine while they got in. Nyssen sat on the backseat, the two men on either side of him.

  As the car began to move he muttered into the telecom-mike under his breath: "Driving off!" hoping that his liaison would interpret it correctly. For the next 30 minutes the car wound its way through the morning traffic jam in the narrow streets of the city. Then they got onto one of the main roads leaving the city and took off at a high speed in a northeasterly direction.

  Nyssen had enough time to develop a plan of action. He knew that what mattered mainly now was not to become subjected to the hypnotic influence of the unknown enemy. The helmet Nyssen had brought along for this purpose from Terrania was lying well-hidden at the bottom of his suitcase back in his hotel room. There must be some other way to avoid falling victim to the enemy's hypnotic commands. Such as, for instance, to divert the unknown foe's attention by some incidents which would seem to be more important than hypnotizing his new prisoner.

  Inside the entire area of the circle whose position Rhodan had determined with the help of Tako Kakuta's tele-jump data, there were only three buildings. One was a dilapidated barn which didn't give the impression it would have a basement. The other two were country villas built in a typical Japanese style. Rhodan had landed in this territory together with 20 men during the early hours of the morning. Their transporter had taken off immediately after discharging its cargo and passengers.

  Rhodan and his men were dressed in special Arkonide transport suits. They were equipped with micro-generators which produced antigravity, deflector and protective fields. It had caused no trouble for Rhodan and his men to spend the better part of the morning hidden in a little nearby forest.

  At first Nyssen's abduction had been an unpleasant surprise. But just as swiftly as the kidnapped major, Rhodan also recognized the opportunity which this event could offer. All along the ride with his two abductors, Nyssen kept up a running commentary describing the direction the car was taking, so that in the end Rhodan no longer had any doubt which of the two country villas was his real goal.

  Rhodan also understood Nyssen's plan to divert the attention of the unknown, who was awaiting the arrival of his latest prisoner, in such a manner as to afford Nyssen a free hand for at least the first half hour after arriving at his place of incarceration.

  No contact could be established with Khrest. The Arkonide scientist had never accepted the fact that it might come in handy under certain circumstances to have a micro-telecom implanted in his skin. Rhodan was firmly convinced however that by now Khrest surely had changed his mind. The mutant master stared with unbelieving eyes at the image showing on the picture screen of his warning and surveillance installation.

  A stranger!

  He was standing in the small interior courtyard which was surrounded by the walls of the square building complex of his farm house. The stranger was weating a suit of a type never before encountered by Monterny. The man held a short-barreled, thick weapon in his hand. Monterny noticed that the man kept looking around as if searching for something.

  One second later he had vanished again. But an instant afterwards he reappeared at another place. This wasn't the same man. He was smaller the first stranger and had broader shoulders! Monterny felt his hands starting to tremble uncontrollably. Two men had managed to pass unnoticed through the outer defense perimeter and to penetrate into the interior courtyard and they could make themselves invisible at will! Monterny gave the alarm signal.

  The two men however had vanished meanwhile and did not reappear for the time being.

  It happened exactly the way Nyssen had hoped it would. The two men led him into the villa through a side entrance. There he was told to wait. One of his guards remained with him while the other walked down a corridor and disappeared in one of the rooms. When he reappeared one minute later he had looked plainly disgusted.

  "He can't be bothered just now!" he yelled to the other guard. "Take him downstairs!"

  An elevator took Nyssen and his captor into the basement. He was locked in a room which Nyssen believed he recognized as the one Kakuta had described. Of course Nyssen couldn't know that there were exactly 30 similar rooms in the basement of this farmhouse. Nyssen sat down on the only chair in the room, planted his elbows on the table and rested his bowed head in his hands. He pretended to be a desperate man for the benefit of the TV spy system which he assumed to be built into the walls.

  In reality he was putting the finishing touches to his plan, remaining as cool as a cucumber on the inside. There was one factor that worried him: He had to consider some unknown quantity in his calculations—the alertness of his opponent. His plan could succeed only if everybody in this house—including every single man on guard duty—would be totally distracted from their duties by the events taking place in the vicinity and on the grounds proper of the villa.

  New strangers made their appearance, all dressed in the same strange-looking suits, all equipped with the same ability to render themselves invisible. Monterny had no doubt that they had penetrated the interior courtyard by arriving through the air.

  For a few minutes he was under the impression that the intruders had come to free his prisoners. This impression changed very soon when he discovered one of the strangers for a fraction of a second on the roof of his villa. He had appeared right next to the big antenna used for beaming out the hypno-broadcasts.

  This discovery greatly alarmed the mutant master. He had a force of 30 guards at his disposal for the protection of his base. He positioned 15 men on the roof to protect his antenna. Ten other guards were patrolling the grounds around the villa. They were given orders to shoot on sight at anything moving through the air in t
he vicinity of the base.

  Having thus done everything he could for the defense of his domain, Monterny prepared for a swift flight. He had arrived at the conclusion that he was practically sitting in a trap. Supposing Rhodan—and the mutant master was fully convinced that these invisible people must be Rhodan's men—did not place such great a value on the prisoners as he Monterny first believed he would—then Rhodan might blow up this base at any moment by his ghost troops.

  Although Monterny quickly changed his opinion about an impending explosion, he acted as if he still believed in it.

  He was a very cautious man who always carefully planned ahead. Underneath the house, starting from a cellar to which he was the only person to have access, he had built an underground passage which ran for ¾ of a mile underground and then emerged again at the surface. Three-quarters of a mile should be enough, estimated Monterny, to remove himself to a safe distance from Rhodan's range of action.

  Exactly one hour after his imprisonment began, Nyssen started banging his fists against the door. He kept this up for a quarter of an hour. Then he heard shuffling steps approach his room. He continued pounding on his door until it started to open. This was the moment when he stepped quickly aside and ducked.

  The guard held the pistol in his hand ready to shoot. But Nyssen came from another direction than the one in which the man thought the prisoner was standing. A Karate-chop caught the guard in exactly the right spot. He screamed in pain, dropped his weapon and whirled around. But he was slow in comparison to Nyssen. Another chop and the guard slumped quickly to the ground. He was knocked out for one minute. In the meantime Nyssen had grabbed his weapon and convinced himself that the area outside and all along the corridor was clear.

  "You listen to me!" he snapped at the guard. "Listen carefully! I'm in a bad spot here. I need you to get out. I don't want to get caught again. I'll shoot you cold if you do anything I don't like. Anything! Understand?"

  The man was a Japanese. He hastily nodded his head to express his agreement. Nyssen was certain that the man was subject to only a very mild post hypnotic suggestion now. If everything was going the way Nyssen had planned then the unknown leader of this group must be too preoccupied otherwise at the moment to be able to keep an eye on each and every one of his men. In any case, the guard's fear of death seemed to out-weigh the post-hypnotic command. The Japanese seemed quite meek now.

  "There's another prisoner down here," declared Nyssen. "Where is he kept?"

  The guard pointed down the hall.

  "How many guards are there down here altogether?"

  "Five."

  "Lead me to the other prisoner but make sure we don't run into any of your colleagues!"

  The Japanese led Nyssen for a few minutes in a criss-cross pattern through the basement. Twice they heard some strange voices from afar but they didn't meet anybody.

  Then they found Khrest.

  The Arkonide scientist needed a little while to adjust to the new situation. Nyssen had some difficulty in convincing him what the next step in his plan was going to be.

  "We're far from safe yet!" declared Nyssen with determination. "The unknown enemy still has a firm grip on his base. We must get back the neutron raygun they've taken away from me!"

  Finally Khrest began to see the light. He agreed then to everything Nyssen proposed. Such as opening his door and shouting at the top of his voice. His guard came running down the corridor, astonished at Khrest's unusual behavior, and was hit over the head from behind by Nyssen. The guard collapsed on the floor without resistance.

  They crept stealthily past the other three guards. They reached the elevator. Khrest remained at the entrance to stand guard, armed with the weapon they had captured, while Nyssen and the Japanese guard rode up to the ground floor. The guard gave Khrest the information where he might find the neutron raygun. It was in the same room where one of his guards had disappeared for a minute shortly after their arrival at the base.

  Taking a calculated risk Nyssen stormed into the room, which fortunately for him was empty now since all the base personnel had been deployed elsewhere. He quickly seized his gun and both men then returned to the basement. There he made some complicated manipulations of the weapon, following Khrest's instructions. Then he placed the weapon at a spot he judged to be both safe and effective for his future plans.

  And finally he got in touch with Perry Rhodan.

  A few minutes afterwards, Rhodan's men proceeded to attack the villa from two sides. They remained clearly visible in the open. The attack from the west began two minutes earlier than from the south. This had the result that the southern side of the house was nearly unguarded for this brief time span.

  Khrest and Nyssen made good use of this time. They made a hundred yard dash, running straight into the arms of Rhodan's advancing men.

  Rhodan was informed of Khrest's and Nyssen's rescue. At once he ordered the attack to be stopped. One of his men, armed with a microphone and a loud-speaker, penetrated into the interior courtyard of the villa and broadcast an announcement which could be clearly heard by everybody, even the guards down in the cellars: "Clear these premises immediately! You have five minutes to get out! Then a bomb will be detonated which will annihilate all life within a radius of 100 yards."

  Naturally, the effect of this warning was practically nil. Everyone in the farmhouse believed it to be a trick. The men tried to ask Monterny for advice but he was unavailable.

  The men decided then to wait and after the five minutes had passed without anything untoward happening, all began to triumph.

  However neutron rays can be neither seen nor heard nor smelled. Not even neutron flows of 1017 neutrons per 0.155 square inch per second.

  That the bomb actually had exploded was not noticed by Monterny's men until their skin suddenly turned red and started to hurt. Within a few seconds they lost their eyesight. In sheer panic the blind men started racing through the corridors, trying to get out of the house. But by then it was too late. Only two guards who had obeyed the evacuation order escaped the catastrophe. They surrendered to Rhodan's men.

  As far as the Japanese were concerned they became officially alerted about the strange events that had taken place at the northern end of the main road leading out of Osaka when somebody noticed astonishingly high radioactivity in that area.

  That was five hours after Nyssen had detonated the bomb. In the meantime, Rhodan, the two freed men, the two prisoners they had taken and Rhodan's expeditionary force had all left the country. In addition they brought back to Terrania all the experiences they had gathered during their search of the unknown enemy's base.

  This conference took place two days later. Rhodan had assembled his friends in order to tell them of the findings of his latest mission.

  "We haven't gained as much as we hoped we would," stated Rhodan in a serious tone. "As far as we have been able to ascertain from both our prisoners and the owner of the printshop whom we also seized in the meantime, the most important person we wanted to capture has escaped. None of our prisoners has ever seen this dangerous stranger face to face, not directly in person nor on the videoscreen. There was only one confidante in that house with whom he had direct personal contact. But this man was found among the dead in the villa. And from a dead man you can't learn anything. We've found the underground passage through which the man made his escape. But we have lost any further trace of him.

  "The few records we found in the base give no hints about his plans, activities and potential as an opponent. Even if we were to assume that those people in his Japanese base who by their own obstinacy met their death, constituted his entire crew, it wouldn't present any difficulty for this man to recruit new followers. He has his own special means, very effective and very despicable. Therefore we must not let ourselves be lulled into a false sense of security by the hope that this war is over. For the time being we haven't even been able to find the scientists that were kidnapped from Terrania.

  "There are three th
ings we have discovered so far:

  "Besides his actual co-worker team, at present no longer in existence, the unknown enemy has at his disposal an undetermined number of middlemen. This brought death to Michikai, the Japanese chap working for Nyssen, and also almost cost Nyssen's life as well.

  "Secondly we know the process by which the unknown foe's mechanized-hypnotic influence is being transmitted. Whenever he gets in touch with his people via v'phone, the most important message is not the verbal part but the wave pattern seen on the screen. It's questionable however whether he'll continue this method of communication once he realizes that we have found out about it.

  "The third thing we know is that the destruction of the enemy's base near Osaka must have been felt by him as a bitter reverse. As little as we might have actually accomplished, we at least foiled one of his plans. It is not unlikely that this will cause him to lose his nerve and that he might make a few mistakes during the next days which hopefully will lead us closer to wherever he is hiding now."

  Perry Rhodan, that same evening at 8 o'clock, personally accompanied Betty Toufry to the aircraft which was to fly her to New York. He spoke softly hut urgently to the little mutant, who listened with utmost attention.

  "There will be many things you won't understand about this mission, Betty. What we hope to accomplish depends to some extent on our success in keeping the General Cosmic Company alive. You're going to New York now to protect Mr. Adams from all enemies who will try to get close to him unnoticed.

  "You'll have to keep your eyes and ears and all your other senses wide open, Betty!"

  The tiny Ms. Toufry halted her pace for a moment and gazed intently into Rhodan's eyes. "I promise to be on the alert at all times," she said solemnly. A short while later she was on her way to New York.