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AN SF CLASSIC
MURDER IN THE VOID
EDMOND HAMILTON
An Alien Vandal Seeks Control of the Strangest Scientific Weapon Known to Man!
(This issue's classic is a rip-roaring example of purple prosed space opera from the June 1938 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and is by the acknowledged king of the genre, Edmond Hamilton. Blurbs are from the orginal magazine printing.)
CHAPTER I
CRANE OF THE TSS
The black, moonless Venus night lay solid over the big metal house and its surrounding grounds. The young Earthman who was creeping stealthily through clumps of weird shrubbery and enormous flowers toward the house thanked heaven fervently for the cloudy planet's stygian nights.
But Rab Crane knew that it was deadly dangerous approaching the house of Doctor Alph, even under cover of darkness. For the Venusian scientist's home had become a focus of interplanetary intrigue in the last few weeks. Every splanet in the System had heard the rumor of Doctor Alph's discovery of a tremendous new scientific weapon. And every one of them had agents trying to secure it. There would be guards inside the house, without doubt.
Crane's bronzed, aquiline face tensed as he crouched for a moment beside a stiff, grotesque shrub. As a member of the Terrestrial Secret Service he had been sent by the TSS to get Doctor Alph's secret weapon and he'd do it or die trying.
Not a light showed from anywhere in the dark, square metal house.
"Too quiet," muttered Crane to himself. "Looks like a trap."
He shifted his stubby beam-pistol to his left hand, and with his right drew a compact little instrument from his pocket. Then he moved silently on toward the dark house.
"Here goes nothing," he whispered. "In two minutes I'll probably rate a nice memorial plaque at headquarters.
Like a sliding shadow, Crane flattened against the side of the house, just beneath a window. He reached up with the little oval instrument he held.
It was a recorder which registered the presence anywhere nearby of invisible watchmen," those diabolically ingenious combinations of electric eyes and atomic beams, effective alarms that blasted down intruders without warning.
To Rab Crane's amazement, the recorder showed no such protective devices in operation around the window. What did it mean? It looked to him like a deliberate trap set by the Venusian scientist.
But he had to go through with it. Too late to back out now. He severed the catch of the window by a single tiny, smothered flash from his beamgun. He rolled the flexible glass quickly aside and drew himself rapidly up into the dark room. He poised motionless in the dark, listening. The house was as silent as the grave. He could not understand it but his instincts warned him of peril.
Soundlessly he moved across the dark room. He knew that Doctor Alph's laboratory lay at the back of the house. There, if anywhere, he might find some clue to the Venusian scientist's great discovery that had so perturbed the planetary governments.
He watched his little recorder alertly as he advanced, expecting it each moment to flash the tiny signal spark that would warn of a network of deadly beams ahead. But it gave no signal. Apparently the whole web of the houses protective beams had been turned off at the main switch. But why?
* * *
Crane moved quickly out of the room into an equally dark hall. In the hall he tripped on something soft and recoiled, his gun-arm stiffening.
He heard no sound. In a moment he ventured to flash a tiny needle of light from a ring on his finger, onto the floor. His breath sucked inward with a sharp hiss. A Venusian house-guard lay there! One glance assured him the man was dead.
The man's neck had been broken cleanly, as though by a twist of powerful hands. The marks of the killer's hands were still visible, red against the Venusian's milky white skin. A beam-gun was still in his limp hand.
So, Rab Crane thought, someone else had visited Doctor Alph's house tonight, ahead of him. Probably some other interplanetary spy trying to get the Venusian scientist's deadly secret for his own world just as Crane was trying to get it for Earth.
Had the other spy got it?
Crane's heart went cold with apprehension at the thought. He straightened from examining the dead guard and moved quietly down the dark hall. He had no fear of the beam-web now. He realized that whoever had been ahead of him had cut off the whole protective system.
He went around a corner of the hall and almost stepped on two more dead Venusians. They, too, had been strangled by clutching fingers that had snapped their necks like pipe-stems. Why hadn't they beamed the killer with their guns when he attacked them?
The door of the laboratory was wide open. Inside, all was dark and deadly still. But instinct warned Crane against showing a light as he stepped into the room. He stopped, his eyes trying to penetrate the darkness. Then a smell came to him that made the heir rise along the back of his neck.
The smell of fresh blood! It came from the darkness at his right. Crane flicked on the tiny ray of his ring-light, swung its beam to the floor. Another body! And one glance at the distorted face told him who it was.
The Venusian scientist's neck had been broken like those of the guards. But his head had been smashed also into a bloody red mass. His massive face, comparatively undamaged, stared upward in the beam of light, horribly contorted.
Then Rab Crane's stunned mind perceived something and instantly comprehended its pressing significance. The blood pool from the shattered skull of Doctor Alph was still widening along the floor! That meant that it had been no more than a few moments since the killer had been there!
The killer must still be in the house! Rab doused his little light and sprang to his feet. But the realization had come too late.
In the darkness behind him a harsh voice said, "Kill him!"
A black shape became a moving shadow in the darkness. With swift, heavy strides it approached. Then a hard fist struck for Rab Crane's skull in a terrific blow, even as he ducked. Only the lightning, instinctive swerve of the TSS man saved him from instant death. As it was, the blow grazed his temple. He reeled, falling stunned, but his senses did not leave him immediately.
As consciousness receded from him, Crane heard, as though in a dream, a voice saying rapidly:
"Quick! To the Vulcan now! I'll carry the braincase!"
Then a hurry of receding steps, and a harsh voice gloating, mirthfully, in the distance, "When they find the dead Earthman there beside Doctor Alph, they'll think he did it all!"
Darkness closed in on Crane then.
* * *
He awakened to a dim awareness of his surroundings, wondered how long he had been senseless. A dazed glance at his watch told him it had been almost an hour.
As full remembrance came to Rab Crane, he staggered to his feet. The laboratory, the house around him, were as dark and silent as before. His head was aching blindingly.
He had blundered badly, he knew. In his first shock of finding that someone had been ahead of him, he had not stopped to reflect that the other spy - or spies - might still be in the laboratory, might have heard him entering and lain in wait for him.
He tried to remember the orders issued by the unseen attackers. Something about getting to the Vulcan, quick - and something about a braincase.
The Vulcan - that was the big spaceliner that was sailing tonight for Jupiter, with stops at Mars and Earth. Whatever interplanetary spy had been here was planning to leave Venus tonight on that ship!
But what was it that had been said about a braincase? Slowly his stunned brain rallied. The voice had said:
"Quick! To the Vulcan! I'll carry the braincase."
Suddenly into Rab Crane's confused mind shot a possible explanation.
He bent quickly over the dead body of Doctor Alph once more, flashed his ring-light on the shattered skull of the Venusian scientist. He gasped as he saw that his shocking surmise had been right.
There was no brain in the broken skull of Doctor Alph! The scientist's brain had been carefully removed by cunning surgery after the skull had been smashed by a blow. Or possibly the blow had been delivered after the operation so that no one would notice the horrible theft.
"God in heaven!" muttered Rab Crane. "Whoever came to get Doctor Alph's secret, got it - by stealing his brain!"
Rab Crane was aghast. He knew that in these days the removal of a living brain from a man's body, and keeping it living in special serum, was child's play to anyone versed in surgery.
And he knew, too, that such preserved, living brains could be made to think and remember; that they could be communicated with by microphonic and loudspeaker electrical connections to their hearing and speech nervecenters. Whoever had taken Doctor Alph's brain had come here intending to steal it, and had brought a special serum-case for its transportation!
And the brain-thief might be already aboard the Vulcan, ready to leave Venus with his ghastly loot. Once away from Venus, it would not take him long to make the living brain give up its secret, and that meant that the planet the thief served would acquire the dead scientist's terrible secret weapon!
Rab Crane looked swiftly at his watch again. The Vulcan sailed at nine. It was a little after eight. He would have just time enough to get aboard the spaceliner before it took off - if he were not stopped.
He must get aboard! Somewhere on that ship was the stolen brain whose terrific secret might spell conquest of and doom for Earth. His one slim chance now was to get on the liner, yet he had but forty minutes to reach the spacestation on the other side of the great Venusian metropolis!
* * *
The big clock over the spacestation showed just ten minutes short of nine when the TSS man fought through the crowd to the gangway of the Vulcan. People were waving farewell to departing friends, sweating dockhands were hustling last-minute freight into the ports, ship's officers were bawling orders. Over the crowd and flaring lights loomed the vast, cigar-like metal bulk, waiting in its cradle for the moment of its flaming leap into space.
Rab Crane, gripping his suitcase in one hand and interplanetary passport and ticket in the other, ran up the gangplank into the glassite-walled promenade deck where the Venusian ship's officer on duty was being beset by passengers wanting various services.
A shriveled, red-skinned little Martian with enormous spectacles was fussing at the office. "I want my crate of machinery samples in my cabin, not in the hold. They're valuable!"
A squat, huge-shouldered Jovian was thrusting rudely past others to make his complaints heard, and a handsome young Earthman who had evidently had too much of the intoxicating "blue force," was asking plaintively, "Where's the vibration-bar?"
The harassed officer glanced at Rab Crane's passport hurriedly.
"Norman Idwall, citizen of Earth, importer. Okay, Mr. Idwall," he said.
A steward ran along the deck banging a gong and crying, "Five minutes to take-off time! All passengers in their cabins!"
Rab Crane, his heart still hammering from his race to the spacestation, had a steward find his cabin. Once in it, the TSS man locked the door and lay down on the bunk as required.
He was on the ship, at least! But who among its scores of passengers could be the spy who had the brain of Doctor Alph? How could he hope to identify him?
Suddenly, in the little cabin, a hoarse, loud voice spoke to Rab Crane. "Crane, I see I failed to kill you at Doctor Alph's," the voice rasped.
Rab Crane bounded to his feet, his beam-pistol leaping into his hand. He glanced around the cabin; there was no one in it but himself. He flung open the door, but no one was in the corridor.
That harsh voice was speaking, seemingly from the air beside him.
"There are still two minutes left before the Vulcan starts. Unless you leave the ship, you will die one minute after the take-off."
The menacing voice ceased abruptly. But this time Crane had traced it. It came from his own coat pocket!
He thrust his hand into the pocket and drew out a small watchlike metal instrument, apparently a super-compact radio receiver and loud-speaker. Someone on deck must have dropped it in his pocket as he boarded the line Crane stared at the thing, thinking fast. This meant that the brain-thief had seen him come abroad, meant to kill him to get him off the trail. But how could the man hope to kill him here in his locked cabin.
He could hear the space-doors of the liner slowly grinding shut. The beat-beat-beat of the ventilation system began. There was a breathless hush throughout the ship. Then with a tremendous roar and quivering shock, the vista outside Crane's cabin window vanished as the Vulcan roared out to ward space.
Crane crouched, rocking from the shock of starting, his beam-gun gripped in his hand, his bronzed face drawn in a mirthless grin. The harsh voice spoke again, from the watch-shape thing in his other hand.
"You were not wise enough to get off the ship. Therefore you die-now!"'
CHAPTER II
DEATH SHIP
Before that rasping voice had ceased to sound, Rab Crane knew how he was about to be murdered. It seared across his brain in a flash even as his muscles sprang into action.
He plunged for the cabin door, tore it open and hurled the watch-like thing in his hand far down the corridor. Before it even hit the floor, it exploded in a blinding flash of atomic force and light!
"God, why didn't I see it before!" exclaimed Rab Crane hoarsely as he wiped his glistening brow. "He had an atomic charge planted in that thing, where he could detonate it by remote control whenever he wanted."
Then he saw that the blinding flash of force had eaten a hole in one inner wall of the corridor but had done no other damage. Excited voices were crying in alarm and heads were sticking out of doors along the corridor.
Stewards and officers came running into the corridor even as Rab Crane drew back into his cabin.
Listening, he heard the officers finish their futile examination and depart, remarking that the atomic bomb must have been planted in the ship earlier. The excited passengers dispersed, reassured that no harm had been done the ship.
Crane found himself shaken a little, despite his steel-hard nerves. The ingenuity of the attempt against his life had been diabolical. Undoubtedly his unknown antagonist was the most deadly he had ever challenged.
Yet Crane's determination to wrest Doctor Alph's stolen brain from the other spy was strengthened rather than weakened. That weirdly living brain was a doom hanging over Earth!
When he dressed for dinner, Crane put his beam-pistol inside his coat, and the feel of it was comforting as he walked into the big, brilliantly lighted dining saloon. Laughing, chatting men and women of several planets, expensively garbed and gowned and jewelled, filled the room. Under the conversation, a Venusian orchestra was softly playing haunting popular melodies.
The steward who led Rab Crane to a table in a corner apologized for its obscure position.
"It's not a very good table, sir, but it was all we had left for last-minute passengers like yourself."
His words made Crane study the others at the table closely as they introduced themselves. The spy who had the stolen brain would be a last-minute passenger, too. He must be at this table!
The four other men at the table were of four different worlds. One was Kin Nilga, a Saturnian rocket engineer, with solemn green face, pale, big eyes and the great-boned body of his race.
Next to him sat Jurk Usk, a Jovian shipping-magnate, squat, huge-shouldered and heavy-browed like all men of Jupiter ' and as surly and sparing of words as most of his compatriots.
The other two were Kark Al, the thin, wisp-like, spectacled little Martian salesman whom Crane had heard complaining about his machinery samples; and Donn Ennimer, the handsome, drunken young Earthman he had noticed when he boarded ship.
* * *
The young Earthman had apparently been imbibing further of the intoxicating blue vibrations at the bar. He was talking with drunken owlishness, to the table at large.
"The service at this table is unspeakable!" Kark Al, the little Martian, told Crane indignantly. "We've been waiting a quarter hour. I'm going to speak to the captain-"
Crane only half listened to their voices. The TSS man was keenly studying the Jovian and Saturnian. He was remembering how the necks of the men in Doctor Alph's house had been broken with one snap.
Only a Jovian or Saturnian had the physical strength to do such a thing! And these two were the only representatives of their worlds in the dining saloon. Was one of them the man with whom Crane was struggling blindly? His heart began to beat a little faster.
"This is my table, isn't it? My name is Lalla Dee," an uncertain, girlish voice said.
It was a Venusian girl who was claiming the last empty chair at the table. She was young and pretty. She wore a white silk dress, and her dark eyes were shining with naive excitement as she looked over the glittering saloon. Crane introduced everyone to her.
"This is my first trip off Venus," Lalla Dee told Crane shyly. "I just won a contest in college - the first prize was a trip to Earth. Isn't it wonderful - people of five different worlds right at this table!"
Crane smiled and said, "Yes, and all of them hungry. It looks as though our steward had forgotten us completely."
"It's an outrage!" declared Kark Al angrily.
"Not gonna wait any longer for steward. I'm hungry," the drunken young Earthman, Ennimer, said owlishly.
And calmly the drunk took one of the exquisite Venusian flame orchids from the center vase, salted it, and began to eat it. Lalla Dee giggled, and Kark Al snorted in disgust.
Crane had not taken his eyes off the Jovian and Saturnian. Jurk Usk sat in the same surly, unmoved silence, but Crane thought that the Saturnian was under tension, that something lurked behind those pale, big-pupiled eyes. Was Kin Nilga his man?
"I was a little afraid to come alone on this trip, but now-" The girl's voice broke off as a scream of awful agony ripped the gay chatter of the saloon and froze everyone into horrified silence.
The scream came from the throat of the drunken young Earthman who had been eating the orchid. The man's lax handsome face was contorted now in agony, his eyes protruding, his body arched half out of his chair, his hands clawing the air.
Another ghastly shriek bubbled from his throat into the frozen silence. Then he crashed down across the table.
Diners sprang to their feet, shouting hoarsely. Stewards and officers came running toward the table. Rab Crane bent swiftly over the young man's body, sniffed at the strange odor that rose from his lips.
Crane straightened, reached for the salt-cellar on the table, sniffed it. His tablemates watched frozenly.
"He's dead - poisoned!" Crane said, finally.
As an officer stooped to lift the body, "Don't touch him with your bare hands!" Crane cried.
For the body of the poisoned man was beginning to glow faintly, his face giving off a feeble, eerie white light!
"Gods of Mars!" cried little Kark Al horrifiedly. "Look at that body - look-"
"This man was poisoned with a super-powerful radium salt," Rab Crane declared to the horrified officers. "He died instantly in awful agony and his whole body is charged with radioactive force now and will have to be handled with lead gloves. Someone substituted the radium salt for the ordinary salt in this salt shaker."
* * *
Lalla Dee looked up at Crane with wide, terrified dark eyes.
"Then maybe it was someone trying to kill you," she said. "The poison couldn't have been intended for any of the rest of us."
Crane knew what she meant. Only Earthmen, out of all the Solar System's peoples, were habitual users of salt. He knew well that the poison had been intended for him - and that someone at this table had made the substitution!
Yet he said, shaking his head, "There's no reason why anyone would want to kill me. I'm just an ordinary importer. No, this young fellow must have had some enemy who took this means to kill him."
"I'll swear that I filled that cellar with ordinary salt today!" said the table-steward hoarsely.
"The whole affair will have to be investigated by the captain," the third mate of the Vulcan said crisply, "meanwhile send for a hospital detail to remove this man's body."
As the body was carried out by leadgloved attendants, Kark Al said sickly:
"I - I guess I'm not hungry after all. I'm going to my cabin."
"I don't want to eat now either," the white-faced Lalla Dee told Rab Crane. "That awful scream-"
In fact, they had all risen from the table except Jurk Usk, the Jovian, who kept his seat and was awaiting his dinner with the surly immobility of his race.
Rab Crane, as he followed the girl toward the door of the noticed that Kin Nilga was already disappearing ahead of them. The Saturnian seemed in a hurry.
Crane's mind was working 'swiftly. Someone at their table had Doctor Alph's brain. And that someone had tried twice, now, to kill him. Of those two things he was certain. But which one? He thought of those snapped necks - the huge physical strength of the Jovian and Saturnian.
He lingered behind Lalla Dee.
"Can you tell me which person at our table came into the dining saloon first tonight?" he asked the shaken table-steward.
"Kin Nilga, the Saturnian gentleman, sir. He was first at the table."
"I want to ask him if he noticed anyone lurking by the table when he entered," Crane said, and went on after the Venusian girl.
But as he moved along the dark promenade deck with Lalla Dee, Crane's excitement was mounting. Kin Nilga, then, had had the best chance of any of them to plant that deadly poison. And Kin Nilga also had the great physical strength that killer must have had.
Was the solemn-faced Saturnian the diabolical agent who had stolen the brain of Doctor Alph? Crane resolved to find out this very night!
Lalla Dee had stopped by the transparent glassite wall of the deck, and Crane saw that she was still shivering.
"That poor young man's face - I'll never forget it!" she said, her dark eyes clouded with horror. "I feel as if there is some horrible monster on this ship, lurking, hidden-"
"Nonsense! Whoever adopted that devilish method of murder was after one man," Crane told her. "And he' be caught within a few hours." And to distract her attention, he pointed through the glassite wall. "There's a sight you'll never see on Venus."
* * *
She looked, and clapped her hands in entranced delight. In the vast black firmament of space burned the eternal stars, glorious blazing jewel in dark space. The ship was rushing through a constellated wilderness of suns. The rocket-tubes had been shut off and only the steady beat-beat-beat of the ventilation pumps came along the dark deck where Crane and the girl stood.
"It's unreal!" Lalla Dee cried. "I've often dreamed what it would be like to see the stars that we can never see through the cloudy skies of Venus, but I didn't dream it was like this."
She pointed to a calm, green speck of light shining large and bright, almost due ahead of the ship.
"That's Earth, isn't it? Is it really as beautiful as everyone says?"
"I'm an Earthman, and my opinion is biased," Crane nodded. "But I think it's the most beautiful world in the System. Its snowy mountains and deep blue seas; its green fields and quiet forests and rivers and old cities - yes, it's beautiful. Beautiful and worth fighting for, worth dying for-"
He had spoken half to himself, his eyes brooding on that calm green speck. He became aware that Lalla Dee was looking at him intently.
"We're always proud of own particular world, aren't we?" he said.
They stared a little longer at the scene, then Lalla Dee turned from the wall.
...
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