The sting reached out and touched Pertin. A blinding light stabbed from it, jolting him with a strong electric shock.
The girl glided in, spreading her now-tattered wings. The stirred air bathed him in a strong scent, ether-sweet, with undertones like the pits of peaches. Pertin searched the bright silvery face and found no expression. It was no more human than a doll’s. The Scorpian’s silver tentacles thrust away the pitiful instructions, making a sound like an enormous gong which Pertin’s Pmal refused to translate.
The purchased woman intervened, hurling herself towards the robot, and was brushed heedlessly aside. She struck against the side of the probe ship, a blow which must have been agony to her human nervous system, but she did not cry out. Awkwardly she tried to project herself again into the fight. Pertin, his muscles beginning to relax their spasm, forced himself to join her.
A bird-like trilling from outside indicated that others were coming, and behind the great winged hulk of the pseudogirl Pertin could see black shadow-shapes moving across the dimly lighted shaft, growing rapidly as they approached.
“Oh, no!” moaned Doc Chimp. “Sheliaks and a Sirian!”
The robot’s single-minded purpose was not deflected; it floated towards Pertin, green dome pulsing. An elongating tentacle struck out at Pertin like an endless silver snake, not to sling this time but to snare. It wrapped him in slick, chill coils. He fought free, was caught again, and then at last the Scorpian turned to confront the other beings. It arched its stinging jet, but held poised, waiting.
The Sirian was first into the launch chamber, a tapered, blue-scaled torpedo shape fifteen feet long, all pliant wing and shining eye. With a ripple of trailing edges it flashed at the Scorpian.
The sting coiled, jetting white light into the wide blue eye.
The Sirian was not defenceless; its own forces gathered the robot’s charge and repelled it, sending the jet back at the robot, reinforced and multiplied.
The pseudogirl turned with great strokes of her wings, her three-fingered hand coming up with the gun-shaped something that had killed Sheliaks. Desperately Pertin twisted to intercept her. Her wings were sadly battered now, but still gave her superior mobility; he missed her on the first try and crashed against a wall. Half blind with his own blood, flowing ink-black in the greenish light, he doubled his legs under him and launched himself at her again.
The gun-shaped thing swung to meet him. It clicked in the pseudogirl’s bright silver hand, and the white jet hissed at him. He heard a brittle crackling sound in the air, and felt the cold breath of death.
But the jet had missed, and he was on her. With one hand he swung at her wrist. It was like striking a crowbar with his bare hand, but it jarred the weapon loose; and just then the battle between Scorpian and Sirian reached its climax.
The Sirian’s triply potent return jet struck a vital place in the great green dome of the robot. It exploded. The mellow booming sound the robot made became a hollow jangle. The tentacles writhed and recoiled. It sprawled in the air, a grotesque huddle of tortured metal, spilling green fire and drops of an acid that sizzled and burned where they struck.
If robots have life, that life was gone; it was dead. The silvery girl abandoned the fight with Pertin. With a great stroke of her wings she propelled herself to the robot, hovered over it, wailing an unearthly sound.
And the great blue eye of the Sirian turned towards Pertin. Behind it the Sheliaks, late on the scene but ready for battle, were elongating their wrinkled necks towards him.
Pertin cried desperately: “Wait! They - they were misleading you. They were trying to prevent the launch, to save their own lives!”
The eye hesitated.
“We’re dead already,” he croaked. “Nothing can help us now, not any organic creature. The radiation will kill us before long, even the Sheliaks. But the robot and the girl—”
He could hear his voice translating and hissing or singing out of the aliens’ Pmals.
“The robot,” he repeated, “and the altered copy that looks like a terrestrial female - they weren’t radiation-vulnerable. They could go on indefinitely. But the rest of us - if we let them succeed in stopping the launch, then we will die for nothing!"
The eye paused irresolute.
Then the foremost of the Sheliaks cried: “Fool! We too are not radiation-vulnerable! We simply need to conjugate, and be born again. But we must have the tachyon receiver, and if you try to keep us from it you must die!”
And the three tapered teardrop shapes, like a school of sharks in formation, plunged towards them, blazing with their own crimson light.
The Sirian eye irresolutely turned towards them, then back towards Pertin; then, with decision, whirled to confront them.
Contemptuously the Sheliaks changed course to meet it. The leading Sheliak widened a ruff of flesh like an instant air-brake and stopped in the air, flowed with a dazzle of colour, narrowed a neck towards the Sirian eye.
The thin neck spat a stream of yellow fluid. It struck the Sirian eye and clung, acid, adhesive, agonizing. The Sirian made an unearthly wailing noise at the sudden pain of the attack against which it had no built-in defences. The great blue eye turned milky white; the horse-huge body knotted itself in agony.
But it still had strength for a final blow. It fired the jet of energy that had destroyed the robot against the Sheliaks.
Electrical energy paralysed their muscular systems; heat seared the life from them. They died instantly, all three of them. But it was the last effort of the Sirian. All its stored energy had gone into that pulse. The reflected cascade of burning energy came bouncing back upon them all, bathed the silvery girl and sent her reeling soundlessly into a wall, to collapse into an ungainly contorted mass that didn’t move. Pertin was farther away and partly shielded by what was left of the robot; even so, it lanced his skin with pain.
But he was alive.
Slowly, and very painfully, he caught a hold-fast on the wall, steadied himself while he looked around.
The purchased people woman was dead, either bled empty or caught in that last furious bolt. The Sirian eye floated aimlessly, broken and no longer moving, a milky ooze coming from its body. The robot was destroyed; the pseudogirl was drifting impotently away; the Sheliaks were cinders.
The chamber was filled with the stench of many different kinds of death, but Pertin was still alive.
Suddenly remembering, he cried, “Doc Chimp!”
The ape was out of sight. Furiously Pertin ransacked the chamber, and found him at last, wedged between the wall of the probe and the ship’s canopy, not quite dead but very unconscious.
Pertin looked down at him sadly and affectionately. It was nearly time to launch the probe, and the question in Pertin’s mind was: was it better to wake him up, or to let him sleep as the probe was launched, the canopy jettisoned, and all the air in the chamber puffed instantly and murderously away into space?
The question was taken out of his hand as the ape stirred moaned softly and opened his eyes. He looked up at Ben James Pertin and said thickly, “The probe?”
“It’s all right,” said Pertin. “We’ll have to launch it by hand.”
“When, Ben James?”
Pertin checked the time. “Just a few minutes now,” he said. The ape grinned painfully. That’s good to know, Ben James,” he said. “No more problems. No more aches and pains. I always thought I’d be afraid of dying, but you know? To tell you the truth, I’m kind of looking forward to it.”