Front matter (continued 2)

The cheer that rang in the room dropped to a hush as the screen glowed with Guantra's snarling face.

"You've won this round, Kortha. But I'm bringing the fleet here. We'll see if you can work magic against belching guns. However, your evil genius can plan, it can't work miracles all the time. You—you imp of Zut's black brother, you!"

Kortha laughed in his face.

The screen went dead.

The engineers went dead, too, until Kortha sent his booming laugh out at them, shouting, "Let him bring his fleet. It's the showdown fight we want. Let him come to us. I've an ace up my sleeve that I haven't played yet. Why, if Earth and Venus were to send their space fleets here with Guantra, we'd still win!"

The men did not believe that, but they shuffled their feet, uncertain. It is hard to doubt a man who has just performed a miracle that your own eyes have seen. There is always that lurking thought that he might pull another, too.

Ilse said, "We have no guns on Ruuzol."

"This whole city is a gun," said Kortha, and laughed again.

His mirth was infectious. The engineers grinned and looked at each other and laughed a little. They hadn't the slightest notion of why Kortha laughed, or why they grinned, but no one could resist such a magnificent confidence in a city that was without a weapon, and yet a gun all by itself.

Kortha spread his hands, asking, "This is a radio-city, isn't it? It has every science necessary to perfect radio technique, hasn't it? Get me Xax! He and I have work to do."

The tumblie shrilled a greeting, passing the engineers leaving the room. He rolled across to the bronzed giant, clicking his needles, eager, curious. Kortha grinned at him, dropped to a knee to speak to him.

"You are the only one in all Ruuzol who can do this job, Xax. Any other who left here would be shot by the guards Guantra will post before he goes. It's up to you. Will you help me fight Guantra? I won't blame you if you refuse."

"Tell me what you want me to do," said Xax simply. "You waste time, talking nonsense."

Kortha took Xax to the tower window and showed him the red cliffs that rose all around Ruuzol, towering toward the sky.

"Years ago, when I first came to Ruuzol from the Academy, I sank cables into the metal of those cliffs. I laid them underground to the mesa, here. I connected their vast bulk with the generators and tube relays of the city. I have to know if those cables are still attached. You can tell me. I shall let you know what tests to apply in the tiny caves where the cable-controls are sunk. You can perform those tests with you feelers, Xax."

"What tests, Kortha?"

The giant told him, repeating himself for emphasis. But the tumblie understood, and said so. Kortha watched him click-roll out of the tower, and rose, sighing.

To Ilse he said, "Let's go back to the laboratories again. I'll need to make more diagrams. Get the engineers to meet me. They'll have to change cable terminals and install them on a different hookup."

Down in the laboratories, Ilse sat for hours, watching Kortha as he labored over charts and graphs, often without moving more than hands and eyes for an hour at a stretch. When he was done, he stood up and stretched like a waking tiger. He grinned, and handed the graphs to her.

Her eyes widened, looking down.

"Why, this is just—" she looked up, startled, beginning to smile.

"Something any modern housewife knows," he agreed. He laughed and said, "Guantra will call it more magic."

"It is magic," Ilse said softly. "It is the magic of your brain that can think of something like this at a time like this."

"Bah," chuckled Kortha, but he tingled meeting her eyes.

Hours later, the western sky grew dark with warships.

Kortha and Ilse stood once more in the tower over the paraboloid city, their arms touching. Before Kortha lay a white metal box with a red enamel switch disappearing inside it.

They watched the mighty battlefliers loom sullen and black above the coppery cliffs, pointing their blunt noses downward, dropping one after the other from the blue sky into the reddish plains below. They came swiftly, in perfect echelon, masts flying the black panther banner of Guantra. Their gunports lay open, the lean metal nozzles of their guns glistening in the sunlight.

"Zut," whispered Ilse. "Guantra compliments you. He has stripped all of Mars to capture you."

Xax said dryly, "The legend of Kortha is more than a legend, it seems."

"To destroy that fleet would cripple Mars for a decade," Kortha whispered. "I couldn't do it, unless I was sure that the stakes we fight for are worth it."

"We fight for Mars," said Ilse.

"Yes. Yes, I begin to believe that. When one man is so powerful he can do with a warfleet what he will, to achieve his own personal ambitions—"

They stood silent, watching the fleets come black across the skies.

"I can give them a taste of what they're going to get unless Guantra surrenders," said Kortha. "I needn't kill them all. Just cause a few—ah—explosions."

"Guantra will never surrender."

"His men will make him. They will realize I hold the trump cards in this little game."

The fleets came in unhurriedly, majestically.

Aboard each flier was purposeful order as men ran across clean decks, stood warily at battle-stations, swarmed into the upper shrouds with small-arms. A few broadsides from those cannon would reduce Ruuzol to smoldering ruins.

"Now?" whispered Ilse through wet lips.

"No. Not yet. I want them all within range."

Minutes eked along, slowly. Now the ships were prow to bow, circling the mesa. Ilse shuddered, looking at the empty holes in the gun-muzzles. She licked her lips and found her tongue dry as the dust of the Yassan Desert.

"Now!" said Kortha, and his hand flashed out, and the red lever swung over, hard.

It stayed over for short seconds....

Ships and guns exploded in the air as they wheeled around Ruuzol. Vast red flares sprang to life amid deafening detonations. Metal buckled and split. Powder charges sloughed upward and outward, carrying men and equipment with it in a crimson spray of destruction. The exploding magazines burst open the fliers, twisting and rending the metal hulls, ripping jagged holes, lifting off entire deck sections, sending men and railings into the air.

Crimson ruin rained on the red plains.

Ilse whimpered, watching.

Kortha swung the red lever back, panting harshly.

"There goes the Mars you built," sobbed Ilse.

"We can rebuild ships," said Kortha. "Some men will die, but not all, as would happen had I let the switch stay on a while longer. Those men will build and man new ships, for a new Mars. Had I left the switch on too long, not a living thing would exist between Ruuzol and those cliffs."

Kortha chuckled a little, seeing distress and surrender flags break from the masts of every ship in the vast flotilla. Even Guantra's flagship fluttered the white pennon.

"Send Guantra to us in unconditional surrender. Radio every flier that unless Guantra yields, we'll kill them all. We won't have to make good that pledge, though. The men and the commanders out there are limp with amazement, and fright of the unknown. They don't know what weapon we use. They thought themselves so secure from reprisal, you see. The unexpected will make cravens of them, for the moment. Oh, yes. And tell Guantra and his men to come unarmed. We in Ruuzol don't own a single gun."

Minutes later a tiny flier broke from the flagship and dropped toward the landing strips on the mesa. Kortha still had his hand on the red lever, watching every vessel that hung motionless in the air above the plain. But there was no fight in any of them. Kortha was right. The sudden destruction that had leaped from the very silence around them had sapped aggressiveness.

Kortha had made his name spell magic once again.

Guantra was a beaten man. As he stepped into the glassite tower, his cheeks were sunken, his eyes hollow above blackish rings. He stumbled over the threshold, and kept licking his lips helplessly. When Ilse saw his eyes, she knew suddenly what an enemy Kortha was. From the eyes of Guantra came the look that a slave might cast to an adored idol that came to life, and thundered curses on him. Guantra looked at Kortha as though he expected fire to shoot from his mouth and devour him.

Kortha grinned, "I told you you would never beat me, Guantra. Are we friends again?"

"Friends?" screamed the Premier, a white froth at the corners of his thin mouth. "You and I were never friends. We were always enemies. We were destined by fate to fight. And you—by some unknown magic you always win. You turn defeat to overwhelming victory. Always. It isn't fair to other men. Are you Zut himself? But now—now that you have won—taste what it feels like to—lose!"

From the depths of his despair, Guantra acted. His hand went to his tunic, lifted out with a heatgun in it.

His officers cried out at his treachery.

Kortha came in low, ducking under the sizzling blast that burnt black splotches on the white fur of his jacket. His left fist arced up, sending the heatgun from the numbed hand of the Premier. His right hand came across in a blur of motion: struck like a piston against Guantra's jaw. His fist whipped the man's head up and back, making the hair fly like seafoam striking a rock.

The crack of the neck breaking under the titanic power of the blow was etched against a frightened stillness.

Ilse and the officers stared at the crumpling form of the Premier whose knees sagged, lowering his body gently to the floor. His head hung at a sick angle from his limp neck.

Across the fallen body, Kortha looked at the white-faced officers. One of them extended his hands, palms down, saying, "Search us, Kortha. We came in peace."

Kortha grinned again and waved a brown hand.

"My fight was with Guantra. I thought he was my friend. Perhaps one of you can tell me about—the Blue Grotto?"

They were all of them men from Guantra's flagship. Eagerly their mouths spilled words, reciting the tale Ilse already had told him. Kortha stared down at Guantra, grim-faced, silent. He sighed once when they were finished, and looked at Ilse.

"And I never knew," he said to her softly.

He spoke to the officers, "It was true, then. Guantra is and has been my enemy, and the enemy of all Mars. I am glad to know that." And he rubbed his right fist thoughtfully.

"Can you find it in your heart to forgive a fool?" he asked of Ilse.

There were tears in her eyes. She stumbled forward, was caught and crushed tight against him. His lips drank from hers, thirstily.

The officers moved their feet, embarrassed. Kortha looked at them across Ilse's platinum hair, and laughed.

"You'll forgive me a moment's humanity," he said. "There are no terms to give you. I am returning to the council. From here on out, Mars will take her place beside Earth and Venus. This time they won't back out of their agreements."

The officers grinned at each other, wanting to yell their delight. They had known Kortha in the old days. One of them stepped ahead, hesitantly.

"We—ah—we are very curious, Kortha. The way in which you beat us, that is. There were no guns in Ruuzol. There was no way to beat us. You could not defeat us. Yet you did. When the explosions began, Guantra went a little mad. He called you 'brood of Zut.' Frankly, a lot of us thought there was something supernatural about it, too. As a matter of fact I still do, and so do the rest of us."

Kortha grinned at them, saying, "As a matter of fact, you have the same weapon I used aboard the flagship. Aboard every ship in the fleet, for that matter."

They looked at him, and their eyes bulged.

Kortha walked hand in hand with Ilse toward a cabinet inset in the tower wall. The officers came to stand around him in a semi-circle, watching him bring forth a small box fitted with a row of electronic tubes and cables fitted to two plates.

"It looks like a radio set," said one of the officers.

"It is," replied Kortha. "Except that it sends a stream of high frequency waves back and forth between those plates, instead of a voice into space. It internally induces heat into an object placed between the plates."

Kortha took an iron bar and set it on the lower plate. He turned switches, looking down. Almost instantly the bar glowed faintly red, then waxed brighter and brighter. From brilliant crimson, it turned white with heat. Kortha flipped the current off.

"The electronic tubes shoot a flow of high frequency waves between the plates."

"But that's ancient," protested an officer. "We cook that way on board—"

He broke off, eyes widening. He managed a sickly grin.

Kortha said, "I know it. I ate a meal cooked that way on the flagship. Housewives cook this way all over the three planets. You see, I am no magician after all. That's what I did to your ships. My two plates were charged cliffsides and the mesa. From the batteries of giant electronic tubes in Ruuzol, I spread those waves back and forth, caught your ships in their flow as food is caught, or as the iron bar. The high heat that was produced internally exploded every powder magazine and bit of gunpowder on your vessels. It literally blew them up from inside. That's why it was so swift and sudden, so silent."

One of the officers shuddered spasmodically, whispering, "If you'd left the power on still longer, you'd have cooked every one of us alive."

Kortha looked at him. One of the younger men looked sick. He turned away.

"You were generous," exclaimed an older officer. "In your place—"

"You men are part of Mars. My quarrel was not with you. I need you, to build Mars up again, to make her one with Earth, one with Venus. We must unite the clans, make the Confederacy strong as ever. Then we shall send deputies to Earth and Venus.

"I rather think that this time they shall listen to us."

He said again, "Go to your ships. Have them refitted and repaired. Then return for me, two weeks from today."

The officers bowed and departed.

Ilse stirred in Kortha's arm, looking up at him.

"Two weeks?" she whispered.

"You and I are returning to the Blue Grotto. After I get my real personality back—minus my red-hot temper—we will return to Ruuzol."

His hands drew her to him.

"Two weeks is a short honeymoon, but for an old hermit like me it will be an eternity of happiness!"

Their lips met avidly, as the shadows of the departing fliers flickered one by one across their bodies, and disappeared over the horizon.

Across the empty red plains of Ruuzol rolled a tumblie. Xax was going home.