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!"'