LITMIR.BIZ

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human feeling in your make-up. You’re nothing but a....”

      “I’m not interested, Abna,” the Amazon broke in. “Open that floor trap and get the ladder dropped. We’re fifty feet from the surface of Io, and that’s where I’m leaving you. You won’t die. There is enough edible vegetation on Io to last you the rest of your life—and water, too. Not a very glorious end for the once-proud ruler of Jove, but necessary.”

      Abna said no more. He moved forward to the floor trap and began to slide the bolts back—then abruptly his hands shot upward instead and simultaneously gripped the Amazon’s gun wrist and her throat. A vicious twist flung the gun out of her grip, and the clutch on her throat slammed her against the curved wall.

      “Since you want it this way, Vi, all right,” Abna said.

      The Amazon’s hands clamped suddenly on Abna’s wrist as he pinned her neck. She strained her muscles to the utter­most and, powerful though he was, he had to give way because of pain in his wrist and forearm. He brought his other hand up, then snatched it back as the Amazon’s teeth bit into it savagely.

      The instant his grip left her she brought up her knee and struck him in the stomach. He doubled, gasping slightly, only to meet the more-than-human impact of her right fist as it slammed into his jaw. He staggered a few paces and half fell at the bench in front of the control board. When he straightened up again the Amazon had recovered her protonic gun.

      With her foot she kicked away the bolts on the floor trap and then lifted it back on its hinges. The air of Io came drifting into the control room, heavy with the scent of genetically-engineered vegetation. She snapped a switch on the control panel and from the bot­tom of the Ultra, below the trap, a ladder extended itself into the depths.

      “Get down,” she ordered coldly.

      Abna considered her, then he smiled faintly. She wondered why. Then, without another word, he stepped into the hole in the floor and began to descend. When he reached the lowest rung and dropped lightly in Io’s third-normal gravity, she closed the switch that returned the ladder into posi­tion and rebolted the trapdoor.

      Her last vision of Abna as she retracted the suspensory-screws and switched in the atomic power was of him standing on a rocky ledge watching the machine’s movement to the upper reaches. He became remote, and then was gone.

      Just as the Amazon was preparing to settle at the control board, she was suddenly flung to the metal floor and held there by a tremendous surge of acceleration with which even the gravity nullifiers could not cope. At the same moment she heard the change in rhythm in the power plant as its load was nearly quadrupled.

      Weighted down with the force of countless tons, the Amazon clawed her way along the floor, straining every muscle in a frantic effort to reach the control board. She realized what had happened. Abna, when he had fallen by the switches, had altered the delayed-action power control. She knew what it meant if she did not reach it. The Ultra would hurtle into outer space at inconceivable speed until every scrap of atomic power was used up. The acceleration, constantly mounting, would so crush down on her heart and lungs that she would become unconscious, strong as she was, until the power plant was exhausted and constant velocity achieved.

      She reached the bench below the control board and lay panting. Then she began to strain upward. Her fingertips came within three inches of the controls—then she could strain no more.

      She collapsed senseless on the floor.

      * * * *

      To the southwest of London stood a residence apart from its fellows. Its tenant, a tall, austere-looking man of uncertain age, was not the type to attract attention. Jeffrey Carshaw was considered to be a wealthy bachelor who had retired to this home with a single manservant to escape the rush and bustle of the busy city.

      Jeffrey Carshaw, however, was Sefner Quorne. To this home he had retired when his grandiose scheme for destroying the female sex of the Earth race had been beaten by the dual activities of the Amazon and Abna. Here he had lived quietly, his features altered by disguise, his whereabouts unknown by his electrical trick of altering his aura.

      On the day after the ceremony Quorne sat in his library, pondering. Presently he rang a bell and his ser­vant entered. He was the only other survivor of the Atlantean race whom Quorne had brought to Earth with him.

      “You rang, excellency?” he asked, still clinging to the designation Quorne had borne on Jupiter.

      “Yes. I’ve verified a suspicion of mine, Nalgo, and I think you should know it. It was not the real Arch­bishop of Canterbury who married the Golden Amazon and his ex-highness yesterday. It was a synthetic image. This morning I viewed the archbishop as he lay in state after his sudden demise yesterday. I chose an oppor­tune moment to remove a sample of his skin from the fingertip—and my an­alysis in the laboratory satisfies me that he was never a real human being.

      “The Golden Amazon created that archbishop from the original and held him by her mind until she was too far away to do it any longer. Then he collapsed and ‘died’.”

      “Might I ask, excellency, why she did this?”

      Quorne smiled slightly. “I have never succeeded in divining the intentions of the Golden Amazon, Nalgo—nor, for that matter, do I particularly want to. All we know is that her marriage is not legal, which will probably distress his ex-highness quite a lot if and when he learns of it. However, the interest­ing thing to us is that we now have a lever by which we can perhaps win popular favour. Suppose I stepped into the scene and brought this archbishop back to life? What would the people think of that?”

      “Excellent idea, sir—but do you know where he is?”

      “Yes. From the constitution of the synthetic image—which is exact in every detail with its original pattern—it was possible for me to mathematic­ally determine the archbishop’s aura number. After that, the compass showed me where he is. The Amazon has no longer a monopoly over an aura compass, Nalgo. The archbishop is still alive and being kept a prisoner in a lonely house in Cornwall. I as­sume that several of the Amazon’s most trusted confidants are keeping watch over him.”

      “She has taken a risk doing that, excellency. If he should escape, her whole subterfuge will be exposed.”

      Quorne shrugged. “Obviously she had some reason for keeping him alive, because she knows the image must ‘die’ with her influence removed. Maybe she even planned as we are planning to restore him from apparent death and strengthen her hold on the imagi­nation of the people. That is by the way: we are going to act while she is away. According to her public announcement, she will not return for two months. We can do much in that time.”

      Nalgo asked: “Am I to assume, excellency, that having failed to achieve dominance over the race by destroying the females, you now intend to turn this planet into a scientific workshop for the conquest of the Solar System—and later the Universe?”

      Quorne nodded. “We come from a race who hold power above everything, Nalgo. We have knowledge beyond anything these Earth fools ever heard of. We can dominate this planet by the science we possess. Tonight we will rescue the archbishop.”

      “Yes, excellency. And then what? The synthetic body is guarded night and day, and will be until the funeral. How do you propose to—“

      “We have weapons, Nalgo, which can reduce those guards to suspended ani­mation, their faculties moving so slowly they will have no idea of what is going on around them, and no remembrance of anything when they recover. The body will still be there, but it will be the real one, sleeping, until I am ready to ‘restore’ it. Yes, indeed, I can im­agine how these Earth fools will wor­ship it. Anything a little beyond their imagination they call a miracle. They have no scientific intelligence what­ever, Nalgo.”

      Nalgo nodded. Whatever Sefner Quorne said was law—with good reason. Quorne’s knowledge of science bordered on the uncanny.

      “We have much to do,” Quorne said, rising. “You had better come down to the laboratory with me.”

      Thus

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