The Mysterious Planet: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

It was to the president I was reporting.”

It was a good thing that Juan had seen the risk such a trick would bring, Bob thought. Otherwise, Jakes might have gotten away with it—if he hadn’t already done so. While the situation had seemed hopeless before, nothing could be worse than the results of injury to young Emo.

“What will you do, Bob?” Juan asked.

It was a question that Bob had been about to ask himself, and he realized he had no answer for it. He hadn’t had time to think. He’d acted on pure instinct, get there first, and depend on what he found for his actions. It still seemed the only thing to do.

The sudden spat of something against the top of the car warned him that the guards meant business. They had cut off their whistle and almost caught him. He jerked the car into another side street, almost running down two pedestrians. He’d have cracked up long before if there had been any real traffic on Thule. Then he began zigzagging toward Center Park, trying to keep out of the line of fire from the pursuing guards.

Then another thought occurred to him. “Those tractor beams that hold down the Icarius—maybe he can’t work them! The Thulians found the papers and substituted false ones for them!”

“I know of that,” Juan answered. “No, it won’t stop him. He found that the papers had been changed. That is why he decided he must escape now, instead of when he had planned.”

Bob was counting on the fact that Jakes would have gone as quietly as he could toward the park. With Emo taken along by force, he would probably have had to move along by stealth, picking subways with no one in them, and lurking at the furthest ends of platforms. It should have taken him quite a while to reach the park that way.

Something spattered against the car again, just missing Bob’s head. Then the car bucked, and began to twist sideways. One of the bullets—real bullets, not wax ones—must have punctured a tire.

He fought it to the curb, and had the door open as it stopped. There were several people standing there, and he’d picked the place because of that. He leaped out, with Juan behind him, and dashed through the group. They would keep the guards from firing—perhaps long enough.

The trick seemed to work, and they still had a chance. The park was only one block away, now. But Bob couldn’t head there directly. He swung around a corner, then dashed across the street. The guards would expect him to take the shortest way, which was straight ahead.

Therefore, the only thing to do was to go around the opposite block.

His legs began to ache, and Juan was having trouble keeping up with him. He slowed down, recognizing his mistake too late. He should have stopped running at once.

Juan caught his arm, and pulled him into the lobby of a building. “Underground, then up,” he gasped.

It would be better than going around the block. This time, they tried to look casual as they moved down the escalator. With their rate of breathing, it wouldn’t have passed close inspection, but there seemed to be no one around to look.

A couple of men were standing on the next lower level, but they didn’t seem to notice anything unusual as Bob and Juan passed them. Then ahead there was the “Up” escalator.

They rode up it, keeping their eyes peeled for a sign of trouble in the lobby they were entering. It seemed quiet, and the street beyond was free of guards.

This time, as they turned the corner, they were facing directly toward the park. Ahead, through the shrubbery, Bob could see the needle nose of the little Icarius. It was still not too late!

They glanced about, then crossed the street quickly, and were behind trees that would conceal them from any passing guard cars. By sticking to the smaller paths, they remained fairly inconspicuous.

But now guards were beginning to arrive. Through the thin shrubbery, Bob could see their cars drive up, and men pile out of them. He viewed them with both alarm and hope. They might be able to stop Jakes’s crazy plan.

The shrubbery thinned out for a space, and Bob and Juan had to find a way around. He remembered that there had been another of the trees with low-hanging branches to the north of the little ship, and began threading in that direction, trying to see what was going on at the ship. But there was nothing to see that made sense.

Approximately fifty guards stood at the far side of the ship, with drawn guns. They were watching something eagerly, but Bob couldn’t see what.

The tree lay ahead then, and he slipped under it, and moved forward to draw back the branches for a view of the clearing.

Simon Jakes was already there, a wide grin on his face. In one hand, he held a long piece of string stretched out tightly and running back into the Icarius. With the other, he was busy taking a cover off one of the little tractor-beam installations that were holding the Icarius locked to the concrete base on which it sat. The cover came off, and he probed about expertly inside.

For a moment, his face tensed, as if something had to be done very carefully. Then he relaxed again, and tossed the tractor-beam gadget back easily.

“The right combination or it explodes—and just the right spots,” Juan breathed in Bob’s ear.

“He explained it to me once when I was to escape with him. It locks itself, one place to the ship, one place deep in the earth, until it is released. But what is he doing with the string?”

Bob could guess, but there was no need for it. Simon stood up and faced toward the crowd of guards.

“All right, you,” he called out. “Get over there fifty feet to the left. And you’d better make sure you keep any new arrivals from getting ideas. Hey, new arrivals!”

He was in his glory, the obvious hero, in complete control of the crowd against him, and on his way to perform what he thought were great deeds. The amazing fact was that somehow he now did manage to seem like a dominating, forceful man, in spite of his appearance.