The Chaos Weapon Read Free Page B

crests. The part of the city that did not sink into the fractured terrain was hopelessly fragmented by the tides of heaving bedrock. The immortal stability of the land on which man had dared to build was now part of a demon conspiracy apparently designed to reduce everything to one flat, featureless plain of scarcely compacted dust.
    Nor was this all. With open-mouthed dismay and fascination the watchers saw the huge avalanche gaining momentum as the shockwaves provoked it to move down toward Edel. Even the mountains themselves had been torn apart, and large fragments broke freeand slipped with the mighty mass to pile high and dangerously on the granite backbone behind the inclined face of the scarp. The bruising upheaval had cracked the foundations of the great granite rock itself. Without warning, the entire face began to lean outward under the weight, and to fall with a calamitous slowness, crushing almost a third of the shattered city. This was followed by the full weight of the avalanche, which, now released from its former constraint, proceeded to bury much of what the scarp face had left uncrushed.
    “Q.E.D.!” said the dark man after a long period of silence. His voice was one from which all trace of emotion had been carefully strained. “Rutter, are you still in touch with Marshal Hover?”
    “In the middle of all that?” Rutter was incredulous. He looked bitterly across the altered landscape over which hung a low cloud of settling dust.
    “Keep trying to make contact until you either get an answer or you can prove he’s dead. But primarily concentrate your resources on finding the man Hover was following. Unlikely as it may seem, there’s a very strong chance he’s still alive. If he’s who and what I think he is, he would have entered that situation very well prepared. And I want him, Captain. Knowing what he knows could be just about the most important imperative for the survival of the human race. Is that understood?”
    “No,” said Rutter. “But that won’t interfere with the execution of your orders. We’ll call for disaster backup, then set one of the lab-ships down on the city itself. If any people are left down there in fragments larger than pieces of mince, we’ll fetch them back in plastic bags and you can sort the bits out later.”
    A technician reported directly to Saraya. “Look, the cat’s coming back.” He pointed to the terrain scanner, which showed quite plainly the vehicle moving back over its original course. “It must have been waiting just out of range.”
    “That means he too expects to find a very specialsurvivor,” said the strange dark man, wrapping his black cloak closer round his shoulders.
    In the seconds before the maelstrom broke, Hover had come into clear sight of his quarry. The man had been kneeling before his bundle on the ground, tearing away the snow-packed netting which concealed a streamlined pod underneath. The apparatus was not familiar to the marshal, but its purpose rapidly became apparent. When the first subterranean shock pitched the ground as if it were the deck of a storm-tossed ship, the man had opened the pod and brought forth something that spread outward and upward like the blossoming of a great white flower. As the flower bloomed, the man stepped into its center; then the great petals closed around him to form a continuous cocoon that continued to expand until it formed a ball of some five meters diameter.
    All at once the marshal understood. Although this contraption was of strange design, it had to be some form of space-disaster capsule. Out in the highway well clear of any buildings, the man was now encapsulated in a womb formed from a series of super-tough concentric balloons. Nothing but a massive crushing force could hurt him, and cradled against all shock he could encounter most of the stresses of a space disaster and still survive. Furthermore, because of its relative lightness and its spherical shape, the sphere was perfectly suited