And where was Vale? The warming sense of her presence was withdrawn. Fear stabbed into him again. Fear—and those tendrils of white-hot anguish.
He was back in the body bank ... alone ... with the Jovian. Black fury burst once more against his reeling mind, but through it rose the faintest of echoes: "Give him hell, Karl!"
Energy, strength, courage, power flooded through him. Still, there was no reality, no visible enemy, no material hall with body banks and mosaic walls and solid plastic floors. Out of a black sea bobbed a cloudy sphere of coruscating evil hate. Venard leaped, his body bending through an arc of torture. He had the sphere in his dripping hands, holding it high. He must hurl it from him, smash it, but it clung to him, seemed a part of him. Blindness thickened his sight; then, as it thinned, he blinked. The Jovian cubicle body was smashing against the high, up-curving wall of the buried body bank hall in S.S.C.
A dazzling greenish glare exploded in a bright crackling flame that flung him full length. In his mind burst an ultimate unhuman cry of raw agony from the Jovian. It climbed beyond his auditory range so high that a stark-shock wrenched his spine and shook his brain in his skull. And the Jovian spewed out in a pulsating, semi-liquid mass, ran down the smoothly polished mosaic.
Venard rubbed his burning eyes, as he sat there wearily trying to grasp some general understanding. His body was terribly tired. The Martian medic helped him to his feet, but he couldn't stand alone. While he swayed dizzily, the Martie's body sac nodded gently. "Thank you, Lieutenant Venard. S.S.C. is free at long last. We had abandoned all hope. A burial place of knowledge is always a final graveyard of hope."
Venard was leaning wearily against the wall and the Martian medic was lifting the first Zharkon's brain-sac into the refrigerated bank when Larson and Vale came running down the hall. Larson was a spectacle for sore eyes. His uniform was waving tatters, his skin a splotched mass from digestive acids of the carnivorous clam. Vale wrapped unforgotten arms around Venard's neck and for a while he forgot Larson, the Zharkon's brain. He forgot almost everything.
"You defeated it," she breathed proudly, eyes shining. "You defeated it! We couldn't help here in S.S.C. We were powerless. But, for that few days when I was free, you would never have known about it."
"He defeated it?" howled Larson from a raw, flaming face. "I defeated it. Me and the Sea People did, that is. But we ain't got any time to argue about who gets the medals. The Martians are outside with a couple of Battlewagons. They're setting up electro-cannons, vibratory beams, oxo-hydro guns, and God alone knows what they got in secret. They're gonna break in here or bust."
The Martian medic said, "They can't, of course. The force fields and—"