V
The shocked hush seemed to reach to all parts of the room. Lolan's thoughts were bitter ones. They concerned the thing that had cursed his people for centuries. Their childish inability to think a problem through, their pathetic attempts to fight back against their aggressors. Now those qualities had doomed them again to misery.
Atarkus was muttering to himself. "We—we thought they would work if we could get within ten or fifteen feet of them."
"But how are you going to approach that close when their guns are effective at two hundred feet?" Lolan countered. Idly he glanced at the piles and piles of ray pistols still being doled out. "How do they operate? Draw on the Martian power station, I suppose?"
Mora pointed at a massive apparatus at the upper end of the hall. "Electronic power," she told him. "We generate our own power. As long as the turbines are running, the guns will operate."
Lolan's eyes went a little wide at that. He scratched his head, scowled, then walked off a little. He whirled about and came back to them. "That gives me a clue! The Martian guns also draw from a central station. Only it's a radioactive type of power. Underneath the barracks there's a huge mass of radite. If that stuff were carried off, they'd have guns no more effective than water pistols!"
Irak snorted. "Who's going to carry it off? It weighs tons. I've seen it. It's like a great lump of radium. If you get too close, even, you'll be poisoned."
"We couldn't carry it off—in its present form! But there is a large, unused sewer hole in a room near it. If we could break it up, using workmen's lead suits, it might be possible to drop it into the underground river. Contact with the water would result in an explosion that would destroy its radioactivity."
Atarkus licked his lips. "Would this be possible? Could anyone get that close to it without being caught?"