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Read Ebook: The Jupiter Weapon by Fontenay Charles L
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Ebook has 161 lines and 8140 words, and 4 pages
THE JUPITER WEAPON
He was a living weapon of destruction--immeasurably powerful, utterly invulnerable. There was only one question: Was he human?
Trella feared she was in for trouble even before Motwick's head dropped forward on his arms in a drunken stupor. The two evil-looking men at the table nearby had been watching her surreptitiously, and now they shifted restlessly in their chairs.
Trella had not wanted to come to the Golden Satellite. It was a squalid saloon in the rougher section of Jupiter's View, the terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede. Motwick, already drunk, had insisted.
A woman could not possibly make her way through these streets alone to the better section of town, especially one clad in a silvery evening dress. Her only hope was that this place had a telephone. Perhaps she could call one of Motwick's friends; she had no one on Ganymede she could call a real friend herself.
Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with a steely arm.
Trella swung with her whole body, and slapped him so hard he nearly fell from his chair. As she walked swiftly toward the bar, he leaped up to follow her.
There were only two other people in the Golden Satellite: the fat, mustached bartender and a short, square-built man at the bar. The latter swung around at the pistol-like report of her slap, and she saw that, though no more than four and a half feet tall, he was as heavily muscled as a lion.
His face was clean and open, with close-cropped blond hair and honest blue eyes. She ran to him.
"Help me!" she cried. "Please help me!"
He began to back away from her.
"I can't," he muttered in a deep voice. "I can't help you. I can't do anything."
The dark man was at her heels. In desperation, she dodged around the short man and took refuge behind him. Her protector was obviously unwilling, but the dark man, faced with his massiveness, took no chances. He stopped and shouted:
"Kregg!"
The other man at the table arose, ponderously, and lumbered toward them. He was immense, at least six and a half feet tall, with a brutal, vacant face.
Evading her attempts to stay behind him, the squat man began to move down the bar away from the approaching Kregg. The dark man moved in on Trella again as Kregg overtook his quarry and swung a huge fist like a sledgehammer.
"The bar!" yelled Kregg. "I hit the damn bar!"
At this juncture, the bartender took a hand. Leaning far over the bar, he swung a full bottle in a complete arc. It smashed on Kregg's head, splashing the floor with liquor, and Kregg sank stunned to his knees. The dark man, who had grabbed Trella's arm, released her and ran for the door.
Moving agilely around the end of the bar, the bartender stood over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged bottleneck in his hand menacingly.
"Get out!" rumbled the bartender. "I'll have no coppers raiding my place for the likes of you!"
Kregg stumbled to his feet and staggered out. Trella ran to the unconscious Motwick's side.
"That means you, too, lady," said the bartender beside her. "You and your boy friend get out of here. You oughtn't to have come here in the first place."
"May I help you, Miss?" asked a deep, resonant voice behind her.
She straightened from her anxious examination of Motwick. The squat man was standing there, an apologetic look on his face.
She looked contemptuously at the massive muscles whose help had been denied her. Her arm ached where the dark man had grasped it. The broad face before her was not unhandsome, and the blue eyes were disconcertingly direct, but she despised him for a coward.
"I'm sorry I couldn't fight those men for you, Miss, but I just couldn't," he said miserably, as though reading her thoughts. "But no one will bother you on the street if I'm with you."
"A lot of protection you'd be if they did!" she snapped. "But I'm desperate. You can carry him to the Stellar Hotel for me."
The gravity of Ganymede was hardly more than that of Earth's moon, but the way the man picked up the limp Motwick with one hand and tossed him over a shoulder was startling: as though he lifted a feather pillow. He followed Trella out the door of the Golden Satellite and fell in step beside her. Immediately she was grateful for his presence. The dimly lighted street was not crowded, but she didn't like the looks of the men she saw.
The transparent dome of Jupiter's View was faintly visible in the reflected night lights of the colonial city, but the lights were overwhelmed by the giant, vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself, riding high in the sky.
"I'm Quest Mansard, Miss," said her companion. "I'm just in from Jupiter."
"I'm Trella Nuspar," she said, favoring him with a green-eyed glance. "You mean Io, don't you--or Moon Five?"
"No," he said, grinning at her. He had an engaging grin, with even white teeth. "I meant Jupiter."
"You're lying," she said flatly. "No one has ever landed on Jupiter. It would be impossible to blast off again."
"My parents landed on Jupiter, and I blasted off from it," he said soberly. "I was born there. Have you ever heard of Dr. Eriklund Mansard?"
"I certainly have," she said, her interest taking a sudden upward turn. "He developed the surgiscope, didn't he? But his ship was drawn into Jupiter and lost."
"It was drawn into Jupiter, but he landed it successfully," said Quest. "He and my mother lived on Jupiter until the oxygen equipment wore out at last. I was born and brought up there, and I was finally able to build a small rocket with a powerful enough drive to clear the planet."
She looked at him. He was short, half a head shorter than she, but broad and powerful as a man might be who had grown up in heavy gravity. He trod the street with a light, controlled step, seeming to deliberately hold himself down.
"If Dr. Mansard succeeded in landing on Jupiter, why didn't anyone ever hear from him again?" she demanded.
"Because," said Quest, "his radio was sabotaged, just as his ship's drive was."
"Jupiter strength," she murmured, looking him over coolly. "You wear Motwick on your shoulder like a scarf. But you couldn't bring yourself to help a woman against two thugs."
He flushed.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That's something I couldn't help."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. It's not that I'm afraid, but there's something in me that makes me back away from the prospect of fighting anyone."
Trella sighed. Cowardice was a state of mind. It was peculiarly inappropriate, but not unbelievable, that the strongest and most agile man on Ganymede should be a coward. Well, she thought with a rush of sympathy, he couldn't help being what he was.
They had reached the more brightly lighted section of the city now. Trella could get a cab from here, but the Stellar Hotel wasn't far. They walked on.
Trella had the desk clerk call a cab to deliver the unconscious Motwick to his home. She and Quest had a late sandwich in the coffee shop.
"I landed here only a week ago," he told her, his eyes frankly admiring her honey-colored hair and comely face. "I'm heading for Earth on the next spaceship."
"We'll be traveling companions, then," she said. "I'm going back on that ship, too."
For some reason she decided against telling him that the assignment on which she had come to the Jupiter system was to gather his own father's notebooks and take them back to Earth.
Motwick was an irresponsible playboy whom Trella had known briefly on Earth, and Trella was glad to dispense with his company for the remaining three weeks before the spaceship blasted off. She found herself enjoying the steadier companionship of Quest.
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