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the control room. She sat down before the communicator, glanced up once more
at the plasmoid station in the screen, got up restlessly and went over to the
Commissioner s chair. She stood there, looking down at him. The Commissioner
slept on.
Then Repulsive said it again.
No! Trigger whispered fiercely. I won t. I can t. You can t make me do it!
There was a stillness then. In the stillness, it was made very clear that
nobody intended to make her do anything.
And then the stillness just waited.
She cried a little.
So this was it.
All right, she said.
The armor suit s triple light-beam blazed into the wide, low, black,
wet-looking mouth rushing toward her. It was much bigger than she had thought
when looking at it from the ship. Far behind her, the fire needles of the
single gun pit which her passage to the station had aroused still slashed
mindlessly about. They weren t geared to stop suits, and they hadn t come
anywhere near her. But the plasmoids looked geared to stop suits.
They were swarming in clusters in the black mouth like maggots in a rotting
skull. Part of the swarms had spilled out over the lips of the mouth,
clinging, crawling, rippling swiftly about. Trigger shifted the flight
controls with the fingers of one hand, dropping a little, then straightening
again. She might be coming in too fast. But she had to get past that mass at
the opening.
Then the black mouth suddenly yawned wide before her. Her left hand pressed
the gun handle. Twin blasts stabbed ahead, blinding white, struck the churning
masses, blazed over them. They burned, scattered, exploded, and rolled back,
burning and exploding, in a double wave to meet her.
Too fast! Repulsive said anxiously. Much too fast!
She knew it. But she couldn t have forced herself to do it slowly. The armor
suit slammed at a slant into a piled, writhing, burning hardness of plasmoid
bodies, bounced upward. She went over and over, yanking down all the way on
the flight controls. She closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them again, the suit hung poised a little above black uneven
flooring, turned back half toward the entrance mouth. A black ceiling was less
than twenty feet above her head.
The plasmoids were there. The suit s light beams played over the massed,
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moving ranks: squat bodies and sinuous ones, immensities that scraped the
ceiling, stalked limbs and gaping nutcracker jaws, blurs of motion her eyes
couldn t step down to define into shapes. Some still blazed with her guns
white fire. The closest were thirty feet away.
They stayed there. They didn t come any closer.
She swung the suit slowly away from the entrance. The ring was closed all
about her. But it wasn t tightening.
Repulsive had thought he could do it.
She asked in her mind, Which way?
She got a feeling of direction, turned the suit a little more and started it
gliding forward. The ranks ahead didn t give way, but they went down. Those
that could go down. Some weren t built for it. The suit bumped up gently
against one huge bulk, and a six-inch pale blue eye looked in at her for a
moment as she went circling around it. Eyes for what?
somebody in the back of her mind wondered briefly. She glanced into the suit s
rear view screen and saw that the ones who had gone down were getting up
again, mixed with the ones who came crowding after her. Thirty feet away!
Repulsive was doing it.
So far there weren t any guns. If they hit guns, that would be her job and the
suit s. The king plasmoid should be regretting by now that it had wasted its
experimental human material. Though it mightn t have been really wasted; it
might be incorporated in the stuff that came crowding after her, and kept
going down ahead.
Black ceiling, black floor seemed to stretch on endlessly. She kept the suit
moving slowly along. At last the beams picked up low walls ahead, converging
at the point toward which the suit was gliding. At the point of convergence
there seemed to be a narrow passage.
Plasmoid bodies were wedged into it.
The suit pulled them out one by one, its steel grippers clamping down upon
things no softer than itself. But it had power to work with and they didn t,
at the moment. Behind the ones it pulled out there were presently glimpses of
the swiftly weaving motion of giant red worm-shapes sealing up the passage.
After a while, they stopped weaving each time the suit
returned and started again as it withdrew, dragging out another plasmoid body.
Then the suit went gliding over a stilled tangle of red worm bodies. And there
was the sealed end of the passage.
The stuff was still soft. The guns blazed, bit into it, ate it away, their
brilliance washing back over the suit. The sealing gave way before the suit
did. They went through and came out into . . .
She didn t know what they had come out into. It was like a fog of darkness,
growing thicker as they went sliding forward. The light beams seemed to be
dimming. Then, they quietly went out as if they d switched themselves off.
In blackness, she fingered the light controls and knew they weren t switched
off.
Repulsive! she cried in her mind.
Repulsive couldn t help with the blackness. She got the feeling of direction.
The blackness seemed to be soaking behind her eyes. She held the speed
throttle steady in fingers slippery with sweat, and that was the only way she
could tell they were still moving forward.
After a while, they bumped gently against something that had to be a wall, it
was so big, though at first she wasn t sure it was a wall. They moved along it
for a time, then came to the end of it and were moving in the right direction
again.
They seemed to be in a passage now, a rather narrow one. They touched walls
and ceiling from time to time. She thought they were moving downward.
There was a picture in front of her. She realized suddenly that she had been
watching it for some time. But it wasn t until this moment that she became
really aware of it.
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The beast was big, strong and angry. It bellowed and screamed, shaking and
covered with foam. She couldn t see it too clearly, but she had the impression
of mad, staring eyes and a terrible lust to crush and destroy.
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