There was a guard outside the airlock of each of the warships, for the crews remained aboard constantly. These guards were standing around talking to friends or moving restlessly about.

The sentries saluted Aron as he marched by, for they could see the bra.s.s on his uniform gleaming in the dark. He found what he wanted, a group of four guards talking by one airlock. They snapped to attention as he approached.

The base had expanded so rapidly, with new units and men being shifted constantly, that Aron counted on the men not knowing exactly who the Captain of the guards should be. All the sentries knew was the insignia of the Captain was before them and the man who wore them was to be obeyed.

His orders sent a chill of alarm through them. He said he had received a report of someone slipping through the guards and moving among the cargo ships. Since the soldiers were needed to patrol, he wanted these men to gather all the warship guards together and search the area of the cargo ships.

In answer to the question in their eyes, he said he knew the warships would be unguarded but he was ordering a special detail to replace them immediately.

The four dispersed and, in a few minutes, all of the lock guards had left their posts and were moving down to the cargo ships.

Time was the critical element now. Aron had taken a terrific chance by donning the Captain's uniform, but he had pulled off the bluff and now he had to capitalize on it--fast!

While the ship sentries were on their futile search, he ran from ship to ship, jumped into the open airlocks and worked quickly with pliers and a screwdriver. It was a little trick that he had learned from a talkative s.p.a.ceman in a bar many years ago. It worked on any ship. Disconnect a tiny spring, cut a wire, and it was impossible to close the ma.s.sive airlock door.

Aron wanted very badly to have those doors stay open.

Twenty-seven ships, hundreds of feet apart. He was on his last five when the search was abandoned and the sentries began returning. He hoped they would react normally, taking their time, dragging their feet and talking to each other in disgust about the wild goose chase.

On the last two ships he had to use different tactics. The sentinels had returned. When he walked up to them, they came to attention sullenly, waiting the chance to deride the usual stupidity of the soldiers and their Captain.

Instead, they had their throats cut.

Finishing the last airlock, Aron then walked through the post. Right up the main street he strode, his heart in his throat but his step and demeanor firm. The time of night helped him, for there were few soldiers about that might recognize him, and what few patches of light were thrown out from windows and doors were quickly swallowed by the black maw of darkness.

Up the main street, past the barracks, towards the last warehouse at the head of the valley. The two pillars of rock that marked the opening of the canyon served as a background for the ma.s.sive blank walls of this warehouse.

At the little door set in the center of the front wall there was a sentry. He was grumbling to himself about having to do such a d.a.m.n-fool thing as guard a warehouse when there wasn't an enemy within light years of the building.

He was wrong. And the enemy killed him.

Inside the warehouse, there being no lock on the door, Aron groped about in the stuffy, pitch blackness till he came to a little fire station set against a wall. There was a locker containing an insulated suit, hatchet and other fire-fighting equipment, at this station.

He donned the fire-fighting suit and helmet and went to one end of the building that was walled-off. In this separate room was the emergency power supply for the base. There was a turbine with a fuel supply and tiers of high-voltage storage batteries. There was also a fire hose on one wall because of the presence of the combustible turbine fuel.

Aron had to pause for a minute to gather his thoughts. He had come so far, so fast through the first steps of his plan and now he was ready for the final action.

What Aron now needed for success was three things. Sulphuric acid and salt water in large quant.i.ties and the right wind.

The first two had been thoughtfully provided by the People's Republic.

The third was a matter of waiting. The land on Kligor was dry. What little water supplies were available weren't enough to maintain a base the size the garrison had built. Since the ocean was only fifteen miles from the valley where the base was located, it was a simple matter to pipe in water.

One of the mammoth cargo ships had been loaded with six inch flexible hose, tougher than steel, wound on drums. It was a matter of a day's work to fly the ship slowly from the ocean to the base, laying out fifteen miles of this flexible pipe on the ground.

It was salt water, then, that was received at the base. Most of it was filtered through a chemical plant in the valley to make fresh water, but it was salt water that was available to the fire hoses for the needed quant.i.ty and pressure.

The emergency power supply and the fire hoses were only normal safety precautions, but now, in the hands of the Traitor, they became deadly weapons.

By pushing the lever that removed the lids from the storage batteries automatically for inspection he had sulphuric acid--for the law of conservation of energy said that man had achieved the highest efficiency of electro-chemical conversion, in practical form, in the lead acid storage battery.

After finding the light switch and flipping it on, Aron found this lever and released it. Now all he needed was wind, and he had that, blowing a cool ten miles an hour down the canyon and over the valley. He had to consult the weather maps at his station for weeks to determine the probability of this wind occurring and the weather conditions that produced it. One small breeze to chart, when his recording instruments gave hourly descriptions of the whole planet's climate. It wasn't too hard a job.

Yet that breeze had to be at the right time, at night and on the night he wanted. Close enough to the attack date to be effective yet not too soon. Last night his instruments recorded the data that would produce this wind, so he was making his strike tonight.

He could not stand and gloat exultantly over his success. There were dead sentries and sprung airlocks that might be discovered.

With a twist of a nozzle, the fire hose came to life, throwing a pulsing stream of water on the batteries.

What Aron had done by ingenuity, luck, daring and careful planning was finished. It was now nature's turn.

The next night after his one man attack on the base, Aron had a visitor at his weather station. The visitor was in sad shape. His clothing was disheveled, his face dirty and unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and he seemed to be on the verge of a mental collapse with a frantic gleam to his eye.

But he held a pistol in his hand and Aron didn't.

He was an officer of the Intelligence Corps of the People's Republic. It was not the officer who had first visited Aron, but one of the others that Aron had come vaguely to know, like picking out sheep from a flock.

He had been away from the base on a planetary reconnaissance mission the night before. Since then he had gone through a nightmare ordeal.

He had returned to his base to find sixty ships of the People's Republic about to fall into enemy hands without a struggle, because 200,000 men were dead or dying of chlorine gas poisoning.

The gas that had come pouring out of the warehouse at the head of the valley last night. It had billowed down the valley, its streamers and tentacles pushed by the gentle wind bringing the sleeping men awake coughing and gasping only to fall asleep again--permanently.

It had seeped through the barracks, the warehouses and into the open airlocks of ships, while dying men tried frantically to close those locks. They wouldn't close though, and the s.p.a.cemen died puzzled as to why not.

In galactic warfare, with the emphasis on speed, maneuverability, range and power of s.p.a.ce cannon, et cetera, everyone had forgotten an archaic weapon--gas. Aron hadn't.

After the horror of this discovery, the Intelligence officer had taken a flier to Aron's station.

He was feeling justifiably sorry for himself and his empire's thwarted plans for conquest, now completely impossible since the United Empire had been notified of the impending attack, and since the most strategic part of that attack, the Kligor task force, had been destroyed.

His military mind refused to admit that one man, the Traitor, Aron, could have caused this tragic defeat. He was willing, however, to vent his desire for revenge on this one man.

Aron was unmoved by his threats and denunciations. The Intelligence man was going to kill him, certainly, but the officer wanted to make him suffer first, to make him squirm.

When one man has defeated and completely made fools of a galactic empire, killing is too simple.

"We weren't stupid enough to try to coerce you with pure logic," the agent was saying to Aron. "We knew you must have a large amount of patriotism to even take such a thankless job as this Kligor post."

"There had to be something else, some stronger reason to make you reject your empire."

Aron watched him warily. He could tell by the malevolent gleam of the Intelligence man's eye and the sneer that he was playing a trump, that he had a choice bit of information he thought would hurt Aron. All Aron could do was listen.

"You came here happily married and full of patriotic zeal," the armed man said. "That way you were no prospect for us.