its weird soundless tickling of my eardrums!
IF you've never been out on an Interplanetary Space Fleet Base, you won't be familiar with vibrasirens. Earth and the planets close to it still signal space raid alarms by audible electasirens, loud wailing alarms that shriek through the air like a dying banshee.
But on Saturn, as on other Federation Space Fleet Bases, these inaudible vibrasirens are used to sound alarm for attack or danger. They travel soundlessly through the air, reacting only on the surface of your eardrums, starting them to tingle.
I was on my feet the moment the sensations of the vibrasiren came to me. On my feet and dashing to the barred section on the door of my cell. Attack alarm!
The worst was evidently just starting to happen!
A guard ran toward my cell. But from the look on his face I knew instantly that he was not thinking of stopping for a chat. He was headed right on past, that boy. He'd heard the vibrasiren too, and wasn't wasting time to seek shelter.
"Hey!" I yelped. "Hey!"
He saw me, and I caught his eyes gazing in surprise at my uniform tunic. He broke stride falteringly.
"Let me out of here!" I howled. "I'm a Space Marine. I was slugged and tossed in here by Martian saboteurs working from the inside of headquarters here!"
It was a wild tale, improbable maybe. But my audience was a damned excited guard. An alarm had been sounded. A uniformed Space Marine telling tales of dirty work and Martians running loose in the cell blocks. Hell, he was dumb enough to fall for it. Don't tell me he was half-witted, for remember I'm an expert on degrees of stupidity—my buddy being Shane.
Excitedly, he fumbled at the electron buttons that opened my cell door. Then I was out, leaving him far behind as I dashed down that corridor. The attack alarm of the vibrasiren was still tickling relentlessly at my ears.
I hit the twisting Saturnian streets two minutes later. No one had stopped me, or tried to. Hell, an attack alarm had sounded, and this was business.
At the landing platforms, I found a space launch from the F.S.S. Western Hemisphere. It was almost loaded with space tars and Marines who'd heard the vibrasiren sounding the attack and were now running out from the saloons and joints to get up into the space harbor to their ship and battle stations.
The last of them piled on, and we were off. From far in the strata above us, we could already hear the peculiar bark of atomic cannon fire opening to repel this attack.
Marines and space tars were turning excitedly to one another, jabbering bewilderedly, indignantly.
"Who in the hell do you suppose—?"
"What in the devil do you think—?"
ALL of them were outraged, all of them cool and determined, but none of them aware what interplanetary enemy of the Federation had launched this attack. Many opinioned that it was Mars, others argued that it was Venus. None could agree.
Except me. And there wasn't any doubt of it in my sickly certain conscience that this could be nothing but a Martian attack. A Martian attack Trojan horsed, so to speak, by Clenoka—from the information unwittingly handed over to him by one Sergeant Shane, late of the Federation Space Marines!
