Read Unto Him That Hath for Free Online Page B

pushed it on, until it crowded the pin at twenty-five, and the jets began to lose apparent power. There he leveled off, set her into a tight circle, and gently dropped the bottle of acid down into the inside, where it would begin eating through the tough metal and tougher insulation, to short-circuit unimaginable power. His foot snapped the hatch back, before any of the fumes could get into the cabin.
    For a second longer, he let the plane circle, before he reached for the controls, to head her out towards the ocean.
    "Hands up, Mike!"
    The voice broke on the words, with the fear riding thickly on them. And Mike's hands shot up as he turned to see Enright crawling out from the rear, his stark white face dirty and strained. The man was shaking, and the gun wavering as it pointed at Mike—the one thing a man who has seen guns in action will always fear.
    "You damned fool," Mike said, trying to keep his voice level. "Do you realize you're sentencing yourself to death?"
    "They won't catch me." Enright had pulled himself up now, bracing himself to withstand the strain of pressure created by the turning of the ship, now much slower and looser than before, but still too much for comfort outside the field of the pseudo-transformer. Mike realized suddenly that the man had probably been blacked out and had seen none of his work with the acid.
    "They won't catch me," Enright said again. "And this time, they'll be satisfied. They'll have to be satisfied. My boys are prisoners of Pan-Asia, Mike Dane! They have been for three years."
    Horror and disgust hit at Mike as he stared at the half-hysterical man. "You!"
    "Me." Enright settled into the other seat, and pulled the control stick over to his side, kicking it around on its frame without letting the gun drop from its aim at Mike. "Call me a spy, Mike. Go ahead. You can't say anything I haven't said. When I sent them the athodyd plans —and the robot schematics—when I promised them this. But they're winning, anyhow! It doesn't make any difference. It just ends the war sooner, so less get killed. And my boys won't be tortured. I got an ear once, a single ear!"
    "So you want to turn the world over to such people," Mike said, and now he was glad that the acid was eating away down there. "You—and Molly!"
    Enright looked at him with an unchanged, taut stare. "Molly? No, I couldn't find what she was doing. They wanted that, too—they wanted it pretty badly. But this will satisfy them. It has to satisfy them. They'll free my boys, and the war will be over. Because they think they can crack the secret there. But you're going back, Mike. I don't want you like my boys!"
    He reached forward, to press a control on the panel, and then stopped. "You should have a parachute. I—" He gulped, and his finger was shaking on the trigger. Then he caught himself. "But it's better than torture, Mike. And I can't shoot you. Damn it, I can't!"
    The finger hit the panel, as if he'd spent hours studying it in the handbook or in their checks of the real thing.
    The Enigma stopped with a violent braking from her jets that threatened to buckle her back on herself. The airspeed indicator jerked to a stop against the zero pin. And suddenly, the seat under Mike seemed to explode outwards through a panel that snapped open and shut behind him. He'd been ejected into the air, twenty miles above the Earth without a parachute.
    Now the Enigma flashed into motion again, and Mike jerked the oxygen mask up against his face. His body ached and burned inside itself at the change in pressure, even through the heavy webbing of the high-altitude suit that could only partially equalize things. Instinctively, he pulled up the zippers that sealed it, and it flooded with oxygen, ending the attack of bends before they could reach a full start. The pressure held his arms and legs out rigidly, but the feeling now was one of lightness and almost peace as he went into free fall toward the ground below.
    The Enigma had turned and was