Battered and bruised, he found himself on his feet when he came to. Sade stood in the door, his good hand fingering the blue welts on his throat. His shirt was in shreds, exposing the white blob of flesh that was his body and the helpless sausage-end stump that was his right arm.  
"If I could get my hands on you—" Norman whispered.
 
"You won't again," Sade said hoarsely. "You're in my hands now. And within the hour I shall have two of them. With them I shall keep you alive forever while you die a thousand deaths. I hold the key to life and death, on Vulcan...." He whirled again and left, followed by his henchmen and the door locked again behind them.
 
The silky zhak-skin rug was worn with Norman's pacing when he heard the key click in the lock again. The door opened to Keren Vaun. Ghostly beautiful against the soft light outside, her starry loveliness meant nothing to Norman. He sprang to the door and covered her scarlet lips with one hand, closed the door quickly. "Tell me how to get to Sade," he demanded, "or I'll wring your neck right here!"
 
Keren remained rigid until he loosened his grasp. Then: "Shut up," she whispered. "I came to help you escape." She didn't look at Dorothy. "I came to help you on one condition. That you take me with you—alone."
 
Norman hesitated three heart beats. "Let's go," he said. He heard Dorothy gasp behind him but he didn't even look back as Keren opened the door, finger to her lips, and led him out.
 
Locking the door behind her, she led him down a dim, white-floored corridor. Norman walked carefully, the baggy suit rustling as he moved. Keren halted before a door at the side of the passage. Glancing up and down the vacant hall, she opened the door quickly and went in. Norman followed.
 
The room was bare with another closed door on the other side. "You don't need that space suit," Keren ordered. "Take it off." Norman peeled the suit off obediently. It was no time for questions. "When I jabbed you with that hypo before Sade found us, it immunized you. It's a vaccination Sade discovered; we're all protected here."
 
As Norman marveled at this strange woman, understanding now that fact of his own salvation from the powers of Vulcan, she motioned toward the door opposite the one through which they had entered the room. "Sade's—John Gordon's cruiser is outside where we left it, about a hundred yards from this door. It's unguarded but there's a guard in the tower. He'll shoot when he sees you so you must get to the ship quickly. The cruiser's guns are loaded. If you make it, take off and blast this building. I'll run for the woods." Keren's heavy-lashed eyes met his. "When they are dead, Vulcan will be ours."
 
Norman smiled. "What if I don't come back? What if I pull out and radio Earth for help?"
 
Keren returned his smile, her eyes like a moonless night. "If you don't come back, I'll kill the Earth girl inside." She threw back her head, hair swirling at her pale throat like the flow of black oil. "Now kiss me—and go."
 
It was a choice; Keren's life or Dorothy's. If he got the ship and Keren ran for the woods, his guns would have to find her before they turned on the house. Then he could bargain with Sade by radio. "I'll owe you a thousand kisses," he said, opened the door, and darted out into the sunlight. Then it was raining red heat as liquid fire spurted around his pounding legs.
 
A bare twenty yards ahead, the cruiser waited, glinting silver in the sun. His pants leg caught fire and he could feel its blistering heat, fanned by the wind, as he streaked across the gravel.
 
Then he saw it too late. A sheen of crimson in the air. Streaks of red, painted on nothing. Johnny's blood! Flame from the guns behind him sizzled on the invisible glass as Norman, unable to check the piston power of his legs, crashed into the invisible wall of what had been Johnny's prison. His forehead hit the glass with a hollow ring. Clutching the wall with both hands, he slid down to the gravel and into darkness for his second failure that afternoon.
 
Roughly, they dragged him back to the house. But he wasn't out. Through the searing pain in his head he had fought back to consciousness as the patrolmen touched him. His mind limped through the pain, trying to figure out what to do now as they dragged him into the big front room and dropped him on the floor.
 
"Imbeciles! Careless fools!"
 
The voice opened Norman's eyes, banished the throbbing in his head as he struggled to his feet. But the two patrolmen locked his arms behind him.
 
"How did he get out!" The fat man glared from Norman to the patrolmen. Swart stood beside him.
 
"There were only two keys to that room," Swart suggested.
 
Sade's florid face paled, then his button eyes flickered with the cold cruelty of a wild animal. "Find Keren," he said softly. "Bring her to my laboratory."
 
Rick's eyes showed helpless fury as his arms tightened in the patrolmen's grasp. "Keren had nothing to do with it," he said. "I picked the lock."
 
Sade reached out and slapped his face repeatedly with his open palm. Hands clamped behind him, Norman took it, barely feeling the stinging blows, their impact light under the impact of what he saw.
 
"Yes! It's real!" Sade halted his slapping and, laughing like a fiend, rolled up his sleeves. He held his hands up close before Norman's eyes. Norman shuddered, staring at Sade's right hand. Slightly smaller, ghastly white but firm, where the stump of Sade's right arm had been was now flesh. Blood coursed through the bulging veins, a pale hand extended pudgy fingers.
 
Sade howled with laughter as Norman drew back from the thing as from a snake. "It's real!" Sade shouted, gleefully. "Flesh and blood! I have two hands now!" Exultantly, he held his clenched fists before Norman's white face. "In these hands I shall hold the pulse of the universe, to let it throb or halt at my will. I shall be neither king nor dictator—I shall be a god! The power of life and death in the universe is mine!"
 
Lifting his gaze from the hands, Norman met the fat man's eyes coldly. "How'd you do this, Sade?"
 
Sade's laughter dwindled to a greasy smile. "After seeing what the power of Vulcan did to your friend, perhaps it is fitting that you should see this power in reverse." He nodded at the patrolmen. "Bring him along."
 
In an arm-lock on both sides, Norman was dragged down the same corridor where he had followed Keren in his futile attempt to escape. They halted at a door at its far end. Sade opened the door and Norman was shoved in.
 
The place was white-walled and bare, like a hospital room but without the usual furniture. On a four-legged platform in the center of the room lay a large porcelain cylinder, like a chamber used for sterilizing surgical instruments, but the surface of the cylinder was smooth, without gadgets, only a heavily bolted cap at one end. Sade patted the cylinder as a sculptor might admire the work of his chisel. "This holds what John Gordon sought and what you seek now to save his life," he smirked. "This container holds fluid from Vulcan's Fountains of Youth!"
 
Standing before the cylinder, Norman's mind's eye searched the situation for some chance of escape. Here was what he had come so far to obtain and he was powerless to take it. But perhaps it wasn't time; there was much he needed to know.
 
"Vulcan's power is a radiation," Sade said, "but not from the Sun. It's a liquid under the ground, like Earthian oil—a radioactive element such as science has only found traces of in the cosmic rays. More powerful than radium, it exudes an exciter to growth—a living force."
 
"How'd you discover it without being affected by it?" Norman asked.
 
"Your friend Gordon was the guinea pig," the Mercurian said. Norman kept still. "After we took him and his cruiser when he entered the Protection Zone, we came here immediately. Working in space suits until my technicians on Mercury discovered an immunization, we brought Vulcan's strange liquid in like an oil gusher. The effect of the pure liquid is instantaneous; its effects on the surface of the ground outside are greatly diluted. While we built this house round the well, we watched Vulcan's milder effects on your friend in the glass cage."
 
Norman's jaw paled, but he kept his head. "How did Johnny get off the planet after he escaped?"
 
"Fool!" Sade laughed. "He didn't escape. We could stay and watch him every minute—that's why we left the automatic camera to record his reactions. He did contrive to get out of the cage but when we found him in the jungle we simply took him off the planet and dropped him in space in a life boat where he'd be picked up." Sade laughed again. "Did you think I didn't know he built two ships with counteractives! John Gordon's return was merely a message to you—to come here in that other ship. Now we have the only counteractives in existence. Vulcan is an utterly impregnable fortress. No army in the universe can interrupt my plans."
 
Norman realized that everything Sade said was true. No power could approach Vulcan without a counteractive. "What are your plans, Sade?"
 
The fat man held up his new right arm, his small eyes glowing. "My technicians obtained for me the hand-bud of an unborn child. It was embedded in the stump of my right arm." He stared at his hand stretched its white fingers, his thick lips smiling. "With but a brief exposure of my arm to a spray of Vulcan's liquid in full strength, I grew the hand of a thirty-year-old man!" He banged the cylinder with his fist. "What would happen if I sprayed this life-death fluid in a city street! It can be placed in a shell and fired from a gun. I have here a ............