Terrors by Richard A. Lupoff Page A

as the two women exchanged words, the cowering male had slipped from their immediate environs. Stationing himself behind a control console he turned dials, studying them until he was satisfied. Then he flicked a toggle switch.
    As she stood confronting the Scorpion Queen, the Golden Saint felta sudden pain. It was as if her feet and legs had burst into flame, yet at the same time a terrible chill shot through her.
    An involuntary gasp of dismay escaped her lips. She slapped involuntarily at her legs and peered down. From the tips of her golden boots to her knees she seemed to be coated with frost. But even this was thecase only for a moment. She realized, then, that the whitenessthat covered her was not a single coating but an array of hundreds, thousands, of busily moving specks.
    They were coming from a great tank that stood against a wall of the Scorpion Queen’s laboratory, an army of white specks that headed for the Saint and crawled up her boots and her gold cloth covered legs. And they were stinging, stinging, inflicting a pain that could only be described as thatof ice-cold flame.
    The Golden Saint managed to capture one of the white specks and raise it to the level of her eyes. It was nothing other than a scorpion, albino in color and reduced to tiny dimensions. As were all of its kind it was equipped with claws and multiple legs, like an Atlantic lobster, but with a curling tail terminating in a wicked stinger.
    “You like my pets?” the Scorpion Queenasked. “Are they not lovely?”
    The Golden Saint slapped and brushed at her legs, striving with frantic energy to scatter the tiny creatures, but as rapidly as she could brush the scorpions off they were replaced by more and more of the tiny stinging creatures.
    They reached her thighs, then her waist. Wherever they had covered her, she felt first a burning agony, then a terrible cold, and then—worstof all—nothing.
    This, the Golden Saint realized, was what had happened to the earlier victims of the mysterious plague that terrified Seacoast City. She knew that she had to act within seconds or she was doomed to become a hollow, frozen replica of herself, her flesh and bones devoured by ravening miniature scorpions. In a flash she realized that she had a chance not merely to survive but totriumph.
    With a rustle and a sudden
crack!
the Golden Saint’s membranous wings spread to their full expanse. With a whirr she lifted off the flagstone floor and rose toward the laboratory’s vaulted ceiling.
    Had the laboratory been of smaller dimensions there would not have been room for the Saint’s wings to spread to their full extent. Had the vaulted ceiling not been so high, it would havebeen impossible for the Saint to take flight. But the arrogance of the Scorpion Queen had dictated that her headquarters be gigantic, and now that very prideful splendor would lead to her defeat.
    As the Saint rose above her enemies she opened a compartment on the belt that hung from her graceful hips. She drew an instrument from it and pointed it at the albino scorpions that had attached themselvesto her boots and her legs. With a low humming sound, a brilliant ruby-tinted ray sped from the instrument. As it struck the tiny scorpions they flared briefly with color, then fell away, most of them landing unharmed on the flagstone floor. The stream of white specks had ceased to emerge from the tank. The creatures milled around on the flagstone floor, seeking some new victim. When they approachedthe oddly made boots of either the Scorpion Queen or her craven deputy they swerved from them, obviously repulsed by the strange material of the boots.
    But not all the scorpions falling from the Golden Saint landed on the laboratory floor. Some landed on the Scorpion Queen; others, on the craven Lord Gorgon. Both of them brushed frantically at the tiny specks of white. It was obvious that thestings of the tiny creatures, as painful as they had been to the Golden Saint’s lower limbs, were