Above the towers and loading peaks of the yards there appeared the most gigantic of all the spaceships in the universe, covering the town like a roof over its roofs.
There were a couple of smoke-bombs dropped into the streets and a few old-fashioned radios exploded under the power of the monster ship’s sending tubes that announced that the city was taken and would be hostage for the rest of the planet’s good behavior. Landing parties went down by lighter ships to establish order and arrange several necktie parties in which the Colonial Governor had the stellar role, minor parts being taken by his subordinates and clerks. Venusian natives were warned off the streets; henceforth none but the Earthborn could show their faces by daylight. Plans were announced to transport the verminous natives to the Darkside District. All this took exactly six hours, Earth time.
A BRIEF RESUME of the life of Alexander Hertford III, Captain of the Fleet and Commander of Patrol Wing Twenty-Three, would include many revealing facts relative to the situation of the moment.
As he lay comfortably sprawled on a divan aboard his lineship Excalibur, a capital fighting vessel of standard offensive and defensive equipment, he was a fine figure of a man in his uniform of purple and gold. The collar was open, which, with his tumbled curls hanging over his brow in the manner of an ancient Irish glib, gave him a dashing, devil-may-care expression. At least Miss Beverly deWinder thought so, for she was smoothing those tumbled curls and smiling maternally.
Leaving the commander’s ship—which was stationed off Rigel—for a moment, we take a brief survey of his career. He was thirty years old, and his grandfather, the first of his name, was also in the Navy. His father was not as bright as his grandfather, but appointments were easily got from the sentimental All Earth Exec, which wished to breed a race of fighting men, true, loyal and hard as nails. Alexander Hertford II just got through Prep Wing and Training Wing by the skin of his teeth, lived on a lineship and died at his post quelling an uprising among the outer planets of Alpha Centauri.
The third of the name was definitely dull. However, by virtue of the anonymous genius who invented the Auto-Cram and peddled them to students, he got through with what could easily be mistaken for flying colors, won his commission, saw service and was promoted to a Wing Command.
Life in Prep Wing and Training Wing was Spartan in the extreme. Tradition was extensively cultivated; for example, it was legitimate to steal anything edible and criminal to steal anything drinkable. Another of the blunders of the career-molding branch of the Navy was the policy of rigidly excluding females from the lives of the boys and men for the duration of the course. Thus it was no more than natural that after graduating they got their romance in heavy doses.
The end-product of this was sprawling off Rigel when a discreet tapping sounded on the door of the Commander’s lounge.
“I’ll see, sweetie,” said Miss deWinder, who was a good-hearted girl. She took the slip of paper that poked through the slot and carried it to Alexander Hertford III.
He opened it and read.
“Damn,” said Alexander Hertford III.
“Wassa matta, sweetie pie? Did bad ol’ Admiral sen’ sweetie pie away Porn li’l Bevvie-wevvie?”
Sweetie pie opened a closet whose inner face was a mirror and adjusted his collar and hair. As he cocked his cap at the right fraction of an angle, he said: “Nothing to worry about. You just sit tight. I may not be back for a few days—we’re seeing action again.” He reread the slip of paper.
“Damn,” he marveled again. “When we used to talk about it around the mess-tables I never thought it’d come in my time. But here it is. Beverly, sweet, the Navy’s taking over. Your lover-boy isn’t a flying policeman anymore.” He buckled on his belt and opened the lap of the handgun holster. There was a look of strain on his dumb, handsome face. “From now on,” he said, “your lover-boy is ruler, and no questions asked, over Cosmic Sector Twenty-Three, with full power of life and death.”
Miss deWinder echoed after him, fascinated: “And no questions asked . . .”
THE DECODE CLERK at Intelligence Wing read off the message he had just received and set into English. Working like an automaton, he was grasping its meaning for the first time, though it had been a full quarter-hour’s labor to untangle the quadruply alternating cipher. He read; he understood at last; he whistled a long, slow whistle of amazement.
In agitated tones he snapped at an office girl: “This is for Barty and nobody else. Give it to him and run, because there’s going to be an explosion.”
He reread the slip of paper: “—hereby notified that the Headquarters Wing has . . .” He folded and sealed the slip.
The office girl stood back a few yards to watch the Commander’s face. Alternately it registered disgust and amazement as he read and reread the slip. “Scat!” he finally choked at her, with an imperious gesture.
Alone in his office with Babe MacNeice he shoved the slip across his desk, his face working.
She read it and looked up, frankly puzzled. “So what?” Babe demanded. “It’s a general order, memo—whatever you want to call it. Why the skillful simulation of epilepsy?”
“You don’t know,” he groaned, burying his head in his hands. “Women, children, imbeciles and men who haven’t passed through the Prep and Training Wings. I’d be just like them if I hadn’t had the spy kink from birth and been through the Training Section of the Wing I now command. You don’t know, Babe, what your typical Navy officer is like.
“Once for an experiment they tried sending some Rigelians—who are very much like genus homo except that they haven’t any internal organs—all highly organized custard inside—to Training. Would those long-headed beauties let them stay? Nope—tradition. It was a school for gentlemen, scholars—by virtue of the Autocram—and Terrestrials exclusively. Things are so bad now that you have to be a direct descendant of a previous student before they admit you. All Earth Execblah! Democratic, but soft-headed and sentimental.
“When these prize beauties get into power they’ll make such a hash of our beautiful colonial system—!” He was nearly weeping.
Babe MacNeice rose from her chair with gleaming eyes. “Well,” she yelled at the man, “don’t just sit there! What are you going to do about it?” He looked up. “Yes,” she snapped, “I said do. Here you are sitting pretty with a corner on all the brains in the Navy, with the most loyal staff of any commander, and you just snivel about what those imbeciles plan for the future. If you feel so damn broken-up about it why don’t you stop them?”
Bartok was looking at her with amazed eyes. Women, he decided, were wonderful. No false sentiment about them; something about their ugly biological job must make them innate fact-facers. Of course some man would have to find them the facts to face, but neither sex was perfect.
“Babe,” he said wonderingly, “I believe you have it.” He sprang to his feet. “Fitzjames,” he barked, “and the rest of his crew are going to curse the days they were born when I’m through with them. Now let’s get down to brass tacks, kid. I have under me about three thousand first-class Intelligence men, one thousand women. My office staff is four hundred. Lab resources—all my men have private labs; for big-scale work we borrow equipment from the University. Armament, every first-class operative owns a hand-gun and shells. Most of them carry illegal personal electric stunners. Rolling stock—two thousand very good one-man ships that can make it from here to Orion without refueling and about five hundred larger ships of various sizes. All ships unarmed. Servicing for the ships is in the hands of the local civilian authorities wherever we land. Good thing that we take fuel like civilian and private ships. Oh, yes—our personnel is scattered pretty widely through the cosmos. But we can call them in any time by the best conference-model communications hookup in space. And that’s that.”
“It sounds good, Barty,” said the girl. “It sounds very good to me. How about the rest of them?”
The Wing Commander looked very sick suddenly. “Them,” he brooded. “Well,
to our one division they have twenty-six, each with a flagship of the line.
They have twenty-six bases—including graving-docks, repair-shops, maintenance crews, fuel, ammunition and what-have-you—and innumerable smaller ships and boats.
“And, Babe, they have one thing we haven’t got at all. Each and every ship in the numbered Patrol Wings of the Navy mounts at least one gun. The lineships, of which there are eighty-two, mount as many as a hundred quick-fire repeaters and twenty loading ordnance pieces, each of which could blow a minor planet to hell and gone. They have guns and we have minds.”
The girl rested her chin in her hands. “Brainpower versus fire-power,” she brooded. “Winner take all.”
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST CLASH came two weeks later off Rigel. Alexander Hertford III, Commander of Patrol Wing Twenty-Three, was apprised of the startling facts as he awoke from a night (theoretically) of revelry with Miss deWinder.
Rubbing the sleep from his baby-blue eyes, he yawned: “Impossible. There aren’t any capital ships other than those in the Navy. There’s some silly mistake. You must have decoded it all wrong.”
“Impossible, Commander,” said the orderly respectfully. “And it wasn’t sent wrong either. They repeated several times.”
The commander stared at the slip which bore the incredible message from Cruiser DM 2. “As regards orders to pacify star-cluster eight, your district, impossible to proceed. Unrecognizable lineship heavily armed warned us away. When asked for section and command they replied, ‘Section One, Command of Reason.’ Instruct. The Commanding Officer, DM 2.”
With one of those steel-spring decisions for which the Navy personnel is famous, he abruptly ordered: “My compliments to what’s his name, the pilot and navigator. We’re going to relieve DM 2 and see what those asses think they’ve found.”
In just the time he took to dress and bid Miss deWinder a cheery though strained good morning, the ship was hauling alongside the cruiser. After an exchange of salutations, the commanding officer of the cruiser, frankly angry, yelled at Hertford (over the communications system): “Use your own damned eyes, commander. You can’t miss the damned thing—biggest damned ship I ever saw in my damned life!”
“Captain,” said the commander, “you’re overwrought. Lie down and we’ll look about.” He was on what they called the bridge, a vast arc of a room which opened, for effect, on the very hull of the ship. Vast, sweepingly curved plates of lucostruc opened on the deeps of space, though scanner discs would have been structurally sounder.
Taking an angry turn about the bridge he snapped at the lookout: “Have you found that lunatic’s chimera yet?” For, be it known, there is no such thing as blundering on a spaceship. You have to do some very involved calculating to blunder on a sun, and even so luck must be on your side. In short, unless this mythical lineship chose to show itself, there wasn’t one chance in a thousand thousand of its being located.
“Can’t see any chimera, commander,” said the lookout, one straining eye glued to a telescope. “But right there’s the biggest, meanest fighting ship I’ve ever struck eyes to.” He yielded to the commander, who stared incredulously through the ’scope.
By God, it was there. By all the twelve planets, so it was. The thing was bigger than the Excalibur, Hertford’s ship. It floated very far away and could be spotted only by the superb display of illumination they’d put on, with taunting intent, it seemed to the commander.
“Battle stations!” he yelled immediately. “Ready full fire-power.” The lookout spoke into a mike and stood by.
“GET IN TOUCH with him,” snapped the commander. “When you get his wavelength give me the speaker. I’ll talk to him direct, whoever he is.” Through his mind were running confused visions of the glorious old days of piracy, when his grandfather had so nobly fought in a ship a tenth the size of his own, to crush the mighty federation of the gentlemen of fortune. “And,” he said aloud, “by God they did it.”
The entire ship was buzzing confusedly with rumor. Each and every one of the crew of a thousand and the marines who numbered half that had his own private theory half an hour after the strange lineship had been sighted. These ranged from the improbably accurate notion that it was a rebel against the Navy who were going to raise some hell, to the equally absurd notion that the commander himself was the rebel and that the Admiral had sent his best ship to punish him. The truth, of course, was too obvious to be guessed by anybody.
As the ship was readied for battle it seemed to draw in on itself, like a crouching tiger. Its skin seemed to be too small for it. Men stood as if rooted to the metal floor-plates, but they quivered in tune with the accumulating mass-energy of the drivers.
A fighting ship is built around its guns, therefore a word about these may not be out of place. The Excalibur had the most modern of armaments. From every imaginable spot in its hide there could extrude the spaceship equivalent of old seagoing “murder guns.” Disgusted gunners gave that name to the little quick-firers with which they picked off floating men and boats.
The Excalibur’s “murder guns” were about a yard long with a caliber of three inches between the lands. They were loaded with shells exploding on time; it would be murder indeed to leave a score or more of contact shells floating unexploded in space. The rate of fire from these little killers was adjusted from single-shot to ten a second and never a jam from the loading mechanism.
There were intermediate guns as well, but more for their own sake than for any practical use. The twelve-inch shells from these could blow a destroyer out of space, but who ever heard of a lineship fighting a destroyer? However, if the occasion should arise, they were there, about twenty of them scattered throughout the ship, covering every second of curved surface.
Finally there were the Big Guns. These were the reason for building the Excalibur or anything like it. The rest of the ship was designed to service those guns, store their ammunition, shelter the men who worked them, move them about in space, and protect them from harm. The Big Guns were really big, so there was no need for more than four of them. Two fore and two aft were sufficiently heavy armament for any ship. One of these four happened to be out of commission on Hertford’s ship. That, he thought bitterly, would count heavily against him in the fight that was coming.
“AIM GUN II, aft,” said the commander. There had been no answer from the mocking fighting ship that had suicidally turned on every light it had. The thing was still in plain view. Hertford did not draw nearer or even move for fear he would be spotted. It was enough that he knew where his nameless foe was.
“Fire,” said Hertford, “when ready.”
From the magazine in the heart of the ship there slid along frictionless runways barrel-like capsules of propulsive burner compound, which consisted of big-moleculed acid and base which combined, in the presence of a catalyst, and released monstrous clouds of gas in the fraction of a second. Following the capsules there slid the Shell, approximately the size of a three-story suburban villa.
Loading machinery, that looked as though it could be utilized in off moments to build universes, fitted the shell into the breech and rammed it home, shoved after it the burner compound that would shoot it on its way.
And all this while, in the quarter of the ship devoted to fire-control, two hundred men had been sighting, resighting, calculating and recalculating at batteries of machines to whom the integraph was as the amoeba is to the mastodon.
The point is this: that Shell couldn’t possibly miss, because to avoid it, the colossal bulk of the nameless enemy would have had to begin moving only a second after the order to fire when ready had been delivered. It was violating every rule of warfare, and, the fire-control men were confident, it would not survive the error.
The Gun finally moved on delicately jeweled bearings. This was going to be the most direct hit of all time. Cubic yards of metal locked it in position.
Metallically, over the loudspeaker: “Ready to fire, commander.”
The commander: “Then fire!”
There are no words to describe the discharge of a Big Gun and the progress of a Shell through space towards a goal. But that mile-long battlewagon was rocked like a sapling in a hurricane. When the initial shock was over the reeling commander clung to a stanchion and glued his eye to the telescope fixed on the nameless enemy.
It still glowed with lights; it still seemed to be a shade bigger than the Excalibur. The feelings of the commander, subtly schooled to brutality and murder, were mostly of exultation as he saw the Shell enter the field of the telescope. Now, he thought, they would be frantically dashing about as it drew nearer and desperately trying and trying to move a mass that could not be moved in less time than it would take the Shell to contact it and explode.
Two seconds . . . one second . . . half—quarter—eighth—
“What the hell?” asked the commander with a childishly hurt air. He scratched his head, and as he scratched it his lineship, the Excalibur, disintegrated in a tangled, pulverized hell of metal, plastic, flesh, bone, Miss Beverly deWinder, two hundred fire-control men, operating crew of a thousand, half that number of marines and Commander Alexander Hertford III. They never knew what hit them, but it was their own Shell.
CHAPTER IV
NEW METROPOLE, capital of Earth and, before the Navy took over, capital of the All Earth Union and Colonies, was being pacified. This is done by lighter-loads of marines and fighting sailors who descend from a lineship hanging ominously over the most highly populated portion of the city. The lineship itself does not descend because an uncalled bluff is worth more than a called one and because the battlewagons cannot land from the moment they are launched to the moment they are scrapped except in graving docks, and the nearest to Earth was at Alpha Centauri.
Marines swarmed through the streets in the traditional manner of rightist revolutionaries. Should a face appear that hinted of Rigelian blood, or should a half-breed with the abnormally long hands and black teeth of a Betelgeusian pass the marines, there would be bloodshed and no questions asked. After a few hours of the reign of terror, the extraterrestrials crept into cellars and stayed there for the duration.
Collected Short Fiction Page 54