by Perry Rhodan
The energy field collapsed, the ship glided through, and an instant later the intense brilliance of the shield's incomprehensible alien power was visible. With the replacement of the force shield the raging sound of the departing ship was also cut off. Fractions of a second later it disappeared into the Gobi Desert sky. Rhodan accelerated the ship at a velocity that would have caused an ordinary hull to glow from the air friction.
General Lesley Pounder restrained the flood of his emotions. As a rocket man it was for him a grand experience to see the giant spaceship race into the heavens with seemingly unlimited power. By comparison, the nuclear powered rockets of the space force seemed to be futile and awkward—and not only those of the space force!
Gregor Petronskij, Marshall and chief of the Eastern Air and Space Defense, also wore a solemn expression on his granite countenance. The glances two high officers met.
"Where is our pride?" said Pounder. "We couldn't be smaller and more helpless than if we were under the foot of a giant!"
Marshal Petronskij declined to answer. His bearing and manner were uncamouflaged; there was no more of doubts and secret enemies. By his mere advent, at least Perry Rhodan had achieved that.
"The small, delicately structured man with the crown of gleaming golden hair smiled pleasantly. No one looked upon him as the all powerful chief of a secret service, although such was his identity in the International Intelligence Agency. Allan D. Mercant advanced a few steps forward. The brief emergency conference held by Rhodan had landed like a bomb. Mercant looked at the clock. When he spoke, his voice was as peaceful and pleasant as ever.
"Shall we go, gentlemen? Or is their any doubt remaining that other intelligences than man exist? If not, then may I urge you to acquaint your governments with the results of the conference? During the next few days you will find me in Washington. Shall we fly together, General?"
Pounder nodded briefly.
"What's going to happen if Rhodan's reconnaissance flight ends in a fiasco?" asked someone in the background. This was Kosselow, chief of the Eastern Secret Service.
Mercant drew the back of his hand across a perspiring forehead. "Then we can only hope that the Earth will not be discovered. Gentlemen, you must impress forcefully upon your governments that we are no longer alone! It is high time that we abandoned, once and for all, the still lingering prejudices we have against a universal unity. If an extraterrestrial opponent should appear, mankind cannot to be divided."
The men departed.
"If it only succeeds," Petronskij murmured. "If the detector indications are correct, Rhodan is going to be shoved into a witch's kettle. How high would you evaluate the fighting capability of the Good Hope?"
"That depends entirely on what the unknown opponents have to offer."
"Well, let's wait and see," answered Petronskij "In my own area of command I'm going to prepare the nuclear attack alert system. If outsiders are going to show an interest in us, I want to know that everything is in as good a working order as possible."
4/
The thick Venusian jungle still trembled in the echoing thunder of the takeoff as the Good Hope disappeared through the roiling turbulence created in the cloud cover of the Solar System's second planet. Only an afterglowing streak of powerfully compressed and superheated air masses marked the steep ascent path of the spaceship, which had traversed the Earth-Venus distance in approximately forty minutes.
For Perry Rhodan the touchdown on Venus had been merely a short digression for the purpose of gathering information. However, as it turned out, the side trip developed an almost life and death importance.
After it had been demonstrated that the relatively small robot brain in the realm of the Third Power did not contain information concerning the probable planetary system of Vega, Rhodan had fallen back on the vague hope of utilizing the giant computer on Venus. The mechanical positronic monster, constructed by the Arkonides long ago in the time of their galactic expansion, was able to yield the precise information that Perry needed as a last resort.
Prior to landing on Venus he had let it be understood, accompanied by an unusually amiable smile, that the twenty-seven light-year hyperspace jump to Vega could be undertaken only if they were in possession of pertinent and demonstrable data concerning the planetary family of the giant star. Khrest and Thora had concealed their annoyance in stubborn silence. The situation on board the Good Hope had seriously approached the state of a feud. Rhodan was confident that a workable compromise solution would be found.
Interrogation of the positronic giant, a thousand times greater in its capacity for data retrieval than the robot brain they had removed from the Good Hope and installed on Earth, was completed with positive results. Yes, the neighboring astronomical areas of the solar system had been investigated, more than 10,000 years before, when the ships of the Arkonides had emerged into the system and the Venusian stronghold had been built as a cosmic refuge. At that time the Arkonides must have been mentally powerful and free willed, in contrast to their degenerated stage of the present. Naturally, care had been taken to provide information concerning the neighboring firmament of Earth.
Perry had counted on this. On the other hand, Thora and Khrest were greatly surprised. Inasmuch as the corresponding details about the Vega system had not been established in the robot brain of the destroyed research cruiser, they had taken it for granted that this would also be the case where the giant computer at the Venus base was concerned.
Though he had no stomach for it, Rhodan was forced once more to bring Khrest's attention to a basic error of his race. On the basis of incontestable fact it was a foregone conclusion that the central positronic memory banks on their distant home planet had been far from containing all knowledge. Further, this inferred that many Arkonide expeditions to distant worlds were never reported or registered. Formerly, this possibility had been vehemently denied by Khrest.
Armed with his new information, Rhodan took off once more—this time, however, with the distant goal in his sights.
The deep thunder of the drive engines in full thrust was now a muted sound in the control room of the spherical spaceship. Full thrust—this meant the expulsion of a very heavy stream of light speed particles that were uniformly compressed and beam aligned by an energy field generated in hyperspace.
Perry Rhodan and the Arkonides designated the drive pulses as "corpuscular waves," which had caused something of a stir in Earthly professional circles. Arkonide technology seemed to be upsetting the established theories and tending to make scientific impossibilities possible. Judging by Rhodan's last lecture at the now world famous Space Flight Academy, it appeared unavoidable that a large segment of Earthly schooling would have to be thrown overboard, or at least some new relationships would have to be established, if Arkonide scientific concepts were to be grasped. Pulse drive propulsion and corpuscular waves—these concepts could he grasped and mastered only by means of fifth dimensional mathematics.
The Good Hope accelerated at the seemingly mad rate of 300 miles per second, which enabled it to reach the speed of light in slightly more than ten minutes.
This time span was theoretical, however, because it was based on the well-known maxim of relativistic velocity in accordance with the simple linear relationship: Velocity equals Time times Constant Acceleration. To an observer on Earth, after ten minutes of constant acceleration the Good Hope would seem to have reached only seventy percent of the speed of light. On the other hand, Rhodan was increasingly aware of the "dilation effect," in which an equally relativistic contraction of the given time span occurred. By Earth standards the equations were far too complicated; Arkonides of Khrest's caliber were accustomed to solving them mentally.
There were numerous problems connected with the command of an interstellar spaceship. In spite of their outstanding qualities as scientists, Perry Rhodan and Reginald Bell had faced insurmountable obstacles if they had not received the Arkonide hypno treatment and training. As the Good Hope raced ever more swif
tly through interplanetary space, Rhodan was able to control the ship with confident ease. The controls were highly automated and if necessary could be handled by one person, provided that person had acquired Arkonide technological training.
Khrest and Thora looked forward to the hypertransition with a matter of fact composure. In spite of their successful qualification and training, however, Rhodan and Reginald Bell could not conceal a certain degree of anticipatory tension. Everything was going smoothly, perhaps too smoothly. The calculations necessary for making the twenty-seven light-year hyperjump were already being closely referenced to the great star that was their goal. The basic data furnished by the direction finders was fed into the galactonautic computer, which took into account such items as ship's mass, distance, and prevailing gravitational field—all as a prelude to deriving the humanly incomprehensible "jump impulse," designated by the Arkonides as the "universal hypertransition velocity."
Rhodan well knew that the resolution of such a problem as breaking the "light barrier" could neither be encompassed nor even come close to being explained by Earthly mathematics. Thus, at first exposure he had been admonished to abandon all handed down Earthly knowledge, in order to concentrate solely on the findings of Arkonide science. This was sufficient cause to involve him and Bell in an emotional conflict. It didn't seem to matter what each of them had already personally experienced, tried, or proved. They were like those legendary primordials who became familiar with the use of fire through observation but who could not conceive that the flames could be painful and dangerous.
The rumble of the four synchronous pulse drive generators increased to a muffled thunder. The closer the Good Hope approached the speed of light, the more intensely the unEarthly machines responded to the demand on them. Earth's orbit had already been crossed. The ship accelerated swiftly away from the sun in order to trigger the hyperspace jump while still inside the solar system. As the speedometer readings indicated within nine-tenths of one percent of light speed and the audible signals of the main autopilot began to howl for additional ionized plasma injection, Rhodan suddenly released the controls. His high backed swivel chair swung around.
Only the leaders of the small crew had appeared in the control room. On the numerous observation screens glittered distant suns, many of which must have possessed planetary systems.
Thora cocked her head curiously on one side, her eyes bright with a sudden alarm. "You stopped the acceleration! Why!"
A flick of Perry's hand extinguished the signal lamps on the hyper sector panel. He got slowly to his feet. Bell studied him. Something was wrong.
"Your very thorough hypno training has planted the fact in my mind that it's not especially advisable to make a hyperjump from inside a planetary system," he explained slowly. We'll coast in free fall to the orbit of Jupiter at just under the speed of light. I don't want to produce any unfavorable magnetic disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field. May I ask you to join me at once in the personnel mess?"
Bell switched the hypersensors over to the defense screen projectors for instant recognition and analysis of any possible foreign bodies that might appear. Then he, too, got up. The fully positronic autopilot was more reliable than any human.
The mutant John Marshall probed telepathically across to the two Arkonides. When he failed to get through their mental shields he turned for help to the pale, delicate girl with the overlarge eyes. Betty Toufry bestowed a slight smile on him, which was not the smile of a child at all. She indicated with a shrug of her shoulders that she had also failed to pick up the thoughts of the aliens, although her powers were greater than Marshall's.
The diminutive Japanese mutant, who had been standing next to Bell, suddenly disappeared. As a part of his continuous practice and training, Tako Kakuta, the man with the astonishing capability of teleportation, had again chosen to take a shortcut.
Besides Betty, Marshall, and the small Japanese, there were still two other people he had hardly known before the take-off. Rhodan had ordered two ultra-fast space fighters to pick them up from the Venus base, where they had completed their final schooling.
People claimed that Wuriu Sengu, a plump, powerfully built Japanese, could see through solid matter by the strength of his will alone. Before he was discovered in Japan by the Mutant Search Corps, he had been employed as a miner. His fellow workers had always been deeply mystified when he predicted with infallible accuracy whether a new gallery would yield coal.
Ralf Marten, offspring of a German merchant and a Japanese woman, possessed even more conspicuous talents. He, too, belonged to that endangered generation which saw the light of day shortly after the bomb over Hiroshima. The way Bell heard it, this tall, slender man was supposed to be able to shut off his personal identity temporarily and, in a parapsychic sense, see through other people's eyes and hear through their ears. Any target of his choosing could never escape his penetration, in spite of the most secret precautions. This seemed to explain Ralf Marten's enormous success in business.
The addition of the five mutants to the already unusual personnel roster completed an uncanny crew. To the Arkonides, whose more advanced development had accustomed them to such phenomena, the mutants were to some extent bearable. However, to the normal human crewmembers they were plain monsters. Though they refrained from voicing such an opinion aloud or, if possible, even thinking it, emotionally the idea was dominant.
As everyone arrived in the crew mess, which had been rebuilt to human requirements, a notable rift built up immediately between the mutants and the fifty commando emergency troops who had been signed on. Mixed glances of cautious respect, awe, mistrust, and curiosity passed back and forth. The mysterious Mutant Corps, created by Perry Rhodan and officially known as the Special Unit of the Third Power, represented an almost frightening safety factor. In spite of their outstanding training, the fifty specialized soldiers could not avoid feeling at a disadvantage. On the other hand, Perry Rhodan knew very well that in the present generation a bridging of the schism between mutants and normal men was not possible to any significant extent. It was enough for him in the meantime to achieve a tolerable relationship between those who were involved.
An atmosphere of high voltage tension, excitement, and involuntary resignation dominated the mess. The latter condition applied to Bell, whose objections to a hyperspace fight were now completely ignored.
Rhodan made his speech short. His glance at the clock gave everyone to understand that any protracted questions were futile.
"As soon as we reach the orbit of Jupiter, we'll make the first hyperspace jump ever attempted by Earthmen," he explained quietly. Nevertheless, his inner tension was felt. "I am urging you to adhere precisely to all instructions you have received. Doctors Haggard and Manoli will check all of you right after the completed jump. It can of course be assumed that no harm of any sort will result. If this thing were dangerous, the Arkonide race would have died out more than 10,000 years ago. During the transition, keep yourselves completely relaxed. It is in the nature of things that you will not remain in a material state during the penetration into fifth dimensional hyperspace. This means that in passing over your physical organism will be disconnected from you because in its present state it cannot exist in the so called supernatural plane. However, you can be sure that when you pop out again into the normal four dimensional cosmos your appendixes will be found in the same spot where Nature intended them to be. Now, there is another item...."
Rhodan looked about him laconically, deliberately inscrutable. The robot brain on Venus contains precise particulars concerning Vega. According to the data, about 10,000 years ago the giant star possessed a system of more than forty-two planets, which isn't so amazing when you consider its gigantic size. Before the time period mentioned, Arkonide explorers took a look around in the Vega area and brought home fairly complete information. Intelligent life was found only on planet number eight, which is called Ferrol, and its inhabitants are referred to as Ferrons. These people are supp
osed to be very human-like in form—that is, they have two arms and two legs, they walk upright, they have only one head, and so forth.
"When the Arkonides visited Ferrol, its inhabitants had just discovered gunpowder. That can mean that today, after 10,000 years, they may have nuclear weapons or may even have achieved interstellar space flight. Either we'll find an outstanding race of people there or a planet sized radioactive slag heap spinning a lonely course around its sun. Prepare yourself for any variation of surprises and keep yourselves under control. That's all I wanted to tell you for now. If you can, try to sleep another hour. It will be to your best advantage if you can pass through the transition while sleeping."
Rhodan tapped a salute against the peak of his cap and left the room. Captain Klein dismissed his men, and Major Deringhouse, who was responsible for the two space fighters that had been brought along, decided to check his machines again. As the bulkhead door of the hangar slid upward, he said to himself, "So help me, this whole thing has a tilt to it!"
Reginald Bell was preoccupied with similar though. Avoiding the antigrav lift, he clambered up the spiral emergency stairs to the control room above. As he entered the bewilderingly instrumented room, he was confronted by a shimmering phenomenon directly before him. Out of emptiness emerged the outline of a human form, which split seconds later evolved into the unmistakable frail shape of Kakuta.
The teleportationist's childlike face broke into an amiable smile. "You forgot your hat, sir!" he said. "Here you are!"
Bell counted automatically to three, then swung a heavy fist. Of Kakuta there was, however, nothing left to see, so he swung wild. Air thudded audibly into the vacuum created by Tako's disappearance. Bell went over to the copilot's control seat Rhodan received him with a poker-faced expression, but the twinkle of a smile was in the corners of his eyes.
"The mutants have been ordered to practice their unusual powers as often as possible and at every opportunity," he said, rather tongue in cheek.