The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  Suddenly there was a throaty hum; then quickly it became the low whine; then, as Arcot turned on the throttle before him, he heard the tens of thousands of horsepower spring into life—and suddenly the whine was a low roar—the mighty propellers out there had became a blur—then with majestic slowness the huge machine moved off across the field!

  Arcot shut off the motors and rose with a broad, relieved smile,“Easy!” he said. They made their way again up through the ship, up through the room of the tremendous cylinder coil, and then into the power room. Now the machines were quiet, for the motors were no longer working.

  “Arcot, you didn’t shut off the biggest machine of all down there. How come?”

  “I couldn’t, Wade. It has no shut-off control, and if it did have, I wouldn’t use it. I will tell you why when we get back to the Solarite.”

  At last they left the mighty machine; walked once more across its broad metal top. Here and there they now saw the ends of those quartz cylinders. Once more they entered the Solarite, through the air lock, and took off the cumbersome insulating suits.

  As quickly as possible Arcot outlined to the two who had stayed with the Solarite, the things they had seen, and the layout of the great ship.

  “I think I can understand the secret of all that power, and it’s not so different from the Solarite, at that. It, too, draws its power from the sun, though in a different way, and it stores it within itself, which the Solarite does not try to do.

  “Light of course, is energy, and therefore, has mass. It exerts pressure, the impact of its moving units of energy—photons. We have electrons and protons of matter, and photons of light. Now we know that the mass of protons and electrons will attract other protons and electrons, and hold them near—as in a stone, or in a solar system. The new idea here is that the photons will attract each other ever more and more powerfully, the closer they get. The Kaxorians have developed a method of getting them so close together, that they will, for a while at least, hold themselves there, and with a little ‘pressure’, will stay there indefinitely.

  “In that huge coil and cylinder we found there we saw the main power storage tank. That was full of gaseous light-energy held together by its own attraction, plus a little help of the generator!”

  “A little help?” Wade exclaimed. “Quite a little! I’ll bet that thing had a million horsepower in its motor!”

  “Yes—but I’ll bet they have nearly fifty pounds of light condensed there—so why worry about a little thing like a million horsepower? They have plenty more where that comes from.

  “I think they go up above the clouds in some way and collect the sun’s energy. Remember that Venus gets twice as much as Earth. They focus it on those tubes on the roof there, and they, like all quartz tubes, conduct the light down into the condensers where it is first collected. Then it is led to the big condenser downstairs, where the final power is added, and the condensed light is stored.

  “Quartz conducts light just as copper conducts electricity—those are bus bars we saw running around there.

  “The bombs we’ve been meeting recently are, of course, little knots of this light energy thrown out by that projector mechanism we saw. When they hit anything, the object absorbs their energy—and is very promptly volatilized by the heat of the absorption.

  “Do you remember that column of hissing radiance we saw shooting out of the wrecked plane just before it blew up? That was the motor connection, broken, and discharging free energy. That would ordinarily have supplied all fifty motors at about full speed. Naturally, when it cut loose, it was rather violent.

  “The main generator had been damaged, no doubt, so it stopped working, and the gravitational attraction of the photons wasn’t enough, without its influence to hold them bound too long. All those floods of energy were released instantaneously, of course.

  “Look—there come the Lanorians now. I want to go back to Sonor and think over this problem. Perhaps we can find something that will release all that energy—though honestly, I doubt it.”

  Arcot seemed depressed, overawed perhaps, by the sheer magnitude of the force that lay bound up in the Kaxorian ship. It seemed inconceivable that the little Solarite could in any way be effective against the incredible machine.

  The Lanorian planes were landing almost like a flock of birds, on the wings, the fuselage, the ground all about the gigantic ship. Arcot dropped into a chair, gazing moodily into emptiness, his thoughts on the mighty giant, stricken now, but only sleeping. In its vast hulk lay such energies as intelligence had never before controlled; within it he knew there were locked the powers of the sun itself. What could the Solarite do against it?

  “Oh, I almost forgot to mention it.” Arcot spoke slowly, dejectedly. “In the heat of the attack back there it went practically unnoticed. Our only weapon beside the gas is useless now. Do you remember how the ship seemed to lose its invisibility for an instant? I learned why when we investigated the ship. Those men are physicists of the highest order. We must realize the terrible forces, both physical and mental that we are to meet. They’ve solved the secret of our invisibility, and now they can neutralize it. They began using it a bit too late this time, but they had located the radio-produced interference caused by the ship’s invisibility apparatus, and they were sending a beam of interfering radio energy at us. We are invisible only by reason of the vibration of the molecules in response to the radio impressed oscillations. The molecules vibrate in tune, at terrific frequency, and the light can pass perfectly. What will happen, however, if someone locates the source of the radio waves? It’ll be simple for them to send out a radio beam and touch our invisible ship with it. The two radio waves impressed on us now will be out of step and the interference will instantly make us visible. We can no longer attack them with our atomic hydrogen blast, or with the gas—both are useless unless we can get close to them, and we can’t come within ten miles of them now. Those bombs of theirs are effective at that distance.”

  Again he fell silent, thinking—hoping for an idea that would once more give them a chance to combat the Kaxorians. His three companions, equally depressed and without a workable idea, remained silent. Abruptly Arcot stood up.

  “I’m going to speak with the Commander-in-Field here. Then we can start back for Sonor—and maybe we had better head for home. It looks as though there is little we can do here.”

  Briefly he spoke to the young Venerian officer, and told him what he had learned about the ship. Perhaps they could fly it to Sonor; or it could be left there undestroyed if he would open a certain control just before he left. Arcot showed him which one—it would drain out the power of the great storage tank, throwing it harmlessly against the clouds above. The Kaxorians might destroy the machine if they wanted to—Arcot felt that they would not wish to. They would hope, with reason, they might recapture it! It would be impossible to move that tremendous machine without the power that its “tank” was intended to hold.

  VII

  Slowly they cruised back to Sonor, Arcot still engrossed in thought. Would it be that Venus would fall before the attack of the mighty planes, that they would sweep out across space, to Earth—to Mars—to other worlds, a cosmic menace? Would the mighty machines soon be circling Earth? Guided missiles with atomic warheads could combat them, perhaps, as could the molecular motion machines. Perhaps these could be armored with twenty-inch steel walls, and driven into the great propellers, or at miles a second, into the ship itself! But these ships would require long hours, days, even weeks to build, and in that time the Kaxorian fleet would be ready. It would attack Earth within six days now! What hope was there to avert incalculable destruction—if not outright defeat?

  In despair Arcot turned and strode quickly down the long hallway of the Solarite. Above him he could hear the smooth, even hum of the sweetly functioning generator, but it only reminded him of the vastly greater energies he had seen controlled that night. The thudding relays in the power room, as Wade maneuvered the ship, seemed some diminu
tive mockery of the giant relays he had seen in the power room of the Kaxorian plane.

  He sat down in the power room, looking at the stacked apparatus, neatly arranged, as it must be, to get all this apparatus in this small space. Then at last he began to think more calmly. He concentrated on the greatest forces known to man—and there were only two that even occurred to him as great! One was the vast energies he had that very night learned of; the other was the force of the molecules, the force that drove his ship.

  He had had no time to work out the mathematics of the light compression, mathematics that he now knew would give results. There remained only the molecular motion. What could he do with it that he had not done?

  He drew out a small black notebook. In it were symbols, formulas, and page after page of the intricate calculus that had ended finally in the harnessing of this great force that was even now carrying him smoothly along.

  Half an hour later he was still busy—covering page after page with swiftly written formulas. Before him was a great table of multiple integers, the only one like it known to exist in the System, for the multiple calculus was an invention of Arcot’s. At last he found the expression he wanted, and carefully he checked his work, excitedly though now, with an expression of eager hope—it seemed logical—it seemed correct—

  “Morey—oh, Morey,” he called, holding his enthusiasm in check, “if you can come here—I want you to check some math for me. I’ve done it—and I want to see if you get the same result independently!” Morey was a more careful mathematician than he, and it was to him Arcot turned for verification of any new discovery.

  Following the general directions Arcot gave him, Morey went through the long series of calculations—and arrived at the same results. Slowly he looked up from the brief expression with which he had ended.

  It was not the formula that astonished him—it was its physical significance.

  “Arcot—do you think we can make it?”

  There was a new expression in Arcot’s eyes, a tightness about his mouth.

  “I hope so, Morey. If we don’t, Lanor is lost beyond a doubt—and probably Earth is, too. Wade—come here a minute, will you? Let Fuller take the controls, and tell him to push it. We have to get to work on this.”

  Rapidly Arcot explained their calculations—and the proof he had gotten.

  “Our beam of molecular motion-controlling energy directs all molecular motion to go at right angles to it. The mechanism so far has been a field inside a coil really, but if these figures are right, it means that we can project that field to a considerable distance even in air. It’ll be a beam of power that will cause all molecules in its path to move at right angles to it, and in the direction we choose, by reversing the power in the projector. That means that no matter how big the thing is, we can tear it to pieces; we’ll use its own powers, its own energies, to rip it, or crush it.

  “Imagine what would happen if we directed this against the side of a mountain—the entire mass of rock would at once fly off at unimaginable speed, crashing ahead with terrific power, as all the molecules suddenly moved in the same direction. Nothing in all the Universe could hold together against it! It’s a disintegration ray of a sort—a ray that will tear, or crush, for we can either make one half move away from the other—or we can reverse the power, and make one half drive toward the other with all the terrific power of its molecules! It is omnipotent—hmmm—” Arcot paused, narrowing his eyes in thought.

  “It has one limitation. Will it reach far in the air? In vacuum it should have an infinite range—in the atmosphere all the molecules of the air will be affected, and it will cause a terrific blast of icy wind, a gale at temperatures far below zero! This will be even more effective here on Venus!

  “But we must start designing the thing at once! Take some of the Immorpho and give me some, and we can let the sleep accumulate till we have more time! Look—we’re in Sonor already! Land us, Fuller—right where we were, and then come back here. We’re going to need you!”

  The gorgeous display of a Venerian dawn was already coloring the east as the great buildings seemed to rise silently about them. The sky, which had been a dull luminous gray, a gray that rapidly grew brighter and brighter, was now like molten silver, through which were filtering the early rays of the intense sun. As the sun rose above the horizon, though invisible for clouds, it still was traceable by the wondrous shell pink that began to suffuse the ten mile layer of vapor. The tiny droplets were, however, breaking the clear light into a million rainbows, and all about the swiftly deepening pink were forming concentric circles of blue, of green, orange, and all the colors of the rainbow, repeated time after time—a wondrous halo of glowing color, which only the doubly intense sun could create.

  “It’s almost worth missing the sun all day to see their sunrises and sunsets,” Fuller commented. The men were watching it, despite their need for haste. It was a sight the like of which no Earthman had ever before seen.

  Immediately, then, they plunged into the extremely complex calculation of the electrical apparatus to produce the necessary fields. To get the effect they wanted, they must have two separate fields of the director ray, and a third field of a slightly different nature, which would cause the director ray to move in one direction only. It would be disconcerting, to say the least, if the director ray, by some mistake, should turn upon them!

  The work went on more swiftly than they had considered possible, but there was still much to be done on the theoretical end of the job alone when the streets about them began to fill. They noticed that a large crowd was assembling, and shortly after they had finished, after some of these people had stood there for more than an hour and a half, the crowd had grown to great size.

  “From the looks of that collection, I should say we are about to become the principals in some kind of a celebration that we know nothing about. Well, we’re here, and in case they want us, we’re ready to come.”

  The guard that always surrounded the Solarite had been doubled, and was maintaining a fairly large clear area about the ship.

  Shortly thereafter they saw one of the high officials of Lanor come down the walk from the governmental building, walking toward the Solarite.

  “Time for us to appear—and it may as well be all of us this time. I’ll tell you what they say afterward, Wade. They’ve evidently gone to considerable trouble to get up this meeting, so let’s cooperate. I hate to slow up the work, but we’ll try to make it short.”

  The four Terrestrians got into their cooling suits, and stepped outside the ship. The Lanorian dignitary left his guard, walked up to the quartet from Earth with measured tread, and halted before them.

  “Earthmen,” he began in a deep, clear voice, “we have gathered here this morning to greet you and thank you for the tremendous service you have done us. Across the awful void of empty space you have journeyed forty million miles to visit us, only to discover that Venerians were making ready to attack your world. Twice your intervention has saved our city.

  “There is, of course, no adequate reward for this service; we can in no way repay you, but in a measure we may show our appreciation. We have learned from the greatest psychologist of our nation, Tonlos, that in your world aluminum is plentiful, but gold and platinum are rare, and that morlus is unknown. I have had a small token made for you, and your friends. It is a little plaque, a disc of morlus, and on it there is a small map of the Solar System. On the reverse side there is a globe of Venus, with one of Earth beside it, as well as our men could copy the small globe you have given us. The northern hemisphere of each is depicted—America, your nation, and Lanor, ours, thus being shown. We want you, and each of your friends, to accept these. They are symbols of your wonderful flight across space!” The Venerians turned to each of the Terrestrians and presented each with a small metal disc.

  Arcot spoke for the Terrestrians.

  “On behalf of myself and my friends here, two of whom have not had an opportunity to learn your language, I wish to
thank you for your great help when we most needed it. You, perhaps, have saved more than a city—you may have made it possible to save a world—our Earth. But the battle here has only begun.

  “There are now in the Kaxorian camp eighteen great ships. They have been badly defeated in the three encounters they have had with the Solarite so far. But no longer will they be vulnerable to our earlier methods of attack. Your spies report that the first plane, the plane which was first attacked by the Solarite, is still undergoing repairs. These will be completed within two days, and then, when they can leave a base guard of two ships, they will attack once more. Furthermore, they will attack with a new weapon. They have destroyed the usefulness of our weapon, invisibility, and in turn, now have it to use against us! We must seek out some new weapon. I hope we are on the right track now, but every moment is precious, and we must get back to the work. This address must be short. Later, when we have completed our preliminary work, we will have to give plans to your workmen, which you will be able to turn into metal, for we lack the materials. With this help we may succeed, despite our handicap.”

  The address was terminated at once. The Lanorians were probably disappointed, but they fully realized the necessity for haste.

  “I wish Terrestrian orators spoke like that,” remarked Morey as they returned to the ship. “He said all there was to say, but he didn’t run miles of speech doing it. He was a very forceful speaker, too!”

  “People who speak briefly and to the point generally are,” Arcot said.

  It was nearly noon that day before the theoretical discussion had been reduced to practical terms. They were ready to start work at once, but they had reason to work cheerfully now. Even through air they had found their ray would be able to reach thirty-five miles! They would be well out of the danger zone while attacking the gigantic planes of Kaxor.

  Morey, Wade and Arcot at once set to work constructing the electrical plant that was to give them the necessary power. It was lucky indeed that they had brought the great mass of spare apparatus! They had more than enough to make all the electrical machinery. The tubes, the coils, the condensers, all were there. The generator would easily supply the power, for the terrific forces that were to destroy the Kaxorian ships were to be generated in the plane itself. It was to destroy itself; the Solarite would merely be the detonator to set it off!