The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  “Do you see why I wanted all that metal?”

  “I do, Buck—Lord, I do,” gasped Faragaut. “That is the perfect power supply.”

  “No, confound it, it isn’t. It’s a secondary source. It isn’t primary. We’re just as limited in the supply of power as ever—only we have increased our distribution of power. Lord knows, we’re going to need a power supply badly enough before long—” Buck relapsed into moody silence.

  “What,” asked Faragaut, looking around him, “does that mean?”

  It was McLaurin who told him of the stranger ship, and Kendall’s interpretation of its meaning. Slowly Faragaut grasped the meaning behind Buck’s strange actions of the past months.

  “The Lunar Bank,” he said slowly, half to himself. “Staffed by trained IP men, experts in expert destruction. Buck, you said something about the profits of this venture. What did you mean?”

  Buck smiled. “We’re going to stick up IP to the extent necessary to pay for that fort—er—bank—on Luna. We’ll also boost the price so that we’ll make enough to pay for those ships I’m having made. The public will pay for that.”

  “I see. And we aren’t to stick the price too high, and just make money?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “The IP Appropriations Board won’t give you what you need, Commander, for real improvements on the IP ships?”

  “They won’t believe Kendall. Therefore they won’t.”

  “What did you mean about gamma rays, Buck?”

  “Mercury will stop them and the Commander here intends to have the refitted ships built so that the engine room and control room are one, and completely surrounded by the mercury tanks. The men will be protected against the gamma rays.”

  “Won’t the rays affect the power stored in the mercury—perhaps release it?”

  “We tried it out, of course, and while we can’t get the intensities we expect, and can’t really make any measurements of the gamma-ray energy impinging on the mercury—it seems to absorb, and store that energy!”

  “What’s next on the program, Buck?”

  “Finish those ships I have building. And I want to do some more development work. The Stranger will return within six months now, I believe. It will take all that time, and more for real refitting of the IP ships.”

  “How about more forts—or banks, whichever you want to call them. Mars isn’t protected.”

  “Mars is abandoned,” replied General Logan seriously. “We haven’t any too much to protect old Earth, and she must come first. Mars will, of course, be protected as best the IP ships can. But—we’re expecting defeat. This isn’t a case of glorious victory. It will be a case of hard won survival. We don’t know anything about the enemy—except that they are capable of interstellar flights, and have atomic energy. They are evidently far ahead of us. Our battle is to survive till we learn how to conquer. For a time, at least, the Strangers will have possession of most of the planets of the system. We do not think they will be able to reach Earth, because Commander McLaurin here will withdraw his ships to Earth to protect the planet—and the great ‘Lunar Bank’ will display its true character.”

  VII

  Faragaut looked unsympathetically at Buck Kendall, as he stood glaring perplexedly at the apparatus he had been working on.

  “What’s the matter, Buck, won’t she perk?”

  “No, damn it, and it should.”

  “That,” pointed out Faragaut, “is just what you think. Nature thinks otherwise. We generally have to abide by her opinions. What is it—or what is it meant to be?”

  “Perfect reflector.”

  “Make a nice mirror. What else, and how come?”

  “A mirror is just what I want. I want something that will reflect all the radiation that falls on it. No metal will, even in its range of maximum reflectivity. Aluminum goes pretty high, silver, on some ranges, a bit higher. But none of them reaches 99%. I want a perfect reflector that I can put behind a source of wild, radiant energy so I can focus it, and put it where it will do the most good.”

  “Ninety-nine percent. Sounds pretty good. That’s better efficiency than most anything else we have, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t. The accumulator is 100% efficient on the discharge, and a good transformer, even before that, ran as high as 99.8 sometimes. They had to. If you have a transformer handling 1,000,000 horsepower, and it’s even 1% inefficient, you have a heat loss of nearly 10,000 horsepower to handle. I want to use this as a destructive weapon, and if I hand the other fellow energy in distressing amounts, it’s even worse at my end, because no matter how perfect a beam I work out, there will still be some spread. I can make it mighty tight though, if I make my surface a perfect parabola. But if I send a million horse, I have to handle it, and a ship can’t stand several hundred thousand horsepower roaming around loose as heat, let alone the weapon itself. The thing will be worse to me than to him.

  “I figured there was something worth investigating in those fields we developed on our magnetic shield work. They had to do, you know, with light, and radiant energy. There must be some reason why a metal reflects. Further, though we can’t get down to the basic root of matter, the atom, yet, we can play around just about as we please with molecules and molecular forces. But it is molecular force that determines whether light and radiant energy of that caliber shall be reflected or transmitted. Take aluminum as an example. In the metallic molecule state, the metal will reflect pretty well. But volatilize it, and it becomes transparent. All gases are transparent, all metals reflective. Then the secret of perfect reflection lies at a molecular level in the organization of matter, and is within our reach. Well—this thing was supposed to make that piece of silver reflective. I missed it that time.” He sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to try again.”

  “I should think you’d use tungsten for that. If you do have a slight leak, that would handle the heat.”

  “No, it would hold it. Silver is a better conductor of heat. But the darned thing won’t work.”

  “Your other scheme has.” Faragaut laughed. “I came out principally for some signatures. IP wants one hundred thousand tons of mercury. I’ve sold most of mine already in the open market. You want to sell?”

  “Certainly. And I told you my price.”

  “I know,” sighed Faragaut. “It seems a shame though. Those IP board men would pay higher. And they’re so damn tight it seems a crime not to make ’em pay up when they have to.”

  “The IP will need the money worse elsewhere. Where do I—oh, here?”

  “Right. I’ll be out again this evening. The regular group will be here?”

  Kendall nodded as he signed in triplicate.

  * * * *

  That evening, Buck had found the trouble in his apparatus, for as he well knew, the theory was right, only the practical apparatus needed changing. Before the group composed of Faragaut, McLaurin and the members of Kendall’s “bank,” he demonstrated it.

  It was merely a small, model apparatus, with a mirror of space-strained silver that was an absolutely perfect reflector. The mirror had been ground out of a block of silver one foot deep, by four inches square, carefully annealed, and the work had all been done in a cooling bath. The result was a mirror that was so nearly a perfect paraboloid that the beam held sharp and absolutely tight for the half-mile range they tested it on. At the projector it was three and one-half inches in diameter. At the target, it was three and fifty-two one hundredths inches in diameter.

  “Well, you’ve got the mirror, what are you going to reflect with it now?” asked McLaurin. “The greatest problem is getting a radiant source, isn’t it? You can’t get a temperature above about ten thousand degrees, and maintain it very long, can you?”

  “Why not?” Kendall smiled.

  “It’ll volatilize and leave the scene of action, won’t it?”

  “What if it’s a gaseous source already?”

  “What? Just a gas-flame? That won’t give you the point sour
ce you need. You’re using just a spotlight here, with a Moregan Point-light. That won’t give you energy, and if you use a gas-flame, the spread will be so great, that no matter how perfectly you figure your mirror, it won’t beam.”

  “The answer is easy. Not an ordinary gas-flame—a very extra-special kind of gas-flame. Know anything about Renwright’s ionization-work?”

  “Renwright—he’s an IP man isn’t he?”

  “Right. He’s developed a system, which, thanks to the power we can get in that atostor, will sextuply ionize oxygen gas. Now: what does that mean?”

  “Spirits of space! Concentrated essence of energy!”

  “Right. And in preparation, Cole here had one made up for me. That—and something else. We’ll just hook it up—”

  With Devin’s aid, Kendall attached the second apparatus, a larger device into which the silver block with its mirror surface fitted. With the uttermost care, the two physicists lined it up. Two projectors pointed toward each other at an angle, the base angles of a triangle, whose apex was the center of the mirror. On very low power, a soft, glowing violet light filtered out through the opening of the one, and a slight green light came from the other. But where the two streams met, an intense, violet glare built up. The center of action was not at the focus, and slowly this was lined up, till a sharp, violet beam of light reached out across the open yard to the target set up.

  Buck Kendall cut off the power, and slowly got into position. “Now. Keep out from in front of that thing. Put on these glasses—and watch out.” Heavy, thick-lensed orange-brown goggles were passed out, and Kendall took his place. Before him, a thick window of the same glass had been arranged, so that he might see uninterruptedly the controls at hand, and yet watch unblinded, the action of the beam.

  Dully the mirror-force relay clicked. A hazy glow ran over the silver block, and died. Then—simultaneously the power was thrown from two small, compact atostors into the twin projectors. Instantly—a titanic eruption of light almost invisibly violet, spurted out in a solid, compact stream. With a roar and crash, it battered its way through the thick air, and crashed into the heavy target plate. A stream of flame and scintillating sparks erupted from the armor plate—and died as Kendall cut the beam. A white-hot area a foot across leaked down the face of the metal.

  “That,” said Faragaut gently, removing his goggles. “That’s not a spotlight, and it’s not exactly a gas-flame. But I still don’t know what that blue-hot needle of destruction is. Just what do you call that tame stellar furnace of yours?”

  “Not so far off, Tom,” said Kendall happily, “except that even S Doradus is cold compared to that. That sends almost pure ultra-violet light—which, by the way, it is almost impossible to reflect successfully, and represents a temperature to be expressed not in thousands of degrees, nor yet in tens of thousands. I calculated the temperature would be about 750,000 degrees. What is happening is that a stream of low-voltage electrons—cathode rays—in great quantity are meeting great quantities of sextuply ionized oxygen. That means that a nucleus used to having two electrons in the K-ring, and six in the next, has had that outer six knocked off, and then has been hurled violently into free air.

  “All by themselves, those sextuply ionized oxygen atoms would have a good bit to say, but they don’t really begin to talk till they start roaring for those electrons I’m feeding them. At the meeting point, they grab up all they can get—probably about five—before the competition and the fierce release of energy drives them out, part-satisfied. I lose a little energy there, but not a real fraction. It’s the howl they put up for the first four that counts. The electron-feed is necessary, because otherwise they’d smash on and ruin that mirror. They work practically in a perfect vacuum. That beam smashes the air out of the way. Of course, in space it would work better.”

  “How could it?” asked Faragaut, faintly.

  “Kendall,” asked McLaurin, “can we install that in the IP ships?”

  “You can start.” Kendall shrugged. “There isn’t a lot of apparatus. I’m going to install them in my ships, and in the—bank. I suspect—we haven’t a lot of time left.”

  “How near ready are those ships?”

  “About. That’s all I can say. They’ve been torn up a bit for installation of the atostor apparatus. Now they’ll have to be changed again.”

  “Anything more coming?”

  Buck smiled slowly. He turned directly to McLaurin and replied: “Yes—the Strangers. As to developments—I can’t tell, naturally. But if they do, it will be something entirely unexpected now. You see, given one new discovery, a half-dozen will follow immediately from it. When we announced that atostor, look what happened. Renwright must have thought it was God’s gift to suffering physicists. He stuck some oxygen in the thing, added some of his own stuff—and behold. The magnetic apparatus gave us directly the shield, and indirectly this mirror. Now, I seem to have reached the end for the time. I’m still trying to get that space-release for high speed—speed greater than light, that is. So far,” he added bitterly, “all I’ve gotten as an answer is a single expression that simply means practical zero—Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Expression.”

  “I’m uncertain as to your meaning”—McLaurin smiled—“but I take it that’s nothing new.”

  “No. Nearly four centuries old—twentieth century physics. I’ll have to try some other line of attack, I guess, but that did seem so darned right. It just sounded right. Something ought to happen—and it just keeps saying ‘nothing more except the natural uncertainty of nature.’”

  “Try it out, your math might be wrong somewhere.”

  Kendall laughed. “If it was—I’d hate to try it out. If it wasn’t I’d have no reason to. And there’s plenty of other work to do. For one thing, getting that apparatus in production. The IP board won’t like me.” Kendall smiled.

  “They don’t,” replied McLaurin. “They’re getting more and more and more worried—but they’ve got to keep the IP fleet in such condition that it can at least catch an up-to-date freighter.”

  * * * *

  Gresth Gkae looked back at Sthor rapidly dropping behind, and across at her sister world, Asthor, circling a bare 100,000 miles away. Behind his great interstellar cruiser came a long line of similar ships. Each was loaded now not with instruments and pure scientists, but with weapons, fuel and warriors. Colonists too, came in the last ships. One hundred and fifty giant ships. All the wealth of Sthor and Asthor had been concentrated in producing those great machines. Every one represented nearly the equivalent of thirty million Earth-dollars. Four and a half billions of dollars for mere materials.

  Gresth Gkae had the honor of lead position, for he had discovered the planets and their stable, though tiny, sun. Still, Gresth Gkae knew his own giant Mira was a super-giant sun—and a curse and a menace to any rational society. Our yellow-white sun (to his eyes, an almost invisible color, similar to our blue) was small, but stable, and warm enough.

  In half an hour, all the ships were in space, and at a given signal, at ten-second intervals, they sprang into the superspeed, faster than light. For an instant, giant Mira ran and seemed distorted, as though seen through a porthole covered with running water, then steadied, curiously distorted. Faster than light they raced across the galaxy.

  Even in their super-fast ships, nearly three and a half weeks passed before the sun they sought, singled itself from the star-field as an extra bright point. Two days more, and the sun was within planetary distance. They came at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic, but they leveled down to it now, and slanted toward giant Jupiter and Jovian worlds. Ten worlds, in one sweep, it was—four habitable worlds. The nine satellites would be converted into forts at once, nine space-sweeping forts guarding the approaches to the planet. Gresth Gkae had made a fairly good search of the worlds, and knew that Earth was the main home of civilization in this system. Mars was second, and Venus third. But Jupiter offered the greatest possibilities for quick settlement, a base from which they c
ould more easily operate, a base for fuels, for the heavy elements they would need—

  Fifteen million miles from Jupiter they slowed below the speed of light—and the IP stations observed them. Instantly, according to instructions issued by Commander McLaurin, a fleet of ten of the tiniest, fastest scouts darted out. As soon as possible, a group of three heavy cruisers, armed with all the inventions that had been discovered, the atostor power system, perfectly conducting power leads, the terrible UV ray, started out.

  The scouts got there first. Cameras were grinding steadily, with long range telescopic lenses, delicate instruments probed and felt and caught their fingers in the fields of the giant fleet.

  At ten-second intervals, giant ships popped into being, and glided smoothly toward Jupiter.

  Then the cruisers arrived. They halted at a respectful distance, and waited. The Miran ships plowed on undisturbed. Simultaneously, from the three leaders, terrific neutron rays shot out. The paraffin block walls stopped those—and the cruisers started to explain their feelings on the subject. They were the IP-J-37, 39, and 42. The 37 turned up the full power of the UV ray. The terrific beam of ultra-violet energy struck the second Miran ship, and the spot it touched exploded into incandescence, burned white-hot—and puffed out abruptly as the air pressure within blew the molten metal away.

  The Mirans were startled. This was not the type of thing Gresth Gkae had warned them of. Gresth Gkae himself frowned as the sudden roar of the machines of his ship rose in the metal walls. A stream of ten-inch atomic bombs shrieked out of their tubes, fully glowing green things floated out more slowly, and immediately waxed brilliant. Gamma ray bombs—but they could be guarded against—

  The three Solarian cruisers were washed in such frightful flame as they had never imagined. Streams of atomic bombs were exploding soundlessly, ineffectively in space, not thirty feet from them as they felt the sudden resistance of the magnetic shields. Hopefully, the 39 probed with her neutron gun. Nothing happened save that several gamma ray bombs went off explosively, and all the atomic bombs in its path exploded at once.