Counterattack

by Scott H Washburn

  “That is excellent… Of course to do this properly, I will need expanded facilities, a good supply of captured prey-creatures, perhaps an assistant or two…”

  “I will order it done.”

  “My thanks, Commander.”

  “This has the potential of repaying the clan many-fold. No thanks are needed. But Ixmaderna… There is another matter I wished to discuss with you today.”

  “Yes, Commander? What matter is that?”

  “You touched upon the subject, just now: instinctive loyalty.”

  “I see,” said Ixmaderna, waving its tendrils in sudden understanding. “You are concerned about the buds.”

  “You have noticed this yourself?” Qetjnegartis was surprised.

  “Yes. The buds created here do not have the automatic submission to the seniors who have arrived later. It is an interesting development.”

  Interesting! Ixmaderna’s habit of understatement could be called ‘interesting’, but this was far too dangerous for that! The entire social structure of the Race was based upon the absolute submission of younger members to the older members within their clan. A member would submit to the will of its progenitor, or its progenitor’s progenitor, or their bud-mates, up the line of ancestry for as far as it existed. But while the buds created on this world would submit to those who were here when they came into existence, they had no such submission to those still on the Homeworld or those who arrived from there after they were budded.

  “I find it a very alarming development, Ixmaderna,” said Qetjnegartis. “Since you have observed it, do you have any explanation for it?”

  “Only an untested theory, Commander.”

  “Share it with me.”

  “If you insist. I’m reluctant to take a stance on something like this with no data to…”

  “Share it with me.”

  “Very well. There are several theories that attempt to explain the known phenomena of our automatic dominance and submission. The most widely accepted - and the one I subscribe to - is that there is a mental link that exists between every member of the Race.”

  “I’m aware of that theory,” said Qetjnegartis.

  “Yes, it is theorized to be similar to the mental melding we can achieve when we grasp tendrils, but that it exists without physical contact and at a very weak - and hence subconscious - level. When a bud achieves consciousness, this subconscious link imprints the new being’s place in the hierarchical structure of the Race. It instantly knows - and accepts - the dominance of all those there before it, and likewise its dominance of all who come after it. The problem in proving this is that no trace of this link has ever been detected even though reason dictates that it must exist within the electromagnet spectrum.”

  “Perhaps.” Qetjnegartis had heard some lesser-accepted theories that postulated some entirely unknown method of transmission.

  “If we accept that the link is electromagnet in nature,” continued Ixmaderna, “then it must obey the inverse-square law. The strength of the link will weaken over distance. My theory is that the link is already very weak. It is strong enough to function within the relative small space of a single world, but too weak to function across interplanetary distances.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Qetjnegartis. “To the buds created here, the others on the Homeworld would be too far away to detect and thus would not be included in their imprinted hierarchy.”

  “That is my theory, yes. Sadly there is no way to test it.”

  “Perhaps not, but it explains what we are observing.” Qetjnegartis paused. “I need to consider the possible consequences of this. There could be some serious issues. Very serious issues.”

  “As you say, Commander.”

  “Ixmaderna, it would be best if we do not mention this to anyone else.”

  “I will obey Commander. But surely the other clans are noticing this, too.”

  “Perhaps so. But if anyone is going to raise an alarm, it will not be the Bajantus Clan.

  * * * * *

  August, 1911, Shoreham, Long Island, NY

  Colonel Andrew Comstock breathed in the warm air and reflected that this was actually a rather nice place when it wasn’t covered in snow. The other times he’d been here it had been in late fall or the dead of winter. He didn’t need his greatcoat today! It would have been uncomfortably warm, in fact, if not for the breeze off Long Island Sound.

  He was here to see the latest invention developed by the brilliant but erratic mind of Nikola Tesla. He’d met the man on a number of occasions and learned that the only thing you could predict about him was that he’d be unpredictable. Andrew glanced at the huge Wardenclyffe Tower, a metal monstrosity almost two hundred feet high, and was surprised to see that not only was it not, apparently, going to be in use today, but it looked as though some of it had been dismantled. When he’d gotten the message from Tesla that he wanted to demonstrate a new ‘electric gun’, he’d assumed it would be some improvement on the earlier adaptations he’d made to the tower. It appeared he’d been wrong.

  He spotted Tesla in a nearby field, standing next to a strange device and surrounded by a group of men, some of whom he realized were newspapermen. “Blast him!” he snapped.

  “Sir?”

  He looked to the man accompanying him and raised an eyebrow. Lieutenant Jeremiah Hornbaker was his new aide and Andrew wasn’t quite used to having him around. He’d been making inspection tours like this since before the war and almost always alone. But he was a colonel now and rated an aide. He’d actually rated one since he made major, but never got around to requesting one. Hornbaker was lanky, eager, and incredibly young - much like he’d been not so many years ago.

  “Tesla!” he said jerking his head toward the tall, impeccably dressed figure. “He doesn’t have the slightest regard for procedures or security. He probably invited those reporters before he bothered to inform the Ordnance Department he’d be making this test today!”

  “I see, sir. But it seems as though he’s built something, there.”

  Indeed it did, and unlike the Wardenclyffe Tower, this actually looked like some sort of weapon. There was a boxy structure about the size and shape of an automobile with all manner of pipes and tubes and wires spilling out of it. Above that, however was a long tapering cylinder, like a cannon barrel, mounted on a rotating mount. Cables came from the box and disappeared into the cylinder. There were thick rings of a white ceramic material at intervals along the length of the cylinder until at the end they stopped with a white ball where the muzzle should have been.

  “Ah, Major Comstock!” cried Tesla when he caught sight of him.

  “It’s colonel…”

  “So good of you to come! Gentlemen, this is Major Comstock from the Ordnance Department! He and I have worked together for years producing weapons for the war against the Martians!” He grabbed him by the arm and displayed him to the group like some prize show animal. Andrew refrained from mentioning that so far, Tesla’s work had yet to produce a single working weapon for the war effort.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Tesla had managed to get a half-dozen captured Martian heat rays operational. They weren’t terribly practical weapons, requiring enormous power generating plants to make them work. Five of them had been incorporated in the defenses of St. Louis, it being seen as the critical lynch-pin in the Mississippi Line.

  “Mr. Tesla,” said Andrew, “what have you built here?”

  “Ah! Yes, right to the point! Good!” He turned and waved his hands at the contraption. “As I was explaining to these gentlemen, using knowledge gleaned from captured Martian machines, I have created the first electric cannon!” Andrew glanced back at the Wardenclyffe Tower and Tesla instantly noticed. “Yes! You were here for my first experiments, but I assure you that my new device is as far advanced beyond that as a machine gun is from a bow and arrow!

  “Some of the problems with my first device - as you so ably pointed out, Major—was the short range, the difficulty in aiming, and the
large power generators needed to operate it.”

  “And you have solved these problems, sir? I can’t help but notice the cables leading back to your generator building,” said Andrew, pointing to several cables as thick as a man’s arm running to the large brick building at the base of the Wardenclyffe Tower.

  “Ah! Yes, the device needs to be charged up by a significant source, but once charged, it is independent and can fire several times without recharging. You see, I have made use of that remarkable Martian wire which has no electrical resistance. Amazing!”

  “Where did you get the wire?” asked Andrew sharply. The stuff was being strictly rationed, since the only source of it was from damaged Martian machines which had been captured. And even though each machine could yield thousands of miles of it, it was proving so useful for the new British-designed radio units and the experimental coil guns, it could only be acquired with Ordnance Department approval; and Andrew was damn sure none had been authorized for Tesla!

  “Oh, I have my sources,” replied Tesla with a smirk. “And I only needed a few hundred miles for this. But as I was saying, using the wire as a storage battery I have been able to accumulate an electrical charge of an unprecedented intensity. It can then be projected through this large tube, where I have additional coils of the wire. From there, the electric charge will leap to the target.” Tesla pointed to an object in an adjoining field. It had to have been at least five hundred yards away.

  “It can fire that far?” asked Andrew, surprised. The earlier demonstrations with the tower had only had a range of about fifty yards.

  “Indeed yes! With future improvements I believe it can fire even farther. But here! Let me demonstrate! I charged the coils earlier today, so it is ready to fire!”

  Andrew instinctively stepped back. The bloody thing was already charged? He’d seen what happened when one of the Martian storage batteries failed first hand and he had no wish to be close to some homemade copy of Tesla’s! “Come on,” he growled to Hornbaker, “let’s move over there.” He led the way to where a low stone wall provided a bit of shelter. Quite a few of the newspapermen followed him.

  “Whenever you’re ready, sir!” he shouted back at Tesla. The man waved and started fiddling with his device.

  One of the newspapermen came up beside Andrew. “So, Colonel,” he said, “you’ve been working with the doctor for a long time?”

  “I wouldn’t actually say working with him. I keep up to date with his activities—most of them anyway—and come to confer with him and observe demonstrations like this when events warrant.”

  “Is he as brilliant as they say?”

  Andrew shrugged. “His mind works on a level I can scarcely conceive of, sir. If that’s brilliant, then I’d have to call him brilliant.”

  “Some say he’s a charlatan. Spending huge sums of government money and producing nothing.”

  Andrew wasn’t touching that one! All he needed was to be quoted in the paper saying something bad about Tesla. “I guess we’ll find out in a few minutes, won’t we?”

  Tesla waved again and shouted something Andrew couldn’t quite make out. His hearing wasn’t as good as it used to be. Getting caught on the edge of the blast of an exploding tripod last year hadn’t helped. But he assumed Tesla was ready and that something would soon happen.

  It did. A loud hum filled the air that got higher and higher in pitch until it faded from his ability to hear. Hornbaker groaned and muttered ow! Several of the other watchers were wiggling fingers in their ears. A moment later a blue glow appeared around the tube of the machine. It was the same color as a Martian tripod getting ready to explode and Andrew tensed to duck behind the wall…

  Then sparks and crackling arcs of electricity were crawling up and down the tube, and an instant later a blindingly bright bolt of what could only be called lightning leapt away from the end of the tube and in an instant struck the distant target. The bolt persisted, connecting tube and target for a few heartbeats and writhing like a snake. There was a blast of flame from the target and then the bolt was jumping around the target, striking the ground in a dozen spots, almost too quickly to see. An enormous crack, like a thunderbolt, shook the air and then the light was gone. The boom rolled away across the landscape and out onto the Sound.

  “God in Heaven,” whispered the newspaperman. Except he wasn’t whispering, he was shouting. Everyone’s ears were stunned.

  “I don’t think anyone will be calling him a charlatan after this,” Andrew shouted back.

  The crowd pulled itself together and went back toward the cannon where Tesla was fairly dancing in delight. “Did you see? Did you see it?”

  “Saw and heard! That was amazing, sir!” And it had been, it really had. The captured heat ray which Tesla had demonstrated had been impressive, but that was something which already existed. Tesla had only figured out how to make it work. But this! This was something totally new. “But what did it do to the target?”

  “Let’s go see!” Without further ado, Tesla skipped toward the target, leaving nearly everyone behind with his long, quick strides. Andrew hurried to catch up. He was sweating by the time they crossed the field. But the target was…

  “Is that part of a Martian machine?”

  “Of course! I had to make sure my cannon could actually damage one!”

  “Where did you get it?” Andrew was sure Tesla hadn’t been authorized this either.

  “A friend supplied it. But look! Look what I did!”

  The target had once been the curving rear plate of a tripod’s head. Now it was a cracked and smoldering wreck. Black streaks marred the gleaming metal and there were holes in several spots. Thousands of the tiny hexagonal metal flakes that made up Martian armor were scattered all over. The thing had been propped up with several steel angles, but these were damaged, too, and the whole thing was leaning over drunkenly to one side. There were scorched patches on the ground all around, too. In a few spots the grass was still burning.

  “Well? Well? What do you think?” demanded Tesla.

  Andrew walked around, looking at the remains and directed Hornbaker to take some photographs with his Brownie camera. “You certainly did significant damage to it, sir.” He put his hand through one of the holes, careful not to touch the edges—the thing was clearly still hot. “It would normally take a large caliber shell to do this sort of damage.” It was impressive, but considering the size of the apparatus and the facilities needed to charge the thing, he was wondering if it was any improvement over conventional artillery. Then something else caught his eye. Just to the rear of the armor there was a… puddle of metal. Something had melted and then solidified again. It wasn’t part of the armor; it had a golden color. “What’s that, sir?”

  “Ah! You have sharp eyes, Major!” said Tesla coming over next to him. “This is how I overcame the targeting problem!”

  “And how did you do that?”

  “The first few times I fired the cannon the electric charge would - as you’d naturally expect - simply jumped to the nearest object which would ground it out. The challenge was to get it to jump to where I wanted it to go.”

  “I can see that, sir.” He remembered an early trial of the tower-device and how the bolt hit several unintended objects.

  “Well, the breakthrough was when I discovered that the power, once stored in the Martian wire, took on a distinct and very unique frequency. You are familiar with electrical frequency, are you not?”

  “In a general sort of way…”

  “Good! Well, the frequency of the Martian current is quite unique. And I discovered that by attuning my projector properly, I could make the electrical bolt jump to a target that resonated at that frequency in preference of any other target! Brilliant, is it not!”

  Andrew opened his mouth to agree and then stopped and looked at the puddle again. “So that’s the Martian wire?” he said aghast. “Destroyed?”

  “Only about a mile of it,” said Tesla waving his hand as if it were nothing.
The stuff was worth ten times its weight in gold right now! And melting would leave it useless. “I needed to make targets, you understand.”

  “Targets?” said Andrew weakly. “H-how many?”

  “Oh, a dozen or so. I had to refine the technique, you understand. I really could use some more of it, now. Can you take care of that, Major?”

  Andrew opened his mouth - he wasn’t sure what was about to come out—but unexpectedly Lieutenant Hornbaker stepped in. “Excuse me, sir, but how did you prevent the bolt from jumping to the storage battery in your cannon? Seems like that would be the closest target.”

  Tesla spun around and stared at Hornbaker as if he’d never seen him before. “Who are you?”

  “This is Lieutenant Hornbaker. He works for me,” said Andrew.

  “Ah, I see. Well, that is an excellent question, young man! And it took all of my inventiveness to find the answer!” He launched into a lengthy explanation of which Andrew could follow very little. The gist of it seemed to be that somehow Tesla had managed to alter the frequency of the current in his storage battery so that it would not attract the bolt.

  “Doctor, so you are saying that your cannon will unerringly send its bolt to find a Martian power unit that’s within range?” asked Andrew. “It will never miss its target?”

  “That has been the result so far,” confirmed Tesla. “At least within the effective range. If the range is too long, misses have occurred. But I should add that I believe the range will be determined by the amount of power stored in the target. The amount I could put in my little target batteries,” he waved his hand at the puddle, “is tiny compared with what a Martian tripod must have. The effective range against one of them might be many times what it is here!”

  Andrew took a deep breath and looked from the target to the cannon and then back to the target. Now this was something! A weapon which could wreck a tripod and never miss? The problems with the size of the device and the need for generators to charge it up seemed far less serious now!