Chapter XIII
ATTACKED
The _Ancient Mariner_ stirred, and rose lightly from its place besidethe city. Visible over the horizon now, and coming at terrific speed,was a fleet of seven Thessian ships.
They must do their best to protect that city. Arcot turned the ship andcalled his decision to Morey. As he did so, one of the Thessian shipssuddenly swerved violently, and plunged downward. The attractive ray wasin action. It struck the rocks of Neptune, and plunged in. Half buried,it stopped. Stopped--and backed out! The tremendously strong relux andlux had withstood the blow, and these strange, inhumanly powerful menhad not been injured!
Two of the ships darted toward him simultaneously, flashing outmolecular rays. The rays glanced off of Arcot's screen already in place,but the tubes were showing almost at once that this could not besustained. It was evident that the swiftly approaching ships would soonbreak down the shields. Arcot turned the ship and drove to one side. Hiseyes went dead.
He cut into artificial space, waited ten seconds, then cut back. Thescene before him changed. It seemed a different world. The light wasvery dim, so dim he could scarcely see the images on the view plate.They were so deep a red that they were very near to black. Even Sirius,the flaming blue-white star was red. The darting Thessian ships weremoving quite slowly now, moving at a speed that was easy to follow.Their rays, before ionizing the air brilliantly red, were now dark. Theinstruments showed that the screen was no longer encountering seriousloading, and, further, the load was coming in at a frequency harmlesslyfar down the radio spectrum!
Arcot stared in wide-eyed amazement. What could the Thessians have donethat caused this change? He reached up and increased the amplificationon the eyes to a point that made even the dim illumination sufficient.Wade was staring in amazement, too.
"Lord! What an idea!" suddenly exclaimed Arcot.
Wade was staring at Arcot in equally great amazement. "What's thesecret?" he asked.
"Time, man, time! We are in an advanced time plane, living faster thanthey, our atoms of fuel are destroyed faster, our second is shorter. Inone second of our earthly time our generators do the same amount of workas usual, but they do many, many times more work in one second, of thetime we were in! We are under the advanced time field."
Wade could see it all. The red light--normal light seen through eyesenormously speeded in all perceptions. The change, the dimness--dimbecause less energy reached them per second of their time. Then camethis blue light, as they reached the X-ray spectrum of Sirius, and sawX-rays as normal light--shielded, tremendously shielded by theatmosphere, but the enormous amplification of the eyes made up for it.
The remaining Thessians seemed to get the idea simultaneously, andstarted for Arcot in his own time field. The Thessian ship appeared tobe actually leaping at him. Suddenly, his speed increased inconceivably.Simultaneously, Arcot's hand, already started toward the space-controlswitch, reached it, and pushed it to the point that threw the ship intoartificial Space. The last glimmer of light died suddenly, as theThessian ship's bow loomed huge beside the _Ancient Mariner_.
There was a terrific shock that hurled the ship violently to one side,threw the men about inside the ship. Simultaneously the lights blinkedout.
Light returned as the automatic emergency incandescent lights in theroom, fed from an energy store coil, flashed on abruptly. The men werewhite-faced, tense in their positions. Swiftly Morey was looking overthe indicators on his remote-reading panel, while Arcot stared at thefew dials before the actual control board.
"_There's an air pressure outside the ship!_" he cried out in surprise."High oxygen, very little nitrogen, breathable apparently, providedthere are no poisons. Temperature ten below zero C."
"Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuitedthem." Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking.
"Nervous shock," commented Zezdon Afthen. "It will be an hour or morebefore we will be in condition to work."
"Can't wait," replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too.
"Morey, make some good strong coffee if you can, and we'll waste alittle air on some smokes."
Morey rose and went to the door that led through the main passage to thegalley. "Heck of a job--no weight at all," he muttered. "There is air inthe passage, anyway." He opened the door, and the air rushed from thecontrol room to the passage till the pressure was equalized. The door tothe power room was shut, but it was bulged, despite its two-inch luxmetal, and through its clear material he could see the wreckage of thepower room.
"Arcot," he called. "Come here and look at the power room. Quintillionsof miles from home, we can't shut off this field now."
Arcot was with him in a moment. The tremendous mass of the nose of theThessian ship had caught them full amid-ship, and the powerful ram haddriven through the room. Their lux walls had not been touched; only asledge-hammer blow would have bent them under any circumstances, letalone breaking them. But the tremendously powerful main generator wassplit wide open. And the mechanical damage was awful. The prow of theship had been driven deep into the machine, and the power room was awreck.
"And," pointed out Morey, "we can't handle a job like that. It will takea tremendous amount of machinery back on a planet to work that stuff,and we couldn't bend that bar, let alone fix it."
"Get the coffee, will you please, Morey? I have an idea that's bound towork," said Arcot looking fixedly at the machinery.
Morey turned and went to the galley.
Five minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stoodstill, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying smallplastic balloons with coffee in them.
They drank the coffee and returned to the control room, and sat about,the terrestrians smoking peacefully, the Ortolian and the Talsoniansatisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, whichZezdon Afthen introduced.
"Well, we have a lot more to do," Arcot said. "The air-apparatus stoppedworking a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing whilethe air in the storage tanks is used up. Did you notice our friends, theenemy?" Through the great pilot's window the bulk of the Thessian ship'sbow could be seen. It was cut across with an exactitude of mathematicalcertainty.
"Easy to guess what happened," Morey grinned. "They may have wrecked us,but we sure wrecked them. They got half in and half out of our spacefield. Result--the half that was in, stayed in. The half that was outstayed out. The two halves were instantaneously a billion miles apart,and that beautifully exact surface represents the point our space cutacross.
"That being decided, the next question is how to fix this poor oldwreck." Morey grinned a bit. "Better, how to get out of here, and downto old Neptune."
"Fix it!" replied Arcot. "Come on; you get in your space suit, take theportable telectroscope and set it up in space, motionless, in such aposition that it views both our ship and the nose of the Thessianmachine, will you, Wade? Tune it to--seven-seven-three." Morey rose withArcot, and followed him, somewhat mystified, down the passage. At theairlock Wade put on his space suit, and the Ortolian helped him with it.In a moment the other three men appeared bearing the machine. It waspractically weightless, though it would fall slowly if left to itself,for the mass of the _Ancient Mariner_ and the front end of the Thessianship made a considerable attractive field. But it was clumsy, and neededguiding here in the ship.
Wade took it into the airlock, and a moment later into space with him.His hand molecular-driving unit pulling him, he towed the machine intoplace, and with some difficulty got it practically motionless withrespect of the two bodies, which were now lying against each other.
"Turn it a bit, Wade, so that the _Ancient Mariner_ is just in itsrange," came Arcot's thoughts. Wade did so. "Come on back and watch thefun."
Wade returned. Arcot and the others were busy placing a heavy emergencylead from the storeroom in the place of one of the broken leads. In fiveminutes they had it fixed where they wanted it.
Into the control roo
m went Arcot, and started the power-room televiewplate. Connected into the system of view plates, the scene was visiblenow on all the plates in the ship. Well off to one side of the room,prepared for such emergencies, and equipped with individual powerstorage coils that would run it for several days, the view platefunctioned smoothly.
"Now, we are ready," said Arcot. The Talsonian proved he understoodArcot's intentions by preceding him to the laboratory.
Arcot had two viewplates operating here. One was covering the scene asshown by the machine outside, and the other showed the power room.
Arcot stepped over to the artificial-matter machine, and worked swiftlyon it. In a moment the power from the storage coils of the ship wasflowing through the new cable, and into the machine. A huge ringappeared about the nose of the Thessian ship, fitting snugly over it. Aterrific wrench--and it was free of the _Ancient Mariner_. The ringcontracted and formed a chunk of the stuff free of the broken nose ofthe ship.
It was carried over to the wall of the _Ancient Mariner_, a smallerpiece snipped off as before, and carried inside. A piece of perhaps halfa ton mass. "I hope they use good stuff," grinned Arcot. The piece wasdeposited on the floor of the ship, and a disc formed of artificialmatter plugged the hole in its side. Another took a piece of the reluxfrom the broken Thessian ship, pushed it into the hole on the ship. Thespace about the scene of operation was a crackling inferno of energybreaking down into heat and light. Arcot dematerialized his tremendoustools, and the wall of the _Ancient Mariner_ was neatly patched withrelux smoothed over as perfectly as before. A second time, using some ofthe relux he had brought within the ship, and the inner wall wasrebuilt. The job was absolutely perfect, save that now, where there hadbeen lux, there was an outer wall of relux.
The main generator was crumpled up, and torn out. The auxiliarygenerators would have to carry the load. The great cables were swiftlyrepaired in the same manner, a perfect cylinder forming about them, anda piece of relux from the store Arcot had sliced from the enemy ship,welding them perfectly under enormous pressure, pressure that made themflow perfectly into one another as heat alone could not.
In less than half an hour the ship was patched up, the power roomgenerally repaired, save for a few minor things that had to be replacedfrom the stores. The main generator was gone, but that was not anessential. The door was straightened and the job done.
In an hour they were ready to proceed.
Invaders from the Infinite Page 13