The Earth In Peril

by Donald A Wollheim (ed)

  She suddenly matched his grin.

  “I went through the first cosmoquake like everybody else,” she told him, “but where I was kept, there wasn’t much information on scientific matters. I’ve come along blind. I know what you’ve done, but not why. What are we aiming for? What are we to make contact with? And what causes cosmoquakes, anyhow? You never bothered to explain!”

  He blinked at her and then*spoke gruffly.

  “Thanks! I’ll tell you. After the first cosmoquake, I got what data was to be had and figured that an object with a mass of twelve sols and a speed near that of light had passed about six hundred million miles from Earth.

  “I figured its course. I thought there might be another one, but the first one could have been alone. There was a second one, and I was pretty sure there’d be a third. There is a third.

  “The gravitometer in the lab said so. And the first was

  two weeks ahead of the second, but the third is only four days behind that. It looks like scouts and an advance guard. Considering their speed, they’re close together.

  “They’re practically tripping over each other. Yet a small party wouldn’t send one of its number even as far ahead as the first. They’d stay as close as they could, to help each other.”

  Jane stared at him.

  “But—you talk as if they were—people!”

  Braddick shrugged.

  “I don’t know what they are. But think! The Things have almost the speed of light. They come from the direction of Polaris—forty light years away. Empty space isn’t altogether empty. There’s at least one atom per cubic centimeter even between the stars.

  “That means resistance to speeds close to light. Nothing can attain such speeds naturally. Whatever the Things are, they had to be driven to get going that fast, and the drive has to stay on to keep them going that fast.

  “Their speed gives them the mass that raises hob, but they’re spaceships. They’re artificial. They’re going somewhere, and our solar system is in the way. And we’re going out to try to persuade them to change course.”

  “If there are—more of them,” said Jane, slowly, “there’ll be more cosmoquakes, and worse ones."

  "So much worse,” Braddick said measuredly, “that if we don’t persuade them to change, course, there’s hardly any use in our going back to Earth. If there are dozens or hundreds of them to come, cosmoquakes will crack open geologic faults and let loose chains of giant volcanoes.

  “The Things that pass close will raise tidal waves five miles high. Maybe the sun itself will be stirred into explosion as a nova. It isn’t impossible! In any case, the human race will be exterminated. So—well—if we don’t persuade them to change course we might as well open the airlock door and step out.”

  Jane sat still an instant, imagining the tiny spaceship hanging in mid-space, alone surviving a solar system gone mad, on whch no planet would provide a foothold, and the nearest other star light years away.

  Then there was a noise in the well which ran along the vertical axis of the ship. Hamlin and Thorn appeared. Somehow, Hamlin had pulled himself together. But he looked like a man on the verge of the horrors. Thorn looked grave, with now a trace of reassured complacency.

  “Look here, Braddick,” said Hamlin, his voice pitched high. “This has gone far enough!”

  “Yes?” said Braddick.

  "You made an agreement with Atomic Power,” said Hamlin. He gave an impression of breathlessness. “It was verbal, but it was recorded as it was made. You’re an employee of the company for as long as Thom is with you. I have written authority to take over any experiment you may be conducting while you are an employee of the company.

  “I take over now! I insist that you stop this experiment at once! If we’re really in space, I order you to return to Earth at once!” He swallowed. “You’re violating a contract. You’ve kidnapped Thom and me. You—”

  “Oh, blast!” said Braddick savagely. He pulled Hamlin’s own flash pistol from his pocket. “Get in that room across the corridor! You’re a fool, and I’ll take no chances! Move! Both of you!”

  “It’s piracy” protested Hamlin, his teeth chattering.

  Thom spoke condescendingly.

  “Mr. Braddick, you do not realize that Atomic Power is a very important corporation! To be on the wrong side of the law, and opposed to Atomic Power—”

  “Move! repeated Braddick furiously.

  They moved. Braddick jammed the door so it would not open from within. He nodded to Jane and climbed back to the control-room. She followed.

  “I could have said you’re Atomic Power by rights,” he grumbled, “but it’s no use. I’m going to hook up a relay. I don’t want to get too far out. I wish the ship had been finished.”

  The ship was actually incomplete, but the parts for its completion had been loaded in while the hull was building. Now he brought out an odd little inertia switch and adjusted it with minute care.

  Then he cross-connected it to half a dozen of the switches on the control-board. When it was finished, he set the drive control to a new point and threw off the main time field. The cosmos went back to a scene of twinkling lights and a now very far distant sun. But this time the sensation of weight was normal.

  He leaned back in the control chair and seemed to relax. With the vision screens all about, the control-room looked like a cage, with windows showing the sky all around. The sun was now merely a bright star, and the earth was probably visible, but not easy to distinguish from vastly more distant stars which shone of their own light.

  At sixty gravities, one attains a speed of twenty-three miles per second the first minute, and the speed increases by twen-ty-three miles per second more "for every added minute. The spaceship was a long way from home.

  “This switch won’t be anywhere near as easy to trip as the gravitometer back in the lab,” said Braddick. “But twelve sols is a lot of mass. If we trip it, our time field goes on to maximum, reducing our mass to as near zero as possible.

  “Everything else goes off. I think—and I hope—we’ll contact the Thing that’s going on to make another cosmoquake. Meanwhile we can only wait. Maybe we’d better pray.”

  Jane spoke quietly.

  “Do you really expect to do anything to an object weighing twelve times as much as the sun?”

  “It only weighs that because of its speed,” said Braddick. He added with a shrug, “Things work out queerly. The odds against the time field being known when the first of those things came by—against my having the hunch that made me do my calculations—against my having a machine that could make a spaceship.

  “Against your coming and being able to do what I wanted with the fields—against our escaping those bombs Atomic Power dropped on us. Add those up, and they’re pretty big odds. It’s practically a miracle that we’re here. And it would be pretty stupid of fate or chance or whatever to waste a good miracle like this by having us helpless at the end of it."

  Jane looked at him, hard. Then she took a quick breath. “I like that,” she said softly. “I like this whole business. I like—everything!” She smiled at him gravely. “I say no more, or I might be unmaidenly.”

  The little spaceship went on through sheer emptiness with an attained speed of four-thousand-odd miles per second and no feeling of motion at all. It was accelerating slowly, now, at one gravity, for comfort.

  It was alone as no man-made object was ever alone before. It was far beyond escape velocity. If the drive failed, it would drift on forever through space. It was a thing orphaned, abandoned by sun and earth and planets. It went on and on and on. . . .

  The the switch clicked over. There was an instant’s sensation of bitter cold. Then the stars were gone, and there was a dark-gray background to all of space. The ship’s drive was off, and there was no feeling of weight at all. The sensation was of a giddy, terrible, endless fall.

  “This,” said Braddick, “is definitely it.’’

  Jane was pale. “You mean—”

/>   “We ran into a gravitational field,” said Braddick. “There’s only one thing with a gravitational field out here, and that’s the Thing we came out to meet."

  He watched the screens, holding himself in the control seat. The time field was on to its limit. Absolutely all the mass which could be taken out of any object had been removed. The time rate, correspondingly, had gone up. The spaceship might have weighed eighty tons or so on earth.

  In this time rate, its mass would have been measurable only in milligrams—and there are three hundred-odd milligrams in an aspirin tablet. In this field, too, time was telescoped to an incredible degree. Not only was visible light too low in frequency to affect the scanners, but X-rays and even cosmics were too far in the red to register.

  Gravity itself had the effect of light, and the tenuous gravitational fields which interlace all space made, a faint grayish glow. The stars were lost against this background. The sun, to be sure, was a visible speck of lighter gray.

  But far away, yet growing nearer with a perceptible speed even at this time rate, there was another and vastly brighter object. Beyond it were others. Small pin-points of brightness, remote, in ordered and patently artificial arrangement.

  They looked like a new constellation, precisely geometric in design. But they were, of course, the space fleet of Things, moving toward some unguessable destination, with Earth and Sol and the solar system merely a course marker, like an ant heap in the desert between the stars.

  The little spaceship was practically without inertia, practically without resistance to gravitational pull. It fell headlong toward the Thing from beyond Polaris, the fellow to the Things which had shaken the earth and roused the sun to fury. It glowed more and more brightly as the spaceship approached. The scanners adjusted to cut down its glare.

  The little spaceship swung past and fell into an orbit about it. The Thing was perhaps a thousand feet long, no more. It glowed with the- fierce energy of its mass. There were rows of openings along its hull. They might have been ports, or they might have been weapons. And it had the mass of twelve suns.

  VII

  Another Miracle

  FOR five hours, as time passed in the master field, the little spaceship from earth swung about the giant, glowing Thing. On earth, in the same interval, only the infinitesimal fraction of a second passed.

  Those in the spaceship lived at such a rate that had they stayed in their orbit until they died of old age, a child’s punctured bubble on earth would not have vanished. But they spent five seeming hours in telescoped time, and despite the lack of weight they were able to work and to know futility.

  The two in the control-room looked at each other, at last, with defeat in their eyes. They had tied themselves in their seats. In its established orbit, everything in the spaceship seemed weightless.

  Despite the Thing’s mass, their revolution about it neutralized all attraction. But their speed in that orbit was actually so enormous that the Thing itself seemed to revolve slowly even in their time rate.

  ‘The situation seems to call for another miracle, Jane,” said Braddick, trying to smile. “We can’t attract attention, even unfavorably. And the Thing itself is invulnerable. At a speed so close to that of light, its every molecule has a mass of tons.

  “No earthly explosive could dent it. If it rammed a planet the size of Earth, it wouldn’t be stopped. It would go right on through. But the planet would explode after it had passed."

  Jane watched his face, her hands folded together demurely.

  “There are creatures of some sort inside it,” said Braddick. “They may be fiends, or they may be quite decent. Were like ants to them, but maybe they wouldn’t deliberately kill us. Yet they’ll never know we were here, because—now that I realized—they’re in a time field too.

  “Einstein figured it out more than seventy years ago. When an object approaches the speed of light and its mass increases, its time rate slows in proportion. With every molecule weighing tons, the creatures who built this thing—whatever they are—must move with infinite slowness and feel quite normal regardless. It’s a penalty they pay for their invulnerability. But we’ll never be able to make them know we’re here.”

  Jane’s eyes remained fixed on his face. Braddick looked suddenly old and worn. The tiny spaceship now circled the Thing fropi outer space as a moth circles a flame. It could do nothing—literally nothing.

  Its weight was infinitesimal, but the power of its drive was proportional to its mass. It simply could not pull away from a gravitational field equal to twelve suns. And it looked now as if the tiny ship would simply remain as a satellite of the Thing until—

  “One more item,” said Braddick. “Revolving around the Thing as we are, we have a terrific velocity ourselves. We’d go into the Thing’s own time rate if we cut off our main field. But I pointed out before, that there’s matter even in supposedly empty space. An atom to the cubic centimeter.

  “At our speed, we’re batting into trillions of them every second. Even the Things need to keep their drives on to keep from being slowed by that normally immeasurable resistance. But our mass is so slight that we're slowing down fast.

  “The more slowly we move, the closer we come to the Thing. We’re closer now than we were. Before many hours we’re going to touch it—and die.”

  Jane glanced at the vision screens and back at him.

  “But the—creatures must know about the slowing of time at their velocity,” she said hesitantly.

  “I’d think so,” said Braddick.

  “And this is one of the scouts,” said Jane. “We saw”— she pointed to the geometric pattern of glowing points on the vision screen—“we can see the rest of the fleet. This one is on ahead, like the ones that made cosmoquakes.”

  Braddick nodded.

  "Yes.”

  “Why would they have scouts,” asked Jane, “if their scouts live so slowly that they couldn’t signal a danger until it was long past? The odds against any solar system having a weapon that will destroy them must be enormous, but they thought it possible or they wouldn't have sent scouts on ahead.”

  Braddick’s forehead creased.

  “Yes, I see.” Then his expression of defeat lightened. “Of course! They’d have to have automatic signals! Signals that would be sent back from a scout that was attacked, whether the creatures in it realized the attack or not! Of course!”

  He straightened, within the cord that held him in his seat.

  “The kick-back, though,” he said drily, “is that if they have a device that will signal the fleet that this ship is attacked, it will almost certainly turn on some defenses for this ship.

  “And they ought to be deadly. They should blow us out of space in a hurry. If we can start them, we’ll be spending our lives simply to send a signal that may not have any effect at all.”

  Jane smiled at him.

  “But aren’t we dead already, Dirk?”

  He nodded.

  “We are. All rightl We try to attack the Thing. But we’ve no projectiles that would stir the top layer of molecules. Hm. . . . What would be long radio waves to us would be visible light to them. Now, if we could start some sort of trigger wave, to start radioactivity. . . .

  “I’m stabbing in the dark,” he added, “but there might be something there.”

  He began to scribble on a pad beside him. He seemed to forget the girl at his elbow. But Jane watched him with a curiously maternal expression. She regarded him like someone watching a little boy of whom she is vastly proud, but whom she knows needs someone to look after him.

  Far off in space, the mighty armada of the Things bored on. There were thousands of them. It was, perhaps, the mass migration of an entire race, leaving the planets of a burned-out sun for younger worlds discovered by its explorers in the course of a search-requiring millenia.

  In the Things would be stored all the equipment for defense and attack that hundreds of thousands of years of civilization had developed. There would be might
y machines and equipment for the reconstruction of a world. The space armada may have been a gallant defiance of fate by an ancient people whose sun had burned low and who had to start anew or die.

  But in its path lay Earth. And on Earth was a young civilization, Atomic Power had been known for less than half a century. Broadcast power was not yet in universal use. Clumsy, laboring rockets had barely circled its moon. Only twice had explorers returned from a satellite hardly a quarter million miles away.

  Its science was childish by comparison with that which had built the Things. And Earth ioas doomed. The human race was destined for annihilation, when the navy of Things merely drove past.

  The second cosmoquake had killed millions. But also it had shaken terrestrial scientists out of their complacency. The second cosmoquake rescued Dirk Braddick’s explanation from the daily paper feature pages and caused it to be given really serious consideration.

  Physics laboratories—those that survived—hastily prepared devices to- test its accuracy. Gravitometers even more delicate than Braddick’s had been made, and they verified his explanation to the full.

  A full hour before the bombing of his laboratory, other scientists knew of the third nearing Thing. More, they had detected the more distant main fleet. But then they could not reach Dirk Braddick. For three days his laboratory had been isolated.

  But on the fourth day Air-Navy helicopters descended and found it in still-smoking ruins. But some of them followed and shot down private fliers who tried to flee—and learned that Atomic Power had bombed and killed—apparently—the man who alone had understood the cosmoquakes from the beginning and was surely the only man who might have devised a defense.

  In the spaceship Braddick looked up in renewed, dull defeat.

  “No use,” he said heavily. “I figured out a frequency that would do the work. A radio wave, a disintegration-frequency that would start radioactivity at work like a lightning fast cancer.