“It would eat up that Thing in seconds. It could only be generated in a ship in our time field, and only work on matter in the time rate yonder. But there’s one flaw in it. It’s useless.”
“You’ll make it work!” said Jane confidently.
“No,” said Braddick. “I could make a generator. But it has to shift electrons in the Thing to start its destruction. I began to figure on the power I’d need. And it worked out beautifully until I remembered that at the speed that thing has attained, its electrons weigh pounds.
“Pounds my dear Jane! And it would take more energy than Atomic Power makes in all its generating stations to pack power enough into a beam to move those outsize electrons. And we simply haven’t got it.”
There was silence. Then Jane put out her hand and touched his shoulder comfortingly.
“Well, then,” she said in a sort of blind confidence, “you’ll think of something else!”
He automatically covered her hand with his own.. But he spoke querulously.
“Dam it, Jane, I don’t like it! I know there’s some way to beat the thing! I know it—”
VIII
No More Cosmoquakes
All OF the lights in the control-room went out. The vision screens went dead. The control-room became inky black. The air purifier had been running. Its noise was a faint murmur. It cut off as the lights did. The stillness was enough to crack one’s eardrums. The blackness was absolute.
Jane spoke in a shaking voice.
“Dirk!—what—”
“I don’t know,” said Braddick evenly. “Maybe the Thing has defenses that turn on after all. Or perhaps—” He said vexedly, “It might be merely a line failure and I haven’t a flashlight on the ship! I simply didn’t think to bring onel”
Of the two possibilities, the-one seemed as likely as the other.
“I’ll check the wiring in the dark,” said Braddick. He got up fumblingly because of his lack of weight. “Better take my place at the control-board. Not that it’ll do any good if—”
He touched her in the inky blackness. And they were weightless, in a tiny bomb of blackness in the vast vacuum of intersellar space. Knowledge of the monstrous vacancy outside made for a feeling of aching loneliness.
The cryptic, monstrous Thing which held them captive was frightening in its impassive deadliness. And the nagging certainty of death ahead caused a sharp urgency in all their emotions.
They touched in the blackness. And Braddick as if moved by an irresistible force, reached out and drew her to him. Her hands reached about his neck.
Soft lips pressed his.
An instant later, he spoke unsteadily.
“The deuce! I didn’t mean to do that! Not yet! But I’m glad I did! Now, dam it, I’m going to work out something."
Jane spoke softly, in the absolute obscurity.
“Even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter so much now! But I’d have hated'to die without your kissing me."
“I’ll be back in a minute,” said Braddick. "I’ll check the switches first and then try to trace the circuits.” He made a sudden, inarticulate sound.
“I’ve got it!” he said fiercely. “By all that’s holy, I know what to do!”
Then there was a scrambling noise. He was pulling himself down the ladder in what had been the corridor.
He went down, floating without weight and holding to the ladder as a guide. He tried to remember to count the rungs, even while his mind raced in estimate of the possibilities in his new idea.
But they would be possbilities only if this was a failure in the spaceship, not a defensive field which prevented all power from functioning so near the Thing.
He grimaced to himself in the blackness. And then, suddenly, clutching fingers grabbed him, and two bodies assailed him. He fought savagely, weightless and almost helpless because of lack of weight. He struck out hard, and hit soft flesh, and the violence of his own blow threw him backward. His head hit something. . . .
He came back to consciousness floating eerily in midair. The lights were on again. Hamlin floated close beside him, holding lightly to a ladder rung with one hand, gripping his recovered flash pistol in the other. He looked righteously triumphant.
“You try to start something, Mr. Braddick,” he said severely, “and I’m going to shoot! Thom will testify in court for me, and he’s going to fix the machinery so it will take us back. I’ve got a legal right to defend myself. Atomic Power—”
Thom’s head and shoulders came out of the drive room opening. He looked confused, like someone trying to feel complacent and worried at the same time. He decided upon worry.
“Mr. Hamlin,” he said plaintively, “He’s changed the leads of the power units! There’s two new leads I don’t understand! I don’t know what’ll happen if I do anything! It’s the drive I’m talking about, and he’s got ’em fixed some new way, so I don’t.know what’ll happen if I fix them like they ought to be!”
Hamlin looked uneasily at Braddick, and back at Thom. Then he spoke irritably.
“Go on and figure it out!. Figure what he did and what it does! If you want a bigger job with the company—”
Thom shook his head stubbornly.
“I know how those units ought to be connected. They aren’t conected that way. They work some way I don’t understand. I've been trained to do things the right way, not understand how wrong ways work. I’m not going to touch it, Mr. Hamlin. It’s against company rules.”
Hamlin protested furiously, but he was uneasy himself. Braddick remained silent. Floating as he was, he saw Jane's face peering down, from the control-room. She made a quick gesture. He gave no sign, except that his eyes followed her as he drifted.
“Come on down here, Thom,” said Hamlin at last, angrily. “We’ll tie Braddick up. Then we’ll tie that girl up. Then we’ll talk it over.”
Thom obediently climbed out into the well which had been a corridor. He came clumsily down the shaft. Braddick floated aimlessly in midair. Now his feet were toward the bow of the ship, and now his head. He knew that Jane was watching.
There was a sudden, terrific Jerk. The three of them, floating free, fell toward the stern of the ship. But Braddick fell feet first. The others hit, Thom head first, Hamlin anyhow. Thorn was knocked cold, and Hamlin dissolved into quivering panic which made him helpless. Braddick staggered as he landed and then sprang upon Hamlin, snatched the flash-pistol and struck savagely with its barrel.
“All right, Jane!” he said shortly. “Turn off the drive, now."
He bundled the two limp forms into another compartment and jammed the door as before. Then he went up.
“They worked their door loose and cut off the power,” he said dryly. “Luckily, not the time field. I’m glad they did. You cut in the drive, and it all leads to—this.”
He kissed her soundly.
“Now listen!” he commanded. “I told you I’d thought of a trick we can try. You’re not; going to like it, but you’ve got to help. Here’s the idea—”
He told her. She went very white, but she nodded soberly. Ten minutes later—ship time—he was clad in a pressure suit designed for use in planes at high altitudes. It was made of a plastic fabric, with a helmet and a tank of oxygen. It was not designed for use in space, but the pressure difference would hardly matter.
He went into the airlock with a huge coil of fine wire, pushing it before him in midair. He closed the inner door. He did not wait to pump the lock empty. He opened the outer door after a first heave at it had cracked it enough to let most of the air in the lock escape to space.
Then he looked out into the strange, improbable gray emptiness which was the cosmos at maximum time rate. The glowing Thing seemed only a little below him. Actually, it was probably no more than two hundred feet away—it had been much farther at the beginning of their circling. He fed the thin bare wire steadily out into space.
It went beyond the time field, but it did not lose its flexibility. Its mass had been removed. It would remai
n in its acquired time rate forever unless another time field restored it to normal for its surroundings. It flowed out and out and out, astern. It had the orbital speed of the spaceship itself, and now Jane put on an infinitesimal trace of drive.
The wire trailed behind as a thin and shining thread. As the spaceship circled the Thing, the wire formed a ring. Presently—so closely had Jane guided the ship—the circle was complete.
The trailing end came back into view beyond the airlock door. Braddick reached out with a hooked length of wire and hauled it in again. He closed the airlock door and let air into the narrow space. He reentered the ship and stripped off the pressure suit.
The little spaceship had ringed the monster Thing with a thin thread of wire forming a perfect circle in empty space. It revolved about the giant object like one of the rings of Saturn. Braddick took the controls.
“Now it’s up to you, Jane.”
As she left the seat, Jane’s face worked a little. She kissed him and fled to the drive room. She came out with two flexible wires. She connected them to the two ends of the bare wire which now circled the Thing. She came back.
“I—put it on the switch you told me to,” she said shakily. “I want to be with you if—anything happens.”
"Right,” said Braddick.
He put his arm about her firmly. They watched the vision screens. Braddick waited a breathtaking length of time. Then, his hand quite steady, he threw the switch. There was an odd, harsh sensation as if someone had plucked the very heartstrings of the universe. As if something under tension had given way, and there was ease after it. And then—
The small spaceship floated alone in space with a suddenly collapsed ring of bare copper wire behind it. The Thing had vanished. It simply wasn’t there any more.
They went into normal time to orient themselves. Braddick had chosen the moment for closing the switch when the spaceship’s position in its orbit was just right. The little plastic vessel had been in the part of its orbit when it moved away from the sun.
When the Thing vanished, the little ship was thrown backward. Much of its sunward velocity, then, was canceled. But Sol was a very bright star, and it was necessary to decellerate violently to keep from being carried on past by the speed the Thing had imparted with its monstrous mass.
For hours on end in time field time, the drive worked valorously to neutralize the little ship’s imposed speed. Braddick topk time out to descend and seal the door of Thorn and Hamlin’s cubbyhole prison. Then he cut a hole in the door for ventilation.
Hamlin grew frantic to the point of incoherence, threatening all the penalties of the law and of Atomic Power’s secret police. Thom became haughty, and at last tolerantly condescending, shaking his head deprecatingly at Braddick for the predicament he was in, having defied Atomic Power.
But when Braddick landed in Washington, it did not quite work out that way. To begin with, he had an obvious spaceship. What he had to say was partly proved by that fact alone. And he was mildly astonished to learn that his explanation of the two cosmoquakes was now accepted scientific doctrine, and that the danger, as well as the existence of the Things had been proven.
In fact, a third cosmoquake had begun its first phase and was being watched with sickened apprehension by every physicist on earth, when it abruptly ceased. Instruments had showed that a body with a mass of twelve sols was moving toward the solar system.
Longer and more accurate observation had proved that it would pass within twenty million miles of Earth. The human race would be exterminated. But then, when the first physical symptoms were evident, the cause vanished.
Braddick could explain the disappearance of the Thing. He did.
“It was a spaceship from somewhere beyond Polaris,” he said briefly. “It had to keep its drive on because at such speeds there’s resistance even in space. So I managed to get a wire around it for the field-coil of a mass time field.
“When I turned on the field, apparently I didn’t make all of it massless, but I evidently neutralized a good deal of mass and speeded up the time rate in its engine room— and consequently its drive, which began to operate at probably millions of times its normal rate.
“The Thing had lost part of its weight, but its drive went up astronomically. So my guess is that it went up beyond the speed of light and has turned up in some other set of dimensions.”
Somebody spoke instinctively.
“But that’s impossible!”
“So are cosmoquakes,” said Braddick, “and spaceships, and —oh, fudge!”
“I mean,” objected his listener, “energy itself has mass. There were thousands—millions of tons of energy stored in the spaceship in the form of the mass it had added by its speed. What did you do with all that energy?”
“My guess,” said Braddick, “is that—” Then he shrugged. "I’ll write a paper about it some time. Right now I’ve got to pass on the plans for more ships like the one I’ve got. Maybe some more can be made before the main fleet gets here.
“But anyhow I’m going to pass out what information I have, load up this ship again, and start to slash at the main fleet of the Things. And I want to get married.”
Jane flushed. But she spoke composedly.
"Yes. And I am Jane Brent, and I want to do something about the officials of Atomic Power, because I think I own control of that company now.”
Then there was confusion. But Atomic Power was not in good odor any more, as Hamlin and Thorn found out when they were released. Even its influence could not stand against the authority of government and the decisive insistence of its principal stockholder that something be done at once to stop its private police force and its private prisons and the murders that had been committed in its name.
But it was something over a day later that the really big news came. The delicate, sensitive gravitometric instruments which had already detected the existence of the space fleet of Things and their approach, now gave good news.
The Thing fleet had split into two, and was widely separated. The breach was widening hour by hour. The Things had used Sol as a course marker. Anticipating no combat, nevertheless scouts and advance guards had been sent on ahead.
The first scouts had gone on through. But one of the advance guards had vanished in the fraction of a second, evidently as the result of an attack by inhabitants of the solar system.
The Things were not seeking conquest. They separated into two fleets, which now would straddle Sol’s family, passing billions and trillions of miles out from the sun, where even their incredible combined mass could do no damage and would not further irritate the population of so belligerent a planetary group.
Dirk Braddick was definitely a hero, and Jane was hardly less admired for the way in which she cleaned up the corporation she had inherited. She turned Braddick’s two bartered inventions over to him, though, and canceled the agreement which would have made the space drive Atomic Power property.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” he said impatiently. “People want me to develop itl They want to make a corporation for interplanetary exploration and trade! You handle it, .Janet I’ve got some research I want to do.”
“What sort of research?” asked Jane, interestedly.
“That gravity business,” said Braddick restlessly. “The fleet must have been a light week away from Earth, at least. But in two days it had found out its scout had vanished, and changed course, and we knew it! How the devil could that happen? Does gravity travel faster than light?”
“Darling,” said Jane, “we’re still on our honeymoon. Don’t you think you’d better do a little more research on how nice it is to be married to me, before you get back to that sort of thing?”
Braddick looked at her suspiciously. Then he grinned.
“Oh, all right! We’ll go out right now and look at the moon and see what discoveries we make.”
Their discoveries were neither new nor unprecedented, but they seemed to be satisfactory.
LETTER FROM
THE STARS By A. E. VAN VOGT
DEAR Pen Pill:
When I first received your letter from the interstellar correspondence club, my impulse was to ignore it. The mood of one who has spent the last seventy planetary periods—years I suppose you would call them—in an Aurigean prison, does not make for a pleasant exchange of letters. However, life is very boring, and so I finally settled myself to the task of writing you.
Your description of Earth sounds exciting. I should like to live there for a while, and I have a suggestion in this connection, but I won’t describe it till I have developed it further.
You will have noticed the material on which this letter is written. It is a highly sensitive metal, very thin, very flexible, and I have inclosed several sheets of it for your use. Tungsten dipped in any strong acid makes an excellent mark on it. It is important to me that you do write on it, as my fingers are too hot—literally—to hold your paper without damaging it.
I’ll say no more just now. It is possible you will not care to correspond with a convicted criminal, and therefore I shall leave the next move up to you. Thank you for your letter. Though you did not know its destination, it brought a moment of cheer into my drab life.
Skander, Planet Aurigae II
Dear Pen Pal: Your prompt reply to my letter made me happy. I am sorry your doctor thought it excited you too much, and sorry, also, if I have described my predicament
in such a way as to make you feel badly. I welcome your many questions, and I shall try to answer them all.
You say the international correspondence club has no record of having sent any letters to Aurigae. That, according to them, the temperature on the second planet of the Aurigae sun is more than 500 degrees Fahrenheit. And that life is not known to exist there. Your club is right about the temperature and the letters. We have what your people would call a hot climate, but then we are not a hydrocarbon form of life, and find 500 degrees very pleasant.
I must apologize for deceiving you about the way your first letter was sent to me. I didn’t want to frighten you away by telling you too much at once. I could not know that you would want to hear from me.
The Earth In Peril Page 6