“Where do you suppose that atomium is, Vi?” Abna asked. “The detector needle is still pointing ahead.” Frowning, she went to the instrument, tested it, but found it working perfectly.
“The atomium is still a million miles distant,” Abna said. “I can think of only one answer, incredible though it is ... Mercury himself is atomium, a whole planet of it!”
The Amazon gazed out for a while upon the small, dizzy little planet.
“Yes, why not?” she breathed at last. “For untold ages, ever since the birth of the solar system. Mercury has been soaked in the radiation of the sun, always circling dangerously near to him. What more likely than that Mercury has been a kind of cosmic sponge, soaking up the vast sluices of energy the sun has poured forth, until Mercury has himself become a mass of crystallized energy? Great heavens! If only we could throw Mercury in the sun and then detonate him!”
Abna shook his head, looking up from the calculations he had been making on the control bench beside him.
“It wouldn’t be practical. For one thing we haven’t enough power to shift an entire planet, even though he is only small; and for another we’d have too much atomium. Instead of rekindling the sun we’d probably blow him in pieces!”
“I see. Well, at least we have atomium enough for our purpose. All we have to do is land on Mercury, hack off as much of the stuff as we need, and then carry it sunward.”
“Correct” Abna agreed. “And what we have to do is find out how much we need. Help me calculate.”
The Amazon settled beside him, and between them, aided by the mathematical machines, they worked out how much material they wanted. By the time they had finished, Mercury was looming dangerously close. Abna turned to the controls, slowed the vessel up and then brought it down with scarcely a jar on the sunward side of the little planet.
Abna was silent, considering the scene with her. They had dropped in a cup-shaped depression, the curious rippled formation of the ground showing how furious heat had subsided into a solid plasma, leaving the marks of ebb and flux behind. To the right was a low barrier range of mountains and over them in an almost black, star-dusted sky the sun loomed, his mighty caverned face roughly bisected by the saw-teeth of the range.
“Journey’s end,” the Amazon said at length. “And I wonder what happened to Arnside. Do you suppose we lost him?”
“We certainly outdistanced him,” Abna got up from a bolometer reading of the sun’s atmosphere. “Eight hundred degrees,” he said. “A few more below and he’ll be over the deadline. We’ve got to act fast.”
The Amazon nodded and together they turned to the apparatus. Since they had an entire mountain range nearby to work on, they directed disintegrator beams upon it, hacking vast pieces of the coke-like, immensely heavy material and then gathering them up with the magnetic grapple. The task was easy. The light gravity of the planet’s mass made the cutting and hacking simple, and the dragging work too. All the Amazon and Abna had to do was sit and watch as they controlled the apparatus.
At the end of two hours they had at the rear of the ship a mighty pile of the rockery. Abna switched off the disintegrator and turned to another instrument. Its reading gave him the exact mass of the material obtained.
“Thirty-seven hundred,” he said finally. “We planned we needed 3,600, so this is just about right. A bit one way or the other doesn’t signify. We’re all ready to make the experiment. As near as I can judge, we will have to make three trips.”
Abna settled himself at the control board, switched in the strange degravitive devices, and his machine swept into the void, the mass of atomium in the grip of the magnetic grapples at the rear.
Within a few minutes the slight pull of Mercury had been shaken loose and the enormous tugging strain of the sun made itself felt. At close quarters his dying face was an incredible sight to gaze upon. He was not so much like a sun, a blinding cauldron of unthinkable raging energies, as a gigantic Mars, his redly flickering surface corroding with the areas of darkness. Even so heat existed sufficiently to kill human life, if it came too close, and against this Abna took every precaution.
Gradually turning his vessel, he waited until he was flying diagonal to the sun, then he gave the Amazon the signal. She opened the switch which controlled the magnetic grapples and the atomium was cast loose. It began flying through space in a huge, mountainous lump, becoming smaller and smaller, a mere speck against the red vastness, until it was lost to sight.
“Two more trips before we’re through,” Abna said.
The Amazon, looking at the sun, nodded — and without any apparent effort against the enormous gravitational drag, Abna made the return trip to Mercury. So finally all the required material had been dumped in the fast cooling mass of the lord of the day — pure crystallized energy, thousands of tons of it, which would sink to the centre of the sun’s still gaseous interior and there be held at the centre of gravity. Mathematically, the force of the supersonic wave operating through the solar atmosphere to the interior would detonate the material, and the rest remained to be seen. Figures had said that it must work, but in dealing with cosmic forces there was always the chance of error.
“Now back to Mercury,” the Amazon said, when the final trip was over. “From there I can control my twin while she operates the supersonic projector from her vessel. I shall see through her eyes exactly what she is doing, feel through her nerves just what her movements are, hear through her ears whatever sounds there may be.”
“In fact, an affinity of the ’nth degree,” Abna smiled.
He turned the machine about and once more the trip back to Mercury was made. It was as they were almost touching down to their valley headquarters, however, that the Amazon stared hard through the window and then gripped Abna’s arm.
“Arnside,” she breathed. “There, in the Ultra, just clear of that mountain range—”
Abna looked, his jaws setting. “Arnside it is! And if he touches off any part of Mercury with that supersonic projector which is aboard he’ll blow us, himself, and half the solar system into the fourth dimension!”
Apparently Arnside had seen them, and he had also gained a good deal of skill in the art of manoeuvre, to judge from the way he handled the Ultra. The big machine swept through the gulf and Abna took a sideways turn to avoid the onrush. Then as he hurtled past, Arnside released a battery of disintegrator beams. Pieces flicked off Abna’s machine, but no vital damage appeared to have been done.
“Give it him back, Vi!” Abna snapped. “Everything we’ve got! I’ll have to control the machine. I understand it better than you.”
The Amazon needed no instructions. She was already at the control board, handling the weapons, sighting the speeding Ultra in the screens. Then she pressed the switches and buttons and hurled a stream of neutronic energy at the vessel. Nothing happened—much to her amazement. There was a flare of light, but the Ultra was otherwise unmarked.
“Of course!” she ejaculated suddenly. “You sheathed it in that special metal — the same stuff with which we built the shelters. It’s proof against neutrons, pressure, heat, and everything else — unless you can spring some four-dimensional tricks?”
Abna shook his head. “I could, but they wouldn’t be any use against that invulnerable metal.”
Watching intently he still kept his craft zig-zagging; then he added. “I’m not risking descending to Mercury until he is taken care of. If he turns supersonic power on that planet it will be the end of everything. Our one hope is that he does not know Mercury is pure atomium.”
“There’s also another hope,” the Amazon responded, watching the Ultra’s wild plunging as Arnside did his utmost to get his weapon trained on his objective. “If you can draw us over the top of the Ultra I could change to it from this machine through the floor hap. Arnside wouldn’t be able to do anything to us because he’d be unable to get at us with his weapons. And on top of the Ultra there’s an exterior valve I can get through. I’m the only one who knows about it
since I built it. Once that’s done I can very soon take care of the rest.”
Abna did not hesitate. Abruptly changing his tactics he turned about, to the obvious confusion of Arnside within the Ultra, and then shot up in a vertical ascent. By means of long, sweeping evasive movements he came gradually to a point where he was over the top of the Ultra, then he began to lower his machine foot by foot while the Amazon hastily donned a space suit.
Her only weapon a protron gun, clenched in her gloved hand, she yanked up the floor hap and dropped into the cavity below. Here she was in darkness with the second outer hap closed. In a moment she had it open — the top flap closing automatically to seal in the control room air — to find the Ultra’s plates no more than three feet below her in the void.
Easing herself through the hole she forced herself down, the only way she could make the change against the vagaries of gravitation. The instant she touched the Ultra’s plates she grabbed the projection tightly and held on, Abna’s machine remaining above her.
This was not the first time she had been on the outside of a machine in space — but its effect on her was just the same. It was an unpleasant two-ways-at-once feeling, the various gravities from the two ships, the sun, and Mercury pulling at her body and creating a terrifying elongating feeling. She felt sick for a while, the void all around her — infinite space and depth upon depth. Then she forced herself to concentrate on the only solid thing — the Ultra.
Crawling along its plates she came to the valve she was seeking. A movement of the outer combination lock opened it and she dropped silently into the dark space below which belonged to the false roof.
So far so good. She closed the trap, took off her helmet, and lay breathing hard for a while as she recovered her steadiness. Then she began to creep forward, making no sound, knowing every inch of the course she was taking. So presently she came to the grating which marked the ventilator from the control room. Peering through the slats she beheld Arnside crouched at the control board, staring hard through the outlook window, obviously trying to imagine what had become of Abna’s flyer. To one side of him was the control board for the weapons and to the other the navigational instruments.
With one movement the Amazon swept up the ventilator grid and swept down, her right arm circling and gripping under Arnside’s chin before he had the chance to turn in his chair. Pinned with that soft but incredibly powerful forearm under his chin he struggled savagely as his hands were dragged away from the switches by the backward movement of his body.
“Now, my friend, I think we have a little score to settle,” the Amazon murmured. “I warned you what would happen if you didn’t play the game straight when I gave you the chance to go on living ...”
With a sudden tremendous wrench Arnside tore free and struggled out of the control chair. He dived for his gun on the bench, but the Amazon’s gloved fist came up into his face and sent him tottering backwards. He hit the wall of the control room, shook his head dazedly, and then stared at her. Her proton-gun was levelled upon him.
“I’d like to kill you in my own way, Arnside, for the trouble you have caused,” she said deliberately; “but I have too many other things to do. So I’ll make it short.”
She fired and the withered corpse of Arnside dropped to the deck.
With a sniff of contempt the Amazon dropped her gun on the bench, then she snapped on the space radio. Since Abna was only immediately above her he received her message clearly without solar interference.
“Cast off and land on Mercury,” she said. “I’ll bring the Ultra down. You don’t have to worry about Arnside any more; he’s been taken care of.”
“See you later,” Abna responded.
The Amazon switched off and then settled at the controls. In a moment or two she saw Abna’s machine head for Mercury. She followed at a more leisurely pace, thinking as she went. After a while she smiled tautly and nodded to herself.
“Yes, that should do it,” she murmured, confirming some inner idea.
Chapter XXII
She brought he Ultra down on the other side of the mountain range some two miles from the spot where lay the little depression where Abna had descended. Fastening her helmet back in place, she opened the airlock, threw Arnside’ s dead body to the rocks outside and then began the journey on foot which would bring her to Abna. To do it she had to move through a fairly high cleft which finally brought her within sight of Abna’s machine, the pick-a-back space flyer still fastened to its top.
When she came to within a few yards of the airlock Abna opened it and helped her into the control room. He gave a puzzled look as she took off her helmet.
“Why didn’t you land the Ultra here?” he asked in surprise. “It would have saved a lot of time, wouldn’t it?”
“I wasn’t taking any risk of a collision,” she replied. Then before Abna could comment she added: “Well, it’s time we started the final move, isn’t it? My image to detonate the stuff in the sun?”
“From here on it’s my party,” she said, wriggling out of her space suit, “since I am the only one who can control the image.”
“Correct,” Abna agreed. “Let’s get the final details right — By radio you set the pick-a-back machine off and guide it to the edge of the solar atmosphere. Then by radio amplification you transmit your commands to your image. She then operates the supersonic projector upon the sun, which should detonate the atomium. If she is lost in the doing it will not matter — but if you can save her for some future task all the better.”
“The programme exactly,” the Amazon agreed. “Here we go.”
She switched on the radio apparatus, able to tell by the dials and indicators exactly what was happening to the pick-a-back spaceship — and sure enough it presently became visible through the ports, heading sunward. From here, however the sun itself was not visible in his entirety — only half his orb loomed over the mountain range.
The Amazon glanced up. “Abna, you’d better get into a space-suit and go to some spot near here were you can see all the sun without difficulty. You’ll need the space-suit since the air is too tenuous to breathe. We have got to know exactly what happens and I can’t leave these controls, nor can we move this vessel in case I lose the wave length.”
“I’ll find a convenient spot somewhere,” Abna responded, taking one of the space suits from the locker and getting into it. Just before he screwed on the helmet and peered experimentally through a pair of purple goggles, the Amazon added:
“There’s a good spot to the north-east of the range where you’ll get a clear view. I noticed it as I came from the Ultra.”
“Right— And the moment anything starts happening I’ll be back.”
“don’t come until you are sure a genuine solar rebirth has set in,” the Amazon advised. “We’re not going to leave things half done.”
Abna put his helmet in position and departed. He kept his eyes on the mighty red ball of the fading sun as he moved. He was a solitary figure in the grey expanse heading toward the mountain range. When he reached it he paused, looking for a good position then remembering the Amazon’s suggestion to head north-east he went that way — and came presently to a clear, level track of land which dropped away at the absurdly near horizon. But here indeed was the view he wanted, with all the sun filling the wastes of the void.
He contemplated the titanic orb as he settled down on a rock. He was, he realized, taking a tremendous risk. If the released power of atomium blasted itself forth in one terrific effulgence of energy there was the chance that the sun itself would be blown in pieces and be obliterated before he could move a dozen yards. If, however — as calculation had shown — the energy dissipated itself more or less uniformly then he would behold a sight such as had never been seen before — the gradual restoration of a dying star to its former glory. If this came about he would have ample time in which to return to the flyer before the heat became so intense that the very landscape began to melt and flow as it had done for time immeasura
ble before the sun had cooled.
He was not sure how long he waited. Time did not seem to signify just as long as a result was forthcoming. Back in the vessel he pictured the Amazon concentrating on the radio and thought-amplifying beam — and out in space, somewhere between him and the huge red globe was the invisible pick-a-back machine which carried the last hope of restoring the doomed monarch. Abna was even commencing to wonder if, after all, the whole gigantic scientific gamble was proving a failure — when he caught sight of a dim white glow amidst the redness of the centre of the sun.
He had hardly noticed it before it grew brighter, and larger. Instantly he slipped on his dark goggles, and only just in time for in complete soundlessness, since there was no air to carry the noise of the unthinkable explosion across the gap, the whiteness flushed across the entire globe. What incredible devouring energies were released at that moment he could only imagine.
Stupendous power was flashing to all parts of the sun, rebuilding the steady atomic processes which had been progressively breaking down. Terrific heat was kindling, building up the fallen temperature. Gases, free electrons, neutrons — all of them were in a state of titanic flux, boiling, scattering, exploding, energy mounting upon energy Light, blinding even through the goggles, blazed down on Abna as the sun’s face became steeped in blinding glare. Heat shafted through the void and he felt it through his space suit. He could look no more upon the risen giant of the day. He had one last glimpse of a vast corona coming into being, together with the twirling prominences of newborn solar life, then he turned and stumbled away, his shadow cut deep on the smoking ground.
His emotions were a curious mixture of exultation and fear. On the one hand the mighty experiment had succeeded and life had been given back to the sun — a life which would continue indefinitely through normal sub-atomic disintegrative process; and on the other hand he wondered if the savage heat would turn the sunward side of Mercury into a molten quagmire before he could reach the vessel where the Amazon was waiting. If his space suit became punctured by any means he was doomed.
Conquest of the Amazon Page 12