For any one of Hoagland’s men, once within the station, could stop this battle merely by firing a single revolver shot through one of the vitals of the radio beacon receiver. Or hitting it with any hard instrument. Or just by flipping the “ON—OFF’’ toggle switch that controlled the entire station.
Both flights, diminished now, hit one another in a mad pass high above the planet. Space filled with bits of jagged metal and the silent shells that would someday end up as satellites to some distant sun—to possibly confuse some space miner that found a piece of nickel-steel completely machined and fitted with copper expansion-bands in an orbit around an unpopulated stellar system.
Numbers being equal, Huston’s men had one small advantage. They wanted to hit Hoagland’s crew. Hoagland’s gang had two objectives. They wanted to destroy the station, and so part of their efforts was directed towards the station itself while only the rest was directed at Huston’s flight.
The flights passed through one another leaving space strewn with ruin; and circled down on opposite sides of a great circle to cross the ice cap face to face again only a few miles above the relay station perched precisely on the polar axis. The wind whistled and the oddsmelling atmosphere took on another odor as the battle raged briefly above the relay station. The ice was dotted again with divots of flaming hell thrown high by missed bombs and water ran from the hot craters in starred rivulets to freeze later in a curiously beautiful pattern.
Again diminished, the flights whirled, stalking and sparring like swordsmen, cautious, angry, hating.
And while the embattled fleets of spacecraft circled one another, Paul Grayson was far in space, coming out of superdrive, confident that he had outrun or at least disappeared from instant contact with the enemy. Alpha IV was far, far behind. Latham’s Triplets were only stars in a neat equilateral triangle below. Very bright stars, but none the less true stars showing no disc to the naked eye.
“Now what?” asked Stacey. “That was damned close, Little Friend.”
“Do we go back?” asked Nora.
“I’d rather not,” said Stacey. “I prefer to die in bed at the age of one hundred and seventeen after a long, pleasant, active, and interesting life.”
“Huston is down there, too, you know,” said Paul thoughtfully.
“So what?”
“He apparently came with quite a gang.”
Stacey grunted. “Let’s wait until we’re sure that the unpleasantness has subsided. Someone will be yelling ‘Veni Vidi Vici’ and I want to be sure that the guy yelling ‘Vici’ is on my side.”
Grayson shook his head thoughtfully. “Huston got here,” he said.
“So?”
“Hoagland and his gang must have—” Grayson’s voice trailed away as Paul went into another reverie of thought.
“Paul, this is what is commonly referred-to as patently obvious.”
Paul snapped out of it again.
“Y’know,” he said slowly, “Neither Hoagland nor Huston would be a-roaring down here with fire in their eyes if they did not know we’d succeeded.”
Nora blinked. “They must have overheard us,” she said.
Paul spread his hands. “Why not? The link was solid between Latham’s Triplets and Neoterra. We might have interfered with their Z-wave.”
“That’s fine reasoning. But now take the next step and where are we?”
“Huston wanted to know how long before the beam came in,” said Paul. “Then he groaned and said that they’d have to defend the station for hours.”
“After which,” said Stacey, “we left somewhat precipitously, if not graciously. I don’t blame us, but of course, we are sort of biassed by our own feelings.”
“But why?” asked Nora.
“I’ve been away from the Galactic Survey for a long time,” said Paul thoughtfully. “It’s more than possible that Latham’s Triplets is the station that completes the link. There is always some question as to where the final beam would cross because we were not sure what the precise stellar separation was. In fact,” he said with a smile, “this determination of stellar distances was the reason for originating the Galactic Survey. Now, if Latham Alpha turned out to be the final link, coming a bit early, and Haedaecker’s Theory was wrong, the link between Sol and Neosol could be complete by Z-wave once the radio contact checked in. Huston might have some plan—” again Paul trailed off as he began to think about the subject deeply.
“And” prompted Nora.
“The final link should be heading towards Alpha IV quite close by now,” said Paul. “We’ll tap it before it lands.”
CHAPTER 17
The courier spacecraft dropped down out of supervelocity and emitted an overwhelming blast of radio signal. One half of the output tube operating life went into Eternity in one half minute of intense power.
Minutes later space stations picked up the radio blast and had radiogoniometers pointing the angle; which when correlated with other space stations bracketed the courier spacecraft nicely. A telemeter beam fingered out and caught the radio-controlled circuits of the courier and the courier turned obediently and started to blast towards Terra.
It landed in a screaming arc and came to rest, smoking both outside and inside, for the driving circuits had been running at overload for nearly four months. Technicians at Great Lakes Spaceport trundled the courier along a runway and dunked the whole thing into Lake Michigan where they watched the clouds of steam boil up and then subside as the hull cooled. They waited, and then they breached the message hull, which was a separable nose.
Accustomed to finding tons of mail, they were shocked to find only one officially sealed envelope addressed to the President of Terra.
They put it on a mail speedster that arched high into the stratosphere and into black space itself in a vast segment of ellipse to drop into the hands of the Capitol’s techs within a matter of minutes. Here the official envelope bypassed any number of official channels …
President Bennington heard tire diffident rap on his bedroom door and grunted unhappily. Then he came awake and realized that nothing less than an official Affair of State would cause his Aide to rap on his door.
Bennington snapped the light on near his bed and went to the door in his pajamas. “What’s up, Phil?” he asked as he opened the door.
Phillip Vanderveer smiled apologetically. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But when a courier spacecraft comes from Neoterra with only one piece of mail labeled ‘Private, Important,’ and addressed to you, it must be both private and important. So—”
Bennington smiled. “Cigarette?” he asked.
“Here, sir.”
“Come in,” said Bennington, accepting the smoke.
“But—er—’’
“M’Lady is sawing wood. This may be important enough for fast action, Phil. Come on in and for—”
Bennington opened the envelope with a thumb and spread out the pages. He looked and then found a magnifying glass and went to work on the micro-typewritten pages.
“Phil,” he said slowly, “forget about this until three days from now. Then see to it that Chadwick Haedaecker is summoned here for a—” Bennington went on to peruse a calendar and then a clock, “—an official session!”
The following day Phillip Vanderveer reported that Haedaecker was out on some tour of the Galactic Network and was not expected back for some time. That was too bad, but not a bar to the future actions of President Bennington.
He spent the next two days closeted with his aides writing a flowery speech of fancy phrases that would do the trick. He decided finally to make his speech from America’s White House, and went with the First Lady to Terra to that shrine where Free Men were first welded into a Strong State, because there in America the seeming incompatibility between Freedom and Empire had been favorably resolved.
Bennington prowled the mansion, looked at the shrined artifacts, and was he, himself, impressed once again. Somewhere in the middle of the road there was the right path
between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny. To be really Free, every man must be released from any governing, which would make him a unit weak enough to be assailed by any grouped force. To rule men meant they had too little to say about their own lives.
Bennington slept in a bed once slept in by Andrew Jackson.
It was midnight of the third day. The shrined White House was a blaze of lights. Newsmen and radio technicians trod the revered halls and strung their wires.
The connection to Z-wave Central had been made, first. The other lines to the rest of the world were ready. The lines to Z-wave Central were ready to bring the message to the planets of Sol—and all that remained was the final connection that would bring President Bennington’s address to the worlds of Neosol.
Bennington sat at his desk with a fountain pen altering the long speech. He was not entirely satisfied with it. It contained flowing passages calculated to jog the emotions, words carefully selected because of their syllables to cause a ringing cadence which would cause an emotional reaction. It was flowery and forceful. It was long; starting on a slow measure and rising to a proper climax, completely a mathematico-musico-psychologico compilation intended to sway emotions and minds in the right direction. He stood up from time to time and delivered portions of it. Playbacks returned both his voice and his appearance to him, and Bennington worked on slight faults of either until his delivery was perfect.
Outside of his room, bustling technicians checked their circuits and Washington itself was alive with the tenseness of waiting.
Tired—and with hours to wait yet—Bennington laid down on a couch to relax. His slumber was fitful, dozing interrupted by vivid dreams, by slight noises, by quick flashes of intense thought by his mind, which was not convinced of the necessity for relaxation. Finally he drifted off deep, completely relaxed for the first time in three days.
They counted—afterwards—that President Bennington had only a total of nine hours sleep in seventy-two.
Then a bell rang. A. siren wailed. A blast of salute-cannon shook the city, and the radio across Terra blasted into life. People across the worlds of Sol awoke; they had been sleeping lightly, awaiting The Moment and now it was here!
Radio sets left running burst into life, waking people everywhere among the planets of Soil at the same instant.
The Galactic Z-wave had come to life!
Light years across the galaxy towards Neosol, Paul Grayson talked into a microphone. And on the planets that were Sol’s Children, a thousand million loudspeakers thundered forth his voice!
“President Bennington! President Bennington!”
Bennington awoke from his fitful nap with a start. The door to his room opened. Phillip Vanderveer stood there looking in, he approached.
Marian Bennington smiled quietly. “This is it!”
Bennington looked at her queerly. His wife. Somehow strangely unimpressed by the solemnity of it all; peculiarly self-serene among all of the importance of the moment. His wife, greeting him with a slightly amused expression. Greatness, of moment or of person seemed a bit remote. Bennington gulped at her and smiled.
“Take it easy Hal,” she said. She kissed him gently as he leaned towards the microphone.
“President Bennington speaking.”
“This is Paul Grayson riding the Latham Alpha IV beam towards the station. Thank God you’re ready!”
“What—?”
“We’re fifteen light minutes out from Contact. Huston is fighting to keep the Station alive; Hoagland is trying to kill it!”
“Fighting?”
“Space battle!”
“Dammit man—Oh God, it’s four or six months flight time there, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Paul. “Just stick around. We’ll win!”
“Grayson, you’ve got to win!”
The ice cap was dotted with craters. Tiny spots of black among the sea of glittering white were men struggling in the icy cold to reach the fight for the final link between Mother Earth and her distant Daughter. In the sky above, Isolationist and Coalitionist fought with nerve and iron to separate versus maintain the original solidarity of the galaxy.
Paul, riding the front of the incoming radio beacon beam, had no idea of how the fight was going.
But of Huston’s hundred ships and one hundred and seventeen of Hoagland’s only nine were left with Huston and seven left with Hoagland. The collected survivors in the relay station numbered thirty souls—determined souls of the same determination of the men who stood at Concord Bridge.
The plain around the station was a mess of bomb craters; desperation measures but all misses. The glass dome itself was holed with a. half-gross of shells fired into the station, and three of the big parabolic antenna-reflectors were drilled with four-inch holes but still electrically functional. Master fighters now because they were survivors, Nine and Seven faced one another cautiously. They raced in, faced one another harshly, like frigates sailing in to receive a heavy broadside, clashed, and came on through as Five and Three.
Huston’s crew circled in a mad melee, five of them in overwhelming odds now. They herded the Three high, caught them in an englobement, and made a flaming kill a hundred miles above the planet, then raced forward as Hoagland started to flee for his life, his campaign defeated.
With the ice cap dotted with death and wreckage, Huston’s command ship left the other four to guard the Upper Sky while he scouted the surface, using his power ruthlessly to cow Hoagland’* separated survivors into abject surrender.
Then, in complete victory, Huston raced his command ship in a vast circle around the damaged but still running Relay Station. It would go deadly-hard with anyone who tried to interfere at this instant.
Huston’s engineer snapped in the Z-wave.
“Grayson! Grayson! Are you—are you?”
The Z-wave receiver in Paul’s ship brought this call.
He snapped the toggle and said; “Huston? I’m riding the radio beam down to Alpha IV.”
“Bennington?”
“I’ve got him on the Z-wave!”
“Let me—connect me—”
Paul reached for a cable with a double-ended plug and shoved both ends home in his patch-panel.
“Mister President, here is Mr. Huston!”
“Bennington! Bennington! You’re ready?”
On Terra, President Bennington nodded and said: “Any time.”
Huston said “ Good. Thank God. Grayson, can we—?”
Paul considered. “Can you get in touch with the Latham Alpha IV Station direct?”
“Take some doing, but—”
“President Bennington, the Galactic Link is almost complete. It’s Z-wave via radio contact from Terra to me. It’s Z-wave from me to Huston; and from Alpha IV to Neoterra it is again Z-wave via radio contact. As soon as Huston taps the radio beam from Alpha IV, we can get you through to—”
A flash of fire—white-hot and vicious—blinded Huston and his crew. It killed all the men on Alpha IV friend and foe alike. The sound—
The sound was a flat and completely-gone silence. The contact had been destroyed before the link could convey any sound.
Down from the black sky a single ship had driven at velocities too high for the radar to catch. It had come at near-light velocity from somewhere, had passed Alpha IV at a tangential altitude of a thousand miles—and had loosened something.
The “Something” had been unbelievable tons of lithium hydride, neatly tamped and packed around a fissionable detonator.
The super bomb drilled into the planetary crust a full quadrant South—at the Equator of Alpha IV—and exploded. Slowly and majestically, Alpha IV expanded. The crust separated along the fault-lines to expose the planetary magma. Ice met molten lava in a riot of exploding steam; mountain range fell into the sea, livid streamers of tortured matter flared forth, and the surface heaved, bubbled, and collapsed and the smoke and dust and soil of Alpha rose into the atmosphere to mingle with the clouds of vaporized metal and superheat
ed steam that roiled and blasted away from the planet into space.
Latham Alpha IV contracted into a boiling mass of energy, distributed and re-distributed and re-re-distributed throughout the planetary mass.
Gone was the ice cap. Forever lost were the men who battled face to face and gun to gun to keep the Relay Station running. Then Latham Alpha began to expand. Slowly and majestically it grew, as the volatile material became gaseous with the energy hurled into it. The flaming-white glow died into a furious orange-red as the localized areas of energy spread out and the whole of the planet began to radiate dully.
Across space, heading into a boiling planetary surface that had no receiver to collect it, came the Galactic Radio Beam. It entered the roiling planet and died, and what missed the planet either splashed aside from the space-stressed energy or went on and on and on through space unchecked and unheeded.
Huston’s spacecraft, hurled upwards by the force of flaming gases, bounced around viciously until Huston’s pilot snapped the high drive briefly, first on and then off.
“Grayson?”
“Huston! What has happened?”
“Super-atomic.”
“God!”
“But the Relay—The Network?”
Paul thought a moment.
“I’ve still got Bennington,” he said. “And—” here Grayson’s voice paused for a moment.
Grayson’s ship had been at One Light velocity, following the Beam towards Alpha IV. Now as he sat at the console of his ship’s drive, he reached for a switch that swerved the ship aside in its course by just a few milliseconds of arc.
Seconds later he passed the boiling ruin of Alpha IV by a half-million miles, still following the head of the Galactic Survey Beam.
As Paul passed the planetary ruin, he snapped another switch, picked up the microphone and cried:
“A1 Donatti! A1 Donatti!”
And down from Neoterra came the reply. “Grayson? You’ve got Bennington?”
“On the other end!”
Back in the White House, President Bennington sat before the broad desk, looking at the microphone with an odd expression on his face. Somehow flowery speeches and fancy, well-calculated words seemed a bit pale and unconvincing in the face of men who lived and died for a Grand Principle.
Operation Interstellar (1950) Page 16