The Battle of the Infinite Trilogy

by John W. Campbell

  Another projectile was launched from the attacking ship, and exploded terrifically but a few hundred feet from the Ancient Mariner. The Terrestrial ship rocked and swayed, and even the distant attacker rocked under the explosion.

  A projectile, glowing white, leaped from the Earthship. It darted toward the enemy ship, seemed to barely touch it, then burst into terrific flames that spread, eating the whole ship, spreading glowing flame. In an instant the blazing ship slumped, started to fall, then seemingly evaporated, and before it touched the ground, was completely gone.

  The relief in Zezdon Afthen's mind was genuine, and it was easily obvious to the Sirians that the winning ship was friendly, for, with all its frightful armament, it had downed a ship obviously of Thett. Though not exactly like the others, it had the all too familiar lines.

  "They welcome us now,” said Zezdon Afthen's mental message to his companions.

  "Tell them we'll be there-with bells on or thoughts to that effect,” grinned Arcot. Morey had appeared in the doorway, smiling broadly.

  "How was the show?” he asked.

  "Terrible-Why didn't you let it fall, and break open?"

  "What would happen to the wreckage as we moved?” he asked sarcastically. “I thought it was a darned good demonstration."

  "It was convincing,” laughed Arcot. “They want us now!"

  The great ship circled down, landing gently just outside of the city. Almost at once one of the slim, long Sirian ships shot up from a courtyard of the city, racing out and toward the Ancient Mariner. Scarcely a moment later half a hundred other ships from all over the city were on the way. Sirians seemed quite humanly curious.

  "We'll have to be careful here. We have to use altitude suits, as the Negrians breathe an atmosphere of hydrogen instead of oxygen,” explained Arcot rapidly to the Ortolian and the Talsonian who were to accompany him. “We will all want to go, and so, although this suit will be decidedly uncomfortable for you and Zezdon Afthen and Stel Felso Theu, I think it wise that you all wear it. It will be much more convincing to the Sirians if we show that people of no less than three worlds are already interested in this alliance."

  A considerable number of Sirian ships had landed about them, and the tall, slim men of the 100,000,000-year-old race were watching them with their great brown eyes from a slight distance, for a cordon of men with evident authority were holding them back.

  "Who are you, friends?” asked a single man who stood within the cordon. His strongly built frame, a great high brow and broad head designated him a leader at a glance.

  Despite the vast change the light of Sirius had wrought, Arcot recognized in him the original photographs he had seen from the planet old Sol had captured as Negra had swept past. So it was he who answered the thought-question.

  "I am of the third planet of the sun your people sought as a home a few years back in time, Taj Lamor. Because you did not understand us, and because we did not understand you, we fought. We found the records of your race on the planet our sun captured, and we know now what you most wanted. Had we been able to communicate with you then, as we can now, our people would never have fought.

  "At last you have reached that sun you so needed, thanks, no doubt, to the genius that was with you.

  "But now, in your new-found peace comes a new enemy, one who wants not only yours, but every sun in this galaxy.

  "You have tried your ray of death, the anti-catalyst? And it but sputters harmlessly on their screens? You have been swept by their terrible rays that fuse mountains, then hurl them into space? Our world and the world of each of these men is similarly menaced.

  "See, here is Zezdon Afthen, from Ortol, far on the other side of the galaxy, and here is Stel Felso Theu, of Talso. Their worlds, as well as yours and mine have been attacked by this menace from a distant galaxy, from Thett, of the sun Ansteck, of the galaxy Venone.

  "Now we must form an alliance of far wider scope than ever has existed before.

  "To you we have come, for your race is older by far than any race of our alliance. Your science has advanced far higher. What weapons have you discovered among those ancient documents, Taj Lamor? We have one weapon that you no doubt need; a screen, which will stop the rays of the molecule director apparatus. What have you to offer us?"

  "We need your help badly,” was the reply. “We have been able to keep them from landing on our planets, but it has cost us much. They have landed on a planet we brought with us when we left the black star, but it is not inhabited. From this as a base they have made attacks on us. We tried throwing the planet into Sirius. They merely left the planet hurriedly as it fell toward the star, and broke free from our attractive ray."

  "The attractive ray! Then you have uncovered that secret?” asked Arcot eagerly.

  Taj Lamor had some of his men bring an attractive ray projector to the ship. The apparatus turned out to be nearly a thousand tons in weight, and some twenty feet long, ten feet wide and approximately twelve feet high. It was impossible to load the huge machine into the Ancient Mariner, so an examination was conducted on the spot, with instruments whose reading was intelligible to the Terrestrians operating it. Its principal fault lay in the fact that, despite the enormous energy of matter given out, the machine still gobbled up such titanic amounts of energy before the attraction could be established, that a very large machine was needed. The ray, so long as maintained, used no more power than was actually expended in moving the planet or other body. The power used while the ray was in action corresponded to the work done, but a tremendous power was needed to establish it, and this power could never be recovered.

  Further, no reaction was produced in the machine, no matter what body it was turned upon. In swinging a planet then, a spaceship could be used as the base for the reaction was not exerted on the machine.

  From such meager clues, and the instruments, Arcot got the hints that led him to the solution of the problem, for the documents, from which Taj Lamor had gotten his information, had been disastrously wiped out, when one of their cities fell, and Taj Lamor had but copied the machines of his ancestors.

  The immense value of these machines was evident, for they would permit Arcot to do many things that would have been impossible without them. The explanation as he gave it to Stel Felso Theu, foretold the uses to which it might be put.

  "As a weapon,” he pointed out, “its most serious fault is that it takes a considerable time to pump in the power needed. It has here, practically the same fault which the artificial matter had on your world.

  "As I see it, the ray is actually a directed gravitational field.

  "Now here is one thing that makes it more interesting, and more useful. It seems to defy the laws of mechanics. It acts, but there is no apparent reaction! A small ship can swing a world! Remember, the field that generates the attraction is an integral, interwoven part of the mesh of Space. It is created by something outside of itself. Like the artificial matter, it exists there, and there alone. There is reaction on that attractive field, but it is created in Space at that given point, and the reaction is taken by all Space. No wonder it won't move.

  "The work considerations are fairly obvious. The field is built up. That takes energy. The beam is focused on a body, the body falls nearer, and immediately absorbs the energy in acquiring a velocity. The machine replenishes the energy, because it is set to maintain a certain energy-level in the field. Therefore the machine must do the work of moving the ship, just as though it were a driving apparatus. After the beam has done what is wanted, it may be shut off, and the energy in the field is now available for any work needed. It may be drained back into power coils such as ours for instance, or one might just spend that last iota of power on the job.

  "As a driving device it might be set to pull the entire ship along, and still not have any acceleration detectable to the occupants.

  "I think we'll use that on our big ship,” he finished, his eyes far away on some future idea.

  "Natural gravity of natural matter is
, luckily, not selective. It goes in all directions. But this artificial gravity is controlled so that it does not spread, and the result is that the mass-attraction of a mass of matter does not fall off as the inverse square of the distance, but like the ray from the parallel beam spotlight, continues undiminished.

  "Actually, they create an exceedingly intense, exceedingly small gravitational field, and direct it in a straight line. The building up of this field is what takes time."

  Zezdon Afthen, who had a question which was troubling him, looked anxiously at his friends. Finally he broke into their thoughts which had been too cryptically abbreviated for him to follow, like the work of a professor solving some problem, his steps taken so swiftly and so abbreviated that their following was impossible to his students.

  "But how is it that the machine is not moved when exerting such force on some other body?” he asked at last.

  "Oh, the ray concentrates the gravitational force, and projects it. The actual strain is in space. It is space that takes the strain, but in normal cases, unless the masses are very large, no considerable acceleration is produced over any great distance. That law operates in the case of the pulled body; it pulls the gravitational field as a normal field, the inverse-square law applying.

  "But on the other hand, the gravity-beam pulls with a constant force.

  "It might be likened to the light-pressure effects of a spotlight and a star. The spotlight would push the sun with a force that was constant; no matter what the distance, while the light pressure of the sun would vary as the inverse square of the distance.

  "But remember, it is not a body that pulls another body, but a gravitational field that pulls another. The field is in space. A normal field is necessarily attached to the matter that it represents, or that represents it as you prefer, but this artificial field has no connection in the form of matter. It is a product of a machine, and exists only as a strain in space. To move it you must move all space, since it, like artificial matter, exists only where it is created in space.

  "Do you see now why the law of action and reaction is apparently flouted? Actually the reaction is taken up by space."

  Arcot rose, and stretched. Morey and Wade had been looking at him, and now they asked when he intended leaving for the intergalactic spaces.

  "Now, I think. We have a lot of work to do. At present we have the mathematics of the artificial matter to carry on, and the math of the artificial gravity to develop. We gave the Sirians all we had on artificial matter and on moleculars.

  "They gave us all they had-which wasn't much beyond the artificial gravity, and a lot of work. At any rate, let's go!"

  CHAPTER XIII

  ATTACKED

  The Ancient Mariner stirred, and rose lightly from its place beside the 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 and called his decision to Morey. As he did so, one of the Thessian ships suddenly swerved violently, and plunged downward. The attractive ray was in action. It struck the rocks of Neptune, and plunged in. Half buried, it stopped. Stopped-and backed out! The tremendously strong relux and lux had withstood the blow, and these strange, inhumanly powerful men had not been injured!

  Two of the ships darted toward him simultaneously, flashing out molecular rays. The rays glanced off of Arcot's screen already in place, but the tubes were showing almost at once that this could not be sustained. It was evident that the swiftly approaching ships would soon break down the shields. Arcot turned the ship and drove to one side. His eyes went dead.

  He cut into artificial space, waited ten seconds, then cut back. The scene before him changed. It seemed a different world. The light was very 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 were moving quite slowly now, moving at a speed that was easy to follow. Their rays, before ionizing the air brilliantly red, were now dark. The instruments showed that the screen was no longer encountering serious loading, and, further, the load was coming in at a frequency harmlessly far down the radio spectrum!

  Arcot stared in wide-eyed amazement. What could the Thessians have done that caused this change? He reached up and increased the amplification on 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 the secret?” he asked.

  "Time, man, time! We are in an advanced time plane, living faster than they, our atoms of fuel are destroyed faster, our second is shorter. In one second of our earthly time our generators do the same amount of work as usual, but they do many, many times more work in one second, of the time we were in! We are under the advanced time field."

  Wade could see it all. The red light-normal light seen through eyes enormously speeded in all perceptions. The change, the dimness-dim because less energy reached them per second of their time. Then came this blue light, as they reached the X-ray spectrum of Sirius, and saw X-rays as normal light-shielded, tremendously shielded by the atmosphere, but the enormous amplification of the eyes made up for it.

  The remaining Thessians seemed to get the idea simultaneously, and started for Arcot in his own time field. The Thessian ship appeared to be actually leaping at him. Suddenly, his speed increased inconceivably. Simultaneously, Arcot's hand, already started toward the space-control switch, reached it, and pushed it to the point that threw the ship into artificial Space. The last glimmer of light died suddenly, as the Thessian 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 blinked out.

  Light returned as the automatic emergency incandescent lights in the room, fed from an energy store coil, flashed on abruptly. The men were white-faced, tense in their positions. Swiftly Morey was looking over the indicators on his remote-reading panel, while Arcot stared at the few 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, provided there are no poisons. Temperature ten below zero C."

  "Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuited them.” Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking.

  "Nervous shock,” commented Zezdon Afthen. “It will be an hour or more before 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 a little air on some smokes."

  Morey rose and went to the door that led through the main passage to the galley. “Heck of a job-no weight at all,” he muttered. “There is air in the passage, anyway.” He opened the door, and the air rushed from the control room to the passage till the pressure was equalized. The door to the power room was shut, but it was bulged, despite its two-inch lux metal, and through its clear material he could see the wreckage of the power room.

  "Arcot,” he called. “Come here and look at the power room. Quintillions of 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 the Thessian ship had caught them full amid-ship, and the powerful ram had driven through the room. Their lux walls had not been touched; only a sledge-hammer blow would have bent them under any circumstances, let alone breaking them. But the tremendously powerful main generator was split wide open. And the mechanical damage was awful. The prow of the ship had been driven deep into the machine, and the power room was a wreck.

  "And,” pointed out Morey, “we can't handle a job like that. It will take a 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 to work,” said Arcot looking fixedly at the machinery.

  Morey turned and went to the galley.

  Five minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stood still, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying small plastic 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 Talsonian satisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, which Zezdon Afthen introduced.

  "Well, we have a lot more to do,” Arcot said. “The air-apparatus stopped working a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing while the air in the storage tanks is used up. Did you notice our friends, the enemy?” Through the great pilot's window the bulk of the Thessian ship's bow could be seen. It was cut across with an exactitude of mathematical certainty.

  "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 space field. Result-the half that was in, stayed in. The half that was out stayed out. The two halves were instantaneously a billion miles apart, and that beautifully exact surface represents the point our space cut across.

  "That being decided, the next question is how to fix this poor old wreck.” Morey grinned a bit. “Better, how to get out of here, and down to old Neptune."

  "Fix it!” replied Arcot. “Come on; you get in your space suit, take the portable telectroscope and set it up in space, motionless, in such a position that it views both our ship and the nose of the Thessian machine, will you, Wade? Tune it to-seven-seven-three.” Morey rose with Arcot, and followed him, somewhat mystified, down the passage. At the airlock 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 was practically weightless, though it would fall slowly if left to itself, for the mass of the Ancient Mariner and the front end of the Thessian ship made a considerable attractive field. But it was clumsy, and needed guiding here in the ship.