“What became of the rosy-figured monitors I have seen about? Some of them are traitors, too, and I fear them more than any of your native Azurans, Istar.”
“They’re a part of our religion, Grayson. We hardly believe in them, never seeing them, you know. But since you see them, they must be there! It is strange to hear you accuse them of being enemies.”
“I noticed none of them about the ship, today.”
“Probably thought we would be destroyed, didn’t want any. To me they are a figment of legend, not to be taken seriously.”
“I would revise that estimate of their importance, Istar. They can yet be the means of our defeat. They are strong, and they have powers from another sphere of life. They know what I know, that your Azura itself is a kind of illusion, due to mass-mind fixations, and not to any law of nature.”
Istar stared at him. “Could you best them, Grayson?”
“How would I know that, Istar? I have never tried!”
“If what you say of them is true, you may get the chance.”
As they talked, the great ship had put on speed, and the dots on the view-crystals began to recede, themselves now on a course diverging from their own. Both fleets were swiftly drawing apart. Istar said:
“We’ve got them puzzled. We’ve shown them a weapon they can’t match, and yet we are in flight, not in pursuit, and they can’t figure it out. They will come about and trail us, after a time, but they’ll keep their distance, at least till they analyze the beam pattern you flung at them.”
“You mean they can ascertain the nature of the beam I constructed in the menta-crystal?”
“There is a device on every ship which catches such beam pictures, and gives the analyst a clue to the nature of the beam. That is how defense force-screens are built when you do not have spies, such as Karnia has used against us.”
“Then I cannot use the same thought-pattern to change the key-crystals of the cannon!”
“Why, no! Do you know only one?”
“It is not that, I have had no opportunity to test such work. I can change the pattern, but how do I know it will work?”
“We’ll test each crystal on a small target, don’t worry about that. We cast an object out of the port, and train the beam upon it. You get to work, Satpor has returned, with his guard of honor, and loaded down, all of them, with our armament.” Istar grinned a mocking grin at Satpor, as if he knew something that Satpor would wish he did not know.
“THIS MUST delight you, this work, Satpor,” murmured Istar for his ear alone.
“It does, Commander, can you not see my delight?”
“I can see it, but it looks a little gloomy to me. Suppose you consider yourself under arrest and go and take a nice rest in the brig until this brawl is over. I am not sure about you. You are a very poor actor, Satpor!”
“Commander Istar! You know, yet you sent me on this errand. Why?”
“To have you watched, and to make sure. Do you think I am friendless, that there is no one I can trust?”
Even as Satpor stepped back, to leave on his dismal self-arrest errand, one of his accompanying guards stepped forward, saluted, said—“He stopped at his cabin and examined each of these crystals that we bear. I watched through the door-transom. He did something to each one. They may be dangerous to work with now. I would suggest jettisoning the lot, and getting this ally of ours other and new crystals from the stores.”
“Very good work, Lieutenant Paronu. I am taking no chances with Crayson’s mind. Get other crystals, we will use these as targets, to test Grayson’s new force patterns upon.”
It was an endless job; at the end of hour’s of work Grayson had but a small pile of a few hundred crystals ready for use. As he finished one, it was taken to a cannon, inserted, and from a port one of the menta-crystals was thrown out into space. The gunner centered the target, pressed the trigger, and if the crystal destroyed the target, it was sent on to the gun it was intended for. But it took too long, and the Karnian fleet, which had come about and was following their course, began to close in. Their greater speed was evident in this drawn out pursuit.
Istar, his eyes worried, watched the enemy fleet get nearer, begin to fire upon them, though the range was still too great.
“Paronu,” he bellowed, his thought-flow powerful as a storm—“take a scout ship, and get one of these crystals to each of our fleet. There is no time for more, we’re in for it. They are too fast for us.”
Grayson sank exhausted to the deck, his mind whirling with weakness from the effort. “Nor any Grayson for more, either, Istar,” he murmured, and passed out.
GRAYSON awoke from a dream of searching for his Sareen with a deep sense of loss and pain. For an instant he felt sure that some peril threatened her, or that she was dead, for him to feel as he did. But he shook off the feeling and arose from the couch where someone had placed him, and made his way unaided back to the bridge. It was signifigant of his recognition that the guards at the doorway did not challenge him, but only entered ahead of him, and announced him, as though he were royalty or a privileged character of some special kind.
Grayson stood beside Istar, where he was bent in intense concentration over the score of view-crystals, occasionally bellowing an order into the Azuran equivalent of a microphone in his hand. It was crystal the size of an orange, with tiny golden wires attached. Grayson recognized it as similar to the device which Sareen had worn at her waist when he first met her, and it gave him a twinge.
On the view planes of the crystals aligned across the bridge like a shelf of great glistening plates set close together, Grayson saw a composite picture of space in all directions. Scattered through that space were hundreds of great space warships, dodging and turning in intricate maneuvers, firing rapidly and constantly. It was plain that Azura was fighting a running battle, and not doing too badly. Grayson saw that the Azuran ships were handicapped in not having the volume of fire that their enemies were blasting at them, their only slightly less speed did not seem to be counting heavily against them. They could not escape, they were giving good account of themselves, and were fighting a very clever battle, leading one after another of the pursuing ships into a waiting battery’s guns. Grayson saw that their own ship was at some distance from the main engagement, while Istar was directing the maneuvers. His great thought-voice was cold, hard, infinitely determined, and strong with something that was not hope, but the will to make every pulse of Azuran energy count.
He shot a quick glance at Grayson, then turned to an officer, saying—“Take over for a moment!”
Then he turned to Grayson, shoving his broad ruddy face into his as if about to strike him a blow with his fist.
“Now that you’re back on your feet, get busy and make us some more weapons! Keep at it till you drop, or we’re lost. We’re ranging them with your rays, but even so, they are too many for us, and their fire power is so much greater I’ve got to have more guns. Try something different, that doesn’t exhaust you so much. Try to do the job without knocking yourself out, Grayson. The life of Azura itself depends on you!”
With one big hand he shoved him back out the door, and Grayson staggered twenty feet with the force of the shove. Where had he gotten the idea he was built more strongly than these Azurans?
Within minutes he was standing before the waiting stack of crystals, of graduated sizes, with Lieutenant Paronu waiting to take the product of his ingenuity away to the waiting cannon. Paronu bent over him, his eyes on fire with the desperate battle strain he had been under while Grayson lay unconscious.
Paul Grayson picked up the biggest of the crystals stacked there like vast jewels shimmering and alive with the forces prisoned inside them. He felt weak and unable to concentrate, but pulled himself together, sent his other-world vision into the interior of the great jewel, watched the spining little vortices of prisoned energy, tried to manipulate them without putting out a great outlay of effort. One by one he pinned them, held them, thinking desperately how he m
ight best put his intent to work within this pattern of destruction in such a way that . . .
HE REMEMBERED his effort that had destroyed the pillar in the city street in Azura, and that he had been sure them that this world was but an illusion in the minds of tenuous force creatures—once products of a life in a material world like his own, who had brought their ideas of nature into this tenuous etherean world. That to dissipate this illusion all that was necessary was a thought, energized with a little traveling beam of his own life-energy, which told the strangely retentive units of this etherean “matter” that they were not obliged any longer to adhere to each other. That each unit of that matter, each atom or molecule or whatever the proper word might be—had in it the same faculty of retention that these crystals had in them, of retaining thought impressions and using them as a pattern of organization. That it was that fact, that they were very life-like in their response to the thought of living creatures, that made Azura the world of luxurious illusion that it was. Illusion was here more than illusion, it was the law of nature that upheld the world, just as the laws of gravity and of molecular adhesion upheld his own world.
So thinking, and so analyzing his situation, it occurred to Grayson that in order to destroy the Karnian fleet, they had only to be mentally convinced that it WAS destroyed, and it would immediately disappear and leave them struggling as mere vague force-bodies in a kind of vacuum, even as he himself had been struggling and lost in a non-supporting medium upon his arrival in this plane of life!
How to convince a horde of creatures whose thought he did not really comprehend himself that their ships had been destroyed? It seemed to Grayson that this could only be done by putting in front of them a picture of something that they had never seen or heard of before, of vast destructive power that they would believe was material destruction, was truly and completely real! If they believed it, it would BE real in fact in this plane!
They had never heard of an atom bomb, or of his own discovery of what he called cosmic power. Both were vastly destructive, and with this crystal he could cause this thought pattern, alien to their thought, to be sent to them. It was worth a try!
Intently he bent over the great crystal, impressing upon it his mental picturization of the explosion of an atom bomb of vast size, such an explosion as would fill space for a thousand miles about them with lethal radiations, with a blast of force which could not leave any material thing in any state but atomic division—the ultimate dust of disintegration!
Feverishly he struggled with the tiny moving picture of the vitals of force itself within the crystal, until to his eyes the picture was identical to that picture he had witnessed when he had been an official observer of the atomic bomb experiments at Bikini. With trembling hands he put the big crystal in the hands of the officer waiting. Paronu took it, wondering at Grayson’s intent expression, for it seemed as if he handed him something that might explode in his hands.
“First take me to Commander Istar again. I must explain the use of this new weapon, or it will destroy Azurans too.”
Paronu complied, carrying the crystal with a worried air, for he had caught Grayson’s expression of extreme peril as he gave it him.
I STAR was shaking a great fist at a wedge of Karnian ships which were boring into his center, splitting the Azuran formation into two parts. Even Grayson could see that the maneuver was one, if successful, would prove the first step in their complete disorganization. As Istar directed one half his strength to make a full circle and join the fleet at the other end, thus shifting his center to what was now the right end, Grayson put his hand on his shoulder.
“I have the thing will give you victory, Commander,” Grayson shouted orally at the Azuran, forgetting his whereabouts, and the sound of his words echoed in the big bridge chamber strangely as gunshots in church. Istar spun about, eyeing Grayson with ill-disguised anger.
Grayson pointed to the big shimmering jewel, lit from within with the flickering fires of its atomic illusion—or was it illusion?
“Any of our forces to whom this thing is not explained will die when this is fired. Let me have your communicator, just for six breaths!”
Paul took the wired little crystal from Istar’s hand, directed his thought into its center.
“Men of Azura, this is Grayson who has given you the effective crystals you now use in your cannon. I have prepared now a new and dangerous ray, it will destroy the whole of the enemy fleet. But it will not harm any Azuran ship unless you fail to understand. When this ray is fired, every man must close his eyes. If any man of our forces opens his eyes when this shot is fired, it will not only blind him, it will conduct the energies of this ray into his own ship and kill his comrades. Do you comprehend?”
One by one the remaining ships of the Azurans sent their assurance of understanding. Grayson then relinquished the communicator to the commander.
“I will tell you when we are ready to fire, Commander Istar. Then you must order every member of your fleet to close his eyes, else will they be blinded and their ship destroyed. Curiosity will be their death!”
“Understood, get to it! We are almost defeated. Hurry, or it will be too late!”
Grayson shot one look at the view-planes of the great glowing board of crystals, saw the maneuver of the wedge had pierced the center, the left wing of Azura had peeled off and was swinging in a wide circle to rejoin the fleet at the other end of the line of battle. But down upon that circling array of ships was diving from above a vast black cloud of Karnian destroyers, rays blazing, screens up, looking like great black bubbles of doom, bubbles that emitted constant streams of fiery death. Their superior speed was going to cut off the circling ships from the main body of the fleet. It was the completed maneuver, and the Karnian attack was very evidently going to succeed. Within short minutes the Azuran fleet would be in hopeless position for defense or attack.
Grayson turned, sprang out the door, raced along the outside companion way to the nearest gun turret. Pulling open the round door, he pushed Paronu ahead of him into the turret, shoved aside the gunner, began dismantling the breech mechanism where the great crystal lay in its bed between the energizing poles that terminated the great cables that led in twisted strength into the breech.
THE GUNNER, falling against the wall, gave vent to an exclamation of anger, was about to strike Grayson with a wrench he seized from a wall rack, but Paronu stopped him with a word. Grayson got the crystal into place, slammed shut the breech, screwed down the bolts.
“Tell Istar we are ready to fire!” cried Grayson orally again, and his words made the turret shake with their strange other-world echoings. The gunners held their hands to their heads in pain, glaring at this interloper, half inclined to mutiny. Paronu seized the round little communicator from the wall bracket, shouted into it:
“Commander Istar, give the order for blindness, we are ready to fire the dangerous beam!”
For an instant there was only silence, Grayson could see in his thought the big commander doubting his own wisdom in allowing such departures from normal procedure in battle.
Then the big speaker crystal in the wall began to vibrate with utter deafening waves of thought energy, and the voice of the commander bellowed; “Men of Azura, to save your own sight and your own lives, close your eyes against the blast to come!”
In an instant Grayson’s hand was on the firing lever, and as he heard Istar say in a lower voice—
“All remaining ships have reported obedience to the order, stranger! Fire away!”
Paul Grayson, stranger in the etherean world of Azura, spun the wheel of the gun pointing mechanism, until the cross hairs of the crystal over the gun centered upon the largest number of Karnian ships—those great black bubbles that were ships surrounded by opaque force sereens, now almost upon the fleeing segment of the Azuran line—and pressed the firing lever full down.
Even he closed his eyes for an instant, but as there was no vast burst of expected sound, he blinked his eyes at the view c
rystal, and the flaring light there struck him senseless to the metal of the deck. Whether it was metal or etherean illusion, the deck and his head made contact with a bump that knocked the wits from his head and left only a vast pain, and Grayson knew even in that world of pain and blindness his own carelessness had cost him—that something had happened when he energized that crystal of retentive immaterial “matter”. Something that might have wiped out the Azuran fleet as well as the enemy.
Shaking his head, Grayson staggered erect, trying to see, but his eyes only gave him a vision of tall forms of vibrant force-vortices, rosy and blue and gold, about him.
A voice strange to him murmured close beside him—“You would do well to obey your own orders, Paul Grayson.”
Grayson recognized the rosy shape beside him as one of the monitors he had thought neutral or enemy or both.
“Who are you?” queried Paul.
“A friend who shielded you just now from your own eyes’ inexperience. I broke the conductive beam of your eyes in time to save you. Had it not been for Sareen and your love for her, I would have let you pass on to the next world of Etherea. There you would have been even less at home than here, I assure you!”
“Thanks, friend. Did my “atomic bomb” illusion work.”
“Here in this plane, your atomic bomb was quite as effective as it Is on your own world, even more so I would say.”
FOR AN INSTANT the rosy pale fingers of force touched his eyes, passed over his head and limbs, and Paul Grayson came back to the world of vision and matter that he had decided was but an illusion to the Azurans.
The gun turret was wrecked. The bodies of the lieutenant and the gunners lay about, and Grayson bent for an instant to note whether they were dead or only shocked into unconsciousness. But he could not tell, they breathed or did not breathe, in his own shaky condition he could not say.
He turned to the sighting view-crystal over the barrel of the ray-cannon, and spun the focusing dials to get a wide-focus view of the whole field of the space battle.
The 47th Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 17