The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 03

by Anthology

  "But can we keep away from them that long?" asked Dol Kenor, pointedly; and his fellow Venerian also had a question to propound:

  "Would it not be preferable to lead them in a wide circle, back to a rendezvous with the Space Fleet, which will probably be ready by the time of meeting?"

  "I am afraid that that would be useless," Westfall frowned in thought. "Given power, that fortress could destroy the entire Fleet almost as easily as she could wipe out the Sirius alone."

  "Kenor's right." Stevens spoke up from the calculator. "You're getting too far ahead of the situation. We aren't apt to keep ahead of them long enough to do much leading anywhere. The Titanians can hold a beam together from Saturn to Jupiter--why can't these snake-folks?"

  "Several reasons," Brandon argued stubbornly. "First place, look at the mass of that thing, and remember that the heavier the beam the harder it is to hold it together. Second, there's no evidence that they wander around much in space. If their beams are designed principally for travel upon Jupiter, why should they have any extraordinary range? I say they can't hold that beam forever. We've got a good long lead, and in spite of their higher acceleration, I think we'll be able to keep out of range of their heavy stuff. If so, we'll trace a circle--only one a good deal bigger than the one Amonar suggested--and meet the fleet at a point where that enemy ship will be about out of power."

  Thus for hours the scientists argued, agreeing upon nothing, while the Vorkulian fortress crept ever closer. At the end of three days of the mad flight, the pursuing space ship was in plain sight, covering hundreds of divisions of the micrometer screens. But now the size of the images was increasing with extreme slowness, and the scientists of the Sirius watched with strained attention the edges of those glowing green pictures. Finally, when the pictured edges were about to cease moving across the finely-ruled lines, Brandon cut down his own acceleration a trifle, and kept on decreasing it at such a rate that the heptagon still crept up, foot by foot.

  "Hey what's the big idea?" Stevens demanded.

  "Coax 'em along. If we run away from them they'll probably reverse power and go back home, won't they? Their beam is falling apart fast, but they're still getting so much stuff along it that we couldn't do a thing to stop them. If they think that we're losing power even faster than they are, though, they'll keep after us until their beam's so thin that they'll just be able to stop on it. Then they'll reverse or else go onto their accumulators--reverse, probably, since they'll be a long ways from home by that time. We'll reverse, too, and keep just out of range. Then, when we both have stopped and are about to start back, their beam will be at its minimum and we'll go to work on 'em--foot, horse, and marines. Nobody can run us as ragged as they've been doing and get away with it as long as I'm conscious and stand a chance in the world of hanging one onto their chins in retaliation. I've got a hunch. If it works, we can take those birds alone, and take 'em so they'll stay took. We might as well break up--this is going to be an ordinary job of piloting for a few days, I think. I'm going up and work with the Martians on that hunch. You fellows work out any ideas you want to. Watch 'em close, Mac. Keep kidding 'em along, but don't let them get close enough to puncture us."

  * * * * *

  Everything worked out practically as Brandon had foretold, and a few days later, their acceleration somewhat less than terrestrial gravity, he called another meeting in the control room. He came in grinning from ear to ear, accompanied by the two Martians, and seated himself at his complex power panel.

  "Now watch the professor closely, gentlemen," he invited. "He is going to cut that beam."

  "But you can't," protested Pyraz Amonar.

  "I know you can't, ordinarily, when a beam is tight and solid. But that beam's as loose as ashes right now. I told you I had a hunch, and Alcantro and Fedanzo worked out the right answer for me. If I can cut it, Quince, and if their screens go down for a minute, shoot your visiray into them and see what you can see."

  "All x. How much power are you going to draw?"

  "Plenty--it figures a little better than four hundred thousand kilofranks. I'll draw it all from the accumulators, so as not to disturb you fellows on the cosmic intake. We don't care if we do run the batteries down some, but I don't want to hold that load on the bus-bars very long. However, if my hunch is right, I won't be on that beam five minutes before it's cut from Jupiter--and I'll bet you four dollars that you won't see the original crew in that fort when you get into it."

  He set upper and lower bands of dirigible projectors to apply a powerful sidewise thrust, and the Sirius darted off her course. Flashing a minute pencil behind the huge heptagon, Brandon manipulated his tuning circuits until a brilliant spot in space showed him that he was approaching resonance with the heptagon's power beam. Micrometer dials were then engaged and the delicate tuning continued until the meters gave evidence that the two beams were precisely synchronized and exactly opposite in phase. Four plunger switches closed, that tiny pilot ray became an enormous rod of force, and as those two gigantic beams met in exact opposition and neutralized each other, a solid wall of blinding brilliance appeared in the empty ether behind the Vorkulian fortress. As that dazzling wall sprang into being, the sparkling green protection died from the walls of the heptagon.

  "Go to it, Quince!" Brandon yelled, but the suggestion was entirely superfluous. Even before the wall-screen had died, Westfall's beam was trying to get through it, and when the visiray revealed the interior of the heptagon, the quiet and methodical physicist was shaken from his habitual calm.

  "Why, they aren't the winged monsters at all--they're hexans!" he exclaimed.

  "Sure they are." Brandon did not even turn his heavily-goggled eyes from the blazing blankness of his own screen. "That was my hunch. Those snakes went about things in a business-like fashion. They didn't strike me as being folks who would pull off such a wild stunt as trying to chase us clear out of the solar system, but a gang of hexans would do just that. Some of them must have captured that ship and, already having it in their cock-eyed brains that we were back of what happened on Callisto, they decided to bump us off if it was the last thing they ever did. That's what I'd do myself, if I were a hexan. Now I'll tell you what's happening back at the home power plant of that ship and what's going to happen next. I'm kicking up a horrible row out there with my interference, and a lot of instruments at the other end of that beam must be cutting up all kinds of didoes, right now. They'll check up on that ship with the expedition, by radio and what-not, and when they find out that it's clear out here--chop! Didn't get to see much, did you?"

  "No, they must have switched over to their accumulators almost instantly."

  "Yeah, but if they've got accumulator capacity enough to hold off our entire cosmic intake and get back to Jupiter besides, I'm a polyp! We're going to take that ship, fellows, and learn a lot of stuff we never dreamed of before. Ha! There goes his beam--pay me the four, Quince."

  The dazzling wall of incandescence had blinked out without warning, and Brandon's beam bored on through space, unimpeded. He shut it off and turned to his fellows with a grin--a grin which disappeared instantly as a thought struck him and he leaped back to his board.

  "Sound the high-acceleration warning quick, Perce!" he snapped, and drove in switch after switch.

  "Cosmic intake's gone down to zero!" exclaimed MacDonald, as the Sirius leaped away.

  "Had to cut it--they might shoot a jolt through that band. Just thought of something. Maybe unnecessary, but no harm done if ... it's necessary, all x--we're taking a sweet kissing right now. You see, even though we're at pretty long range, they've got some horrible projectors, and they were evidently mad enough to waste some power taking a good, solid flash at us--and if we hadn't been expecting it, that flash would have been a bountiful sufficiency, believe me--Great Cat! Look at that meter--and I've had to throw in number ten shunt! The outer screen is drawing five hundred and forty thousand!"

  * * * * *

  They stared at the meter in amaz
ement. It was incredible, even after they had seen those heptagons in action, that at such extreme range any offensive beam could be driven with such unthinkable power--power requiring for its neutralization almost the full output of the prodigious batteries of accumulators carried by the Sirius! Yet for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that beam drove furiously against their straining screens, and even Brandon's face grew tense and hard as that frightful attack continued. At the end of twenty-two minutes, however, the pointer of the meter snapped back to the pin and every man there breathed an explosive sigh of relief--the almost unbearable bombardment was over; the screen was drawing only its maintenance load.

  "Wow!" Brandon shouted. "I thought for a minute they were going to hang to us until we cracked, even if it meant that they'd have to freeze to death out here themselves!"

  "It would have meant that, too, don't you think?" asked Stevens.

  "I imagine so--don't see how they could possibly have enough power left to get back to Jupiter if they shine that thing on us much longer. Of course, the more power they waste on us, the quicker we can take them; but I don't want much more of that beam, I'll tell the world--I just about had heart failure before they cut off!"

  The massive heptagon was now drifting back toward Jupiter at constant velocity. The hexans were apparently hoarding jealously their remaining power, for their wall screens did not flash on at the touch of the visiray. Through unresisting metal the probing Terrestrial beams sped, and the scientists studied minutely every detail of the Vorkulian armament; while the regular observers began to make a detailed photographic survey of every room and compartment of the great fortress. Much of the instrumentation and machinery was familiar, but some of it was so strange that study was useless--days of personal inspection and experiment, perhaps complete dismantling, would be necessary to reveal the secrets hidden within those peculiar mechanisms.

  "They're trying to save all the power they can--think I'll make them spend some more," Brandon remarked, and directed against the heptagon a heavy destructive beam. "We don't want them to get back to Jupiter until after we've boarded them and found out everything we want to know. Come here, Quince--what do you make of this?"

  Both men stared at the heptagon, frankly puzzled; for the screens of the strange vessel did not radiate, nor did the material of the walls yield under the terrible force of the beam. The destructive ray simply struck that dull green surface and vanished--disappeared without a trace, as a tiny stream of water disappears into a partially-soaked sponge.

  "Do you know what you are doing?" asked Westfall, after a few minutes' thought. "I believe that you are charging their accumulators at the rate of," he glanced at a meter, "exactly thirty-one thousand five hundred kilofranks."

  "Great Cat!" Brandon's hand flashed to a switch and the beam expired. "But they can't just simply grab it and store it, Quince--it's impossible!"

  "The word 'impossible' in that connection, coming from you, has a queer sound," Westfall said pointedly and Brandon actually blushed.

  "That's right, too--we have got pretty much the same idea in our cosmic intake fields, but we didn't carry things half as far as they have done. Huh! They're flashing us again ... but those thin little beams don't mean anything. They're just trying to make us feed them some more, I guess. But we've got to hold them back some way--wonder if they can absorb a tractor field?"

  The hexans had lashed out a few times with their lighter weapons, but, finding the Sirius unresponsive, had soon shut them off and were stolidly plunging along toward Jupiter. Brandon flung out a tractor rod and threw the mass of his cruiser upon it as it locked into those sullen green walls. But as soon as the enemy felt its drag, their screens flared white, and the massive Terrestrial space-ship quivered in every member as that terrific cable of force was snapped.

  "They apparently cannot store up the energy of a tractor," commented Westfall, "but you will observe that they have no difficulty in radiating when they care to."

  "Those two ideas didn't pan out so heavy. There's lots of things not tried yet, though. Our next best bet is to get around in front of him and push back. If they wiggle away from more than fifty percent of a pressor, they're really good."

  The pilot maneuvered the Sirius into line, directly between Jupiter and the pentagon; and as the driving projectors went into action, Brandon drove a mighty pressor field along their axis, squarely into the center of mass of the Vorkulian fortress. For a moment it held solidly, then, as the screens of the enemy went into action, it rebounded and glanced off in sparkling, cascading torrents. But the hexans, with all their twisting and turning, could not present to that prodigious beam of force any angle sufficiently obtuse to rob it of half its power, and the driving projectors of the pentagon again burst into activity as the backward-pushing mass of the Sirius made itself felt. In a short time, however, the wall-screens were again cut off--apparently more power was required to drive them than they were able to deflect.

  Although even the enormous tonnage of the Terrestrial cruiser was insignificant in comparison with the veritable mountain of metal to which she was opposed, so that the fiercest thrust of her driving projectors did not greatly affect the monster's progress; yet Brandon and his cohorts were well content.

  "It's a long trip back to where they came from, and since they wanted to drift all the way, I think they'll be out of power before they get there," Brandon summed up the situation. "We aren't losing any power, either, since we are using only a part of our cosmic intake."

  In a few hours the struggle had settled down to a routine matter--the Sirius being pushed backward steadily against the full drive of her every projector, contesting stubbornly every mile of space traversed. Assured that the regular pilots and lookouts were fully capable of handling the vessel, the scientists were about to resume their interrupted tasks when one of the photographers called them over to look at something he had discovered in one of the lowermost and smallest compartments of the heptagon. All crowded around the screens, and saw pictured there the winged, snake-like form of one of the original crew of the Vorkulian vessel!

  "Dead?" Brandon asked.

  "Not yet," replied the photographer. "He is twitching a little once in a while, but you see, he's pretty badly cut up."

  "I see he is ... he must have a lot of vitality to have lasted this long--may be he'll live through it yet. Hold him on the plate, and get his exact measurements." He turned to the communicator. "Doctor von Steiffel? Can you come down to the control room a minute? We may want you to operate upon one of these South Jovians after a while."

  "Himmel! Es ... ist ... der...." The great surgeon, bearded and massive, stared into the plate, and in his surprise started to speak in his native German. He paused, his long, powerful fingers tracing the likeness of the Vorkul upon the plate, then went on: "I would like very much to operate, but, not understanding our intentions, he would, of course, struggle. And when that body struggles--schrecklichkeit!" and he waved his arms in a pantomime of wholesale destruction.

  "I thought of that--that's why I am talking to you now instead of when we get to him, two or three days from now. We'll give you his exact measurements, and a crew of mechanics will, under your direction, sink holes in the steel floor and install steel bands heavy enough to hold him rigid, from tailfins to wing-tips. We'll hold him there until we can make him understand that we're friends. It is of the utmost importance to save that creature's life if possible; because we do not want one of their fortresses launched against us--and in any event, it will not do us any harm to have a friend in the City of the South."

  "Right. I will also have prepared some kind of a space-suit in which he can be brought from his vessel to ours," and the surgeon took the measurements and went to see that the "operating table" and suit were made ready for Kromodeor, the sorely wounded Vorkul.

  * * * * *

  It was not long until the projectors of the heptagon went out and she lay inert in space, power completely exhausted. Knowing that the screens of th
e enemy would absorb any ordinary ray, the scientists had calculated the most condensed beam they could possibly project, a beam which, their figures showed, should be able to puncture those screens by sheer mass action--puncture them practically instantaneously, before the absorbers could react. To that end they had arranged their circuits to hurl seven hundred sixty-five thousand kilofranks--the entire power of their massed accumulators and their highest possible cosmic intake--in one tiny bar of superlative density, less than one meter in diameter! Everything ready, Brandon shot in prodigious switches that launched that bolt--a bolt so vehement, so inconceivably intense, that it seemed fairly to blast the very ether out of existence as it tore its way along its carefully predetermined line. The intention was to destroy all the control panels of the absorber screens; parts so vital that without them the great vessel would be helpless, and yet items which the Terrestrials could reconstruct quite readily from their photographs and drawings.

  As that irresistible bolt touched the Vorkulian wall-screen, the spot of contact flared instantaneously through the spectrum and into the black beyond the violet as that screen overloaded locally. Fast as it responded and highly conductive though it was, it could not handle that frightfully concentrated load. In the same fleeting instant of time every molecule of substance in that beam's path flashed into tenuous vapor--no conceivable material could resist or impede that stabbing stiletto of energy--and the main control panel of the Vorkulian wall-screen system vanished. Time after time, as rapidly as he could sight his beam and operate his switches, Brandon drove his needle of annihilation through the fortress, destroying the secondary controls. Then, the walls unresisting, he cut in the vastly larger, but infinitely less powerful, I-P ray, and with it systematically riddled the immense heptagon. Out through the gaping holes in the outer walls rushed the dense atmosphere of Jupiter, and the hexans in their massed hundreds died.