The landing beams of the Erebus flashed out. Light flickered in the chill darkness. The beams darted here and there.
Then the machines appeared. The scene was remarkable. Over the dunes marched gigantic metal monsters, many-legged, with bodies as great as the Erebus itself. Great bulges on their forward parts gave the look of eyes, as if these were huge insects marching to devour and destroy. As the landing light beams flickered from one to another of them, huge metallic tusks appeared, and toothed jaws—used for excavation. They were not machines designed for war, but they were terrifying, and they could be terrible.
Esther’s hand on Stan’s shoulder trembled as the monsters closed in. Then Stan, in the unarmed and seemingly defenseless little space yacht, swung the meteor repeller controls and literally cut them to pieces.
CHAPTER 6
“We’re barbarians,” said Stan, “compared to these folk. So we’ve an advantage. It’s likely to be only temporary, though!”
He watched the carcasses of the great machines, flicking the landing light beams back and forth. They were tumbled terribly on the ground. Some were severed in two or three places, and their separate sections sprawled astonishedly on a dune side. One was split through lengthwise. Another had all of one set of legs cut off clean, and lay otherwise unharmed but utterly helpless.
Out of that incapacitated giant a smaller version of itself crawled. It was like a lifeboat. Stan watched. Other small versions of the great machines appeared. One made a dash at the Erebus, and he cut it savagely in two. There was no other attack. Instead, the smaller many-legged machines ran busily from one to another of the wrecks—seeming to gather up survivors—and then went racing away into the dark. Then there was stillness.
“They knew we saw them,” said Stan grimly. “They knew we could smash them. They realized that I wouldn’t unless they attacked again. I wonder what they think of us now?”
“What you did to them was—awful,” said Esther. She shuddered. “I still don’t know what it was. I never heard of any weapon like that!”
“It could only exist here,” said Stan. He grimaced. “We’ve meteor repellers. They push away anything in their beam. I narrowed them to their smallest size and put full power into them. That was all.”
“But meteor repellers don’t cut!” protested Esther.
“These did,” said Stan. “They were working through sand, just that. They pushed it. With a force of eighty tons in a half-inch beam. The sand that was in the beam was shot away with an acceleration of possibly fifty thousand gravities—and more sand kept falling into the beam. Each particle was traveling as fast as a meteor when it hit, over there. When it struck it simply flared to incandescent vapor. No atomic torch was ever hotter! And there was no end to the sand I threw. You might say I cut those machines up with a sandblast, but there was never such a sandblast as this! It took a barbarian—like me—to think of it.”
He continued to watch the vision screens, filtered to view their surroundings by infrared and seeing nearly as brightly as if by day.
“Now,” he added, “I need to go over to those machines and get some stuff I think they’ve got in them. That’s what I provoked this attack for. But maybe the drivers are laying low to jump on me if I try it. I’ll have to wait until nearly dawn. They won’t risk waiting until almost time for the sandstorms! Not with fifty miles to travel back to the grid!”
He stayed on guard. Presently he yawned. He stood up and paced back and forth, glancing from time to time at the screen. After a long time Esther said:
“You didn’t sleep last night, Stan. Could I watch for a while so you can rest?”
“Mmmmm. Yes. If anything stirs, wake me. But I don’t look for action here. The real action will be back underground, where they’ll put their best brains to devising weapons. They ought to make up some pretty devices, too, but if they haven’t thought of such things for fifty thousand years or so it may take them a while to get started.”
He went back into the cabin and threw himself down. Almost instantly he was asleep. Esther watched the vision plates dutifully. There was silence and stillness everywhere. After a long time she looked in on the sleeping Stan. A little later she looked in again, reached over, and touched his hair gently. Later still she looked in yet again. She kissed him lightly—he did not wake—and went back to the control cabin, to watch the vision plates.
Nothing happened. Bright stars shone down on the night side of the desert world, and sandstorms raged and howled and blew frenziedly on the side under the dwarf white sun. But nothing happened in or near the Erebus.
Out in space, though, very many millions of miles away, a tiny mote winked into existence as if by magic, with the cutting off of its Bowdoin-Hall field drive. It hung seemingly motionless for a while, as if orienting itself. It seemed to locate what it sought, and vanished, but again winked into being a bare few thousand miles from the planet’s surface. It did not disappear again. It drove down toward the half-obscured disk at the normal acceleration of a landing drive. Toward dawn it screamed down into atmosphere above the planet’s surface. It drove on into the day, and into howling winds and far-flung sand. It rose swiftly, and went winging toward the summer polar cap. Khor Alpha’s single planet had gone unvisited by men during two centuries of interstellar travel, but now there had been three separate visitations within ten days.
The last of the three visitors settled to ground where hoar frost partly whitened the desert’s face. A full power carrier wave spread out from it. In the control room of the Erebus a speaker suddenly barked savagely:
“Stan Buckley! I’m here to kill you! Communicate!” A pause, and the same savage words again:
“Stan Buckley! I’m here to kill you! Communicate!”
Esther gasped. She recognized the voice. Rob Torren. Back more than two months before Stan had expected him. The words did not make sense to her. Stan had tried to spare her despair by concealing the fact that Torren’s return would be to kill him, under a compact which her presence here made void.
“Rob!” cried Esther softly into the transmitter. “Rob Torren. It’s Esther calling! Esther Hume!”
An indescribable sound emitted from the speaker. With trembling hands she adjusted the vision receiver. She looked into the taut, drawn, raging features of Rob Torren. He stared at her out of the screen.
“Stan’s asleep, Rob!” cried Esther eagerly. “He didn’t expect you back for a long time yet! You’re wondering how I got here? Oh—”
Laughing a little, joyously, she told of her desperate voyage to be with Stan when he should be tried, and how her drive had been burned out by impinging on the drive of the space skid on which Stan had left the Stallifer. Of course she told of her subsequent meeting with Stan.
“There are inhabitants here,” she finished eagerly, “and they’ve been trying to kill us. They attacked tonight and we fought them off. Stan has some hope, I think, of getting the material to repair our drive from the machines he wrecked.”
She was all joy and relief at Torren’s arrival. But his face was ravaged by conflicting emotions, all of them intense and all harrowing. He did not smile. His eyes seemed to burn. The strangeness of his look struck her, suddenly.
“But—what’s the matter, Rob?” she asked. “You look so queer!” Then she added in abrupt, startled doubt. “And Rob! Why did you say you had come back to kill Stan? You were joking, weren’t you?”
He raged at her instantly:
“He coached you, eh? To pretend you didn’t know anything? Trying to make me take you both to safety on a promise of fighting me later? It won’t work! I’ve a line on your wave and I’ll be coming! I’ll be coming fast! Maybe you’ve no weapons, but I have! I’ve a Space Guard one-man ship. I forced the Stallifer to dock at Lora Beta and put me ashore! I got this ship to hunt back for Stan, claiming his recapture as my responsibility! I did plan to have him write you a letter before I killed him, but since you know everything now—”
She saw the beginning
of an infuriated movement. Then the screen went blank.
After a moment’s frightened irresolution she went to Stan. She woke him, and after the first three words he was sternly alert. He listened, though—his hands clenched—until she was through.
“This sets things up nicely!” he said bitterly. “You didn’t know about him, of course, but—our friends of the grid are concocting weapons to destroy us, and now he’s streaking here along his locator line to blast us with everything a Space Guard ship can carry! He’ll have long range stuff! He can burn us to a crisp if we put a repeller beam on him! We can’t sandblast him! We can’t—”
He stopped, frowning.
“We don’t know how far away he is,” he snapped. “There’s a margin of error in locators on a planet. It might take him just long enough to find us—”
He began to struggle swiftly into a spacesuit. Esther said quickly:
“Wherever you’re going, I’m going too!”
“You’re not!” he said harshly. “You’ll go in the control room with your hands on the beam controls. If some of the local citizens are hiding in those wrecks, you’ll smash them if they jump me! I haven’t so much as a pocket knife! You’ve got to be my weapons while I dig into those wrecks!”
He went swiftly out the airlock with only a cutting torch in his hands. He fairly ran toward the debris of the attacking army of machines. He reached the first. It had been sliced longitudinally in half by a stream of sand particles traveling at fifty miles or better per second, in a stream of air of the same velocity. Nothing could have withstood such an attack. No material substance in the universe could have resisted it. Four-inch plates of steel and foot-thick girders had been cut through like so much dough, the severed edges turned not to liquid but to vapor by the deadly stream.
The whole mechanism of the machine was exposed. The great biting jaws, designed to tear away huge masses of intermingled sand and ice. The tusks to break loose sections for the jaws to handle. The tanks to contain the precious damp material. The machine had not been made for fighting, but it, alone, could have torn the Erebus to fragments. With an army of such machines—
Stan clambered into the neatly halved shell with his cutting torch. All about him were small devices; cryptic things; the strictly practical contrivances of a hundred thousand year old civilization. He itched to examine them, but he needed certain bars of allotropic graphite he suspected would be here. They were. The motors which ran the leg movements were motors like those which turned the great slabs. They consisted of slabs of graphite and the metal which slid past them. That was all. Only one special allotrope of graphite makes a motor of such simplicity. Only—
He burdened himself with black, flaky bars, cutting ruthlessly through machinery an engineer would have devoted months to study. He had an even dozen of the bars in his arms when a sudden blast rocked him. He whirled, and saw a small cloud of still incandescent vapor and something which was separating horribly into many steaming pieces. Other things seemed to leap to smother him under their weight. He could not see them save as vague shapes, but he knew they were there.
Another exploded as Esther, in the Erebus and watching with the infrared scanner, desperately used the weapon which had never existed before and could not be used anywhere save on this one planet.
Stan ran clumsily for the ship over the drifting, powdery sand. Inhumanly resolute unhuman things leaped after him. He saw the flares as Esther destroyed them. He knew that she was wide-eyed and trembling and sick with horror at what she had to do.
He stumbled into the airlock and dogged it shut behind him. Esther came running to greet him, not shaking and not trembling and not horrified, but with burning eyes and the fiery anger of a Valkyrie.
“They tried to kill you!” she cried fiercely. “They were hiding! They’d have murdered you—”
He put down his bars of allotropic graphite. He reached out to take her in his arms. But—
“Darn these spacesuits!” he said furiously. “You’ll have to wait to be kissed until this job’s finished!”
He tore up the flooring hatch above the little ship’s drive. He jerked off the housing.
“Keep watch!” he called to the control room. “At least one of the machines must be waiting behind the dunes, hoping for a break!”
He worked with frantic haste, shedding his spacesuit by convulsive movements. This should have been the most finicky of fine fitting jobs. To repair a Bowdoin-Hall drive unit by replacing its graphite bars for maximum efficiency is a matter for micrometric precision. But efficiency was not what he wanted, now, but speed. The stolen bars almost fitted. They were vastly unlike the five hundred pound monsters for the grid slabs. They should at least move the ship, and if the ship could be moved—
He had two of them in place and six more to go when the speaker in the control room blared triumphantly.
“Stan Buckley! Tune in! I’m right above your ship! Tune in!”
Stan swore in a sick disgust. Two out of eight was not enough. He was helpless for lack, now, of time. The corrosive hatred that comes of helplessness filled him. He went into the control room and said drearily to Esther:
“Sorry, my dear. Another twenty minutes and you’d have been safe. I think we lose.”
He kissed her, and with fury steadied fingers tuned in the communication plate. Rob Torren grinned furiously at him.
“I thought I’d let you know what’s happening,” said Torren in a voice that was furry with whipped-up rage. “I’m going to go back and report that you were killed resisting arrest. I’m going to melt down the yacht until it could never be identified as the Erebus—if anybody ever sees it again! And—maybe you’ll enjoy knowing that I did the things I charged you with, and have the proceeds safely banked away! I faked the evidence that proved it on you. I hoped to have Esther, too, but she’s spoiled that by trying to come and help you! Now—”
“Now,” said Stan coldly, “you’ll stand off a good twenty miles and beam us. You’ll take no chances that we might be able to throw a handful of sand at you! You’ll be so cautious that you won’t even come close to see your success with your own eyes! You’ll read it off on instruments! You’re pretty much afraid of me!”
“Afraid?” raged Rob Torren. “You’ll see!”
The communication screen went blank. Stan leaped to the meteor repeller controls and stared at the vertical vision plate which showed all the sky above.
“Not the shadow of a chance,” he said coldly, “but a beam does make a little glow! if he misses us once—but he won’t—maybe I can get in one blast…”
There was tense silence. Deadly silence. The screen overhead showed a multitude of cold, unwinking stars. One of them winked out and on again.
“I’ll try—” began Stan.
Then the screen seemed to explode into light. Something flared like a nova in the sky. Intolerable brilliance filled a quarter of the screen, and faded. Swiftly. It went out.
“Wh-what was that?” chattered Esther.
Stan drew a deep breath.
“That,” be said softly, “I think it was sixty thousand million horsepower in a power beam. I think our friends the grid-makers have been working on armament to fight us with, and I think they’ve got something quite good! They don’t like strangers. Torren was a stranger, and they got a shot at him, and they took it. Now they’ll get set to come over here after us. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to the drive.”
He returned to the cabin where two out of a necessary eight graphite bars were in place. He worked. Fast. No man ever worked so fast or so fiercely or with such desperately steady hands. In twenty minutes he made the last, the final connection. Just as he dropped the hatch in place, Esther called anxiously:
“More machines coming, Stan! The microphones picked them up!”
“Coming!” he told her briskly. He went to the instrument board and threw switches here and there. “The normal thing,” he said evenly, “would be to lift from the ground here, on la
nding drive, and go into field drive out of atmosphere. But we don’t do it for two reasons. One is that we have no landing drive. The other is that at normal takeoff acceleration our friends of the grid would take a pot shot at us with the thing they used on Rob Torren. With sixty thousand million horsepower. So—here goes!”
He stabbed a simple push button.
With no perceptible interval and with no sensation of movement, the Erebus was out in deep space. The screens showed stars on every side—all the stars of the galaxy. These were not the hostile, immobile, unfriendly stars the first voyagers of space had seen. With the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times a second, the stars moved visibly. The nearer ones moved more swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. The cosmos seemed very small and almost cozy, and the stars mere fireflies and the Rim itself no more than a few miles away.
Stan watched. He said:
“We’re not making much time. Not over six hundred lights, I’d say. But we’ll get there.”
“And—and when we do—”
“Hm,” said Stan. “You can swear Torren said he’d committed the crimes he charged me with and faked the evidence against me. With that testimony, they’ll examine the evidence as they do when there are no witnesses. It’ll fall down. I’ll be cleared.”
“Stan!” said Esther indignantly. “I meant—”
“When I’m cleared,” said Stan. “We’ll get married.”
“That,” admitted Esther, “is what I had in mind.”
He kissed her, and stood watching the moving cosmos critically.
“Our friends the grid-builders have gotten waked up now,” he observed. “They know they’re not the only intelligent race in the universe, and they may not like it. They’re a fretful crew! But they’ll have to be made friends with. And quick, or they might cause trouble. I think I’ll apply to be assigned the task force that will undertake the job. It ought to be interesting! Not a dull moment!”
Esther scowled at him.
“Now,” she protested, “you reduce me to being glad we’re not making our proper speed! Because after you get back—”
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 57