Keller reached out over the array of cubes that had been experienced by Holmes and himself while using the helmets from the cube-library. One cube had been set aside. Keller put it in place on the extra helmet and handed it to Burke.
“Try it,” said Keller.
Burke put the helmet on his head.
He was in this same instrument-room, but he wore a uniform and he sat at an instrument-board. He knew that there were drone service-boats perhaps ten thousand miles out, perhaps a hundred. They’d been fitted out to make a mock attack on the fortress. Counter-tactics men devised them. There was reason for worry. Three times, now, drones pretending to be Enemy ships had dodged past the screen of globes set out to prevent just such an evasion. Once, one of the drones had gloatingly touched the stone of the fortress’ outer surface. This was triumph for the counter-tactics crew, but it was proof that an Enemy ship could have wiped out the fortress and all its garrison a hundred times over.
Burke sweated. There was a speck with a yellow ring about it. It was a globe, poised and ready to dart in any conceivable direction if an Enemy detection-device ranged it. The globes did not go seeking an Enemy. They placed themselves where they would be sought. They set themselves up as targets. But when a radar-pulse touched them, they flung themselves at its source, their reflex chooser-circuits pouring incredible power into a beam of the same characteristics as the radar-touch. That beam, of course, paralyzed or burned out the Enemy device necessarily tuned to it. And the globes plunged at the thing which had found them. They accelerated at a hundred and sixty gravities and mere high explosive would be wasted if they carried it. Nothing could stand their impact. Nothing!
But in drills three drones had dodged them. The counter-tactics men understood the drones, of course, as it was hoped the Enemy did not. But it should not be possible to get to the fortress! If the fortress was vulnerable, so was the Empire. If the Empire was vulnerable, the Enemy would wreck its worlds, blast its cities, exterminate its population and only foulness would remain in the galaxy.
On the monitor-board a light flashed. A line of green light darted across the screen. It was the path of a globe hurtling toward something that had touched it with a radar-frequency signal. The acceleration of the globe was breathtaking. It seemed to explode toward its target.
But this globe hit nothing. It went on and on.… A second globe sprang. It also struck nothing. It went away to illimitable emptiness. Its path exactly crossed that of the first. A third and fourth and fifth.… Each one flung itself ferociously at the source of some trickle of radiation. Their trails crossed at exactly the same spot. But there was nothing there.…
Burke suddenly flung up a row of switches, inactivating the remaining globes under his control. Five had flung themselves away, darting at something which radiated but did not exist. Something which was not solid. Which was not a drone ship impersonating an Enemy. They’d attacked an illusion.…
At the control-board, Burke clenched his fist and struck angrily at the flat surface before him. An illusion! Of course!
Cunningly, he made adjustments. He had five globes left. He chose one and changed the setting of its reflex chooser-circuit. It would ignore radar frequencies now. It would pick up only stray radiation—induction frequencies from a drone ship with its drive on.
The globe’s light flashed. A train of green fire appeared. A burst of flame. A hit! The drone was destroyed. He swiftly changed the setting of the reflex circuits of the rest. Two! Three! Three drones blasted in twice as many seconds.
He mopped his forehead. This was only a drill, but when the Enemy came it would be the solution of such problems that would determine the survival of the fortress and the destruction of the Enemy.
He reported his success crisply.
Burke took off the helmet.
Keller said mildly, “What did he do?”
Burke considered.
“The drone, faking to be an enemy, had dumped something out into space. Metal powder, perhaps. It made a cloud in emptiness. Then the drone drew off and threw a radar-beam on the cloud of metal particles. The beam bounced in all directions. When a globe picked it up, it shot for the phony metal-powder target. It went right through and off into space. Other globes fell for the same trick. When they were all gone, the drones could have come right up to the fort.”
He was almost interested. He’d felt, at least, the sweating earnestness of an unknown member of this garrison, dead some thousands of years, as he tried to make a good showing in a battle drill.
“So he changed the reflex circuits,” Burke added. “He stopped his globes from homing on radar frequencies. He made them home on frequencies that wouldn’t bounce.” Then he said in surprise, “But they didn’t hit, at that! The drones blew up before the globes got to them! They were exploding from the burning-out of all their equipment before the globes got there!”
Keller nodded. He said sorrowfully, “So clever, our ancestors. But not clever enough!”
“Of our chances,” said Burke, “or what I think are chances, the least promising seems to be the idea of trying to hook something together to fight with.” He considered, and then smiled very faintly. “You saw movements you couldn’t identify in the vision-plates? Sandy says she saw something alive. I wonder if something besides us answered the space-call and got info the fortress by a different way, and has been hiding out, afraid of us.”
Keller shook his head.
“I don’t believe it either,” admitted Burke. “It seems crazy. But it might be true. It might. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for solutions to our problem.”
Keller shook his head again. Burke shrugged and went out of the instrument-room. He went down the stairs and the first long corridor, and past the long rows of emplacements in which were set the hunkering metal monsters he’d cube-dreamed of using, but which would be of no conceivable use against speeding, whirling, artificial-gravity fields with the pull and the mass of suns.
He reached the last long gallery on which the ship-lock opened. He saw the broad white ribbon of many strands of light, reaching away seemingly without limit. And he saw a tiny figure running toward him. It was Sandy. She staggered as she ran. She had already run past endurance, but she kept desperately on, Burke broke into a run himself.
When he met her, she gasped, “Pam! She—vanished—down below! We were—looking, and Pam cried out. We ran to her. Gone! And we—heard noises! Noises! Holmes is searching now. She—screamed, Joe!”
Burke swung her behind him.
“Tell Keller,” he commanded harshly. “You’ve got that hand-weapon? Hold on to it! Bring Keller! We’ll all search! Hurry!”
He broke into a dead run.
It might have seemed ironic that he should rush to help Sandy’s sister in whatever disaster had befallen her when they were facing the end of the whole solar system. In cold blood, it couldn’t be considered to matter. But Burke ran.
He panted when he plunged dawn the ramp to the lower portions of the asteroid. He reached the huge cavern in which the motionless power-generator towered storeys high toward a light-laced ceiling.
“Holmes!” he shouted, and ran on. “Holmes!”
He’d been no farther than this, before, but he went on into tunnels with only double lines of light-tubes overhead, and he shouted and heard his own voice reverberating in a manner which seemed pure mockery. But as he ran be continued to shout.
And presently Holmes shouted in return. There was a process of untangling innumerable echoes, and ultimately they met. Holmes was deathly white. He carried something unbelievable in his hands.
“Here!” he growled. “I found this. I cornered it, I killed it! What is it? Did things like this catch Pam?”
Only a man beside himself could have asked such a question. Holmes carried the corpse of a bird with mottled curly feathers. He’d wrung its neck. He suddenly flung it aside.
“Where’s Pam?” he demanded fiercely. “What the hell’s happened to her? I’ll kill
anything in creation that’s tried to hurt her!”
Burke snapped questions. Inane ones. Where had Pam been last? Where were Holmes and Sandy when they missed her? When she cried out?
Holmes tried to show him. But this part of the asteroid was a maze of corridors with uncountable doorways opening into innumerable compartments. Some of these compartments were not wholly empty, but neither Burke nor Holmes bothered to examine machine-parts or stacks of cases that would crumble to dust at a touch. They searched like crazy men, calling to Pam.
Keller and Sandy arrived. They’d passed the corpse of the bird Holmes had killed, and Keller was strangely white-faced. Sandy panted, “Did you find her? Have you found any sign?”
But she knew the answer. They hadn’t found Pam. Holmes was haggard, desperate, filled with a murderous fury against whatever unnameable thing had taken Pam away.
“Here!” snapped Burke. “Let’s get some system into this! Here’s the case with the message-cube. It’s our marker. We start from here! I’ll follow this cross corridor and the next one. You three take the next three corridors going parallel. One each! Look in every doorway. When we reach the next cross-corridor we’ll compare notes and make another marker.”
He went along the way he’d chosen, looking in every door. Cryptic masses of metal in one compartment. A heap of dust in another. Empty. Empty. A pile of metal furniture. Another empty. Still another.
Holmes appeared, his hands clenching and unclenching. Sandy turned up, struggling for self-control.
“Where’s Keller?”
“I heard him call out,” said Sandy breathlessly. “I thought he’d found something and I hurried—”
He did not come. They shouted. They searched. Keller had disappeared. They found the mark they’d started from and retraced their steps. Burke heard Holmes swear startledly, but there were so many echoes he could not catch words.
Sandy met Burke. Holmes did not. He did not answer shouts. He was gone.
“We stay together,” said Burke in an icy voice. “We’ve both got hand-weapons. Keep yours ready to fire. I’ve got mine. Whatever out of hell is loose in this place, we’ll kill it or it will kill us, and then—”
He did not finish. They stayed close together, with Burke in the lead.
“We’ll look in each doorway,” he insisted. “Keep that pistol ready. Don’t shoot the others if you see them, but shoot anything else!”
“Y-yes,” said Sandy. She swallowed.
It was nerve-racking. Burke regarded each doorway as a possible ambush. He investigated each one first, making sure that the compartment inside it was wholly empty. There was one extra-large archway to an extra-large compartment, halfway between their starting point and the next cross-corridor. It was obviously empty, though there was a large metal plate on the floor. But it was lighted. Nothing could lurk in there.
Burke inspected the compartment beyond, and the one beyond that.
He thought he heard Sandy gasp. He whirled, gun ready.
Sandy was gone.
CHAPTER 10
The star Sol was as bright as Sirius, but no brighter because it was nearly half a light-year away and of course could not compare in intrinsic brightness with that farther giant sun. The Milky Way glowed coldly. All the stars shone without any wavering in their light, from the brightest to the faintest tinted dot. The universe was round. There were stars above and below and before and behind and to the right and left. There was nothing which was solid, and nothing which was opaque. There were only infinitely remote, unwinking motes of light, but there were thousands of millions of them. Every where there were infinitesimal shinings of red and blue and yellow and green; of all the colors that could be imagined. Yet all the starlight from all the cosmos added up to no more than darkness. The whitest of objects would not shine except faintly, dimly, feebly. There was no warmth. This was deep space, frigid beyond imagining; desolate beyond thinking; empty. It was nothingness spread out in the light of many stars.
In such cold and darkness it would seem that nothing could be, and there was nothing to be seen. But now and again a pattern of stars quivered a little. It contracted a trace and then returned to its original appearance. The disturbance of the star-patterns moved, as a disturbance, in vast curved courses. They were like isolated ripplings in space.
There seemed no cause for these ripplings. But there were powerful gravitational fields in the void, so powerful as to warp space and bend the starlight passing through them. These gravity-fields moved with an incredible speed. There were ten of them, circling in a complex pattern which was spread out as an invisible unit which moved faster than the light their space-twisting violence distorted.
They seemed absolutely undetectable, because even such minute light-ripplings as they made were left behind them. The ten ships which created these monstrous force-fields were unbelievably small. They were no larger than cargo ships on the oceans of one planet in the solar system toward which they sped. They were less than dust particles in infinity. They would travel for only a few more days, now, and then would flash through the solar system which was their target. They should reach its outermost planet—four light-hours away—and within eight minutes more swing mockingly past and through the inner worlds and the sun. They would cross the plane of the ecliptic at nearly a right angle, and they should leave the planets and the yellow star Sol in flaming self-destruction behind them. Then they would flee onward, faster than the chaos they created could follow.
The living creatures on the world to be destroyed would have no warning. One instant everything would be as it had always been. The next, the ground would rise and froth out flames, and more than two thousand million human beings would hardly know that anything had occurred before they were destroyed.
There was no purpose to be served by notifying the world that it was to die. The rulers of the nations had decided that it was kinder to let men and women look at each other and rejoice, thinking they had all their lives before them. It was kinder that children should be let play valorously, and babies wail and instantly be tended. It was better for humanity to move unknowing under blue and sunshine-filled skies than that they should gaze despairingly up at white clouds, or in still deeper horror at the shining night stars from which devastation would presently come.
In the one place where there was foreknowledge, no attention at all was paid to the coming doom. Burke went raging about brightly lighted corridors, shouting horrible things. He cried out to Sandy to answer him, and defied whatever might have seized her to dare to face him. He challenged the cold stone walls. He raged up and down the gallery in which she had vanished, and feverishly explored beyond it, and returned to the place where she had disappeared, and pounded on solid rock to see if there could be some secret doorway through which she had been abducted. It seemed that his heart must stop for pure anguish. He knew such an agony of frustration as he had never known before.
Presently method developed in his searching. Whatever had happened, it must have been close to the tall archway with the large metal plate in its floor and the brilliant lights overhead. Sandy could not have been more than twenty feet from him when she was seized. When he heard her gasp, he was at this spot. Exactly this spot. He’d whirled, and she was gone. She could not have been farther than the door beyond the archway, or else the one facing it. He went into the most probable one. It was a perfectly commonplace storage-room. He’d seen hundreds of them. It was empty. He examined it with a desperate intentness. His hands shook. His whole body was taut. He moved jerkily.
Nothing. He crossed the corridor and examined the room opposite. There was a bit of dust in one corner. He bent stay and fingered it. Nothing. He came out, and there was the tall archway, brightly lighted. The other compartments had no light-tubes. Being for storage only, they would not need to be lighted except to be filled and emptied of whatever they should contain. But the archway was very brilliantly lighted.
He went into it, his hand-weapon shaking with the tensi
on in him. There was the metal plate on the floor. It was huge—yards in extent. He began a circuit of the walls. Halfway around, he realized that the walls were masonry. Not native rock, like every other place in the fortress. This wall had been made! He stared about. On the opposite wall there was a small thing with a handle on it, to be moved up or down. It was a round metal disk with a handle, set in in masonry.
He flung himself across the room to examine it. He was filled with terror for Sandy, which would turn into more-than-murderous fury if he found her harmed. The metal floor-plate lay between. He stepped obliviously on the plate…
The universe dissolved around him. The brightly lit masonry wall became vague and misty. Simultaneously quite other things appeared mistily, then solidified.
He was abruptly in the open air, with a collapsed and ruined structure about and behind him. This was not emptiness, but the surface of a world. Over his head there was a sunset sky. Before him there was grass, and beyond that a horizon, and to his left there was collapsed stonework and far off ahead there was a hill which he knew was not a natural hill at all. There was a moon in the sky, a half-moon with markings that he remembered. There were trees, too, and they were trees with long, ribbony leaves such as never grew on Earth.
He stood frozen for long instants, and a second, smaller moon came up rapidly over the horizon and traveled swiftly across the sky. It was jagged and irregular in shape.
Then flutings came from somewhere to his rear. They were utterly familiar sounds. They had distinctive pitch, which varied from one to another, and they were of different durations like half-notes and quarter-notes in music. And they had a plaintive quality which could have been termed elfin.
All this was so completely known to him that it should have been shocking, but he was in such an agony of fear for Sandy that he could not react to it. His terror for her was breath-stopping. He held his weapon ready in his hand. He tried to call her name, but he could not speak.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 87