The Atom Hell of Grautier

by Perry Rhodan

  Over on the other side of the street, one of the remaining foundations broke apart with a loud noise. Bright sparks sprayed on all sides. Fellmer Lloyd leaped involuntarily for cover, letting go of Reginald Bell. Under pressure of the storm, Bell slid back up against the wall over which they had just lifted him.

  They had to go back. Rhodan felt his headache threatening to tear his skull apart. His left arm, which he had sprained, was tortured by hot waves of pain, driving sweat down his face. His lungs were getting no more air. When he opened his mouth like a choking man to pump air to his chest, a shooting pain stabbed near his heart, bringing him almost to the point of madness. He screamed, calling Fellmer Lloyd a fool because he had let go. But Lloyd did not hear because he was screaming without interruption himself. Even Atlan, the Arkonide, had long lost his composure, reacting to the sensation of fear gripping at his throat.

  They finally did it. The wall of flame had reached the outskirts of the town. Whatever plastic building material had withstood the storm till now melted into glowing pools or exploded with loud bangs. The Quad began to totter. With a final exertion of all their strength, they yanked Reginald Bell's body off the ground and pushed it through the open manhole of the small hatch into the interior of the vehicle. After that they hardly had enough energy left to climb through the hatch and press close together because the airlock was designed for two, at most three, men. They closed the seal.

  The hot air was pumped much too slowly out of the Quad and replaced with fresh, cool air from the reservoirs. When the green light lit up, Rhodan simply let himself fall to the side, striking the inner hatch door with his right shoulder. The hatch came open and Rhodan stumbled into the passenger room. With his last ounce of strength he grasped the armrest of the pilot's chair and pulled himself up into the seat.

  With mechanical hand movements he set the engines into operation.

  The vehicle obeyed readily. In seconds the glowing outlines of the building remains grew smaller and finally disappeared under the all-covering carpet of the atomfire. Like a machine, Rhodan regulated the Quad's course. Altitude: maximum. Speed: maximum. Direction: east.

  The course stabilizer operated at full power. The higher the vehicle climbed, the lower grew the velocity of the storm from the west. For that there was now a vertical element in the wind speed. The air masses climbed straight up from the hot expanse of the atomfire. Rhodan chose not to compensate for that factor completely. He compensated only enough to allow the Quad to be steered with full control. The remaining upwards driving force he used to raise the vehicle even faster than the engines could have managed on their own.

  After 10 minutes he knew they were safe—temporarily! The radiant expanse of the atomfire was left behind in the west. The Quad had reached an altitude of 15 kilometers and at that height the air temperature was still only a few degrees above the usual figure.

  The sun was no longer in view, in any event. The unleashed nuclear power had thrown masses of smoke and dust high enough into the sky that Grautier would be forever hidden from the sun—or at least for the next three or four days, when the planet would forever cease to exist.

  For the first time Rhodan took time to look around at his companions. Bell and Lloyd lay motionless on the floor. The shock of acceleration, which the vehicle's weak antigrav could only partially neutralize, had evidently thrown Lloyd down and his landing had been anything but gentle. The same seemed to have happened to Atlan the Arkonide but now he was getting up between two of the seats. Rhodan saw him smiling behind the smudged glassite faceplate of his helmet. It was a tired smile, one that hardly fit in with his sunken red-rimmed eyes.

  "Did we do it, barbarian?" the Arkonide asked in a low voice.

  Rhodan nodded. He wanted to say something in reply but his voice failed him. He had to swallow a few times and then his tortured lungs freed themselves in a minute-long attack of coughing. After that, his voice was back. It was painful to speak but the words came out understandably. "For now, Admiral, but you know we won't have succeeded until we get off this planet."

  Atlan pushed his way between the seats and sat down next to Rhodan in the copilot's chair. "I've been thinking about that Arkonide robot," he said. "It surely wasn't alone."

  "Certainly not," Rhodan agreed. He was too tired to be curious about where the Arkonide was leading.

  "The robots have no doubt come from one of the Arkonide ships in a spaceworthy auxiliary, right?"

  "No doubt. But we don't have any more time to go looking for their auxiliary, not to mention the fact they've probably left Grautier already."

  "Alright, but perhaps they're looking for us again... in a place still far away from the atomfire."

  Rhodan looked to the side at Atlan and managed a weak smile. "Well then, Admiral," he answered with emphasis, "we'll certainly want to consider their auxiliary craft in time to make use of it."

  Atlan nodded thoughtfully. When, somewhat later, he spoke again, his voice had a different tone. "To come back to our immediate problems," he said, business-like, "what are we going to do now?"

  "A lot of things," Rhodan replied. "First: find a halfway safe place where we can have some hours of rest."

  "I'd suggest an island," said Atlan.

  "I'm glad our thinking coincides on this matter as well," Rhodan responded with friendly sarcasm. "The atmosphere of Grautier is not involved in the atomfire. We can therefore assume as certain that the Arkon Bombs dropped here don't affect elements seven and eight, nitrogen and oxygen. One of the typical bomb settings is to No. 10. When all the elements whose number is greater than 10. begin to react, that's enough to destroy the solid core of a planet. The atmosphere is annihilated automatically along with it." He looked at Atlan, who seemed to assent.

  "That means," Atlan said, taking up Rhodan's thread, "that water, since it's made up of the elements hydrogen and oxygen, will not be drawn into the reaction at first."

  "At first," Rhodan repeated emphatically. "The atomfire won't quite come to a halt on a seashore. The heat at the edge of the firefield will be enough to vaporize the water and gradually expose the seabed. But the process will be braked. It will move through the ocean at a speed slower than on land by a factor of 10. However, there exists the danger that in the meantime the fire will eat its way underwater up to the island. Instead of being in safety, the islanders may be sitting on top of a potential plasma volcano."

  "Quite right," Atlan said. "But since we're forced to follow up even the slightest chance, we'll land on an island."

  "We'll undertake a few observations," Rhodan continued, "to see if the Arkonides are still there. If not, we'll send out an emergency signal and be picked up within a few hours."

  "And then?"

  The question hung heavily in the air for some time. In spite of his weariness, Rhodan had not failed to notice the odd undertone in Atlan's voice.

  "And then," he answered quietly, "we'll carry on with our preparations for the attack on Arkon." He added: "I'm not thinking of revenge. This is not a personal grudge match between me and the Robot Regent, it's a question of the Earth's existence. The only thing that's changed in the past hours is that we've lost a base and a lot of good men. What hasn't changed, on the other hand, is the necessity in bringing the Regent on Arkon to reason!"

  Atlan stared stiffly ahead. He answered only after some minutes had passed. "I believe you're right, barbarian. And I admire your tenacity!"

  • • •

  The Quad moved at a speed of 500 kilometers per hour. The engines did not allow for anything faster. It was designed for expeditions which had no choice of the terrain over which they had to move after the landing of a spaceship on an alien world. Its designers had not had any intention of building it in the shape of a racing vehicle, either.

  The four refugees, two of them still unconscious, needed just three hours to reach the east coast of the continent, about 1,400 kilometers from the base. A narrow peninsula stretching towards the south was separated from the
east coast by an arm of the sea 80 kilometers long. On the other side of the peninsula began the large central ocean, measuring nearly 7,000 kilometers in width. Hundreds of small and tiny islands were scattered throughout the ocean. Rhodan picked out one nearly in the middle of the central sea as most suitable.

  During the flight over the eastern portion of the continent they had come to realize the full scope of the catastrophe the Arkonide attack had unleased on Grautier. They had flown over the fire expanses of five different Arkon Bombs. The planet was in turmoil. At various places the atomfire had already eaten its way deep into the planetary interior, bursting out again in some other place with the united fury of 10,000 volcanos. Columns of glowing white plasma streamed into the sky out of their eruption sites, broadening out at the edge of the stratosphere into gigantic mushrooms. Seas of molten lava covered the surface of the planet where steamy green jungle had grown just the day before. The rivers had vanished. Winding walls of steam marked the paths they had formerly taken. The Quad's exterior mike picked up the unceasing, murderous explosions, cracklings, hissings and bubblings of the disaster, well underway to engulfing an entire planet within a few days.

  No sign of the pain, fear and panic suffered by the animals of this world in that hour reached the altitude at which the Quad moved. The imaginations of the men seeking to find safety high above the raging elements below was not enough to conceive of the misery spreading over Grautier.

  They reached the coast towards sundown. They knew that it was time for the sun to go down. They did not see it.

  Fellmer Lloyd came to, complaining of a headache, shortly after they flew over the peninsula. Rhodan sent him to the medicine chest. He could use some pills himself: his head felt no better than Fellmer Lloyd's and the pain in his left arm had grown so he could barely use his hand.

  After his body had overcome the worst effects of the nerve shock Reginald Bell came to an hour later. He did so in his usual dry, dramatic fashion. He sat up halfway, groaned and at length complained: "What kind of hospital is this where they leave the patients lying on the floor?"

  3/ STARSHIP TO THE RESCUE

  The propagation of hyper-electromagnetic alternating fields, as it is used for communications traffic without any loss of time through the immeasurable vastness of space, is a perfect example of how modern physics cannot be pictured by the human mind. Of course, hyper-electromagnetic vibrations can be mathematically depicted by formulas similar to those which describe the electromagnetic phenomena of classical electrodynamics. Yet, even here a number of unimaginable features are inherent, and hyper-electrodynamics, at least from the standpoint of an outside observer, has done nothing more than to elevate the unimaginable to a postulate and allow what little could still be pictured to disappear. The human power of imagination is not suited to forming a conception of a vector which can be divided into five axial components and periodically changes its size in 5th dimensional space. Beyond that, it requires a new physical theory to explain that in this 5th dimensional space, called hyperspace, the limits of relativity mechanics are no longer valid, and passing time must be measured with a new scale, which comes out to the fact that all events in hyperspace occur at an immeasurably faster rate than in normal or Einstein Space. This phenomenon is made use of in space travel in terms of 'hypertransitions' or 'hytrans' to as great an advantage as in hypercommunications technology.

  Nevertheless, hyper-electromagnetic waves, hyperwaves for short, have much in common with the electromagnetic ones—and not only insofar as representations in the form of formulas are concerned. As for those waves, there are materials which they can penetrate or be absorbed or reflected by. In addition, there is about as much energy inherent in the hyperwaves used for normal communications as in x-rays in the electromagnetic spectrum between 10 and 100 angstroms. This fact enables hyperwaves to produce effects already familiar to us from x-rays: hyperwaves can ionize and excite atoms.

  The highly developed hypercom tracking technique is based on this effect. Imagine a sphere consisting of a material which absorbs a high percentage of hyperwaves. The sphere is further imagined to be so thick that even the most energy-laden hyperwaves are unable to penetrate any farther than the sphere's center. Result: a hypercom tracking antenna. The sphere is divided into thousands of tiny, narrow sectors, cones then whose points are at the center of the sphere and whose bases lie on the surface. This gives the spherical antenna a faceted surface. To remain with the familiar picture, the narrow cones are nothing more than ionization chambers consisting of solid matter. The ionization created by an incoming hyperwave can be measured. The direction from which the wave comes can also be determined. Moreover, if the tracker has mastered the complicated mathematics of radiated output and the input received wave resistance of the vacuum and all the matter lying between the sender and the receiver, the distance between those two can be calculated, so that finally all the tracker needs to locate a sender is available: the two angle coordinates in Theta and Phi and the amount of the radius vector.

  However, the tracker still has problems. As with all measurements, the measurement of a sender contains an unavoidable amount of error originating in the resolving capability of the apparatus, called the 'uncertainty factor' by trackers. If the distance between the sender and tracker is r, then the uncertainty factor grows according to the tracker's rule of thumb at a rate of r1.6. This means if a tracker can pinpoint the position of a sender one light-year away to within 1000 kilometers plus or minus, then at a distance of 10 light-years the uncertainty grows to 40,000 kilometers, and at a distance of 100 kilometers, 1,600,000 kilometers. Since the volume of space that has to be searched through is proportional to the third power of the uncertainty (the uncertainty is regarded as the radius of the sphere within which the sender must be sought), the amount of time which the tracker must spend in order to really pinpoint the sender grows at the, average of r4.6. To clarify that in a quantitative example as well, it will be assumed that the tracker needs on the average one minute to actually find a sender located as being one light-year away. The distance of approach is not figured in, only the time required to search for the sender in the target area. Therefore the tracker receiving a signal from 10 light-years away would need 40,000 minutes, or about 28 days. It has also been assumed that only one signal was received and that the sender did not transmit again during the search in the target area.

  Naturally, these assertions are rather one-sided. They have for example too many assumptions, such as the one that holds the tracker would use the same equipment for a distance of 10 light-years as he would for one of one light-year, and not something better which would reduce the uncertainty and the search time, or something worse which would increase them. In practical calculations these things have a perceptible effect, of course. The important point is, however, that the tracker located farther away from a once-spotted sender must spend considerably more time to actually find it than the tracker standing closer to the sender at the moment of transmission.

  Such considerations as the foregoing are not only useful for allowing aspiring communications officers in the spaceflight academy to get used to hypercom technique, they could also—in a decisive moment—change the course of galactic history.

  • • •

  From above the island appeared on the infrared screen like an old pancake with turned-up edges. As the ship sank lower, it could be seen that the up-turned edge was a mountain chain of an average height of 2,000 meters encircling the island like a ring. It was the strangest island that any of the vehicle's four occupants had ever seen in their lives. But for the stay on Grautier during its final hours before its eventual destruction, it was well-suited. The encircling mountains would block off all the tidal waves crashing towards the island from the enraged ocean.

  As it sank toward the pancake island, the Quad seemed to be at the end of its strength. During the more than 10 hours of its flight it had used about 20 times more energy for course-stabilizing than for the engines t
hemselves, and the dials on Rhodan's control panel showed that under the present circumstances the energy supply was at most enough for a flight of another 50 kilometers.

  Apart from that, the four occupants of the vehicle felt more comfortable than the circumstances would seem to permit. A scanning taken two hours before had revealed that at least over that part of the planet within range of the instruments there were no more Arkonide ships. There were no Terran ships, either. The enemy had pulled back. He had seen what he had wrought with his bombs and evidently was convinced that Grautier was no longer a threat to him and never would be again.

  Fellmer Lloyd had emptied the medicine chest, finding something for everyone. For himself, Atlan and Perry Rhodan he found a pain-killing medication. For Reginald Bell he found a preparation that drove the rest of the nerve-shock out of his pain-filled limbs.

  They waited anxiously for the moment when they could send a distress call from a solid position on the island and then await the arrival of a Terran ship.

  Rhodan landed the Quad precisely in the center of the circular island. He sat quietly for a moment, letting his glance slide across the undisturbed brushland filling the island hollow outside, then looked at the device measuring the radioactivity outside the ship. The figure was close to 60 rem per hour. That was more than a reasonable man could expose himself to for even a few minutes.

  Sighing, Rhodan switched off the infrared lights. The vidscreen faded out. The small Quad cabin seemed to be entirely closed off from the dark outside world where an entire planet was dying.

  "We're staying here," Rhodan decided. "There's no point in sticking our noses outside."

  He gestured to Fellmer Lloyd, who picked up the small carrying case he had loyally carried over his shoulder until he and Atlan had found the Quad, and placed it in front of Rhodan by the control panel. Rhodan yanked the plastic closure back and stared thoughtfully for a few seconds. at the small control plate that came into view underneath.