Hendricks blinked, blanched briefly, and then smiled wanly. "I thought
so. Nothing to see, though. We do have a slow-action movie of the
debacle. Reminds me of something out of a superthriller, shot in
miniature. We had the sphere beam set up in duplex, one taking power
out of the star, supplying the other beam which was clutching about
five thousand miles of the star's core. The projectors were anchored to
the crust of Brimstone, here, and we started pulling. We pulled like
a dentist working on an impacted wisdom tooth. Unlike the dentist,
the tooth stayed. We broke several beams, each one doing a bit of
crust-cracking when the pressure let up. Then we took a big bite and
heaved for all we were worth. A slab of crust about seven miles square
heaved up, tilted like a poorly-trimmed raft in a heavy sea, and slid
sidewise into the semi-plastic inner core of Brimstone."
"I'll bet it was bad, huh?"
* * * * *
"We all got away. The planet heaved and gurgled for a week before it
settled down. But Brimstone is less strained than Terra and aside from
a few scattered quakes now and then, she's quiet. Made a mess of that
district, though. Horrible roaring, clouds of boiling steam, and all
the trimmings out of a 'Birth of Terra' animated moving picture."
"Try it with an anchor set in the planet's core?"
"Yeah, but that's too much like anchoring a towline in a cup of
custard. Too plastic. We might do it if stars weren't so confounded far
apart. Beams get awfully thin on that projection even if we could make
it, which I doubt."
"And if we could," said Billy, "we'd have to wait a few years while the
beams got to our stars. They propagate at the speed of light, you know."
"Wonder if we could drop a beam from close by, go into superdrive and
race for the other star, stretching--"
"What causes the traction?"
"The ... ah ... I see what you mean. It's the fact that the beam
itself is ponderable and unyielding. Superdrive or no, the beam would
propagate at speed of light and the superdriven ship would either
be held back or the beam would break because of the space between
excitation pulses. O.K., Billy, how do we jerk a hunk out of a star
core?"
"We can't do the Samson Trick," said Billy, "but--"
"Samson Trick?"
"Samson was supposed to have brought the temple down about his ears by
taking two of the main pillars and pulling one against the other. Well,
we can't pull one star core against another, but why can't we set up a
tripod, anchored in the stellar core, and then use that as a base for
hauling with another beam? And feed power for the gadget from other
stellar intake beams right from the star itself."
"In other words a sort of reflex Samson Trick? You make the star pull
itself apart, with the aid of mankind and a few thousand years of
technical development. I'll have the boys get to work."
"Did you get any compression?"
Hendricks shook his head.
"That was a vain hope. The stellar core is under hard compression
already. O.K., Jim. Oh, Hello, Cliff."
"Hi, Billy. So you sold them a bill of goods?"
"Unless we get results, Lane, it'll be a bill of goods. If we come
through, we're not bad off. Where's your sidekick?"
"Stellor? He'll be along directly. But look, Billy, what do you intend
to do with this dingcrank when you get it working? Tear the guts out of
the Sscantovian System?"
"Nope. Just insurance."
"We'll need it," grinned Lane. "You cut out a large hunk of selling
when you ask Linzete and his gang of rugged, predatory individualists
to form an alliance with the Loard-vogh."
"Trouble is that 'alliance' isn't the right word. I'm offering the
grand and glorious opportunity of becoming willing subjects to the
Loard-vogh."
"Huh. Never was a cat that took to being ordered around. Gosh, they're
worse than we are. We'll take orders if it will do us any good. But
Sscantovians? _Phoooo._"
"Well," said Billy, "when a lion tamer enters a cage full of cats he
gets results. But most of them are well equipped with a revolver, a
whip, and a four-legged stool. I'll walk in easily, tell the catmen to
be nice, and wave my whip. But the whip has got to be loaded. Linzete
wouldn't fall for a bluff. Cats don't. You've got to show 'em the
stuff, and then you get your answer. Well, we've a couple of other
things to try."
* * * * *
"We aren't licked yet," nodded Lane cheerfully. "But look, Billy, I'm
still befuddled by Downing's stinking slow, methodical way of doing
things. As I get it, Toralen Ki and Hotang Lu told us that we'd all be
increased in mental stature after the Transformation."
"Sure. We are."
"I don't notice anything."
Thompson grinned. "You won't. You never will. No Terran ever will.
We'll all go on just the same as we were, apparently. It is a Terran
characteristic that a personal change always seems to be an opposite
change in the rest. We'll all go on as we are and the rest of the
Galaxy will appear to get stupider. The change is and has been--and
will continue--to be gradual enough so that you will believe that
you've always been possessed of a near-perfect memory. But play chess
with your pals, and you find that you are still even because the other
guy can lay just as complicated traps as you can with your increased
ability to reason. But you see, it is like that old analogy. If the
entire Galaxy and everything in it were increased by one hundred
times, you would not be able to detect the change. That's because your
yardstick changes, too."
"Relativity, speaking," grinned Lane.
"Classification: Pune. Definition: Pun that needs an oxygen tent. Or
better, the perpetrator a half-hour immersion in liquid helium." He
looked around and saw Stellor Downing, leaning against the door with a
half-amused expression on his face. "Hello, Stellor."
"Howdedo. A nice job of selling you did on Vorgan."
"Yeah, and a nice pinch he put me in."
"Maybe you shouldn't have niggled him so far."
"I was a little rough on him," agreed Billy. "But I pushed him right to
the limit of my safety. I applied all the traffic will bear. I had to,
to show my boldness and to intrigue his fancy, since I knew that in all
their victorious twenty thousand years of conquest they had never hit a
race that stood up and told him off, face to face."
"You knew what you were doing, as usual," admitted Downing. "But I came
to tell you that Hendricks has the tripod beam and the associated junk
is set up and ready for the job of jerking the guts out of VanMaanen's
Star."
* * * * *
It was not too impressive on the surface. Brimstone was cold and
forbidding and airless, the only planet to the runaway star known as
VanMaanen's Star. A useless system save for experiments of this nature,
but excellently adapted for such.
The solar intake beams were operating efficiently. The torrents
of power they would drag out of the star and use to develop the
unthinkable pressures necessary to move the core of the star would
come into the acceptor tubes. Foot-thick superconductors connected the
intake beams to those to be used for the tearing process. And these
superconductors were maintained at the temperature of liquid helium by
a liquid-cooling system. Liquid helium needed no circulation, since its
heat-conducting properties were such that no local heating in a bath of
liquid helium is possible. Normal evaporation from the open bath at one
side kept the system cold, all the way through to the superconductors.
"Good thing they don't have to use switches or breakers, otherwise
I don't know how they'd handle the energy," said Lane. "A sort of
grid-controlled intake--swell stuff. Well, fellers, let's get in the
control room and see what gives."
Hendricks handed Billy a small chromium-plated case the size of a
cigarette pack.
"We're putting personnel snatchers on all of us. If this blows--in fact
if the whole planet blows, we all end up a couple of thousand miles in
space, all canned up in incompressible spheres. Safety first, I say."
"That's how you saved the gang in the earthquake experiment, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh," admitted Hendricks.
"Well, let's take off. We've got everything nailed down tight."
Hendricks advanced the power. The meters read up, and the anchoring
tractors moved slightly in their gimbals and became immobile. The
projectors forming the tripod of inflexible beams took up all the
remaining slack in the beam system. Not one piece of unprotected
matter was left to form a weak link. Beams of sheer energy, efficient
to within a fraction of a percent of the ideal one hundred percent,
linked the beams invisibly. A system of inflexible energy, driven and
maintained by the energy output of a star--driven to rip the core out
of the star itself.
The beams thickened as the automatic control advanced in timed
steps. Evaporation from the lake of liquid helium increased as the
superconductors warmed slightly from the terrible load.
A wrenching--_feeling_--came to them.
A meter indicated that one of the beams--the sphere beam clutching a
five thousand mile sphere of stellar center--indicated a movement of
point one seven four inches.
* * * * *
The automatic controller went up another stepless interval, and the
wrenched--_feeling_--increased.
Through the viewport, the small flaming disk of VanMaanen's Star blazed
at them. It looked as though it were quite ignorant of the cosmic
forces that were tearing at its vitals. There was an air of saucy
disregard in its placid, immobile brightness.
The pressure increased.
"At this point we jerked up a slab of Brimstone's hard crust," remarked
Hendricks.
But Brimstone was not in the link. Brimstone was not even present. The
inflexible tripod of energy would scorn to move with the planet. The
control room and the main development housing connected to the high
base of the projector network were depending upon the invisible tripod
of energy, deep in space. Brimstone was a large moon, a gibbous last
quarter, out through one side window.
The automatic control went higher. And as the pressure increased
between the limbs of the tripod, even so increased the power intake
from the star itself.
Did a star have within it enough energy to cause its own destruction?
They did not find out.
The _feeling_ of a wrenching increased, and then leaped into full
being. Nausea, sheer instantaneous torture, a pulsed wave of pain, a
shattering sensation of intolerable noise, a blinding light that came
though the eyes were closed.