XXI

The party descended to the ground floor and walked out to the ship. They

filed into the airlock, and in the power room they looked in amazement

at the tiny machines that ran the ship. The long black cylinder of the

main power unit for the molecular drive looked weak and futile compared

to the bulky machines that ran their own ships. The power storage coils,

with their fields of intense, dead blackness, interested the Physicist

immensely.

The ship was a constant source of wonder to them all. They investigated

the laboratory and then went up to the second floor. Morey and Fuller

greeted them at the door, and each of the four Earthmen took a group

around the ship, explaining as they went.

The library was a point of great interest, exceeded only by the control

room. Arcot found some difficulty in taking care of all his visitors;

there were only four chairs in the control room. The Three could sit

down, but Arcot needed the fourth chair to pilot the ship. The rest of

the party had to hold on as best they could, which was not too difficult

for men of such physical strength; they were accustomed to high

accelerations in their elevators.

Morey, Wade, and Fuller strapped themselves into the seats at the ray

projectors at the sides and stern.

Arcot wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ship's armament

first, and then the maneuverability. He picked a barren hillside for the

first demonstration. It was a great rocky cliff, high above the timber

line, towering almost vertically a thousand feet above them.

Wade triggered his molecular projector, and a pale beam reached out

toward the cliff. Instantly, the cliff leaped ten miles into the air,

whining and roaring as it shot up through the atmosphere. Then it

started to fall. Heated by its motion through the air, it struck the

mountaintop as a mass of red hot rock which shattered into fragments

with a terrific roar! The rocks rolled and bounced down the

mountainside, their path traced by a line of steam clouds.

Then, at Arcot's order, the heat beams were all turned on the mountain

at full power. In less than a minute, the peak began to melt, sending

streamers of lava down the sides. The beams began to eat out a crater in

the center, where the rock began to boil furiously under the terrific

energy of the heat beams.

Then Arcot shut off the heat beams and turned on the molecular ray.

The molecules of the molten rock were traveling at high velocities--the

heat was terrific. Arcot could see that the rock was boiling quite

freely. When the molecular beam hit it, every one of those fast moving

molecules shot upward together! With the roar of a meteor, it plunged

toward space at five miles a second!

It had dropped to absolute zero when the beam hit it, but at that speed

through the air, it didn't stay cold long! Arcot followed it up in the

_Ancient Mariner_. It was going too slowly for him. The air had slowed

it down and heated it up, so Arcot hit it with the molecular ray again,

converting the heat back into velocity.

By the time they reached free space, Arcot had maneuvered the lump of

rock into an orbit around the planet.

"Tharlano," he thought at the Astronomer, "your planet now has a new

satellite!"

"So I perceive!" replied Tharlano. "Now that we are in space, can we use

the instrument you told me of?"

Arcot established the ship in an orbit twenty thousand miles from the

planet and led them back to the observatory, where Morey had already

trained the telectroscope on the planet below. There wasn't much to see;

the amplification showed only the rushing ground moving by so fast that

the image blurred.

He turned it to Sator. It filled the screen as they increased the power,

but all they could see was billowing clouds. Another poor subject.

Morey showed Tharlano, the Astronomer, how to use the controls, and he

began to sweep the sky with the instrument, greatly pleased with its

resolving ability and tremendous magnification.

The Military Leader of the Three pointed out that the Satorians still

had a weapon that was reported deadly, and they were in imminent danger

unless Arcot's inventions were applied at once. All the way back to

Nansal, they spent the time discussing the problem in the _Ancient

Mariner_'s Library.

It was finally agreed that the necessary plans and blueprints were to be

given to the Nansalians, who could start production at once. The biggest

problem was in the supply of lux and relux, which, because of their vast

energy-content, required the atomic converters of the _Ancient Mariner_

to make them. The Earthmen agreed to supply the power and the necessary

materials to begin operations.

When the ship landed, a meeting of the manufacturers was called. Fuller

distributed prints of the microfilmed plans for the equipment that he

had packed in the library, and the factory engineers worked from them to

build the necessary equipment.

The days that followed were busy days for Earthmen and Nansalians alike.

The Nansalians were fearful of the consequences of the weapon that the

Satorians were rumored to have. The results of their investigations

through their agents had, so far, resulted only in the death of the

secret service men. All that was known was exactly what the Satorians

wanted them to know; the instrument was new, and it was deadly.

On the other hand, the Satorians were not entirely in the dark as to the

progress of Nansal, as Arcot and Morey discovered one day.

After months of work designing and tooling up the Nansalian factories,

making the tools to make the tools to make the war material needed, and

training the engineers of Nansal all over the planet to produce the

equipment needed, Arcot and Morey finally found time to take a few days

off.

Tharlano had begun a systematic search of the known nebulae, comparing

them with the photographs the Earthmen had given him, and looking for a

galaxy with two satellite star clouds of exactly the right size and

distance from the great spiral.

After months of work, he had finally picked one which filled the bill

exactly! He invited Arcot and Morey to the observatory to confirm his

findings.

The observatory was located on the barren peak of a great mountain more

than nine miles high. It was almost the perfect place for an

astronomical telescope. Here, well above the troposphere, the air was

thin and always clear. The solid rock of the mountain was far from

disturbing influences which might cause any vibration in the telescope.

The observatory was accessible only from a spaceship or air flyer, and,

at that altitude, had to be pressurized and sealed against the thin,

cold air outside. Within, the temperature was kept constant to a

fraction of a degree to keep thermal expansion from throwing the mirror

out of true.

Arcot and Morey, accompanied by Tharlano and Torlos, settled the

_Ancient Mariner_ to the landing field that had been blasted out of the

rock of the towering mountain. They went over to the observatory and

were at once admitted to the airlock.

The floor was of smoothed, solid rock, and in this, the great clock

which timed and moved the telescope was set.

The entire observatory was, of course, surrounded by a magnetic shield,

and it was necessary to make sure there were no enemy ships around

before using the telescope, because the magnetic field affected the

light rays passing through it.

The mirror for the huge reflecting telescope was nearly three hundred

inches in diameter, and was powerful enough to spot a spaceship leaving

Sator. Its military usefulness, however, was practically nil, since

painting the ships black made them totally invisible.

There were half a dozen assistants with Tharlano at the observatory at

all times, one of them in charge of the great file of plates that were

kept on hand. Every plate made was printed in triplicate, to prevent

their being destroyed in a raid. The original was kept at the

observatory, and copies were sent to two of the largest cities on

Nansal. It was from this file that Tharlano had gathered the data

necessary to show Arcot his own galaxy.

Tharlano was proudly explaining the telescope to Arcot, realizing that

the telectroscope was far better, but knowing that the Earthmen would

appreciate this triumph of mechanical perfection. Arcot and Morey were

both intensely interested in the discussion, while Torlos, slightly

bored by a subject he knew next to nothing about, was examining the rest

of the observatory.

Suddenly, he cried out in warning, and leaped a full thirty feet over

the rock floor to gather Arcot and Morey in his great arms. There was a

sharp, distinct snap of a pneumatic pistol, and the thud of a bullet.

Arcot and Morey each felt Torlos jerk!

Quick as a flash, Torlos pushed the two men behind the great tube of the

telescope. He leaped over it and across the room, and disappeared into

the supply room. There was the noise of a scuffle, another crack from a

pneumatic pistol, and the sudden crash and tinkle of broken glass.

Suddenly, the figure of a man described a wide arc as it flew out of the

supply room and landed with a heavy crash on the floor. Instantly,

Torlos leaped at him. There was a trickle of blood from his left

shoulder, but he gripped the man in his giant arms, pinning him to the

floor. The struggle was brief. Torlos simply squeezed the man's chest in

his arms. There was the faint creak of metal, and the man's chest began

to bend! In a moment, he was unconscious.

Torlos pulled a heavy leather belt off of the unconscious man and tied

his arms with it, wrapping it many times around the wrists, and was

picking the man up when Tharlano arrived, followed by Arcot and Morey.

Torlos smiled broadly.

"This is one Satorian spy that won't report. I could have finished him

when I got my hold on him, but I wanted to take him before the Council

for questioning. He'll be all right; I just dented his chest a little."

"We owe our lives to you again, Torlos," Arcot told him gravely. "But

you certainly risked your life; the bullet might well have penetrated

your heart instead of striking a rib, as it seems to have done."

"Rib? What is a rib?" The thought concept seemed totally unfamiliar to

Torlos.

Arcot looked at him oddly, then reached out and ran an exploratory hand

over Torlos' chest. It was smooth and solid!

"Morey!" Arcot exclaimed. "These men have no ribs! Their chest is as

solid as their skulls!"

"Then how do they breathe?" Morey asked.

"How do you breathe? I mean most of the time. You use your diaphragm and

your abdominal muscles. These people do, too!"

Morey grinned. "No wonder Torlos jumped in front of that bullet! He

didn't have as much to fear as we do--he had a built-in bullet proof

vest! You'd have to shoot him in the abdomen to reach any vital organ."