The engines were humming quietly now, singing the low song of power held
in leash.
But then they screamed like a buzz saw biting into an iron-hard stick of
white oak. Screamed in a single, frightful agony as they threw into the
protecting wall that enclosed the _Invincible_ all the power they could
develop.
The air of the ship was instantaneously charged with a hazy, bluish
glow, and the sharp, stinging odor of ozone filled the ship.
* * * * *
Outside, an enormous burst of blue-white flame splashed and spattered
around the _Invincible_. Living lightning played in solid, snapping
sheets around the vision port and ran in trickling blazing fire across
the plates.
Russ cried out and backed away, holding his arm before his eyes. It was
as if he had looked into a nova of energy exploding before his eyes.
In the instant the scream died and the splash of terrific fire had
vanished. Only a rapidly dying glow remained.
"What was it?" asked Russ dazedly. "What happened? Ten engines every one
of them capable of over five billion horsepower and every one of them
screaming!"
"Craven," said Greg grimly. "He let us have everything he had. He simply
drained his accumulator stacks and threw it all into our face. But he's
done now. That was his only shot. He'll have to build up power now and
that will take a while. But we couldn't have taken much more."
"Stalemate," said Russ. "We can't hurt him, he can't hurt us."
"Not by a damn sight," declared Greg. "I still have a trick or two in
mind."
He tried them. From the _Invincible_ a fifty-billion-horsepower bolt of
living light and fire sprang out as all ten engines thundered with an
insane voice that racked the ship.
Fireworks exploded in space when the bolt struck Craven's ship. Screen
after screen exploded in glittering, flaming sparks, but the ship rode
the lashing charge, finally halted the thrust of power. The beam glowed
faintly, died out.
Perspiration streamed down Greg's face as he bent over a calculator and
constructed the formula for a magnetic field. He sent out a field of
such unimaginable intensity that it would have drawn any beryl-steel
within a mile of it into a hard, compact mass. Even the _Invincible_, a
hundred miles away, lurched under the strain. But Craven's ship, after
the first wild jerk, did not move. A curious soft glow spread out from
the ship, veered sharply and disappeared in the magnetic field.
Greg swore softly. "He's cutting it down as fast as I try to build it
up," he explained, "and I can't move it any nearer."
From Craven's ship lashed out another thunderbolt and once again the
engines screamed in terrible unison as they poured power into the ship's
triple screen. The first screen stopped all material things. The second
stopped radiations by refracting them into the fourth dimension. The
third shield was akin to the anti-entropy field, which stopped all
matter ... and yet the ten engines bellowed like things insane as Craven
struck with flaming bolts, utilizing the power he had absorbed from the
fifty billion horsepower Greg had thrown at him.
There was anger in Greg Manning's face ... a terrible anger. His fists
knotted and he shook them at the gleaming ship that lay far down near
Jupiter.
"I've got one trick left," he shouted, almost as if he expected Craven
to hear. "Just one trick. Damn you, see if you can stop this one!"
He set up the pattern on the board and punched the activating lever. The
ten engines thrummed with power. Then the howling died away.
Four times they screamed and four times they ebbed into a gentle hum.
"Get on the navigation controls!" yelled Greg. "Be ready to give the
ship all you've got."
Greg leaped for the control chair, grasped the acceleration lever.
"Now," growled Greg, "look out, Craven, we're coming at you!"
Greg, teeth gritted, slammed the acceleration over.
Suddenly all space wrenched horribly with a nauseating, terrible thud
that seemed to strain at the very anchors of the Universe.
_CHAPTER EIGHTEEN_
Jupiter and the Jovian worlds leaped suddenly backward, turned swiftly
green, then blue, and faded in an instant into violet. The Sun spun
crazily through space, retreating, dimming to a tiny ruby-tinted star.
The giant generators in the _Invincible_ hummed louder now, continually
louder, a steel-throated roar that trembled through every plate, through
every girder, through every bit of metal in the ship.
The ship itself was plunging spaceward, streaking like a runaway star
for the depths of space beyond the Solar System. And behind it, caught
tight, gripped and held, Craven's ship trailed at the end of a tractor
field that bound it to the space-rocketing _Invincible_.
The acceleration compensator, functioning perfectly, had taken up the
slack as the ship had plunged from a standing start into a speed that
neared the pace of light. But it had never been built to stand such
sudden, intense acceleration, and for an instant Russ and Greg seemed
to be crushed by a mighty weight that struck at them. The sensation
swiftly lifted as the compensator took up the load.
* * * * *
Greg shook his head, flinging the trickling perspiration from his eyes.
"I hope their compensator worked as well as ours," he said.
"If it didn't," declared Russ, "we're towing a shipload of dead men."
Russ glanced at the speed dial. They were almost touching the speed of
light. "He hasn't cut down our speed yet."
"We threw him off his balance. His drive depends largely on the mass of
some planet as a body to take up the reaction of his ship. Jupiter is
the ideal body for that ... but he's leaving Jupiter behind. He has to
do something soon or it'll be too late."
"He's getting less energy, too," said Russ. "We're retreating from his
main sources of energy, the Sun and Jupiter. Almost the speed of light
and that would cut down his energy intake terrifically. He has to use
what he's got in his accumulators, and after that last blast at us, they
must be nearly drained."
As Russ watched, the speed needle fell off slightly. Russ held his
breath. It edged back slowly, creeping. The speed was being cut down.
"Craven is using whatever power he has," he said. "They're alive back
there, all right. He's trying to catch hold of Jupiter and make its
gravity work for him."
The _Invincible_ felt the strain of the other ship now. Felt it as
Craven poured power into his drive, fighting to get free of the
invisible hawser that had trapped him, fighting against being dragged
into outer space at the tail-end of a mighty craft heading spaceward
with frightening speed.
Girders groaned in the _Invincible_, the engines moaned and throbbed.
The speed needle fell back, creeping down the dial, slowly, unwillingly,
resisting any drop in speed. But Craven was cutting it down. And as he
cut it, he was able to absorb more energy with his collector lens. But
he was fighting two things ... momentum and the steadily decreasing
gravitational pull of Jupiter and the Sun. The Sun's pull was dwindling
slowly, Jupiter's rapidly.
The needle still crept downward.
"What's his point of equality to us?" demanded Greg. "Will we make it?"
Russ shook his head. "Won't know for hours. He'll be able to slow us
up ... maybe he'll even stop us or be able to jerk free, although I
doubt that. But every minute takes him farther away from his main source
of power, the Solar System's radiation. He could collect power anywhere
in space, you know, but the best place to collect it is near large
radiant bodies."
Russ continued to crouch over the dial, begrudging every backward
flicker of the needle.
This was the last play, the final hand. If they could drag Craven and
his ship away from the Solar System, maroon him deep in space, far
removed from any source of radiation, they would win, for they could go
back and finish the work of smashing Interplanetary.
But if Craven won--if he could halt their mad dash for space, if he
could shake free--they'd never have another chance. He would be studying
that field they had wrapped around him, be ready for it next time, might
even develop one like it and use it on the _Invincible_. If Craven could
win his way back to the Sun, he would be stronger than they were, could
top them in power, shatter all their plans, and once again the worlds
would bow to Interplanetary and Spencer Chambers.
Russ watched the meter. The speed was little more than ten miles a
second now and dropping rapidly. He sat motionless, hunched, sucking at
his dead pipe, listening to the thrumming of the generators.
* * * * *
"If we only had a margin," he groaned. "If we just had a few more
horsepower. Just a few. But we're wide open. Every engine is developing
everything it can!"
Greg tapped him on the shoulder, gently. Russ turned his head and looked
into the face of his friend, a face as bleak as ever, but with a hint of
smile in the corners of the eyes.
"Why not let Jupiter help us?" he asked. "He could be a lot of help."
Russ stared for a moment, uncomprehending. Then with a sob of gladness
he reached out a hand, shoved over a lever. Mirrors of anti-entropy
shifted, assumed different angles, and the _Invincible_ sheered off.
They were no longer retreating directly from the Sun, but at an angle
quartering off across the Solar System.
Greg grinned. "We're falling behind Jupiter now. Letting Jupiter run
away from us as he circles his orbit, following the Sun. Adds miles per
second to our velocity of retreat, even if it doesn't show on the dial."
The cosmic tug of war went on, grimly--two ships straining, fighting
each other, one seeking to escape, the other straining to snake the
second ship into the maw of open, hostile space.
The speed was down to five miles a second, then a fraction lower. The
needle was flickering now, impossible to decide whether it was dropping
or not. And in the engine rooms, ten great generators howled in their
attempt to make that needle move up the dial again.
Russ lit his pipe, his eyes not leaving the dial. The needle was
creeping lower again. Down to three miles a second now.
He puffed clouds of smoke and considered. Saturn fortunately was ninety
degrees around in his orbit. On the present course, only Neptune
remained between them and free space. Pluto was far away, but even if it
had been, it really wouldn't count, for it was small and had little
attraction.
In a short while Ganymede and Callisto would be moving around on the far
side of Jupiter and that might help. Everything counted so much now.
The dial was down to two miles a second and there it hung. Hung and
stayed. Russ watched it with narrowed eyes. By this time Craven
certainly would have given up much hope of help from Jupiter. If the big
planet couldn't have helped him before, it certainly couldn't now. In
another hour or two Earth would transit the Sun and that would cut down
the radiant energy to some degree. But in the meantime Craven was
loading his photo-cells and accumulators, was laying up a power reserve.
As a last desperate resort he would use that power, in a final attempt
to break away from the _Invincible_.
Russ waited for that attempt. There was nothing that could be done about
it. The engines were developing every watt of power that could be urged
out of them. If Craven had the power to break away, he would break
away ... that was all there would be to it.
An hour passed and the needle crept up a fraction of a point. Russ was
still watching the dial, his mind foggy with concentration.
* * * * *
Suddenly the _Invincible_ shuddered and seemed to totter in space, as if
something, some mighty force, had struck the ship a terrific blow. The
needle swung swiftly backward, reached one mile a second, dipped to half
a mile.
Russ sat bolt upright, holding his breath, his teeth clenched with death
grip upon the pipe-stem.
Craven had blasted with everything he had! He had used every last
trickle of power in the accumulators ... all the power he had been
storing up.
Russ leaped from the chair and raced to the periscopic mirror.
Stooping, he stared into it. Far back in space, like a silver bauble,
swung Craven's ship. It swung back and forth in space, like a mighty,
cosmic pendulum. Breathlessly he watched. The ship was still in the grip
of the space field!
"Greg," he shouted, "we've got him!"
He raced back to the control panel, snapped a glance at the speed dial.
The needle was rising rapidly now, a full mile a second. Within another
fifteen minutes, it had climbed to a mile and a half. The _Invincible_
was starting to go places!
The engines still howled, straining, shrieking, roaring their defiance.
In an hour the needle indicated the speed of four miles a second. Two
hours later it was ten and rising visibly as Jupiter fell far behind and
the Sun became little more than a glowing cinder.
Russ swung the controls to provide side acceleration and the two ships
swung far to the rear of Neptune. They would pass that massive planet at
the safe distance of a full hundred million miles.
"He won't even make a pass at it," said Greg. "He knows he's licked."
"Probably trying to store some more power," suggested Russ.
"Sweet chance he has to do that," declared Greg. "Look at that needle
walk, will you? We'll hit the speed of light in a few more hours and
after that he may just as well shut off his lens. There just won't be
any radiation for him to catch."
Craven didn't make a try at Neptune. The planet was far away when they
intersected its orbit ... furthermore, a wall of darkness had closed in
about the ships. They were going three times as fast as light and the
speed was still accelerating!
Hour after hour, day after day, the _Invincible_ and its trailing
captive sped doggedly outward into space. Out into the absolute wastes
of interstellar space, where the stars were flecks of light, like tiny
eyes watching from very far away.
* * * * *
Russ lounged in the control chair and stared out the vision plate. There
was nothing to see, nothing to do. There hadn't been anything to see or
do for days. The controls were locked at maximum and the engines still
hammered their roaring song of speed and power. Before them stretched an
empty gulf that probably never before had been traversed by any
intelligence, certainly not by man.
Out into the mystery of interstellar space. Only it didn't seem
mysterious. It was very commonplace and ordinary, almost monotonous.
Russ gripped his pipe and chuckled.
There had been a day when men had maintained one couldn't go faster than
light. Also, men had claimed that it would be impossible to force nature
to give up the secret of material energy. But here they were, speeding
along faster than light, their engines roaring with the power of
material energy.
They were plowing a new space road, staking out a new path across the
deserts of space, pioneering far beyond the 'last frontier.'
Greg's steps sounded across the room. "We've gone a long way, Russ.
Maybe we better begin to slow down a bit."
"Yes," agreed Russ. He leaned forward and grasped the controls. "We'll
slow down now," he said.
Sudden silence smote the ship. Their ears, accustomed for days to the
throaty roarings of the engines, rang with the torture of no sound.
Long minutes and then new sounds began to be heard ... the soft humming
of the single engine that provided power for the interior apparatus and
the maintenance of the outer screens.
"Soon as we slow down below the speed of light," said Greg, "we'll throw
the televisor on Craven's ship and learn what we can about his
apparatus. No use trying it now, for we couldn't use it, because we're
in the same space condition it uses in normal operation."
"In fact," laughed Russ, "we can't do much of anything except move.
Energies simply can't pass through this space we're in. We're marooned."
Greg sat down in a chair, gazed solemnly at Russ.
"Just what was our top speed?" he demanded.
Russ grinned. "Ten thousand times the speed of light," he said.