SUPER-SHIP IN ACTION
Doctor Frederick Rodebush sat at the control panel of Triplanetary's
newly reconstructed super-ship; one finger poised over a small black
button. Facing the unknown though the physicist was, yet he grinned
whimsically at his friend.
"Something, whatever it is, is about to occur. The _Boise_ is about to
take off. Ready, Cleve?"
"Shoot!" laconically. Cleveland also was constitutionally unable to
voice his deeper sentiments in time of stress.
Rodebush drove his finger down, and instantly over both men there came a
sensation akin to a tremendously intensified vertigo; but a vertigo as
far beyond the space-sickness of weightlessness as that horrible
sensation is beyond mere Earthly dizziness. The pilot reached weakly
toward the board, but his leaden hands refused utterly to obey the
dictates of his reeling mind. His brain was a writhing, convulsive mass
of torment indescribable; expanding, exploding, swelling out with an
unendurable pressure against its confining skull. Fiery spirals, laced
with streaming, darting lances of black and green, flamed inside his
bursting eyeballs. The Universe spun and whirled in mad gyrations about
him as he reeled drunkenly to his feet, staggering and sprawling. He
fell. He realized that he was falling, yet he could not fall! Thrashing
wildly, grotesquely in agony, he struggled madly and blindly across the
room, directly toward the thick steel wall. The tip of one hair of his
unruly thatch touched the wall, and the slim length of that single hair
did not even bend as its slight strength brought to an instant halt the
hundred-and-eighty-odd pounds of mass--mass now entirely without
inertia--that was his body.
But finally the sheer brain power of the man began to triumph over his
physical torture. By force of will he compelled his grasping hands to
seize a life-line, almost meaningless to his dazed intelligence; and
through that nightmare incarnate of hellish torture he fought his way
back to the control board. Hooking one leg around a standard, he made a
seemingly enormous effort and depressed a red button; then fell flat
upon the floor, weakly but in a wave of relief and thankfulness, as his
racked body felt again the wonted phenomena of weight and of inertia.
White, trembling, frankly and openly sick, the two men stared at each
other in half-amazed joy.
"It worked," Cleveland smiled wanly as he recovered sufficiently to
speak, then leaped to his feet. "Snap it up, Fred! We must be falling
fast--we'll be wrecked when we hit!"
"We're not falling anywhere." Rodebush, foreboding in his eyes, walked
over to the main observation plate and scanned the heavens. "However,
it's not as bad as I was afraid it might be. I can still recognize a few
of the constellations, even though they are all pretty badly distorted.
That means that we can't be more than a couple of light-years or so away
from the Solar System. Of course, since we had so little thrust on,
practically all of our energy and time was taken up in getting out of
the atmosphere. Even at that, though, it's a good thing that space isn't
a perfect vacuum, or we would have been clear out of the Universe by
this time."
"Huh? What are you talking about? Impossible! Where are we, anyway? Then
we must be making mil.... Oh, I see!" Cleveland exclaimed, somewhat
incoherently, as he also stared into the plate.
"Right. We aren't traveling at all--_now_." Rodebush replied. "We are
perfectly stationary relative to Tellus, since we made that hop without
inertia. We must have attained one hundred percent neutralization--one
hundred point oh oh oh oh oh--which we didn't quite expect. Therefore we
must have stopped instantaneously when our inertia was restored.
Incidentally, that original, pre-inertialess velocity 'intrinsic'
velocity, suppose we could call it?--is going to introduce plenty of
complications, but we don't have to worry about them right now. Also, it
isn't _where_ we are that is worrying me--we can get fixes on enough
recognizable stars to find that out in short order--it's _when_."
"That's right, too. Say we're two light years away from home. You think
maybe that we're two years older now than we were ten minutes ago?
Interesting no end--and distinctly possible. Maybe even probable--I
wouldn't know--there's been a lot of discussion on that theory, and as
far as I know we're the first ones who ever had a chance to prove or
disprove it absolutely. Let's snap back to Tellus and find out, right
now."
"We'll do that, after a little more experimenting. You see, I had no
intention of giving us such a long push. I was going to throw the
switches in and out, but you know what happened. However, there's one
good thing about it--it's worth two years of anybody's life to settle
that relativity-time thing definitely, one way or the other."
"I'll say it is. But say, we've got a lot of power on our ultra-wave;
enough to reach Tellus, I think. Let's locate the sun and get in touch
with Samms."
"Let's work on these controls a little first, so we'll have something to
report. Out here's a fine place to try the ship out--nothing in the
way."
"All right with me. But I _would_ like to find out whether I'm two years
older than I think I am, or not!"
Then for four hours they put the great super-ship through her paces,
just as test-pilots check up on every detail of performance of an
airplane of new and radical design. They found that the horrible vertigo
could be endured, perhaps in time even conquered as space-sickness could
be conquered, by a strong will in a sound body; and that their new
conveyance had possibilities of which even Rodebush had never dreamed.
Finally, their most pressing questions answered, they turned their most
powerful ultra-beam communicator toward the yellowish star which they
knew to be Old Sol.
"Samms ... Samms." Cleveland spoke slowly and distinctly. "Rodebush and
Cleveland reporting from the 'Space-Eating Wampus', now directly in line
with Beta Ursae Minoris from the sun, distance about two point two light
years. It will take six bands of tubes on your tightest beam, LSV3, to
reach us. Barring a touch of an unusually severe type of space-sickness,
everything worked beautifully; even better than either of us dared to
believe. There's something we want to know right away--have we been gone
four hours and some odd minutes, or better than two years?"
He turned to Rodebush and went on:
"Nobody knows how fast this ultra-wave travels, but if it goes as fast
as we did coming out it's no creeper. I'll give him about thirty
minutes, then shoot in another...."
But, interrupting Cleveland's remark, the care-ravaged face of Virgil
Samms appeared sharp and clear upon the plate and his voice snapped
curtly from the speaker.
"Thank God you're alive, and twice that that the ship works!" he
exclaimed. "You've been gone four hours, eleven minutes, and forty one
seconds, but never mind about abstract theorizing. Get back here, to
Pittsburgh, as fast as you can drive. That Nevian vessel or another one
like her is mopping up the city, and has destroyed half the Fleet
already!"
"We'll be back there in nine minutes!" Rodebush snapped into the
transmitter. "Two to get from here to atmosphere, four from Atmosphere
down to the Hill, and three to cool off. Notify the full four-shift
crew--everybody we've picked out. Don't need anybody else. Ship,
equipment, and armament are _ready_!"
"Two minutes to atmosphere? Think you can do it?" Cleveland asked, as
Rodebush flipped off the power and leaped to the control panel. "You
might, though, at that."
"We could do it in less than that if we had to. We used scarcely any
power at all coming out, and I'm going to use quite a lot going back,"
the physicist explained rapidly, as he set the dials which would
determine their flashing course.
The master switches were thrown and the pangs of inertialessness again
assailed them--but weaker far this time than ever before--and upon their
lookout plates they beheld a spectacle never before seen by eye of man.
For the ultra-beam, with its heterodyned vision, is not distorted by any
velocity yet attained, as are the ether-borne rays of light. Converted
into light only at the plate, it showed their progress as truly as
though they had been traveling at a pace to be expressed in the ordinary
terms of miles per hour. The yellow star that was the sun detached
itself from the firmament and leaped toward them, swelling visibly,
momently, into a blinding monster of incandescence. And toward them also
flung the Earth, enlarging with such indescribable rapidity that
Cleveland protested involuntarily, in spite of his knowledge of the
peculiar mechanics of the vessel in which they were.
"Hold it, Fred, hold it! Way 'nuff!" he exclaimed.
"I'm using only a few thousand kilograms of thrust, and I'll cut that as
soon as we touch atmosphere, long before she can even begin to heat,"
Rodebush explained. "Looks bad, but we'll stop without a jar."
"What would you call this kind of flight, Fritz?" Cleveland asked.
"What's the opposite of 'inert'?"
"Damned if I know. Isn't any, I guess. Light? No ... how would 'free'
be?"
"Not bad. 'Free' and 'Inert' maneuvering, eh? O.K."
Flying "free", then, the super-ship came from her practically infinite
velocity to an almost instantaneous halt in the outermost, most tenuous
layer of the Earth's atmosphere. Her halt was but momentary. Inertia
restored, she dropped at a sharp angle downward. More than dropped; she
was forced downward by one full battery of projectors; projectors driven
by iron-powered generators. Soon they were over the Hill, whose violet
screens went down at a word.
Flaming a dazzling white from the friction of the atmosphere through
which she had torn her way, the _Boise_ slowed abruptly as she neared
the ground, plunging toward the surface of the small but deep artificial
lake below the Hill's steel apron. Into the cold waters the space-ship
dove, and even before they could close over her, furious geysers of
steam and boiling water erupted as the stubborn alloy gave up its heat
to the cooling liquid. Endlessly the three necessary minutes dragged
their slow way into time, but finally the water ceased boiling and
Rodebush tore the ship from the lake and hurled her into the gaping
doorway of her dock. The massive doors of the airlocks opened, and while
the full crew of picked men hurried aboard with their personal
equipment, Samms talked earnestly to the two scientists in the control
room.
"... and about half the fleet is still in the air. They aren't
attacking; they are just trying to keep her from doing much more damage
until you can get there. How about your take-off? We can't launch you
again--the tracks are gone--but you handled her easily enough coming
in?"
"That was all my fault," Rodebush admitted. "I had no idea that the
fields would extend beyond the hull. We'll take her out on the
projectors this time, though, the same as we brought her in--she handles
like a bicycle. The projector blast tears things up a little, but
nothing serious. Have you got that Pittsburgh beam for me yet? We're
about ready to go."
"Here it is, Doctor Rodebush," came Norma's voice, and upon the screen
there flashed into being the view of the events transpiring above that
doomed city. "The dock is empty and sealed against your blast."
"Goodbye, and power to your tubes!" came Samms' ringing voice.
As the words were being spoken mighty blasts of power raved from the
driving projectors, and the immense mass of the super-ship shot out
through the portals and upward into the stratosphere. Through the
tenuous atmosphere the huge globe rushed with ever-mounting speed, and
while the hope of Triplanetary drove eastward Rodebush studied the
ever-changing scene of battle upon his plate and issued detailed
instructions to the highly trained specialists manning every offensive
and defensive weapon.
But the Nevians did not wait to join battle until the newcomers arrived.
Their detectors were sensitive--operative over untold thousands of
miles--and the ultra-screen of the Hill had already been noted by the
invaders as the Earth's only possible source of trouble. Thus the
departure of the _Boise_ had not gone unnoticed, and the fact that not
even with his most penetrant rays could he see into her interior had
already given the Nevian commander some slight concern. Therefore as
soon as it was determined that the great globe was being directed toward
Pittsburgh the fish-shaped cruiser of the void went into action.
High in the stratosphere, speeding eastward, the immense mass of the
_Boise_ slowed abruptly, although no projector had slackened its effort.
Cleveland, eyes upon interferometer grating and spectrophotometer
charts, fingers flying over calculator keys, grinned as he turned toward
Rodebush.
"Just as you thought, Skipper; an ultra-band pusher. C4V63L29. Shall I
give him a little pull?"
"Not yet; let's feel him out a little before we force a close-up. We've
got plenty of mass. See what he does when I put full push on the
projectors."
As the full power of the Tellurian vessel was applied the Nevian was
forced backward, away from the threatened city, against the full drive
of her every projector. Soon, however, the advance was again checked,
and both scientists read the reason upon their plates. The enemy had put
down reenforcing rods of tremendous power. Three compression members
spread out fanwise behind her, bracing her against a low mountainside,
while one huge tractor beam was thrust directly downward, holding in an
unbreakable grip a cylinder of earth extending deep down into bedrock.
"Two can play at that game!" and Rodebush drove down similar beams, and
forward-reaching tractors as well. "Strap yourselves in solid,
everybody!" he sounded in general warning. "Something is going to give
way somewhere soon, and when it does we'll get a jolt!"
And the promised jolt did indeed come soon. Prodigiously massive and
powerful as the Nevian was, the _Boise_ was even more massive and more
powerful; and as the already enormous energy feeding the tractors,
pushers, and projectors was raised to its inconceivable maximum, the
vessel of the enemy was hurled upward, backward; and that of Earth shot
ahead with a bounding leap that threatened to strain even her mighty
members. The Nevian anchor rods had not broken; they had simply pulled
up the vast cylinders of solid rock that had formed their anchorages.
"Grab him now!" Rodebush yelled, and even while an avalanche of falling
rock was burying the countryside Cleveland snapped a tractor ray upon
the flying fish and pulled tentatively.
Nor did the Nevian now seem averse to coming to grips. The two warring
super-dreadnoughts darted toward each other, and from the invader there
flooded out the dread crimson opacity which had theretofore meant the
doom of all things Solarian. Flooded out and engulfed the immense globe
of humanity's hope in its spreading cloud of redly impenetrable murk.
But not for long. Triplanetary's super-ship boasted no ordinary
Terrestrial defense, but was sheathed in screen after screen of
ultra-vibrations: imponderable walls, it is true, but barriers
impenetrable to any unfriendly wave. To the outer screen the red veil of
the Nevians clung tenaciously, licking greedily at every square inch of
the shielding sphere of force, but unable to find an opening through
which to feed upon the steel of the _Boise's_ armor.
"Get back--'way back! Go back and help Pittsburgh!" Rodebush drove an
ultra communicator beam through the murk to the instruments of the
Terrestrial admiral; for the surviving warships of the fleet--its most
powerful units--were hurling themselves forward, to plunge into that red
destruction. "None of you will last a second in this red field. And
watch out for a violet field pretty soon--it'll be worse than this. We
can handle them alone, I think; but if we can't, there's nothing in the
System that can help us!"
And now the hitherto passive screen of the super-ship became active. At
first invisible, it began to glow in fierce violet light, and as the
glow brightened to unbearable intensity the entire spherical shield
began to increase in size. Driven outward from the super-ship as a
center, its advancing surface of seething energy consumed the crimson
murk as a billow of blast-furnace heat consumes the cloud of snowflakes
in the air above its cupola. Nor was the red death-mist all that was
consumed. Between that ravening surface and the armor skin of the
_Boise_ there was nothing. No debris, no atmosphere, no vapor, no single
atom of material substance--the first time in Terrestrial experience
that an absolute vacuum had ever been attained!
Stubbornly contesting every foot of way lost, the Nevian fog retreated
before the violet sphere of nothingness. Back and back it fell,
disappearing altogether from all space as the violet tide engulfed the
enemy vessel; but the flying fish did not disappear. Her triple screens
flashed into furiously incandescent splendor and she entered unscathed
that vacuous sphere, which collapsed instantly into an enormously
elongated ellipsoid, at each focus a madly warring ship of space.
Then in that tube of vacuum was waged a spectacular duel of
ultra-weapons--weapons impotent in air, but deadly in empty space.
Beams, rays, and rods of Titanic power smote crackingly against
ultra-screens equally capable. Time after time each contestant ran the
gamut of the spectrum with his every available ultra-force, only to find
all channels closed. For minutes the terrible struggle went on, then:
"Cooper, Adlington, Spencer, Dutton!" Rodebush called into his
transmitter. "Ready? Can't touch him on the ultra, so I'm going onto the
macro-bands. Give him everything you have as soon as I collapse the
violet. Go!"
At the word the violet barrier went down, and with a crash as of a
disrupting Universe the atmosphere rushed into the void. And through the
hurricane there shot out the deadliest material weapons of Triplanetary.
Torpedoes--non-ferrous, ultra-screened, beam-dirigible torpedoes charged
with the most effective forms of material destruction known to man.
Cooper hurled his canisters of penetrating gas, Adlington his
allotropic-iron atomic bombs, Spencer his indestructible armor-piercing
projectiles, and Dutton his shatterable flasks of the quintessence of
corrosion--a sticky, tacky liquid of such dire potency that only one
rare Solarian element could contain it. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred
were thrown as fast as the automatic machinery could launch them; and
the Nevians found them adversaries not to be despised. Size for size,
their screens were quite as capable as those of the _Boise_. The
Nevians' destructive rays glanced harmlessly from their shields, and the
Nevians' elaborate screens, neutralized at impact by those of the
torpedoes, were impotent to impede their progress. Each projectile must
needs be caught and crushed individually by beams of the most prodigious
power; and while one was being annihilated dozens more were rushing to
the attack. Then while the twisting, dodging invader was busiest with
the tiny but relentless destroyers, Rodebush launched his heaviest
weapon.
The macro-beams! Prodigious streamers of bluish-green flame which tore
savagely through course after course of Nevian screen! Malevolent fangs,
driven with such power and velocity that they were biting into the very
walls of the enemy vessel before the amphibians knew that their
defensive shells of force had been punctured! And the emergency screens
of the invaders were equally futile. Course after course was sent out,
only to flare viciously through the spectrum and to go black.
Outfought at every turn, the now frantically dodging Nevian leaped away
in headlong flight, only to be brought to a staggering, crashing halt as
Cleveland nailed her with a tractor beam. But the Tellurians were to
learn that the Nevians held in reserve a means of retreat. The tractor
snapped--sheared off squarely by a sizzling plane of force--and the
fish-shaped cruiser faded from Cleveland's sight, just as the _Boise_
had disappeared from the communicator plates of Radio Center, back in
the Hill, when she was launched. But though the plates in the control
room could not hold the Nevian, she did not vanish beyond the ken of
Randolph, now Communications Officer in the super-ship. For, warned and
humiliated by his losing one speeding vessel from his plates in Radio
Center, he was now ready for any emergency. Therefore as the Nevian fled
Randolph's spy-ray held her, automatically behind it as there was the
full output of twelve special banks of iron-driven power tubes; and thus
it was that the vengeful Earthmen flashed immediately along the Nevians'
line of flight. Inertialess now, pausing briefly from time to time to
enable the crew to accustom themselves to the new sensations,
Triplanetary's super-ship pursued the invader; hurtling through the void
with a velocity unthinkable.
"He was easier to take than I thought he would be," Cleveland grunted,
staring into the plate.
"I thought he had more stuff, too," Rodebush assented, "but I guess
Costigan got almost everything they had. If so, with all our own stuff
and most of theirs besides, we should be able to take them. Conway's
data indicated that they have only partial neutralization of inertia--if
it's one hundred percent we'll never catch them--but it isn't--there
they are!"
"And this time I'm going to hold her or burn out all our generators
trying," Cleveland declared, grimly. "Are you fellows down there able to
handle yourselves yet? Fine! Start throwing out your cans!"
Space-hardened veterans, all, the other Tellurian officers had fought
off the horrible nausea of inertialessness, just as Rodebush and
Cleveland had done. Again the ravening green macro-beams tore at the
flying cruiser, again the mighty frames of the two space-ships shuddered
sickeningly as Cleveland clamped on his tractor rod, again the highly
dirigible torpedoes dashed out with their freights of death and
destruction. And again the Nevian shear-plane of force slashed at the
_Boise's_ tractor beam; but this time the mighty puller did not give
way. Sparkling and spitting high-tension sparks, the plane bit deeply
into the stubborn rod of energy. Brighter, thicker, and longer grew the
discharges as the gnawing plane drew more and more power; but in direct
ratio to that power the rod grew larger, denser, and ever harder to cut.
More and more vivid became the pyrotechnic display, until suddenly the
entire tractor rod disappeared. At the same instant a blast of
intolerable flame erupted from the _Boise's_ flank and the whole
enormous fabric of her shook and quivered under the force of a terrific
detonation.
"Randolph! I don't see them! Are they attacking or running?" Rodebush
demanded. He was the first to realize what had happened.
"Running--fast!"
"Just as well, perhaps, but get their line. Adlington!"
"Here!"
"Good! Was afraid you were gone--that was one of your bombs, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Well launched, just inside the screens. Don't see how it could
have detonated unless something hot and hard struck it in the tube; it
would need about that much time to explode. Good thing it didn't go off
any sooner, or none of us would have been here. As it is, Area Six is
pretty well done in, but the bulkheads held the damage to Six. What
happened?"
"We don't know, exactly. Both generators on the tractor beam went out.
At first, I thought that was all, but my neutralizers are dead and I
don't know what else. When the G-4's went out the fusion must have
shorted the neutralizers. They would make a mess; it must have burned a
hole down into number six tube. Cleveland and I will come down, and
we'll all look around."
Donning space-suits, the scientists let themselves into the damaged
compartment through the emergency airlocks, and what a sight they saw!
Both outer and inner walls of alloy armor had been blown away by the
awful force of the explosion. Jagged plates hung awry; bent, twisted and
broken. The great torpedo tube, with all its intricate automatic
machinery, had been driven violently backward and lay piled in hideous
confusion against the backing bulkheads. Practically nothing remained
whole in the entire compartment.
"Nothing much we can do here," Rodebush said finally, through his
transmitter. "Let's go see what number four generator looks like."
That room, although not affected by the explosion from without, had been
quite as effectively wrecked from within. It was still stiflingly hot;
its air was still reeking with the stench of burning lubricant,
insulation, and metal; its floor was half covered by a semi-molten mass
of what had once been vital machinery. For with the burning out of the
generator bars the energy of the disintegrating allotropic iron had had
no outlet, and had built up until it had broken through its insulation
and in an irresistible flood of power had torn through all obstacles in
its path to neutralization.
"Hm ... m ... m. Should have had an automatic shut-off--one detail we
overlooked," Rodebush mused. "The electricians can rebuild this stuff
here, though--that hole in the hull is something else again."
"I'll say it's something else," the grizzled Chief Engineer agreed.
"She's lost all her spherical strength--anchoring a tractor with this
ship now would turn her inside out. Back to the nearest Triplanetary
shop for us, I would say."
"Come again, Chief!" Cleveland advised the engineer. "None of us would
live long enough to get there. We can't travel inertialess until the
repairs are made, so if they can't be made without very much traveling,
it's just too bad."
"I don't see how we could support our jacks ..." the engineer paused,
then went on: "If you can't give me Mars or Tellus, how about some
other planet? I don't care about atmosphere, or about anything but mass.
I can stiffen her up in three or four days if I can sit down on
something heavy enough to hold our jacks and presses; but if we have to
rig up space-cradles around the ship herself it'll take a long
time--months, probably. Haven't got a spare planet on hand, have you?"
"We might have, at that," Rodebush made surprising answer. "A couple of
seconds before we engaged we were heading toward a sun with at least two
planets. I was just getting ready to dodge them when we cut the
neutralizers, so they should be fairly close somewhere--yes, there's the
sun, right over there. Rather pale and small; but it's close,
comparatively speaking. We'll go back up into the control room and find
out about the planets."
The strange sun was found to have three large and easily located
children, and observation showed that the crippled space-ship could
reach the nearest of these in about five days. Power was therefore fed
to the driving projectors, and each scientist, electrician, and mechanic
bent to the task of repairing the ruined generators; rebuilding them to
handle any load which the converters could possibly put upon them. For
two days the _Boise_ drove on, then her acceleration was reversed, and
finally a landing was effected upon the forbidding, rocky soil of the
strange world.
It was larger than the Earth, and of a somewhat stronger gravitation.
Although its climate was bitterly cold, even in its short daytime, it
supported a luxuriant but outlandish vegetation. Its atmosphere, while
rich enough in oxygen and not really poisonous, was so rank with
indescribably fetid vapors as to be scarcely breatheable. But these
things bothered the engineers not at all. Paying no attention to
temperature or to scenery and without waiting for chemical analysis of
the air, the space-suited mechanics leaped to their tasks; and in only a
little more time than had been mentioned by the chief engineer the hull
and giant frame of the super-ship were as staunch as of yore.
"All right, Skipper!" came finally the welcome word. "You might try her
out with a fast hop around this world before you shove off in earnest."
Under the fierce blast of her projectors the vessel leaped ahead, and
time after time, as Rodebush hurled her mass upon tractor beam or
pressor, the engineers sought in vain for any sign of weakness. The
strange planet half girdled and the severest tests passed flawlessly,
Rodebush reached for his neutralizer switches. Reached and paused,
dumbfounded, for a brilliant purple light had sprung into being upon his
panel and a bell rang out insistently.
"What the hell!" Rodebush shot out an exploring beam along the detector
line and gasped. He stared, mouth open, then yelled:
"_Roger_ is here, rebuilding his planetoid! STATIONS ALL!"