"Go along with him," said William Wrightwood. "Aid him, and--"
Steve laughed bitterly; swapped ends, and flashed along the line toward
Sanaron.
He dropped down upon Wrightwood's hotel and dashed along the corridor.
He shouldered his way into the suite with a yell that brought servants
and hotel detectives running. It also brought William Wrightwood from
his bed, clad in a pair of pale blue silk pajamas.
Somehow it seemed appropriate to flee a holocaust in a pair of
passionate pajamas, and for the first time in years Steve saw a bit of
humor in his father's mien.
"Black Alarm," he said breathlessly. He shoved Wrightwood back into the
bedroom and shut the door on the incoming help.
"Can't save 'em all," said Steve, working his false-fear act for all it
was worth. "Slip out with me and we'll es--"
"Good boy, I knew you had what it took."
Wrightwood started to look for clothing.
"No time," snapped Steve. "_Lunalight_ blew up ten minutes spacedrive
out of Sanaron. The Guardians have the Black Alarm running, but the
magma will get here first. That's raving death from an exploding sun
for a billion people living on eight planets. Come on."
Wrightwood looked out of a window frantically. Everything seemed so
solid, so safe. Yet--
He turned and nodded at Steve.
* * * * *
With a sly grin Wrightwood could not see, Steve led the older man out
into the chill of night and relished the shiver as the cold bit in
through the silk pajamas and struck at the man. Then they were into the
Guardian craft and into space.
"Where--?"
Steve shrugged. "Want to see it?" he asked.
Horrified, Wrightwood nodded.
Eight minutes later they were approaching the scene. Spread out on a
shapeless form ten million miles across, tongues and streamers of raw
energy flared forward, flaying space before it as it came. At a hundred
and seventy thousand miles per second it came toward Sanaron, so near
to the velocity of light that the roaring particles of energy had
enormous mass.
No need for the great searchlights here, for the coverage of the
explosion was so great that there was no need to filter the blackness
away.
Instead, Guardians played before the oncoming death and fought it.
With a quiet disregard for death, Steve ran his little ship to within a
mile of the raving storm front and matched its velocity.
White-faced and awed, William Wrightwood watched the horror without
really knowing how close he was to death. It was too big to be
personal, that flaming front. He saw the circling ships fighting first
this tongue and then that, saw the planers fencing the streamers in,
holding them while coners sucked away the raving energies and spread
them too far apart to be tangible. He saw the swampers soar in to chill
a raving island of exploding space, and watched with heaving stomach
one of the Guardians get touched by a lance of flame--saw it go searing
into death to recreate an island of raw fire of itself.
Then the mad attack against the roaring furnace cleared; Wrightwood
began to see that there was a pattern to this.
Methodically the Guardians were isolating the forward-reaching tongues
of energy from the main mass; cutting them off, and swamping them. From
behind, as Steve circled the scene, planers and swampers were closing
in on the trailing flame, chopping it off bit by bit and chilling it
out of existence.
Sanaron was no longer a star lost in the stellar field. It was a
flaming disc that could be seen, but to look at it hurt the eyes. Steve
knew; Sanaron was not too far away.
He hurled his ship to the front again.
And then, as though it were a wave hitting a breakwater, the
coruscating front dashed against the massed warp-planes of a whole
squadron of Guardians, braced, planted, ready and waiting. The planes
buckled and the squadron was forced back but the raving front
flattened against the planes and was washed aside; turned back, spread
to curl around the edges like tongues of doom reaching for the prey
that lurked behind the wall. The squadron retreated, forming its shape
as it went, until firm pressor rays behind the out-flung planes felt
for and caught the core of Sanaron's outermost planet. With planetary
mass behind, the squadron held a parabolic shield in space, ploughing a
hole in the racing field of exploding energy.
* * * * *
Fire and flame enveloped the planet, passed around it, held from it by
the warp-planes of the Guardians. A ship crumpled and died; its place
was refilled by a spare. Another ship ran out of power abruptly and it
was replaced until it could drop into the planet and recharge.
Then, as abruptly as the passing of an ocean wave, the roaring furnace
in space was passed. The swampers and coners that fought the rear guard
of the flaming death appeared in the tortured sky, scurrying around to
wipe out the isolated trailers that the passage of the holocaust had
left behind.
Another squadron came out of the blackness, a group from a distant
sector that plunged past the planet and hit the flame from the rear.
Steve circled the field of horror again and Wrightwood, his face
pressed against the viewplate, watched the arrival of three more
squadrons that hit Sanaron, formed a plate-to-plate shield while
fighting for position, and established their protection for the next
planet with a matter of seconds to spare.
One streamer leaked through a crevasse in the hastily-made shield, and
the inside of the paraboloid was filled with swampers that fought the
flame right to the atmosphere of the planet before it died.
And as the sun itself came under attack, the bulk of the racing
squadrons came circling in from distant sectors. Men and sentient
beings coming prepared to fight a supernova, to stand in there while a
sun explodes, fighting space to hold a tenuous barrier in place to save
the fragments of humanity that lived on the eight planets of Sanaron.
But Sanaron the Sun had mass, and the flaming particles of the erupting
space had mass but were discrete.
There was a turning in the flame, a coalescence that centered, radially
inward, upon the sun that waited for it and attracted it. With stellar
mass behind, the flung planes of warped space held well, but the mass
of energy, as its volume was, and the gouts and streamers of raw
flaming space flattened against the plates and curled along them,
creeping around and around. And around and around.
"Hold 'em," cried Steve.