_Battle in Space_
In the middle of the word the radio man's clear, precisely spaced
enunciation became a hideous drooling, a slobbering, meaningless
mumble. Martin stared into his plate in amazement. The Communications
Officer of Martin's ship, the _Washington_, had slumped down loosely
into his seat as though his every bone had turned to a rubber string.
His tongue lolled out limply between slack jaws, his eyes protruded,
his limbs jerked and twitched aimlessly.
Every man visible in the plate was similarly affected--the entire
Communications staff was in the same pitiable condition of utter
helplessness. But Ferdinand Stone did not stare. A haze of livid light
had appeared, gnawing viciously at his spherical protective screen, and
he sprang instantly to his instruments.
"I can't say that I expected this particular development, but I know
what they are doing and I am not surprised," Stone said, coolly.
"They have discovered the thought band and are broadcasting such an
interference on it that no human being not protected against it can
think intelligently. There, I have expanded our zone to cover the whole
ship. I hope that they don't find out for a few minutes that we are
immune, and I don't think they can, as I have so adjusted the screen
that it is now absorbing, instead of radiating.
"Tell the captain to put the ship into heaviest possible battle order,
everything full on, as soon as the men can handle themselves. Then I
want to make a few suggestions."
"What happened, anyway?" the Communications Officer, semi-conscious
now, was demanding. "Something hit me and tore my brain all apart--I
couldn't think, couldn't do a thing. My mind was all chewed up by
curly pinwheels...." Throughout the vast battleship of space men raved
briefly in delirium; but, the cause removed, recovery was rapid and
complete. Martin explained matters to the captain, that worthy issued
orders, and soon the flagship had in readiness all her weapons, both of
defense and of offense.
"Doctor Stone, who knows more about the automatons than does any other
human being, will tell us what to do next," the Flight Director said.
"The first thing to do is to locate them," Stone, now temporary
commander, stated crisply. "They have taken over at least one of our
vessels, probably one close to us, so as to be near the center of the
formation. Radio room, put out tracers on wave point oh oh two seven
one...." He went on to give exact and highly technical instructions as
to the tuning of the detectors.
"We have found them, sir," soon came the welcome report. "One ship, the
_Dresden_, coordinates 42-79-63."
"That makes it bad--very bad," Stone reflected, audibly. "We can't
expand the zone to release another ship from the control of the robots
without enveloping the _Dresden_ and exposing ourselves. Can't surprise
them--they're ready for anything. It's rather long range, too." The
vessels of the Fleet were a thousand miles apart, being in open order
for high-velocity flight in open space. "Torpedoes would be thrown off
by her meteorite deflectors. Only one thing to do, Captain--close in
and tear into her with everything you've got."
"But the men in her!" protested Martin.
"Dead long ago," snapped the expert. "Probably been animated corpses
for days. Take a look if you want to; won't do any harm now. Radio, put
us on as many of the _Dresden's_ television plates as you can--besides,
what's the crew of one ship compared to the hundreds of thousands of
men in the rest of the Fleet? We can't burn her out at one blast,
anyway. They've got real brains and the same armament we have, and will
certainly kill the crew at the first blast, if they haven't done it
already. Afraid it'll be a near thing, getting away from the sun, even
with eleven other ships to help us--"
* * * * *
He broke off as the beam operators succeeded in making connection
briefly with the plates of the _Dresden_. One glimpse, then the
visibeams were cut savagely, but that glimpse was enough. They saw that
their sister-ship was manned completely by automatons. In her every
compartment men, all too plainly dead, lay wherever they had chanced to
fall. The captain swore a startled oath, then bellowed orders; and the
flagship, driving projectors fiercely aflame, rushed to come to grips
with the _Dresden_.
"You intimated something about help," Martin suggested. "Can you
release some of the other ships from the automaton's yoke, after all?"
"Got to--or roast. This is bound to be a battle of attrition--we can't
crush her screens alone until her power is exhausted and we'll be in
the sun long before then. I see only one possible way out. We'll have
to build a neutralizing generator for every lifeboat this ship carries,
and send each one out to release one other ship in our Fleet from the
robot's grip. Eleven boats--that'll make twelve to concentrate on
her--about all that could attack at once, anyway. That way will take
so much time that it will certainly be touch-and-go, but it's the only
thing we can do, as far as I can see. Give me ten good radio men and
some mechanics, and we'll get at it."
While the technicians were coming on the run Stone issued final
instructions:
"Attack with every weapon you can possibly use. Try to break down the
_Dresden's_ meteorite shields, so that you can use our shells and
torpedoes. Burn every gram of fuel that your generators will take.
Don't try to save it. The more you burn the more they'll have to, and
the quicker we can take 'em. We can refuel you easily enough from the
other vessels if we get away."
Then, while Stone and his technical experts labored upon the generators
of the screens which were to protect eleven more of the gigantic
vessels against the thought-destroying radiations of the automatons,
and while the computers calculated, minute by minute, the exact
progress of the Fleet toward the blazing sun, the flagship _Washington_
drove in upon the rebellious _Dresden_, her main forward battery
furiously aflame. Drove in until the repellor-screens of the two
vessels locked and buckled. Then Captain Malcolm really opened up.
That grizzled four-striper had been at a loss--knowing little indeed
of the oscillatory nature of thought and still less of the abstruse
mathematics in which Ferdinand Stone took such delight--but here was
something that he understood thoroughly. He knew his ship, knew her
every weapon and her every whim, knew to the final volt and to the
ultimate ampere her Gargantuan capacity both to give it and to take it.
He could fight his ship--and how he fought her!
From every projector that could be brought to bear there flamed
out against the _Dresden_ beams of an energy and of a potency
indescribable, at whose scintillant areas of contact the defensive
screens of the robot-manned cruiser flared into terribly resplendent
brilliance. Every type of lethal vibratory force was hurled, upon every
usable destructive frequency.
* * * * *
Needle-rays and stabbingly penetrant stilettos of fire thrust and
thrust again. Sizzling, flashing planes cut and slashed. The heaviest
annihilating and disintegrating beams generable by man clawed and tore
in wild abandon.
And over all and through all the stupendously powerful blanketing
beams--so furiously driven that the coils and commutators of their
generators fairly smoked and that the refractory throats of their
projectors glared radiantly violet and began slowly, stubbornly to
volatilize--raved out in all their pyrotechnically incandescent might,
striving prodigiously to crush by their sheer power the shielding
screens of the vessel of the automatons.
Nor was the vibratory offensive alone. Every gun, primary or auxiliary,
that could be pointed at the _Dresden_ was vomiting smoke- and
flame-enshrouded steel as fast as automatic loaders could serve it, and
under that continuous, appallingly silent concussion the giant frame of
the flagship shuddered and trembled in every plate and member.
And from every launching-tube there were streaming the deadliest
missiles known to science; radio-dirigible torpedoes which, looping
in vast circles to attain the highest possible measure of momentum,
crashed against the _Dresden's_ meteorite deflectors in Herculean
efforts to break them down; and, in failing to do so, exploded and
filled all space with raging flame and with flying fragments of metal.
Captain Malcolm was burning his stores of fuel and munitions at an
appalling rate, careless alike of exhaustion of reserves and of
service-life of equipment. All his generators were running at a
shockingly ruinous overload, his every projector was being used so
mercilessly that not even their powerful refrigerators, radiating the
transported heat into the interplanetary cold from the dark side of the
ship, could keep their refractory linings in place for long.
And through raging beam, through blasting ray, through crushing force;
through storm of explosive and through rain of metal the _Dresden_
remained apparently unscathed. Her screens were radiating high into the
violet, but they showed no sign of weakening or of going down. Neither
did the meteorite deflectors break down. Everything held. Since she was
armed as capably as was the flagship and was being fought by inhumanly
intelligent monstrosities, she was invulnerable to any one ship of the
Fleet as long as her generators could be fed.
Nevertheless, Captain Malcolm was well content. He was making the
_Dresden_ burn plenty of irreplaceable fuel, and his generators and
projectors would last long enough. His ship, his men, and his weapons
could and would carry the load until the fresh attackers should take it
over; and carry it they did. Carried it while Stone and his over-driven
crew finished their complicated mechanisms and flew out into space
toward the eleven nearest battleships of the Fleet.
They carried it while the computers, grim-faced and scowling now,
jotted down from minute to minute the enormous and rapidly-increasing
figure representing their radial velocity. Carried it while Earth's
immense armada, manned by creatures incapable of even the simplest
coherent thought or purposeful notion, plunged sickeningly downward in
its madly hopeless fall, with scarcely a measurable trace of tangential
velocity, toward the unimaginable inferno of the sun.
* * * * *
Eventually, however, the shielded lifeboats approached their objectives
and expanded their screens to enclose them. Officers recovered,
air-locks opened, and the lifeboats, still radiating protection, were
taken inside. Explanations were made, orders were given, and one by one
the eleven vengeful superdreadnaughts shot away to join their flagship
in abating the Menace of the Machine.
No conceivable structure, however armed or powered, could long
withstand the fury of the combined assault of twelve such superb
battle craft, and under that awful concentration of force the screens
of the doomed ship radiated higher and higher into the ultra-violet,
went black, and failed. And, those mighty defenses down, the end was
practically instantaneous.
No unprotected metal can endure even momentarily the ardor of such
beams, and they played on, not only until every plate and girder of the
vessel and every nut, bolt, and rivet of its monstrous crew had been
blasted out of all semblance to what it had once been, but until every
fragment of metal had not only been liquefied, but had been completely
volatilized.
At the instant of cessation of the brain-scrambling activities of the
automatons the Communications Officer had begun an insistent broadcast.
Aboard all of the ships there were many who did not recover--who would
be helpless imbeciles during the short period of life left to them--but
soon an intelligent officer was at every control and each unit of the
Terrestrial Contingent was exerting its maximum thrust at a right
angle to its line of fall.
And now the burden was shifted from the fighting staff to the no less
able engineers and computers. To the engineers the task of keeping
their mighty engines in such tune as to maintain constantly the
peak acceleration of three Earth gravities; to the computers that
of so directing their ever-changing course as to win every possible
centimeter of precious tangential velocity.