Bloodhounds of Space
Two days later Bill jumped from a landing heliocar, presented his
credentials as special correspondent, and was admitted to the Lakehurst
base of the Moon Patrol. Nine slender sunships lay at the side of the
wide, high-fenced field, just in front of their sheds. In the brilliant
morning sunlight they scintillated like nine huge octagonal ingots of
polished silver.
These war-fliers of the Moon Patrol were eight-sided, about twenty feet
in diameter and a hundred long. Built of steel and the new aluminum
bronzes, with broad vision panels of heavy vitrolite, each carried
sixteen huge positive ray tubes. These mammoth vacuum tubes, operated
at enormous voltages from vitalium batteries, were little different
in principle from the "canal ray" apparatus of some centuries before.
Their "positive rays," or streams of atoms which had lost one or more
electrons, served to drive the sunship by reaction--by the well-known
principle of the rocket motor.
And the sixteen tubes mounted in twin rings about each vessel served
equally well as weapons. When focused on a point, the impact-pressure
of their rays equaled that of the projectile from an ancient cannon.
Metal in the positive ray is heated to fusion, living matter carbonized
and burned away. And the positive charge carried by the ray is
sufficient to electrocute any living being in contact with it.
This Moon Patrol fleet of nine sunships was setting out in pursuit of
the Prince of Space, the interplanetary buccaneer who had abducted
Paula Trainor and her father, and the enigmatic Mr. Cain. Bill was
going aboard as special correspondent for the _Herald-Sun_.
On the night before the _Helicon_, the sunship which had been attacked
in space, had been docked at Miami by the rescue crew put aboard from
the _Avenger_. The world had been thrown into a frenzy by the report of
the men who had examined the two hundred dead on board.
"Blood sucked from _Helicon_ victims!" the loud speakers were croaking.
"Mystery of lost sunship upsets world! Medical examination of the two
hundred corpses found on the wrecked space flier show that the blood
had been drawn from the bodies, apparently through curious circular
wounds about the throat and trunk. Every victim bore scores of these
inexplicable scars. Medical men will not attempt to explain how the
wounds might have been made.
"In a more superstitious age, it might be feared that the Prince of
Space is not man at all, but a weird vampire out of the void. And, in
fact, it has been seriously suggested that, since the wounds observed
could have been made by no animal known on earth, the fiend may be a
different form of life, from another planet."
Bill found Captain Brand, leader of the expedition, just going on board
the slender, silver _Fury_, flagship of the fleet of nine war-fliers.
He had sailed before with this bluff, hard-fighting guardsman of the
space lanes; he was given a hearty welcome.
"Hunting down the Prince is a good-sized undertaking, from all
appearances," Bill observed.
"Rather," big, red-faced Captain Brand agreed. "We have been after him
seven or eight times in the past few years--but I think his ship has
never been seen. He must have captured a dozen commercial sunships."
"You know, I rather admire the Prince--" Bill said, "or did until that
_Helicon_ affair. But the way those passengers were treated is simply
unspeakable. Blood sucked out!"
"It is hard to believe that the Prince is responsible for that. He has
never needlessly murdered anyone before--for all the supplies and money
and millions worth of vitalium he has taken. And he has always left his
engraved card--except on the _Helicon_.
"But anyhow, we blow him to eternity on sight!"
The air-lock was open before them, and they walked through, and made
their way along the ladder (now horizontal, since the ship lay on her
side) to the bridge in the bow. Bill looked alertly around the odd
little room, with its vitrolite dome and glistening instruments, while
Captain Brand flashed signals to the rest of the fleet for sealing the
locks and tuning the motor ray generators.
A red rocket flared from the _Fury_. White lances of flame darted from
the down-turned vacuum tubes. As one, the nine ships lifted themselves
from the level field. Deliberately they upturned from horizontal to
vertical positions. Upward they flashed through the air, with slender
white rays of light shooting back from the eight rear tubes of each.
Bill, standing beneath the crystal dome, felt the turning of the
ship. He felt the pressure of his feet against the floor, caused by
acceleration, and sat down in a convenient padded chair. He watched
the earth become a great bowl, with sapphire sea on the one hand and
green-brown land and diminishing, smokeless city on the other. He
watched the hazy blue sky become deepest azure, then black, with a
million still stars bursting out in pure colors of yellow and red
and blue. He looked down again, and saw the earth become convex, an
enormous bright globe, mistily visible through haze or air and cloud.
Swiftly the globe drew away. And a tiny ball of silver, half black,
half rimmed with blinding flame, sharply marked with innumerable round
craters, swam into view beyond the misty edge of the globe--it was the
moon.
Beyond them flamed the sun--a ball of blinding light, winged with a
crimson sheet of fire--hurling quivering lances of white heat through
the vitrolite panels. Blinding it was to look upon it, unless one wore
heavily tinted goggles.
Before them hung the abysmal blackness of space, with the canopy
of cold hard stars blazing as tiny scintillant points of light, at
an infinite distance away. The Galaxy was a broad belt of silvery
radiance about them, set with ten thousand many-colored jewels of fire.
Somewhere in the vastness of that void they sought a daring man, who
laughed at society, and called himself the Prince of Space.
The nine ships spread out, a thousand miles apart. Flickering
heliographs--swinging mirrors that reflected the light of the sun--kept
them in communication with bluff Captain Brand, while many men at
telescopes scanned the black, star-studded sweep of space for the
pirate of the void.
Days went by, measured only by chronometer, for the winged, white sun
burned ceaselessly. The earth had shrunk to a little ball of luminous
green, bright on the sunward side, splotched with the dazzling white of
cloud patches and polar caps.
Sometimes the black vitalium wings were spread, to catch the energy of
the sun. The sunship draws its name from the fact that it is driven
by solar power. It utilizes the remarkable properties of the rare
radioactive metal, vitalium, which is believed to be the very basis
of life, since it was first discovered to exist in minute traces in
those complex substances so necessary to all life, the vitamins. Large
deposits were discovered at Kepler and elsewhere on the moon during the
twenty-first century. Under the sun's rays vitalium undergoes a change
to triatomic form, storing up the vast energy of sunlight. The vitalium
plates from the sunshine are built into batteries with alternate
sheets of copper, from which the solar energy may be drawn in the form
of electric current. As the battery discharges, the vitalium reverts
to its stabler allotropic form, and may be used again and again.
The Vitalium Power Company's plants in Arizona, Chili, Australia,
the Sahara, and the Gobi now furnish most of the earth's power. The
sunship, recharging its vitalium batteries in space, can cruise
indefinitely.
* * * * *
It was on the fifth day out from Lakehurst. The _Fury_, with her
sister ships spread out some thousands of miles to right and left, was
cruising at five thousand miles per hour, at heliocentric elevation
93.243546, ecliptic declination 7°, 18' 46" north, right ascension XIX
hours, 20 min., 31 sec. The earth was a little green globe beside her,
and the moon a thin silver crescent beyond.
"Object ahead!" called a lookout in the domed pilot-house of the
_Fury_, turning from his telescope to where Captain Brand and
Bill stood smoking, comfortably held to the floor by the ship's
acceleration. "In Scorpio, about five degrees above Antares. Distance
fifteen thousand miles. It seems to be round and blue."
"The Prince, at last!" Brand chuckled, an eager grin on his square
chinned face, light of battle flashing in his blue eyes.
He gave orders that set the heliographic mirrors flickering signals
for all nine of the Moon Patrol fliers to converge about the strange
object, in a great crescent. The black fins that carried the charging
vitalium plates were drawn in, and the full power of the motor ray
tubes thrown on, to drive ahead each slender silver flier at the limit
of her acceleration.
Four telescopes from the _Fury_ were turned upon the strange object.
Captain Brand and Bill took turns peering through one of them. When
Bill looked, he saw the infinite black gulf of space, silvered with
star-dust of distant nebulae. Hanging in the blackness was an azure
sphere, gleaming bright as a great globe cut from turquoise. Bill was
reminded of a similar blue globe he had seen--when he had stood at the
enormous telescope on Trainor's Tower, and watched a little blue circle
against the red deserts of Mars.
Brand took two or three observations, figured swiftly.
"It's moving," he said. "About fourteen thousand miles per hour. Funny!
It is moving directly toward the earth, almost from the direction of
the planet Mars. I wonder----" He seized the pencil, figured again.
"Queer. That thing seems headed for the earth, from a point on the
orbit of Mars, where that planet was about forty days ago. Do you
suppose the Martians are paying us a visit?"
"Then it's not the Prince of Space?"
"I don't know. Its direction might be just a coincidence. And the
Prince might be a Martian, for all I know. Anyhow, we're going to find
what that blue globe is!"
Two hours later the nine sunships were drawn up in the form of a
great half circle, closing swiftly on the blue globe, which had been
calculated to be about one hundred feet in diameter. The sunships were
nearly a thousand miles from the globe, and scattered along a curved
line two thousand miles in length. Captain Brand gave orders for eight
forward tubes on each flier to be made ready for use as weapons. From
his own ship he flashed a heliographic signal.
"The _Fury_, of the Moon Patrol, demands that you show ship's papers,
identification tags for all passengers, and submit to search for
contraband."
The message was three times repeated, but no reply came from the azure
globe. It continued on its course. The slender white sunships came
plunging swiftly toward it, until the crescent they formed was not two
hundred miles between the points, the blue globe not a hundred miles
from the war-fliers.
Then Bill, with his eye at a telescope, saw a little spark of purple
light appear beside the blue globe. A tiny, bright point of violet-red
fire, with a white line running from it, back to the center of the
sphere. The purple spark grew, the white line lengthened. Abruptly,
the newspaperman realized that the purple was an object hurtling
toward him with incredible speed.
* * * * *
Even as the realization burst upon him, the spark became visible as a
little red-blue sphere, brightly luminous. A white beam shone behind
it, seemed to push it with ever-increasing velocity. The purple globe
shot past, vanished. The white ray snapped out.
"A weapon!" he exclaimed.
"A weapon and a warning!" said Brand, still peering through another
eyepiece. "And we reply!"
"Heliograph!" he shouted into a speaking tube. "Each ship will open
with one forward tube, operating one second twelve times per minute.
Increase power of rear tubes to compensate repulsion."
White shields flickered. Blindingly brilliant rays, straight bars of
dazzling opalescence, burst intermittently from each of the nine ships,
striking across a hundred miles of space to batter the blue globe with
a hail of charged atoms.
Again a purple spark appeared from the sapphire globe, with a beam of
white fire behind it. A tiny purple globe, hurtling at an inconceivable
velocity before a lance of white flame. It reached out, with a certain
deliberation, yet too quickly for a man to do more than see it.
It struck a sunship, at one tip of the crescent formation.
A dazzling flash of violet flame burst out. The tiny globe seemed
to explode into a huge flare of red-blue light. And where the slim,
eight-sided ship had been was a crushed and twisted mass of metal.
"A solid projectile!" Brand cried. "And driven on the positive ray! Our
experts have tried it, but the ray always exploded the shell. And that
was some explosion! I don't know what--unless atomic energy!"
The eight sunships that remained were closing swiftly upon the blue
globe. The dazzling white rays flashed intermittently from them. They
struck the blue globe squarely--the fighting crews of the Moon Patrol
are trained until their rays are directed with deadly accuracy. The
azure sphere, unharmed, shone with bright radiance--it seemed that a
thin mist of glittering blue particles was gathering about it, like a
dust of powdered sapphires.
Another purple spark leapt from the turquoise globe.
In the time that it took a man's eyes to move from globe to slim,
glistening sunship, the white ray had driven the purple spark across
the distance. Another vivid flash of violet light. And another sunship
became a hurtling mass of twisted wreckage.
"We are seven!" Brand quoted grimly.
"Heliograph!" he shouted into the mouthpiece. "Fire all forward tubes
one second twenty times a minute. Increase rear power to maximum."
White rays burst from the seven darting sunships, flashing off and on.
That sapphire globe grew bright, with a strange luminosity. The thin
mist of sparkling blue particles seemed to grow more dense about it.
"Our rays don't seem to be doing any good," Brand muttered, puzzled.
"The blue about that globe must be some sort of vibratory screen."
Another purple spark, with the narrow white line of fire behind it,
swept across to the flier from the opposite horn of the crescent, burst
into a sheet of blinding red-violet light. Another ship was a twisted
mass of metal.
"Seven no longer!" Brand called grimly to Bill.
"Looks as if the Prince has got us beaten!" the reporter cried.
"Not while a ship can fight!" exclaimed the Captain. "This is the Moon
Patrol!"
Another tiny purple globe traced its line of light across the black,
star-misted sky. Another sunship crumpled in a violet flash.
"They're picking 'em off the ends," Bill observed. "We're in the
middle, so I guess we're last."
"Then," said Captain Brand, "we've got time to ram 'em."
"Control!" he shouted into the speaking tube. "Cut off forward tubes
and make all speed for the enemy. Heliograph! Fight to the end! I am
going to ram them!"
Another red-blue spark moved with its quick deliberation. A purple
flash left another ship in twisted ruin.
Bill took his eye from the telescope. The blue globe, bright under the
rays, with the sapphire mist sparkling about it, was only twenty miles
away. He could see it with his naked eye, drifting swiftly among the
familiar stars of Scorpio.
It grew larger very swiftly.
With the quickness of thought, the purple sparks moved out alternately
to right and to left. They never missed. Each one exploded in purple
flame, crushed a sunship.
"Three fliers left," Bill counted, eyes on the growing blue globe
before them. "Two left. Good-by, Brand." He grasped the bluff Captain's
hand. "One left. Will we have time?"
He looked forward. The blue globe, with the dancing, sparkling haze of
sapphire swirling about it, was swiftly expanding.
"The last one! Our turn now!"
He saw a tiny fleck of purple light dart out of the expanding azure
sphere that they had hoped to ram. Then red-violet flame seemed to
envelope him. He felt the floor of the bridge tremble beneath his feet.
He heard the beginning of a shivering crash like that of shattering
glass. Then the world was mercifully dark and still.