Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘That is better, son. Never forget that it is a waste of energy to do the same thing twice, and that if you know precisely what is to be done, you need not do it personally at all. Forces are faster than human hands, they are tireless, and they neither slip nor make mistakes.’
‘Thanks, Rovol – I’ll bet this lesson will make it stick in my mind, too.’
‘You are not thoroughly accustomed to using all your knowledges as yet. That will come with practice, however, and in a few weeks you will be as thoroughly at home with forces as I am.’
‘Hope so, chief, but it looks like a tall order to me.’
Finally the last torpedo was despatched. The tube closed. Seaton moved the projection back up into the council chamber, finding it empty.
‘Well, the conference is over – besides, we’ve got more important fish to fry. War has been declared, on both sides, and we’ve got to get busy. They’ve got nine hundred and six vessels out, and every one of them has got to go to Davy Jones’s locker before we can sleep sound of nights. My first job’ll have to be untangling those nine oh six forces, getting lines on each one of them, and seeing if I can project straight enough to find the ships before the torpedoes overtake them. Mart, you and Orlon, our astronomers, had better figure out the last reported positions of each of those vessels, so we’ll know about where to hunt for them, Rovol, you might send out a detector screen a few light-years in diameter, to be sure none of them slip a fast one over on us. By starting it right here and expanding it gradually, you can be sure that no Fenachrone is inside it. Then we’ll find a hunk of copper on that planet somewhere, plate it with some of their own X metal, and blow them into Kingdom Come.’
‘May I venture a suggestion?’ asked Drasnik, the First of Psychology.
‘Absolutely – nothing you’ve said so far has been idle chatter.’
‘You know, of course, that there are real scientists among the Fenachrone; and you yourself have suggested that while they cannot penetrate the zone of force nor use fifth-order rays, yet they might know about them in theory, might even be able to know when they were being used – detect them in other words. Let us assume that such a scientist did detect
your forces while you were there a short time ago. What should he do?’
‘Search me … What would he do?’
‘He might do any one of several things, but if I read their nature aright, such a one would gather up a few men and women – as many as he could – and migrate to another planet. For he would of course grasp instantly the fact that you had used fifth-order rays as carrier waves, and would be able to deduce your ability to destroy. He would also realize that in the brief time allowed him, he could not hope to learn to control those unknown forces; and with his terribly savage and vengeful nature and intense pride of race, he would take every possible step both to perpetuate his race and to obtain revenge. Am I right?’
Seaton swung his controls savagely, and manipulated dials and keys.
‘Right as rain, Drasnik. There – I’ve thrown a fifth-order detector screen, that they can’t possibly neutralize, around them. Anything that goes out through it will have a tracer slapped onto it. But say, it’s been half an hour or so since war was declared – suppose we’re too late? Maybe some of ’em have got away already, and if one couple escapes we’ll have the whole thing to do over again a thousand years or so from now. You’ve got the massive intellect, Drasnik. What can we do about it? We can’t throw a detector screen around the whole galaxy.’
‘I would suggest that since you have now guarded against further exodus, it is not necessary to destroy the planet for a time. Rovol and his co-workers have the other projector nearly done. Let them project me to the world of the Fenachrone, where I shall conduct a thorough mental investigation. By the time you have taken care of the raiding vessels, I believe that I shall have learned everything we need to know.’
‘Fine – hop to it, and may there be lots of bubbles in your think-tank. Anybody else know of any other loop-holes I’ve left open?’
No other suggestions were made, and each man bent to his particular task. Crane at the star-chart of the galaxy and Orlon at the Fenachrone operator’s despatching scroll rapidly worked out the approximate positions of the Fenachrone vessels, and marked them with tiny green lights in a vast model of the galaxy which they had already caused forces to erect in the air of the projector’s base. It was soon learned that a few of the ships were exploring quite close to their home system; so close that the torpedoes, with their unthinkable acceleration, would reach them within a few hours.
Ascertaining the stop-number of the tracer upon the torpedo which should first reach its destination, Seaton followed it from his panel out to the flying messenger. Now moving with a velocity many times that of light, it of course was invisible to direct vision; but to the light waves heterodyned upon the fifth-order forces it was as plainly visible as though it were stationary. Lining up the path of the projectile accurately, he then
projected himself forward in that exact line, with a flat detector-screen thrown out for half a light-year upon each side of him. Setting the controls, he flashed ahead, the detector stopping him instantaneously upon encountering the power plant of the exploring raider. An oscillator sounded a shrill and rising note, and Seaton slowly shifted his controls until he stood in the control room of the enemy vessel.
The Fenachrone ship, a thousand feet long and more than a hundred feet in diameter, was tearing through space toward a brilliant blue-white star. Her crew were at battle stations, her navigating officers peering intently into the operating visiplates, all oblivious to the fact that a stranger stood in their very midst.
‘Well, here’s the first one. I hate like the devil to do this – it’s altogether too much like pushing baby chickens into a creek – but it’s a dirty job that’s got to be done.’
As one man, Orlon and the other remaining Norlaminians leaped out of the projector and floated to the ground below.
‘I expected that,’ Seaton said. ‘They can’t even think of a thing like this without getting the blue willies – I don’t blame them much, at that. How about you, Carfon? You can be excused if you like.’
‘I want to watch those forces at work. I do not enjoy destruction, but like you, I can make myself endure it.’
Dunark, the fierce and bloodthirsty Osnomian prince, leaped to his feet, his eyes flashing.
‘That’s one thing I never could get about you, Dick!’ he exclaimed in English. ‘How a man with your brains can be so soft – so sloppily sentimental, gets clear past me. You remind me of a bowl of mush – you wade around in slush clear to your ears. Faugh! It’s their lives or ours! Tell me what button to push and I’ll be only too glad to push it. Cut out the sob-sister act and for Cat’s sake, let’s get busy!’
‘’At-a-boy, Dunark! That’s tellin’ ’em! But it’s all right with me – I’ll be glad to let you do it. When I say “shoot” throw in that plunger there – number sixty-three.’
Seaton manipulated controls until two electrodes of force were clamped in place, one at either end of the huge power-bar of the enemy vessel; adjusted rheostats and forces to send a disintegrating current through that massive copper cylinder, and gave the word. Dunark threw in the switch viciously, as though it were an actual sword which he was thrusting through the vitals of one of the hideous crew, and the very universe exploded around them – exploded into one mad, searing coruscation of blinding, dazzling light as the gigantic cylinder of copper resolved itself instantaneously into the pure energy from which its metal originally had come into being.
Seaton and Dunark staggered back from the visiplates,
blinded by the intolerable glare of light, and even Crane, working at his model of the galaxy, blinked at the intensity of the radiation. Many minutes passed before the two men could see through their tortured eyes.
‘Zowie! That was fierce!’ exclaimed Seaton, when a slowly-returning perception of things other than dizzy spirals and balls of flame assured him that his eyesight was not permanently gone. ‘It’s nothing but my own fool carelessness, too. I should’ve known that with the visible spectrum in heterodyne, for visibility, enough of that stuff would leak through to raise hell on our plates – that bar weighed a hundred tons and would liberate energy enough to blow a planet from here to Arcturus. How’re you coming, Dunark? See anything yet?’
‘Coming along O.K. now, I guess – but for a couple of minutes it had me guessing.’
‘I’ll do better next time. I’ll cut out the visible before the flash, and convert and reconvert the infra-red. That’ll let us see what happens, without any direct effect. What’s my force number on the next nearest one, Mart?’
‘Twenty-nine.’
Seaton fastened a detector ray upon stop twenty-nine of the tracer-beam panel and followed its pencil of force out to the torpedo hastening upon its way toward the next doomed cruiser. Flashing ahead in its line as he had done before, he located the vessel and clamped the electrodes of force upon the prodigious driving bar. Again, as Dunark drove home the detonating switch, there was a frightful explosion and a wild glare of frenzied incandescence far out in that desolate region of interstellar space; but this time the eyes behind the visiplates were not torn by the high frequencies and everything that happened was plainly visible. One instant, there was an immense space-cruiser boring on through the void upon its horrid mission, with its full complement of the hellish Fenachrone performing their routine tasks. The next instant there was a flash of light extending for thousands upon untold thousands of miles in every direction. That flare of light vanished as rapidly as it had appeared – instantaneously – and throughout the entire neighborhood of the place where the Fenachrone cruiser had been, there was nothing. Not a plate nor a girder, not a fragment, not the most minute particle nor droplet of disrupted metal nor of condensed vapor. So terrific, so incredibly and incomprehensibly vast were the forces liberated by that mass of copper in its instantaneous decomposition that every atom of substance in that great vessel had gone with the power-bar – had been resolved into radiations which would at some distant time and in some far-off solitude unite with other radiations, again to form matter and thus obey Nature’s immutable cyclic law.
Vessel after vessel was destroyed of that haughty fleet which until now had never suffered a reverse, and a little green light in the
galactic model winked out and flashed back in rosy pink as each menace was removed. In a few hours the space surrounding the system of the Fenachrone was clear; then progress slackened as it became harder and harder to locate each vessel as the distance between it and its torpedo increased. Time after time Seaton would stab forward with his detector screen extended to its utmost possible spread, upon the most carefully plotted prolongation of the line of the torpedo’s flight, only to have the projection flash far beyond the vessel’s farthest possible position without a reaction from the far-flung screen. Then he would go back to the torpedo, make a minute alteration in his line, and again flash forward, only to miss it again. Finally, after thirty fruitless attempts to bring his detector screen into contact with the nearest Fenachrone ship, he gave up the attempt, rammed his battered, reeking briar full of the rank blend that was his favorite smoke, and strode up and down the floor of the projector base – his eyes unseeing, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, his jaw thrust forward, clamped upon the stem of his pipe, emitting dense, blue clouds of strangling vapor.
‘The young maestro is thinking, I perceive,’ remarked Dorothy sweetly, entering the projector from an airboat. ‘You must all be blind, I guess – you no hear the bell blow, what? I’ve come after you – it’s time to eat!’
‘’At-a-girl, Dot – never miss the eats! Thanks,’ and Seaton with a visible effort, put his problem away.
‘This is going to be a job, Mart,’ he went back to it as soon as they were seated in the airboat, flying toward ‘home’. ‘I can nail them, with an increasing shift in azimuth, up to about thirty thousand light-years, but after that it gets awfully hard to get the right shift, and up around a hundred thousand it seems to be impossible – gets to be pure guesswork. It can’t be the controls, because they can hold a point rigidly at five hundred thousand. Of course, we’ve got a pretty short back-line to sight on, but the shift is more than a hundred times as great as the possible error in my back-sight could account for, and there’s apparently nothing either regular or systematic about it that I can figure out. But … I don’t know … Space is curved in the fourth dimension, of course … I wonder if … hm … m … m.’ He fell silent and Crane made a rapid signal to Dorothy, who was opening her mouth to say something. She shut it, feeling ridiculous, and nothing was said until they had disembarked at their destination.
‘Did you solve the puzzle, Dickie?’
‘Don’t think so – got myself in deeper than ever, I’m afraid,’ he answered, then went on, thinking aloud rather than addressing anyone in particular.
‘Space is curved in the fourth dimension, and fifth-order tracers, with their velocity, may not follow the same path in that dimension that light does – in fact, they do not. If that path is to be plotted it requires the solution of five simultaneous equations, each complete and general,
and each of the fifth degree, and also an exponential series with the unknown in the final exponent, before the fourth-dimensional concept can be derived … hm … m … m. No use – we’ve struck something not even Norlaminian theory can handle.’
‘You surprise me,’ Crane said. ‘I supposed that they had everything worked out.’
‘Not on fifth-order stuff. It begins to look as though we’d have to stick around until every one of those torpedoes gets somewhere near its mother-ship. Hate to do it, too – it’ll take a long time to reach the vessels clear across the galaxy. I’ll put it up to the gang at dinner – guess they’ll let me talk business a couple of minutes overtime, especially after they find out what I’ve got to say.’
He explained the phenomenon to an interested group of white-haired scientists as they ate. Rovol, to Seaton’s surprise, was elated and enthusiastic.