Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘How do you know?’ asked Dorothy. ‘By the distance? How far are they?’
‘I know, Red-Top, by what I didn’t find out with that screen I just put out. It didn’t reach them, and it went so far that the distance is absolutely meaningless, even expressed in parsecs. Well, a stern chase is proverbially a long chase, and I guess this one ain’t going to be any exception.’
Every eight hours Seaton launched his all-embracing ultra-detector, but day after day passed and the instruments remained motionless after each cast of that gigantic net. For days the galaxy behind them had been dwindling; from a space-filling mass of stars it had shrunk down to a fairly bright ellipse. At the previous cast of the detector it had still been distinctly
visible. Now, as Dorothy and Seaton, alone in the control room, stared into that visiplate, they were shocked – their own galaxy was indistinguishable from numberless other tiny, dim patches of light. It was as small, as insignificant, as remote, as any other nebula!
‘This is awful, Dick … horrible. It just simply scares me pea-green!’ She shuddered as she drew herself to him, and he swept both arms around her.
‘’Sall right, Dottie; steady down. That stuff out there’d scare anybody – I’m scared purple myself. It isn’t in any finite mind to understand this sort of thing. There’s one redeeming feature, though – we’re together.’
‘I couldn’t stand it, otherwise.’ Dorothy returned his caress with all her old-time fervor and enthusiasm. ‘I feel better now. If it gets you, too, I know it’s all right – I was beginning to think maybe I was yellow, or something … but maybe you’re kidding me?’ She held him off at arm’s length, looking deep into his eyes: then, reassured, went back into his arms. ‘No, you feel it, too,’ and her glorious auburn head found its natural resting-place in the curve of his shoulder.
‘Yellow! … You?’ Seaton pressed his wife closer still and laughed aloud. ‘Maybe – but so is picric acid; so is TNT, and so is pure gold.’
‘Flatterer!’ Her low, entrancing chuckle bubbled over. ‘But you know I just revel in it. I’ll kiss you for that!
‘It
is
awfully lonesome out here, without even a star to look at,’ she went on, after a time, then laughed again. ‘If the Cranes and Shiro weren’t along, we’d be really “alone at last”, wouldn’t we?’
‘I’ll say we would! But that reminds me of something. According to my figures we might have been able to detect the Fenachrone on the last test, but we didn’t. Think I’ll try ’em again before we turn in.’
Once more he flung out that tenuous net of force, and as it reached the extreme limit of its travel the needle of the micro-ammeter flickered slightly, barely moving off its zero mark.
‘Whee! Whoopee!’ he yelled. ‘Mart, we’re on ’em!’
‘Close?’ demanded Crane, hurrying into the control room upon his beam.
‘Anything but. Barely touched ’em – current something less than a thousandth of a micro-ampere on a million to one step-up. However, it proves our ideas are right.’
The next day –
Skylark Three
was running on Eastern Standard Time, of the Tellurian United States of North America – the two mathematicians covered sheet after sheet of paper with computations and curves. After checking and rechecking the figures Seaton shut off the power, released the molecular drive, and applied acceleration of twenty-nine point six-oh-two feet per second; and five human beings breathed at once a profound sigh of relief as an almost-normal force of gravitation was restored to them.
‘Why the let-up?’ asked Dorothy. ‘They’re an awful long ways off yet, aren’t they? Why not hurry up and catch them?’
‘Because we’re going infinitely faster than they are now. If
we kept up full acceleration we’d pass them so fast that we couldn’t fight them at all. This way, we’ll still be going a lot faster than they are when we get close to them, but not enough faster to keep us from maneuvering with them if we have to. Guess I’ll take another reading on ’em.’
‘I do not believe that you should,’ Crane suggested, thoughtfully. ‘After all, they may have perfected their instruments, and yet may not have detected that extremely light touch of our contact last night. If so, why put them on guard?’
‘They’re probably on guard anyway, without having to be put there – but it’s a sound idea, nevertheless. Along the same line I’ll release the fifth-order screens, with the fastest possible detector on guard. We’re just about within reach of a light copper-driven beam right now, but they can’t send anything heavy this far, and if they think we’re overconfident so much the better.
‘There,’ he continued, after a few minutes at the keyboard.
‘All set. If they put a detector on us I’ve got a force set to make a noise like a fire siren. If pressed, I will very reluctantly admit that we’re carrying caution to a point ten thousand degrees below the absolute zero of sanity. I’ll bet my shirt that we won’t hear a yip out of them before we touch them off. Furthermore—’
The rest of his sentence was lost in a crescendo bellow of sound. Seaton, still at the controls, shut off the noise, studied his meters carefully, and turned to Crane with a grin.
‘You win the shirt, Mart. I’ll give it to you next Wednesday, when my other one comes back from the laundry. It’s a fifth-order detector, coming in beautifully on band forty-seven fifty.’
‘Aren’t you going to put something on ’em?’ asked Dorothy in surprise.
‘No – what’s the use? I can read theirs as well as I could one of my own. Maybe they know that, too – if they don’t we’ll let ’em think we’re coming along, as innocent as Mary’s little lamb. That beam is much too thin to carry anything, and if they thicken it up I’ve got an axe set to chop it off.’ Seaton whistled a merry, lilting refrain as his fingers played over the stops and keys.
‘Why, Dick, you seem actually pleased about it.’ Margaret was plainly ill at ease.
‘Sure I am. I never did like to drown baby kittens, and it goes against the grain to stab a guy in the back, even if he is a Fenachrone. In a battle, though, I could blow them out of space without a qualm or a quiver.’
‘But suppose they fight back too hard?’
‘They can’t – the worst that can possibly happen is that we can’t lick them. They certainly can’t lick us, because we can
outrun ’em. If we can’t take ’em alone, we’ll go back to Norlamin and bring up reinforcements.’
‘I am not so sure,’ Crane spoke slowly. ‘There is, I believe, a theoretical possibility that sixth-order forces exist. Would an extension of the methods of detection of fifth-order rays reveal them?’
‘Sixth?
Sweet spirits of niter! Nobody knows anything about them. However, I’ve had one surprise already, so maybe your suggestion isn’t as crazy as it sounds. We’ve got three or four days yet before either side can send anything except on the sixth, so I’ll find out what I can do.’
He flew at the task, and for the next three days could hardly be torn from it for rest; but:
‘O.K. Mart,’ he finally announced. ‘They exist, all right, and I can detect ’em. Look here,’ and he pointed to a tiny receiver, upon which a small lamp flared in brilliant scarlet light.
‘Are they sending them?’
‘No, fortunately. They’re coming from our bar. See, it shines blue when I shield it from the bar, and stays blue when I attach it to their detector ray.’
‘Can you direct them?’
‘Not a chance in the world. That means a lifetime, probably many lifetimes, of research unless somebody uses a fairly complete pattern of them close enough so that I can analyze it. It’s a good deal like calculus in that respect. It took thousands of years to get it in the first place, but it’s easy when somebody that already knows it shows you how it goes.’
‘The Fenachrone learned to handle fifth-order rays so quickly, then, by an analysis of our fifth-order projector there?’
‘Our secondary projector, yes. They must have had some neutronium in stock, too – but it would have been funny if they hadn’t, at that – they’ve had atomic power for ages.’
Silent and grim, he seated himself at the console, and for an hour he wrote an intricate pattern of forces upon the inexhaustible supply of keys afforded by the ultra-projector before he once touched a plunger.
‘What are you doing? I followed you for a few hundred steps, but could go no farther.’
‘Merely a little safety-first stuff. In case they should send any real pattern of sixth-order stuff this set-up will analyze it, record the complete analysis, throw out a screen against every frequency of the pattern; throw on the molecular drive, and pull us back toward the galaxy at full acceleration, while switching the frequency of our carrier wave a thousand times a second, to keep them from shooting a hot one through our open band. It’ll do it all in about a millionth of a second, too … Hm-m-m … They’ve shut off their ray – they know we’ve tapped it. Well, war’s declared now – we’ll see what we can see.’
Transferring the assembled beam to a plunger, he sent out a secondary projector toward the Fenachrone vessel, as fast as it
could be driven, close behind a widespread detector net. He soon found the enemy cruiser, but so immense was the distance that it was impossible to hold the projection anywhere in its neighborhood. They flashed beyond it and through it and upon all sides of it, but the utmost delicacy of the controls would not permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as the power-bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship they saw piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men of her crew, each man at battle stations at the controls of some frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen closed behind them – the Earthmen felt an instant of unreasoning terror as it seemed that one-half of their peculiar dual personalities vanished utterly. Seaton laughed.
‘That was a funny sensation, wasn’t it? It just means that they’ve climbed a tree and pulled the tree up after them.’
‘I do not like the odds, Dick.’ Crane’s face was grave. ‘They have many hundreds of men, all trained; and we are only two. Yes, only one, for I count for nothing at those controls.’
‘All the better, Mart. This board more than makes up the difference. They’ve got a lot of stuff, of course, but they haven’t got anything like this control system. Their captain’s got to issue orders, whereas I’ve got everything right under my hands. Not so uneven as they think!’
Within battle range at last, Seaton hurled his utmost concentration of direct forces, under the impact of which three courses of Fenachrone defensive screen flared through the ultraviolet and went black. There the massed direct attack was stopped – at what cost the enemy alone knew – and the Fenachrone countered instantly and in a manner totally unexpected. Through the narrow slit in the fifth-order screen through which Seaton was operating, in the bare one-thousandth of a second that it was open, so exactly synchronized and timed that the screens did not even glow as it went through the narrow opening, a gigantic beam of heterodyned force struck full upon the bow of the
Skylark
, near the sharply-pointed prow, and the stubborn metal instantly flared blinding white and exploded outward in puffs of incandescent gas under the awful power of that titanic thrust. Through four successive skins of inoson, the theoretical ultimate of possible strength, toughness, and resistance, that frightful beam drove before the automatically-reacting detector closed the slit, and the impregnable defensive screens, driven by their mighty uranium bars, flared into incandescent defense. Driven as they were, they held, and the Fenachrone, finding that particular attack useless, shut off their power.
‘Wow! They really have got something!’ Seaton exclaimed in unfeigned admiration.
‘What
a wallop that was! We will now take time out for repairs. Also, I’m going to cut our slit down to a width of one
kilocycle, if I can possibly figure out a way of working on that narrow band, and I’m going to step up our shifting speed to a hundred thousand. It’s a good thing they built this ship in a lot of layers – if that’d got through to the interior it would have raised hell. You might weld up those holes, Mart, while I see what I can do here.’
Then Seaton noticed the women, white and trembling, upon a seat.
‘’Smatter? Cheer up, kids, you ain’t seen nothing yet. That was just a couple of little preliminary love-taps, like two boxers feeling each other out in the first ten seconds of the first round.’
‘Preliminary love-taps!’ repeated Dorothy, looking into Seaton’s eyes and being reassured by the serene confidence she read there. ‘But they hit us, and hurt us badly – why, there’s a hole in our
Skylark
as big as a house, and it goes through four or five layers!’
‘Yeah, but we ain’t hurt a bit. They’re easily fixed, and we’ve lost nothing but a few tons of inoson and uranium. We’ve got lots of spare metal. I don’t know what I did to him, any more than he knows what he did to us, but I’ll bet my other shirt that he knows he’s been nudged!’
Repairs completed and the changes made in the method of projection, Seaton actuated the rapidly-shifting slit and peered through it at the enemy vessel. Finding their screens still up he directed a complete-coverage attack upon them with four bars while, with the entire massed power of the remaining generators concentrated into one frequency, he shifted that frequency up and down the spectrum – probing, probing, ever probing with that gigantic beam of intolerable energy – feeling for some crack, however slight, into which he could insert that searing sheet of concentrated destruction. Although much of the available power of the Fenachrone was perforce devoted to repelling the continuous attack of the
Skylark,
they maintained an equally continuous offensive and in spite of the narrowness of the open slit and the rapidity with which that slit was changing from frequency to frequency, enough of the frightful forces came through to keep the ultra-powered defensive screens radiating far into the violet – and, the utmost power of the refrigerating system proving absolutely useless against the concentrated beams being employed, mass after mass of inoson was literally blown from the outer and secondary skins of the
Skylark
by the comparatively tiny jets of force that leaked through the momentarily open slit.