Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
‘How do you figure on doing us any good if the whole world explodes?’ Loring lighted a cigarette, his hand steady and his face pinkly unruffled. ‘If she goes up, it looks as if we go out, like that –
puff
!’ And he blew out the match.
‘Not at all, Doll,’ DuQuesne reassured him. ‘An atomic explosion starting on the surface and propagating downward would hardly develop enough power to drive anything material much, if any, faster than light, and no explosion wave, however violent, can exceed that velocity. The
Violet
, as you know, although not to be compared with even this scout as a fighter, has an acceleration of five times that, so that we could outrun the explosion in her. However, if we stay in our own ship, we shall certainly be found and blown out of space as soon as this defensive formation is completed.
‘On the other hand, this ship carries full Fenachrone power of offense and defense, and we should be safe enough from detection in it, at least for as long a time as we shall need it. Since these small ships are designed for purely local scout work, though, they are comparatively slow and would certainly be destroyed in any such cosmic explosion as is manifestly a possibility. That possibility is very remote, it is true, but it should be taken into consideration.’
‘So what? You’re talking yourself around a circle, right back to where you started from.’
‘Only considering the thing from all angles.’ DuQuesne was unruffled. ‘We have lots of time, since it will take them quite a while to perfect this formation. To finish the summing up – we want to use this vessel, but is it safe? It is. Why? Because the Fenachrone, having had atomic energy themselves for a long time, are thoroughly familiar with its possibilities and have undoubtedly perfected screens through which no such bomb could penetrate.
‘Furthermore, we can install the high-speed drive in this ship in a few days – I gave you all the dope on it over the educator, you know – so that we’ll be safe, whatever happens. That’s the safest plan, and it will work. So you move the stores and our most necessary personal belongings in here while I’m figuring out an orbit for the
Violet
. We don’t want her anywhere near us, and yet we want her to be within reaching distance while we are piloting this scout ship of ours to the place where she is supposed to be in Plan XB218.’
‘What are you going to do that for – to give them a chance to knock us off?’
‘No. I need some time to study these brains, and it will take some time for that battleship mother ship of ours to get into her assigned position, where we can steal her most easily.’ DuQuesne, however, did not at
once remove his headset, but remained standing where he was, silent and thoughtful.
‘Uh-huh,’ agreed Loring. ‘I’m thinking the same thing you are. Suppose that it
is
Seaton that’s got them all hot and bothered this way?’
‘The thought has occurred to me several times, and I have considered it at length,’ DuQuesne admitted at last. ‘However, I have concluded that it is not Seaton. For if it is, he must have a lot more stuff than I think he has. I do not believe that he can possibly have learned that much in the short time he has had to work in. I may be wrong, of course; but the immediately necessary steps toward the seizure of that battleship remain unchanged whether I am right or wrong; whether or not Seaton was the cause of this disturbance.’
The conversation definitely at an end, Loring again encased himself in his space-suit and set to work. For hours he labored, silently and efficiently, at transferring enough of their Earthly possessions and stores to render possible an extended period of living aboard the vessel of the Fenachrone.
He had completed that task and was assembling the apparatus and equipment necessary for the rebuilding of the power plant before DuQuesne finished the long and complex computations involved in determining the direction and magnitude of the force required to give the
Violet
the exact trajectory he desired. The problem was finally solved and checked, however, and DuQuesne rose to his feet, closing his book of nine-place logarithms with a snap.
‘All done with the
Violet
, Doll?’ he asked, donning his armor.
‘Yes.’
‘Fine! I’ll go aboard and push her off, after we do a little stage-setting here. Take that body there – I don’t need it any more, since he didn’t know much of anything, anyway – and toss it into the nose compartment. Then shut that bulkhead door, tight. I’m going to drill a couple of holes through there from the
Violet
before I give her the gun.’
‘I see – going to make us
look
disabled, whether we are or not, huh?’
‘Exactly! We’ve got to have a good excuse for our visirays being out of order. I can make reports all right on the communicator, and send and receive code messages and orders, but we certainly couldn’t stand a close-up inspection on a visiplate. Also, we’ve got to have some kind of an excuse for signaling to and approaching our mother battleship. We will have been hit and punctured by a meteorite. Pretty thin excuse, but it probably will serve for as long a time as we will need.’
After DuQuesne had made sure that the small compartment in the prow of the vessel contained nothing of use to them, the body of one of the Fenachrone was thrown carelessly into it, the air-tight bulkhead was closed and securely locked, and the chief marauder stepped into the airlock.
‘As soon as I get her exactly on course and velocity, I’ll step out into space and you can pick me up,’ he directed briefly, and was gone.
In the
Violet
’s engine room DuQuesne released
the anchoring attractor beams and backed off to a few hundred yards’ distance. He spun a couple of wheels briefly, pressed a switch, and from the
Violet
’s heaviest needle-ray projector there flashed out against the prow of the scout patrol a pencil of incredibly condensed destruction.
Dunark, the crown prince of Kondal, had developed that stabbing ray as the culminating ultimate weapon of ten thousand years of Osnomian warfare: and, driven by even the comparatively feeble energies known to the denizens of the Green System before Seaton’s advent, no known substance had been able to resist for more than a moment its corrosively, annihilatingly poignant thrust.
And now this furious stiletto of pure energy, driven by the full power of four hundred pounds of disintegrating atomic copper, at this point-blank range, was hurled against the mere inch of transparent material which comprised the skin of the tiny cruiser. DuQuesne expected no opposition, for with a beam less potent by far he had consumed utterly a vessel built of arenak – arenak, that Osnomian synthetic which is five hundred times as strong, tough, and hard as Earth’s strongest, toughest, and hardest alloy steel.
Yet that annihilating needle of force struck that transparent surface and rebounded from it in scintillating torrents of fire. Struck and rebounded, struck and clung; boring in almost imperceptibly as its irresistible energy tore apart, electron by electron, the surprisingly obdurate substance of the cruiser’s wall. For that substance was the ultimate synthetic – the one limiting material possessing the utmost measure of strength, hardness, tenacity, and rigidity theoretically possible to any substance built up from the building blocks of ether-borne electrons. This substance, developed by the master scientists of the Fenachrone, was in fact identical with the Norlaminian synthetic metal, ihoson, from which Rovol and his aides had constructed for Seaton his gigantic ship of space –
Skylark Three
.
For five long minutes DuQuesne held that terrific beam against the point of attack, then shut it off; for it had consumed less than half the thickness of the scout patrol’s outer skin. True, the focal area of the energy was an almost invisibly violet glare of incandescence, so intensely hot that the concentric shading off through blinding white, yellow, and bright-red heat brought the zone of dull red far down the side of the vessel; but that awful force had had practically no effect upon the space-worthiness of the stanch little craft.
‘No use, Loring!’ DuQuesne spoke calmly into the transmitter inside his face-plate. True scientist that he was, he neither expressed nor felt anger or bafflement when an idea failed to work, but abandoned it promptly and completely, without rancor or repining. ‘No possible meteorite could puncture that shell. Stand by!’
He inspected the power meters briefly, made several readings through the filar micrometer of number six visiplate, and checked the vernier
readings of the great circles of the gyroscopes against the figures in his notebook. Then, assured that the
Violet
was following precisely the predetermined course, he entered the airlock, waved a bloated arm at the watchful Loring, and coolly stepped off into space. The heavy outer door clanged shut behind him, and the globular ship of space rocketed onward; while DuQuesne fell with a sickening acceleration toward the mighty planet of the Fenachrone, so many thousands of miles below.
That fall did not long endure. Loring, now a space pilot second to none, had held his vessel even with the
Violet
; matching exactly her course, pace, and acceleration at a distance of barely a hundred feet. He had cut off all his power as DuQuesne’s right foot left the Osnomian vessel, and now falling man and plunging scout ship plummeted downward together at the same mad pace; the man drifting slowly toward the ship because of the slight energy of his step into space from the
Violet
’s side and beginning slowly to turn over as he fell. So good had been Loring’s spacemanship that the scout did not even roll; DuQuesne was still opposite her starboard airlock when Loring stood in its portal and tossed a space line to his superior. This line – a small, tightly stranded cable of fiber capable of retaining its strength and pliability in the heatless depths of space – snapped out and curled around DuQuesne’s bulging space-suit.
‘I thought you’d use an attractor, but this is probably better, at that,’ DuQuesne commented, as he seized the line in a mailed fist.
‘Yeah. I haven’t had much practice with them on delicate and accurate work. If I had missed you with this line I could have thrown it again; but if I missed this opening with you on a beam and shaved your suit off on this sharp edge, I figured it’d be just too bad.’
The two men again in the control room and the vessel once more leveled out in headlong flight, Loring broke the silence:
‘That idea of being punctured by a meteorite didn’t pan out so heavy. How would it be to have one of the crew go space-crazy and wreck the boat from the inside? They do that sometimes, don’t they?’
‘Yes, they do. That’s an idea – thanks. I’ll study up on the symptoms. I have a lot more studying to do, anyway – there’s a lot of stuff I haven’t got yet. This metal, for instance – we couldn’t possibly build a Fenachrone battleship on Earth. I had no idea that any possible substance could be as resistant as the shell of this ship is. Of course, there are many unexplored areas in these brains here, and quite a few high-class brains aboard our mother ship that I haven’t even seen yet. The secret of the composition of this metal must be in some of them.’
‘Well, while you’re getting their stuff, I suppose I’d better fly at that job of rebuilding our drive. I’ll have time enough all right, you think?’
‘Certain of it. I have learned that their system is ample.
It’s automatic and foolproof. They have warning long before anything can possibly happen. They can, and do, spot trouble over a light-week away, so their plans allow one week to perfect their defenses. You can change the power plant over in three or four days, so we’re well in the clear on that. I may not be done with my studies by that time, but I shall have learned enough to take effective action. You work on the drive and keep house. I will study Fenachrone science and so on, answer calls, make reports, and arrange the details of what is to happen when we come within the volume of space assigned to our mother ship.’
Thus for days each man devoted himself to his task. Loring rebuilt the power plant of the short-ranging scout patrol into the terrific open-space drive of the first-line battleships and performed the simple routines of their spartan housekeeping. DuQuesne cut himself short on sleep and spent every possible hour in transferring to his own brain every worthwhile bit of knowledge which had been possessed by the commander and crew of the patrol ship which he had captured.
Periodically, however, he would close the sending circuit and report the position and progress of his vessel, precisely on time and observing strictly all the military minutiae called for by the manual – the while watching appreciatively and with undisguised admiration the flawless execution of that stupendous plan of defense.
The change-over finished, Loring went in search of DuQuesne, whom he found performing a strenuous setting-up exercise. The scientist’s face was pale, haggard, and drawn.
‘What’s the matter, chief?’ Loring asked. ‘You look kind of peaked.’
‘Peaked is good – I’m just about bushed. This thing of getting a hundred and ninety years of solid education in a few days would hardly come under the heading of light amusement. Are you done?’
‘Done and checked – O.K.’
‘Good! I am, too. It won’t take us long to get to our destination now; our mother ship should be just about at her post by this time.’
Now that the vessel was approaching the location assigned to it in the plan, and since DuQuesne had already taken from the brains of the dead Fenachrone all that he wanted of their knowledge, he threw their bodies into space and rayed them out of existence. The other corpse he left lying, a bloated and ghastly mass, in the forward compartment as he prepared to send in what was to be his last flight report to the office of the general in command of the plan of defense.
‘His high-mightiness doesn’t know it, but that is the last call he is going to get from this unit,’ DuQuesne remarked, leaving the sender and stepping over to the control board. ‘Now we can leave our prescribed course and go where we can do ourselves some good. First,
we’ll find the
Violet
. I haven’t heard of her being spotted and destroyed as a menace to navigation, so we’ll look her up and start her off for home.’