Authors: E. E. 'Doc' Smith
Radnor and his scientists devoted themselves exclusively to the development of new and ever more powerful weapons of offense; the Chlorans ceased their fruitless attacks upon the central dome and concentrated all their offensive power into two semicircular arcs, which they directed vertically downward upon the outer ring of the Valeronian works in an incessant and methodical flood of energy.
They could not pierce the defensive shields against Valeron’s massed power, but they could and did bring into being a vast annular lake of furiously boiling lava, into which the outer ring of fortresses began slowly to crumble and dissolve. This method of destruction, while slow, was certain; and grimly, pertinaciously, implacably, the Chlorans went about the business of reducing Valeron’s only citadel.
The Bardyle wondered audibly how the enemy could possibly maintain indefinitely an attack so profligate of energy, but he soon learned that there were at least four of the floating fortresses engaged in the undertaking. Occasionally the two creations then attacking were replaced by two precisely similar structures, presumably to return to Chlora in order to renew their supplies of the substance, whatever it was, from the atomic disintegration of which they derived their incomprehensible power.
And slowly, contesting stubbornly and bitterly every foot of ground lost, the forces of Valeron were beaten back under the relentless, never-ceasing attack of the Chloran monstrosities – back and ever back toward their central dome as ring after ring of the outlying fortifications slagged down into that turbulently seething, that incandescently flaming lake of boiling lava.
Valeron was making her last stand. Her back was against
the wall. The steadily contracting ring of Chloran force had been driven inward until only one thin line of fortified works lay between it and the great dome covering the city itself. Within a week at most, perhaps within days, that voracious flood of lava would lick into and would dissolve that last line of defense. Then what of Valeron?
All the scientists of the planet had toiled and had studied, day and night, but to no avail. Each new device developed to halt the march of the encroaching constricting band of destruction had been nullified in the instant of its first trial:
‘They must know every move we make, to block us so promptly,’ Quedrin Radnor had mused one day. ‘Since they certainly have no visiray viewpoints of material substance within our dome, they must be able to operate a spy ray using only the narrow gravity band, a thing we have never been able to accomplish. If they can project such viewpoints of pure force through such a narrow band, may they not be able to project a full materialization and thus destroy us? But, no, that band is –
must
be – altogether too narrow for that.’
Stirred by these thoughts he had built detectors to announce the appearance of any non-gravitational forces in the gravity band and had learned that his fears were only too well founded. While the enemy could not project through the open band any forces sufficiently powerful to do any material damage, they were thus in position to forestall any move which the men of Valeron made to ward off their inexorably approaching doom.
Far beneath the surface of the ground, in a room which was not only sealed but was surrounded with every possible safeguard, nine men sat at a long table, the Bardyle at its head.
‘… and nothing can be done?’ the coordinator was asking. ‘There is no possible way of protecting the edges of the screens?’
‘None.’ Radnor’s voice was flat, his face and body alike were eloquent of utter fatigue. He had driven himself to the point of collapse, and all his labor had proved useless. ‘Without solid anchorages we cannot hold them – as the ground is fused they give way. When the fused area reaches the dome the end will come. The outlets of our absorbers will also be fused, and with no possible method of dissipating the energy being continuously radiated into the dome we shall all die, practically instantaneously.’
‘But I judge you are trying something new, from the sudden cutting off of nearly all our weight,’ stated another.
‘Yes. I have closed the gravity band until only enough force
can get through to keep us in place on the planet, in a last attempt to block their spy rays so that we can try one last resort …’ He broke off as an intense red light suddenly flared into being upon a panel. ‘No; even that is useless. See that red light? That is the pilot light of a detector upon the gravity band. The Chlorans are still watching us. We can do nothing more, for if we close that band any tighter we shall leave Valeron entirely and shall float away, to die in space.’
As that bleak announcement was uttered the councilors sat back limply in their seats. Nothing was said – what was there to say? After all, the now seemingly unavoidable end was not unexpected. Not a man at that table had really in his heart thought it possible for peaceful Valeron to triumph against the superior war-craftiness of Chlora.
They sat there, staring unseeing into empty air, when suddenly in that air there materialized Seaton’s projection. Since its reception has already been related, nothing need be said of it except that it was the Bardyle himself who was the recipient of that terrific wave of mental force. As soon as the Terrestrial had made clear his intentions and his desires, Radnor leaped to his feet, a man transformed.
‘A laboratory of radiation!’ he exclaimed, his profound exhaustion forgotten in a blaze of new hope. ‘Not only shall I lead him to such a laboratory, but my associates and I shall be only too glad to do his bidding in every possible way.’
Followed closely by the visitor, Radnor hurried buoyantly along a narrow hall and into a large room in which, stacked upon shelves, lying upon benches and tables, and even piled indiscriminately upon the floor, there was every conceivable type and kind of apparatus for the generation and projection of etheric forces.
Seaton’s flashing glance swept once around the room, cataloguing and classifying the heterogeneous collection. Then, while Radnor looked on in a daze of incredulous astonishment, that quasi-solid figure of force made tangible wrought what was to the Valeronian a scientific miracle. It darted here and there with a speed almost impossible for the eye to follow, seizing tubes, transformers, coils, condensers, and other items of equipment, connecting them together with unbelievable rapidity into a mechanism at whose use the bewildered Radnor, able physicist though he was, could not even guess.
The mechanical educator finished, Seaton’s image donned one of its sets of multiple headphones and placed another upon the unresisting head of his host. Then into Radnor’s already reeling mind there surged an insistent demand for his language, and almost immediately the headsets were tossed aside.
There, that’s better!’ Seaton – for the image was, to all intents and purposes, Seaton himself exclaimed. ‘Now that we can talk to each other we’ll soon make those Chlorans wish that they had stayed at home.’
‘But they are watching everything you do,’ protested Radnor, ‘and we cannot block them out without cutting off
our gravity entirely. They will therefore be familiar with any mechanism we may construct and will be able to protect themselves against it.’
‘They just think they will,’ grimly. ‘I can’t close the gravity band without disaster, any more than you could, but I can find any spy ray they can use and send back along it a jolt that’ll burn their eyes out. You see, there’s a lot of stuff down on the edge of the fourth order that neither you nor the Chlorans know anything about yet, because you haven’t had enough thousands of years to study it.’
While he was talking, Seaton had been furiously at work upon a small generator, and now he turned it on.
‘If they can see through
that
,’ he grinned, ‘they’re a lot smarter than I think they are. Even if they’re bright enough to have figured out what I was doing while I was doing it, it won’t do them any good, because this outfit will scramble any beam they can send through that band.’
‘I must bow to your superior knowledge, of course,’ Radnor said gravely, ‘but I should like to ask one question. You are working a full materialization through less than a tenth of the gravity band – something that has always been considered impossible. Is there no danger that the Chlorans may analyze your patterns and thus duplicate your feat?’
‘Not a chance,’ Seaton assured him positively. ‘This stuff I am using is on a tight beam, so tight that it is proof against analysis or interference. It took the Norlaminians – and they’re a race of real thinkers – over eight thousand years to go from the beams you and the Chlorans are using down to what I’m showing you. Therefore I’m not afraid that the opposition will pick it up in the next week or two. But we’d better get busy in a big way. Your most urgent need, I take it, is for something – anything – that will stop that surface of force before it reaches the skirt of your defensive dome and blocks your dissipaters?’
‘Exactly!’
‘All right. We’ll build you a four-way fourth-order projector to handle full materializations – four-way to handle four attackers in case they get desperate and double their program. With it you will send working images of yourselves into the power rooms of the Chloran ships and clamp a short-circuiting field across the secondaries of their converters. Of course they can bar you out with a zone of force if they detect you before you can kill the generators of their zones, but that will be just as good, as far as we’re concerned – they can’t do a thing as long as they’re on, you know. Now put on the headset again and I’ll give you the data on the projector. Better get a recorder, too, as there’ll be some stuff that you won’t be able to carry in your head.’
The recorder was brought in and from Seaton’s brain there flowed into it and into the mind of Radnor the fundamental concepts and complete equations and working details of the new instrument.
Upon the Valeronian’s face was first blank amazement, then dawning comprehension, and lastly sheer, wondering awe as, the plan completed, he removed the headset. He began a confused panegyric of thanks, but Seaton interrupted him briskly.
‘That’s all right, Radnor, you’d do the same thing for us if things were reversed. Humanity has got to stick together against all the vermin of all the universes. But, say, I’d like to see this mess cleared up, myself – think I’ll stick around and help you build it. You’re worn out, but you won’t rest until the Chlorans are whipped – I can’t blame you for that, I wouldn’t either – and I’m fresh as a daisy. Let’s go!’
In a few hours the complex machine was done. Radnor and Siblin were seated at two of the sets of controls, associate physicists at the others.
‘Since I don’t know any more about their systems of conversion than you do, I can’t tell you in detail what to do,’ Seaton was issuing final instructions. ‘But whatever you do, don’t monkey with their primaries – shorting them might overload their liberators and blow this whole solar system over into the next galaxy. Take time to be dead sure that you’ve got the secondaries of their main converters, and slap a short circuit on as many of them as you can before they cut you off with a zone. You’ll probably find a lot of liberator-converter sets on vessels of that size, but if you can kill the ones that feed the zone generators they’re cold meat.’
‘You are much more familiar with such things than we are,’ Radnor remarked. ‘Would you not like to come along?’
‘I’ll say I would, but I can’t,’ Seaton replied instantly. ‘This isn’t me at all, you know. Um … um … m … I could tag along, of course, but it would be … but let’s see …’
‘Oh, of course,’ Radnor apologized. ‘In working with you so long and so cordially I forgot for the moment that you are not here in person.’
‘Can’t be done, I’m afraid.’ Seaton frowned, still immersed in the hitherto unstudied problem of the re-projection of a projected image. ‘Need over two hundred thousand relays and – um – synchronization – neuro-muscular – not on this outfit. Wonder if it can
be
done at all? Have to look into it some time – but excuse me, Radnor, I was thinking and got lost. Ready to go? I’ll follow you up and be ready to offer advice – not that you’ll need it. Shoot!’
Radnor snapped on the power and he and his aid shot their projections into one of the opposing fortresses, Siblin and his associate going into the other. Through compartment after compartment of the immense structures the as yet invisible projections went, searching for the power rooms. They were not hard to find, extending as they did nearly the full length of the stupendous structures; vaulted caverns filled with linked pairs of mastodontic fabrications, the liberator-converters.
Springing in graceful arcs from heavily insulated ports
in the ends of one machine of each pair were five great bus-bars, which Radnor and Siblin recognized instantly as secondary leads from the converters – the gigantic mechanisms which, taking the raw intra-atomic energy from the liberators, converted it into a form in which it could be controlled and utilized.
Neither Radnor nor Siblin had ever heard of five-phase energy of any kind, but those secondaries were unmistakable. Therefore all four images drove against the fivefold bars their perfectly conducting fields of force. Four converters shrieked wildly, trying to wrench themselves from their foundations; insulation smoked and burst wildly into yellow flame; the stubs of the bars grew white-hot and began to fuse; and in a matter of seconds a full half of each prodigious machine subsided to the floor, a semi-molten, utterly useless mass.
Similarly went the next two in each fortress, and the next – then Radnor’s two projections were cut off sharply as the Chlorans’ impenetrable zone of force went on, and that fortress, all its beams and forces inoperative, floated off into space.
Siblin and his partner were more fortunate. When the amoebus commanding their prey threw in his zone switch nothing happened. Its source of power had already been destroyed, and the two Valeronian images went steadily down the line of converters, in spite of everything the ragingly frantic monstrosities could do to hinder their progress.