Spacehounds of IPC
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Edward Elmer Smith >> Spacehounds of IPC
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They went into the airlock, and Stevens admitted air until their
suits began to collapse. Then, face-plate valves cracked, he sniffed
cautiously, finally opening his helmet wide. Nadia followed suit and
the man laughed as she wrinkled her nose in disgust as two faint, but
unmistakable odors smote her olfactory nerves.
"I never cared particularly for hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide,
either," he assured her, "but they aren't strong enough to hurt us in
the short time we'll be here. Those Titanian chemists know their stuff,
though."
He opened the outer valves slowly, then opened the door and they stepped
down upon the smooth, solid floor, which Stevens examined carefully.
"I thought so, from his story. Solid platinum! This whole planet is
built of platinum, iridium, and noble alloys--the only substances known
that will literally last forever. Believe me, ace of my bosom, I don't
wonder that it cost them lives to build it--with their conditions, I
don't see how they ever got it built at all."
Before them rose an immense, flat-topped cone of metal, upon the top of
which was situated the power plant. Twelve massive pillars supported a
flat roof, but permitted the air to circulate freely throughout the one
great room which housed the machinery. They climbed a flight of stairs,
passed between two pillars, and stared about them. There was no noise,
no motion--there was nothing that _could_ move. Twelve enormous masses
of metallic checkerwork, covered with wide cooling fins, almost filled
the vast hall. From the center of each mass great leads extended out
into a clear space in the middle of the room, there uniting in mid-air
to form one enormous bus-bar. This bar, thicker than a man's body, had
originally curved upward to the base of an immense parabolic structure
of latticed bars. Now, however, it was broken in midspan and the two
ends bent toward the floor. Above their heads, a jagged hole gaped in
the heavy metal of the roof, and a similar hole had been torn in the
floor. The bar had been broken and these holes had been made by some
heavy body, probably a meteorite, falling with terrific velocity.
"This is it, all right," Stevens spoke to distant Barkovis. "Sure
there's nothing on this beam? If it should be hot and I should short
circuit or bridge it with my body, it would be just too bad."
"We have made sure that nothing is connected to it," the Titanian
assured him. "Do you think you can do anything?"
"Absolutely. We've got jacks that'll bend heavier stuff than that, and
after we get it straightened the welding will be easy, but I'll have
to have some metal. Shall I cut a piece off the pavement outside?"
"That will not be necessary. You will find ample stores of space metal
piled at the base of each pillar."
"All x. Now we'll get the jack, Nadia," and they went back to their
vessel, finding that upon Saturn, their combined strength was barely
sufficient to drag the heavy tool along the floor.
"Stand aside, please. We will place it for you," a calm voice sounded in
their ears, and a pale blue tractor beam picked the massive jack lightly
from the floor, and as lightly lifted it to its place beneath the broken
bus-bar and held it there while Stevens piled blocks and plates of
platinum beneath its base.
"Well, here's where I peel down as far as the law allows. This is going
to be real work, girl--no fooling. It'd help a lot if this outfit were
sending out a few thousand kilo-franks instead of standing idle."
"How would that help?"
"It's a heat-engine, you know--works by absorbing heat. The cold air
sinks--I imagine it pretty nearly blows a gale down the side of this
cone when it's working--and hot air rushes in to take its place. I could
use a little cool breeze right now," and Stevens, stripped to the waist,
bent to the lever of the powerful hydraulic jack.
Beads of sweat gathered upon his broad back, uniting to form tiny
rivulets, and the girl became highly concerned about him.
"Let me help you, Steve--I'm pretty husky, too, you know."
"Sure you are, ace, but this is a job for a truck-horse, not a
tenderly-nurtured maiden of the upper classes. You can help, though, by
breaking out that welding outfit and getting it ready while I'm doing
this bending to prepare for the welding."
Under the urge of that mighty jack the ends of the broken bus-bar rose
into place, while far off in space the Titanians clustered about their
visiray screens, watching, in almost unbelieving amazement, the
supernatural being who labored in that reeking inferno of heat and
poisonous vapor--who labored almost naked and entirely unprotected,
refreshing himself from time to time with drafts of molten water!
"All x, Barkovis--that's high, I guess." Stevens flipped perspiration
from his hot forehead with a wet finger and straightened his weary back.
"Now you can put this jack away where we had it. Then you might trundle
me over enough of that spare metal to fill up this hole, and I'll put on
my suit and goggles and practice welding on this floor and the roof, to
get the feel of the metal before I tackle the bar."
The hole in the floor was filled with scrap and soon sparks were flying
wildly as the searing beam of Stevens' welding projector bit viciously
into the stubborn alloy of noble metals; fashioning a smooth, solid
floor where the yawning aperture had been. Then, lifted with his tools
and plates to the roof, the man repaired that hole also.
"Now I know enough about it to do a good job on the bar," he decided,
and brick after brick of alloy was fused into the crack, until only a
smoothly rounded bulge betrayed that a break had ever existed in that
mighty rod of metal.
"Give 'em the signal to draw power, and see if that's all that was the
matter," Stevens instructed, as he relaxed in the grateful coolness of
their control room. "Whew, that was a warm job, Nadia--and this air of
ours does smell good!"
* * * * *
"It was a horrible job, and I'm glad it's done," she declared. "But say,
Steve, that thing looks as little like a power-plant as anything I can
imagine. How does it work? You said that it worked on heat, but I don't
quite see how. But don't draw diagrams and _please_ don't integrate!"
"No ordinary plant such as we use could run for centuries
without attention," he replied. "This is a highly advanced
heat-engine--something like a thermo-couple, you know. This whole thing
is simply the hot end, connected to the cold end on Titan by a beam
instead of wires. When it's working, this metal must cool off something
fierce. That's what the checkerwork and fins are for--so that it can
absorb the maximum amount of heat from the current of hot, moist air
I spoke about. It's a sweet system--we'll have to rig up one between
Tellus and the moon. Or even between the Equator and the Arctic Circle
there'd be enough thermal differential to give us a million kilofranks.
We haven't got the all x signal yet, but it's working--look at it sweat
as it cools down!"
"I'll say it's sweating--the water is simply streaming off it!" In their
plate they saw that moisture was already beginning to condense upon the
heat-absorber: moisture running down the fins in streams and creeping
over the dull metal floor in sluggish sheets; moisture which, turning
into ice in the colder interior of the checkerwork, again became fluid
at the inrush of hot, wet Saturnian air.
"There's the signal--all x, Barkovis? By the way it's condensing water,
it seems to be functioning again."
"Perfect!" came the Titanian's enthusiastic reply, "You two
planet-dwellers have done more in three short hours than the entire
force of Titan could have accomplished in months. You have earned, and
shall receive, the highest...."
"As you were, ace!" Stevens interrupted, embarrassed. "This job was just
like shooting fish down a well, for us. Since you saved our lives, we
owe you a lot yet. We're coming out--straight up!"
The _Forlorn Hope_ shot upward, through mile after mile of steaming fog,
until at last she broke through into the light, clear outer atmosphere.
Stevens located the Titanian space-ship, and the two vessels once more
hurtling together through the ether toward Titan, he turned to his
companion.
"Take the controls, will you, Nadia? Think I'll finish up the tube. I
brought along a piece of platinum from the power plant, and something
that I think is tantalum from Barkovis' description of it. With those
and the fractions we melted out, I think I can make everything we'll
need."
Now that he had comparatively pure metal with which to work, drawing
the leads and filaments was relatively a simple task. Working over
the hot-bench with torch and welding projector, he made short work of
running the leads through the almost plastic glass of the great tube and
of sealing them in place. The plates and grids presented more serious
problems; but they were solved and, long before Titan was reached, the
tube was out in space, supported by a Titanian tractor beam between the
two vessels. Stevens came into the shop, holding a modified McLeod gauge
which he had just taken from the interior of the tube. When it had come
to equilibrium, he read it carefully and yelled.
"Eureka, little fellow! She's down to where I can't read it, even on
this big gauge--so hard that it won't need flashing--harder than any
vacuum I ever got on Tellus, even with a Rodebush-Michalek super-pump!"
"But how about occluded and absorbed gas in the filaments and so on when
they heat up?" demanded Nadia, practically.
"All gone, ace. I out-gassed 'em plenty out there--seven times, almost
to fusion. There isn't enough gas left in the whole thing to make a deep
breath for a microbe."
He took up his welding projector and a beam carried him back to the
tube. There, in the practically absolute vacuum of space, the last
openings in the glass were sealed, and man and great transmitting tube
were wafted lightly back into the Terrestrial cruiser.
Hour after hour mirrored Titanian sphere and crude-fashioned terrestrial
wedge bored serenely on through space, and it was not until Titan loomed
large beneath them that the calm was broken by an insistent call from
Titan to the sphere.
"Barkodar, attention! Barkodar, attention!" screamed from the speakers,
and they heard Barkovis acknowledge the call.
"The Sedlor have broken through and are marching upon Titania. The order
has gone out for immediate mobilization of every unit."
"There's that word 'Sedlor' again--what are they, anyway, Steve?"
demanded Nadia.
"I don't know. I was going to ask him when he sprung it on us first, but
he was pretty busy then and I haven't thought of it since. Something
pretty serious, though--they've jumped their acceleration almost to
Tellurian gravity, and none of them can live through much of that."
"Tellurians?" came the voice of Barkovis from the speaker. "We have
just...."
"All x--we were on your wave and heard it," interrupted Stevens. "We're
with you. What are those Sedlor, anyway? Maybe we can help you dope out
something."
"Perhaps--but whatever you do, do not use your heat-projector. That
would start a conflagration raging over the whole country, and we shall
have enough to do without fighting fire. But it may be that you have
other weapons, of which we are ignorant, and I can use a little time in
explanation before we arrive. The Sedlor are a form of life, something
like your..." he paused, searching through his scanty store of Earthly
knowledge, then went on, doubtfully, "perhaps some thing like your
insects. They developed a sort of intelligence, and because of their
fecundity, adapted themselves to their environment as readily as did
man; and for ages they threatened man's supremacy upon Titan. They
devoured vegetation, crops, animals, and mankind. After a world-wide
campaign, however, they were finally exterminated, save in the
neighborhood of one great volcanic crater, which they so honeycombed
that it is almost impregnable. All around that district we have erected
barriers of force, maintained by a corps of men known as 'Guardians of
the Sedlor.' These barriers extend so far into the ground and so high
into the air that the Sedlor can neither burrow beneath them nor fly
over them. They were being advanced as rapidly as possible, and in a
few more years the insects would have been destroyed completely--but
now they are again at large. They have probably developed an armor or
a natural resistance greater than the Guardians thought possible, so
that when the walls were weakened, they came through in their millions,
underground and undetected. They are now attacking our nearest city--the
one you know, and which you have called Titania."
"What do you use--those high-explosive bombs?"
"The bombs were developed principally for use against them, but proved
worse than useless, for we found that when a Sedlor was blown to pieces,
each piece forthwith developed into a new, complete creature. Our most
efficient weapons are our heat rays--not yours remember--and poison gas.
I must prepare our arms."
"Would our heat-ray actually set them afire, Steve?" Nadia asked, as the
plate went blank.
"I'll say it would. I'll show you what heat means to them--showing
you will be plainer than any amount of explanation," and he shot the
visiray beam down toward the city of Titania. Into a low-lying building
it went, and Nadia saw a Titanian foundry in full operation. Men clad
in asbestos armor were charging, tending, and tapping great electric
furnaces and crucibles; shrinking back and turning their armored heads
away as the hissing, smoking melt crackled into the molds from their
long-handled ladles. Nadia studied the foundry for a moment, interested,
but unimpressed.
"Of course it's hot there--foundries always _are_ hot," she argued.
"Yes, but you haven't got the idea yet." Stevens turned again to the
controls, following the sphere toward what was evidently a line of
battle. "That stuff that they are melting and casting and that is so
hot, is not metal, but _ice!_ Remember that the vital fluid of all life
here, animal and vegetable, corresponding to our water, is probably
more inflammable than gasoline. If they can't work on ice-water without
wearing suits of five-ply asbestos, what would a real heat-ray do to
them? It'd be about like our taking a dive into the sun!"
"_Ice_!" she exclaimed. "Oh of course--but you couldn't really believe
a thing like that without seeing it, could you? Oh, Steve--how utterly
horrible!"
* * * * *
The "Barkodar" had dropped down into a line of sister ships, and had
gone into action in midair against a veritable swarm of foes. Winged
centipedes they were--centipedes fully six feet long, hurling themselves
along the ground and through the air in furious hordes. From the flying
globes emanated pale beams of force, at the touch of which the Sedlor
disappeared in puffs of vapor. Upon the ground huge tractors and trucks,
manned by masked soldiery, mounted mighty reflectors projecting the same
lethal beam. From globes and tanks there sounded a drumming roar and
small capsules broke in thousands among the foe; emitting a red cloud of
gas in which the centipedes shriveled and died. But for each one that
was destroyed two came up from holes in the ground and the battle-line
fell back toward Titania, back toward a long line of derrick-like
structures which were sinking force-rods into the ground in furious
haste.
Stevens flashed on his ultra-violet projector and swung it into the
thickest ranks of the enemy. In the beam many of the monsters died,
but the Terrestrial ray was impotent compared with the weapons of the
Titanians, and Stevens, snapping off the beam with a bitter imprecation,
shot the visiray out toward the bare, black cone of the extinct volcano
and studied it with care.
"Barkovis, I've got a thought!" he snapped into the microphone. "Their
stronghold is in that mountain, and there's millions of them in there
yet, coming out along their tunnels. They've got all the vegetation
eaten away for miles, so there's nothing much left there to spread a
fire if I go to work on that hill, and, I'll probably melt enough water
to put out most of the fires I start. Detail me a couple of ships to
drop your fire-foam bombs on any little blazes that may spread, and I'll
give them so much to worry about at home, that they'll forget all about
Titania."
The _Forlorn Hope_ darted toward the crater, followed closely by two of
the dazzling globes. They circled the mountain until Stevens found a
favorable point of attack--a stupendous vertical cliff of mingled rock
and crystal, upon the base of which he trained his terrific infra-red
projector.
"I'm going to draw a lot of power," he warned the Titanians then. "I'm
giving this gun everything she'll take."
He drove the massive switches in, and as that dull red beam struck the
cliff's base there was made evident the awful effect of a concentrated
beam of real and pure heat upon such an utterly frigid world. Vast
columns of fire roared aloft, helping Stevens, melting and destroying
the very ground as the bodies of the Sedlor in that gigantic ant-heap
burst into flames. Clouds of superheated steam roared upward, condensing
into a hot rain which descended in destructive torrents upon the
fastnesses of the centipedes. As the raging beam ate deeper and deeper
into the base of the cliff, the mountain itself began to disintegrate;
block after gigantic block breaking off and crashing down into the
flaming, boiling, seething cauldron which was the apex of that ravening
beam.
Hour after hour Stevens drove his intolerable weapon into the great
mountain, teeming with Sedlorean life; and hour after hour a group of
Titanian spheres stood by, deluging the surrounding plain with a flood
of heavy fumes, through which the holocaust could not spread for lack of
oxygen. Not until the mountain was gone--not until in its stead there
lay a furiously boiling lake, its flaming surface hundreds of feet below
the level of the plain--did Stevens open his power circuits and point
the deformed prow of the _Forlorn Hope_ toward Titania.
CHAPTER VII
The Return to Ganymede
"Must you you go back to Ganymede?" Barkovis asked, slowly and
thoughtfully. He was sitting upon a crystal bench beside the fountain,
talking with Stevens, who, dressed in his bulging space-suit, stood near
an airlock of the _Forlorn Hope_. "It seems a shame that you should face
again those unknown, monstrous creatures who so inexcusably attacked us
both without provocation."
"I'm not so keen on it myself, but I can't see any other way out of it,"
the Terrestrial replied. "We left a lot of our equipment there, you
know; and even if I should build duplicates here, it wouldn't do us any
good. These ten-nineteens are the most powerful transmitting tubes known
when we left Tellus, but even their fields, dense as they are, can't
hold an ultra-beam together much farther than about six astronomical
units. So you see we can't possibly reach our friends from here with
this tube; and your system of beam transmission won't hold anything
together even that far, and won't work on any wave shorter than Roeser's
Rays. We may run into some more of those little spheres, though, and I
don't like the prospect. I wonder if we couldn't plate a layer of that
mirror of yours upon the _Hope_ and carry along a few of those bombs? By
the way, what is that explosive--or is it something beyond Tellurian
chemistry?"
"Its structure should be clear to you, although you probably could not
prepare it upon Tellus because of your high temperature. It is nothing
but nitrogen--twenty-six atoms of nitrogen combined to form one molecule
of what you would call--N-twenty-six?"
"Wow!" Stevens whistled. "Crystalline, pentavalent nitrogen--no wonder
it's violent!"
"We could, of course, cover your vessel with the mirror, but I am afraid
that it would prove of little value. The plates are so hot that it would
soon volatilize."
"Not necessarily," argued Stevens. "We could live in number one
life-boat, and shut off the heat everywhere else. The life-boats are
insulated from the structure proper, and the inner and outer walls of
the structure are insulated from each other. With only the headquarters
lifeboat warm, the outer wall could be held pretty close to zero
absolute."
"That is true. The bombs, of course, are controlled by radio, and
therefore may be attached to the outer wall of your vessel. We shall be
glad to do these small things for you."
The heaters of the _Forlorn Hope_ were shut off, and as soon as the
outer shell had cooled to Titanian temperature, a corps of mechanics set
to work. A machine very like a concrete mixer was rolled up beside the
steel vessel, and into its capacious maw were dumped boxes and barrels
of dry ingredients and many cans of sparkling liquid. The resultant
paste was pumped upon the steel plating in a sluggish, viscid stream,
which spread out into a thick and uniform coating beneath the flying
rollers of the skilled Titanian workmen. As it hardened, the paste
smoothed magically into the perfect mirror which covered the
space-vessels of the satellite; and a full dozen of the mirror explosive
bombs of this strange people were hung in the racks already provided.
"Once again I must caution you concerning those torpedoes," Barkovis
warned Stevens. "If you use them all, very well, but do not try to take
even one of them into any region where it is very hot, for it will
explode and demolish your vessel. If you do not use them, destroy them
before you descend into the hot atmosphere of Ganymede. The mirror will
volatilize harmlessly at the temperature of melting mercury, but the
torpedoes must be destroyed. Once more, Tellurians, we thank you for
what you have done, and wish you well."
"Thanks a lot for _your_ help--we still owe you something," replied
Stevens. "If either of your power-plants go sour on you again, or if
you need any more built, be sure to let us know--you can come close
enough to the inner planets now on your own beam to talk to us on the
ultra-communicator. We'll be glad to help you any way we can--and we may
call on you for help again. Goodbye, Barkovis--goodbye, all Titania!"
He made his way through the bitterly cold shop into the control-room of
their lifeboat, and while he was divesting himself of his heavy suit,
Nadia lifted the _Forlorn Hope_ into the blue-green sky of Titan,
accompanied by an escort of the mirrored globes. Well clear of the
atmosphere of the satellite, the terrestrial cruiser shot forward at
normal acceleration, while the Titanian vessels halted and wove a
pattern of blue and golden rays in salute to the departing guests.
"Well, Nadia, we're off--on a long trek, too."
"Said Wun Long Hop, the Chinese pee-lo," Nadia agreed. "Sure
everything's all x, big boy?"
"To nineteen decimals," he declared. "You couldn't squeeze another frank
into our accumulators with a proof-bar, and since they're sending us all
the power we want to draw, we won't need to touch our batteries or tap
our own beam until we're almost to Jupiter. To cap the climax, what it
takes to make big medicine on those spherical friends of ours, we've
got. We're not sitting on top of the world, ace--we've perched exactly
at the apex of the entire universe!"
"How long is it going to take?"
"Don't know. Haven't figured it yet, but it'll be _beaucoup_ days," and
the two wanderers from far-distant Earth settled down to the routine of
a long and uneventful journey.
They gave Saturn and his spectacular rings a wide berth and sped on,
with ever-increasing velocity. Past the outer satellites, on and on,
the good ship _Forlorn Hope_ flew into the black-and-brilliant depths of
interplanetary space. Saturn was an ever-diminishing disk beneath them:
above them was Jupiter's thin crescent, growing ever larger and more
bright, and the Monarch of the Solar System, remaining almost stationary
day after day, increasing steadily in apparent diameter and in
brilliance.
* * * * *
Although the voyage from Titan to Ganymede was long, it was not
monotonous, for there was much work to be done in the designing and
fabrication of the various units which were to comprise the ultra-radio
transmitting station. In the various compartments of the _Forlorn Hope_
there were sundry small motors, blowers, coils, condensers, force-field
generators, and other items which Stevens could use with little or no
alteration; but for the most part he had to build everything himself.
Thus it was that time passed quickly; so quickly that Jupiter loomed
large and the Saturnian beam of power began to attenuate almost before
the Terrestrials realized that their journey was drawing to an end.
"Our beam's falling apart fast," Stevens read his meters carefully, then
swung his communicator beam toward Jupiter. "We aren't getting quite
enough power to hold our acceleration at normal--think I'll cut now,
while we're still drawing enough to let the Titanians know we're off
their beam. We've got lots of power of our own now; and we're getting
pretty close to enemy territory, so they may locate that heavy beam.
Have you found Ganymede yet?"
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