Spacehounds of IPC

E >> Edward Elmer Smith >> Spacehounds of IPC

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CHAPTER IX

The _Sirius_ Takes a Hand

The _Sirius_ loafed along through the ether at normal acceleration
just outside the orbit of Mars and a million miles north of the
ecliptic plane. In the control room, which had been transformed into a
bewilderingly complete laboratory, Norman Brandon strode up and down,
waving his arms, his unruly black hair on end, addressing savagely his
friend and fellow-scientist, who sat unmoved and at ease.

"For cat's sake, Quince, let's get busy! They're outside somewhere,
since the police have scoured every cubic kilometer within range of
the power plants without finding a trace of them. We've got the power
question licked right now--with these fields we can draw sixty thousand
kilofranks from cosmic radiation, which is lots more than we'll ever
need. We haven't drawn a frank from a plant in a month, and we've had to
cut our field strength down to a whisper to keep from burning out our
accumulators. We can hunt as far as Neptune easy--we can go to Alpha
Centauri if we want to. This thing of piffling and monkeying around
here's pulling my cork, and for the ten thousand four hundred and sixty
seventh time I say _let's prowl_ and _prowl now_! In fact, I'm getting
so sick of sticking around doing nothing that I'm going out anyway, if
I have to go alone in a lifeboat!"

[Illustration: _The flying fortresses were finally wrenched from the
ground and hurled upward._]

Impetuous and violent as Brandon had always been, never before had he
gone to such lengths as to suggest a disruption of the partnership;
and Westfall, knowing that Brandon, in his most violent moments, never
threatened idly, thought long before he replied.

"You will not go alone, of course. If you insist upon going without
further preparation I will go too, no matter how foolish I think such
a course to be. We have power, it is true, but in all other respects we
are in no condition to meet an opponent having command of such resources
as must certainly be possessed by those who attacked the _Arcturus_.
Our detectors are inefficient, our system of vision is crude, to say
the least, and many other things are still in the experimental stage.
We have not the slightest idea whom or what we may encounter. It is all
too probable that we would simply be throwing away uselessly the lives of
more good men. It is also foolish from a general viewpoint, for as you
already know, we and our assistants happen to be in better position to
study these things than is any one else at the present time. However,
I will compromise with you. We can learn much in a month if you will
really try, instead of wasting time in fuming around the ship and
indulging in these idiotic tantrums. If you will buckle down and really
study the problems confronting us for thirty days, we will set out at
the end of that time, ready or not."

"All x. I hate to do it, but we've been together too long to bust it
up now," and Brandon turned toward his bench. Scarcely had he reached
it when a series of dots and dashes roared from an amplifier. Both men
leaped for the receiver which had so unexpectedly burst into sound,
reaching it just as it relapsed into silence, and from the tape of the
recorder they read the brief message.

"...h four seven ganymede point oh four seve...."

"That's Steve!" yelled Brandon. "Nobody else could build an
ultra-sender! Direction?"

"No need of calculating distance or direction. Ganymede is the third
major satellite of Jupiter."

"Sure. Of course, Quince--never thought of that. Dope enough--point oh
four seven."

As Stevens had told Nadia, the message was completely informing to those
for whom it was intended, and soon Brandon's answer was flying toward
the distant satellite. He then started to call the officers of the
Inter-planetary Corporation, but was restrained by his conservative
friend.

"It would be better to wait a while, Norman. In a few hours we will know
what to tell them."

At high acceleration the _Sirius_ drove toward the Jupiter-Earth-North
plane, and Brandon calculated from his own bearings and from the current
issue of the "Ephemeris" the time at which Stevens' reply should be
received. Two minutes before that time he was pacing up and down in
front of the ultra-receiver, and fifteen seconds after it he snapped:

"Come on, Perce, get busy! Shake a leg!"

"Oh, come, Norman; give him a few minutes' leeway, at least," said
Westfall, with amused tolerance. "Even if your calculations are that
accurate--which of course they are," he added hastily at a stormy glance
from hot black eyes, "since we received that message direct, instead of
through one of our relay stations, Stevens probably has been throwing
it around for hours or perhaps days, looking for us, and the shock of
hearing from us at last might well have put him out of control for a
minute or two."

The carrier wave hissed into the receiver, forestalling Brandon's fiery
reply, followed closely by the code signals they had been expecting. As
soon as the story had been told, and while Brandon was absorbed in the
scientific addenda of Stevens, Westfall thoughtfully called up Newton,
Nadia's father.

"Nadia is alive, free, safe, well, and happy," he shot out without
preliminary or greeting, as soon as the now lined features of the
director showed upon the communicator screen, and the careworn
countenance smoothed magically into the keen face of the fighting Newton
of old, as Westfall recounted rapidly the tale of the castaways.

"They apparently have not suffered in any way," he concluded. "All that
Stevens wants is some cigarettes, and your daughter's needs, while
somewhat more numerous than his, seem to be only clothes, powder,
perfume, and candy. Therefore we need not worry about them. The fate of
the others is still unknown, but there seems to be a slight possibility
that some of them may yet be rescued. You may release as much or as
little of this story as may seem desirable. Stevens is still sending
data of a highly technical nature. We shall arrive there at 21:32 next
Tuesday."

* * * * *

In due time the message from Ganymede ended and Brandon, with many pages
of his notebook crammed with figures and equations, snapped off the
power of the receiver and turned to his bench. Gone was the storming,
impetuous rebel; his body was ruled solely by the precise and insatiable
brain of the research scientist.

"He's great, that kid Perce! When I see him, I'm going to kiss him
on both cheeks. He's got enough dope on them to hang them higher than
Franklin's kite, and we'll nail those jaspers to the cross or I'm a
polyp! He's crazier than a loon in most of his hunches, but he's filled
four of our biggest gaps. There is such a thing, as a ray-screen, you
kill-joy, and there are also lifting or tractor rays--two things I've
been trying to dope out and that you've been giving me the Bronx cheer
on. The Titanians have had a tractor ray for ages--he sent me complete
dope on it--and the Jovians have got them both. We'll have them in three
days, and it ought to be fairly simple to dope out the opposite of a
tractor, too--a pusher or presser beam. Say, round up the gang, will
you, while I'm licking some of this stuff into shape for you to tear
apart? Where are Venus and Mars? Um ... m ... m. Tell Alcantro and
Fedanzo to come over here pronto--give 'em a special if necessary. We'll
pick up Dol Kenor and Pyraz Amonar on the way--no, get them to Tellus,
too. Then we'll get action quicker. Those four are all I want--get
anybody else you want to come along."

His hands playing over the keys of an enormous calculating machine,
Brandon was instantly immersed in a profound mathematico-physical
problem; deaf and blind to everything about him. Westfall, knowing well
that far-reaching results would follow Brandon's characteristic attack,
sat down at the controls of the communicator. He first called Mars, the
home planet of Alcantro and Fedanzo, the foremost force-field experts of
three planets; and was assured in no uncertain terms that those rulers
of rays were ready and anxious to follow wherever Brandon and Westfall
might lead. Thence to Venus, where Dol Kenor, the electrical wizard,
and Pyraz Amonar, the master of mechanism, also readily agreed to
accompany the expedition. He then called the General-in-Chief of the
Interplanetary Police, requesting a detail of two hundred picked men
for the hazardous venture. These most important calls out of the way,
he was busy for over an hour giving long-distance instructions so that
everything would be in readiness for the servicing of the immense
space-cruiser the following Tuesday night.

Having guarded against everything his cautious and far-seeing mind
could envisage, he went over to Brandon's desk and sat down, smoking
contemplatively until the idea had been roughed out in mathematical
terms.

"Here's the rough draft of the ray screen, Quince. We generate a blanket
frequency, impressed upon the ultra carrier wave. That's old stuff, of
course. Here's the novelty, in equation 59. With two fields of force,
set up from data 27 to 43, it will be possible actually to project a
pure force of such a nature that it will react to de-heterodyne the
blanketing frequency at any predetermined distance. That, of course,
sets up a barrier against any frequency of the blanketed band.
Incidentally, an extension of the same idea will enable us to see
anywhere we want to look--calculate a retransmitting field."

"One thing at a time, please. That screen may be possible, but
those fields will never generate it. Look at datum 31, in which your
assumptions are unsound. In order to make any solution at all possible
you have assumed cosine squared theta negligible. Mathematically, it is
of course vanishingly small compared to the first power of the cosine,
but fields of that type must be _exact_, and your neglect of the square
is indefensible. Since you cannot integrate with the squared term in
place, your whole solution fails."

"Not necessarily. We'll go back to 29, and put in sine squared theta
minus one equal to z sub four. That gives us a coversed sine in 30,
and then we integrate...."

Thus the argument raged, and all the assistants whose work was not
too pressing gathered around unobtrusively, for it was from just such
fierce discussions as this that the ultra-radio and other epoch-making
discoveries had come into being. Yard after yard of calculator paper
was filled with equations and computations. Weirdly shaped curves
were drawn, with arguments at every point--arguments hot and violent
from Brandon, from Westfall cold and precise, backed by lightning
calculations and with facts and diagrams culled from the many abstruse
works of reference, which by this time literally covered the bench and
overflowed upon the floor.

It was in this work that the strikingly different temperaments and
abilities of the two scientists were revealed. Brandon never stood
still, but walked around jerkily, chewing savagely the stem of an
ancient and reeking pipe, gesticulating vigorously, the while his keen
and agile mind was finding a way over, around, or through the apparently
insuperable obstacles which beset their path; by means of mathematical
and physical improvisations, which no one not inspired by sheer genius
could have evolved. Westfall, seated quietly at the calculator,
mercilessly shredded Brandon's theories to ribbons, pointing out their
many flaws with his cold, incisive reasoning and with rapid calculations
of the many factors involved. Then Brandon would find a remedy for each
weakness in turn and, when Westfall could no longer find a single flaw
in the structure, they would toss the completed problem upon a table
and attack the next one with unabated zeal. Brandon, in his light
remark that the two made one real scientist, had far understated
the case--those two brains, each so powerful and each so perfectly
complementing the other, comprised the master-scientist who was to
revolutionize science completely in a few short years.

To such good purpose did they labor that the calculations were
practically finished by the time they reached the earth. There the ship
was serviced with a celerity that spoke volumes for the importance of
her mission--even the _Aldebaran_, the dazzlingly gold-plated queen of
the fleet, waited unattended and disregarded on minus time while the
entire force of the Interplanetary Corporation concentrated upon the
battle-scarred old hulk of the _Sirius_. Brandon was surprised when he
saw the two companies of police, but characteristically accepted without
question the wisdom of any decision of his friend, and cordially greeted
Inspector-General Crowninshield, only a year or so older than himself,
but already in charge of a Division.

"Keen-looking bunch, Crown. Lot of different outfits--volunteers for
special duty from the whole Tellurian force?"

"Yes. Everybody wanted to go, and there threatened to be trouble over
the selection, so we picked the highest ratings from the whole Service.
If there ever was such a thing as a picked force, we shall have it
with us."

"What d'you mean, 'us'? You aren't going, are you?"

"Try to keep me from it! The names of all five of us I-G's were put in
a hat, and I was lucky."

"Well, you may come in handy, at that," Brandon conceded. "And here's
the big boss himself. Hi, Chief!"

"Ho, Brandon! Ho, Westfall!" Newton, Chairman of the Board of Directors
of the IPC, shook hands with the two scientists. "Your Martians and
Venerians are in Lounge Fifteen. I suppose that you have a lot of things
to thrash out, so you may as well start now. Everything is being
attended to--I'll take charge now."

"You going along, too?" asked Brandon.

"Going along, _too_? I'm _running_ this cruise!" Newton declared. "I may
take advice from you on some things and from Crowninshield on others,
but I am in charge!"

"All x--it's a relief, at that," and Brandon and Westfall went to join
their fellow-scientists in the designated room of the space-cruiser.

* * * * *

What a contrast was there as the representatives of three worlds
met! All six men were of the same original stock or of a similar
evolution--science has not, even yet, decided the question definitely.
Their minds were very much alike, but their respective environments had
so variantly developed their bodily structures that to outward seeming
they had but little in common.

Through countless thousands of generations the Martians had become
acclimated to a planet having little air, less water, and characterized
by abrupt transitions from searing heat to bitter cold: from
blinding light to almost impenetrable darkness. Eight feet tall
and correspondingly massive, they could barely stand against the
gravitational force of the Earth, almost three times as great as that
of Mars, but the two Martian scientists struggled to their feet as the
Terrestrials entered.

"As you were, fellows--lie down again and take it easy." Brandon
suggested in the common Interplanetarian tongue. "We'll be away from
here very soon, then we can ease off."

"We greet our friends standing as long as we can stand," and, towering
a full two feet above Brandon's own six-feet-two, Alcantro and Fedanzo
in turn engulfed his comparatively tiny hand in a thick-shelled paw
and lifted briefly the inner lids of quadruply-shielded eyes. For the
Martian skin is not like ours. It is of incredible thickness; dry,
pliable, rubbery, and utterly without sensation: heavily lined with
fat and filled throughout its volume with tiny air-cells which make
it an almost perfect non-conductor of heat and which prevent absolutely
the evaporation of the precious moisture of the body. For the same
reasons their huge and cat-like eyes are never exposed, but look
through sealed, clear windows of membrane, over which may be drawn at
will one or all of four pairs of lids--lids transparent, insensible,
non-freezable, air-spaced insulators. Even the air they exhale carries
from their bodies a minimum of the all-important heat and moisture,
for the passages of their nostrils do not lead directly to the lungs,
as do ours. They are merely the intakes for a tortuous system of
tubes comprising a veritable heat-exchanger, so that the air finally
expelled is in almost perfect equilibrium with the incoming supply
in temperature and in moisture content. A grayish tan in color, naked
and hairless--though now, out of deference to Terrestrial conventions,
wearing light robes of silk--indifferent alike to any extreme of heat or
cold, light or darkness: such were the two forbidding beings who arose
to greet their Terrestrial friends, then again reclined.

"I suppose that you have been given to drink?" Westfall made sure that
they had been tendered the highest hospitality of Mars.

"We have drunk full deeply, thanks; and it was not really necessary,
for we drank scarcely three weeks ago."

Brandon and Westfall turned then and greeted the two Venerians,
as different from the Martians as they were from the Terrestrials.
Of earthly stature, form, and strength, yet each was encased in a
space-suit stretched like a drum-head, and would live therein or in
the special Venerian rooms of the vessel as long as the journey should
endure. For the atmosphere of Venus is more than twice as dense as ours,
is practically saturated with water-vapor, carries an extremely high
concentration of carbon dioxide, and in their suits and rooms is held
at a temperature of one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. The lenses
of their helmets were of heavy, yellowish-red composition, protecting
their dead-white skins and red eyes from all actinic rays--for the
Venerian lives upon the bottom of an everlasting sea of fog and his
thin epidermis, utterly without pigmentation, burns and blisters as
frightfully at the least exposure to actinic light as does ours at
the touch of a red-hot iron.

Out in space at last, cruising idly with the acceleration set at a point
bearable for the Martians, Westfall called the meeting to order and
outlined the situation facing them. Brandon then handed around folios of
papers, upon which the Venerians turned the invisible infra-red beams of
the illuminators upon their helmets, thus flooding them with the "light"
to which their retinas were most responsive.

"Here's the data," Brandon began. "As you see from Sheet 1, we can
already draw any amount of power we shall need from cosmic radiation
alone...."

"Perpetual motion--ridiculous!" snapped from the sending disk upon the
helmet of the master of mechanism.

"Not at all, Amonar," put in his fellow Venerian, "any more than
a turbo-generator at the foot of a waterfall is perpetual motion.
Those radiations originate we know not where, probably as a result
of intra-atomic reactions. The fields of force of our hosts merely
intercept these radiations, as a water-driven turbine intercepts the
water. We merely use a portion of their energy before permitting
them to go on, to we know not what end. Truly you have made a notable
achievement in science, Tellurian friends, and we congratulate you upon
its accomplishment. Please proceed."

"Upon the following sheets are described the forces employed by the
Jovians, as we shall call them until we find out who or what they really
are. We will discuss these forces later. For each force we have already
calculated a screen, and we have also calculated various other forces of
our own, with which we hope to arm ourselves before we reach Ganymede.
The problems facing us are complex, since there are some nine thousand
forcebands of the order in which we are working, each differing from all
the others as much as torque differs from tension, or as much as red
differs from green. Therefore we have appealed to you for help, knowing
that we could do but little alone. Alcantro and Fedanzo will supervise
the construction of the generators of the various fields from these
calculations. Dol Kenor will correlate power and electricity to and
with the fields. Westfall and I will help work out the theoretical
difficulties as they arise. Pyraz Amonar, who can devise and build a
machine to perform any conceivable mechanical task, will help us all
in the many mechanical difficulties we shall certainly encounter.
Discussion of any point is now in order."

* * * * *

Step by step and equation after equation the calculations and plans
were gone over, until every detail was clear in each mind. Then the men
bent to their tasks; behind them not only the extraordinarily complete
facilities of that gigantic workshop which was the _Sirius_; but also
the full power of the detachment of police--the very cream of the young
manhood of the planet. Week after toilsome week the unremitting labor
went on, and little by little the massive cruiser of the void became
endowed with an offensive and defensive armament incredible. An armament
conceived in the fertile and daring brain of a sheer genius, guided only
by the knowledge that such things were already in existence somewhere;
reduced to working theory by a precise, mathematical logician;
translated into fields of force by the greatest known experts; powered
by the indefatigable efforts of an electrical wizard; made possible by
the artful mechanical devices of the greatest inventor that three worlds
had ever known! Thus it was that they approached Ganymede, ready, with
blanketing screens full out, save for one narrow working band, and
with a keen-eyed observer at every plate. When even the hyper-critical
Westfall was convinced that their preparations were as complete as they
could be made with the limited information at hand, Brandon directed a
beam upon the satellite and tapped off a brief message:

"stevens ganymede will arrive in about ten hours direct carrier beam
toward sun we can detect it and will follow it to wherever you are
sirius."

"ipv sirius," came the reply, "everything here, all x glad to see you
thanks newton and stevens."

Brandon, at the controls, scanning his screens narrowly, dropped the
vessel down to within a mile or two of the point of origin of Stevens'
carrier beam without incident; then spoke to Westfall, at his side, with
a grin.

"Nice layout the kid's got down there, Quince. It's too bad--don't look
like we're going to get any action for our money a-tall. 'Sa shame,
too--what's the use of wasting it, now that we've got it all made?"

"We are not done yet," cautioned Westfall, and even as he spoke an alarm
bell burst into strident clamor--one of their far-flung detector screens
was telling the world that it had encountered a dangerous frequency.
The new ultra-lights flared instantly along the line automatically laid
down by the detector, and upon the closely ruled micrometer screen of
Brandon's desk there glowed in natural color the image of a globular
space-ship, approaching them with terrific speed.

"Men all stationed, of course, Crown?"

"Stationed and ready." Crowninshield, phones at his ears and microphone
at his lips, was staring intently into his own plate.

"Kinda think I'll do most of it from here, but you can't always tell. If
they get inside my guard you all know what to do."

"All x."

Expecting another such hollow victory as the other Hexan vessel had won
over the defenseless _Arcturus_, the small stranger flashed nearer and
nearer that huge and featureless football of armor steel. Within range,
she launched her flaming plane of energy, but this time that Jovian
sheet of force did not encounter unprotected and non-resisting steel.
Upon the outer ray-screen, flaming white into incandescent defense,
the furious bolt spent itself, and in the instant of the launching of
the searing blade of flame, Brandon had gone into action. Switch after
switch drove home, and one after another those frightful fields of
force, those products of the mightiest minds of three planets, were
hurled out against the tiny Jovian sphere. Driven as they were by the
millions upon millions of horsepower stored in the accumulators of the
_Sirius_ they formed a coruscating spherical shell of intolerable energy
all around the enemy vessel, but even their prodigious force was held
at bay by the powerful defensive screens of the smaller space-ship.
But attack the Jovian could not, every resource at her command being
necessary to fend off the terrific counter-attack of her intended prey,
and she turned in flight. Small and agile as she was, the enormous
mass of the _Sirius_ precluded any possibility of maneuvering with
the Jovian, but Brandon had no intention of maneuvering. Rapid as
the motions of the stranger were and frantic as was her dodging, the
terrific forces of the tractor beams of the Interplanetary Vessel
held her in an unbreakable grip, and although she dragged the massive
_Sirius_ hither and thither, she could not escape.

"Hm ... m ... m," mused Brandon. "We seem to be getting nowhere fast.
How much power we using, Mac, and how much have we got coming in?"

"Output eighty-five thousand kilofranks," replied MacDonald, the first
assistant. "Intake forty-nine thousand."

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