Spacehounds of IPC

E >> Edward Elmer Smith >> Spacehounds of IPC

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"Well, you've seen it, Miss Newton," Stevens said regretfully, as he
led her toward the captain's office. "The lower half is full of heavy
stuff--accumulators, machinery, driving projectors, and such junk, so
that the center of gravity is below the center of action of the driving
projectors. That makes stable flight possible. It's all more or less
like what we've just seen, and I don't suppose you want to miss the
dance--anyway, a lot of people want to dance with you."

"Wouldn't you just as soon show me through the lower half as dance?"

"Rather, lots!"

"So would I. I can dance any time, and I want to see everything.
Let's go!"

Down they went, past battery after battery of accumulators; climbing
over and around the ever-increasing number of huge steel girders and
bracers; through mazes of heavily insulated wiring and conduits; past
mass after mass of automatic machinery which Stevens explained to his
eager listener. They inspected one of the great driving projectors,
which, built rigidly parallel to the axis of the ship and held immovably
in place by enormous trusses of steel, revealed neither to the eye nor
to the ear any sign of the terrific force it was exerting. Still lower
they went, until the girl had been shown everything, even down to the
bottom ultra-lights and stern braces.

"Tired?" Stevens asked, as the inspection was completed.

"Not very. It's been quite a climb, but I've had a wonderful time."

"So have I," he declared, positively. "I know what--we'll crawl up into
one of these stern lifeboats and make us a cup of coffee before we climb
back. With me?"

"'Way ahead of you!" Nadia accepted the invitation enthusiastically,
and they made their way to the nearest of the miniature space-cruisers.
Here, although no emergency had been encountered in all the four years
of the vessel's life, they found everything in readiness, and the two
soon had prepared and eaten a hearty luncheon.

"Well, I can't think of any more excuses for monopolizing you, Miss
Newton, so I suppose I'll have to take you back. Believe me, I've
enjoyed this more than you can realize--I've...."

He broke off and listened, every nerve taut. "What was that?" he
exclaimed.

"What was what? I didn't hear anything?"

"Something screwy somewhere! I felt a vibration, and anything that'd
make this mountain of steel even quiver must have given us one
gosh-awful nudge. There's another!"

The girl, painfully tense, felt only a barely perceptible tremor, but
the computer, knowing far better than she the inconceivable strength and
mass of that enormous structure of solidly braced hardened steel, sprang
into action. Leaping to the small dirigible look-out plate, he turned on
the power and swung it upward.

* * * * *

"Great suffering snakes!" he ejaculated, then stood mute, for the
plate revealed a terrible sight. The entire nose of the gigantic craft
had been sheared off in two immense slices as though clipped off by a
gigantic sword, and even as they stared, fascinated, at the sight, the
severed slices were drifting slowly away. Swinging the view along the
plane of cleavage, Stevens made out a relatively tiny ball of metal,
only fifty feet or so in diameter, at a distance of perhaps a mile.
From this ball there shot a blinding plane of light, and the _Arcturus_
fell apart at the midsection, the lower half separating clean from
the upper portion, which held the passengers. Leaving the upper half
intact, the attacker began slicing the lower, driving half into thin,
disk-shaped sections. As that incandescent plane of destruction made
its first flashing cut through the body of the _Arcturus_, accompanied
by an additional pyrotechnic display of severed and short-circuited
high-tension leads, Stevens and Nadia suddenly found themselves floating
weightless in the air of the room. Still gripping the controls of the
look-out plate, Stevens caught the white-faced girl with one hand, drew
her down beside him, and held her motionless while his keen mind flashed
over all the possibilities of the situation and planned his course
of action.

"They're apparently slicing us pretty evenly, and by the looks of
things, one cut is coming right about here," he explained rapidly, as
he found a flashlight and drew his companion through the door and along
a narrow passage. Soon he opened another door and led her into a tiny
compartment so low that they could not stand upright--a mere cubicle of
steel. Carefully closing the door, he fingered dials upon each of the
walls of the cell, then folded himself up into a comfortable position,
instructed Nadia to do the same, and snapped off the light.

"Please leave it on," the shaken girl asked. "It's so ghastly!"

"We'd better save it, Nadia," he advised, pressing her arm reassuringly,
"it's the only light we've got, and we may need it worse later on--its
life is limited, you know."

"Later on? Do you think we'll need anything--later on?"

"Sure! Of course they may get us, Nadia, but this little tertiary
air-break is a mighty small target for them to hit. And if they miss us,
as I think they will, there's a larger room opening off each wall of
this one--at least one of which will certainly be left intact. From any
one of those rooms we can reach a life-boat. Of course, it's a little
too much to expect that any one of the life-boats will be left whole,
but they're bulkheaded, too, you know, so that we can be sure of finding
something able to navigate--providing we can make our get-away. Believe
me, ace, I'm sure glad we're aboard the old _Arcturus_ right now, with
all her safety-devices, instead of on one of the modern liners. We'd be
sunk right."

"I felt sunk enough for a minute--I'm feeling better now, though, since
you are taking it so calmly."

"Sure--why not? A man's not dead until his heart stops beating, you
know--our turn'll come next, when they let up a little."

"But suppose they change the width of their slices, and hit this cubby,
small as it is?"

"It'd be just too bad," he shrugged. "In that case, we'd never know
what hit us, so it's no good worrying about it. But say, we might do
something at that, if they didn't hit us square. I can move fairly fast,
and might be able to get a door open before the loss of pressure seals
it. We'll light the flash ... here, you hold it, so that I can have both
hands free. Put both arms around me, just under the arms, and stick to
me like a porous plaster, because if I have to move at all, I'll have
to jump like chain lightning. Shine the beam right over there, so it'll
reflect and light up all the dials at once. There ... hold on tight!
Here they come!"

As he spoke, a jarring shudder shook one side of their hiding-place,
then, a moment later, the phenomenon was repeated, but with much less
force, upon the other side. Stevens sighed with relief, took the light,
and extinguished it.

"Missed us clean!" he exulted. "Now, if they don't find us, we're all
set."

"How can they possibly find us? I seem to be always worried about the
wrong things, but I should think that their finding us would be the
least of our troubles."

"Don't judge their vision system by ours--they've got everything,
apparently. However, their apparatus may not be delicate enough to spot
us in a space this small when their projectors flash through it, as they
probably will. Then, too, there's a couple of other big items in our
favor--nobody else is in the entire lower half, since all this machinery
down here is either automatic or else controlled from up above, so they
won't be expecting to see anybody when they get down this far; and we
aren't at all conspicuous. We're both dressed in gray--your clothes in
particular are almost exactly the color of this armor-plate--so
altogether we stand a good chance of being missed."

"What shall we do now?"

"Nothing whatever--wish we could sleep for a couple of hours, but of
course there's no hope of that. Stretch out here, like that--you can't
rest folded up like an accordion--and I'll lie down diagonally across
the room. There's just room for me that way. That's one advantage of
weightlessness--you can lie down standing on your head, and go to sleep
and like it. But I forgot--you've never been weightless before, have
you? Does it make you sick?"

"Not so much, now, except that I feel awfully weird inside. I was
horribly dizzy and nauseated at first, but it's going away."

* * * * *

"That's good--it makes lots of people pretty sick. In fact, some folks
get awfully sick and can't seem to get used to it at all. It's the
canals in the inner ear that do most of it, you know. However, if you're
as well as that already, you'll be a regular spacehound in half an hour.
I've been weightless for weeks at a stretch, out in the _Sirius_, and
now I've got so I really like it. Here, we'd better keep in touch."
He found her hand and tucked it under his arm. "Stabilize our positions
more, besides keeping us from getting too lonesome, here in the dark,"
he concluded, in a matter-of-fact voice.

"Thanks for saying 'us'--but you would, wouldn't you?" and a wave of
admiration went through her for the real and chivalrous manhood of the
man with whom she had been forced by circumstances to cast her lot.
"How long must we stay here?"

"As long as the air lasts, and I'd like to stay here longer than that.
We don't want to move around any more than we absolutely have to until
their rays are off of us, and we have no way of knowing how long that
will be. Also, we'd better keep still. I don't know what kind of an
audio system they've got, but there's no use taking unnecessary
chances."

"All x--I'm an oyster's little sister," and for many minutes the
two remained motionless and silent. Now and then Nadia twitched and
started at some vague real or imaginary sound--now and then her fingers
tightened upon his biceps--and he pressed her hand with his great arm in
reassurance and understanding. Once a wall of their cell resounded under
the impact of a fierce blow and Stevens instantly threw his arm around
the girl, twisting himself between her and the threatened wall, ready
for any emergency. But nothing more happened; the door remained closed,
the cell stayed bottle-tight, and time wore slowly on. All too soon the
unmistakable symptoms of breathing an unfit atmosphere made themselves
apparent and Stevens, after testing each of the doors, drew the girl
into a larger room, where they breathed deeply of the fresh, cool air.

"How did you know that this room was whole?" asked Nadia. "We might have
stepped out into space, mightn't we?"

"No; if this room had lost its tightness, the door wouldn't have opened.
They won't open if there's a difference of one kilogram pressure on the
two sides. That's how I knew that the room we were in at first was cut
in two--the door into that air-break wouldn't move."

"What comes next?"

"I don't know exactly what to do--we'd better hold a little council of
war. They may have gone..." Stevens broke off as the structure began
to move, and they settled down upon what had been one of the side-walls.
Greater and greater became the acceleration, until their apparent weight
was almost as much as it would have been upon the Earth, at which point
it became constant. "... but they haven't," he continued the interrupted
sentence. "This seems to be a capture and seizure, as well as an attack,
so we'll have to take the risk of looking at them. Besides, it's getting
cold in here. One or two of the adjoining cells have apparently been
ruptured and we're radiating our heat out into space, so we'll have to
get into a life-boat or freeze. I'll go pick out the best one. Wonder
if I'd better take you with me, or hide you and come back after you?"

"Don't worry about that--I'm coming with you," Nadia declared, positively.

"Just as well, probably," he assented, and they set out. A thorough
exploration of all the tight connecting cells revealed that not a
lifeboat within their reach remained intact, but that habitable and
navigable portions of three such craft were available. Selecting the
most completely equipped of these, they took up their residence therein
by entering it and closing the massive insulating door. Stevens
disconnected all the lights save one, and so shielded that one before
turning it on that it merely lightened the utter darkness into a
semi-permeable gloom. He then stepped up to the lookout plate, and with
his hand upon the control, pondered long the possible consequences of
what he wished to do.

"What harm would it do to take just a little peek?"

"I don't know--that's the dickens of it. Maybe none, and then again,
maybe a lot. You see, we don't know who or what we are up against. The
only thing we know is that they've got us beat a hundred ways, and we've
got to act accordingly. We've got to chance it sometime, though, if we
can ever get away, so we might as well do it now. I'll put it on very
short range first, and see what we can see. By the small number of cells
we've got here I'm afraid they've split us up lengthwise, too--so that
instead of having a whole slice of the old watermelon to live in, we've
got only about a sixth of one--shaped about like a piece of restaurant
pie. One thing I can do, though. I'll turn on the communicator receiver
and put it on full coverage--maybe we can hear something useful."

Putting a little power upon the visiray plate, he moved the point of
projection a short distance from their hiding-place, so that the plate
showed a view of the wreckage. The upper half of the vessel was still
intact, the lower half a jumble of sharply-cut fragments. From each of
the larger pieces a brilliant ray of tangible force stretched outward.
Suddenly their receiver sounded behind them, as the high-powered
transmitter in the telegraph room tried to notify headquarters of
their plight.

"_Arcturus_ attacked and cut up being taken tow...."

Rapidly as the message was uttered the transmitter died with a rattle
in the middle of a word, and Nadia looked at Stevens with foreboding in
her eyes.

"They've got something, that's one thing sure, to be able to neutralize
our communicator beams that way," he admitted. "Not so good--we'll have
to play this close to our vests, girl!"

"Are you just trying to cheer me up, or do you really think we have a
chance?" she demanded. "I want to know just where we stand."

"I'm coming clean with you, no kidding. If we can get away, we'll be all
x, because I'll bet a farm that by this time Brandon's got everything
those birds have, and maybe more. They beat us to it, that's all. I'm
kind of afraid, though, that getting away isn't going to be quite as
simple as shooting fish down a well."

* * * * *

Far ahead of them a port opened, a lifeboat shot out at its full power,
and again their receiver tried to burst into sound, but it was a vain
attempt. The sound died before one complete word could be uttered, and
the lifeboat, its power completely neutralized by the rays of the tiny
craft of the enemy, floated gently back toward the mass of its parent
and accompanied it in its headlong flight. Several more lifeboats made
the attempt, as the courageous officers of the _Arcturus_, some of
whom had apparently succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the captors,
launched the little shells from various ports; but as each boat issued,
its power was neutralized and it found itself dragged helplessly along
in the grip of one of those mysterious, brilliant rays of force. At
least one hidden officer must have been watching the fruitless efforts,
for the next lifeboat to issue made no attempt, either to talk or to
flee, but from it there flamed out into space a concentrated beam of
destruction--the terrible ray of annihilation, against which no known
substance could endure for a moment; the ray which had definitely
outlawed war. But even that frightful weapon was useless--it spent
its force harmlessly upon an impalpable, invisible barrier, a hundred
yards from its source, and the bold lifeboat disappeared in one blinding
explosion of incandescence as the captor showed its real power in
retaliation. Stevens, jaw hard-set, leaped from the screen, then brought
himself up so quickly that he skated across the smooth steel floor.
Shutting off the lookout plate, he led the half-fainting girl across
the room to a comfortable seat and sat down beside her--raging, but
thoughtful. Nadia soon recovered.

"Why are you acting so contrary to your nature--is it because of _me_?"
she demanded. "A dozen times I've seen you start to do something and
then change your mind. I _will not_ be a load on you nor hinder you in
anything you want to do."

"I told your father I'd look after you, and I'm going to do it," he
replied, indirectly. "I would do it anyway, of course--even if you are
ten or twelve years older than I thought you were."

"Yes, Dad never has realized that I'm more than eight years old. I
see--you were going out there and be slaughtered?" He flushed, but made
no reply. "In that case I'm glad I'm here--that would have been silly.
I think we'd better hold that council of war you mentioned a while ago,
don't you?"

"I need a smoke--do you indulge?"

"No thanks. I tried it a few times at school, but never liked it."

He searched his pockets, bringing to light an unopened package and a
tattered remnant which proved to contain one dilapidated cigarette.
He studied it thoughtfully. "I'll smoke this wreck," he decided, "while
it's still smokable. We'll save the rest of them--I'm afraid it'll be
a long time between smokes. Well, let's confer!"

"This will have to be a one-sided conference. I don't imagine that any
of my ideas will prove particularly helpful. You talk and I'll listen.

"You can't tell what ideas may be useful--chip in any time you feel the
urge. Here's the dope, as I see it. They're highly intelligent creatures
and are in all probability neither Martians nor Venerians. If any of
them had any such stuff as that, some of us would have known about it
and, besides, I don't believe they would have used it in just that way.
Mercury is not habitable, at least for organic beings; and we have never
seen any sign of any other kind of inhabitants who could work with
metals and rays. They're probably from Jupiter, although possibly from
further away. I say Jupiter, because I would think, judging from the
small size of the ship, that it may still be in the experimental stage,
so that they probably didn't come from any further away than Jupiter.
Then, too, if they were very numerous, somebody would have sighted one
before. I'd give my left leg and four fingers for one good look at the
inside of that ship."

"Why didn't you take it, then? You never even looked toward it, after
that one first glimpse."

"I'll say I didn't--the reason being that they may have automatic
detectors, and as I have suggested before, our system of vision is so
crude that its use could be detected with a clothesline or a basket
full of scrap iron. But to resume: Their aim is to capture, not destroy,
since they haven't killed anybody except the one crew that attacked
them. Apparently they want to study us or something. However, they don't
intend that any of us shall get away, nor even send out a word of what
has happened to us. Therefore it looks as though our best bet is to hide
now, and try to sneak away on them after a while--direct methods won't
work. Right?"

"You sound lucid. Is there any possibility of getting back, though, if
we got anywhere near Jupiter? It's so far away!"

"It's a long stretch from Jupiter to any of the planets where we have
power-plants, all right--particularly now, when Mars and Tellus are
subtending an angle of something more than ninety degrees at the sun,
and Venus is between the two, while Jupiter is clear across the sun from
all three of them. Even when Jupiter is in mean opposition to Mars, it
is still some five hundred and fifty million kilometers away, so you
can form some idea as to how far it is from our nearest planet now.
No, if we expect to get back under our own power, we've got to break away
pretty quick--these lifeboats have very little accumulator capacity, and
the receptors are useless above about three hundred million
kilometers...."

"But it'll take us a long time to go that far, won't it?"

"Not very. Our own ships, using only the acceleration of gravity, and
both plus and minus at that, make the better than four hundred million
kilometers of the long route to Mars in five days. These birds are using
almost that much acceleration, and I don't see how they do it. They must
have a tractor ray. Brandon claimed that such a thing was theoretically
possible, but Westfall and I couldn't see it. We ragged him about it a
lot--and he was right. I thought, of course, they'd drift with us, but
they are using power steadily. They've got _some_ system!"

"Suppose they could be using intra-atomic energy? We were taught that it
was impossible, but you've shattered a lot of my knowledge today."

"I wouldn't want to say definitely that it is absolutely impossible,
but the deeper we go into that line, the more unlikely intra-atomic
energy power-plants become. No, they've got a real power-transmission
system--one that can hold a tight beam together a lot farther than
anything we have been able to develop, that's all. Well, we've given
them quite a lot of time to get over any suspicion of us, let's see
if we can sneak away from them."

* * * * *

By short and infrequent applications of power to the dirigible
projectors of the life-boat, Stevens slowly shifted the position of
the fragment which bore their craft until it was well clear of the
other components of the mass of wreckage. He then exerted a very small
retarding force, so that their bit would lag behind the procession, as
though it had accidently been separated. But the crew of the captor was
alert, and no sooner did a clear space show itself between them and the
mass than a ray picked them up and herded them back into place. Stevens
then nudged other pieces so that they fell out, only to see them also
rounded up. Hour after hour he kept trying--doing nothing sufficiently
energetic to create any suspicion, but attempting everything he could
think of that offered any chance of escape from the clutches of their
captors. Immovable at the plate, his hands upon the controls, he
performed every insidious maneuver his agile brain could devise, but
he could not succeed in separating their vehicle from its fellows.
Finally, after a last attempt, which was foiled as easily as were its
predecessors, he shut off his controls and turned to his companion
with a grin.

"I didn't think I could get away with it--they're keen, that gang--but
I had to keep at it as long as it would have done us any good."

"Wouldn't it do us any good now?"

"Not a bit--we're going so fast that we couldn't stop--we're out of even
radio range of our closest power-plant. We'll have to put off any more
attempts until they slow us down. They're fairly close to at least one
of the moons of Jupiter, we'll have our best chance--so good, in fact,
that I really think we can make it."

"But what good would that do us, if we couldn't get back?" Dire
foreboding showed in her glorious eyes.

"Lots of things not tried yet, girl, and we'll try them all. First, we
get away. Second, we try to get in touch with Norman Brandon...."

"How? No known radio will carry half that far."

"No, but I think that a radio as yet unknown may be able to--and there
is a bare possibility that I'll be able to communicate."

"Oh wonderful--that lifts a frightful load off my mind," she breathed.

"But just a minute--I said I'd come clean with you, and I will. The odds
are all against us, no matter what we do. If that unknown radio won't
work--and it probably won't--there are several other things we can try,
but they're all pretty slim chances. Even if we get away, it'll probably
be about the same thing as though you were to be marooned on a desert
island without any tools, and with your rescue depending upon your
ability to build a high-powered radio station with which to call to
a mainland for help. However, if we don't try to get away, our only
alternative is letting them know we're here, and joining our friends
in captivity."

"And then what?"

"You know as much as I do. Imprisonment and restraint, certain; death,
possible; return to Earth, almost certainly impossible--life as guests,
highly improbable."

"I'm with you, Steve, all the way."

"Well, it's time to spring off--we've both been awake better than fifty
hours. Personally, I'm all in, and you're so near dead that you're a
physical wreck. We'll get us a bite of supper and turn in."

An appetizing supper was prepared from the abundant stores and each
ate a heartier meal than either would have believed possible. Stevens
considered his unopened package of cigarettes, then regretfully put it
back into his pocket still unopened and turned to Nadia.

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