Triplanetary
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Edward Elmer Smith >> Triplanetary
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The struggle had lasted scarcely ten seconds, coming to its close just
as Bradley finished blinding and deafening the robot. Costigan picked up
the projector, again donned his spy-ray goggles, and the two hurried on.
"Nice work, Chief--it must be a gift to rough-house the way you do,"
Bradley exclaimed. "That's why you took the live one?"
"Practice helps some, too! I've been in brawls before, and I'm a lot
younger and maybe some faster than you are," Costigan explained briefly,
penetrant gaze rigidly to the fore as they ran along one corridor after
another.
Several more guards, both living and mechanical, were encountered on the
way, but they were not permitted to offer any opposition. Costigan saw
them first. In the furious beam of the projector of the dead pirate they
were riven into nothingness, and the two officers sped on to the room
which Costigan had located from afar. The three suits of Triplanetary
space armor had been sealed into a cabinet whose doors Costigan
literally blew off with a blast of force, rather than consume time in
tracing the power leads.
"I feel like something now!" Costigan, once more encased in his own
armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with
one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have
any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along--we'll
carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it
up after we've wrecked the works."
Contemptuous now of possible guards, the armored pair strode toward the
room which housed the pulsating heart of the immense fortress of space.
Guards were encountered, and captains--officers who signaled frantically
to their chief, since he alone could unleash the frightful forces at his
command, and who profanely wondered at his unwonted silence--but the
enemy beams were impotent against the mighty ether-walls of that armor;
and the pirates, without armor in the security of their own planet as
they were, vanished utterly in the ravening beams of the twin Lewistons.
As they paused before the door of the power room, both men felt Clio's
voice raised in her first and last appeal, an appeal wrung from her
against her will by the extremity of her position.
"Conway! Hurry! Oh, hurry! I can't last much longer--good-bye, dear!" In
the horror-filled tones both men read clearly the girl's dire extremity.
Each saw plainly a happy, care-free young earth girl, upon her first
trip into space, locked inside an ether-wall with an over-brained,
under-conscienced human machine--a super-intelligent but lecherous and
unmoral mechanism of flesh and blood, acknowledging no authority, ruled
by nothing save his own scientific drivings and the almost equally
powerful urges of his desires and passions! She had fought with every
resource at her command. She had wept and pleaded, she had stormed and
raged, she had feigned submission and had played for time--and her
torment had not touched in the slightest degree the merciless and
gloating brain of the being who called himself Roger. Now his
tantalizing, ruthless cat-play was done, the horrible gray-brown face
was close to hers--she wailed her final despairing message to Costigan
and attacked that hideous face with the fury of a tigress.
Costigan bit off a bitter imprecation. "Hold him just a second longer,
sweetheart!" he cried, and the power room door vanished.
Through the great room the two Lewistons swept at full aperture and at
maximum power, two rapidly opening fans of death and destruction. Here
and there a guard, more rapid than his fellows, trained a futile
projector--a projector whose magazine exploded at the touch of that
frightful field of force, liberating instantaneously its thousands upon
thousands of kilowatt-hours of stored-up energy. Through the delicately
adjusted, complex mechanisms the destroying beams tore. At their touch
armatures burned out, high-tension leads volatilized in crashing,
high-voltage sparks, masses of metal smoked and burned in the path of
vast forces now seeking the easiest path to neutralization, delicate
instruments blew up, copper ran in streams like water. As the last
machine subsided into a semi-molten mass of metal the two wreckers, each
grasping a brace, felt themselves become weightless and knew that they
had accomplished the first part of their program.
Costigan leaped for the outer door. His the task to go to Clio's aid....
Bradley would follow more slowly, bringing the girl's armor and taking
care of any possible pursuit. As he sailed through the air he spoke.
"Coming, Clio! All right, girl?" Questioningly, half fearfully.
"All right, Conway." Her voice was almost unrecognizable, broken in
retching agony. "When everything went crazy he ... found out that the
ether-wall was up ... forgot all about me. He shut it off ... and seemed
to go crazy, too ... he is floundering around like a wild man now....
I'm trying to keep ... him from ... going down-stairs."
"Good girl--keep him busy one minute more--he's getting all the warnings
at once and wants to get back to his board. But what's the matter with
you? Did he ... hurt you, after all?"
"Oh, no; not that. But I'm sick--horribly sick. I'm falling.... I'm so
dizzy I can scarcely see ... my head is breaking up into little pieces
... I just _know_ I'm going to die, Conway! Oh ... oh!"
"Oh, is _that_ all!" In his sheer relief that they had been in time,
Costigan did not think of sympathizing with Clio's very real present
distress of mind and body. "I forgot that you're a
ground-gripper--that's just a little touch of space-sickness. It'll wear
off directly.... All right, I'm coming! Let go of him and get as far
away from him as you can!"
He was now in the street. Perhaps two hundred feet distant and a hundred
feet above him was the tower room in which were Clio and Roger. He
sprang directly toward its large window, and as he floated "upward" he
corrected his course and accelerated his pace by firing backward at
various angles with his heavy service pistol, uncaring that at the point
of impact of each of those shells a small blast of destruction erupted.
He missed the window a trifle, but that did not matter--his flaming
Lewiston opened a way for him, partly through the window, partly through
the wall. As he soared through the opening he trained projector and
pistol upon Roger, now almost to the door, noticing as he did so that
Clio was clinging convulsively to a lamp-bracket upon the wall. Door and
wall vanished in the Lewiston's terrific beam, but the pirate stood
unharmed. Neither ravening ray nor explosive shell could harm him--he
had snapped on the protective shield whose generator was always upon his
person.
But Roger, while not exactly a ground-gripper, did not know how to
handle himself without weight; whereas Costigan, given six walls against
which to push, was even more efficient in weightless combat than when
handicapped by the force of gravitation. Keeping his projector upon the
pirate, he seized the first club to hand--a long, slender pedestal of
metal--and launched himself past the pirate chief. With all the momentum
of his mass and velocity and all the power of his mighty right arm he
swung the bar at the pirate's head. That fiercely driven mass of metal
should have taken Roger's head from his shoulders, but it did not. That
shield of force was utterly rigid and impenetrable; the only effect of
the frightful blow was to set him spinning, end over end, like the
flying baton of an acrobatic drum-major. As the spinning form crashed
against the opposite wall of the room, Bradley floated in, carrying
Clio's armor. Without a word the captain loosened the helpless girl's
grip upon the bracket and encased her in the suit. Then, supporting her
at the window, he held his Lewiston upon the captive's head while
Costigan propelled him toward the opening. Both men knew that Roger's
shield of force must be threatened every instant--that if he were
allowed to release it he probably would bring to bear a hand-weapon even
superior to their own.
Braced against the wall, Costigan sighted along Roger's body toward the
most distant point of the lofty dome of the artificial planet and gave
him a gentle push. Then, each grasping Clio by an arm, the two officers
shoved mightily with their feet and the three armored forms darted away
toward their only hope of escape--an emergency boat which could be
launched through the shell of the great globe. To attempt to reach the
_Hyperion_ and to escape in one of her lifeboats would have been
useless; they could not have forced the great gates of the main
air-locks and no other exits existed. As they sailed onward through the
air, Costigan keeping the slowly-floating form of Roger enveloped in his
beam, Clio began to recover.
"Suppose they get their gravity fixed?" she asked, apprehensively. "And
they're raying us and shooting at us!"
"They may have fixed it already. They undoubtedly have spare parts and
duplicate generators, but if they turn it on the fall will kill Roger
too, and he wouldn't like that. They'll have to get him down with an
airship, and they know that we'll get them as fast as they come up. They
can't hurt us with hand-weapons, and before they can bring up any heavy
stuff they'll be afraid to use it, because we'll be too close to their
shell.
"I wish we could have brought Roger along," he continued, savagely, to
Bradley. "But you were right, of course--it'd be altogether too much
like a rabbit capturing a wildcat. My Lewiston's about done right now,
and there can't be much left of yours--what he'd do to us would be a sin
and a shame."
Now at the great wall, the two men heaved mightily upon a lever, the
gate of the emergency port swung slowly open, and they entered the
miniature cruiser of the void. Costigan, familiar with the mechanism of
the craft from careful study from his prison cell, manipulated the
controls. Through gate after massive gate they went, until finally they
were out in open space, shooting toward distant Tellus at the maximum
acceleration of which their small craft was capable.
Costigan cut the other two phones out of circuit and spoke, his
attention fixed upon some extremely distant point.
"Samms!" he called, sharply. "Costigan. We're out ... all right ... yes
... sure ... absolutely ... you tell 'em, Sammy; I've got company here."
Through the sound-disks of their helmets the girl and the captain had
heard Costigan's share of the conversation. Bradley stared at his
erstwhile first officer in amazement, and even Clio had often heard that
mighty, half-mythical name. Surely that bewildering young man must rank
high, to speak so familiarly to Virgil Samms, the all-powerful head of
the space-pervading Secret Service of the Triplanetary League!
"You've turned in a general call-out," Bradley stated, rather than
asked.
"Long ago--I've been in touch right along," Costigan answered. "Now that
they know what to look for and know that ether-wave detectors are
useless, they can find it. Every vessel in seven sectors, clear down to
the scout patrols, is concentrating on this point, and the call is out
for all battleships and cruisers afloat. There are enough operatives out
there with ultra-waves to locate that globe, and once they spot it
they'll point it out to all the other vessels."
"But how about the other prisoners?" asked the girl. "They'll all be
killed, won't they?"
"Hard telling," Costigan shrugged. "Depends on how things turn out. We
lack a lot of being safe ourselves yet, and it's my personal opinion
that there's going to be a real war."
"What's worrying me mostly is our own chance," Bradley assented. "They
will chase us, of course."
"Sure, and they'll have more speed than we have. Depends on how far away
the nearest Triplanetary vessels are. Anyway, we've done everything we
can do--it's in the laps of the gods now."
Silence fell, and Costigan cut in Clio's phone and came over to the seat
upon which she was reclining, white and stricken--worn out by the
horrible and terrifying ordeals of the last few hours. As he seated
himself beside her she blushed vividly, but her deep blue eyes met his
gray ones steadily.
"Clio, I ... we ... you ... that is," he flushed hotly and stopped. This
secret agent, whose clear, keen brain no physical danger could cloud;
who had proved over and over again that he was never at a loss in any
emergency, however desperate--this quick-witted officer floundered in
embarrassment like any schoolboy, but continued, doggedly: "I'm afraid
that I gave myself away back there, but...."
"We gave ourselves away, you mean," she filled in the pause. "I did my
share, but I won't hold you to it if you don't want--but I _know_ that
you love me, Conway!"
"_Love_ you!" The man groaned, his face lined and hard, his whole body
rigid. "That doesn't half tell it, Clio. You don't need to hold me--I'm
held for life. There never was a woman who meant anything to me before,
and there never will be another. You're the only woman that ever
existed. It isn't that. Can't you see that it's impossible?"
"Of course I can't--it isn't impossible, at all." She released her
finger shields, four hands met and tightly clasped; and her low voice
thrilled with feeling as she went on: "You love me and I love you. That
is all that matters."
"I wish it were," Costigan returned bitterly, "but you don't know what
you'd be letting yourself in for. It's who and what you are and who and
what I am that's eating me. You, Clio Marsden, Curtis Marsden's
daughter. Nineteen years old. You think you've been places and done
things. You haven't. You haven't seen or done anything--you don't know
what it's all about. And who am I to love a girl like you? A homeless
space-flea who hasn't been on any planet three weeks in three years. A
hard-boiled egg. A trouble-shooter and a brawler by instinct and
training. A sp...." He bit off the word and went on quickly: "Why, you
don't know me at all, and there's a lot of me that you never _will_
know--that I can't let you know! You'd better lay off me, girl, while
you can. It'll be best for you, believe me."
"But I can't Conway, and neither can you," the girl answered softly, a
glorious light in her eyes. "It's too late for that. On the ship it was
just another of those things, but since then we've come really to know
each other, and we're sunk. The situation is out of control, and we both
know it--and neither of us would change it if we could, and you know
that, too. I don't know very much, I admit, but I do know what you
thought you'd have to keep from me, and I admire you all the more for
it. We all honor the Service, Conway dearest--it is only you men who
have made and are keeping the Three Planets fit places to live in--and I
know that Virgil Samms' chief lieutenant would have to be a man in four
thousand million...."
"What makes you think that?" he demanded sharply.
"You told me so yourself, indirectly. Who else in the known Universe
could possibly call him 'Sammy'? You are hard, of course, but you must
be so--and I never did like soft men, anyway. And you brawl in a good
cause. You are very much a _man_, my Conway; a real, _real_ man, and I
love you! Now, if they catch us, all right--we'll die together, at
least!" she finished, passionately.
"You're right, sweetheart, of course," he admitted. "I don't believe
that I _could_ really let you let me go, even though I know you ought
to," and their hands locked together even more firmly than before. "If
we ever get out of this jam I'm going to kiss you, but this is no time
to be taking off your helmet. In fact, I'm taking too many chances with
you in keeping your finger shields off. Snap 'em on, Clio mine; the
pirates ought to be getting fairly close by this time."
Hands released and armor again tight, Costigan went over to join Bradley
at the control board.
"How're they coming, Captain?" he asked.
"Not so good. Quite a ways off yet. At least an hour, I'd say, before a
cruiser can get within range."
"I'll see if I can locate any of the pirates chasing up. If I do, it'll
be by accident; this little spy-ray isn't good for much except close
work. I'm afraid the first warning we'll have will be when they take
hold of us with a beam or spear us with a ray. Probably a beam, though;
this is one of their emergency lifeboats and they wouldn't want to
destroy it unless they have to. Also, I imagine that Roger wants us
alive pretty badly. He has unfinished business with all three of us, and
I can well believe that his 'not particularly pleasant extinction' will
be even less so after the way we rooked him."
"I want you to do me a favor, Conway." Clio's face was white with horror
at the thought of facing again that unspeakable creature of gray. "Give
me a gun or something, please. I don't want him to touch me again while
I'm alive."
"He won't," Costigan assured her, narrow of eye and grim of jaw. He was,
as she had said, hard. "But you don't want a gun. You might get nervous
and use it too soon. I'll take care of you at the last possible moment,
because if he gets hold of us we won't stand a chance of getting away
again."
For minutes there was silence, Costigan surveying the ether in all
directions with his ultra-wave device. Suddenly he laughed, deeply and
with real enjoyment, and the others stared at him in surprise.
"No, I'm not crazy," he told them. "This is really funny; it had never
occurred to me that all these pirate ships are invisible to any ether
wave as long as they're using power. I can see them, of course, with
this sub-ether spy, but they can't see us! I knew that they should have
overtaken us before this. I've finally found them. They've passed us,
and are now tacking around, waiting for us to cut off our power for a
minute so that they can see us! They're heading right into the
Fleet--they think they're safe, of course, but what a surprise they've
got coming to them!"
But it was not only the pirates who were to be surprised. Long before
the pirate ship had come within extreme visibility range of the
Triplanetary Fleet, it lost its invisibility and was starkly outlined
upon the lookout plates of the three fugitives. For a few seconds the
pirate craft seemed unchanged, then it began to glow redly, with a red
that seemed to become darker as it grew stronger. Then the sharp
outlines blurred, puffs of air burst outward, and the metal of the hull
became a viscous, fluid-like something, flowing away in a long, red
streamer into seemingly empty space. Costigan turned his ultra-gaze into
that space and saw that it was actually far from empty. There lay a vast
something, formless and indefinite even to his sub-ethereal vision; a
something into which the viscid stream of transformed metal plunged.
Plunged, and vanished.
Powerful interference blanketed his ultra-wave and howled throughout his
body; but in the hope that some part of his message might get through he
called Samms, and calmly and clearly he narrated everything that had
just happened. He continued his crisp report, neglecting not the
smallest detail, while their tiny craft was drawn inexorably toward a
redly impermeable veil; continued it until their lifeboat, still intact,
shot through that veil and he found himself unable to move. He was
conscious, he was breathing normally, his heart was beating; but not a
voluntary muscle would obey his will.
CHAPTER III
Fleet Against Planetoid
One of the newest and fleetest of the Law Enforcement Vessels of the
Triplanetary League, the heavy cruiser _Chicago_, of the North American
Division of the Tellurian Contingent, plunged stolidly through
interplanetary vacuum. For five long weeks she had patrolled her
allotted volume of space. In another week she would report back to the
city whose name she bore, where her space-weary crew, worn by their long
"trick" in the awesomely oppressive depths of the limitless void, would
enjoy to the full their fortnight of refreshing planetary leave.
She was performing certain routine tasks--charting meteorites, watching
for derelicts and other obstructions to navigation, checking in
constantly with all scheduled space-ships in case of need, and so
on--but primarily she was a warship. She was a mighty engine of
destruction, hunting for the unauthorized vessels of whatever power or
planet it was, that had not only defied the Triplanetary League, but
were evidently attempting to overthrow it; attempting to plunge the
Three Planets back into the ghastly sink of bloodshed and destruction
from which they had so recently emerged. Every space-ship within range
of her powerful detectors was represented by two brilliant, slowly
moving points of light; one upon a great micrometer screen, the other in
the "tank"--the immense, three-dimensional, minutely cubed model of the
entire Solar System.
A brilliantly intense red light flared upon a panel and a bell clanged
brazenly the furious signals of the sector alarm. Simultaneously a
speaker roared forth its message of a ship in dire peril.
"Sector alarm! N. A. T. _Hyperion_ gassed with Vee-Two. Nothing
detectable in space, but...."
The half-uttered message was drowned out in a crackling roar of
meaningless noise, the orderly signals of the bell became a hideous
clamor, and the two points of light which had marked the location of the
liner disappeared in widely spreading flashes of the same high-powered
interference. Observers, navigators, and control officers were alike
dumfounded. Even the captain, in the shell-proof, shock-proof, and
doubly ray-proof retreat of his conning compartment, was equally at a
loss. No ship or thing could _possibly_ be close enough to be sending
out interfering waves of such tremendous power--yet there they were!
"Maximum acceleration, straight for the point where the _Hyperion_ was
when her tracers went out," the captain ordered, and through the fringe
of that widespread interference he drove a solid beam, reporting
concisely to G. H. Q. Almost instantly the emergency call-out came
roaring in--every vessel of the Sector, of whatever class or tonnage,
was to concentrate upon the point in space where the ill-fated liner had
last been known to be.
Hour after hour the great globe drove on at maximum acceleration,
captain and every control officer alert and at high tension. But in the
Quartermaster's Department, deep down below the generator rooms, no
thought was given to such minor matters as the disappearance of a
_Hyperion_. The inventory did not balance, and two Q. M. privates were
trying, profanely, and without much success, to find the discrepancy.
"Charged cells for model DF Lewistons, none requisitioned, on hand
eighteen thous...." The droning voice broke off short in the middle of a
word and the private stood rigid, in the act of reaching for another
slip, every faculty concentrated upon something, imperceptible to his
companion.
"Come on, Cleve--snap it up!" the second commanded, but was silenced by
a vicious wave of the listener's hand.
"What!" the rigid one exclaimed. "Reveal ourselves! Why, it's ... Oh,
all right.... Oh, that's it.... Uh-huh.... I see.... Yes, I've got it
solid. Maybe I'll see you again some time. If not, so long!"
The inventory sheets fell unheeded from his hand, and his fellow private
stared after him in amazement as he strode over to the desk of the
officer in charge. That officer also stared as the hitherto easy-going
and gold-bricking Cleve saluted briskly, showed him something flat in
the palm of his left hand, and spoke.
"I've just got some of the funniest orders ever put out,
Lieutenant"--his voice was low and intense--"but they came from 'way,
'way up. I'm to join the brass hats in the Center. You'll know about it
directly, I imagine. Cover me up as much as you can, will you?" And he
was gone.
Unchallenged he made his way to the control room, and his curt "urgent
report for the Captain" admitted him there without question. But when he
approached the sacred precincts of the Captain's own and inviolate room,
he was stopped in no uncertain fashion by no less a personage than the
Officer of the Day.
" ... and report yourself under arrest immediately!" the O. D. concluded
his brief but pointed speech.
"You were right in stopping me, of course," the intruder conceded,
unmoved. "I wanted to get in there without giving everything away, if
possible, but it seems that I can't. Well, I've been ordered by Virgil
Samms to report to the Captain, at once. See this? Touch it!" He held
out a flat, insulated disk, cover thrown back to reveal a tiny golden
meteor, at the sight of which the officer's truculent manner altered
markedly.
"I've heard of them, of course, but I never saw one before," and the
officer touched the shining symbol lightly with his finger, jerking
backward involuntarily as there shot through his whole body a thrilling
surge of power, shouting into his very bones an unpronounceable
syllable--the password of the Secret Service. "Genuine or not, it gets
you to the Captain. He'll know, and if it's a fake you'll be breathing
space in five minutes."
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