Triplanetary

E >> Edward Elmer Smith >> Triplanetary

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Projector at the ready, the Officer of the Day followed Cleve into the
Holy of Holies. There the grizzled four-striper touched the golden
meteor lightly, then drove his piercing gaze deep into the unflinching
eyes of the younger man. But that captain had won his high rank neither
by accident nor by "pull"--he understood at once.

"It _must_ be an emergency," he growled, half-audibly, still staring at
his lowly Q. M. clerk, "to make Samms uncover his whole organization."
He turned and curtly dismissed the wondering O. D. Then: "All right! Out
with it!"

"Serious enough so that every one of us afloat has just received orders
to reveal himself to his commanding officer and to anyone else, if
necessary to reach that officer at once--orders never before issued. The
enemy have been located. They have built a base, and have ships better
than our best. Base and ships cannot be seen nor detected by any ether
wave. However, the Service has been experimenting for years with a new
type of communicator beam; and, while pretty crude yet, it was given to
us when the _Dione_ went out without leaving a trace. One of our men was
in the _Hyperion_, managed to stay alive, and has been sending data. I
am instructed to attach my new phone set to one of the universal plates
in your conning room, and to see what I can find."

"Go to it!" The captain waved his hand and the operative bent to his
task.

"Commanders of all vessels of the Fleet!" The Headquarters speaker,
receiver sealed upon the wave-length of the Admiral of the Fleet, broke
the long silence. "All vessels, in sectors L to R, inclusive, will
interlock location signals. Some of you have received, or will receive
shortly, certain communications from sources which need not be
mentioned. Those commanders will at once send out red K4 screens.
Vessels so marked will act as temporary flagships. Unmarked vessels will
proceed at maximum to the nearest flagship, grouping about it in
regulation squadron cone in order of arrival. Squadrons most distant
from objective point designated by flagship observers will proceed
toward it at maximum; squadrons nearest it will decelerate or reverse
velocity--that point must not be approached until full Fleet formation
has been accomplished. Heavy and Light Cruisers of all other sectors
inside the orbit of Mars ..." the orders went on, directing the
mobilization of the stupendous forces of the League, so that they would
be in readiness in the highly improbable event of the failure of the
massed power of seven sectors to reduce the pirate base.

In those seven sectors perhaps a dozen vessels threw out enormous
spherical screens of intense red light, and as they did so their tracer
points upon all the interlocked lookout plates also became ringed about
with red. Toward those crimson markers the pilots of the unmarked
vessels directed their courses at their utmost power; and while the
white lights upon the lookout plates moved slowly toward and clustered
about the red ones--the ultra-instruments of the Secret Service
operatives were probing into space, sweeping the neighborhood of the
computed position of the pirate's stronghold.

But the object sought was so far away that the small spy-ray sets of the
Secret Service men, intended as they were for close-range work, were
unable to make contact with the invisible planetoid for which they were
seeking. In the captain's sanctum of the _Chicago_, the operative
studied his plate for only a minute or two, then shut off his power and
fell into a brown study, from which he was rudely aroused.

"Aren't you even going to _try_ to find them?" demanded the captain.

"No," Cleve returned shortly. "No use--not half enough power or control.
I'm trying to think ... maybe ... say, Captain, will you please have the
Chief Electrician and a couple of radio men come in here?"

They came, and for hours, while the other ultra-wave men searched the
apparently empty ether with their ineffective beams, the three technical
experts and the erstwhile Quartermaster's clerk labored upon a huge and
complex ultra-wave projector--the three blindly and with doubtful
questions; the one with sure knowledge at least of what he was trying to
do. Finally the thing was done, the crude but efficient graduated
circles were set, and the tubes glowed redly as their solidly massed
output was driving into a tight beam of ultra-vibration. "There it is,
sir," Cleve reported, after some ten minutes of delicate manipulation,
and the vast structure of the miniature world flashed into being upon
his plate. "You may notify the fleet--co-ordinates H 11.62, RA
124-31-16, and Dx about 173.2."

The report made and the assistants out of the room, the captain turned
to the observer and saluted gravely.

"We have always known, sir, that the Service had _men_; but I had no
idea that any one man could possibly do, on the spur of the moment, what
you have just done--unless that man happened to be Lyman Cleveland."

"Oh, it doesn't ..." the observer began, but broke off, muttering
unintelligibly at intervals; then swung the visiray beam toward the
earth. Soon a face appeared upon the plate, the keen but careworn face
of Virgil Samms!

"Hello, Lyman." His voice came clearly from the speaker, and the Captain
gasped--his ultra-wave observer and sometime clerk was Lyman Cleveland
himself, probably the greatest living expert in beam transmission! "I
knew that you'd do something, if it could be done. How about it--can the
others install similar sets on their ships? I'm betting that they
can't."

"Probably not," Cleveland frowned in thought. "This is a patchwork
affair, made of gunny-sacks and hay-wire. I'm holding it together by
main strength and awkwardness, and even at that it's apt to go to pieces
any minute."

"Can you rig it up for photography?"

"I think so. Just a minute--yes, I can. Why?"

"Because there's something going on out there that neither we nor the
so-called pirates know anything about. The Admiralty seems to think that
it's the Jovians again, but we don't see how it can be--if it is, they
have developed a lot of stuff that none of our agents has even
suspected," and he recounted briefly what Costigan had reported to him,
concluding: "Then there was a burst of interference--on the
_ultra-band_, mind you--and I've heard nothing from him since. Therefore
I want you to stay out of the battle entirely. Stay as far away from it
as you can and still get good pictures of everything that happens. I
will see that orders are issued to the _Chicago_ to that effect."

"But listen ..."

"Those are orders!" snapped Samms. "It is of the utmost importance that
we know every detail of what is going to happen. The answer is pictures.
The only possibility of obtaining pictures is that machine you have just
developed. If the fleet wins, nothing will be lost. If the fleet
loses--and I am not half as confident of success as the Admiral is--the
_Chicago_ doesn't carry enough power to decide the issue, and we will
have the pictures to study, which is all-important. Besides, we've
probably lost Conway Costigan to-day, and we don't want to lose _you_,
too."

Cleveland remained silent, pondering this startling news, but the
grizzled Captain, veteran of the Fourth Jovian War that he was, was not
convinced.

"We'll blow them out of space, Mr. Samms!" he declared.

"You just think you will, Captain. I have suggested, as forcibly as
possible, that the general attack be withheld until after a thorough
investigation is made, but the Admiralty will not listen. They see the
advisability of withdrawing a camera ship, but that is as far as they
will go."

"And that's plenty far enough!" growled the _Chicago's_ commander, as
the beam snapped off. "Mr. Cleveland, I don't like the idea of running
away under fire, and I won't do it without direct orders from the
Admiral."

"Of course you won't--that's why you are going...."

He was interrupted by a voice from the Headquarters speaker. The captain
stepped up to the plate and, upon being recognized, he received the
exact orders which had been requested by the Chief of the Secret
Service--now not as secret as it had been heretofore.

Thus it was that the _Chicago_ reversed her acceleration, cut off her
red screen, and fell rapidly behind, while the vessels following her in
their loose cone formation shot away toward another crimson-flaring
leader. Farther and farther back she dropped, back to the limiting range
of the ultra-cameras upon which Cleveland and his highly trained
assistants were furiously and unremittingly at work. And during all this
time the forces of the seven sectors had been concentrating. The pilot
vessels, with their flaming red screens, each followed by a cone of
space-ships, drew closer and closer together, approaching the
_Fearless_--the British super-dreadnaught which was to be the flagship
of the Fleet--the mightiest and heaviest space-ship which had yet lifted
her stupendous mass into the ether.

Now, systematically and precisely, the great Cone of Battle was coming
into being; a formation developed during the Jovian Wars while the
forces of the Three Planets were fighting in space for their very
civilizations' existence, and one never used since the last space-fleets
of Jupiter's murderous hordes had been wiped out.

The mouth of that enormous hollow cone was a ring of scout patrols, the
smallest and most agile vessels of the fleet. Behind them came a
somewhat smaller ring of light cruisers, then rings of heavy cruisers
and of light battleships, and finally of heavy battleships. At the apex
of the cone, protected by all the other vessels of the formation and in
best position to direct the battle, was the flagship. In this formation
every vessel was free to use her every weapon, with a minimum of danger
to her sister ships; and yet, when the gigantic main projectors were
operated along the axis of the formation, from the entire vast circle of
the cone's mouth there flamed a cylindrical field of force of such
intolerable intensity that in it no conceivable substance could endure
for a moment!

The artificial planet of metal was now close enough so that it was
visible to the ultra-vision of the Secret Service men, so plainly
visible that the warships of the pirates were seen issuing from the
enormous air-locks. As each vessel shot out into space it sped straight
for the approaching fleet without waiting to go into any formation--gray
Roger believed his structures invisible to Triplanetary eyes, thought
that the presence of the fleet was the result of mathematical
calculations, and was convinced that his mighty vessels of the void
would destroy even that vast fleet without themselves becoming known. He
was wrong. The foremost globes were allowed actually to enter the mouth
of that conical trap before an offensive move was made. Then the
vice-admiral in command of the fleet touched a button, and
simultaneously every generator in every Triplanetary vessel burst into
furious activity. Instantly the hollow volume of the immense cone became
a coruscating hell of resistless energy, an inferno which, with the
velocity of light, extended itself into a far-reaching cylinder of
rapacious destruction. Ether-waves they were, it is true, but vibrations
driven with such fierce intensity that the screens of deflection
surrounding the pirate vessels could not handle even a fraction of their
awful power. Invisibility lost, their defensive screens flared briefly;
but even the enormous force backing Roger's inventions, greater far than
that of any single Triplanetary vessel, could not hold off the
incredible violence of the massed attack of the hundreds of mighty
vessels composing the Fleet. Their defensive screens flared briefly,
then went down; their great spherical hulls first glowing red, then
shining white, then in a brief moment exploding into flying masses of
red hot, molten, and gaseous metal.

A full two-thirds of Roger's force was caught in that raging,
incandescent beam; caught and obliterated: but the remainder did not
retreat to the planetoid. Darting out around the edge of the cone at a
stupendous acceleration, they attacked its flanks and the engagement
became general. But now, since enough beams were kept upon each ship of
the enemy so that invisibility could not be restored, each Triplanetary
war vessel could attack with full efficiency. Magnesium flares and
star-shells illuminated space for a thousand miles, and from every unit
of both fleets was being hurled every item of solid, explosive, and
vibratory destruction known to the highly scientific warfare of that
age. Offensive beams, rods and daggers of frightful power struck and
were neutralized by defensive screens equally capable; the long range
and furious dodging made ordinary solid or high-explosive projectiles
useless; and both sides were filling all space with such a volume of
blanketing frequencies that such radio-dirigible torpedoes as were
launched could not be controlled, but darted madly and erratically
hither and thither, finally to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space by
the touch of some fiercely insistent, probing beam of force.

Individually, however, the pirate vessels were far more powerful than
those of the fleet, and that superiority soon began to make itself felt.
The power of the smaller ships began to fail as their accumulators
became discharged under the awful drain of the battle, and vessel after
vessel of the Triplanetary fleet was hurled into nothingness by the
concentrated blasts of the pirates' rays. But the Triplanetary forces
had one great advantage. In furious haste the Secret Service men had
been altering the controls of the radio-dirigible torpedoes, so that
they would respond to ultra-wave control; and, few in number though they
were, each was highly effective.

A hard-eyed observer, face almost against his plate and both hands and
both feet manipulating controls, hurled the first torpedo. Propelling
rockets viciously aflame, it twisted and looped around the incandescent
rods of destruction so thickly and starkly outlined, under perfect
control; unaffected by the hideous distortion of all ether-borne
signals. Through a pirate screen it went, and under the terrific blast
of its detonation one entire panel of the stricken battleship vanished,
crumpled and broken. It should have been out, cold--but, to the
amazement of the observers, it kept on fighting with scarcely lessened
power! Three more of the frightful space-bombs had to be exploded in
it--it had to be reduced to junk--before its terrible rays went out; Not
a man in that great fleet had even an inkling of the truth; that those
great vessels, those terrible engines of destruction, did not contain a
single living creature: that they were manned and fought by automatons;
robots controlled by keen-eyed, space-hardened veterans inside the
planetoid so distant by means of tight, interference-proof communicator
beams!

But they were to receive an inkling of it. As ship after ship of the
pirate fleet was blown to pieces, Roger realized that his navy was
beaten, and forthwith all his surviving vessels darted toward the apex
of the cone, where the heaviest battleships were stationed. There each
hurled itself upon a Triplanetary warship, crashing to its own
destruction, but in that destruction insuring the loss of one of the
heaviest vessels of the enemy. Thus passed the _Fearless_, and twenty of
the finest space-ships of the fleet as well. But the ranking officer
assumed command, the war-cone was re-formed, and, yawning maw to the
fore, the great formation shot toward the pirate stronghold, now near at
hand. It again launched its stupendous cylinder of annihilation, but
even as the mighty defensive screens of the planetoid flared into
incandescently furious defense, the battle was interrupted and pirates
and Triplanetarians learned alike that they were not alone in the ether.

Space became suffused with a redly impenetrable opacity, and through
that indescribable pall there came reaching huge arms of force
incredible; writhing, coruscating beams of power which glowed a baleful,
although almost imperceptible, red. A vessel of unheard-of armament and
power, hailing from a distant solar system of the Galaxy, had come to
rest in that space. For months her commander had been investigating sun
after sun in quest of one precious substance. Now his detectors had
found it; and, feeling neither fear of Triplanetarian weapons nor
reluctance to sacrifice those thousands of Triplanetarian lives, he was
about to take it!

CHAPTER IV

Within the Red Veil

Nevia, the home planet of the marauding space-ship, would have appeared
peculiar indeed to Terrestrial senses. High in the deep red heavens a
fervent blue sun poured down its flood of brilliant purplish light upon
a world of water. Not a cloud was to be seen in that flaming sky, and
through that dustless atmosphere the eye could see the horizon--a
horizon three times as distant as the one to which we are
accustomed--with a distinctness and clarity impossible in our Terra's
dust-filled air. As that mighty sun dropped below the horizon the sky
would fill suddenly with clouds and rain would fall violently and
steadily until midnight. Then the clouds would vanish as suddenly as
they had come into being, the torrential downpour would cease, and,
through that huge world's wonderfully transparent, gaseous envelope, the
full glory of the firmament would be revealed. Not the firmament as we
know it--for that hot blue sun and Nevia, her one planet-child, were
many light-years distant from Old Sol and his numerous brood--but a
strange and glorious firmament containing not one constellation familiar
to earthly eyes.

[Illustration:

Many bridges and more tubes extended through the air
from building to building, and the watery "streets" teemed
with surface craft, and with submarines.]

Out of the vacuum of space a fish-shaped vessel of the void--the vessel
that was shortly to attack so boldly both the massed fleet of
Triplanetary and Roger's planetoid--plunged into the rarefied outer
atmosphere, and crimson beams of force tore shriekingly the thin air as
it braked its terrific speed. A third of the circumference of Nevia's
mighty globe was traversed before the velocity of the craft could be
reduced sufficiently to make a landing possible. Then, approaching the
twilight zone, the vessel dived vertically downward, and it became
evident that Nevia was neither entirely aqueous nor devoid of
intelligent life. For the blunt nose of the space-ship was pointing
toward what was evidently a half-submerged city, a city whose buildings
were flat-topped, hexagonal towers, exactly alike in size, shape, color,
and material. These buildings were arranged as the cells of a honeycomb
would be if each cell were separated from its neighbors by a relatively
narrow channel of water, and all were built of the same white metal.
Many bridges and more tubes extended through the air from building to
building, and the watery "streets" teemed with surface craft, and with
submarines.

The pilot, stationed immediately below the conical prow of the
space-ship, peered intently through the thick windows of crystal-clear
metal which afforded unobstructed vision in every direction except
vertically upward and behind him. His four huge and contractile eyes
were active, each operating independently in sending its own message to
his peculiar but capable brain. One was watching the instruments, the
others scanned narrowly the immense, swelling curve of the ship's belly,
the water upon which his vessel was to land, and the floating dock to
which it was to be moored. Four hands--if hands they could be
called--manipulated levers and wheels with infinite delicacy of touch,
and with scarcely a splash the immense mass of the Nevian sky-wanderer
struck the water and glided to a stop within a foot of its exact berth.

Four mooring bars dropped neatly into their sockets and the
captain-pilot, after locking his controls in neutral, released his
safety straps and leaped lightly from his padded bench to the floor.
Scuttling across the floor and down a runway upon his four short,
powerful, heavily scaled legs, he slipped smoothly into the water and
flashed away, far below the surface. For Nevians are true amphibians.
Their blood is cold; they use with equal comfort and efficiency gills
and lungs for breathing; their scaly bodies are equally at home in the
water or in the air; their broad, flat feet serve equally well for
running about upon a solid surface or for driving their stream-lined
bodies through the water at a pace few of our fishes can equal.

Through the water the Nevian commander darted along, steering his course
accurately by means of his short, vaned tail. Through an opening in a
wall he sped and along a submarine hallway, emerging upon a broad ramp.
He scurried up the incline and into an elevator which lifted him to the
top floor of the hexagon, directly into the office of the Secretary of
Commerce of all Nevia.

"Welcome, Captain Nerado!" The Secretary waved a tentacular arm and the
visitor sprang lightly upon a softly cushioned bench, where he lay at
ease, facing the official across his low, flat "desk." "We congratulate
you upon the success of your final trial flight. We received all your
reports, even while you were traveling with many times the velocity of
light. With the last difficulties overcome, you are now ready to start?"

"We are ready," the captain-scientist replied, soberly. "Mechanically,
the ship is as nearly perfect as our finest minds can make her. She is
stocked for two years. All the iron-bearing suns within reach have been
plotted. Everything is ready except the iron. Of course the Council
refused to allow us any of the national supply--how much were you able
to purchase for us in the market?"

"Nearly ten pounds...."

"Ten pounds! Why, the securities we left with you could not have bought
two pounds, even at the price then prevailing!"

"No, but you have friends. Many of us believe in you, and have dipped
into our own resources. You and your fellow scientists of the expedition
have each contributed his entire personal fortune; why should not some
of the rest of us also contribute, as private citizens?"

"Wonderful--we thank you. Ten pounds!" The captain's great triangular
eyes glowed with an intense violet light. "A full year of cruising. But
... what if, after all, we should be wrong?"

"In that case you shall have consumed ten pounds of irreplaceable
metal." The Secretary was unmoved. "That is the viewpoint of the Council
and of almost everyone else. It is not the waste of treasure they object
to; it is the fact that ten pounds of iron will be forever lost."

"A high price truly," the Columbus of Nevia assented, "And after all, I
may be wrong."

"You probably are--of course you are wrong," his host made a startling
answer. "It is practically certain--it is almost a demonstrable
mathematical fact--that no other sun within hundreds of thousands of
light-years of our own has a planet. In all probability Nevia is the
only planet in the entire Universe. We are the only intelligent life in
the Universe. But there is one chance in numberless millions that,
somewhere with the cruising range of your newly perfected space-ship,
there may be an iron-bearing planet upon which you can effect a landing,
and it is upon that infinitesimal chance that some of us are staking a
portion of our wealth. We expect no return whatever, but if you _should_
by some miracle happen to find stores of iron somewhere in space, what
then? Deep seas being made shallow, civilization extending itself over
the globe, science advancing by leaps and bounds, Nevia becoming
populated as she should be peopled--that, my friend, is a chance well
worth taking!"

The Secretary called in a group of guards, who escorted the small
package of priceless metal to the space-ship, and before the massive
door was sealed the friends bade each other farewell.

" ... I will keep in touch with you on the ultra-wave," the Captain
concluded. "After all, I do not blame the Council for refusing to allow
the other ship to go with us. Ten pounds of iron will be a fearful loss
to the world. If we _should_ find iron, however, see to it that the
other vessel loses no time in following us."

"No fear of that! If you find iron all space will be full of vessels, as
soon as they can possibly be built--good-bye!"

The last opening was sealed and Nerado shot the great vessel into the
air. Up and up, out beyond the last tenuous trace of atmosphere, on and
on through space it flew with ever-increasing velocity until Nevia's
gigantic blue sun had been left so far behind that it became a splendid
blue-white star. Then, projectors cut off to save the precious iron
whose disintegration furnished them power, for week after week Captain
Nerado and his venturesome crew of scientists drifted idly through the
illimitable void. Sun after sun, as visible in their ultra-instruments
as though the flying vessel were moving slower than light, they studied
without finding a single planet.

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