Triplanetary
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Edward Elmer Smith >> Triplanetary
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"Well, then, be as careful as you can."
"We'll do that, Chief," Cleveland put in. "We think a lot of us, and we
aren't committing suicide just yet if we can help it. And remember about
everybody staying inside when we take off--it's barely possible that
we'll take up a lot of room. Good-bye to all of you."
"Good-bye, fellows!"
The massive insulating doors were shut, the metal side of the mountain
opened, and huge, squat caterpillar tractors came roaring and clanking
into the room. Chains and cables were made fast and, mighty steel rails
groaning under the load, the space-ship upon her rolling ways was
dragged out of the Hill and far out upon the level floor of the surface
before the tractors cast off and returned to the fortress.
"Everybody is under cover." Samms informed Rodebush. The chief was
staring intently into his plate, upon which was revealed the control
room of the untried super-ship. He heard Rodebush speak to Cleveland;
heard the observer's brief reply; saw the navigator throw his
switches--then the communicator plate went blank. Not the ordinary
blankness of a cut-off, but a peculiarly disquieting fading out into
darkness. And where the great space-ship had rested there was for an
instant nothing. Exactly nothing--a vacuum. Vessel, falsework, rollers,
trucks, the enormous steel I-beams of the tracks, even the deep-set
concrete piers and foundations and a vast hemisphere of the solid
ground; all had disappeared utterly and instantaneously. But almost as
suddenly as it had been formed the vacuum was filled by a cyclonic rush
of air. There was a detonation as of a hundred vicious thunderclaps made
one, and, through the howling, shrieking blasts of wind, there rained
down upon the valley, plain and metaled mountain a veritable avalanche
of debris: bent, twisted, and broken rails and beams, splintered
timbers, masses of concrete, and thousands of cubic yards of soil and
rock. For inertia and gravitation had not been neutralized at precisely
the same instant, and for a moment everything within the radius of
action of the iron-driven gravity nullifiers of the _Boise_ had
continued its absolute motion with inertia unimpaired. Then, left behind
immediately by the almost infinite velocity of the cruiser, all this
material had again become subject to all of Nature's everyday laws and
had crashed back to the ground.
"Could you hold your beam, Randolph?" Samm's voice cut sharply through
the daze of stupefaction which held spellbound most of the denizens of
the Hill. But all were not so held--no conceivable emergency could take
the attention of the chief ultra-wave operator from his instruments.
"No, sir," Radio Center shot back. "It faded out and I couldn't recover
it. I put everything I've got behind a tracer on that beam, but haven't
been able to lift a single needle off the pin."
"And no wreckage of the vessel itself," Samms went on, half audibly.
"Either they have succeeded far beyond their wildest hopes or else ...
more probably...." He fell silent and switched off the plate. Were his
two friends, those intrepid scientists, alive and triumphant, or had
they gone to lengthen the list of victims of that man-killing
space-ship? Reason told him that they were gone. They _must be_ gone, or
else his ultra-beams--energies of such unthinkable velocity of
propagation that man's most sensitive instruments had never been able
even to estimate it--would have held the ship's transmitter in spite of
any velocity attainable by any matter under any conceivable conditions.
The ship must have been disintegrated as soon as Rodebush released his
forces. And yet, had not the physicist dimly foreseen the possibility of
such an actual velocity--or had he? However, individuals could came and
could go, but Triplanetary went on. Samms squared his shoulders
unconsciously, and slowly, grimly, made his way back to his private
office.
He had scant time to mourn. Scarcely had he seated himself at his desk
when an emergency call came snapping in; a call of such import that his
secretary's usually calm voice trembled as she put it on his plate.
"Commissioner Hinkle is calling, sir," she announced. "Something
terrible is going on again, out toward Orion. Here he is," and there
appeared upon the screen the face of the Commissioner of Public Safety,
the commander of Triplanetary's every armed force--whether of land or of
water, of air or of empty space.
"They've come back, Samms!" the Commissioner rapped out, without
preliminary or greeting. "Four vessels gone--a freighter and a passenger
liner, with her escort of two heavy cruisers. All in Sector M; Dx about
151. I have ordered all traffic out of space for the duration of the
emergency, and since even our warships seem useless, every ship is
making for the nearest dock at maximum. How about that new flyer of
yours--got anything that will do us any good?" No one beyond the
"Hill's" shielding screens knew that the _Boise_ had already been
launched.
"I don't know. We don't even know whether we have a super-ship or not,"
and Samms described briefly the beginning--and very probably the
ending--of the trial flight, concluding: "It looks bad, but if there was
any possible way of handling her, Rodebush and Cleveland did it. All our
tracers are negative yet, so nothing definite has...."
He broke off as a frantic call came in from the Pittsburgh station for
the Commissioner, a call which Samms both heard and saw.
"The city is being attacked!" came the urgent message. "We need all the
reinforcements you can send us!" and a picture of the beleaguered city
appeared in ghastly detail upon the screens of the observers; a view
being recorded from the air. It required only seconds for the
commissioner to order every available man and engine of war to the seat
of conflict; then, having done everything they could, Hinkle and Samms
stared in helpless, fascinated horror into their plates, watching the
scenes of carnage and destruction depicted there.
* * * * *
The Nevian vessel--the sister-ship, the craft which Costigan had seen in
mid-space as it hurtled earthward in response to Nerado's summons--hung
poised in full visibility, high above the metropolis. Scornful of the
pitiful weapons wielded by man she hung there, her sinister beauty of
line sharply defined against the cloudless sky. From her shining hull
there reached down a tenuous but rigid rod of crimson energy; a rod
which slowly swept hither and thither as the detectors of the amphibians
searched out the richest deposits of the precious iron for which the
inhuman visitors had come so far. Iron, once solid, now a viscous red
liquid, was sluggishly flowing in an ever-thickening stream up that
intangible crimson duct and into the capacious storage tanks of the
Nevian raider; and wherever that flaming beam went there went also ruin,
destruction, and death. Office buildings, skyscrapers towering
majestically in their architectural symmetry and beauty, collapsed into
heaps of debris as their steel skeletons were abstracted. Deep into the
ground the beam bored; flood, fire, and explosion following in its wake
as the mazes of underground piping disappeared. And the humanity of the
buildings died: instantaneously and painlessly, never knowing what
struck them, as the life-bearing iron of their bodies went to swell the
Nevian stream.
Pittsburgh's defenses had been feeble indeed. A few antiquated railway
rifles had hurled their shells upward in futile defiance, and had been
quietly absorbed. The district planes of Triplanetary, newly armed with
iron-driven ultra-beams, had assembled hurriedly and had attacked the
invader in formation, with but little more success. Under the impact of
their beams the stranger's screens had flared white, then poised ship
and flying squadron alike had been lost to view in a murkily opaque
shroud of crimson flame. The cloud had soon dissolved, and from the
place where the planes had been there had floated or crashed down a
litter of non-ferrous wreckage. And now the cone of space-ships from the
Buffalo base of Triplanetary was approaching Pittsburgh, hurling itself
toward the Nevian plunderer and toward known, gruesome and hopeless
defeat.
"Stop them, Hinkle!" Samms cried. "It's sheer slaughter! They haven't
got a thing--they aren't even equipped yet with the iron drive!"
"I know it," the commissioner groaned, "and Admiral Barnes knows it as
well as we do, but it can't be helped--wait a minute! The Washington
cone is reporting. They're as close as the other, and they have the new
armament. Philadelphia is close behind, and so is New York. Now perhaps
we can do something!"
The Buffalo flotilla slowed and stopped, and in a matter of minutes the
detachments from the other bases arrived. The cone was formed and
iron-driven vessels in the van, the old-type craft far in the rear, it
bore down upon the Nevian, vomiting from its hollow front a solid
cylinder of annihilation. Once more the screens of the Nevian flared
into brilliance, once more the red cloud of destruction was flung
abroad. But these vessels were not entirely defenseless. Their
iron-driven ultra-generators threw out screens of the Nevians' own
formulae, screens of prodigious power to which the energies of the
amphibians clung and at which they clawed and tore in baffled, wildly
coruscant displays of power unthinkable. For minutes the furious
conflict raged, while the inconceivable energy being dissipated by those
straining screens hurled itself in terribly destructive bolts of
lightning upon the city far beneath.
No battle of such incredible violence could long endure. Triplanetary's
ships were already exerting their utmost power, while the Nevians,
contemptuous of Solarian science, had not yet uncovered their full
strength. Thus the last desperate effort of mankind was proved futile as
the invaders forced their beams deeper and deeper into the overloaded,
defensive screens of the war-vessels; and one by one the supposedly
invincible space-ships of humanity dropped in horribly dismembered
wreckage upon the ruins of what had once been Pittsburgh.
CHAPTER IX
Specimens
Only too well founded was Costigan's conviction that the submarine of
the deep-sea fishes had not been able to prevail against Nerado's
formidable engines of destruction. For days the Nevian lifeboat with its
three Terrestrial passengers hurtled through the interstellar void
without incident, but finally the operative's fears were realized--his
far-flung detector screens reacted; upon his observation plate lay
revealed Nerado's mammoth space-ship, in full pursuit of its fleeing
lifeboat!
"On your toes, folks--it won't be long now!" Costigan called, and
Bradley and Clio hurried into the tiny control room.
Armor donned and tested, the three Terrestrials stared into the
observation plates, watching the rapidly enlarging pictures of the
Nevian space-ship. Nerado had traced them and was following them, and
such was the power of the great vessel that the nearly inconceivable
velocity of the lifeboat was the veriest crawl in comparison to that of
the pursuing cruiser.
"And we've hardly started to cover the distance back to Tellus. Of
course you couldn't get in touch with anybody yet?" Bradley stated,
rather than asked.
"I kept on trying until they blanketed my wave, but all negative.
Thousands of times too far for my transmitter. Our only hope of reaching
anybody was the mighty slim chance that our super-ship might be prowling
around out here already, but it isn't, of course. Here they are!"
Reaching out to the control panel, Costigan shot out against the great
vessel wave after wave of lethal vibrations, under whose fiercely
clinging impacts the Nevian defensive screens flared white; but,
strangely enough, their own screens did not radiate. As if contemptuous
of any weapons the lifeboat might wield, the mother ship simply defended
herself from the attacking beams, in much the same fashion as a wildcat
mother wards off the claws and teeth of her spitting, snarling kitten
who is resenting a touch of needed maternal discipline.
"They probably won't fight us, at that," Clio first understood the
situation. "This is their own lifeboat, and they want us alive, you
know."
"There's one more thing we can try--hang on!" Costigan snapped, as he
released his screens and threw all his power into one enormous pressor
beam.
The three were thrown to the floor and held there by an awful weight, as
if the lifeboat darted away at the stupendous acceleration of the beam's
reaction against the unimaginable mass of the Nevian sky-rover; but the
flight was of short duration. Along that pressor beam there crept a dull
rod of energy, which surrounded the fugitive shell and brought it slowly
to a halt. Furiously then Costigan set and reset his controls, launching
his every driving force and his every weapon, but no beam could
penetrate that red murk, and the lifeboat remained motionless in space.
No, not motionless--the red rod was shortening, drawing the truant craft
back toward the launching port from which she had so hopefully emerged a
few days before. Back and back it was drawn; Costigan's utmost efforts
futile to affect by a hair's breadth its line of motion. Through the
open port the boat slipped neatly, and as it came to a halt in its
original position within the multilayered skin of the monster, the
prisoners heard the heavy doors clang shut behind them, one after
another.
And then sheets of blue fire snapped and crackled all about the three
suits of Triplanetary armor--the two large human figures and the small
one were outlined starkly in blinding blue flame.
"That's the first thing that has come off according to schedule."
Costigan laughed, a short, fierce bark. "That is their paralyzing ray;
we've got it stopped cold, and we've each got enough iron to hold it
forever."
"But it looks as though the best we can do is to stalemate," Bradley
argued. "Even if they can't paralyze us, we can't hurt them, and we are
heading back for Nevia."
"I think Nerado will come in for a conference, and we'll be able to make
terms of some kind. He must know what these Lewistons will do, and he
knows that we'll get a chance to use them, some way or other, before he
gets to us again," Costigan asserted confidently--but again he was
wrong.
The door opened, and through it there waddled, rolled, or crawled a
metal-clad monstrosity--a thing with wheels, legs, and writhing
tentacles of jointed bronze; a thing possessed of defensive screens
sufficiently powerful to absorb the full blast of the Triplanetary
projectors without effort. Three brazen tentacles reached out through
the ravening beams of the Lewistons, smashed them to bits, and wrapped
themselves in unbreakable shackles about the armored forms of the three
human beings. Through the door the machine or creature carried its
helpless load, and out into and along a main corridor. And soon the
three Terrestrials, without armor, without arms, and almost without
clothing, were standing in the control room, again facing the calm and
unmoved Nerado. To the surprise of the impetuous Costigan, the Nevian
commander was entirely without rancor.
"The desire for freedom is perhaps common to all forms of animate life,"
he commented, through the transformer. "As I told you before, however,
you are specimens to be studied by the College of Science, and you shall
be so studied in spite of anything you may do. Resign yourselves to
that."
"Well, say that we don't try to make any more trouble; that we
co-operate in the examination and give you whatever information we can,"
Costigan suggested. "Then you will probably be willing to give us a ship
and let us go back to our own world?"
"You will not be allowed to cause any more trouble," the amphibian
declared, coldly. "Your co-operation will not be required. We will take
from you whatever knowledge and information we wish. In all probability
you will never be allowed to return to your own system, because as
specimens you are too unique to lose. But enough of this idle
chatter--take them back to their quarters!"
And back to their inter-communicating rooms the prisoners were led under
heavy guard.
True to his word, Nerado made certain that they had no more
opportunities to escape. All the way back to far-distant Nevia the
space-ship sped, where at once, in manacles, the Terrestrials were taken
to the College of Science, there to undergo the physical and psychical
examinations which Nerado had promised them.
Clio and Costigan learned that the Nevian scientist-captain had not
erred in stating that their co-operation was neither needed nor desired.
Furious but impotent, the human beings were studied in laboratory after
laboratory by the coldly analytical, unfeeling scientists of Nevia, to
whom they were nothing more nor less than specimens; and in full measure
they came to know what it meant to play the part of an unknown, lowly
organism in a biological research. They were photographed, externally
and internally. Every bone, muscle, organ, vessel, and nerve was studied
and charted. Every reflex and reaction was noted and discussed. Meters
registered every impulse and recorders filmed every thought, every idea,
and every sensation. Endlessly, day after day, the nerve-wracking
torture went on, until the frantic subjects could bear no more.
White-faced and shaking, Clio finally screamed wildly, hysterically, as
she was being strapped down upon a laboratory bench; and at the sound
Costigan's nerves, already at the breaking point, gave way in an
outburst of Berserk fury.
The man's struggles and the girl's shrieks were alike futile, but the
surprised Nevians, after a consultation, decided to give the specimens a
vacation. To that end they were installed, together with their earthly
belongings, in a three-roomed structure of transparent metal, floating
in the large central lagoon of the city. There they were left
undisturbed for a time--undisturbed, that is, except by the continuous
gaze of the crowd of hundreds of amphibians which constantly surrounded
the floating cottage.
"First we're bugs under a microscope," Bradley growled, "then we're
goldfish in a bowl. I don't know that...."
He broke off as two of their jailers entered the room. Without a word
into the transformers, they seized Bradley and the girl. As those
tentacular arms stretched out toward Clio, Costigan leaped. A vain
attempt. In midair the paralyzing ray of the Nevians touched him and he
crashed heavily to the crystal floor; and from that floor he looked on
in helpless, raging fury while his sweetheart and his captain were
carried out of their prison and into a waiting submarine.
CHAPTER X
The _Boise_ Acts
But what of the super-ship? What happened after that inertialess, that
terribly destructive take-off?
Doctor Frederick Rodebush sat at the control panel of Triplanetary's
newly reconstructed space-ship, his hands grasping the gleaming, ebonite
handles of two double-throw switches. Facing the unknown though the
physicist was, yet he grinned whimsically at his friend.
"Something, whatever it is, is about to take place. The _Boise_ is
taking off, under full neutralization. Ready for anything to happen,
Cleve?"
"All ready--shoot!" Laconically. Cleveland also was constitutionally
unable to voice his deeper sentiments in time of stress.
Rodebush flipped the switches clear over in flashing arcs, and instantly
over both men there came a sensation akin to a tremendously intensified
vertigo; but a vertigo as far beyond the space-sickness of
weightlessness, as that horrible sensation is beyond mere terrestrial
dizziness. The pilot tried to reverse the switches he had just thrown,
but his leaden hands utterly refused to obey the dictates of his reeling
mind. His brain was a writhing, convulsive mass of torment
indescribable; expanding, exploding, swelling out with an unendurable
pressure against its confining skull. Fiery spirals, laced with
streaming, darting lances of black and green, flamed inside his bursting
eyeballs. The Universe spun and whirled in mad gyrations about him as he
reeled drunkenly to his feet, staggering and sprawling. He fell. He
realized that he was falling, yet he could not fall! Thrashing wildly,
grotesquely in agony, he struggled madly and blindly across the room,
directly toward the thick steel wall. The tip of one hair of his unruly
thatch touched the wall, and the slim length of that single hair did not
even bend as its slight strength brought to an instant halt the
hundred-and-eighty-odd pounds of mass--mass now entirely without
inertia--that was his body.
But finally the sheer brain power of the man began to triumph over his
physical torture. By indomitable force of will he compelled his groping
hands to seize a life-line, almost meaningless to his dazed
intelligence; and through that nightmare incarnate of hellish torture he
fought his way back to the control board. Hooking one leg around a
standard, he made a seemingly enormous effort and drove the two switches
back into their original positions; then fell flat upon the floor,
weakly but in a wave of relief and thankfulness, as his racked body felt
again the wonted phenomena of weight and of inertia. White, trembling,
frankly and openly sick, the two men stared at each other in half-amazed
joy.
"It worked." Cleveland smiled wanly as he recovered sufficiently to
speak, then leaped to his feet. "Snap it up, Fred! We must be falling
fast--we'll be wrecked when we hit!"
"We're not falling anywhere." Rodebush, foreboding in his eyes, walked
over to the main observation plate and scanned the heavens. "However,
it's not as bad as I was afraid it might be. I can still recognize a few
of the constellations, even though they are all pretty badly distorted.
That means that we can't be more than a couple of light-years or so away
from the Solar System. Of course, since we had so little thrust on,
practically all of our time and energy was spent in getting out of the
atmosphere; but, even at that, it's a good thing that space isn't an
absolutely perfect vacuum or we would have been clear out of the
Universe by this time."
"Huh? Impossible--where are we anyway? Then we must be making mil ...
Oh, I see!" Cleveland exclaimed in disjointed sentences as he also
stared into the plate.
"Right. We aren't traveling at all _now_." Rodebush replied. "We are
perfectly stationary relative to Tellus, since we made the hop without
inertia. We must have attained one hundred percent neutralization, which
we didn't quite expect, and therefore we must have stopped
instantaneously when our inertia was restored. But it isn't _where_ we
are that is worrying me the most--we can fix our place in space
accurately enough by a few observations--it's _when_."
"That's right, too. Say we're two light-years away. You think maybe
we're two years older than we were ten minutes ago, then? That's
possible, of course, maybe probable: there's been a lot of discussion on
that theory. Now's a good time to prove or to disprove it. Let's snap
back to Tellus and find out."
"We'll do that, after a little more experimenting. You see, I had no
intention of giving us such a long push. I was going to throw the
switches over and back, but you know what happened. However, there's one
good thing about it--it's worth two years of anybody's life to settle
that relativity-time thing definitely, one way or the other."
"I'll say it is. But say, we've got a lot of power on our ultra-wave:
enough to reach Tellus, I think. Let's locate the sun and get in touch
with Samms."
"Let's work on these controls a little first, so we'll have something to
report. Out here's a fine place to try the ship out--nothing in the
way."
"All right with me. But I _would_ like to find out whether I'm two years
older than I think I am, or not!"
Then for hours they put the great super-ship through her paces, just as
test-pilots check up on every detail of performance of an airplane of
new and radical design. They found that the horrible vertigo could be
endured, perhaps in time even conquered as space-sickness could be
conquered, by a strong will in a sound body; and that their new
conveyance had possibilities of which even Rodebush had never dreamed.
Finally, their most pressing questions answered, they turned their most
powerful ultra-beam communicator toward the yellowish star which they
knew to be Old Sol.
"Samms ... Samms." Cleveland spoke slowly and distinctly. "Rodebush and
Cleveland reporting from the 'Space-Eating Wampus', now directly in line
with Beta Ursae Minoris from the sun, distance about two point two light
years. It will take six banks of tubes on your tightest beam, LSV3, to
reach us. Barring a touch of an unusually severe type of space-sickness,
everything worked beautifully; even better than our calculations showed.
There's something we want to know right away--have we been gone four
hours and some odd minutes, or better than two years?"
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