Collected short fiction, p.54
Collected Short Fiction, page 54
I reached the metal door, a thick cylinder of frosted marble in its crust of snow. I fell against it, hammering it with hands that had no feeling. A great dark cloud obscured my vision, and I collapsed in infinite lassitude.
The great valve slid open as I fell. Strange figures, grotesque and gleaming like men of metal in the silvered space-suits, were clambering out. Quickly, tenderly, they picked up my fallen comrades and myself, carried us through the valve and down into the warm compartments at the top of the shaft.
Payne and Gerald were unconscious, nearly dead. I fought for my voice. The guards who had rescued us saw my struggle, poured powerful stimulants down my throat. I recovered enough strength to stammer out the story, to tell of the wrecked flier, with Doane and Lafollette in it, and to give directions for finding it without delay.
“Bris is back with his fliers,” the guards told me. “He can go.”
A great gladness came over me, like a welcome flood of warmth. We had won. Lafollette and Doane and the Comet were saved. I passed into a deep and undisturbed sleep.
When I woke again, I was in a small white bed, with Leroda sitting beside me. She was almost ridiculously attentive, but it was good to have her near. The exposure had been rather hard on me; I was in bed several days, with my beautiful fiancée, or my mother, or Valence with me most of the time.
Gardiner came twice, great, kindly man, with his cheerful jests and his news of Warrington.
Bris, with the fliers, had had no difficulty in locating the Comet from my description. The crew of the wrecked vessel had been transferred to another flier, and the Comet itself had been raised and brought back to the cavern, where it was now being repaired.
Lafollette and Doane came to my room to see me, with thanks for the dreadful trip through the night. They said they had seen my companions, Payne and Lieutenant Gerald, who were in the hospital, doing nicely.
My own condition improved rapidly; and when the fleet, a day before sunrise, left Firecrest for Theophilus, I was able to go along. A swift and uneventful voyage on the crowded ships left us at the great spaceport of that city, just as the white cone of the solar corona rose in the east.
We were greeted with a wild ovation. The whole population of the city, it seemed, was waiting at the air-lock to meet us with a thunder of welcome. Warrington’s troops were passed in review through the streets, along with those men of Lafollette’s which had been sent to Theophilus.
Lafollette, with his soldiers and supplies, had brought new encouragement and enthusiasm to the moon.
CHAPTER XXIII
The New Plan
WARRINGTON met us as we entered the air-lock, his shoulders still erect under the load of responsibility he bore, and his eyes still undimmed with care. He greeted us warmly, and we were taken at once to a banquet in honor of Lafollette. Following that was a conference, in which the plan that finally brought victory had its birth.
Warrington spoke to us, in his quiet, dignified manner.
“There is a plan that I have long had in mind,” he said, “to turn against our opponents the natural elements and to let the dreadful night of the moon strike a blow for liberty. There are obstacles, however, that I have never overcome, though I have attempted the thing in our last two campaigns.
“Twice I have succeeded in enticing Humbolt out of New Boston. On each occasion, I was unable to hold him until it would be too late for him to return. Once the plan was to trap him in a crater—it was the one called Painted Pit, which can be entered only through a narrow defile. A hundred brave fellows had volunteered to stay and hold the pass, if Humbolt could be trapped inside, though the coming of the night would have meant death for all. Humbolt was to think that I had sought refuge in the crater, and a show was to be made of holding the pass, so that he would storm it and enter. It might have gone over, but Van Thoren’s fliers saw my main force marching away beyond the crater, and that gave away the plan. Humbolt hurried back to New Boston.
“The idea is obviously impractical, while the enemy has a fleet. But the new fliers, under Doane’s skillful command, might engage the fleet of Van Thoren while the action on the surface is carried out, or, at least, worry them enough to keep them from interfering with the operation.”
The plan was thoroughly discussed, pro and con, but no definite action was taken upon it. In fact, it seemed that no one was able to suggest any practical means whereby it might be carried out.
Toward the end of the meeting Gardiner brought up another subject—that of a protective armor against the D-ray. It appeared that the old savant had been working on the problem for some time. He had the mathematics of it well worked out. On a blackboard set up on the rostrum, he illustrated his talk with drawings in colored chalk.
“You all know,” he said, “that the destructive action of the D-ray depends upon the fluctuation of the several frequencies that compose it, in cycles incredibly rapid, so that the electronic vibration is enormously amplified in the substance under the ray, until it is literally shaken to the simpler atoms of the inert gases, when the frequency of the ray is adjusted in harmony with the natural period of vibration of the electrons.” He proceeded with the lecture, saying the same thing in more scientific language. He sketched colored drawings of the atom according to the latest theory, with a detailed discussion of the process by which the high-frequency D-ray breaks it down, with the evolution of the inert gases of the helium group.
Finally he concluded, “As you know, any etheric vibration can be canceled by another wave of the same frequency and of opposite phase. That is the principle upon which the fan-ray is based. Now I have the idea for something new. It would be a paint of some kind, which would absorb part of the energy of the D-ray, and re-radiate it with such a wave-length as will cancel a vital part of the D-ray. Against such an armor D-ray would be no more effective than would be a beam of ultra-violet light. As I have demonstrated, the mathematical part is already worked out. There remains a good deal of research to be done, to find the exact chemical compound which will serve our need.
“If equipment and technical skill can be had, I am sure that it can be done.”
The Assembly was enthusiastic in voting approval of Gardiner’s plan. Funds for the work were put at his command, and he was urged to push the task with all possible speed.
When the meeting was over, I went to him and offered to undertake the laboratory work—the great Lunarian was so valuable as statesman and diplomat, that he could ill be spared for months of isolated work.
With a grin, he informed me that he already had me in mind for the task. During the long lunar day at Theophilus I worked with him over the mathematical points involved, until I was sure that my understanding of the problem was as clear as his own. Then he helped me in selecting the needed equipment, designed one or two new devices for me, and suggested in detail the method of research to be followed. The Firecrest cavern seemed the logical place for the experiment work; and it was agreed that Doane would carry me there, with my books and equipment, during the next lunar night.
Meanwhile, Warrington went afield with Lafollette. The campaigns of the day were not important, amounting to mere skirmishing and guerilla warfare with Humbolt’s forces in the neighborhood of New Boston. Our men were safely back at Theophilus long before sunset. The men from earth were getting valuable training, of course, in lunar military tactics.
The sun set, and Doane duly conveyed me and my new equipment back to Firecrest. I had a gloriously happy reunion with Leroda and father and mother, and fell to my work at once.
Leroda had finished her new seal, the crescent “with the old moon in its arms,” surrounded with a ring of thirteen stars, to represent the thirteen incorporated cities. The seal had ben unanimously adopted by the Assembly, as the emblem of the new free Moon Corporation. It adorned public buildings and documents of state, and as a flag with blue ground, it was carried at the head of the armies of the moon.
NEARLY a year went by. I worked as hard as I have ever done. I had a regular schedule; six hours sleep, two hours exercise—usually spent in a game of tennis or a hike, with Ledora—thirty minutes for meals, and the balance of the time in the laboratory. I had abundant equipment, and usually three or four assistants worked with me. Franklin was frequently at Firecrest; he kept up with the work, and made many invaluable suggestions. Steadily I marched toward my goal.
The work was by no means without its element of excitement. After the mathematical details were complete, the experimentation consisted mostly in making a compound that satisfied the known requirements, painting a slab of rock or metal with it, and setting it up in front of a D-ray. Usually the object was merely fused, or vanished in a puff of vapor. But some of the substances we worked out seemed to act as catalysts to increase the violence of the disintegration.
On one occasion a boulder which had been sprayed with a mixture of mercurous fluoride and calcium bromide exploded with such deafening violence, that our laboratory was wrecked almost completely. One of my assistants, a poor chap named Stanley, was killed. The heavy D-ray tube was smashed and the wreckage blown over on me. I suffered nothing worse, however, than a broken arm and a few minor contusions.
By the time I was able to be back at work, my fellow experimenters had most of the equipment repaired or replaced, and we went on as before. That was only the most spectacular of a score of accidents and misfortunes. In spite of them, we moved steadily toward our object.
Meanwhile, Warrington and Lafollette and Gardiner were frequently at Firecrest, to meet with the Assembly. Military operations had not been important. But Lafoilette’s veterans were now used to lunar conditions. They had mastered the “moon-calf” technique of guerilla warfare; and the raw lunar recruits, training with them, had gained much in discipline and military spirit.
At this time the strength of the Tellurians was still concentrated in New Boston. Humbolt had nearly a hundred and fifty thousand men there. Opposed to him were Warrington’s force of about sixty thousand men, Lafoilette’s forty thousand, and the army of almost twenty thousand under Hall at Colon.
Steadily, out of long hours of patient conference, grew the plan for the final campaign that ended the war.
It was about this time, too, that Tom Dowling, something of a poet, composed the words and music to the lunar anthem, “To Ye Lunar Hills Ablaze.” He had become an officer in the fleet, to the infinite anxiety and pride of Valence; he had been on a flier that rescued a little settlement attacked by a force from New Boston. Inspired by sight of the crude little fortification, defended by ragged miners with their drilling-rays, with the lunar flag that Leroda had designed waving over them, he had written a fervent, ringing lyric of patriotism. The song spread over the moon like a new wave of hope. It was sung in the streets, hummed in factories and mines, whistled in Warrington’s ranks.
And Tom proved as able an officer as a poet. By the end of the year he had won the captaincy of a war-flier and proved his spurs in victorious combat with a scouting cruiser from New Boston.
At last I was successful in my research. I found that the halide compounds of one of the isotopes of barium re-radiated a higher frequency of the D-ray in such a manner as to cancel it by interference, no matter how the ray was focussed. Objects covered with an infinitesimally thin layer of this barium compound, and exposed to the D-ray, were not affected, save for a moderate heating effect.
The principal difficulty in the process had been to separate the isotopes of barium. Since the atomic weight of barium is 137.4, and since all atomic weights of simple substances, with the exception of hydrogen and a few others, are whole numbers, it is apparent readily enough that barium is composed of several isotopes, of different whole atomic weights, whose average is 187.4. But since the atomic number of each of these is 56, their chemical properties are identical, and it is quite impossible to separate them by purely chemical means.
A parallel case is that of chlorine. Its atomic weight is 35.46. But positive ray analysis shows that it is composed of two isotopes, of atomic weights exactly 85 and exactly 37.
My first experiments with barium had failed because of the presence of the other isotopes, which disintegrated under the ray, destroying the armor. But at last I devised a method of using the D-ray itself in removing these, leaving the pure isotope I required, of atomic weight 138.
Warrington, Gardiner, Doane and Lafollette were at the time in Firecrest, still working on their plan of campaign. I called them down to the laboratory when the great discovery was completed, for a demonstration.
It was made simply enough.
I took the two metal bowls in which my simple breakfast of fruit and the liquid synthetic food combination had been brought me that morning. One of them I sprayed with a thin layer of barium bromide. I set them side by side on the ground in front of my D-ray projector and began focusing it.
Focusing the D-ray, which involves the synchronization of the several frequencies and their adjustment to the natural period of electronic vibration of the particular substance, to be disintegrated, is a rather slow and complicated process.
As I now worked over the tube, I spoke to Doane about the need of quick focusing in military operations; I had been much impressed by the fact that a few seconds of difference, in the time required to focus the rays, might turn the issue to victory or defeat in a contest of space fliers.
“Leave that to me!” Doane said, grinning. “But go ahead with your demonstration.”
At last I got the ray focused. I closed the switch. The thin finger of intense red light flashed out and touched the two metal discs. The untreated one blew up, with a white flash of flame. The other was hurled a dozen feet by the explosion. But it had not been affected by the D-ray, save to be slightly warmed.
Doane gave vent to a wild yell of enthusiasm. Lafollette congratulated me, grasping my hand, while tears of joy stood in his eyes. Gardiner merely stood smiling at me, while Warrington began a volley of questions about the manufacture and use of the new compound.
“I knew you’d do it,” he told me. “And we’re ready to use it in the next campaign.”
CHAPTER XXIV
Victory
BEFORE the conference was ended, plans had been completed for the final campaign. Before the lunar dawn, the repaired Comet carried Warrington and Lafollette and Gardiner back to Theophilus, to drill and equip their combined forces of nearly a hundred thousand men for the great attack on Humbolt at New Boston.
I stayed with Doane at Firecrest, where the fleet was being made ready for a decisive action. Acting under Warrington’s orders, we were preparing immense quantities of the bromides and chlorides of barium, obtaining the metal by treating ores from a limitless deposit of barium sulphate in the Firecrest mines with the D-ray. The great machine-shops in the cavern hurriedly turned out a large number of sprayers with which the protective compound could be rapidly and easily applied.
As part of the preparation for the coming battle, the war-fliers were thoroughly sprayed with the barium halides. That made them almost invulnerable to D-rays so long as the coating adhered, though the explosive atomic vortexes would be as destructive as ever, and it was feared that the violence of explosion would break the protective film, exposing the fliers to the rays.
Nearly a thousand steel drums of the barium halides were loaded on the fliers with three hundred of the compressed air sprays.
The luminous white cone of the solar corona was again in the east. Slowly the white blinding eye of the sun came up in a sky that was a pall of Cimmerian darkness, sparkling with a million crystal stars. The frost and solid air upon the desert once more rose in thick blue mist, rolling up in turbid clouds about the peaks, presently dissipating as the sun climbed into a dark blue sky.
Our preparation occupied us until well toward the lunar noon. Then old Jenkins, as queer and red and good-natured as ever, appeared, coming in flying leaps upon the scarlet elephantine M’Ob, with orders from headquarters.
Warrington had left Theophilus, was marching on New Boston with his and Lafollette’s forces combined. Doane was to leave Firecrest as soon as possible, fly to Warrington’s camp, and accompany him during the rest of the march. We were to find him in the vicinity of Smith’s crater, where one of the earlier engagements of the war had been fought.
The great war-fliers were brought up out of the cavern—having been taken, for refitting and repairs, back to the cradles in which they were built. I parted from father and mother—Valence, my sister, had gone aboard another flier, to take a final adieu from her devoted Captain Tom. During the long months at Firecrest, busy as I had been, I had had many happy moments with them all. Now, as I embraced my father’s aging form, and kissed the smooth cheek of my mother, and held the lithe warm figure of Leroda in my arms once more, looking into dark eyes where tears were welling up, it was with a heavy and saddening sense of the perils that were before me. Valiantly I tried to shake off a gloomy foreboding that I would never return to the dear home of my childhood and to those waiting for me there.
Then the brass gong sounded, and I had to leave them with a last laughing word of unfelt cheer, and to run through the lines to the great silver ship. A few minutes more and we were drifting swiftly southward over the towering mountains of the moon.
Six hours later we were in sight of Warrington’s army, marching in long white columns down that road between Theophilus and New Boston that he had traversed so often in the progress of the war. Our fliers hung low upon the surface, and kept to the rear, in order that the enemy might know of them no sooner than necessary.
Forty-eight hours later we were in sight of New Boston, beyond the cragged summit of Meteor Hill. Walled and roofed with glass, it was like a thick slab of some white, shining crystal, lying in the dreary mountainous wilderness. It was gay with the forest of glistening towers and domes, with the bright pennons of Metals fluttering from them.
The buildings at the space-port seemed largely deserted. The fleet of Van Thoren was not in evidence at the broad landing place below the city. Our own twenty vessels hung ready, low behind Meteor Hill, while Warrington deployed his troops about the walls, and got his field D-ray units into position, as if he intended to storm the city.
