Collected short fiction, p.61
Collected Short Fiction, page 61
Dazzling white rays flashed from the tubes. Swiftly, they found the two forward sunships. The slender octagons of silver shone white under the rays. They reeled, whirled about, end over end, under the terrific pressure of atomic bombardment. In a moment they glowed with dull red incandescence, swiftly became white. A bluish haze spread about them—the discharge of the electric energy carried by the atoms, which would electrocute any man not insulated against it.
From the three other ships flaming white rays darted, searching for the Red Rover. But they had hardly found the mark when Brand ordered his rays snapped out. The two vessels he had struck were but whirling masses of incandescent wreckage—completely out of the battle, though most of the men aboard them still survived in their insulated cells.
The Prince himself spoke into the tube. “Maneuver number forty-one. Drive for the Triton.”
Driven by alternate burst from front and rear motor tubes, the Red Rover started a curiously irregular course toward the treasure ship. Spinning end over end, describing irregular curves, she must have been an almost impossible target.
And twice during each spin, when her axis was in line with the Triton, all tubes were fired for an instant, striking the treasure ship with a force that reeled and staggered her, leaving her plates half-fused, twisted and broken.
Three times a ray caught the Red Rover for an instant, but her amazing maneuvers, which had evidently been long practised by her crew, carried her on a course so erratic and puzzling that the few rays that found her were soon shaken off.
Before the pirate flier reached the Triton, the treasure vessel was drifting helpless, with all rays out. The Red Rover passed by her, continuing on her dizzily whirling course until she was directly between the two remaining fliers.
“Hold her still,” the Prince then shouted into the tube. “And fire all rays, fore and aft.”
BLINDING opalescent rays jetted viciously from the two rings of tubes. Since the Red Rover lay between the two vessels, they could not avoid firing upon each other. Her own rays, being fired in opposite directions, served to balance each other and hold her at rest, while the rays of the enemy, as well as those of the pirate that impinged upon them, tended to send them into spinning flight through space.
Blinding fluorescence obscured the vitrolite panels, and the stout walls of the Red Rover groaned beneath the pressure of the hail of atoms upon them. Swiftly they would heat, soften, collapse. Or the insulation would burn away and the electric charge electrocute her passengers.
The enemy was in a state as bad. The white beams of the pirate flier had found them earlier, and could be held upon them more efficiently. It was a contest of endurance.
Suddenly the jets of opalescence snapped of! the pirate. Bill, gazing out into star-dusted space, saw the two Patrol vessels spinning in mad flight before the pressure of the rays, glowing white in incandescent twisted ruin.
A few minutes later the Red Rover was drifting beside the Triton holding the wrecked treasure-flier with electromagnetic plates. The air-lock of the pirate vessel opened to release a dozen men in metal vacuum suits, armed with ray pistols and equipped with wrecking tools and oxygen lances. The Prince was their leader.
They forced the air-lock of the Triton, and entered the wreck. In a few minutes grotesque metal-suited figures appeared again, carrying heavy leaden tubes filled with the precious vitalium.
The Red Rover was speeding into space, an hour later, under full power. The Prince of Space was in the bridge room, with Bill, Captain Brand, Dr. Trainor, and Paula. Bill noticed that the girl seemed pathetically joyous at the Prince’s safety, though he gave her scant attention.
“We have the two tons of vitalium,” said the Prince. “Nearly forty-six hundred pounds, in fact. Easily enough to furnish power for the voyage to Mars. We have the metal—provided we can get away with it.”
“Is there still danger?” Paula inquired nervously. “Yes. Most of the passengers of the Triton were still alive. When I gave her captain my card, he told me that they sent a heliographic S.O.S. as soon as we attacked. Some forty or fifty fliers of the Moon Patrol will be hot on our trail.”
The Red Rover flew on into space, under all her power. Presently the lookouts picked up a score of tiny flickering points of light behind them. The Moon Patrol was in hot pursuit.
“Old friends of mine,” said Captain Brand. “Every one of them would give his life to see us caught. And I suppose every one of them feels now that he has a slice of that fifteen million eagles reward! The Moon Patrol never gives up and never admits defeat.”
Tense, anxious hours went by while every battery was delivering its maximum current, and every motor tube was operating at its absolutely highest potential.
Paula waited on the bridge, anxiously solicitous for the Prince’s health—he was still pale and weak from the adventure in the desert. Presently, evidently noticing how tired and worried she looked, he sent her to her stateroom to rest. She went, in tears.
“No chance to fight, if they run us down,” said Captain Brand. “We can handle four, but not forty.”
Time dragged heavily. The Red Rover flew out into space, past the moon, on such a course as would not draw pursuit toward the City of Space. Her maximum acceleration was slightly greater than that of the Moon Patrol fliers, because of the greater number and power of her motor tubes. Steadily she forged away from her pursuers.
At last the flickering lights behind could be seen no longer.
But the Red Rover continued in a straight line, at the top of her speed, for many hours, before she turned and slipped cautiously toward the secret City of Space. She reached it in safety, was let through the air-lock. Once more Bill looked out upon the amazing city upon the inner wall of a spinning cylinder. He enjoyed the remarkable experience of a walk along a street three miles in length, which brought him up in an unbroken curve, and back to where he had started.
It took a week to refit the Red Rover, in preparation for the voyage to Mars. Her motor ray tubes were rebuilt, and additional vitalium generators installed. The precious metal taken from the Triton was built into new batteries to supply power for the long voyage. Good stocks of food, water, and compressed oxygen were taken aboard, as well as weapons and scientific equipment of all variety.
“We start for Mars in thirty minutes,” Captain Brand told Bill when the warning gong had called him and the others aboard.
CHAPTER VI
The Red Star of War
THE Red Rover slipped out through the great airlock of the City of Space, and put her bow toward Mars. The star of the war-god hung before her in the silver-dusted darkness of the faint constellation of Capricornus, a tiny brilliant disk of ocherous red. The Prince of Space, outlawed by the world of his birth, was hurtling out through space in a mad attempt to save that world from the horrors of Martian invasion.
The red point that was Mars hung almost above them, it seemed, almost in the center of the vitrolite dome of the bridge. “We are not heading directly for the planet,” Captain Brand told Bill. “Its orbital velocity must be considered. We are moving toward the point that it will occupy in twenty days.
“We can make it in twenty days? Three million miles a day?”
“Easily, if the vitalium holds out, and if we don’t collide with a meteorite. There is no limit to speed in space, certainly no practical limit. Acceleration is the important question.”
“We may collide with a meteorite you say? Is there much danger?”
“A good deal. The meteorites travel in swarms which follow regular orbits about the sun. We have accurate charts of the swarms whose orbits cross those of the earth and moon. Now we are entering unexplored territory. And most of them are so small, of course, that no telescope would reveal them in time. Merely little pebbles, moving with a speed about a dozen times that of a bullet from an old-fashioned rifle.”
“And what are we going to do if we live to get to Mars?”
“A big question!” Brand grinned. “We could hardly mop up a whole planet with the motor rays. Trainor has a few of his rocket torpedoes, but not enough to make much impression upon a belligerent planet. The Prince and Trainor have a laboratory rigged up down below. They are doing a lot of work. A new weapon, I understand. I don’t know what will come of it.” Presently Bill found his way down the ladder to the laboratory. He found the Prince of Space and Dr. Trainor hard at work. He learned little by watching them, save that they were experimenting upon small animals, green plants, and samples of the rare vitalium. High tension electricity, electron tubes, and various rays seemed to be in use.
Noticing his interest, the Prince said, “You know that vitalium was first discovered in vitamins, in infinitesimal quantities. The metal seems to be at the basis of all life. It is the trace of vitalium in chlorophyl which enables the green leaves of plants to utilize the energy of sunlight. We are trying to determine the nature of the essential force of life—we know that the question is bound up with the radioactivity of vitalium. We have made a good deal of progress, and complete success would give us a powerful instrumentality.”
Paula was working with them in the laboratory, making a capable and eager assistant—she had been her father’s helper since her girlhood. Bill noticed that she seemed happy only when near the Prince, that the weight of unhappiness and trouble left her brown eyes only when she was able to help him with some task, or when her skill brought a word or glance of approval from him.
The Prince himself seemed entirely absorbed in his work; he treated the girl courteously enough, but seemed altogether impersonal toward her. To him, she seemed only to be a fellow-scientist. Yet Bill knew that the Prince was aware of the girl’s feelings—and he suspected that the Prince was trying to stifle a growing reciprocal emotion of his own.
Bill spent long hours on the bridge with Captain Brand, staring out at the star-scattered midnight of space. The earth shrank quickly, until it was a tiny green disk, with the moon an almost invisible white speck beside it. Day by day, Mars grew larger. It swelled from an ocher point to a little red disk.
Often Bill scanned the spinning scarlet globe through a telescope. He could see the white polar caps, the dark equatorial regions, the black lines of the canals. And after many days, he could see the little blue circle that had been visible in the giant telescope on Trainor’s Tower.
“It must be something enormous, to stand out so plainly,” he said when he showed it to Captain Brand.
“I suppose so. Even now, we could see nothing with a diameter of less than a mile or so.”
“If it’s a ship, it must be darned big—big enough for the whole race of ’em to get aboard.”
Bill was standing, a few hours later, gazing out through the vitrolite panels at the red-winged splendor of the sun, when suddenly he heard a series of terrific crashes. The ship rocked and trembled beneath him; he heard the reverberation of hammered metal, and the hiss of escaping air.
“Meteorite!” screamed Brand.
Wildly, he pointed to the vitrolite dome above. In three places the heavy crystal was shattered, a little hole drilled through it, surrounded with radiating cracks. In two other sections the heavy metal wall was dented. Through the holes, the air was hissing out. It formed a white cloud outside, and glistening frost gathered quickly on the crystal panels.
Bill felt the air suddenly drawn from his lungs. He gasped for breath. The bridge was abruptly cold. Little particles of snow danced across it.
“The air is going!” Brand gasped. “We’ll suffocate!”
He touched a lever and a heavy cover fell across the ladder shaft, locked itself, making the floor an airtight bulkhead.
“That’s right,” Bill tried to say. “Give others—chance.”
His voice had failed. A soaring came in his ears. He felt as if a malignant giant were sucking out his breath. The room grew dark, swam about him. He reeled; he was blind. A sudden chill came over his limbs—the infinite cold of space. He felt hot blood spurting from his nose, freezing on his face. Faintly he heard Brand moving, as he staggered and fell into unconsciousness.
WHEN he looked about again, air and warmth were coming back. He saw that the shaft was still sealed, but air was hissing into the room through a valve. Captain Brand lay inert beside him on the floor. He looked up at the dome, saw that soft rubber patches had been placed over the holes, where air-pressure held them fast. The Captain had saved the ship before he fell.
In a moment the door opened. Dr. Trainor rushed in, with Prince and others behind him. They picked up the unconscious Brand and rushed him down to the infirmary. The plucky captain had been almost asphyxiated, but administration of pure oxygen restored him to consciousness. On the following day he was back on the bridge.
The Red Rover had been eighteen days out from the City of Space. The loss of air due to collision with the meteorites had brought inconveniences, but good progress had been made. It was only two more days to Mars. The forward tubes had been going many hours, to retard the ship.
“Object dead ahead!” called a lookout from his telescope.
“A small blue globe, coming directly toward us,” he added, a moment later.
“Another of their ships, setting out for the earth,” Brand muttered. “It will about cook our goose!”
In a few moments the Prince and Dr. Trainor had rushed up the ladder from the laboratory. The blue globe was rushing swiftly toward them; and the Red Rover was plunging forward at many thousand miles per hour.
“We can’t run from it,” said Brand. “It is still fifty thousand miles away, but we are going far too fast to stop in that distance. We will pass it in about five minutes.”
“If we can’t stop, we go ahead,” the Prince said, smiling grimly.
“We might try a torpedo on ’em,” suggested Dr. Trainor. He had mounted a tube to fire his rocket torpedoes from the bridge. It will have all the speed its own motor rays can develop, plus what the ship has at present, plus the relative velocity of the globe. That might carry it through.”
The Prince nodded assent.
Trainor slipped a slender, gleaming rocket into his tube, sighted it, moved the lever that set the projectile to spinning, and fired. The little white flame of the motor rays dwindled and vanished ahead of them. Quickly, Trainor fired again, and then a third time.
“Switch off the rays and darken the lights,” the Prince ordered. “With combined speeds of ten thousand miles a minute, we might pass them without being seen—if they haven’t sighted us already.”
For long seconds they hurtled onward in tense silence. Bill was at a telescope. Against the silver and black background of space, the little blue disk of the Martian ship was growing swiftly.
Suddenly a bright purple spark appeared against the blue, grew swiftly brighter.
“An atomic bomb!” he cried. “They saw us. We are lost!”
He tensed himself, waiting for the purple flash that would mean the end. But the words were hardly out of his mouth when he saw a tiny sheet of violet flame far ahead of them. It flared up suddenly, and vanished as abruptly. The blue disk of the ship still hung before them, but the purple spark was gone. For a moment he was puzzled. Then he understood.
“The atomic bomb struck a torpedo!” he shouted. “It’s exploded. And if they think it was we——”
“Perhaps they can’t see us, with the rays out,” Brand said.
“It is unlikely,” Trainor observed, “that the bomb actually struck one of our torpedoes. More likely it was set to be detonated by the gravitational attraction of any object that passed near it.”
Still watching the azure globe, Bill saw a sudden flare of orange light against it. A great burst of yellow flame. The blue ball crumpled behind the flame. The orange went out, and the blue vanished with it. Only twisted scraps of white metal were left.
“The second torpedo struck the Martian!” Bill cried.
“And you notice that the blue went out,” said Dr. Trainor. “It must be merely a vibratory screen.”
The Red Rover hurtled on through space, toward the crimson planet that hour by hour and minute by minute expanded before her. The blue disk was now plainly visible against the red. It was apparently a huge globe of azure, similar to the ships they had met, but at least a mile in diameter. She lay just off the red desert, near an important junction of “canals.”
“Some huge machine, screened by the blue wall of vibration,” Dr. Trainor suggested.
During the last two days the Prince and Dr. Trainor, and their eager assistant, Paula, had worked steadily in the laboratory, without pause for rest. Bill was with them when the Prince threw down his pencil and announced the result of his last calculation.
“The problem is solved,” he said. “And its answer means both success and failure. We have mastered the secret of life. We have unlocked the mystery of the ages! A terrific force is at our command—a force great enough to sweep man to the millennium, or to wipe out a planet! But that force is useless without the apparatus to release it.”
“We have the laboratory——” Trainor began.
“But we lack one essential thing. We must have a small amount of cerium, one of the rare earth metals. For the electrode, you know, inside the vitalium grid in our new vacuum tube. And there is not a gram of cerium in all our supplies.”
“We can go back to the Earth——” said Trainor.
“That will mean forty days gone, before we could come back—more than forty, because we would have to stop at the City of Space to refit. And all the perils of the meteorites again. I am sure that in less than forty days the Martians will be putting the machine in that enormous blue globe to its dreadful use.”
“Then we must land on Mars and find the metal!” said Captain Brand, who had been listening by the door.
“Exactly,” said the Prince. “You will pick out a spot that looks deserted, at a great distance from the blue globe. Somewhere in the mountains, as far back as possible from the canals. Land there just after midnight. We will have mining and prospecting equipment ready to go to work when day comes. Almost any sort of ore ought to yield the small quantity of cerium we need.”
