Triplanetary
was not needed. As the flaring exhausts ceased Cleveland swung out his
heavy bag and stepped lightly off into space, and in a right line he
floated directly into the open doorway of the rocket-plane. The door
clanged shut behind him and in a matter of moments he stood in the
control room of the racer, divested of his armor and shaking hands with
his friend and co-laborer, Frederick Rodebush.
"Well, Fred, what do you know?" Cleveland asked, as soon as greetings
had been exchanged. "How do the various reports dovetail together? I
know that you couldn't tell me anything on the wave, but there's no
danger of eavesdroppers _here_."
"You can't tell," Rodebush soberly replied. "We're just beginning to
wake up to the fact that there are a lot of things we don't know
anything about. Better wait until we're back at the Hill. We have a full
set of ultra-screens around there now. There's a couple of other good
reasons, too--it would be better for both of us to go over the whole
thing with Virgil, from the ground up; and we can't do any more talking,
anyway. Our orders are to get back there at maximum, and you know what
that means aboard the _Sliver_. Strap yourself solid in that
shock-absorber there, and here's a pair of ear-plugs."
"When the _Sliver_ really cuts loose it means a rough party, all right,"
Cleveland assented, snapping about his body the heavy spring-straps of
his deeply cushioned seat, "but I'm just as anxious to get back to the
Hill as anybody can be to get me there. All set."
Rodebush waved his hand at the pilot and the purring whisper of the
exhausts changed instantly to a deafening, continuous explosion. The men
were pressed deeply into their shock-absorbing chairs as the _Silver
Sliver_ spun around her longitudinal axis and darted away from the
_Chicago_ with such a tremendous acceleration that the spherical warship
seemed to be standing still in space. In due time the calculated
mid-point was reached, the slim space-plane rolled over again, and, mad
acceleration now reversed, rushed on toward the earth, but with
constantly diminishing speed. Finally a measurable atmospheric pressure
was encountered, the needle prow dipped downward, and the _Silver
Sliver_ shot forward upon her tiny wings and vanes, nose-rockets now
drumming in staccato thunder. Her metal grew hot: dull red, bright red
yellow, blinding white; but it neither melted nor burned. The pilot's
calculations had been sound, and though the limiting point of safety of
temperature was reached and steadily held, it was not exceeded. As the
density of the air increased so decreased the velocity of the man-made
meteorite. So it was that a dazzling lance of fire sped high over
Seattle, lower over Spokane, and hurled itself eastward, a furiously
flaming arrow; slanting downward in a long, screaming dive toward the
heart of the Rockies. As the now rapidly cooling greyhound of the skies
passed over the western ranges of the Bitter Roots it became apparent
that her goal was a vast, flat-topped, and conical mountain, shrouded in
livid light; a mountain whose height awed even its stupendous neighbors.
While not artificial, the Hill had been altered markedly by the
Triplanetary engineers who had built into it the headquarters of the
Secret Service. Its mile-wide top was a jointless expanse of gray armor
steel; the steep, smooth surface of the truncated cone was a
continuation of the same immensely thick sheet of metal. No known
vehicle could climb that smooth, hard, forbidding slope of steel; no
known projectile could mar that armor; no known craft could even
approach the Hill without detection. Could not approach it at all, in
fact, for it was constantly inclosed in a vast hemisphere of lambent
violet flame through which neither material substance nor destructive
ray could pass.
As the _Silver Sliver_, crawling along at a bare three-hundred miles an
hour, approached that transparent, brilliantly violet wall of
destruction, a violet light filled her control room and as suddenly went
out; flashing on and off again and again.
"Giving us the once-over, eh?" Cleveland asked. "That is something new,
isn't it, Fred?"
"Yes, it's a high-powered ultra-wave spy," Rodenbush returned. "The
light is simply a warning, which can be carried if desired. It can also
carry voice and vision...."
"Like this," Samms' voice interrupted from the powerful dynamic speaker
upon the pilots' panel and his clear-cut face appeared upon the
television screen. "I don't suppose Fred thought to mention it, but this
is one of his inventions of the last few days. We are just trying it out
on you. It doesn't mean a thing though, as far as the _Sliver_ is
concerned. Come ahead!"
A circular opening appeared in the wall of force, an opening which
disappeared as soon as the plane had darted through it; and at the same
time her landing-cradle rose into the air through a great trap-door.
Slowly and gracefully the space-plane settled downward into that
cushioned embrace. Then cradle and nestled _Sliver_ sank from view and,
turning smoothly upon mighty trunnions, the plug of armor drove solidly
back into its place in the metal pavement of the mountain's lofty
summit. The cradle-elevator dropped rapidly, coming to rest many levels
down in the heart of the Hill, and Cleveland and Rodebush leaped lightly
out of their transport, through her still hot outer walls. A door opened
before them and they found themselves in a large room of full daylight
illumination; the anteroom of the private office of Virgil Samms. Chiefs
of Departments sat at their desks, concentrated upon problems or at
ease, according to the demands of the moment; televisotypes and
recorders flashed busily but silently; calmly efficient men and women
went wontedly about the all-embracing business of Triplanetary's
space-pervading Secret Service.
"Right of way, Norma?" Rodebush paused briefly before the desk of the
Chief's private secretary; but even before he had spoken she had pressed
a button and the door behind her swung wide.
"You two do not need to be announced," the attractive young woman
smiled. "Go right in."
Samms met them at the door eagerly, shaking hands particularly
vigorously with Cleveland.
"Congratulations on that camera, Lyman!" he exclaimed. "You did a
wonderful piece of work on that. Help yourselves to smokes and sit
down--there are a lot of things we want to talk over. Your pictures
carried most of the story, but they would have left us pretty much at
sea without Costigan's reports. But as it was, Fred here and his crew
worked out most of the answers from the dope the two of you got; and
what few they haven't got yet they soon will have."
"Nothing new on Conway?" Cleveland was almost afraid to ask the
question.
"No." A shadow came over Samms' face. "I'm afraid ... but I'm hoping
it's only that those creatures, whatever they are, have taken him so far
away that he can't reach us."
"They certainly are so far away that we can't reach them." Rodenbush
volunteered. "We can't even get their ultra-wave interference any more."
"Yes, that's a hopeful sign," Samms went on. "I hate to think of Conway
Costigan checking out. There, fellows, was a real observer. He was the
only man, I have ever known, who combined the two qualities of the
perfect witness. He could actually see everything he looked at, and
could report it truly, to the last, least detail. Take all this stuff,
for instance; especially their ability to transform iron into a fluid
allotrope, and in that form to use its intra-atomic energy as power.
Something brand new--unheard of except in the ravings of imaginative
fiction--and yet he described their converters and projectors so
minutely that Fred was able to work out the underlying theory in three
days, and to tie it in with our own super-ship. My first thought was
that we'd have to rebuild it iron-free, but Fred showed me my error--you
found it first yourself, of course."
"It wouldn't do any good to make the ship non-ferrous unless you could
so change our blood chemistry that we could get along without
hemoglobin, and that would be quite a feat," Cleveland agreed. "Then,
too, our most vital electrical machinery is built around iron cores. No,
we'll have to develop a screen for those forces--screens, rather, so
powerful that they can't drive anything through them."
"We've been working along those lines ever since you reported," Rodebush
said, "and we're beginning to see light. And in that same connection
it's no wonder that we couldn't handle our super-ship. We had some good
ideas, but they were wrongly applied. However, things look quite
promising now. We have that transformation of iron all worked out in
theory, and as soon as we get a generator going we can straighten out
everything else in short order. And think what that unlimited power
means! All the power we want--power enough even to try out such hitherto
purely theoretical possibilities as the neutralization of gravity, and
even of the inertia of matter!"
"Hold on!" protested Samms. "You certainly can't do _that_! Inertia
is--_must_ be--a basic attribute of matter, and surely cannot be done
away with without destroying the matter itself. Don't start anything
like that. Fred--I don't want to lose you and Lyman, too."
"Don't worry about us, Chief." Rodebush replied with a smile. "If you
will tell me what matter is, fundamentally, I may agree with you ... No?
Well, then, don't be surprised at anything that happens. We are going to
do a lot of things that nobody ever thought of doing before."
Thus for a long time the argument and discussion went on, to be
interrupted by the voice of the secretary.
"Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Samms, but some things have come up that you
will have to handle. Knobos is calling from out near Mars. He has caught
the _Endymion_, and has killed about half her crew doing it. Milton has
finally reported from Venus, after being out of touch for five days. He
trailed the Wintons into Thalleron swamp. They crashed him there, but he
won out and has what he went after. And just now I got a flash from
Fletcher, in the asteroid belt. I think that he has finally traced that
dope line. But Knobos is on now--what do you want him to do about the
_Endymion_?"
"Tell him to--no, put him on here, I'd better tell him myself," Samms
directed, and his face hardened in ruthless decision as the horny,
misshapen face of the Martian lieutenant appeared upon the screen. "What
do you think, Knobos? Shall they come to trial or not?"
"No."
"I don't think so, either. It is better that a few gangsters should
disappear in space than run the risk of another uprising. See to it."
"Right." The screen darkened and Samms spoke to his secretary. "Put
Milton and Fletcher on whenever their rays come in." He then turned to
his guests. "We've covered the ground quite thoroughly. Good-bye--I wish
I could go with you, but I'll be pretty well tied up for the next week
or two."
"Tied up, doesn't half express it," Rodebush remarked as the two
scientists walked along a corridor toward an elevator. "He probably is
the busiest man on the three planets."
"As well as the most powerful," Cleveland supplemented. "And very few
men could use his power as fairly--but he's welcome to it, as far as I'm
concerned. I'd have the pink fantods for a month if I had to do only
once what he's just done--and to him it's just part of a day's work."
"You mean the _Endymion_? What else could he do?"
"Nothing--that's just what I'm talking about. It had to be done, since
bringing them to trial would probably mean killing half the people of
Morseca; but at the same time it's a ghastly thing to have to order a
job of deliberate, cold-blooded, and illegal murder."