Triplanetary
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?"
He shut off the power, turned to Rodebush, and went on:
"Nobody knows how fast this ultra-wave travels, but if it goes as fast
as we did coming out it's certainly moving. I'll give him about thirty
minutes, then shoot in another call."
But in less than two minutes the care-ravaged face of their chief
appeared sharp and clear upon their plates and his voice snapped curtly
from the speaker.
"Thank God you're alive, and twice that the ship works!" he exclaimed.
"You've been gone four hours, eleven minutes, and forty-one seconds, but
never mind about abstract theorizing. Get back here, to Pittsburgh, as
fast as you can drive. That Nevian vessel or another like her is mopping
up the city, and has destroyed half the Fleet already!"
"We'll be back there in nine minutes!" Rodebush snapped into the
transmitter. "Two to get from here to atmosphere, four from atmosphere
down to the Hill, and three to cool off. Notify the full four-shift
crew--everybody we've picked out. Don't need anybody else. Ship,
batteries, and armament are _ready_!"
"Two minutes to atmosphere, and it took ten coming out? Think you can do
it?" Cleveland asked, as Rodebush flipped off the power and leaped to
the control panel.
"We could do it in a few seconds if we had to. We used scarcely any
power at all coming out, and I'm not using very much going back," the
physicist explained rapidly, as he set the dials which would determine
their flashing course.
The master switches were thrown and the pangs of inertialessness again
assailed them--but weaker far this time than ever before--and upon their
lookout plates they beheld a spectacle never before seen by eye of man.
For the ultra-beam, with its heterodyned vision, is not distorted by any
velocity yet attained, as are the ether-borne rays of light. Converted
into light only at the plate, it showed their progress as truly as
though they had been traveling at a pace to be expressed in the ordinary
terms of miles per hour. The yellow star that was the sun detached
itself from the firmament and leaped toward them, swelling visibly,
momentarily, into a blinding monster of incandescence. And toward them
also flung the earth, enlarging with such indescribable rapidity that
Cleveland protested involuntarily, in spite of his knowledge of the
peculiar mechanism of the vessel in which they were.
"Hold it, Fred, hold it! Way 'nuff!" he exclaimed.
"I'm using only ten thousand dynes, so she'll stop herself as soon as we
touch atmosphere, long before she can even begin to heat," Rodebush
explained. "Looks bad, but we'll stop without a jar."
And they did. Weightless and without inertia, gravitation powerless
against her neutralizing generators, the great super-ship came from her
practically infinite velocity to an almost instantaneous halt in the
outermost, most tenuous layer of the earth's atmosphere. Her halt was
but momentary. Inertia restored and gravitation allowed again to affect
her mass, she dropped at a sharp angle downward. More than dropped; she
was forced downward by one full battery of projectors; projectors driven
by iron-powered generators. Soon they were over the Hill, whose violet
screens went down at a word.
Flaming a dazzling white from the friction of the atmosphere through
which she had torn her way, the _Boise_ slowed abruptly as she neared
the ground, plunging toward the surface of the small but deep artificial
lake below the Hill's steel apron. Into the cold waters the space-ship
dove, and even before they could close over her, furious geysers of
steam and boiling water erupted as the stubborn alloy gave up its heat
to the cooling liquid. Endlessly the three necessary minutes dragged
their slow way into time, but finally the water ceased boiling and
Rodebush tore the ship from the lake and hurled her into the gaping
doorway of her dock. The massive doors of the air-locks opened, and
while the full crew of picked men hurried aboard with their personal
equipment, Samms talked earnestly to the two scientists in the control
room.
" ... and about half the fleet is still in the air. They aren't
attacking; they are just trying to keep her from doing much more damage
until you can get there. How about your take-off? We can't launch you
again--the tracks are gone--but you handled her easily enough coming
in?"
"That was all my fault," Rodebush admitted. "I should have neutralized
inertia first, but I had no idea that the fields would extend beyond the
hull, nor that they wouldn't act simultaneously. We'll take her out on
the projectors this time, though, the same as we brought her in--she
handles like a bicycle. The projector blast tears things up a little,
but nothing serious. Have you got that Pittsburgh beam for me yet? We're
about ready to go."
"Here it is, Doctor Rodebush," came the secretary's voice, and upon the
screen there flashed into being the view of the events transpiring above
that doomed city. "The dock is empty and sealed against your blast," and
thereupon "Good-bye, and power to your tubes!" came Samms' ringing
voice.
As the words were being spoken, mighty blasts of power raved from the
driving projectors and the immense mass of the super-ship shot out
through the portals and upward into the stratosphere. Through the
tenuous atmosphere the huge ship rushed with ever-mounting speed, and
while the hope of Triplanetary drove eastward Rodebush studied the
ever-changing scene of battle upon his plate and issued detailed
instructions to the highly trained specialists manning every offensive
and defensive weapon.
But the Nevians did not wait to join battle until the newcomers arrived.
Their detectors were sensitive--operative over untold thousands of
miles--and the ultra-screen of the Hill had already been noted by the
invaders as the earth's only possible source of trouble. Thus the
departure of the _Boise_ had not gone unnoticed, and the fact, that, not
even with his most penetrant rays could he see into her interior, had
already given the Nevian commander some slight concern. Therefore, as
soon as it was determined that the great ship was being directed toward
Pittsburgh the fish-shaped cruiser of the void went into action.
High in the stratosphere, speeding eastward, the immense mass of the
_Boise_ slowed abruptly, although no projector had slackened its effort.
Cleveland, eyes upon interferometer grating and spectrophotometer
charts, fingers flying over calculator keys, grinned as he turned toward
Rodebush.
"Just as you thought, Skipper; an ultra-band pusher. C4V63L29. Shall I
give him a little pull?"
"Not yet; let's feel him out a little before we force a close-up. We've
got plenty of mass. See what he does when I put full push on the
projectors."
As the full power of the Terrestrial vessel was applied the Nevian was
forced backward, away from the threatened city, against the full drive
of her every projector. Soon, however, the advance was again checked,
and both scientists read the reason upon their plates. The enemy had put
down re-enforcing rods of tremendous power. Three compression members
spread out fanwise behind her, bracing her against the low mountainside,
while one huge tractor beam was thrust directly downward, holding in an
unbreakable grip a cylinder of earth extending deep down into bedrock.
"Two can play at that game!" And Rodebush drove down similar beams, and
forward-reaching tractors as well. "Strap yourselves in solid,