Triplanetary
with us and tarred with the same brush. There's a lot of gossip, that
may or may not be true, but I know one very startling fact. Here it is.
My great-great-grandfather left some notes which, taken in connection
with certain things I myself saw on the planetoid, prove beyond question
that our Roger went to Harvard University at the same time he did. Roger
was a grown man then, and the elder Penrose noted that he was marked,
like this," and the American sketched a cabalistic design.
"What!" Baxter exclaimed. "An adept of North Polar Jupiter--_them?_"
"Yes. That was before the First Jovian War, you know, and it was those
medicine-men--really high-caliber scientists--that prolonged that war
so...."
"But I say, Penrose, that's really a bit thick. When they were wiped out
it was proved a lot of hocus-pocus...."
"Some of it was, but most of it wasn't," Penrose interrupted in turn.
"I'm not asking you to believe anything except that one fact; I'm just
telling you the rest of it. But it is also a fact that those adepts knew
things and did things that take a lot of explaining. Now for the gossip,
none of which is guaranteed. Roger is undoubtedly of Tellurian
parentage, and the story is that his father was a moon-pirate, his
mother a Greek adventuress. When the pirates were chased off the moon
they went to Ganymede, you know, and some of them were captured by the
Jovians. It seems that Roger was born at an instant of time sacred to
the adepts, so they took him on. He worked his way up through the
Forbidden Society as all adepts did, by various kinds of murder and job
lots of assorted deviltries, until he got clear to the top--the
seventy-seventh mystery...."
"The secret of eternal youth!" gasped Baxter, awed in spite of himself.
"Right, and he stayed Chief Devil, in spite of all the efforts of all
his ambitious sub-devils to kill him, until the turning-point of the
First Jovian War. He cut away then in a space-ship, and ever since then
he has been working--and working hard--on some stupendous plan of his
own that nobody else has ever got even an inkling of. That's the story.
True or not, it explains a lot of things that no other theory can touch.
And now I think you'd better shuffle along; enough of this is a great
plenty!"
Baxter went to his own cubby, and each man of the adept's cold-blooded
crew methodically took up his task. True to prediction, in fifteen days
a planet loomed beneath them and their vessel settled through a reeking
atmosphere toward a rocky and forbidding plain. Then for another day
they plunged along, a few thousand feet above the surface of that
strange world, while Roger with his analytical detectors sought the most
favorable location from which to wrest the materials necessary for his
program of construction.
It was a world of cold; its sun was distant, pale, and wan. It had
monstrous forms of vegetation, of which each branch and member writhed
and fought with a grotesque and horrible individual activity. Ever and
anon a struggling part broke from its parent plant and darted away in
independent existence; leaping upon and consuming or being consumed by a
fellow creature equally monstrous. This flora was of a uniform color--a
lurid, sickly yellow. In form some of it was fern-like, some
cactus-like, some vaguely tree-like; but it was all outrageous,
inherently repulsive to all Solarian senses. And no less hideous were
the animal-like forms of life, which slithered and slunk rapaciously
through that fantastic pseudo-vegetation. Snake-like, reptile-like,
bat-like, the creatures squirmed, crawled, and flew; each covered with a
dankly oozing yellow hide and each motivated by twin common impulses--to
kill and insatiably and indiscriminately to devour. Over this reeking
wilderness Roger drove his vessel, untouched by its disgusting, its
appalling ferocity and horror.
"There should be intelligence, of a kind," he mused, and swept the
surface of the planet with an exploring beam. "Ah, yes, there is a city,
of sorts," and in a few minutes the outlaws were looking down upon a
metal-walled city of roundly conical buildings.
Inside these structures and between and around them there scuttled
formless blobs of matter, one of which Roger brought up into his vessel
by means of a tractor ray. Held immovable by the beam it lay upon the
floor, a strangely extensile, amoeba-like metal-studded mass of leathery
substance. Of eyes, ears, limbs, or organs it apparently had none, yet
it radiated an intensely hostile aura; a mental effluvium concentrated
of rage and of hatred.
"Apparently the ruling intelligence of the planet," Roger commented.
"Such creatures are useless to us; we can build robots in half the time
required for their subjugation and training. Still, it should not be
permitted to carry back what it may have learned of us." As he spoke the
adept threw the peculiar being out into the air and dispassionately
rayed it out of existence.
"That thing reminds me of a man I used to know, back in Penobscot."
Penrose was as coldly callous as his unfeeling master. "The
evenest-tempered man in town--mad all the time!"
Eventually Roger found a location which satisfied his requirements of
raw materials, and made a landing upon that unfriendly soil. Sweeping
beams denuded a great circle of life, and into that circle leaped
robots. Robots requiring neither rest nor food, but only lubricants and
power; robots insensible alike to that bitter cold and to that noxious
atmosphere.
But the outlaws were not to win a foothold upon that inimical planet
easily, nor were they to hold it without effort. Through the weird
vegetation of the circle's bare edge there scuttled and poured along a
horde of the metal-studded men--if "men" they might be called--who,
ferocity incarnate, rushed the robot line. Mowed down by hundreds, still
they came on; willing, it seemed to expend any number of lives in order
that one living creature might once touch a robot with one out-thrust
metallic stud. Whenever that happened there was a flash as of lightning,
the heavy smoke of burning insulation, grease and metal, and the robot
went down out of control. Recalling his remaining automatons, Roger sent
out a shielding screen, against which the defenders of their planet
raged in impotent fury. For days they hurled themselves and their every
force against that impenetrable barrier, then withdrew: temporarily
stopped, but by no means acknowledging defeat.
Then, while Roger and his cohorts directed affairs from within their
comfortable and now sufficiently roomy vessel, there came into being
around it an industrial city of metal, peopled by metallic and insensate
mechanisms. Mines were sunk, furnaces were blown in, smelters belched
forth into the already unbearable air their sulphurous fumes, rolling
mills and machine shops were built and equipped: and as fast as new
enterprises were completed additional robots were ready to man them. In
record time the heavy work of girders, members, and plates was well
under way; and shortly thereafter light, deft, and multi-fingered
mechanical men began the interminable task of building and installing
the prodigious amount of precise machinery required for the vast
structure. Roger was well content: but one day he was rudely awakened
from his dream of complete isolation.
Even though he had no reason to believe that there was anything
dangerous within hundreds of millions of miles, it was Roger's cautious
custom to release the screens from time to time, in order to allow his
detectors to range out. This day, as he sent out his beams, his hard
gray eyes grew even harder.
"Mirsky! Nishimura! Come here!" he snapped, and showed them upon his
plate an enormous sphere of steel, its rays flaming viciously. "Is there
any doubt whatever in your minds as to the System to which that ship
belongs?"
"None at all--Triplanetarian," replied the Russian. "While larger than
any I have seen before, its construction is unmistakable. They managed
to trace us, and are testing out their weapons before attacking. Do we
attack or do we run away?"
"If Triplanetarian, and it surely is, we attack," coldly. "This one
section is armed and powered to defeat Triplanetary's entire navy. We
shall take that ship, and shall add its slight resources to our own. And
it may even be that they have picked up the three who escaped me.... I
have never yet been balked for long. Yes, we shall take that vessel. And
those three sooner or later. Bradley I care nothing about ... but
Costigan handled me ... and the woman...." Diamond-hard eyes glared
balefully at the urge of thoughts to a clean and normal mind
unthinkable.
"To your posts," he ordered. "The robots will continue to function under
their automatic controls during the short time it will require to abate
this nuisance."
"_One moment!_" A strange voice roared from the speakers. "Consider
yourselves under arrest, by order of the Triplanetary Council! Surrender
and you shall receive impartial hearing; fight us and you shall never
come to trial. From what we have learned of Roger, we do not expect him
to surrender, but if any of you other men wish to avoid immediate death,
leave your vessel at once. We will come back for you later."
"Any of you wishing to leave this vessel have my full permission to do
so," Roger announced, disdaining any reply to the challenge of the
_Boise_. "Any such, however, will not be allowed inside the planetoid
area after the rest of us return from wiping out that patrol. We attack
in one minute."
"Would not one do better by stopping on?" Baxter, in the quarters of the
American, was in doubt as to the most profitable course to pursue. "I
should leave immediately if I thought that that ship could win; but I do
not fancy that it can, do you?"
"That ship? _One_ Triplanetary ship against _us_?" Penrose laughed
raucously. "Do as you please. I'd go in a minute if I thought that there
was any chance of us losing; but there isn't, so I'm staying. I know
which side _my_ bread's buttered on. Those cops are bluffing, that's
all. Not bluffing exactly, either, because they'll go through with it as
long as they last. Foolish, but it's a way they have--they'll die trying
every time, instead of running away, even when they know they're licked
before they start. They don't use good judgment."
"None of you are leaving? Very well, you each know what to do," came
Roger's emotionless voice. The stipulated minute having elapsed, he
advanced a lever and the outlaw cruiser slid quietly into the air.
Toward the poised _Boise_ Roger steered. Within range, he flung out a
weapon new-learned and supposedly irresistible to any ferrous thing or
creature, the red converter-field of the Nevians. For Roger's analytical
detectors had stood him in good stead during those frightful minutes in
the course of which the planetoid had borne the brunt of Nerado's
superhuman attack; in such good stead that from the records of those
ingenious instruments he and his scientists had been able to reconstruct
not only the generators of the attacking forces, but also the screens
employed by the amphibians in the neutralization of similar beams. With
a vastly inferior armament the smallest of Roger's vessels had defeated
the most powerful battleships of Triplanetary; what had he to fear in
such a heavy craft as the one he now was driving, one so superlatively
armed and powered? Well it was for his peace of mind that he had no
inkling that the harmless-looking sphere he was so blithely attacking
was in reality the much-discussed, half-mythical "super-ship" of
Triplanetary's Secret Service; nor that its already unprecedented
armament had been re-enforced, thanks to that hated Costigan, with
Roger's own every worth-while idea, as well as with every weapon and