"Saving every man aboard a doomed ship at the moment of destruction with the individual snatcher globes is a good way of not losing a man," explained Billy. "But it doesn't save materiel. They've got both, in plenty. We'll have to fall back on the secret."
"But when?" asked Lane.
"When the time is ripe. And not one moment before."
Thompson rang off. And then with a concentrated effort, the Solarian forces drove upward in a piercing needle of ships. They broke through, not without loss, and made their escape into the sky. When they landed on Terra, every ship was crammed to discomfort with men from stricken ships—literally snatched from the jaws of death with the personnel snatcher.
In numbers enough to take a whole planet, the Loard-vogh landed on Umbriel and overran it in an hour. Inward they swept to Titan and the Saturnian colonies. Inward they came to overrun Callisto and Ganymede.
Downward they dropped to Phobos and Deimos, where they set up vast projectors and hurled the attack upon Mars. Simultaneously they fell upon Venus—a monstrous horde of ships. Systematically they went through the Evening Star taking area after area, and they held Mars in their grip at the same time that Venus fell to their hordes.
"God—their numbers," groaned Cliff Lane. "I'd hoped that they might find it tough to hold everything and still hurl fresh equipment into Sol."
"They are numberless," said Hotang Lu.
The Loard-vogh swept into Terra.
Terra, the home of man. Terra, the mighty. Terra, defended as few planets were defended against the legions of Vorgan, Lord of All.
Despite the humans on Venus and Mars, they were still colonies compared to the home planet. Knowing that massed energy might hold out, all Solar defenses had been moved to Terra. Let Terra hold out and eventually mankind would recover, expand, and then drive the enemy back.
And when the Loard-vogh came to Terra, they found it defended against them.
Nowhere on Terra was there a place to land in safety. They took dead Luna easily and hurried to set up a long-range beam. Atomic spheres of unheard-of size reached upward from Terra and Luna sparkled with mighty atomic storms. Whole detachments of the Loard-vogh flamed into incandescence as the super-atomics bit fifty-foot spheres out of the face of Luna, compressed the matter itself, and let it explode.
They made a landing in Siberia and the encampment burst with a roar that shook the earth.
Overhead they roared, raining down energy that never reached through the upthrust beams. The cities were fortresses that hurled power into the sky, and though the shattered wrecks of the Loard-vogh dropped like rain, none of them reached Earth in large enough pieces to do any damage. The air took on a metallic smell, and ozone fixed out as the stratosphere shimmered in the grip of a torrent of energy beams that crossed and nullified one another.
Across the face of Terra, the high-power transmission beams hurled energy back and forth. Energy to feed the projectors that fenced with the ships of the Loard-vogh. Beams that ran on sublevel energy and could not be cut.
In the master room, there was a huge globe, wired with multicolored lights. And as the battle swept back and forth over the face of Terra, the lights changed from dark red to violet, depending upon the power drain of that district. Master technicians, making lightning calculations in a mathematical medium adapted for power work, viewed the globe and pressed buttons that hurled relay-impulses across Terra to switch and divert power for the needy locations. Their hope was to maintain a medium red all over instead of bright violet here and almost-black red there.
The Mongolian sector flamed violet after the Siberian attempt was made. Power was switched from Africa, raising the dark continent higher into the red and lowering the dangerous violet of the Mongolian sector. A sortie hit Africa, and the area pulsed briefly into the yellow and died before the technician could hit his button.
North America caught it next, and power came from Antarctica to drive the invaders away. The Mongolian effort stopped and the map died into black. The extra power went into North America and it became a less dangerous color.
And then the Panamanian district flared up. Into the violet it went, and the switches flew to drive power into the isthmus. Spreckled all over the globe were minor flarings, and they all increased as the Panama Zone took more and more power and still crept upward and upward.
It was all very much like a game of chess here in Terra's Master Power Distribution Center. But on Panama, another scene was taking place.
Four thousand of the Loard-vogh dropped to ground, driven by sheer power and as they landed, they anchored themselves to the crust of Terra.
A super-atomic reached over and its sphere of energy clutched—another atomic sphere.
Their inflexible beams strained against one another. Wrestling in subelectronic space, pulling and straining against one another. The crust of Terra groaned and the fault-lines rubbed and heaved. The inflexible beams pulled, trying to up-root the other—and both were anchored to the crust of the planet.
Luckily, the beams broke before the very surface of Terra gave. The backlash shook Terra to the core and the tidal waves lashed out against the shorelines. The ground shook, and the resulting quakes did what the Loard-vogh had not been able to do. The quakes shook earthly damage into the cities of Terra.
The energy continued to pour into the Loard-vogh planethead. The air shimmered and burst away from the hemisphere of terror, and the resulting convections drew fresh air in to be heated to almost-incandescence and driven upward.
Hotang Lu faced Billy Thompson bitterly. "This secret weapon of yours," he demanded, "it was to win for us?"
"It is," said Billy.
"IS? Is it not time that it be used? The Loard-vogh are upon the planet itself. Death looks us in the face."
"It is not yet time."
"Once before you were under their control," said Hotang Lu sharply. "Your actions now—and for the past weeks of terror—lead me to believe you are again."
"I am not."
"And who can prove it?" argued Hotang Lu.
Kennebec shook his head. "He is the one who might prove it—if you cannot trust him, who can be trusted?"
"For this, Toralen Ki died," said Hotang Lu bitterly. "My friend—dead! He died in the hope that this very thing would not happen. He met death quickly, even argued with you for the chance. A friend walked into the valley of the shadow for Terra, and Terra sits by and spits on his life by doing nothing. I would—"
"Stop it," snarled Billy Thompson. "You and your ideas. You simple fools. To think that you believed that one small system could come up ten thousand years of evolution in a year and beat a quarter of the Galaxy! I'm fighting your battle, and yet I curse you all! Have you ever stopped to think that if it were not for you and Toralen Ki,we would not be in this killing battle? To die for an ideal is all right. Toralen Ki died happy, at least! He believed that he had done his part, and no more could he do. Fine! The Loard-vogh would have ignored us for another three thousand years if you had not come here and stirred us up. Now we reap the seed of your foolishness.
"Terra writhes under the energies poured out by more ships than we have men! Gone and lost are our hopes, and our peaceful future. Our secret weapon? Our secret weapon will be successful—and from then on Terra must ever be alert and on guard. Think you the Loard-vogh will bow to us? Our secret weapon must be used from now on, every day, every minute of every day from the time we unleash it to the end of eternity.
"And if you hadn't stirred us to it, peace would reign on Terra for another three thousand years."
Hotang Lu stepped back a pace, but faced the angry Terran firmly. "And your children's children, three thousand years removed would have this fight to make."
"So what? Does that bother me? Can I grow anxious over the certain knowledge that the Universe may end ten to fifty years from now? Who can predict? Perhaps three thousand years more of evolution and science would bring forth a weapon far superior to their best. And if we remained in mental ignorance, well—is the worm unhappy? Does the beetle miss the trappings of civilization? Does the ant know of Earth moving machinery? Does the bee employ electricity?
"So we fight another race's lost battle for them, brought about by them, hurled upon our shoulders by them, and you, their representative, question my motives. The secret weapon will be unleashed in time."
"Be careful lest you cut the line too fine," warned Hotang Lu. "You are my mental superior in capability, but not in training."
"Showing the fallacy of your actions," snapped Thompson. "Had you been wiser, you would have known that the untrained ability to be a genius is less important than a normal man working at high intensity. Question your own judgment, Hotang Lu. And worry—in retrospect!"
XVI.
The Loard-vogh expanded their sphere. And like the attack upon Procyon IV, another globe of Loard-vogh dropped upon the planet. The power distribution center fought against itself and sapped power dangerously to drive off this new invasion.
A third invasion turned the trick. Power distribution failed; fell apart despite attempts to hold the network together.
"Your secret!" screamed Hotang Lu to Thompson.
Billy shook his head. "It is not yet time."
The Tlemban appealed to Kennebec.
The Co-ordinator of the Solar Combine agreed with Billy. "You still do not understand," he told Hotang Lu.
He faced Lane and Downing. "They will conquer us!"
Lane spoke for the pair of them. "You needn't appeal to us. I had partial foresight before—you said so. He had the ability to make lightning plans." He turned to Downing. "Or was it the other way around?"
"No matter," answered Stellor Downing. "Foresight is no good when planning is a part of the psyche. Instinctive and impetuous action do not match well with a planning nature. Since the transformation, we have both been slower—and quite bewildered, most of the time. No, Hotang Lu, all you can get from us is resentment over losing our ability to lead. Now, we no longer decide anything for ourselves. We cannot make up our minds."
Hotang Lu went to Patricia. "And you?"
"I am not a ruling voice."
"Prevail upon them."
"It is not my place. Besides, you do not understand."
"I understand this!" exploded Hotang Lu. "You are invaded. You will be conquered. You will join the slaves of the Loard-vogh. They will strip you from your homes and make you work for them. You will be driven and killed, for they have no compassion. They have no need of frugality in slaves. Terra will die."
"It is not yet time."
"Your judgment is faulty!" shouted Hotang Lu.
He hurled himself from the house and into his tiny spacecraft. He paused for only an instant to view the grave of Toralen Ki on the broad green lawn, and then he drove upward in superdrive. His size and his speed got him through, and Hotang Lu headed for Tlembo—alone and a beaten man.
Lindoo picked up the communicator and spoke to the operator. The connection beamed across the light-years and found Vorgan.
"Lord of All, it is going well."
"Give me the details. I was afraid of their secret weapon."
"Lord of All, the phrase 'secret weapon' is an old Solarian trick. It is meaningless."
"Go on."
"We landed on the isthmus that connects the two areas of land on the Second Hemisphere of Terra. The going was very hard, Vorgan. They drew power out of their sun like a torrent and we caught it all. It was terrible, and it was glorious. Our brave men died like flies—and not even the rock itself could stand against the energy turned loose. But we outnumbered them. We invaded again and again, and divided their power. Now we are screening the sun to run down their power intake. The globe expands, and we are holding most of the southern Land Area. From the northern pole, an invasion circle is spreading to meet the one on the isthmus."
"The other planets?"
"All taken."
"Terra is about through," breathed Vorgan.
"They are."
"I was deeply afraid," admitted Vorgan. "They are a vicious threat."
"Once conquered, though, they will be most useful."
"Yes, indeed. A race with the will to live is far superior to a race with a will like a bunch of cattle. They will rise high."
"Vorgan, you may have my throat for this, but I feel that it is a shame that we could not have them as equals."
"That would never work."
"I know it wouldn't. But it is a shame. I feared the landing here, Vorgan. The place is rife with spores, fungi, and bacterial death. But their weapons scoured the area."
"The fools."
"I know—but we are safe now. Terra is conquered."
"Then as soon as possible, bring me the ones I want."
"Lord of All, you will have them."
The air above Terra grew less turbulent, the energy died. Loard-vogh ships found less opposition as they landed at will on the former Planet of Terror. By hundreds and by thousands they landed—and by thousands they died as they tried to flip back their helmets and breathe the air of Terra. They turned black, they fell down, and the growths of ravaging microscopic life raced and built into horrid green mold and whispy hair as the growths of fungus found absolutely no opposition.
But with better direction, the Loard-vogh roamed the planet without death, though fungus-spores drifted freely. Their suits grew cultures, and the lubricants teemed with growing life—and if the inhabitant stayed too long in the suit, he died as fungi grew in the lubricant and was carried inside of the suit by mere action.
Air-tight to seventy pounds they were, those spacesuits. Seventy pounds inside or outside—and yet the insidious growths slipped inside and killed them.
But their numbers! As they died, so they were replaced. And the roadways thundered to the treads of their portables; the sky roared with the passing of their planes; and the cities echoed and re-echoed to the tramp of their feet. The sky was dark with their light spacers, landing, and the air was roiled mechanically with the landing craft that dropped from the spacecraft in never-ending streams.
Lindoo, arrayed as a conquering hero of the Loard-vogh should, awaited in the grand spacecraft of the Loard-vogh at Panama. The area had been scourged by fire and by sheer energy. Yet the tropical climate seemed to spawn trouble for the Loard-vogh.
Behind a triple sheet of reflectionless glass, Lindoo sat, outwardly triumphant, but inwardly afraid. He hoped that the powerful, color-less antiseptic mixtures between the sheets of glass would keep him safe.
Hurled in to the other side of the room were Kennebec and his daughter. Thompson followed, and Lane and Downing were hurled in lastly. They stood up defiantly.
Kennebec faced Lindoo. "You are the emissary of the Loard-vogh?"
"You know me—and my language?"
"Why not?" asked Kennebec. "Your speech is not difficult."
"No matter. You have this ability with all alien tongues?"
Downing smiled. "I spent one month among your planets, mingling with your people. They did not suspect."
"All alien tongues?" insisted Lindoo.
"Any, and all, can be learned by us in a matter of hours."
"Your race will be useful. Do you now accept defeat?"
"It was forced upon us?"
"Accept it!" exploded Lindoo, "or die!"
"A dead slave is useless," reminded Kennebec.
"And a dead malcontent is no trouble," snapped Lindoo. "Do you accept defeat?"
"As I said, defeat was forced upon us. Yes, we must accept defeat."
"Then broadcast the order to cease firing. Order Terra to drop its arms and submit."
"Will the integrity of our people be preserved?"
"Unconditional surrender does not permit terms."
"I will surrender unconditionally—but I demand the right to be treated as a worthy opponent."
"Your defeat at our hands was inevitable."
"We know that."
"Then why did you fight?"
"Only to gain your respect as an enemy."
Lindoo bowed his head briefly. "You have our respect. You have had our respect enough to cause a major change in the Master Plan. You will not be treated with contempt. There will be no looting, no pillage. Not if you will submit without further fight."
"Your terms I accept."
And Kennebec picked up the communicator and snapped the switch to General Broadcast.
And on Procyon IV, four survivors clustered around a crude, haywired receiver picked up the message. When it was through, they left their hidden cave full of Loard-vogh souvenirs. Openly they walked to the nearest encampment and knocked on the stockade.
And across the Galaxy to Vorgan, Lord of All, went the final word:
"The Solarian Sector is complete. All Solarians are being tested for adaptability, and upon completion will be trans-shipped to the proper situations in the Loard-vogh empire. Terra, Sol, and the entire Mutation Area will be left devoid of life."
Within hours, Lindoo was working on the problem of displacement. He—and all of the Loard-vogh—worked madly to complete this project. For all of them wanted to leave, forever, the former Planet of Terror.
Terra—conquered, completely!
XVII.
Lindoo's return from the Solar Sector was that of a conqueror. There were speeches and parades, and public demonstrations; and the hours wore by interminably. Lindoo knew just how important his victory had been, and yet how obvious had been his chances of winning. Even the Head of Strategy of a proud and tyrannical race could feel within him the seeds of discontent. He suffered the publicity because such propaganda was necessary, and as soon as he could, he sought private audience with Vorgan.
"Hail the conquering hero," greeted Vorgan, as Lindoo entered. The tone was slightly sarcastic.
Lindoo was not hurt. "How many know?" he asked the Lord of All.
"Very few—thanks to a pleased fate."
"But we know," said Lindoo bitterly. "What a victory. A bulldozer crushing an ant hill; a pile driver smashing eggs; an elephant warding off mosquitoes."
"And yet," Vorgan told him, "unlimited freedom would build the ant hill beyond the ability of the bulldozer, and the mosquitoes could smother the elephant if their numbers filled the atmosphere. It was necessary."
Lindoo nodded. "We lost seventeen million of our first-line fighting men. They were bitter opponents."
"Think of what might have happened if they'd expanded for another two thousand years."
"That would be double their scientific history, I think," agreed Lindoo. "They've been expanding on a high order exponential curve. Another two thousand years would have put a barrier across the Galaxy with the Solar Sector at the center, and the Loard-vogh might never complete their plan. We acted rightly, Vorgan. But in spite of seventeen million men lost, and in spite of the danger to our plans, I feel that there is something strictly awry. They are an intelligent race. They must have known their inability to win—yet they fought like demons. We could well afford to lose seventeen million expendables. They could not, yet—?"
"Did they?"
"They must have. Our forces may have been overeager. An attacking force usually loses more than the defending force. Our fighter psychology is more battle-minded than theirs, for our soldiers are trained to think only in terms of battle. But even so, Vorgan, the tacticians and statisticians estimate that we could have lost no more than two to one. And granting that, it means a loss of eight and one half million men lost from the Solar Sector."
Vorgan thought that over. "They could ill afford to lose that many of their prime citizens."
"And knowing that, and knowing that they are of a high order of intelligence, I ask again: Why did they fight?"
"Could it have been sheer desperation?"
"There was calculated strategy in their battle plan. There was a purpose, I tell you. It is obscure to me, but there was a definite plan, and no plan is executed without a purpose."
"Could they have hoped to hold us off?"
"Never. They knew our strength. They knew our plan. They understood our purpose, and they recognized our determination. Does the weakling, knowing all factors, fight against his superior?"
"It might have been the determination—knowing they must lose—to take as many enemies with them as possible."
"The cornered rat technique?"
"It has been done before," observed Vorgan.
Lindoo agreed. "You were not there," he told the Lord of All. "Their plan bore the stamp of a superior strategist who had some purpose in mind. A purpose that required him to fight a losing battle for other reasons than the cornered rat technique. You see, Vorgan, the cornered rat technique presents a rather peculiar psychological problem. It is a suicide-fighter's psychology. And suicide fighters operate in a vastly different manner than a man who is fighting for something beyond the abstract concepts of a victory for his contemporaries and his descendants. Even the most vicious and well-trained of suicide fighters is inferior to a reasonably well trained man wrested from his home and impressed for service. The psychology of the suicide fighter evolves into a seeking-for-death technique, which lessens his survival factor over a man fighting to preserve his integrity—and fighting to get the battle over with so that he can go home and resume his daily life. We know that. That is why the Loard-vogh fighter is supreme. He is no suicide fighter. He is vicious because he has been wrested from his home and family, and his tenure of service depends upon his ability. Since a victorious soldier is mustered out of arms and sent home sooner than a lax one, it urges all men to perform great deeds, act in a superior manner, and to be victorious in the shortest time so that he may return to his daily life. The Terrans are far from suicide fighters, Lord of All. Their theories of warfare are similar to ours. In fact," smiled Lindoo thoughtfully, "every race that offers us a stiff resistance seems to have come to that conclusion."
"Then what was their purpose? Seems to me that they must have been fighting for something."
"I don't know. They will fight if outnumbered, of course. The entire Solar Sector is composed of forms of life with a bitterly high value of survival factor. That, coupled with high intelligence, should indicate that surrender offers the greater number of survivals."
"Perhaps you do not understand their psychology."
Lindoo admitted this. "I have with me their mental leader—the former susceptible Billy Thompson. Perhaps we may get some idea by questioning him."
"Have him brought in," agreed Vorgan.
He pressed a button.
A crack opened in the ceiling, and down from above there dropped a reflection-free sheet of perfect glass. It slid in fitted slides, and sealed off the room into two sections.
The section occupied by Lindoo and his emperor was large and roomy, but the other section was small, a sort of cove, off of the main room. A man-at-arms moved an ornate chair that stopped the descent of the glass, and when the sheet of glass reached the floor, men-at-arms went around the edges and sealed it with a gluey mixture that came from portable pressure-guns. This was done on both sides, and as those on the small side left the room through the tiny square door, one of them snapped a button on the wall. The invisible and soundless atomizer-vents in the ceiling filled the air with a gentle spray of the best bactericide known to the Loard-vogh.
The tiny door opened again, and Billy Thompson entered, leaving his glass case attached to the door frame on the other side.
His nose wrinkled at the smell of the bactericide, but he grinned at the precautions. He, the vanquished, still held sway over their fears.
Thompson advanced and saluted. Then he waited.
"Arrogant, to boot," snapped Vorgan to Lindoo. His voice came to Billy out of the speaker in the ceiling, and Thompson stifled the natural impulse to face the position from which came the voice. He faced Vorgan.
"Not arrogant," he said quietly. "I merely request the respect shown to a vanquished, but adequate adversary."
"Our adversaries are always vanquished," snapped Lindoo. "And they become our slaves."
"A slave you may consider me," nodded Billy. "That I can not change. But the self-respect I have for having been vanquished only after a bitter fight requires me to consider myself more than a voiceless slave. You can not change that."
Vorgan looked at Lindoo. "Was that your reason for fighting?" asked the Lord of All.
"The basic reason for all strife," said Billy, "is to impose your will upon your adversaries."
Vorgan and Lindoo nodded impatiently.
"We fought to impose our will upon you. Our will is that we of the Solar Sector gain your respect, slaves though we must be."
"And you were willing to lose eight and one half million men to gain that respect?"
"Your estimate is wrong. We lost but seven thousand souls—five thousand of which were civilians caught in the backwash and splash-over from our fighting."
"Seven thous—" exploded Vorgan, visibly shaken.
"Seventeen million—" cried Lindoo hoarsely.
"Your losses?" asked Billy of Lindoo.
The Head of Strategy nodded.
"It is deplorable. I am sorry—"
"How dare you!" thundered Vorgan. "How dare you, a slave, to feel sorry for your masters?"
Thompson smiled wanly. "Would I get better treatment if I claimed to be glad of your losses?"
"I'll have your throat—"
"Careful, Lord of All, you are not being fair. I am damned for being sorry and equally damned if I feel glad. Do you prefer my sympathy or my hatred?"
"You brazen, arrogant—"
"Vorgan, I and all of the Solar Sector are at your mercy. We fought you to prove our ability, and to gain your respect. Had we surrendered without a fight, we would have gained your contempt. Also," smiled Thompson, "it is foreign to our psychology to give up easily. But the main reason for fighting was to extract from you a modicum of respect. That we have done."
"You assume—"
"I know. You are puzzled by my temerity, amused by my position, and completely baffled by my purpose. Were it not so, I would be dead instead of here, behind this protecting glass. For otherwise you wouldn't bother with a race so dangerous to your very lives. Am I correct?"
"Assume so. And proceed."
"The thing that makes us dangerous to you is the same thing that will make us useful to you."
"A moment. At this point I can wait no longer," said Lindoo. "Before this bold Terran leads us too far from the subject, I must know: How did you preserve your forces in that bitter fighting where your ships fell like hail?"
"We ran out of ships, not men," smiled Thompson. "We adapted a phase of the snatcher beam to personnel-protection. Each man carried a focal attractor in his clothing. Ship-destruction triggered a fast time-constant multi-driver circuit that inclosed each man in the incompressible spheres of the atomic crusher principle. They were withdrawn from the stricken ship while it was still exploding and brought back safely to a redistributing station where they re-entered the battle in a new ship."
"We'll make a note of that," rumbled Vorgan. Lindoo looked a bit ashamed of himself for not having thought of it before.
"Now, Terran," said Lindoo, "there was talk of a secret weapon. What was it and why was it not used?"
"As a means of destruction," explained Thompson, "nothing of that nature exists. Terra's secret weapon in this case lies within your own minds. We were fighting for survival, and the retention of our integrity. Our secret weapon is the respect we extracted from you in fighting valiantly and losing necessarily. Our secret weapon is our minds and our ability to employ logic and data to a problem and come up with an answer. The personnel snatcher is but one phase of this weapon we possess. You admire it. It is, of course, yours by right of conquest. Other developments will be yours, also. But they would be lost if we had been merely trampled over and our interesting facets ignored by the high councils of the Loard-vogh. You have a horde of problems, Lord of All. A myriad of problems that we of Terra may solve. I offer you the Solar Sector as a research area!"
"You offer?" asked Vorgan, puzzled. "You infer that we have not taken?"
"Permit us our integrity. Sol is our home. Sol is unfit for you, and Terrans are not well liked in your empire because of the living death we carry. Permit us to remain in the Solar Sector and we will be your research area."
"And free to breed discontent?" asked Lindoo.
"Are we fools? Our battle was to impress you with our ability to be recognized as worthy. Another fight would prove our lack of intellectual grasp of the truth. Permit us to live as we were, and you will have all of the benefits of our rather harsh environment to aid you in your plan. Were you of another psychology, I'd offer alliance, but being what you are I can but offer allegiance."
"Offers!" scorned Vorgan impatiently. "We demand."
"You cannot force mental activity," reminded Thompson. "You can drive a slave to fetch and carry, to become agricultural, to be menial. But you can never drive a man into mental activity. The subconscious mind will block. The subconscious mind will divert, and will work against those who drive, and the result will be complete loss of Sol's children and the benefits of a violent heredity. Permit us to remain as we are. Put overseers there, communications offices. We will solve your problems."
Lindoo whispered to Vorgan for a moment. The Lord of All snapped off the communicator, and he and the Head of Strategy spoke for an hour while Billy waited in silence, wondering what they had in mind. Finally Vorgan turned the communicator on again and said:
"Terran, if what you say is true, you are correct in your assumption that Sol will be of value as she is. I offer you a chance to prove it. Sscantoo is against all forms of alliance. Sscantoo will ally herself with any other race temporarily to fight us. The entire Galaxy may spring against us if Sscantoo can not be subdued. We must attack Sscantoo in the due course of time.
"There is one difficulty, however. The Sscantovians are not a gregarious race. Eventually we shall have the same trouble with Sscantoo as we have had with Tlembo. The catmen will seek a worthy adversary, and cause us to attack some sector long before our plan calls for it. Your premature battle was but one in several caused by Tlembo, all of which bring the Loard-vogh out of line and off balance like a runner careening downhill. Numberless though we may seem, we cannot overrun the Galaxy until our numbers permit it. It must be taken slowly and with definite pattern.
"Now, Terran, we can wait one year before we hit Sscantoo. I'll give you that one year, Terran. In that year, you must devise a means of gathering Sscantoo into the Loard-vogh empire. It must be done without battle. It must be done without losing a man—no, that is expecting too much," smiled the Lord of All nastily, "it must be done without losing more than one hundred men! That does not include Sscantovians, of course."
"Within one year," said Billy Thompson, "we will hand you Sscantoo as a willing part of the Loard-vogh empire. It will be done without battle, without losing more than one hundred men in the process. What will happen to the Sscantovians I will not presume to care, but I shall destroy as few as possible. During that year, of course, we will be free to work?"
"I will countermand the order displacing all Solar Persons save a small percentage willing to act as data clerks and research co-ordinators," said Vorgan. "That is my will."
"You will be more than amply repaid," said Thompson. "And one research we will make to provide the Galaxy with adequate protection against visiting Terrans, and protection for those visiting the Solar Sector. That, too, is a promise."
Within an hour, Thompson was on his way back to Terra. A year, he had. And four months would be gone ere he landed on Terra, and another long period of time would pass before he could get to Sscantoo. All in all, Billy felt that he had too little time.
Yet he smiled. For even in defeat, Terra would not lose her integrity. And how bad is slavery when the master prefixes his request with "Please"?
XVIII.
Billy Thompson fretted for four long months in the confines of the returning spacecraft. He was not idle. Daily he spent his time in the communications room, talking and conferring with his laboratory staff on Terra.
The order freeing the Solar Sector of its displacement of peoples took about ten days to clear, and another ten days to settle. It was swift; no Loard-vogh wanted to remain in that section of the Galaxy anyway. And though most of the worlds were cleaning up the shambles of the bitter struggle, the laboratory staff and research organizations went to work with a will. Let the others clean up the mess; it was their job to make the cleaning worth while by coming up with the answer to Billy's problem.
For only the right answer would leave Terrans around to inhabit a cleaned-up Terra.
So Billy fretted because he had to confer by voice alone. It did not matter that the secondary radiation from his subtransmitter, exciting bands in the electromagnetic spectrum near forty megacycles, would not reach Sol for hundreds of years, and that relative to his ship, the beams were hurled out backwards instead of coming forward toward Sol. But the four months were not entirely wasted. By the time that Billy landed, conferred with Kennebec on the future, discussed the major problem with a few Terran scientists, and then took off and finally arrived at the stellar laboratory on VanMaanen's Star's only, God-forsaken planet, they knew several hundred things that would not work.
Hendricks, the chief of staff, smiled wearily as Billy entered the safety dome and flipped back his space helmet.
"Hi, Billy. I hope you have a few new ideas."
"Nope. Not right now. I've been busier than the devil for the past seventy hours."
"So've we, on the last seventeen suggestions. We ran out of ideas when you ran into Terra. Now what?"
Billy grinned. "I'd like to see the quake area."
Hendricks blinked, blanched briefly, and then smiled wanly. "I thought so. Nothing to see, though. We do have a slow-action movie of the debacle. Reminds me of something out of a superthriller, shot in miniature. We had the sphere beam set up in duplex, one taking power out of the star, supplying the other beam which was clutching about five thousand miles of the star's core. The projectors were anchored to the crust of Brimstone, here, and we started pulling. We pulled like a dentist working on an impacted wisdom tooth. Unlike the dentist, the tooth stayed. We broke several beams, each one doing a bit of crust-cracking when the pressure let up. Then we took a big bite and heaved for all we were worth. A slab of crust about seven miles square heaved up, tilted like a poorly-trimmed raft in a heavy sea, and slid sidewise into the semi-plastic inner core of Brimstone."
"I'll bet it was bad, huh?"
"We all got away. The planet heaved and gurgled for a week before it settled down. But Brimstone is less strained than Terra and aside from a few scattered quakes now and then, she's quiet. Made a mess of that district, though. Horrible roaring, clouds of boiling steam, and all the trimmings out of a 'Birth of Terra' animated moving picture."
"Try it with an anchor set in the planet's core?"
"Yeah, but that's too much like anchoring a towline in a cup of custard. Too plastic. We might do it if stars weren't so confounded far apart. Beams get awfully thin on that projection even if we could make it, which I doubt."
"And if we could," said Billy, "we'd have to wait a few years while the beams got to our stars. They propagate at the speed of light, you know."
"Wonder if we could drop a beam from close by, go into superdrive and race for the other star, stretching—"
"What causes the traction?"
"The ... ah ... I see what you mean. It's the fact that the beam itself is ponderable and unyielding. Superdrive or no, the beam would propagate at speed of light and the superdriven ship would either be held back or the beam would break because of the space between excitation pulses. O.K., Billy, how do we jerk a hunk out of a star core?"
"We can't do the Samson Trick," said Billy, "but—"
"Samson Trick?"
"Samson was supposed to have brought the temple down about his ears by taking two of the main pillars and pulling one against the other. Well, we can't pull one star core against another, but why can't we set up a tripod, anchored in the stellar core, and then use that as a base for hauling with another beam? And feed power for the gadget from other stellar intake beams right from the star itself."
"In other words a sort of reflex Samson Trick? You make the star pull itself apart, with the aid of mankind and a few thousand years of technical development. I'll have the boys get to work."
"Did you get any compression?"
Hendricks shook his head.
"That was a vain hope. The stellar core is under hard compression already. O.K., Jim. Oh, Hello, Cliff."
"Hi, Billy. So you sold them a bill of goods?"
"Unless we get results, Lane, it'll be a bill of goods. If we come through, we're not bad off. Where's your sidekick?"
"Stellor? He'll be along directly. But look, Billy, what do you intend to do with this dingcrank when you get it working? Tear the guts out of the Sscantovian System?"
"Nope. Just insurance."
"We'll need it," grinned Lane. "You cut out a large hunk of selling when you ask Linzete and his gang of rugged, predatory individualists to form an alliance with the Loard-vogh."
"Trouble is that 'alliance' isn't the right word. I'm offering the grand and glorious opportunity of becoming willing subjects to the Loard-vogh."
"Huh. Never was a cat that took to being ordered around. Gosh, they're worse than we are. We'll take orders if it will do us any good. But Sscantovians?Phoooo."
"Well," said Billy, "when a lion tamer enters a cage full of cats he gets results. But most of them are well equipped with a revolver, a whip, and a four-legged stool. I'll walk in easily, tell the catmen to be nice, and wave my whip. But the whip has got to be loaded. Linzete wouldn't fall for a bluff. Cats don't. You've got to show 'em the stuff, and then you get your answer. Well, we've a couple of other things to try."
"We aren't licked yet," nodded Lane cheerfully. "But look, Billy, I'm still befuddled by Downing's stinking slow, methodical way of doing things. As I get it, Toralen Ki and Hotang Lu told us that we'd all be increased in mental stature after the Transformation."
"Sure. We are."
"I don't notice anything."
Thompson grinned. "You won't. You never will. No Terran ever will. We'll all go on just the same as we were, apparently. It is a Terran characteristic that a personal change always seems to be an opposite change in the rest. We'll all go on as we are and the rest of the Galaxy will appear to get stupider. The change is and has been—and will continue—to be gradual enough so that you will believe that you've always been possessed of a near-perfect memory. But play chess with your pals, and you find that you are still even because the other guy can lay just as complicated traps as you can with your increased ability to reason. But you see, it is like that old analogy. If the entire Galaxy and everything in it were increased by one hundred times, you would not be able to detect the change. That's because your yardstick changes, too."
"Relativity, speaking," grinned Lane.
"Classification: Pune. Definition: Pun that needs an oxygen tent. Or better, the perpetrator a half-hour immersion in liquid helium." He looked around and saw Stellor Downing, leaning against the door with a half-amused expression on his face. "Hello, Stellor."
"Howdedo. A nice job of selling you did on Vorgan."
"Yeah, and a nice pinch he put me in."
"Maybe you shouldn't have niggled him so far."
"I was a little rough on him," agreed Billy. "But I pushed him right to the limit of my safety. I applied all the traffic will bear. I had to, to show my boldness and to intrigue his fancy, since I knew that in all their victorious twenty thousand years of conquest they had never hit a race that stood up and told him off, face to face."
"You knew what you were doing, as usual," admitted Downing. "But I came to tell you that Hendricks has the tripod beam and the associated junk is set up and ready for the job of jerking the guts out of VanMaanen's Star."
It was not too impressive on the surface. Brimstone was cold and forbidding and airless, the only planet to the runaway star known as VanMaanen's Star. A useless system save for experiments of this nature, but excellently adapted for such.
The solar intake beams were operating efficiently. The torrents of power they would drag out of the star and use to develop the unthinkable pressures necessary to move the core of the star would come into the acceptor tubes. Foot-thick superconductors connected the intake beams to those to be used for the tearing process. And these superconductors were maintained at the temperature of liquid helium by a liquid-cooling system. Liquid helium needed no circulation, since its heat-conducting properties were such that no local heating in a bath of liquid helium is possible. Normal evaporation from the open bath at one side kept the system cold, all the way through to the superconductors.
"Good thing they don't have to use switches or breakers, otherwise I don't know how they'd handle the energy," said Lane. "A sort of grid-controlled intake—swell stuff. Well, fellers, let's get in the control room and see what gives."
Hendricks handed Billy a small chromium-plated case the size of a cigarette pack.
"We're putting personnel snatchers on all of us. If this blows—in fact if the whole planet blows, we all end up a couple of thousand miles in space, all canned up in incompressible spheres. Safety first, I say."
"That's how you saved the gang in the earthquake experiment, isn't it?"
"Uh-huh," admitted Hendricks.
"Well, let's take off. We've got everything nailed down tight."
Hendricks advanced the power. The meters read up, and the anchoring tractors moved slightly in their gimbals and became immobile. The projectors forming the tripod of inflexible beams took up all the remaining slack in the beam system. Not one piece of unprotected matter was left to form a weak link. Beams of sheer energy, efficient to within a fraction of a percent of the ideal one hundred percent, linked the beams invisibly. A system of inflexible energy, driven and maintained by the energy output of a star—driven to rip the core out of the star itself.
The beams thickened as the automatic control advanced in timed steps. Evaporation from the lake of liquid helium increased as the superconductors warmed slightly from the terrible load.
A wrenching—feeling—came to them.
A meter indicated that one of the beams—the sphere beam clutching a five thousand mile sphere of stellar center—indicated a movement of point one seven four inches.
The automatic controller went up another stepless interval, and the wrenched—feeling—increased.
Through the viewport, the small flaming disk of VanMaanen's Star blazed at them. It looked as though it were quite ignorant of the cosmic forces that were tearing at its vitals. There was an air of saucy disregard in its placid, immobile brightness.
The pressure increased.
"At this point we jerked up a slab of Brimstone's hard crust," remarked Hendricks.
But Brimstone was not in the link. Brimstone was not even present. The inflexible tripod of energy would scorn to move with the planet. The control room and the main development housing connected to the high base of the projector network were depending upon the invisible tripod of energy, deep in space. Brimstone was a large moon, a gibbous last quarter, out through one side window.
The automatic control went higher. And as the pressure increased between the limbs of the tripod, even so increased the power intake from the star itself.
Did a star have within it enough energy to cause its own destruction?
They did not find out.
Thefeelingof a wrenching increased, and then leaped into full being. Nausea, sheer instantaneous torture, a pulsed wave of pain, a shattering sensation of intolerable noise, a blinding light that came though the eyes were closed.
But these things were merely the physical and mental effects caused by—
By what?
There had been no grinding crash. There had been no failure of the beams.
Yet the meters read zero. Both intake and output. Test power and operation perfect registered on the string of indicators.
Nothing wrong—
—but the flaming disk of VanMaanen's Star was gone.
Something had failed, but it hadn't been the equipment.
Something had failed, but it hadn't been the star.
And the station and the control room was drifting aimlessly in space. Inspection showed that no star was close enough to be VanMaanen's Star. There were no stars within a couple of light-years from them. Above their heads, the projectors were idling in their slack gimbals, the tie-beams were off. The solar intake beams were taking in no power. The lake of helium, a twenty-foot open bath on the roof of the housing, was lying quiescent.
The entire assembly and assemblage was as it had been before the initial surge of power, excepting that Brimstone and his bright primary were nowhere to be seen.
XIX.
"Well, what happened?" asked Lane.
"You tell me," Downing said.
"Obviously something gave—but quick," remarked Billy. "The question is: What could give?"
"The star didn't. We weren't on the planet. Whatever gave—we are a long way from where we started, at any rate." Hendricks scratched his head in puzzlement. "You don't suppose we have gone and warped ourselves right out of space, do you?"
"That sounds like a comic book plot. I'm not taking any odds-on bets, though. Have you got an air condenser and a resistance-capacity bridge? Not the kind that compares a standard condenser against the unknown in terms of the resistance ratio arms, but one of the cheap varieties that merely compares the resistance ratio arms against the ratio of resistance versus capacitive reactance."
"Uh-huh."
"Is it calibrated to within an inch of its eyebrows?"
"Yup."
"Well, the dielectric constant of space is calculable. Measure up your air condenser and see if it comes out even. Get the boys to measure the radiation resistance of this space. It should be three hundred and seventy-seven ohms. That is—if we are still in our original space. Also you might get the standing wave ratio on some of the microwave transmission lines. They depend upon the characteristic impedances of space, the permeability and dielectric constant."
"O.K.," smiled Hendricks.
"Why the smile, Jim?"
"I was merely recalling a story like this. The hero proved it by determining that Planck's Constant was not the same as back at home. I was wondering how we'd measure it."
"How did they do it?"
"They didn't say."
"Good thing. Well, I like my method better. By measuring the capacity of an air dielectric condenser, the dielectric constant of space will be evident—but only if it is measured on the resistance type of bridge. Comparing it to a standard condenser would result in both of them shifting at the same time. Whereas the resistance of a metal wouldn't change. That does not depend upon the vector analysis factors of space, whereas capacitive reactance does."
"We might measure the speed of light, too."
"Not until we get this barge to a planet so we can get a decent base line."
"We're not ill-equipped as all that," objected Hendricks. "This barge, as you call it, is fully equipped with drivers."
"Why didn't the snatchers work when we took out after the devil?" asked Lane.
"Nothing blew, in the first place," said Thompson. "And in the second place, if we've warped ourselves out of our original space, the snatchers might have had a tough time focusing on something heading out of space through a warp in the continuum."
"Spectral lines do not mean anything in particular," said Downing, who had been peering through a solar spectrometer at some of the nearer stars. "More proof."
"Well, sure. Among items like having a different set of elements and physical laws, the impedance of space is all tied up in the speed of light, wave length, is a function of that, and so forth. Show me one item lying in the field pertaining to the angular vector-pattern of this space that agrees with that back home and the rest will probably match too, and we'll be back home but displaced by God-knows-what."
"Ralph Welles claims that the radiation resistance of space is about two hundred and seventeen ohms," reported Hendricks. "And Al Forbes reports that the dielectric constant of space here is about twenty micromicrofarads per meter less than back home. And the boys in the microwave group claim that the quarterwave stubs in their pet transmission line demand a new fundamental frequency of operation. O.K., fellows. We started to bust up a sun and busted ourselves right out of space and into another. Well, let's find a nice solid planet somewhere and get there so we have solar power. Then we can start thinking of ways to get back."
"So we couldn't pull the insides out of a sun, even using the sun's own stellar atom factory for power," smiled Thompson, "but we did manage to pull ourselves right out of space. Sort of a case of the sun pulling first, I guess."
"Yeah," agreed Lane plaintively. "But how many different spaces are there in the cosmos?"
"Probably an infinite number infinitesimally separated," answered Downing.
"In which case," returned Lane, "how many spaces did we skip between back home and right here?"
"I doubt that the separation between different space continuums is infinitesimally small," objected Hendricks. "More like a matter of a sort of quanta-separation. If the separation were not reasonably large, the energy necessary to break through would not be so great. I predict that we are in the space next door to our own."
"And if we take hold of another sun and pull—do we go one more space away or back again?"
"I dunno. There isn't a space-theorist among us. I'll tell you one thing, though. By the time we pull ourselves back and forth a few times, we'll know which valve to hold down in order to drive up instead of down."
Billy nodded. "If, as, and when we get back, let's see if we can devise a method of tilting a hunk of stellar center into this space from there. Better, probably, than just jerking it loose."
"Far better," observed Hendricks dryly. "If we can tilt ourselves into a new space whilst pulling on a stellar core, obviously it is easier to warp something into a new space than it is to rip the innards out of a star."
"Is this the point to suggest that we have a brand new galaxy to work on?" suggested Downing.
"Nope. We'll tell the Loard-vogh about it, though, and they may decide to do something about it."
Perhaps never before has a stranger object traversed interstellar space. Not by a stretch of the imagination could any race have designed a spacecraft resembling the squat housing adorned above with the battery of projectors. In the first place, it was all wrong for spacecraft design, being built to sit flat on a planet where the normal gravitic urge was down—or rather normal to the flat bottom. Spacecraft are tall, ovoid shells that travel vertically, parallel to their long axis, and the decking extends from side to side, at right angles to the ship's course. And the projectors should not be all on one side. That would leave the strange craft at the mercy of an attacking enemy from below. Spacecraft armaments consist of one turret in the top, or nose, one similar turret below, and several at discrete intervals about the center of the ship for side protection.
Of infinitely more trouble than the problem of traversing space in superdrive with an engineering project instead of a spacecraft was the decision of which way to go.
Being lost in the depths of interstellar space without a star map and with no idea of their position, and no one to call for a "fix," there was no way of determining which of the stars were the closer. They all stood there, twinkling against their background of stellar curtain, and one looked as close as the next. Brightness was no criterion. Deneb, four hundred light-years from Terra is brighter than Alpha Centaurus, four light-years away.
Yet, with superdrive, they could cross quite a bit of space in a short time. Hitting it off in any direction might bring them to within deciding distance of a star in a short time or it might be that the course went between stars for many hundred light-years.
It was Hendricks who solved the problem. "Get a hemisphere picture—and we'll superdrive for one hour and take another. Superimposing them one a-top the other should give us a reasonable parallax on the nearer stars. One that we could see with the naked eye."
With the fates obviously laughing up their sleeves, the second plate was never exposed. At fifty-one minutes of superdrive, the stellar detector indicated stellar radiation within one quarter light-year.
Planet-locating plates were exposed as the project swept through the star's neighborhood. There was quite an argument as to which of the seven planets to choose, and for no other reason than sentimental reasons—and the fact that the physical constants were right for them—the group finally fixed their desire on the third planet.
The engineering project started to head for Planet III.
"Better name it, Billy," smiled Hendricks. "You found it."
"I found it? O.K.," grinned Thompson, "we'll call it Eureka."
"Eureka III?"
"Too cumbersome. Since we'll possibly not chart the system let's just call the planet Eureka and forget about the stellar classification."
"Well, Eureka it is."
Jack Rhodes opened the door. "Better call it Money," he suggested.
"Why?"
"Because you fellows are going to find out that it is the hardest thing you've ever tried to hold."
"Huh?" asked Hendricks.
"We're right close and there isn't the faintest shred of gravitic field."
"Oh, no. Newton's Law—"
"Is valid right up to the last decimal place. 'Every object in the universe attracts—' and we just ain't a part of this universe."
"Doesn't seem right."
"May be of exceptionally low density."
"Must be zero then," grinned
Rhodes. "And if so, how does it hold itself together?"
"You answer that—it's your question."
"How long before landing?" asked Hendricks.
"Half hour. Look, chief, d'ye suppose we might find it to be contraterrene matter?"
"Um. What do you think, Billy?"
"If the matter here is the same as the matter back home, we'd have a fifty-fifty chance of it being contraterrene. It might even be something that was neither terrene or contraterrene for all we know."
"Interesting possibility. You mean something that is neutrally charged so far as we're concerned, but which in this universe consists of oppositely charged items?"
Billy nodded. "We'll find out."
"It has atmosphere, and the test shell didn't result in a contraterrene indication," called the pilot of the project.
"An atmosphere of what?"
Rhodes grinned. "God-knows-what," he said. "If Stellor can't make head nor tail out of the spectrograph, the chances are that the atomic stuff here might not jibe with ours at all."
"There is really no reason for our planeting at all," said Billy. "But I'm just curious, that's all."
"We'll be there soon."
The project approached the planet, and was forced to drive all the way. By the time that they had matched the angular velocity of the planet's rotation, the project was inverted with respect to the surface—though to the men it seemed as if they were drivingupto a ground-surface. It gave them an eerie feeling.
"I can see myself visiting a psychiatrist by the time we get back," grunted Hendricks. "We're landing—upward—and I'm getting the screaming terrors already from that feeling of falling upward into the sky."