The entire wall area of the great room was covered with projectors, and before each one sat a man, but the mighty cylinder in the center was carefully railed off.
The entire wall area of the great room was covered with projectors, and before each one sat a man, but the mighty cylinder in the center was carefully railed off.
The entire wall area of the great room was covered with projectors, and before each one sat a man, but the mighty cylinder in the center was carefully railed off.
The view faded; another replaced it. Now they seemed to be in a smaller room, a room whose front wall was lined with a series of large view boards. Twenty of these boards there were, and on each was the image of a room whose metal walls glistened in the light of the dull red sun. They were looking into the operating room of the greatest of the ships—the flagship. This ship, unlike the others, was a cube, surmounted by a smaller cube control-top. The mighty cylinder inside generated a field that surrounded all the ship with the protecting force, but triply intense. The fighting machines were two thousand one hundred feet long, and three hundred beam. These carried powerful protective force generators, but also they carried fourteen sets of the projectors, three along each side, the top and the bottom, and one at each end. Inside, the terrific energy needed to operate these was being generated in smoothly humming machines. Titanic they loomed above the tiny men tending them. These same giant machines would, later, with a few simple adjustments, furnish the power for the receiver machines to receive the things from the Solar System. But now they were engines of war. Over each thousand of these great ships was a division leader. The twenty division leaders were represented by the twenty view boards in the flagship. The individual ships were each represented by one of the boards in the central control room, so that in any case they knew the fate of every ship, and aid could be sent them.
Now the scene on Hal Jus's screen became misty—the ship was being sent into space. It would be close to an hour before the scene reappeared. Now they shifted the adjustment to watch the sending of the armada of space.
With the many stations in operation, the work went along smoothly and within two hours all were there. The twenty thousand ships had automatically assumed the formation of a mighty cone; the three dimensional equivalent of the flying wedge of their remote ancestors.
Gradually now the men within were awakening. The scene in the control room shifted to the flagship's engine room, as clicking relays shifted the connection to another viewplate on the distant ship. The mighty engines loomed huge above the tiny cots of the sleeping engineers. Here too was the mighty cylinder, but now it was seen as the core of a gigantic coil, into which ran great cables from huge, soft-purring generators. Even the forces of material energy required straining to operate that great electron distorter.
Hal Jus pushed another button. Again the tiny relays out in space reconnected him. The commander was awake. The control room was soon a scene of the greatest activity. As soon as the necessary weapon had been discovered, the plans for the great action had been sketched. The formations were rapidly being worked out.
The great fleet was divided into ten parts of two thousand each, and to each of the nine smaller, cool planets one of the ten divisions went. The tenth stayed as a guard to the flagship. Now they went in ten great cones of glistening ships, a mighty armada of space, coming across the void to conquer the new universe for Mankind. And now they separated as they drew closer to the System, for the ships had been re-formed nearly four billion miles from the central sun, Betelguese.
The expeditions swept along over and close to the surface of the planets they had been sent to investigate. Heat, cold, size, made no difference to the Atomic Creatures and all the small planets would be taken first. The smaller planets would be attacked first. The creatures would probably flee to the outer planet, but it was necessary to plan to attack them there.
Low over the sunlit surface of a great planet they were swinging; below them there rapidly unrolled a terrain of mighty forests of green trees, vast green meadows of gently rolling land, and all bathed in the blinding glory of a blazing white sun. What a scene for eyes that had been starved of light for countless years! What a land of hope and promise and pleasure it seemed to these small gentle men. For generations the only plants they had seen were the poor small things raised artificially in the museums. Here they saw magnificent trees that towered two-hundred feet into the air, in wondrous profusion of leafy green.
Now they were swinging over mighty oceans, gigantic patches of water that were large enough to cover all the surface of their smaller globes, for this planet was large as the long gone Neptune, or Uranus. How wonderful those vast areas of magnificent blue water, sparkling brilliantly in the light of the gigantic sun, seemed to them. Each man, before he started on this expedition, had his eyes treated that the new light would not be too bright and that it might appear white to him, so that now they could fully appreciate the wondrous beauty of the scene beneath.
And wondrous it was to men who had never seen water except as it had been manufactured in their great plants for community use. No oceans, no rivers, no lakes had there been in their system for over five billion years.
Now they were following a mighty river, a river larger than any that Earth had ever seen, for it drained a vast area of a humid planet. Yet it was a new planet, with mighty mountain ranges, mountains that towered in mighty snowcapped peaks in the blue distance, over wide ranges of green forest! What a sight it was for the eyes of these men! What a wondrous country! And now, as they rounded the bend in the great river, they cried out in excited wonder, for before them the great river, vaster than three Amazons, was pouring over a mighty ledge of rock, nearly four hundred feet in height; and from it rose a tremendous wave of sound that made the great ships tremble with the force of it, as they slowed to a few hundred miles an hour to watch the gigantic cascade. Then on again—There was much to do ere they could claim this beautiful country.
And on a low ridge among the mighty mountains they came upon a grim reminder that it was not theirs yet. A great hole lay carved out in bare soil—a sharp contrast with the rich green of the country. Here and there they saw scattered brightly shining bits of metal and a section of heavy metal armor plate, torn and twisted by some enormous strain. To one side lay a heavy girder, torn and bent into a U. They recognized the spot whence the voice of the lost expedition had come across the void to them. Careful electroscopic and photographic studies of the spot were made ere they moved on.
The Atomic Creatures feared them now, it seemed, for though they had come even to one of the planets, they had seen none of the enemy. Surely there must be many hiding!
On the other side of the great mountain range they found their answer. Here, too, was a vast area of green, rolling meadow, but far out across it they could see a great bare spot, where only the dark, raw soil was visible. They swung the armada toward it, and shot forward to investigate, but before they had come within a thousand miles of the spot there suddenly appeared as from nowhere an army of the Atomic Giants. No doubt this bare spot was their home, and from the great area it seemed that they must inhabit it in great numbers. The powerful radioactive effects of their force-fields no doubt killed every plant.
These creatures were not entirely defenseless, for if their numbers were great enough they could exert a powerful interfering force and break down the protective field. But they knew that many would be required. And now all in an instant the battle for this world was on, the great creatures striving to destroy the ships, while burning rays of milk radiance stabbed and slashed at their strange glowing force-pools. Soon they found the vulnerable point of the ships and began to attack single ships in numbers. Slowly, slowly, the milky radiance would contract, while the smooth purring of the mighty generators rose to a throaty hum, then became a vicious snarling roar. The great electron distorter cylinder would become a mass of shooting sparks, crackling, snapping till the atmosphere about it was alive with twisting streamers of flame twelve to twenty-four inches long. Then slowly it would heat—and if the attack was still unbroken, there would be a queer sighing hum from the generator, and a slight explosion—and the ship was gone. The generators, however, would withstand the attacks of ten or eleven of the creatures safely, and the other ships would come to the rescue—but many times there were no free ships in the neighborhood, and all available power must be turned into the ray generators, the slashing beams cutting at the many opponents. Even the propulsion apparatus was robbed of energy that every last meg-erg might be fed into the ray generators. Thousands of the Atomic Giants were destroyed, their color turning that strange green, then they suddenly were snuffed out. But sixty-two ships were lost. Still many remained when at last the Atomic enemy fled suddenly into space. There was no way of following their motion, they merely disappeared, going off with the speed of light. Then the visitors explored all that world, and nowhere did they find any more creatures.
But now the reports from all the other planets were coming in, and in every case eventual victory was secured. On two planets the issue was for a time in doubt, for there seemed to be great centers of the creatures here. However, there was no difficulty in discovering where the remnant had fled to! The electronic activity readings of the outermost planet, the minor sun, had risen 12.5 per cent. Since a star does not depend on atomic energy, it was easy to see that the creatures had sought refuge here. The range of the present ray was too short to permit attack on that planet. The blazing furnace drove them back to a distance of a million miles as the least distance of safe approach. They could not attack the creatures here. What could they do? They must exterminate them before the people moved to their new planets, for the creatures could make a raid, destroy a city, and be gone before the battleships could leave their docks.
The control ship proceeded directly to the most pleasant of the planets, with its guard, and the other ships were sent to watch the planets lest the Atomic Creatures return. Then on the planet the men began to set up one of the great receiving stations. From the sides of the ships ran mighty power cables to the powerful station. Then across space there came expert engineers, workmen, instruments and tools, working machines, constructor robots, and then great pieces of machinery so huge they could send only one section at a time. With these a new station was built to replace the temporary one.
Already a small city was developing it seemed. But back on the old planets, mighty works were being undertaken. They were building two thousand ships, the biggest ships that had ever been built. Millions of tons they weighed, and each ship was one vast power plant. Down through the heart of it ran a mighty cylinder of glistening metal. A tiny control room, invisible among the titanic machines, governed all its vast energies. It was a gargantuan projector of the nullifying field, a mighty ship that could hurl its energies into space to form a field of the force that could reach out across a million and a half miles. Two thousand of these vast machines were being built. Gigantic power plants they were. But these peacefully minded men designed them so that, their work done, they could be easily converted into merchant cargo ships, and the mighty generators could be used to light and heat their cities.
In less than two weeks the great ships were ready, and were resting on the surface of the great world out there across space, ready for the attack. The last mighty form had but just floated, light as a feather, from the huge receiving station, and now they lay in a row. So vast they were that they seemed unreal, figments of some strange dream. Mighty cigar-shaped hulls of four-foot armor plate, half sunken in slight depressions they lay now, their terrific weight making the soil flow like some semi-liquid mass. Nestled between two of the gargantuan ships there rested the control ship. Now, one by one the fleet of the mighty bulks rose gently, gracefully into the air, formed in a perfect cone, with the control ship, scarcely visible in this congregation of giants, following behind the leading ship.
Out to that minor sun they flashed, and around it they formed a great sphere of ships. Then each of the mighty projectors, nose pointing to the blazing sun below, turned loose its powers. Through special filters they could watch the field forming. First it was a thin shell that surrounded the entire planet as the projectors threw it into position. Ten thousand small ships were occupied in maintaining the field of electrons in place with their projectors. Already the shell of force was thick and strong. Unless the Force Creatures made a concerted effort at some one point, they would soon be doomed.
They did this. There must have been many, many thousands of them. The field was almost broken, it was bulging out, scattering under the drive of their energies. Soon they would have broken through, but one of the great projector ships reached the spot before the field had quite yielded, and condensing his field projector till it was a ray, they could see the field suddenly fall in, driven in by the awful power of that titanic driving.
It took them sixty-three hours to completely establish that mighty energy field. Naturally the star, which made no use of Atomic energy, was quite unaffected. But when, at the end of three weeks, the energy field had slowly dissipated itself into space, there were no more of the Atomic Giants.
Now the four habitable planets were at once settled upon. Already they had been carefully mapped, and the Supreme Council had drawn up a plan for the use of the vast planets. More area there was than they needed now, by far, so the cities were scattered widely over the globes. Mere planetary distances meant nothing to them. And all the areas between were carefully preserved as vast, natural parks. Through them wound roads for the little ground cars, so that the people might better see the beauties of the place. And some of the harmless animals would be permitted to live that the future population might know them. It was to be the fulfilment of a millennium-old dream—a warm, sunlight world, a kindly, young world where nature supplied the air, and the water, and the warmth in great abundance.
It was a kindly nature they seemed to have met here. And the work began.
Dozens, hundreds of the great receiver stations were set up. And at each station there would grow a great city. Now there poured across the infinite void a mighty influx of machines and workers and tools. These were the first, for they must build the cities for the billions to come. Rapidly the work went on as the skilled artisans directed the mighty machines in their labors, and on the surface of this new globe there rose from the ground mighty walls of lustrous, gleaming metal, reflecting the sun in a million different colors, a wondrous city of flashing, changing light, for the metal walls were automatically ruled with thousands of lines to the inch, a titanic diffraction grating that sent up a rainbow of changing, flashing color. A mile and a half into the air towered the buildings of the cities, and already the commerce was building up as the great receiver stations discharged their steady stream of immigrants.
One and a half years it took them to move all their treasures and priceless records, all their goods, all their machines and themselves across the void into their new cities. One and a half years of swift, efficient labor that transformed these new worlds into civilized planets.
But now they had twenty billion years to live ere these planets, too, would be dark, cold and sunless. And then they could easily move to some other distant system. But why wait till the Sun grew cold? They were already making investigations. Out across space there still glowed countless millions of unexplored stars! Now there would be no population limit to their peoples; there would be expansion, and since each man lived from two to three thousand years, the expansion could be rapid.
Four of the planets were naturally habitable, but five there were which should be so in the future. There was one yet a glowing planet, still hot from its formation. Two were so far from the major sun that they were cold to absolute zero, save when they were in conjunction with the minor sun. These the engineers and astro-physicists had investigated. They would be drawn nearer the sun when the population warranted, and one more that turned on its axis but once a year could easily be started rotating. Air and water it lacked, but that would be easy to supply. And a last planet was so close to the mighty blazing Betelguese that it was kept dull red by the titanic furnace so near it, a scant thirty million miles away. That would be drawn to a more comfortable distance. There was indeed room for much expansion in this system.
But still there was the urge of exploration, of adventure. There might be other battles to fight, other worlds to conquer! Already mighty exploration ships were being prepared to dispatch to half a dozen systems. Perhaps they would bring commerce; perhaps it would be wider domain. But it was that same lure of adventure that had driven the first caveman from his rocky cliff to explore the wilder lands. It was the love of adventure, another name for ambition. It would take more than ten thousand thousand thousand years to kill that!
THE END