X.
Die-straight, the Orionad flew. On a course tangent to the orbit of Pluto, on and on and on beyond the limits of the Solar System, out to a position almost twice the distance from Pluto to Sol; a distance of 7,180,000,000 miles. And there Maynard looked down upon the globe of another world.
"There it is," he said to Kane in what he hoped to sound like awe.
"I'd never have believed it," breathed Kane.
"The funny part," said Maynard in a surprised tone, "is that this planet is about the correct distance for agreement with Bode's Law for Pluto, which is not met. Wonder why it never occurred to the brass hats to look in the 'Bode Position' all the way around."
"Neptune sort of screwed Bode's Law up," smiled Kane. "It is the fly in the ointment. If you set up Bode's Law and check for Neptune, you find that Pluto occupies that position, while Neptune is in a supposedly unoccupied position. Neptune is an interloper."
"Wonder why he came," mused Maynard.
"Probably got here and couldn't leave," said Kane. "Well, Guy, if nothing else, you've re-established the value of Bode's Law. Proper continuity on either side of a discontinuous section—Neptune—indicates to me that the Law is correct. It is the presence of an alien planet that is the troublemaker."
"Is there anything on that planet?"
"I wouldn't know. Has three moons, though. Guy, how could anything live on this planet ... you're entitled to name it, you know, since you discovered it."
"I discovered it?"
"You'll get the credit, and not without reason, Guy."
Guy shrugged. "We'll call him Mephisto. I'm going to run in close, Kane. I'd like some initial information on this planet before we return." He called into the communicator: "Marshal to Executive: Until further notice, we shall call this planet 'Mephisto.' Therefore, circle Mephisto at one thousand miles. Have the technician's crew take all data possible. Have the astrogator check his constants, and if possible, get an initial estimate of Mephisto's velocity, orbit, and ecliptic angle."
"Executive to Marshal: Check."
The answer to Kane's idle question as to the possibility of Mephisto being inhabited came with a distinctness that left no doubt. Not only was Mephisto inhabited, but Mephisto harbored intelligent life. And the intelligent life either resented the arrival of the Orionad, or thought that the Orionad was the vanguard of a special invasion.
At any rate, both were correct. And no matter what the inhabitants of Mephisto thought, they acted.
The detectors rang in alarm, and automatic circuits closed. The big turrets of the Orionad whipped around with speed enough to warm their almost frictionless bearings in the brief arc. They threw their surge on the ordnance-supply lines, and the meters jumped high. The big AutoMacMillans emitted their energy silently and invisibly, and seven great gouts of flame bloomed in the space between Mephisto and Orionad.
They swiveled slightly and fired a second time, and four more blossoms of flame spread, this time closer to the Orionad. Upon the third attack, the flashes were very close to the super ship.
"Ships—or torpedoes?" asked Kane.
"Torpedoes," said Maynard definitely.
"How can you tell?" asked Kane.
"Ships would have flared less brilliantly and more slowly. It takes a well-loaded warhead to blast that way. The fierceness and the velocity of the blast give the answer to that one. Also, those things were coming up at better than a thousand G, all the way. That's guessing that they all started at once or nearly so. In order to separate that much in the distance they covered, and to cover so much distance between the first, second, and third contacts the acceleration must be about that high." He snapped the communicator and asked: "Marshal to Executive: What was the acceleration of the exploded bodies?"
The answer came immediately. "Approximately, 941-G, according to the recorders on the detector circuits."
"Good-bye, Guy."
"Lots of practice," said Maynard. "Well, we're heading back. I'm not going to risk the Orionad in a single-handed battle against a whole planet. Even if I won, they'd bust me flat. We'll head for Terra and set us up a real punitive expedition. Then we'll return and take Mephisto for Terra!"
The Orionad based at Sahara Base and Maynard went into the Bureau of Exploration building. His entry into Malcolm Greggor's office was easy, and he told the space marshal about his discovery. Greggor's reaction was first doubt, but Maynard called Kane and his executive officer, and when Greggor was convinced, his excitement knew no bounds.
He called an immediate conference with the head of several bureaus, and told Maynard he was to remain, and then added Kane to the list. Once assembled, Maynard explained the details, complete, and Malcolm Greggor opened the discussion by stating: "This will be difficult. They resent us. If we go in at all, we must go in armed to the teeth, and expect trouble all the way."
Mantley, of the Bureau of Ordnance, said: "You expect anything unique in ordnance, Maynard?"
"I hardly think so. On the other hand, they have space travel, as witness those torpedoes. They must have a definite isolation policy, otherwise they would have contacted us long ago."
"Not necessarily," objected the head of the Bureau of Exploration. "They may be alien—they must be utterly alien to inhabit a planet that far from Sol. What form they take, or what their chemistry might be, I have no idea. Furthermore, I don't care, and if I ask about it, it'll be academically only. They exist, they have science. They do not like us. Perhaps they know of us, and realize that any traffic with us of the inner worlds is impossible."
"Their attitude in firing upon the Orionad gives us no alternative," said Mantley. He turned to Garlinger, and asked: "We haven't heard from the Bureau of Maneuvers, yet. Have any ideas?"
"It'll be out and out war," said Garlinger. "I'm certain that we made no warlike move in merely visiting them. They've been in preferred isolation, and now that we've discovered them, they fire on us, without provocation. My guess is that we'd not only be better off going in armed, but we'd best prepare for countermeasures, counterattack, and all the trimmings. Now that they've been smoked out, I'll bet they won't sit there on their icy planet and wait for us to come a-blasting."
"How and why have they developed space travel," asked Greggor, "if they care nothing for interplanetary commerce?"
"Their moons," suggested Kane. "There were signs of inhabitation on all three of them."
"This is going to be more difficult than I thought. The problem of breaching a planet alone is one that has seldom been tried. But if Mephisto has three armed moons, that's another item to consider. Well, fellows, it has never been Terra's way to go in with less than all we have. If we have ten million men that never see Mephisto from anything but the viewports of the transports, we'll be better off than if we were blasted to every last man for not having enough of them. It'll be a full-scale attack, gentlemen."
"More than that, Garlinger, we'll get lots of practise."
"Meaning?"
"Some day we're going to be forced into fighting Mars on an all-out basis. This will be excellent experience. I believe that Mars will be the harder to fight, gentlemen. After all, knowing your enemy makes the battle easier—and they know us very well. So if we correct our mistakes on Mephisto, and take the resulting plan to Mars, we may break this deadlock between Mars and Terra forever."
"No one here doubts that it will be an all-out attack," said Mantley. "We'll have to mobilize—and that's your job, Donigan."
"Yup," drawled Donigan. "After you boys get all done making your plans, you hand it to me. Uh-huh—and after I get 'em, it's war with a capital W. Gentlemen, is it your wish that the Bureau of Warfare take over from here on in?"
"It is."
"My aides will present to you the requirements of the Bureau of Warfare as soon as they can be pulled from the files. You will break the news," he said to Kane, "immediately, and in headline form only. Mere mention, in this case, of the new planet, and Guy Maynard, the discoverer. Meanwhile I'll have the Bureau of Propaganda prepare a news-campaign for you, which you will follow within reason."
"With nothing to print but the mere discovery of Mephisto," smiled Kane, "I'll be forced to play up Patrol Marshal Maynard. That all right?"
"Oh certainly. After all, he's fairly well-known and it will seem only right that a well-known figure gets the limelight. I see your problem; you can't break a lonely headline."
"I must at least fill up one column, and even with eighteen point type it takes words. We'll prepare the way, though."
"I want Maynard," said Donigan suddenly.
"The Bureau of Warfare runs this show," nodded Mantley. "May I ask what for?"
"He'll command one phase of the attack. And it will look well that the discoverer leads the battle. It implies that we have implicit confidence in him, in spite of his youth."
"Will he require an increase in rank?"
"Not at the present time. That will come as necessary. But let's close this. Time is important; Mephisto will be mobilizing even as we are."
"May I use the official wire?" asked Kane. "And one more item. What about secrecy?"
"A thing this big can not be kept a secret," answered Donigan. "We haven't enough men and materiel to successfully attack a militant planet. Therefore we must recruit men, and get the manufacturers to produce supplies. Mars—I believe—will sit tight and wait until we take the initiative. A move on their part will hinge upon our success or failure on Mephisto. Break it wide and big, Kane. And send it out on the interplanetary service. Mars may as well have something to think of. We know she will never attack Terra as long as the Terran Space Patrol maintains a fleet. Mars is too small and, therefore, too easy to cover compared to Terra. Go ahead and break your story, Kane."
Kane was as good as his word. It hit the newsstands that evening, in three-inch headlines. They said nothing more than the hourly news-broadcasts for news, but Kane's writers had done an excellent job in building Maynard up as the man of the hour.
And then the report of the attack followed. Guy Maynard, commanding the Orionad, had been fired upon without provocation as he attempted to run in close to the new planet for photographic records. The bursting of the torpedoes was pictured in the newscasts in all their blasting flame, and the pictures suffered nothing from the film record.
Guy Maynard was then called upon to face the iconoscopes. He looked into the faces of three hundred billion Terrans and told them simply and forcefully that Mephisto's military action prevented any peaceful negotiations, and that it was certain that they were even now preparing to maintain their isolation.
"And," he finished, "we know that isolation can not be defended. To preserve isolation, the enemy must be destroyed on his home base. We can expect attack from Mephisto unless we tackle them first. And to take the battle from Terra to them, we need men, material, and all the myriad of things that follow."
The recruiting posters hit the public next, and all of the machinery of war was started. And though it rolled in the super-slow gear at first, it would pick up momentum as time went on. All that the Patrol needed was a backlog to replace losses, and with that assured within the next few months, the mighty fleet of the Terran Space Patrol assembled at Sahara Base, formed a complex space lattice, and drove outward towards Mephisto.
Inexorably, the Terran battle fleet drove onward. Massively ponderous; immobile in its chosen course, the massed fleet flashed up through the velocity range to mid-course, made their complex turnover, and started to decelerate. Hours passed, grew into days, and the days added one to the other, and the lattice was maintained with precision and perfection. Hardly a centimeter of vacillation was observed from ship to ship, and from the Orionad in the center of the space lattice, it seemed as though the monstrous, assembled fleet were truly set in a huge glasslike jelly, immobilized.
But it was a wary personnel that manned the huge Terran Space Patrol task force. They expected something. And the fact that so many hours and days had gone without interruption did not make them less restive. Each moment that went without trouble brought more certain the chance of excitement in the next. It was a beautiful war of nerves, with the Terrans getting more and more certain of attack as the hours sped on and the fleet's velocity dropped to far below the lightning-speed of the maximum at turnover.
The watch was not stirring, save that the crews were on the constant alert for the clangor of the alarms; and the detectors were operating at overload range which gave them plenty of time to get into action—barring something superior in the way of weapons. Far better than human senses were the detectors, and they could be relied upon.
Surprise was impossible because attack was inevitable. And since the human element of watching was eliminated by the ever-alert detectors and the element of counterattack was automatic with the turret-coupled AutoMacs, it was only a matter of time. As one, the fleet moved through the vastness of space between the orbit of Pluto and their goal.
Guy Maynard prowled his scanning room impatiently. In the easy-chair beside the broad desk, Ben Williamson lazed without apparent excitement. Upon the twentieth cigarette, Ben said softly: "You should take it easy, Guy."
"Like you?" asked Maynard. "You look calm—but!"
"I know all about it. But remember, even though it's action you crave; you're the big boss on this expedition and you'll be able to do nothing but watch."
"Watch—and pray that my plans are effective. Uh-huh. But talking it down won't lessen the tension."
"Wait 'em out, Guy. They'll come soon enough."
Guy snorted, tossed his cigarette into the wastebasket and tried to relax. A matter of time, all right. Well, maybe he could wait in patience. At best he'd have to wait until the Mephistans were ready to attack.
When it came, it was swift to start and equally swift to end. From one side there came a fast-moving jet of tiny spacecraft. At unthinkable velocities, the thin stream poured into the space pattern of the Terrans.
The clangor of the alarm ceased as contacts were opened. The communications band roared with cries and questions.
"Who got it?"
"Scorpiad!"
"Bad?"
"Not yet."
"Get out the fighter-cover!"
"They're coming—give us time!"
"Time, hell! This is a space fight, not a pink tea!"
The turrets of the Scorpiad danced back and forth in a mad pattern. At the end of each lightning move they paused. At each pause they vomited unseen energy that catapulted the temperature of the Mephistan ship into incandescence.
The sky beside the moving fleet was dotted with winks of light as the fencing AutoMacs parried the rapier thrusts of the tiny fighters. More ships poured into the arrowing horde, and the dancing turrets raced madly to keep up their program. They lost space, and the wall of coruscating death moved inward.
From long range the Pleiad opened fire, and the dancing motes of flame moved back as the overloaded detectors found more time to focus upon the incoming horde.
Maynard mopped his forehead, one half at a time to permit at least one eye on the celestial globe during the job. "That was close," he snapped.
"It ain't over yet!" said Williamson shortly.
"No ... here comes another line of those devils ... at Pleiad!"
"They're not afraid to die!"
"They seem to want it!"
The Pleiad stopped the long-range fire and began to take care of the horde that was striking at her direct. Pleiad was capable of handling this new attack easily, but it left the brunt of the heavy attack on the Scorpiad.
Once more the flashing motes moved inward as the detectors found themselves unable to keep up. And still more of the tiny ships poured into the stream, and the borderline of death moved into almost-contact with the constellation ship.
A burst of flame came from the flank of the Scorpiad, and the ports flashed outward, followed by gouts of smoke and incandescence. Four red spots spread outward on the Scorpiad's hull, and the constellation ship lost drive. Unable to keep up the deceleration of the rest of the Terran fleet, Scorpiad fell out of position and dropped below the fleet—farther and farther ahead.
A blinding flash of flame came and died.
"Gone!" moaned Maynard.
"But what a cost!" said Ben.
"No cost is worth it!" said Maynard. Then he calmed and added: "Accursed business. But we may be ahead in the exchange."
"It's brutal," agreed Ben. "Let's keep 'em from getting another."
"Might be robots."
"Nope. If so, the technicians would have scrambled 'em. What's making now?"
"The fighter-cover! It's arrived!"
The incoming jet of Mephistan fighters wavered like a gas flame in a high wind, and scintillations scarred the perfection of the needling ships. The long-range fire of the constellation ships picked off the aimlessly moving ships and as the flaming specks reached an almost-solid appearance, the jet of tiny fighters ceased abruptly.
"Stopped 'em!"
Maynard nodded. "For the time."
The communicator spoke: "Commander to Marshal: Located the mother-fleet."
"Yes?"
"We're hitting them now—as per orders. But this is a warning. If we don't stop 'em first, they'll be there in fifteen minutes. They're on collision course!"
"Expected that," said Guy, worriedly.
"O.K.," said Ben in what he hoped would be an encouragement. "Now we'll see if your battle-plan works."
"I keep worrying that it won't."
"If it didn't have merit," observed Ben dryly, "it wouldn't have been adopted."
"I want to get out there and pitch."
"You gotta stay in here and hope they pitch to your call," said Williamson.
Twelve minutes later, the Mephistan fleet came into long-detector range, and the entire Terran fleet opened fire. The heavies, still circling the fleet, took up the job as soon as they came into range, and the space between became filled with flashes of fire as crossed MacMillan beams neutralized one another and spent their mighty energies in light and heat. The power rooms of the ships became a noisy clatter of automatically opening and closing circuit breakers as the MacMillan overloads worked the safety-circuits. Now and then the ultra-loud clamor of the fuse alarms rang out above the chattering racket, and the power gangs worked furiously to replace master line-fuses while the rest of the ship fumed and fretted without power for offense or defense.
The heavies—the sluggers—got between the constellation ships and the Mephistans, and their super-powered AutoMacs outfought the lighter turret-mounts of the Mephistans.
They took their long-range toll, and then as the Mephistans came into torpedo range, the sluggers fell back through the open-work pattern of the constellation ships. From here on in, the omni-powerful battlecraft would have to face battle with every weapon.
Unleashed energy filled the gap between the fleets, and the sky below the decelerating ships became a blazing graveyard of ruin as the ships lost drive and went free, falling ahead of the main body.
Word flashed through the Terran fleet that the Centuriad II had discovered the interference frequency of the Mephistan torpedoes. Technicians in all Terran ships shifted their transmitters to the called frequency, and the torpedoes lost their aiming perfection.
But they were not safe.
Wandering torpedoes continued to roam in among the Terran fleet and touched off fountains of flame and death.
Then from point-blank range, the sub-ships of Terra flashed in through the Mephistan fleet. In one great swarm they came. From the virtual zero of the detectors—that in-close distance that limited the minimum range—torpedoes dropped into being from nowhere and hit full upon ship after ship.
The Mephistan fleet became a flaring holocaust of coruscating flame.
When the fifteen-minute deadline came, the Terrans fought a remainder of the huge Mephistan horde that had tried to stop them. The dead hulls, still incandescent, were easy to dodge, though most of them had fallen free long enough before to have them cross Terra's course ahead rather than at coincidence.
Combining the big turrets of the sluggers with the primary, secondary, and tertiary batteries of the constellation ships, Terra's forces fairly crushed the fragments of Mephisto's horde that remained.
And then the sky was clear once more. The winking lights of death were silent. The furor and clatter of the instrument rooms ceased more slowly as the alarms continued to pick out detritus and to reject such harmless stuff. The power rooms were quiet, too, and the generator rooms no longer resounded to the scream of overworked generators. A clean-up began, and droplets of metal from blown fuses mingled with blackened bits of contalloy from the circuit breakers. Pyrometers dropped back to the central portion of their scales, and the air, acrid and warm, cooled and became sweet again.
They looked, and saw that the sky was theirs—completely.
Mephisto was a disk in the sky below them.
It beckoned—or did it taunt?