XIII.
The scene at the proving grounds was a bustle of activity. In the center of the area stood a huge machine with a paraboloid reflector, pointing skyward on gimbals. Supporting the projector was a girdered and trussed platform, with tractor beams on each corner, pointing down to the center of Terra. Vast was the machine; no telescope in the Solar Combine was half as solid as the trunnions and bars that rigidized the setting of the relatively small, ten-foot bowl of the projector.
A line of portable telephone poles, strung with portable wiring, led from the housing below the projector. Off across the proving ground they went to a master-control office almost lost in the horizon and the haze.
But the projector would not be studied from the remote position. That was just a clearing house—a veritable telephone exchange—that fed terrestrial data from all of the research laboratories of Terra to the monster on the proving ground.
Inside the housing was Cliff Lane, directing the technical staff. There, too, was Linzete, the catman, brought back to Terra by Lane's doubly convincing mind. Linzete did not like primates; he avoided them and went out of his way to keep a two-foot clear space between himself and the primates as he moved around in the crowded housing.
The Terrans, warned beforehand, did their best to honor his dislike of them. They respected his preference in contact, though they, at this point, tended to use his mind and his experience as something presented to them. For they—and he—knew that their mental ability exceeded his and he was there only because his experience had been greater than theirs.
Out on the trestles and the catwalks of the machine stood Stellor Downing, directing the final touches of the monstrous mechanical system.
The operator called to Lane: "The sounding-boat is over the Mindanao Deep, sir. Ready and waiting."
"How's the terrestrial laboratory at Washington?"
"Ready for an hour. And Cal Tech has been chewing their fingernails for two hours."
"Call Downing and ask him how long?"
"Calling Stellor Downing—"
"On the roger," answered Downing, grabbing a phone from its rack on a catwalk.
"How much more greasing are you going to give that mecanno set?" asked Cliff.
"Oh, any time you're ready, we are."
"I know but—"
"Until the bell rings, we'll sort of pick curls of dust out of the bearings, put a drop of oil here and there, and see that the stuff is shiny—and as slippery as the devil."
The operator plugged into a ringing line. "Lane," he called after listening, "the crew just dropped the drone."
"Get the detector gang and tell 'em."
The operator unplugged and shoved the plug into another jack. He spoke, and listened for several minutes.
"Detector gang has picked up the drone," he announced to Lane.
"Ring the warning bell!"
The clangor of the warning bell shattered the air. Over the tactac of machinery and the rumble of heavy generators, it fell on waiting ears, and from all parts of the great projector there was a general rush to hit solid ground. A huge ring of men formed a hundred yards from the machine, and Downing entered the housing.
"Can we see better in here or out there?" he asked.
"In here," said Cliff. "The drone won't be within a ten light-sec range when we hit it. The celestial globe, here, has been juggled up to show both drone and projector. It's rough, but the lack of definition won't bother us. We can understand what's happening—and if it happens as we expect, we'll see it go blooey and be able to reconstruct the event. Stick around."
Linzete came and stood beside them. "I think the sawtooth is not of the proper shape," he suggested.
"Perhaps not," agreed Lane. "But to put any sharper break on it will require another high-power driver stage. I'm hoping it will be adequate."
"The recovery time may seem slow," added Downing. "But remember how much distance it controls."
Linzete nodded dubiously. He was not the type to argue. If these gadget-mad Terrans were going to ruin a second-rate ship on the first try, well, they'd find out soon enough. He hoped they had a stock of radio-controlled drones. They'd need them.
They had—and they probably would need them.
"On target!" came the cry.
Above, the platform swung around. The projector bobbled over in its gimbals and centered on something invisible in the blue sky. The tractor beams took hold invisibly and there was a grunting of the bearings as the whole mechanism anchored itself to the core of the planet.
Then the projector jumped perceptibly. It seemed to gather itself together and pounce. Then the system relaxed, apparently, for the tractor beams died and the bearings resumed their freedom.
Down in the housing, the celestial globe showed a small, outdated cruiser. Speed was apparently zero, for the globe and its detecting and scanning circuits was following it, mile for mile and second by second. A range and velocity computed below the globe gave the data: Nine light-sec range, velocity sixty-six MPS.
The cruiser faltered in flight and the scanners almost passed ahead of it. It faltered momentarily—that was during the time that the projector seemed to gather its energy. As the pounce came, something inside of the cruiser exploded very slowly. It expanded the cruiser slightly here and there; a plate blew off; five or six of the greenhouses shattered in puffs of mild fire; and then the cruiser staggered and continued on at a lower velocity.
"Send out the word," called Lane. "General coverage. That was the first shock."
Laboratories marked the time all over Terra. It would take hours for the shock—if any—to reach the antipodes. What Lane was more interested in was the report from Cal Tech, only a few hundred miles away.
"Linzete, you were right," said Lane. "It'll take time, and we'll need it. But—Hey! Fellows! Get the high-power stage rigged and see what can be done about increasing the sharpness of the sawtooth generator."
The period of waiting was filled with activity. The reports started to come in:
"Cal Tech reports very mild shock."
"Washington indicated almost zero—just a trace."
"O.K., we can stand it," said Lane. "How's the target?"
"Circling Terra. Radius seven light-sec. Velocity fifty-three MPS."
The projector was ready when the drone returned. Again the projector gathered itself together, and the pounce was quite visible. Beneath them, the ground shook violently, and the projector and its mighty platforms rattled in the bearings, held as they were by tractors to the core of Terra.
In the celestial sphere, the cruiser faltered again, and then exploded in a wild blast of sheer flame, white and violent. The radiating gases expanded, passed out of the scope of the scanner, and then the scanner fell away from the scene and roamed aimlessly across the sky, showing a mad whirling pattern of uninteresting stars.
"What happened?" asked Linzete.
"Main target blew up completely. Nothing massive to focus on, so the finders and scanners just roam at will. That's it, Stellor."
"Wait until we get the seismographic reports," cautioned the Martian. "Maybe we can blast a ship to bits at two million miles, but so what if California slides into the San Jacinto fault?"
"Well, there'll be no more attempts until the returns are all in from the labs," said Lane. "I'm taking no more chances." He turned to Linzete. "You'll want the plans, of course?"
The Sscantovian nodded. "I will not require the main circuits, of course. The snatcher portion is just an oversized version of our own invention. What I shall need is the details of the compressing sphere. We were content to tear a section out of the ship. You made a precision slicing operation out of it which pleased us greatly. But this problem of taking the spherical cut and actually compressing the matter inside—then releasing it instantly to create an atomic explosion is far beyond me. We can copy it, but no Sscantovian would ever hope to develop it from the facts here unless he had detailed plans. We—could not understand its operation."
"You did understand the main principle, though. You were the one who predicted that the release-time was not fast enough and suggested sharpening the sawtooth generator."
"One may make suggestions without understanding the whole process," purred Linzete. "Your weapon seems to be a success."
"We'll know that when the seismographic reports are all in. Hurling a beam of this kind, doing what we do, may well shake the planet's crust. We hope to extend our range to ten million miles, and we'll know if we can in a few months. If you have any deities, Linzete, you might burn a prayer to 'em."
It was thirty-six hours before the returns were all in. All along the fault-lines of Terra came reports of very mild temblors. Nowhere was there any severe slippage of Terra's crust: the seismographs could find no epicenters, the uncounted tons of rock, under unknown tons of pressure, had slid uniformly, creating a general, little shock.
And Lane grinned. "With little slippages," he said, "we may do away with all severe earthquakes. Releasing the crust-pressures before they build up to a disaster-quantity should help, not hinder. We might continue hitting small targets like this until the distribution of fault-pressures is even all over. Then we can swing the Big Beam."
"What I'm interested in at this point," said Downing, "is the countermeasures group. What if the Loard-vogh get this thing?"
"Billy says that they can't miss getting it eventually. And Billy also says that the countermeasures gang is working on another development. Has something to do with a similar gadget, only the sphere of force can be made to pierce the snatcher—or any other field of force—and remove smaller items inside. Sort of grab the stuff out from the contracting sphere and toss it outside. It might save a lot of the crew, especially since the atomic sphere is necessarily small."
Linzete purred and asked: "Couldn't you compress a whole section of the ship?"
Lane turned. "Billy says we could, but why? Takes that much more power, and the ultimate explosion would do little harm. This way we can grab a hunk the size of a baseball and make quite an atomic blowup out of it. Takes much less power, and the explosion is great."
"I think you'll find," offered Downing, "that it takes just as much power to wreck a ship by crushing it physically as it does to compress a small sphere and then let it explode."
"The atomic explosion takes more," said Lane.
"Then why?"
"Projector-size. We're getting away with swinging a ten-foot bowl around. If we wanted to inclose a whole ship, we'd require a paraboloid about forty times the longest diameter of the ship, just as the ten-foot bowl is forty times the diameter of the compressible sphere. And cutting a section out—well, that's the weapon we had before and decided against because it left a chance for a well-designed ship to lose a section and still carry on, or be repaired. Complete destruction is the only answer."
"In other words, the power input is greater, but the operational power—?"
"The overall power requirements of the atomic sphere projector are about even this way to just crumpling a ship."
"That's what I said," objected Downing.
"I thought you meant just the crushing factor. The difference is made up in the projector elements. Well, that's those. Billy says we can turn this over to the secondary crew, now."
"Then what?"
"I'm going to get six of these made up for each planet. We'll also mount some on the outer planets; and the colonials of Alpha, Procyon, and the rest."
Hotang Lu pounded the table with his little fist. "That weapon might have stopped them!" he snapped. "Why did you stop production?"
"Are you questioning my motives?" asked Thompson quietly.
"Yes!"
"Have you any doubts as to my loyalty?"
"I ... ah ... no."
"And you do not understand my intent?"
"No."
"He's not alone, Billy," put in Kennebec. "What do you intend to do?"
"The use of Terra's secret weapon is critical. It must be employed at exactly the opportune moment, and not one minute before and not one minute after. There must be, for psychological reasons you all know, a certain amount of normal, mine-run fighting before we employ our secret. But I do not want them to be defeated by our might and our weapons. That would be disastrous, for they would return in a few years, and they would return and return, until finally they succeeded in conquering us. We must fight this as I have planned, and when the time is exactly ripe, we shall employ our secret weapon and from that time on, there will be no more carnage, and the Loard-vogh will be conquered."
"When you're dealing with the Loard-vogh, there's no better way to skin a cat than to grab the skin at the neck and pull," scowled Downing. "Choking them to death with cream will not work. I spent three weeks there, remember, and I tell you, Billy, you can not temporize with them!"
Kennebec shook his head at Billy, "I wonder if your practice of getting what you want without fighting for it mightn't be carried too far."
"We are a million million in population," said Billy. "That's counting the Solar Combine plus the colonial outposts. This fight we're facing can not be won in another way. They outnumber us a million to one—think of that! To win, every Solarian must kill one million Loard-vogh! And that," he concluded bitterly, "makes us all come out even!"
"There isn't a man in this sector that wouldn't prefer to die protecting his own than to knuckle under Loard-vogh rule."
"I know—"
"Billy, I can not permit this order to continue," said Kennebec. "We must not permit them to take Terra!"
"Then you're overriding my order?"
"I am—and I pray that the procrastination isn't fatal."
Downing frowned. "Look, Billy, remember this: The Loard-vogh fear us as we are! Otherwise they would not be mobilizing against us. Despite the million-to-one ratio, they fear us and our heredity. We can and will win!"
"We'll win, never fear," said Billy. "But we'll win only if we play it properly."
"And properly means to fight with every weapon that we have."
"Spore bombs?"
"That's but one thing."
"They'll help—only to make the other trillion Loard-vogh mad. Douse a few planets and thousands of others will muster."
Billy Thompson thought for a moment and then answered: "Really, it makes little difference how we fight. We'll win anyway. Go ahead and build your gadgets."
He left, and Hotang Lu nodded. "I pray there is time left. Time to build smaller ones, too, that will fit the ships of the Solar Guard. Time to manufacture the necessary fighting equipment. Time to ... ah, always we are fighting time. I curse the lack of time."
And then the Tlemban added: "I am mystified. In my cosmos, if a secret weapon is worthy of use, it is worthy of use from the time it is discovered. I am puzzled—but then, I do not understand your secret weapon. It sounds foolish to me."
Kennebec spent the next three hours trying to make the Tlemban understand, and finally gave up.