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.
The feeling of 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.