XVIII.
Very near to Valeron, as space distances go, yet so far away in terms of miles that he could take no active part whatever in the proceedings, Quedrin Radnor sat tense at his controls, staring into his powerful visiplates. Even before Klynor Siblin had lifted his rocket plane off the ground, Radnor had opened his throttles wide. Then, his ship hurtling at full drive toward home, everything done he could do, he sat and watched.
Watched, a helpless spectator. Watched while Siblin made his futilely spectacular attack; watched the gallant plane's destruction; watched the capture of the brave but foolhardy pilot; watched the rolling up and compression of the Chloran dome; watched in agony the obliteration of everything, animate and inanimate, pertaining to the outlying village; watched in horrified relief the departure of the invading space ship.
Screaming through the air, her outer plating white hot from its friction, her forward rocket tubes bellowing a vicious crescendo, Radnor braked his ship savagely to a landing in the dock beside the machine shop in which she had been built. During that long return voyage his mind had not been idle. Not only had he decided what to do, he had also made rough sketches and working drawings of the changes which must be made in his peaceful space ship to make of her a superdreadnought of the void.
This was not as difficult an undertaking as might be supposed. She already had power enough and to spare, her generators and connectors being able to supply, hundreds of times over, her maximum present drain; and, because of the ever-present danger of collision with meteorites, she was already amply equipped with repeller screens and with automatically tripped zones of force. Therefore all that was necessary was the installation of the required offensive armament—beam projectors, torpedo tubes, fields of force, controls, and the like—the designing of which was a simple matter for the brain which had tamed to man's everyday use the ultimately violent explosiveness of intra-atomic energy.
Radnor first made sure that the machine-shop superintendent, master mechanic, and foremen understood the sketches fully and knew precisely what was to be done. Then, confident that the new projectors would project and that the as yet nonexistent oxygen bombs would explode with their theoretical violence, he hurried to the office of the Bardyle. Already gathered there was a portentous group. Besides the coördinator there were scientists, engineers, architects, and beam specialists, as well as artists, teachers, and philosophers.
"Greetings, Quedrin Radnor!" began the Bardyle. "Your plan for the defense of Valeron has been adopted, with a few minor alterations and additions suggested by other technical experts. It has been decided, however, that your proposed punitive visit to Chlora cannot be approved. As matters now stand it can be only an expedition of retaliation and vengeance, and as such can in no wise advance our cause."
"Very well, O Bardyle! It is—" Radnor, trained from infancy in cooperation, was accepting the group decision as a matter of course when he was interrupted by an emergency call from his own laboratory. An assistant, returning to the temporarily deserted building, had found the message of Klynor Siblin and had known that it should be given immediate attention.
"Please relay it to us here, at once," Radnor instructed; and, when the message had been delivered:
"Fellow councilors, I believe that this word from Klynor Siblin will operate to change your decision against my proposed flight to Chlora. With these incomplete facts and data to guide me I shall be able to study intelligently the systems of offense and of defense employed by the enemy, and shall then be in position to strengthen immeasurably our own armament. Furthermore, Siblin was alive within the hour—there may yet be some slight chance of saving his life in spite of what he has said."
The Bardyle glanced once around the circle of tense faces, reading in them the consensus of opinion without having recourse to speech.
"Your point is well taken, Councilor Quedrin, and for the sake of acquiring knowledge your flight is approved," he said slowly. "Provided, however—and this is a most important proviso—that you can convince us that there is a reasonable certainty of your safe return. Klynor Siblin had, of course, no idea that he would be captured. Nevertheless, the Chlorans took him, and his life is probably forfeit. You must also agree not to jeopardize your life in any attempt to rescue your friend unless you have every reason to believe that such an attempt will prove successful. We are insisting upon these assurances because your scientific ability will be of inestimable value to Valeron in this forthcoming struggle, and therefore your life must at all hazards be preserved."
"To the best of my belief and ability my safe return is certain," replied Radnor positively. "Siblin's plane, used only for low-speed atmospheric flying, had no defenses whatever and so fell an easy prey to the Chlorans' attack. My ship, however, was built to navigate space, in which it may meet at any time meteorites traveling at immensely high velocities, and is protected accordingly. She already had four courses of high-powered repeller screens, the inside course of which, upon being punctured, automatically throws around her a zone of force.
"This zone, as most of you know, sets up a stasis in the ether itself, and thus is not only absolutely impervious to and unaffected by any material substance, however applied, but is also opaque to any vibration or wave-form propagated through the ether. In addition to these defenses I am now installing screens capable of neutralizing any offensive force with which I am familiar, as well as certain other armament, the plans of all of which are already in your possession, to be employed in the general defense.
"I agree also to your second condition."
"Such being the case your expedition is approved," the Bardyle said, and Radnor made his way back to the machine shop.
His first care was to tap Siblin's beam, but his call elicited no response. Those ultrainstruments were then lying neglected in a corner of an air-filled room upon far Chlora, where the almost soundless voice of the tiny receiver went unheard. Setting upon his receiver a relay alarm to inform him of any communication from Siblin, Radnor joined the force of men who were smoothly and efficiently re-equipping his vessel.
In a short time the alterations were done, and, armed now to the teeth with vibratory and with solid and gaseous destruction, he lifted his warship into the air, grimly determined to take the war into the territory of the enemy.
He approached the inimical planet cautiously, knowing that their cities would not be undefended, as were those of his own world, and fearing that they might have alarms and detector screens of which he could know nothing. Poised high above the outermost layer of that noxious atmosphere he studied for a long time every visible feature of the world before him.
In this survey he employed an ordinary, old-fashioned telescope instead of his infinitely more powerful and maneuverable visirays, because the use of the purely optical instrument obviated the necessity of sending out forces which the Chlorans might be able to detect. He found the diamond-shaped ocean and the elliptical lake without difficulty, and placed his vessel with care. He then cut off his every betraying force and his ship plunged downward, falling freely under the influence of gravity.
Directly over the city Radnor actuated his braking rockets, and as they burst into their staccato thunder his hands fairly flashed over his controls. Almost simultaneously he scattered broadcast his cargo of bombs, threw out a vast hemisphere of force to confine the gas they would release, activated his spy ray, and cut in the generators of his awful offensive beams.
The bombs were simply large flasks of metal, so built as to shatter upon impact, and they contained only oxygen under pressure—but what a pressure! Five thousand Valeronian atmospheres those flasks contained. Well over seventy-five thousand pounds to the square inch in our ordinary terms, that pressure was one handled upon Earth only in high-pressure laboratories. Spreading widely to cover almost the whole circle of the city's expanse, those terrific canisters hurtled to ground and exploded with all the devastating might of the high-explosive shells which in effect they were.
But the havoc they wrought as demolition bombs was neither their only nor their greatest damage. The seventy-five million cubic feet of free oxygen, driven downward and prevented from escaping into the open atmosphere by Radnor's forces, quickly diffused into a killing concentration throughout the Chloran city save inside that one upstanding dome. Almost everywhere else throughout that city the natives died exactly as had died the people of the Valeronian village in the strangling chlorine of the invaders; for oxygen is as lethal to that amœbic race as is their noxious halogen to us.
Long before the bombs reached the ground Radnor was probing with his spy ray at the great central dome from within which Klynor Siblin's message had in part been sent. But now he could not get through it; either they had detected Siblin's beam and blocked that entire communication band or else they had already put up additional barriers around their headquarters against his attack, quickly though he had acted.
Snapping off the futile visiray, he concentrated his destructive beam into a cylinder of the smallest possible diameter and hurled it against the dome; but even that frightful pencil of annihilation, driven by Radnor's every resource of power, was utterly ineffective against that greenly scintillant hemisphere of force. The point of attack flared into radiant splendor, but showed no sign of overloading or of failure.
Knowing now that there was no hope at all of rescuing Siblin and that he himself had only a few minutes left in which to work, Radnor left his beam upon the dome only long enough for his recording photometers to analyze the radiations emanating from the point of contact. Then, full-driven still, but now operating at maximum aperture, he drove it in a dizzying spiral outwardly from the dome, fusing the entire unprotected area of the metropolis into a glassily fluid slag of seething, smoking desolation.
But beneath that dome of force there was a mighty fortress indeed. It is true that her offensive weapons had not seen active service for many years; not since the last rebellion of the slaves had been crushed. It is also true that the Chloran officers whose duty it was to operate these weapons had been caught napping—as thoroughly surprised at that fierce counterattack as would be a group of Earthly hunters were the lowly rabbits to turn upon them with repeating rifles in their furry paws.
But it did not take long for those officers to tune in their offensive armament, and that armament was driven by no such puny engines as Radnor's space ship bore. Being stationary and a part of the regular equipment of a fortress, their size and mass were of course much greater than anything ordinarily installed in any vessel, of whatever class or tonnage. Also, in addition to being superior in size and number, the Chloran generators were considerably more efficient in the conversion and utilization of interatomic energy than were any then known to the science of Valeron.
Therefore, as Radnor had rather more than expected, he was not long allowed to wreak his will. From the dome there reached out slowly, almost caressingly, a huge arm of force incredible, at whose first blighting touch his first or outer screen simply vanished—flared through the visible spectrum and went down, all in the veriest twinkling of an eye. That first screen, although the weakest by far of the four, had never even radiated under the heaviest test loads that Radnor had been able to put upon it. Now he sat at his instruments, tense but intensely analytical, watching with bated breath as that Titanic beam crashed through his second screen and tore madly at his third.
Well it was for Valeron that day that Radnor had armed and powered his vessel to withstand not only whatever forces he expected her to meet, but had, with the true scientific spirit and in so far as he was able, provided against any conceivable emergency. Thus, the first screen was, as has been said, sufficiently powerful to cope with anything the vessel was apt to encounter. Nevertheless, the power of the other defensive courses increased in geometrical progression; and, as a final precaution, the fourth screen, in the almost unthinkable contingency of its being overloaded, threw on automatically in the moment of its failure an ultimately impenetrable zone of force.
That scientific caution was now to save not only Radnor's life, but also the whole civilization of Valeron. For even that mighty fourth screen, employing in its generation as it did the unimaginable sum total of the power possible of production by the massed converters of the space flyer, failed to stop that awful thrust. It halted it for a few minutes, in a blazingly, flamingly pyrotechnic display of incandescence indescribable, but as the Chlorans meshed in additional units of their stupendous power plant it began to radiate higher and higher into the ultra-violet and was certainly doomed.
It failed, and in the instant of its going down actuated a zone of force—a complete stasis in the ether itself, through which no possible manifestation, either of matter or of energy in any form, could in any circumstances pass. Or could it? Radnor clenched his teeth and waited. Whether or not there was a sub-ether—something lying within and between the discrete particles which actually composed the ether—was a matter of theoretical controversy and of some academically scientific interest.
But, postulating the existence of such a medium and even that of vibrations of such infinitely short period that they could be propagated therein, would it be even theoretically possible to heterodyne upon them waves of ordinary frequencies? And could those amorphous monstrosities be so highly advanced that they had reduced to practical application something that was as yet known to humanity only in the vaguest, most tenuous of hypotheses?
Minute after minute passed, however, during which the Valeronian remained alive within an intact ship which, he knew, was hurtling upward and away from Chlora at the absolute velocity of her inertia, unaffected by gravitation, and he began to smile in relief. Whatever might lie below the level of the ether, either of vibration or of substance, it was becoming evident that the Chlorans could no more handle it than could he.
For half an hour Radnor allowed his craft to drift within her impenetrable shield. Then, knowing that he was well beyond atmosphere, he made sure that his screens were full out and released his zone. Instantly his screens sprang into a dazzling, coruscant white under the combined attack of two space ships which had been following him. This time, however, the Chloran beams were stopped by the third screen. Either the enemy had not had time to measure accurately his power, or they had not considered such measurement worth while.
They were now to pay dearly for not having gauged his strength. Radnor's beam, again a stabbing stiletto of pure energy, lashed out against the nearer vessel; and that luckless ship mounted no such generators as powered her parent fortress. That raging spear, driven as it was by all the power that Radnor had been able to pack into his cruiser, tore through screens and metal alike as though they had been so much paper; and in mere seconds what had once been a mighty space ship was merely a cloud of drifting, expanding vapor. The furious shaft was then directed against the other enemy, but it was just too late—the canny amœbus in command had learned his lesson and had already snapped on his zone of force.
Having learned many facts vital to the defense of Valeron and knowing that his return homeward would now be unopposed, Radnor put on full touring acceleration and drove toward his native world. Motionless at his controls, face grim and hard, he devoted his entire mind to the problem of how Valeron could best wage the inevitable war of extinction against the implacable denizens of the monstrous, interloping planet Chlora.