II.
"Can you open the airlocks of that scout ship from the outside, doctor?" asked Loring, as the two adventurers came out of the armory into the control room where DuQuesne, by means of the attractors, began to bring the two vessels together.
"Yes. I know everything that that engineer of a first-class battleship knew. To him, one of these little scouts was almost beneath notice, but he did know that much about them—the outside controls of all Fenachrone ships work the same way."
Under the urge of the attractions, the two ships of space were soon door to door. DuQuesne set the mighty beams to lock the craft immovably together and both men stepped into the Violet's airlock. Pumping back the air, DuQuesne opened the outer door, then opened both outer and inner doors of the scout.
As he opened the inner door the poisoned atmosphere of the vessel screamed out into space, and as soon as the frigid gale had subsided the raiders entered the control room of the enemy craft. Hardened and conscienceless killer though Loring was, the four bloated, ghastly objects that had once been men gave him momentary pause.
"Maybe we shouldn't have let the air out so fast," he suggested, tearing his gaze away from the grisly sight.
"The brains aren't hurt, and that's all I care about." Unmoved, DuQuesne opened the air valves wide, and not until the roaring blast had scoured every trace of the noxious vapor from the whole ship did he close the airlock doors and allow the atmosphere to come again to normal pressure and temperature.
"Which ship are you going to use—theirs or our own?" asked Loring, as he began to remove his cumbersome armor.
"I don't know yet. That depends largely upon what I find out from the brain of the lieutenant in charge of this patrol boat. There are two methods by which we can capture a battleship; one requiring the use of the Violet, the other the use of this scout. The information which I am about to acquire will enable me to determine which of the two plans entails the lesser amount of risk.
"There is a third method of procedure, of course; that is, to go back to Earth and duplicate one of their battleships ourselves, from the knowledge I shall have gained from their various brains concerning the apparatus, mechanisms, materials, and weapons of the Fenachrone. But that would take a long time and would be far from certain of success, because there would almost certainly be some essential facts that I would not have secured. Besides, I came out here to get one of their first-line space ships, and I intend to do it."
With no sign of distaste DuQuesne coupled his brain to that of the dead lieutenant of the Fenachrone through the mechanical educator, and quite as casually as though he were merely giving Loring another lesson in Fenachrone matters did he begin systematically to explore the intricate convolutions of that fearsome brain. But after only ten minutes' study he was interrupted by the brazen clang of the emergency alarm. He flipped off the power of the educator, discarded his headset, acknowledged the call, and watched the recorder as it rapped out its short, insistent message.
"Something is going on here that was not on my program," he announced to the alert but quiescent Loring. "One should always be prepared for the unexpected, but this may run into something cataclysmic. The Fenachrone are being attacked from space, and all armed forces have been called into a defensive formation—Invasion Plan XB218, whatever that is. I'll have to look it up in the code."
The desk of the commanding officer was a low, heavily built cabinet of solid metal. DuQuesne strode over to it, operated rapidly the levers and dials of its combination lock, and took from one of the compartments the "Code"—a polygonal framework of engraved metal bars and sliders, resembling somewhat an Earthly multiplex squirrel-cage slide rule.
"X—B—Two—One—Eight." Although DuQuesne had never before seen such an instrument, the knowledge taken from the brains of the dead officers rendered him perfectly familiar with it, and his long and powerful fingers set up the indicated defense plan as rapidly and as surely as those of any Fenachrone could have done. He revolved the mechanism in his hands, studying every plane surface, scowling blackly in concentration.
"Munition plants—shall—so-and-so—We don't care about that. Reserves—zones—ordnance—commissary—defensive screens—Oh, here we are! Scout ships. Instead of patrolling a certain volume of space, each scout ship takes up a fixed post just inside the outer detector zone. Twenty times as many on duty, too—enough so that they will be only about ten thousand miles apart—and each ship is to lock high-power detector screens and visiplate and recorder beams with all its neighbors.
"Also, there is to be a first-class battleship acting as mother ship, protector, and reserve for each twenty-five scouts. The nearest one is to be—Let's see, from here that would be only about twenty thousand miles over that way and about a hundred thousand miles down."
"Does that change your plans, chief?"
"Since my plans were not made, I cannot say that it does—it changes the background, however, and introduces an element of danger that did not previously exist. It makes it impossible to go out through the detector zone—but it was practically impossible before, and we have no intention of going out, anyway, until we possess a vessel powerful enough to go through any barrage they can lay down. On the other hand, there is bound to be a certain amount of confusion in placing so many vessels, and that fact will operate to make the capture of our battleship much easier than it would have been otherwise."
"What danger exists that wasn't there before?" demanded Loring.
"The danger that the whole planet may be blown up," DuQuesne returned bluntly. "Any nation or race attacking from space would of course have atomic power, and any one with that power could volatilize any planet by simply dropping a bomb on it from open space. They might want to colonize it, of course, in which case they wouldn't destroy it, but it is always safest to plan for the worst possible contingencies."
"How do you figure on doing us any good if the whole world explodes?" Loring lighted a cigarette, his hand steady and his face pinkly unruffled. "If she goes up, it looks as if we go out, like that—puff!" And he blew out the match.
"Not at all, Doll," DuQuesne reassured him. "An atomic explosion starting on the surface and propagating downward would hardly develop enough power to drive anything material much, if any, faster than light, and no explosion wave, however violent, can exceed that velocity. The Violet, as you know, although not to be compared with even this scout as a fighter, has an acceleration of five times that, so that we could outrun the explosion in her. However, if we stay in our own ship, we shall certainly be found and blown out of space as soon as this defensive formation is completed.
"On the other hand, this ship carries full Fenachrone power of offense and defense, and we should be safe enough from detection in it, at least for as long a time as we shall need it. Since these small ships are designed for purely local scout work, though, they are comparatively slow and would certainly be destroyed in any such cosmic explosion as is manifestly a possibility. That possibility is very remote, it is true, but it should be taken into consideration."
"So what? You're talking yourself around a circle, right back to where you started from."
"Only considering the thing from all angles." DuQuesne was unruffled. "We have lots of time, since it will take them quite a while to perfect this formation. To finish the summing up—we want to use this vessel, but is it safe? It is. Why? Because the Fenachrone, having had atomic energy themselves for a long time, are thoroughly familiar with its possibilities and have undoubtedly perfected screens through which no such bomb could penetrate.
"Furthermore, we can install the high-speed drive in this ship in a few days—I gave you all the dope on it over the educator, you know—so that we'll be safe, whatever happens. That's the safest plan, and it will work. So you move the stores and our most necessary personal belongings in here while I'm figuring out an orbit for the Violet. We don't want her anywhere near us, and yet we want her to be within reaching distance while we are piloting this scout ship of ours to the place where she is supposed to be in Plan XB218."
"What are you going to do that for—to give them a chance to knock us off?"
"No. I need a few days to study these brains, and it will take a few days for that battleship mother ship of ours to get into her assigned position, where we can steal her most easily." DuQuesne, however, did not at once remove his headset, but remained standing in place, silent and thoughtful.
"Uh-huh," agreed Loring. "I'm thinking the same thing you are. Suppose that it is Seaton that's got them all hot and bothered this way?"
"The thought has occurred to me several times, and I have considered it at some length," DuQuesne admitted at last. "However, I have concluded that it is not Seaton. For if it is, he must have a lot more stuff than I think he has. I do not believe that he can possibly have learned that much in the short time he has had to work in. I may be wrong, of course; but the immediately necessary steps toward the seizure of that battleship remain unchanged whether I am right or wrong; or whether Seaton was the cause of this disturbance."
When the conversation was thus definitely at an end, Loring again incased himself in his space suit and set to work. For hours he labored, silently and efficiently, at transferring enough of their Earthly possessions and stores to render possible an extended period of living aboard the vessel of the Fenachrone.
He had completed that task and was assembling the apparatus and equipment necessary for the rebuilding of the power plant before DuQuesne finished the long and complex computations involved in determining the direction and magnitude of the force required to give the Violet the exact trajectory he desired. The problem was finally solved and checked, however, and DuQuesne rose to his feet, closing his book of nine-place logarithms with a snap.
"All done with Violet, Doll?" he asked, donning his armor.
"Yes."
"Fine! I'll go aboard and push her off, after we do a little stage-setting here. Take that body there—I don't need it any more, since he didn't know much of anything, anyway—and toss it into the nose compartment. Then shut that bulkhead door, tight. I'm going to drill a couple of holes through there from the Violet before I give her the gun."
"I see—going to make us look disabled, whether we are or not, huh?"
"Exactly! We've got to have a good excuse for our visirays being out of order. I can make reports all right on the communicator, and send and receive code messages and orders, but we certainly couldn't stand a close-up inspection on a visiplate. Also, we've got to have some kind of an excuse for signaling to and approaching our mother battleship. We will have been hit and punctured by a meteorite. Pretty thin excuse, but it probably will serve for as long a time as we will need."
After DuQuesne had made sure that the small compartment in the prow of the vessel contained nothing of use to them, the body of one of the Fenachrone was thrown carelessly into it, the air-tight bulkhead was closed and securely locked, and the chief marauder stepped into the airlock.
"As soon as I get her exactly on course and velocity, I'll step out into space and you can pick me up," he directed briefly, and was gone.
In the Violet's engine room DuQuesne released the anchoring attractor beams and backed off to a few hundred yards' distance. He spun a couple of wheels briefly, pressed a switch, and from the Violet's heaviest needle-ray projector there flashed out against the prow of the scout patrol a pencil of incredibly condensed destruction.
Dunark, the crown prince of Kondal, had developed that stabbing ray as the culminating ultimate weapon of ten thousand years of Osnomian warfare; and, driven by even the comparatively feeble energies known to the denizens of the Green System before Seaton's advent, no known substance had been able to resist for more than a moment its corrosively, annihilatingly poignant thrust.
And now this furious stiletto of pure energy, driven by the full power of four hundred pounds of disintegrating atomic copper, at this point-blank range, was hurled against the mere inch of transparent material which comprised the skin of the tiny cruiser. DuQuesne expected no opposition, for with a beam less potent by far he had consumed utterly a vessel built of arenak—arenak, that Osnomian synthetic which is five hundred times as strong, tough, and hard as Earth's strongest, toughest, or hardest alloy steel.
Yet that annihilating needle of force struck that transparent surface and rebounded from it in scintillating torrents of fire. Struck and rebounded, struck and clung; boring in almost imperceptibly as its irresistible energy tore apart, electron by electron, the surprisingly obdurate substance of the cruiser's wall. For that substance was the ultimate synthetic—the one limiting material possessing the utmost measure of strength, hardness, tenacity, and rigidity theoretically possible to any substance built up from the building blocks of ether-borne electrons. This substance, developed by the master scientists of the Fenachrone, was in fact identical with the Norlaminian synthetic metal, inoson, from which Rovol and his aids had constructed for Seaton his gigantic ship of space—Skylark Three.
For five long minutes DuQuesne held that terrific beam against the point of attack, then shut it off; for it had consumed less than half the thickness of the scout patrol's outer skin. True, the focal area of the energy was an almost invisibly violet glare of incandescence, so intensely hot that the concentric shading off through blinding white, yellow, and bright-red heat brought the zone of dull red far down the side of the vessel; but that awful force had had practically no effect upon the spaceworthiness of the stanch little craft.
"No use, Loring!" DuQuesne spoke calmly into the transmitter inside his face plate. True scientist that he was, he neither expressed nor felt anger or bafflement when an idea failed to work, but abandoned it promptly and completely, without rancor or repining. "No possible meteorite could puncture that shell. Stand by!"
He inspected the power meters briefly, made several readings through the filar micrometer of number six visiplate and checked the vernier readings of the great circles of the gyroscopes against the figures in his notebook. Then, assured that the Violet was following precisely the predetermined course, he entered the airlock, waved a bloated arm at the watchful Loring, and coolly stepped off into space. The heavy outer door clanged shut behind him, and the globular ship of space rocketed onward; while DuQuesne fell with a sickening acceleration toward the mighty planet of the Fenachrone, so many thousands of miles below.
That fall did not long endure. Loring, now a space pilot second to none, had held his vessel dead even with the Violet; matching exactly her course, pace, and acceleration at a distance of barely a hundred feet. He had cut off all his power as DuQuesne's right foot left the Osnomian vessel, and now falling man and plunging scout ship plummeted downward together at the same mad pace; the man drifting slowly toward the ship because of the slight energy of his step into space from the Violet's side and beginning slowly to turn over as he fell. So consummate had been Loring's spacemanship that the scout did not even roll; DuQuesne was still opposite her starboard airlock when Loring stood in its portal and tossed a space line to his superior. This line—a small, tightly stranded cable of fiber capable of retaining its strength and pliability in the heatless depths of space—snapped out and curled around DuQuesne's bulging space suit.
"I thought you'd use an attractor, but this is probably better, at that," DuQuesne commented, as he seized the line in a mailed fist.
"Yeah. I haven't had much practice with them on delicate and accurate work. If I had missed you with this line I could have thrown it again; but if I missed this opening with you on a beam and shaved your suit off on this sharp edge, I figured it'd be just too bad."
The two men again in the control room and the vessel once more leveled out in headlong flight, Loring broke the silence:
"That idea of being punctured by a meteorite didn't pan out so heavy. How would it be to have one of the crew go space-crazy and wreck the boat from the inside? They do that sometimes, don't they?"
"Yes, they do. That's an idea—thanks. I'll study up on the symptoms. I have a lot more studying to do, anyway—there's a lot of stuff I haven't got yet. This metal, for instance—we couldn't possibly build a Fenachrone battleship on Earth. I had no idea that any possible substance could be so resistant as the shell of this ship is. Of course, there are many unexplored areas in these brains here, and quite a few high-class brains aboard our mother ship that I haven't even seen yet. The secret of the composition of this metal must be in some of them."
"Well, while you're getting their stuff, I suppose I'd better fly at that job of rebuilding our drive. I'll have time enough all right, you think?"
"Certain of it. I have learned that their system is ample—automatic and foolproof. They have warning long before anything can possibly happen. They can, and do, spot trouble over a light-week away, so their plans allow one week to perfect their defenses. You can change the power plant over in four days, so we're well in the clear on that. I may not be done with my studies by that time, but I shall have learned enough to take effective action. You work on the drive and keep house. I will study Fenachrone science and so on, answer calls, make reports, and arrange the details of what is to happen when we come within the volume of space assigned to our mother ship."
Thus for days each man devoted himself to his task. Loring rebuilt the power plant of the short-ranging scout patrol into the terrific open-space drive of the first-line battleships and performed the simple routines of their Spartan housekeeping. DuQuesne cut himself short on sleep and spent every possible hour in transferring to his own brain every worth-while bit of knowledge which had been possessed by the commander and crew of the patrol ship which he had captured.
Periodically, however, he would close the sending circuit and report the position and progress of his vessel, precisely on time and observing strictly all the military minutiae called for by the manual—the while watching appreciatively and with undisguised admiration the flawless execution of that stupendous plan of defense.
The change-over finished, Loring went in search of DuQuesne, whom he found performing a strenuous setting-up exercise. The scientist's face was pale, haggard, and drawn.
"What's the matter, chief?" Loring asked. "You look kind of peaked."
"Peaked is good—I'm just about bushed. This thing of getting a hundred and ninety years of solid education in a few days would hardly come under the heading of light amusement. Are you done?"
"Done and checked—O.K."
"Good! I am, too. It won't take us long to get to our destination now; our mother ship should be just about at her post by this time."
Now that the vessel was approaching the location assigned to it in the plan, and since DuQuesne had already taken from the brains of the dead Fenachrone all that he wanted of their knowledge, he threw their bodies into space and rayed them out of existence. The other corpse he left lying, a bloated and ghastly mass, in the forward compartment as he prepared to send in what was to be his last flight report to the office of the general in command of the plan of defense.
"His high-mightiness doesn't know it, but that is the last call he is going to get from this unit," DuQuesne remarked, leaving the sender and stepping over to the control board. "Now we can leave our prescribed course and go where we can do ourselves some good. First, we'll find the Violet. I haven't heard of her being spotted and destroyed as a menace to navigation, so we'll look her up and start her off for home."
"Why?" asked the henchman. "Thought we were all done with her."
"We probably are, but if it should turn out that Seaton is back of all this excitement, our having her may save us a trip back to the Earth. Ah, there she is, right on schedule! I'll bring her alongside and set her controls on a distance-squared decrement, so that when she gets out into space she'll have a constant velocity."
"Think she'll get out into free space through those screens?"
"They will detect her, of course, but when they see that she is an abandoned derelict and headed out of their system they'll probably let her go. It will be no great loss, of course, if they do burn her."
Thus it came about that the spherical cruiser of the void shot away from the then feeble gravitation of the vast but distant planet of the Fenachrone at a frightful but constant speed. Through the outer detector screens she tore. Searching beams explored her instantly and thoroughly; but since she was so evidently a deserted hulk and since the Fenachrone cared nothing now for impediments to navigation beyond their screens, she was not pursued.
On and on she sped, her automatic controls reducing her power in exact ratio to the square of the distance attained; on and on, her automatic deflecting detectors swinging her around suns and solar systems and back upon her original right line; on and on toward the Green System, the central system of this the First Galaxy—our own native island universe.