Spacehounds of IPC, E. E. Smith [best books to read for students TXT] 📗

as the stone missiles of the slingers rebounded from his reverberating shell of steel, but he fired carefully, steadily, and powerfully until his last arrow had been loosed. Then, the wicked dirk in his left hand and the long and heavy saber weaving a circular path of brilliance in the sun, he stepped forward a couple of paces to meet the attackers. For a few moments nothing could stand before that fiercely driven blade—severed heads, limbs, and fragments of torsos literally filled the air, but sheer weight of numbers bore him down. As he fell, he saw the white shaft of one of Nadia's hunting-arrows flash past his helmet and bury itself to the flock in the body of one of the horde above him. Nadia knew that her arrows could not harm her lover, and through a chink between two boulders she was shooting into the thickest of the mob speeding her light arrows with the full power of her bow.

Though down, the savages soon discovered that Stevens was not out. In such close quarters he could not use his sword, but the fourteen-inch blade of the dirk, needle-pointed as it was and with two razor-sharp, serrated cutting edges, was itself no mean weapon, and time after time he drove it deep, taking life at every thrust. Four more red monsters threw themselves upon the prostrate man, but not sufficiently versed in armor to seek out its joints, their fierce short spear thrusts did no damage. Presently four more corpses lay still and Stevens, with his, to them incredible, earthly strength, was once more upon his feet in spite of their utmost efforts to pinion his mighty limbs, and was again swinging his devastating weapon. Half their force lying upon the field, wiped out by a small, but invincible and apparently invulnerable being, the remainder broke and ran, pursued by Stevens to the point where the red monsters had first halted. He recovered his arrows and returned to the cave, opening his face-plate as he came.

"All x, sweetheart?" he asked, rolling away the boulders. "Didn't get anything through to you, did they?"

"No, they didn't even realize that I was taking part in the battle, I guess. Did they hurt you while they had you down? I was scared to death for a minute."

"No, the old armor held. One of them must have gnawed on my ankle some, between the greave and the heel-plate, but he couldn't quite get through. 'Sa darn small opening there, too—must have bent my foot 'way around to get in at all. Have to tighten that joint up a little, I guess. I'll bet I've got a black spot and blue spot there the size of my hand—maybe it's only the size of yours, though."

"You won't die of that, probably. Heavens, Steve, that cleaver of yours is a frightful thing in action! Suppose it's safe for us to go home?"

"Absolutely—right now is the best chance we'll ever have, and something tells me that we'd better make it snappy. They'll be back, and next time they won't be so easy to take."

"All x, then—hold me, Steve, I can't stand the sight of that—-let alone wade through it. I'm going to faint or something, sure."

"As you were!" he snapped. "You aren't going to pass out now that it's all over! It's a pretty ghastly mess, I know, but shut your eyes and I'll carry you out of sight."

"Aren't we out of sight of that place yet?" she demanded after a time.

"I have been for quite a while," he confessed, "but you're sitting pretty, aren't you? And you aren't very heavy—not here on Ganymede, anyway!"

"Put me down!" she commanded. "After that crack I won't play with you any more at all—I'll pick up my marbles and go home!"

He released her and they hurried hack toward their waterfall, keeping wary eyes sharp-set for danger in any form, animal or vegetable. On the way back across the foothills Stevens shot another hexaped, and upon the plateau above the river Nadia bagged several birds and small animals, but it was not until they were actually in their own little canyon that their rapid pace slackened and their vigilance relaxed.

"After this, ace, we hunt together and we go back to wearing armor while we're hunting. It scared me out of a year's growth when you checked up missing."

"We sure do, Steve," she concurred emphatically. "I'm not going to get more than a meter away from you from now on. What do you suppose those horrible things are?"

"Which?"

"Both."

"Those flowers aren't like anything Tellus ever saw, so we have no basis of comparison. They may be a development of a flycatching plant, or they may be a link between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. However, we don't intend to study 'em, so let's forget 'em. Those animals were undoubtedly intelligent beings; they probably are a race of savages of this satellite."

"Then the really civilized races are probably...."

"Not necessarily—there may well be different types, each struggling toward civilization. They certainly are on Venus, and they once were on Mars."

"Why haven't we seen anything like that before, in all these months? Things have been so calm and peaceful that we thought we had the whole world to ourselves, as far as danger or men were concerned."

"We never saw them before because we never went where they lived—you were a long ways from your usual stamping-grounds, you know. That animal-vegetable flower is probably a high-altitude organism, living in the mountains and never coming as low as we are down here. As for the savages—whatever they are—they probably never come within five kilometers of the falls. Many primitive peoples think that waterfalls are inhabited by demons, and maybe these folks are afflicted the same way."

"We don't know much about our new world yet, do we?"

"We sure don't—and I'm not particularly keen on finding out much more about it until we get organized for trouble, either. Well, here we are—just like getting back home to see the 'Hope,' isn't it?"

"It is home, and will be until we get one of our own on earth," and after Stevens had read his meters, learning with satisfaction that the full current was still flowing into the accumulators, he began to cut up the meat.

"Now that you've got the power-plant running at last, what next?" asked Nadia, piling the cuts in the freezer.

"Brandon's ultra-radio comes next, but it's got more angles to it than a cubist's picture of a set of prisms; so many that I don't know where to begin. There, that job's done—let's sit down and I'll talk at you awhile. Maybe between us we can figure out where to start. I've got everything to build it lined up except for the tube, but that's got me stopped cold. You see, fields of force are all right in most places, but I've got to have one tube, and it's got to have the hardest possible vacuum. That means a mercury-vapor super pump. Mercury is absolutely the only thing that will do the trick and the mercury is one thing that is conspicuous by its absence in these parts. So are tungsten for filaments, tantalum for plates, and platinum for leads; and I haven't found anything that I can use as a getter, either—a metal, you know, to flash inside the tube to clean up the last traces of atmosphere in it."

"I didn't suppose that such a simple thing as a radio tube could hold you up, after the perfectly unbelievable things that you have done already—but I see now how it could. Of course, the tubes in our receiver over there are too small?"

"Yes, they are only receiver and communicator tubes, and I need a high-power transmitting tube—a fifty-kilowatter, at least. I'd give my left leg to the knee joint for one of those big water-cooled, sixty-kilowatt ten-nineteens right now—it would save us a lot of grief."

"Maybe you could break up those tubes and use the plates and so on?"

"I thought of that, but it won't work—there isn't half enough metal in the lot, and the filaments in particular are so tiny that I couldn't possibly work them over into a big one. Then, too, we haven't got many spare tubes, and if I smash the ones we're using, I put our communicators out of business for good, so that we can't yell for help if we have to drift home—and I still don't get any mercury."

"Do you mean to tell me there's no mercury on this whole planet?"

"Not exactly; but I do mean that I haven't been able to find any, and that it's probably darned scarce. And since all the other metals I want worst are also very dense and of high atomic weight, they're probably mighty scarce here, too. Why? Because we're on a satellite, and no matter what hypothesis you accept for the origin of satellites, you come to the same conclusion—that heavy metals are either absent or most awfully scarce and buried deep down toward the center. There are lots of heavy metals in Jupiter somewhere, but we probably couldn't find them. Jupiter's atmosphere is one mass of fog, and we couldn't see, since we haven't got an infra-red transformer. I could build one, in time, but it would take quite a while—and we couldn't work on Jupiter, anyway, because of its gravity and probably because of its atmosphere. And even if we could work there, we don't want to spend the rest of our lives prospecting for mercury." Stevens fell silent, brow wrinkled in thought.

"You mean, dear, that we're..." Nadia broke off, the sentence unfinished.

"Gosh, no! There's lots of things not tried yet, and we can always set out to drift it. I was thinking only of building the tube. And I'm trying to think ... say, Nadia, what do you know about Cantrell's Comet?"

"Not a thing, except that I remember reading in the newspapers that it was peculiar for something or other. But what has Cantrell's Comet got to do with the high cost of living—or with radio tubes? Have you gone cuckoo all of a sudden?"

"You'll be surprised!" Stevens grinned at her puzzled expression. "Cantrell's Comet is one of Jupiter's comet family and is peculiar in being the most massive one known to science. It was hardly known until after they built those thousand-foot reflectors on the Moon, where the seeing is always perfect, but it has been studied a lot since then. Its nucleus is small, but extremely heavy—it seems to have an average density of somewhere around sixteen. There's platinum and everything else that's heavy there, girl! They ought to be there in such quantity that even such a volunteer chemist as I am could find them!"

"Heavens, Steve!" A look of alarm flashed over Nadia's face, then disappeared as rapidly as it had come into being. "But of course, comets aren't really dangerous."

"Sure not. A comet's tail, which so many people are afraid of as being poison gas, is almost a perfect vacuum, even at its thickest, and we'd have to wear space-suits anyway. And speaking of vacuum ... whoopee! We don't need mercury any more than a goldfish needs a gas-mask. When we get Mr. Tube done, we'll take him out into space, leaving his mouth open, and very shortly he'll be as empty as a flapper's skull. Then we'll seal him up, flash him out, come back here, and start spilling our troubles into Brandon's shell-like ear!"

"Wonderful, Steve! You do get an idea occasionally, don't you? But how do we get out there? Where is this Cantrell's Comet?"

"I don't know, exactly—there's one rub. Another is that I haven't even started the transmitter and receptor units. But we've got some field-generators here on board that I can use, so it won't be so bad. And our comet is in this part of the solar system somewhere fairly close. Wish we had an Ephemeris, a couple of I-P solar charts, and a real telescope."

"You can't do much without an Ephemeris, I should think. It's a good thing you kept the chronometers going. You know the I-P time, day, and dates, anyway."

"I'll have to do without some things, that's all," and the man stared absently at the steel wall. "I remember something about its orbit, since it is one thing that all I-P vessels have to steer clear of. Think I can figure it close enough so that we'll be able to find it in our little telescope, or even on our plate, since we'll be out of this atmosphere. And it might not be a bad idea for us to get away, anyway. I'm afraid of those folks on that space-ship, whoever they were, and they must live around here somewhere. Cantrell's Comet swings about fifty million kilometers outside Jupiter's orbit at aphelion—close enough for us to reach, and yet probably too far for them to find