Empire, Clifford D. Simak [books for students to read txt] 📗

is also a defensive screen. And he has to use some power to keep our television apparatus out."

Russ chuckled. "I suppose, at that, we have him plenty worried."

The thunder of the engines filled the control room. For days now that thunder had been in[144] their ears. They had grown accustomed to it, now hardly noticed it. Ten mighty engines, driving the Invincible at a pace no other ship had ever obtained, except, possibly, the Interplanetarian, although lack of power should have held Craven's ship down to a lower speed. Craven wouldn't have dared to build up the acceleration they had now attained, for he would have drained his banks and been unable to charge them again.

"Maybe he won't fight," said Russ. "Maybe he's figured out by this time that he's heading for the wrong star. He may be glad to see us and follow us back to the Solar System."

"No chance of that. Craven and Chambers won't pass up a chance for a fight. They'll give us a few wallops if only for the appearance of things."

"We're crawling up all the time," said Russ. "If we can catch him within four or five billion miles of the star, he won't be too tough to handle. Be getting plenty of radiations even then, but not quite as much as he would like to have."

"He'll have to start decelerating pretty soon," Greg declared. "He can't run the chance of smashing into the planetary system at the speed he's going. He won't want to waste too much power using his field as a brake, because he must know by this time that we're after him and he'll want what power he has to throw at us."

Hours passed. The Invincible crept nearer and nearer, suddenly seemed to leap ahead as the Interplanetarian began deceleration.

"Keep giving her all you got," Greg urged Russ. "We've got plenty of power for braking. We can overhaul him and stop in a fraction of the time he does."

Russ nodded grimly. The distance indicator needle on the mechanical shadow slipped off rapidly. Greg, leaping from his chair, hung over it, breathlessly.

"I think," he said, "we better slow down now. If we don't, we'll be inside the planetary system."

"How far out is Craven?" asked Russ.

"Not far enough," Greg replied unhappily. "He can't be more than three billion miles from the star and that star's hot. A class G, all right, but a good deal younger than old Sol."

"We'll let them know we've arrived," grinned Greg. He sent a stabbing beam of half a billion horsepower slashing at the Interplanetarian.

The other ship staggered but steadied itself.

"They know," said Russ cryptically from his position in front[145] of the vision plate. "We shook them up a bit."

They waited. Nothing happened.

Greg scratched his head. "Maybe you were right. Maybe they don't want to fight."

Together they watched the Interplanetarian. It was still moving in toward the distant sun, as if nothing had happened.

"We'll see," said Greg.

Back at the controls he threw out a gigantic tractor beam, catching the other ship in a net of forces that visibly cut its speed.

Space suddenly vomited lashing flame that slapped back and licked and crawled in living streamers over the surface of the Invincible. The engines moaned in their valiant battle to keep up the outer screen. The pungent odor of ozone filtered into the control room. The whole ship was bucking and vibrating, creaking, as if it were being pulled apart.

"So they don't want to fight, eh?" hooted Russ.

Greg gritted his teeth. "They snapped the tractor beam."

"They have power there," Russ declared.

"Too much," said Greg. "More power than they have any right to have."

His hand went out to the lever on the board and pulled it back. A beam smashed out, with the engines' screaming drive behind it, billions of horsepower driving with unleashed ferocity at the other ship.

Greg's hand spun a dial, while the generators roared thunderous defiance.

"I'm giving them the radiation scale," said Greg.

The Interplanetarian was staggering under the terrific bombardment, but its screen was handling every ounce of the power that Greg was pouring into it.

"Their photo-cells can't handle that," cried Russ. "No photo-cell would handle all that stuff you're shooting at them. Unless ..."

"Unless what?"

"Unless Craven has improved on them."

"We'll have to find out. Get the televisor."

Russ leaped for the television machine.

A moment later he lifted a haggard face.

"I can't get through," he said. "Craven's got our beams stopped and now he has our television blocked out."

Greg nodded. "We might have expected that. When he could scramble our televisors back in the Jovian worlds, he certainly ought to be able to screen his ship against them."

He shoved the lever clear over,[146] slamming the extreme limit of power into the beam. The engines screamed like demented things, howling and shrieking. Instantly a tremendous sheet of solid flame spun a fiery web around the Interplanetarian, turning it into a blazing inferno of lapping, leaping fire.

A dozen terrific beams, billions of horsepower in each, stabbed back at the Invincible as the Interplanetarian shunted the terrific energy influx from the overcharged accumulators to the various automatic energy discharges.

The Invincible's screen flared in defense and the ten great engines wailed in utter agony. More stabbing flame shot from the Interplanetarian in slow explosions.

The temperature in the Invincible's control room was rising. The ozone was sharp enough to make their eyes water and nostrils burn. The vision glass was blanked out by the lapping flames that crawled and writhed over the screen outside the glass.

Russ tore his collar open, wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. "Try a pure magnetic!"

Greg, his face set and bleak as a wall of stone, grunted agreement. His fingers danced over the control manual.

Suddenly the stars outside twisted and danced, like stars gone mad, as if they were dancing a riotous jig in space, some uproariously hopping up and down while others were applauding the show that was being provided for their unblinking eyes.

The magnetic field was tightening now, twisting the light from those distant stars and bending it straight again. The Interplanetarian reeled like a drunken thing and the great arcs of electric flame looped madly and plunged straight for the field's very heart.

The stars danced weirdly in far-off space again as the Interplanetarian's accumulators lashed out with tremendous force to oppose the energy of the field.

The field glowed softly and disappeared.

"They have us stopped at every turn," groaned Russ. "There must be some way, something we can do." He looked at Greg. Greg grinned without humor, wiping his face. "There is something we can do," said Russ grimly. "We should have thought of it long ago."

He strode to the desk, reached out one hand and drew a calculator near.

"You keep them busy," he snapped. "I'll have this thing figured out in just a while."

From the engine rooms came the roar and hum of the laboring units and the Invincible shuddered[147] once again as Greg grimly hurled one beam after another, at the Interplanetarian.

The Interplanetarian struck back, using radio frequency that flamed fiercely against the Invincible's outer screen. Simultaneously the Interplanetarian leaped forward with a sudden surge of accumulated energy, driving at the star that lay not more than three billion miles away.

Greg worked desperately, cursing under his breath. He pulled down the outer screen that was fighting directly against the radio frequency, energy for energy, and allowed the beam to strike squarely on the second screen, the inversion field that shunted the major portion of the energy impacting against it through 90 degrees into another space.

The engines moaned softly and settled into a quieter rumble as the necessity of supplying the first screen was eliminated. But they screamed once again as Greg sent out a tractor beam that seized and held, dragged the Interplanetarian to a standstill. Craven's ship had gained millions of miles, though, and established a tremendous advantage by fighting nearer to its source of energy.

"Russ," gasped Greg, "if you don't get that scheme of yours figured out pretty soon, we're done for. They've stopped everything we've got. They're nearer the sun. We won't stand a chance if they make another break like that."

Russ glanced up to answer, but his mouth fell open in amazement and he did not speak. A streak of terrible light was striking at them from the Interplanetarian, blinding white light, and along that highway of light swarmed a horde of little green figures, like squirming green amebas. Swarming toward the Invincible, stretching out hungry, pale-green pseudopods toward the inversion barrier ... and eating through it!

Wherever they touched, holes appeared. They drifted through the inversion screen easily and began drilling into the inner screen of anti-entropy. Eating their way into the anti-entropy ... into a state of matter which Russ and Greg had thought would resist all change!

For seconds both men stood transfixed, unable to believe the evidence of their eyes. But the ameba things came on in ever-increasing throngs, creatures that gnawed and slobbered at the anti-entropy, eating into it, flaking it away, drilling their way through it.

When they pierced the anti-entropy, they would cut through the steel plates of the Invincible like so much paper![148]

And more were coming. More and more!

With a grunt of amazement, Greg slammed a beam straight into the heart of the amebas. They ate the beam and vanished as mistily as before, little glowing things that ate and died. But there were always more to take their place. They overwhelmed the beam and ate back along its length, attacked the screen again.

They ate through walls of force and walls of metal, and a rush of hissing air began to flame into ions in the terrific battle of energies outside the Invincible.

Russ was crouching over the manual of the televisor board. His breath moaned in his throat as his fingers flew.

"I have to have power, Greg," he said. "Lots of power."

"Take it." Greg replied. "I haven't been able to do anything with it. It isn't any use to me."

Russ's thumb reached out and tripped the activating lever. The giant engines shrieked and yowled.

Something was happening on the television screen ... something terrifying. Craven's ship seemed to retreat suddenly for millions of miles ... and as suddenly the Invincible appeared on the screen. For a single flashing instant, the view held; then it was gone in blank grayness. For seconds nothing happened on the screen, unnerving seconds while the two men held their breath.

The screen's grayness fled and they looked into the control room of the Interplanetarian. Craven was hunched in a chair, intent upon a series of controls. Behind him and to one side stood Stutsman, a heat pistol dangled from his hand, his face twisted into a sneer of triumph. There was no sign of Chambers.

"You damn fool," Craven was snapping at Stutsman. "You're cheating us out of the only chance we ever had of getting home."

"Shut up," snarled Stutsman, the pistol jerking in his hand. "Have you got that apparatus on full power?"

"It's been on full power for minutes now," said Craven. "It must be eating holes straight through Manning's ship."

"See you keep it that way. I really don't need you any more, anyhow. I've watched and I know all the tricks. I could carry on this battle single-handed."

Craven did not reply, merely hunched closer over the controls, eyes watching flickering dials.

Greg jogged Russ's elbow. "That must be the apparatus over there, in the corner of the room. That triangular affair. A condenser of some sort. That stuff they're throwing at us must[149] be super-saturated force fields and they'd need a space-field condenser for that."

Russ nodded. "We'll take care of that."

His fingers moved swiftly and a transport beam whipped out, riding the television beam. Bands of force wrapped around the triangular machine and wrenched viciously. In the screen the apparatus disappeared ... simply was gone. It now lay within the Invincible's control room, jerked there by the tele-transport.

The flood of dazzling light reaching out from the Interplanetarian snapped off and the little green ameba things were gone. The shrill whistle of escaping air stopped as the eaten screens clamped down again, sealing in the atmosphere despite the holes bored through the metal plates.

In the television screen, Craven leaped from his chair, was staring with Stutsman at the place where the concentrator had stood. The machine had been ripped from a welded base and jagged, bright, torn metal gleamed in the control room lights. Snapped cables and broken busbars lay piled about the room.

"What happened?" Stutsman was screaming. They heard Craven laugh at the terror in the other's voice. "Manning just walked in and grabbed it away from us."

"But he couldn't! We had the screen up! He couldn't get through!"

Craven shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know how he did it, but he did. Probably he could clean out the whole place if he wanted to."

"That's a good idea," said Russ, judiciously.

He stripped bank after bank of the other ship's photo-cells from their moorings, wrecked the force field controls, ripped cables from the engines and left the ship without means of collecting power, without means of using power, without means of movement, of offense or defense.

He leaned back in his chair and regarded the screen with deep satisfaction.

"That," he decided, "should hold them for a while."

He hauled the pipe out of his pocket and filled it from the battered leather pouch.

Greg regarded him with a quizzical stare. "You sent the televisor back in time. You got it inside the Interplanetarian before Craven had run up his screen and then you brought it forward."

"You guessed it," said Russ, tamping the tobacco into the bowl. "We should have thought of that long ago. We have a time factor there. In fact, the whole[150] thing revolves around time. We move the televisor, we use the tele-transport, by giving the objects we wish to move an acceleration in time."

Greg wrinkled his brow. "Maybe that means we can really investigate the past, or even the future. Can sit here before our screen and see everything that has happened, everything that is going to happen."

Russ shook his head. "I don't know, Greg. Notice, though, that we got no screen response until the televisor came up out of the past and actually reached the point which coincided with