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

they won't be lighted up and it's awfully hard to see anything out here, anyway. We probably won't know they're within a million kilometers until they put a beam on us. Barkovis says that this mirror will reflect any beam they can use, and I've already got a set of photo-cells in circuit to ring an alarm at the first flash off of our mirror plating. I'd like to get in the first licks myself, but I haven't been able to dope out any way of doing it. So you might as well sleep in your own room, as usual, and I'll camp here right under the panel until we get to Ganymede. There's a couple of little things I just thought of, though, that may help some; and I'm going to do 'em right now."

Putting on his space-suit, he picked up a power drill and went out into the bitter cold of the outer structure. There he attacked the inner wall of their vessel, and the carefully established inter-wall vacuum disappeared in a screaming hiss of air as the tempered point bit through plate after plate.

"What's the idea, Steve?" Nadia asked, when he had re-entered the control room. "Now you'll have all that pumping to do over again."

"Protection for the mirrors," he explained. "You see, they aren't perfect reflectors. There's a little absorption, so that some stuff comes through. Not much, of course; but enough to kill some of those Titanians and almost enough to ruin their ship got through in about ten minutes, and only one enemy was dealing it out. We can stand more than they could, of course, but the mirror itself won't stand much more heat than it was absorbing then. But with air in those spaces instead of vacuum, and with the whole mass of the Hope, except this one lifeboat, as cold as it is, I figure that there'll be enough conduction and convection through them to keep the outer wall and the mirror cold—cool enough, at least, to hold the mirror on for an hour. If only one ship tackles us, it won't be bad—but I figure that if there's only one, we're lucky."

Stevens' fears were only too well grounded, for during the "evening" of the following day, while he was carefully scanning the heavens for some sign of enemy craft, the alarm bell over his head burst into its brazen clamor. Instantly he shot out the detectors and ultra-lights and saw not one, but six of the deadly globes—almost upon them, at point-blank range! One was already playing a beam of force upon the Forlorn Hope, and the other five went into action immediately upon feeling the detector impulses and perceiving that the weapon of their sister ship had encountered an unusual resistance in the material of that peculiarly mirrored wedge. As those terrific forces struck her, the terrestrial cruiser became a vast pyrotechnic set piece, a dazzling fountain of coruscant brilliance: for the mirror held. The enemy beams shot back upon themselves and rebounded in all directions, in the same spectacular exhibition of frenzied incandescence which had marked the resistance of the Titanian sphere to a similar attack.

But Stevens was not idle. In the instant of launching his detectors, as fast as he could work the trips, four of the frightful nitrogen bombs of Titan—all that he could handle at once—shot out into space, their rocket-tubes flaring viciously. The enemy detectors of course located the flying torpedoes immediately, but, contemptuous of material projectiles, the spheres made no attempt to dodge, but merely lashed out upon them with their ravening rays. So close was the range that they had no time to avoid the radio-directed bombs after discovering that their beams were useless against the unknown protective covering of those mirrored shells. There were four practically simultaneous detonations—silent, but terrific explosions as the pent-up internal energy of solid pentavalent nitrogen was instantaneously released—and the four insensately murderous spheres disappeared into jagged fragments of wreckage, flying wildly away from the centers of explosion. One great mass of riven and twisted metal was blown directly upon the fifth globe, and Nadia stared in horrified fascination at the silent crash as the entire side of the ship crumpled inward like a shell of cardboard under the awful impact. That vessel was probably out of action, but Stevens was taking no chances. As soon as he had clamped a pale blue tractor rod upon the sixth and last of the enemy fleet, he drove a torpedo through the gaping wall and into the interior of the helpless war-vessel. There he exploded it, and the awful charge, detonated in that confined space, literally tore the globular space-ship to bits.

"We'll show these jaspers what kind of trees make shingles!" he gritted between clenched teeth; and his eyes, hard now as gray iron, fairly emitted sparks as he launched four torpedoes upon the sole remaining globe of the squadron of the void. "I've had a lot of curiosity to know just what kind of unnatural monstrosities can possibly have such fiendish dispositions as they've got—but beasts, men or devils, they'll find they've grabbed something this time they can't let go of," and fierce blasts of energy ripped from the exhausts as he drove his missiles, at their highest possible acceleration, toward the captive sphere so savagely struggling at the extremity of his tractor beam.

But that one remaining vessel was to prove no such easy victim as had its sister ships. Being six to one, and supposedly invincible, the squadron had been overconfident and had attacked carelessly, with only its crippling slicing beams instead of its more deadly weapons of total destruction; and so fierce and hard had been Stevens' counter-attack that five of its numbers had been destroyed before they realized what powerful armament was mounted by that apparently crude, helpless, and innocuous wedge. The sixth, however, was fully warned, and every resource at the command of its hellish crew was now being directed against the Forlorn Hope.

Sheets, cones, and gigantic rods of force flashed and crackled. Space was filled with silent, devastating tongues of flame. The Forlorn Hope was dragged about erratically as the sphere tried to dodge those hurtling torpedoes; tried to break away from the hawser of energy anchoring her so solidly to her opponent. But the linkage held, and closer and closer Stevens drove the fourfold menace of his frightful dirigible bombs. Pressor beams beat upon them in vain. Hard driven as those pushers were, they could find no footing, but were reflected at many angles by that untouchable mirror and their utmost force scarcely impeded the progress of the rocket-propelled missiles. Comparatively small as the projectiles were, however, they soon felt the effects of the prodigious beams of heat enveloping them, and torpedo after torpedo exploded harmlessly in space as their mirrors warmed up and volatilized. But for each bomb that was lost, Stevens launched another, and each one came closer to its objective than had its predecessor.

Made desperate by the failure of his every beam, the enemy commander thought to use material projectiles himself—weapons abandoned long since by his race as antiquated and inefficient, but a few of which were still carried by the older types of vessels. One such shell was found and launched—but in the instant of its launching Stevens' foremost bomb struck its mark and exploded. So close were the other three bombs, that they also let go at the shock; and the warlike sphere, hemmed in by four centers of explosions, flew apart—literally pulverized. Its projectile, so barely discharged, did not explode—it was loaded with material which could be detonated only by the warhead upon impact or by a radio signal. It was, however, deflected markedly from its course by the force of the blast, so that instead of striking the Forlorn Hope in direct central impact, its head merely touched the apex of the mirror-plated wedge. That touch was enough. There was another appalling concussion, another blinding glare, and the entire front quarter of the terrestrial vessel had gone to join the shattered globes.

Between the point of explosion and the lifeboats there had been many channels of insulation, many bulkheads, many air-breaks, and compartment after compartment of accumulator cells. These had borne the brunt of the explosion, so that the control room was unharmed, and Stevens swung his communicator rapidly through the damaged portions of the vessels.

"How badly are we hurt, Steve—can we make it to Ganymede?"

Nadia was quietly staring over his shoulder into the plate, studying with him the pictures of destruction there portrayed as he flashed the projector from compartment to compartment.

"We're hurt—no fooling—but it might have been a lot worse," he replied, as he completed the survey. "We've lost about all of our accumulators, but we can land on our own beam, and landing power is all we want, I think. You see, we're drifting straight for where Ganymede will be, and we'd better cut out every bit of power we're using, even the heaters, until we get there. This lifeboat will hold heat for quite a while, and I'd rather get pretty cold than meet any more of that gang. I figured eight hours just before they met us, and we were just about drifting then. I think it is safe to say seven hours blind."

"But can't they detect us anyway? They may have sent out a call, you know."

"If we aren't using any power for anything, their electromagnetics are the only things we'll register on, and they're mighty short-range finders. Even if they should get that close to us, they'll probably think we're meteoric, since we'll be dead to their other instruments. Luckily we've got lots of air, so the chemical purifiers can handle it without power. I'll shut off everything and we'll drift it. Couldn't do much of anything, anyway—even our shop out there won't hold air. But we can have light. We've got acetylene emergency lamps, you know, and we don't need to economize on oxygen."

"Perhaps we'd better run in the dark. Remember what you told me about their possible visirays, and that you've got only two bombs left."

"All x; that would be better. If I forget it, remind me to blow up those before we hit the atmosphere of Ganymede, will you?" He opened all the power switches, and, every source of ethereal vibrations cut off, the Forlorn Hope drifted slowly on, now appearing forlorn indeed.

Seven hours dragged past: seven age-long hours during which the two sat tense, expecting they knew not what, talking only at intervals and in subdued tones. Stevens then snapped on the communicator beam just long enough to take an observation upon Ganymede. Several such brief glimpses were taken; then, after a warning word to his companion, he sent out and exploded the nitrogen bombs. He then threw on the power, and the vessel leaped toward the satellite under full acceleration. Close to the atmosphere it slanted downward in a screaming, fifteen-hundred-mile drive; and soon the mangled wedge dropped down into the little canyon, which for so long had been "home."

"Well, colonel, home again!" Stevens exulted as he neutralized the controls. "There's that falls, our power plant, the catapults, 'n' everything. Now, unless something interrupts us again; we'll run up our radio tower and give Brandon the long yell."

"How much more have you got to do before you can start sending?"

"Not an awful lot. Everything built—all I've got to do is assemble it. I should be able to do it easily in a week. Hope nothing else happens—if I drag you into any more such messes as those we've just been getting out of by the skin of our teeth, I'll begin to wish that we had started out at first to drift it back to Tellus in the Hope. Let's see how much time we've got. We should start shooting one day after an eclipse, so that we'll have five days to send. You see, we don't want to point our beam too close to Jupiter or to any of the large satellites, because the enemy might live there and might intercept it. We had an eclipse yesterday—so one week from today, at sunrise, I start shooting."

"But Earth's an evening star now; you can't see it in the morning."

"I'm not going to aim at Tellus. I'm shooting at Brandon, and he's never there for more than a week or two at a stretch. They're prowling around out in space somewhere almost all the time."

"Then how can you possibly hope to hit them?"

"It may be quite a job of hunting, but not as bad as you might think. They probably aren't much, if any, outside the orbit of Mars, and they usually stay within a couple of million kilometers or so of the Ecliptic, so we'll start at the sun and shoot our beam in a spiral to cover that field. We ought to be able to hit them inside of twelve hours, but if