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

car beside a row of its fellows, the Callistonian driver indicated that the Terrestrials were to follow him and led the way into a large hall. There the others from the Arcturus were assembled, facing Captain King, who was standing upon a table.

"Fellow travelers," King addressed them, "our course of action has been decided. There are two hundred three of us. There will be twenty sections of ten persons, each section being in charge of one of the officers of the Arcturus. Doctor Penfield, our surgeon, a man whose intelligence, fairness, and integrity are unquestioned, will be in supreme command. His power and authority will be absolute, limited only by the Callistonian Council. He will work in harmony with the engineer, who is to direct the entire project of building the new vessel. Each of you will be expected to do whatever he can—the work you will be asked to do will be well within your powers, and you will each have ample leisure for recreation, study, and amusement, of all of which you will find unsuspected stores in this underground community. You will each be registered and studied by physicians, surgeons, and psychologists; and each of you will have prescribed for him the exact diet that is necessary for his best development. You will find this diet somewhat monotonous, compared to our normal fare of natural products, since it is wholly synthetic; but that is one of the minor drawbacks that must be endured. Chief Pilot Breckenridge and I will not be with you. In some small and partial recompense for what they are doing for us all, he and I are going with Captain Czuv to Callisto, there to see whether or not we can aid them in any way in the fight against the hexans. One last word—Doctor Penfield's rulings will be the products of his own well-ordered mind after consultation and agreement with the Council of this city, and will be for the best good of all. I do not anticipate any refusal to cooperate with him. If, however, such refusal should occur, please remember that he is a despot with absolute power, and that anyone obstructing the program by refusing to follow his suggestions will spend the rest of his time here in confinement and will go back to Tellus in irons, if at all. In case Chief Pilot Breckenridge and I should not see you again, we bid you goodbye and wish you a safe voyage—but we expect to go back with you."

Brief farewells were said and captain and pilot accompanied Czuv to one of the little street-cars. Out of the building it dashed and down the crowded but noiseless thoroughfare to the portal. Signal lights flashed briefly there and they did not stop, but tore on through the portal and the tunnel, with increasing speed.

"Don't have to transfer to a big car, then?" asked Breckenridge.

"No," King made answer. "Small cars can travel these tubes as well as the large ones, and on much less power. In the city the wheels touch the rails lightly, not for support, but to make contacts through which traffic signals are sent and received. In the tunnels the wheels do not touch at all, as signaling is unnecessary—the tunnels being used infrequently and by but one vehicle at a time. No trolleys, tracks, or wires are visible, you notice. Everything is hidden from any possible visiray of the hexans."

"How about their power?"

"I don't understand it very well—hardly at all, in fact."

"It is quite simple." To the surprise of both Terrestrials, Czuv was speaking English, but with a strong and very peculiar accent; slighting all the vowels and accenting heavily the consonant sounds. "The car no longer requires my attention, so I am now free to converse. You are surprised at my knowing your language? You will speak mine after a few more applications of the thought exchanger. I am speaking with a vile accent, of course, but that is merely because my vocal organs are not accustomed to making vowel sounds. Our power is obtained by the combustion of gases in highly efficient turbines. It is transmitted and used as direct current, our generator and motors being so constructed that they can produce no etheric disturbances capable of penetrating the shielding walls of our city. The city was built close to deposits of coal, oil, and gas of sufficient amount to support our life for thousands of years; for from these deposits come power, food, clothing, and all the other necessities and luxuries of our lives. Strong fans draw air from various extinct craters, force it through ventilating ducts into every room and recess of the city, and exhaust it into the shaft of a quiescent volcano, in whose gaseous outflow any trace of our activities is, of course, imperceptible. For obvious reasons no rockets or combustion motors are used in the city proper."

Thus Captain Czuv explained to the Terrestrials his own mode of life, and received from them in turn full information concerning Earthly life, activity, and science. Long they talked, and it was almost time to slow down for the journey's end when the Callistonian brought the conversation back to their immediate concerns.

"My lieutenant and I were upon a mission of some importance, but it is more important to take you to Callisto, for there may be many things in which you can help us. Not in rays—we know all the vibrations you have mentioned and several others. The enemy, however, is supreme in that field, and until our scientists have succeeded in developing ray-screens, such as are used by the hexans, it would be suicidal to use rays at all. Such screens necessitate the projection of pure, yet dirigible, forces—you do not have them upon your planet?"

"No, and so far as I know such screens are also unknown upon Mars and Venus, with whose inhabitants we are friendly."

"The inhabitants of all the planets should be friendly; the solar system should be linked together in intercourse for common advancement. But that is not to be. The hexans will eventually triumph here, and a Jovian system peopled by hexans will have no intercourse with any human civilization save that of internecine war. We, of Callisto, have only one hope—or is it really a hope? In the South Polar country of Jupiter, there dwells a race of beings implacably hostile to the hexans. They seem to invade the country of the hexans frequently, even though they are apparently repulsed each time. Our emissaries to the South Polar country, however, have never returned—those beings, whatever they are, if not actively inimical, certainly are not friendly toward us."

"You know nothing of their nature?"

"Nothing, since our electrical instruments are not sufficiently sensitive to give us more than a general idea of what is transpiring there, and vision is practically useless in that eternal fog. We know, however, that they are far advanced in science, and we are thankful indeed that none of their frightful flying fortresses have been launched against us. They apparently are not interested in the satellites, and it is no doubt due to their unintentional assistance that we have survived as long as we have."

In the cavern at last, the three men boarded the Callistonian space-plane and were shot up the crater's shaft. The voyage to Callisto was uneventful, even uninteresting save at its termination. The Bzarvk, coated every inch as it was with a dull, dead black, completely absorptive outer coating, entered the thin layer of Callisto's atmosphere in darkest night, with all rockets dead, with not a light showing, and with no apparatus of any kind functioning. Utterly invisible and undetectable, she dove downward, and not until she was well below the crater's rim did the forward rockets burst into furious life. Then the Terrestrials understood another reason for the immense depth of those shafts other than that of protection from the detectors of the enemy—all that distance was necessary to overcome the velocity of their free fall without employing a negative acceleration greater than the frail Callistonian bodies could endure. From the cavern at the foot of the shaft, a regulation tunnel extended to the Callistonian city of Zbardk. Portal and city were very like Wruszk, upon distant Europa, and soon the terrestrial captain and pilot were in conference with the Council of Callisto.

Months of Earthly time dragged slowly past, months during which King and Breckenridge studied intensively the offensive and defensive systems of Callisto without finding any particular in which they could improve them to any considerable degree. Captain Czuv and his warplane still survived, and it was while the Callistonian commander was visiting his terrestrial guests, that King voiced the discontent that had long affected both men.

"We're both tired of doing nothing, Czuv. We have been of little real benefit, and we have decided that your ideas of us are all wrong. We are convinced that our personal horsepower can be of vastly more use to you than our brain-power, which doesn't amount to much. Your whole present policy is one of hiding and sniping. I think that I know why, but I want to be sure. Your vessels carry lots of fuel—why can the hexans outrun you?" Thus did King put his problem.

"They can stand enormously higher accelerations than we can. The very strongest of us loses consciousness at an acceleration of twenty-five meters per second per second, no matter how he is braced, and that is only a little greater than the normal gravity of our enemies upon Jupiter. Their vessels at highest power develop an acceleration of thirty-five meters, and the hexans themselves can stand much more than even that high figure," replied Czuv.

"I thought so. Assume that you traveled at forty-five. Would it disable you permanently, or would you recover as soon as it was lowered?"

"We would recover promptly, unless the exposure had been unduly prolonged. Why?"

"Because," said King, "I can stand an acceleration of fifty-four meters for two hours, and Breckenridge here tests fifty two meters. I can navigate anything, and Breckenridge can observe as well as any of your own men. Build a plane to accelerate at forty-five meters and we will blow those hexans out of the ether. You will have to revive and do the shooting, however—your gunnery is entirely beyond us."

"That is an idea of promise, and one that had not occurred to any of us," Czuv replied and work was begun at once upon the new flyer.

When the super-plane was ready for its maiden voyage, its crew of three studied it as it lay in the catapult at the portal. Dead black as were all the warplanes, its body was twice as large as that of the ordinary vessel, its wings were even more stubby, and its accommodations had been cut to a minimum to make room for the enormous stores of fuel necessary to drive the greatly increased battery of rocket motors and for the extra supply of torpedoes carried. Waving to the group of soldiers and citizens gathered to witness the take-off of the new dreadnought of space, the three men entered the cramped operating compartment, strapped themselves into their seats, and were shot away. As usual the driving rockets were cut off well below the rim of the shaft, and the vessel rose in a long and graceful curve, invisible in the night. Such was its initial velocity and so slight was the force of gravity of the satellite that they were many hundreds of miles from the exit before they began to descend, and Breckenridge studied his screens narrowly for signs of hexan activity.

"Do you want to try one of your long-range shots when we find one of them?" the pilot asked Czuv.

"No, it would be useless. Between deflection by air-currents and the dodging of the enemy vessels, our effective range is shortened to a few kilometers, and their beams are deadly at that distance. No, our best course is to follow the original plan—to lure them out into space at uniform acceleration, where we can destroy them easily."

"Right," and Breckenridge turned to King, who was frowning at his controls. "How does she work on a dead stick, Chief?"

"Maneuverability about minus ten at this speed and in this air. She'd have to have at least fifteen hundred kilometers an hour to be responsive out here. See anything yet?"

"Not yet ... wait a minute! Yes, there's one now—P-12 on area five. Give us all the X10 and W27 you can, without using power—we want to edge over close enough so that she can't help but see us when we start the rockets."

"Be sure and stay well out of range. I'm giving her all she'll take, but she won't take much. With these wings she has the gliding angle of a kitchen sink."

"All x—I'm watching the range, close. Wish we had instruments like these on the IPV's. We'll have to install some when we get back. All x! Give her