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

"Several reasons," Brandon argued stubbornly. "First place, look at the mass of that thing, and remember that the heavier the beam the harder it is to hold it together. Second, there's no evidence that they wander around much in space. If their beams are designed principally for travel upon Jupiter, why should they have any extraordinary range? I say they can't hold that beam forever. We've got a good long lead, and in spite of their higher acceleration, I think we'll be able to keep out of range of their heavy stuff. If so, we'll trace a circle—only one a good deal bigger than the one Amonar suggested—and meet the fleet at a point where that enemy ship will be about out of power."

Thus for hours the scientists argued, agreeing upon nothing, while the Vorkulian fortress crept ever closer. At the end of three days of the mad flight, the pursuing space ship was in plain sight, covering hundreds of divisions of the micrometer screens. But now the size of the images was increasing with extreme slowness, and the scientists of the Sirius watched with strained attention the edges of those glowing green pictures. Finally, when the pictured edges were about to cease moving across the finely-ruled lines, Brandon cut down his own acceleration a trifle, and kept on decreasing it at such a rate that the heptagon still crept up, foot by foot.

"Hey what's the big idea?" Stevens demanded.

"Coax 'em along. If we run away from them they'll probably reverse power and go back home, won't they? Their beam is falling apart fast, but they're still getting so much stuff along it that we couldn't do a thing to stop them. If they think that we're losing power even faster than they are, though, they'll keep after us until their beam's so thin that they'll just be able to stop on it. Then they'll reverse or else go onto their accumulators—reverse, probably, since they'll be a long ways from home by that time. We'll reverse, too, and keep just out of range. Then, when we both have stopped and are about to start back, their beam will be at its minimum and we'll go to work on 'em—foot, horse, and marines. Nobody can run us as ragged as they've been doing and get away with it as long as I'm conscious and stand a chance in the world of hanging one onto their chins in retaliation. I've got a hunch. If it works, we can take those birds alone, and take 'em so they'll stay took. We might as well break up—this is going to be an ordinary job of piloting for a few days, I think. I'm going up and work with the Martians on that hunch. You fellows work out any ideas you want to. Watch 'em close, Mac. Keep kidding 'em along, but don't let them get close enough to puncture us."

Everything worked out practically as Brandon had foretold, and a few days later, their acceleration somewhat less than terrestrial gravity, he called another meeting in the control room. He came in grinning from ear to ear, accompanied by the two Martians, and seated himself at his complex power panel.

"Now watch the professor closely, gentlemen," he invited. "He is going to cut that beam."

"But you can't," protested Pyraz Amonar.

"I know you can't, ordinarily, when a beam is tight and solid. But that beam's as loose as ashes right now. I told you I had a hunch, and Alcantro and Fedanzo worked out the right answer for me. If I can cut it, Quince, and if their screens go down for a minute, shoot your visiray into them and see what you can see."

"All x. How much power are you going to draw?"

"Plenty—it figures a little better than four hundred thousand kilofranks. I'll draw it all from the accumulators, so as not to disturb you fellows on the cosmic intake. We don't care if we do run the batteries down some, but I don't want to hold that load on the bus-bars very long. However, if my hunch is right, I won't be on that beam five minutes before it's cut from Jupiter—and I'll bet you four dollars that you won't see the original crew in that fort when you get into it."

He set upper and lower bands of dirigible projectors to apply a powerful sidewise thrust, and the Sirius darted off her course. Flashing a minute pencil behind the huge heptagon, Brandon manipulated his tuning circuits until a brilliant spot in space showed him that he was approaching resonance with the heptagon's power beam. Micrometer dials were then engaged and the delicate tuning continued until the meters gave evidence that the two beams were precisely synchronized and exactly opposite in phase. Four plunger switches closed, that tiny pilot ray became an enormous rod of force, and as those two gigantic beams met in exact opposition and neutralized each other, a solid wall of blinding brilliance appeared in the empty ether behind the Vorkulian fortress. As that dazzling wall sprang into being, the sparkling green protection died from the walls of the heptagon.

"Go to it, Quince!" Brandon yelled, but the suggestion was entirely superfluous. Even before the wall-screen had died, Westfall's beam was trying to get through it, and when the visiray revealed the interior of the heptagon, the quiet and methodical physicist was shaken from his habitual calm.

"Why, they aren't the winged monsters at all—they're hexans!" he exclaimed.

"Sure they are." Brandon did not even turn his heavily-goggled eyes from the blazing blankness of his own screen. "That was my hunch. Those snakes went about things in a business-like fashion. They didn't strike me as being folks who would pull off such a wild stunt as trying to chase us clear out of the solar system, but a gang of hexans would do just that. Some of them must have captured that ship and, already having it in their cock-eyed brains that we were back of what happened on Callisto, they decided to bump us off if it was the last thing they ever did. That's what I'd do myself, if I were a hexan. Now I'll tell you what's happening back at the home power plant of that ship and what's going to happen next. I'm kicking up a horrible row out there with my interference, and a lot of instruments at the other end of that beam must be cutting up all kinds of didoes, right now. They'll check up on that ship with the expedition, by radio and what-not, and when they find out that it's clear out here—chop! Didn't get to see much, did you?"

"No, they must have switched over to their accumulators almost instantly."

"Yeah, but if they've got accumulator capacity enough to hold off our entire cosmic intake and get back to Jupiter besides, I'm a polyp! We're going to take that ship, fellows, and learn a lot of stuff we never dreamed of before. Ha! There goes his beam—pay me the four, Quince."

The dazzling wall of incandescence had blinked out without warning, and Brandon's beam bored on through space, unimpeded. He shut it off and turned to his fellows with a grin—a grin which disappeared instantly as a thought struck him and he leaped back to his board.

"Sound the high-acceleration warning quick, Perce!" he snapped, and drove in switch after switch.

"Cosmic intake's gone down to zero!" exclaimed MacDonald, as the Sirius leaped away.

"Had to cut it—they might shoot a jolt through that band. Just thought of something. Maybe unnecessary, but no harm done if ... it's necessary, all x—we're taking a sweet kissing right now. You see, even though we're at pretty long range, they've got some horrible projectors, and they were evidently mad enough to waste some power taking a good, solid flash at us—and if we hadn't been expecting it, that flash would have been a bountiful sufficiency, believe me—Great Cat! Look at that meter—and I've had to throw in number ten shunt! The outer screen is drawing five hundred and forty thousand!"

They stared at the meter in amazement. It was incredible, even after they had seen those heptagons in action, that at such extreme range any offensive beam could be driven with such unthinkable power—power requiring for its neutralization almost the full output of the prodigious batteries of accumulators carried by the Sirius! Yet for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes that beam drove furiously against their straining screens, and even Brandon's face grew tense and hard as that frightful attack continued. At the end of twenty-two minutes, however, the pointer of the meter snapped back to the pin and every man there breathed an explosive sigh of relief—the almost unbearable bombardment was over; the screen was drawing only its maintenance load.

"Wow!" Brandon shouted. "I thought for a minute they were going to hang to us until we cracked, even if it meant that they'd have to freeze to death out here themselves!"

"It would have meant that, too, don't you think?" asked Stevens.

"I imagine so—don't see how they could possibly have enough power left to get back to Jupiter if they shine that thing on us much longer. Of course, the more power they waste on us, the quicker we can take them; but I don't want much more of that beam, I'll tell the world—I just about had heart failure before they cut off!"

The massive heptagon was now drifting back toward Jupiter at constant velocity. The hexans were apparently hoarding jealously their remaining power, for their wall screens did not flash on at the touch of the visiray. Through unresisting metal the probing Terrestrial beams sped, and the scientists studied minutely every detail of the Vorkulian armament; while the regular observers began to make a detailed photographic survey of every room and compartment of the great fortress. Much of the instrumentation and machinery was familiar, but some of it was so strange that study was useless—days of personal inspection and experiment, perhaps complete dismantling, would be necessary to reveal the secrets hidden within those peculiar mechanisms.

"They're trying to save all the power they can—think I'll make them spend some more," Brandon remarked, and directed against the heptagon a heavy destructive beam. "We don't want them to get back to Jupiter until after we've boarded them and found out everything we want to know. Come here, Quince—what do you make of this?"

Both men stared at the heptagon, frankly puzzled; for the screens of the strange vessel did not radiate, nor did the material of the walls yield under the terrible force of the beam. The destructive ray simply struck that dull green surface and vanished—disappeared without a trace, as a tiny stream of water disappears into a partially-soaked sponge.

"Do you know what you are doing?" asked Westfall, after a few minutes' thought. "I believe that you are charging their accumulators at the rate of," he glanced at a meter, "exactly thirty-one thousand five hundred kilofranks."

"Great Cat!" Brandon's hand flashed to a switch and the beam expired. "But they can't just simply grab it and store it, Quince—it's impossible!"

"The word 'impossible' in that connection, coming from you, has a queer sound," Westfall said pointedly and Brandon actually blushed.

"That's right, too—we have got pretty much the same idea in our cosmic intake fields, but we didn't carry things half as far as they have done. Huh! They're flashing us again ... but those thin little beams don't mean anything. They're just trying to make us feed them some more, I guess. But we've got to hold them back some way—wonder if they can absorb a tractor field?"

The hexans had lashed out a few times with their lighter weapons, but, finding the Sirius unresponsive, had soon shut them off and were stolidly plunging along toward Jupiter. Brandon flung out a tractor rod and threw the mass of his cruiser upon it as it locked into those sullen green walls. But as soon as the enemy felt its drag, their screens flared white, and the massive Terrestrial space-ship quivered in every member as that terrific cable of force was snapped.

"They apparently cannot store up the energy of a tractor," commented Westfall, "but you will observe that they have no difficulty in radiating when they care to."

"Those two ideas didn't pan out so heavy. There's lots of things not tried yet, though. Our next best bet is to get around in front of him and push back. If they wiggle away from more than fifty percent of a pressor, they're really good."

The pilot maneuvered the Sirius into line, directly between Jupiter and the pentagon; and as the driving projectors went into action, Brandon drove a mighty pressor field along their axis, squarely into the center of mass of the Vorkulian fortress. For a moment it held solidly, then, as the screens of the enemy went into action, it rebounded and glanced off in sparkling, cascading torrents.