A huge spot on the side of the ship had become incandescent. A vapor, a strange puff of smokiness exploded from it, and disappeared instantly.
Another came and faster and faster they followed each other. The cosmium was disintegrating under the ray, but very slowly, breaking first into gaseous cosmic rays, then free, and spreading.
"We will not fight," muttered Morey happily as he saw Arcot shift in his seat.
Arcot picked the moleculars. They reached out, touched the heavy relux of the fort, and it exploded into opalescence that was hazily white, the colors shifted so quickly. A screen sprang into being, and the ray was chopped off. The screen was a ma.s.s of darting flames as energies of stupendous magnitude clashed.
Arcot used a bit more of his inconceivable power. The ray struck the screen, and it flashed once--then died into blackness. The fort suddenly crumpled in like a dented can, and rolled clumsily away. The other fort was near now, and started an attack of its own. Arcot chose the artificial matter this time. He was not watching the many attacking ships.
The great ship careened suddenly, fell over heavily to one side.
"Foolish of me," said Arcot. "They tried crashing us."
A ma.s.s of crumpled, broken relux and lux surrounded by a haze of gas lying against a slight scratch on the great sides, told the story. Eight inches of cosmium does not give way.
Yet another ship tried it. But it stopped several feet away from the real wall of the ship. It struck a wall even more unyielding--artificial matter.
But now Arcot was using this major weapon--artificial matter. Ship after ship, whether fleeing or attacking, was surrounded suddenly by a great sphere of it, a sudden terrific blaze of energy as the sphere struck the ray shield, the control forces now backed by the energy of all the millions of stars of s.p.a.ce shattered it in an instant. Then came the inexorable crush of the artificial matter, and a ball of matter alone remained.
But the pressing disc of the battle-front which had been lowering on Chicago, greatest of Earth"s metropolises, was lifted. This disc-front was staggering back now as Arcot"s mighty ship weakened its strength, and destroyed its morale, under the steady drive of the now hopeful Solarians.
The other gigantic fort moved up now, with twenty of the largest battleships. The fort turned loose its destructive ray--and Arcot tried his new "magnet." It was not a true magnet, but a transformed s.p.a.ce field, a field created by the energy of all the universe.
The fort was gigantic. Even Arcot"s mighty ship was a small thing beside it, but suddenly it seemed warped and twisted as s.p.a.ce curved visibly in a magnetic field of such terrific intensity as to be immeasurable.
Arcot"s armory was tested and found not wanting.
Suddenly every Thessian ship in sight ceased to exist. They disappeared.
Instantly Arcot threw on all time power, and darted toward Venus. The Thessians were already nearing the planet, and no possible rays could overtake them. An instantaneous touch of the s.p.a.ce control, and the mighty ship was within hundreds of miles of the atmosphere.
s.p.a.ce twisted about them, reeled, and was firm. The Thessian fleet was before them in a moment, visible now as they slowed to normal speed.
Startled, no doubt, to find before them the ship they had fled, they charged on for a s.p.a.ce. Then, as though by some magic, they stopped and exploded in gouts of light.
When s.p.a.ce had twisted, seconds before, it was because Arcot had drawn on the enormous power of s.p.a.ce to an extent that had been appreciable even to it--ten sols. That was forty million tons of matter a second, and for a hundredth part of a second it had flowed. Before them, in a vast plane, had been created an infinitesimally thin film of artificial matter, four hundred thousand tons of it, and into this invisible, infinitely hard barrier, the Thessian fleet had rammed. And it was gone.
"I think," said Arcot softly, as he took off his headpiece, "that the beginning of the end is in sight."
"And I," said Morey, "think it is now out of sight. Half a dozen ships stopped. And they are gone now, to warn the others."
"What warning? What can they tell? Only that their ships were destroyed by something they couldn"t see." Arcot smiled. "I"m going home."
Chapter XX
DESTRUCTION
Some time later, Arcot spoke. "I have just received a message from Zezdon Fentes that he has an important communication to make, so I will go down to New York instead of to Chicago, if you gentlemen do not mind.
Morey will take you to Chicago in the tender, and I can find Zezdon Fentes."
Zezdon Fentes" message was brief. He had discovered from the minds of several who had been killed by the magnetic field Arcot had used, and not destroyed, that they had a base in this universe. Thett"s base was somewhere near the center of the galaxy, on a system of unusually large planets, circling a rather small star. But what star their minds had not revealed.
"It"s up to us then to locate said star," said Arcot, after listening to Zezdon Fentes" account: "I think the easiest way will be to follow them home. We can go to your world, Zezdon Fentes, and see what they are doing there, and drive them off. Then to yours, Stel Felso. I place your world second as it is far better able to defend itself than is Ortol. It is agreeable?"
It was, and the ship which had been hanging in the atmosphere over New York, where Zezdon Afthen, Fentes and Inthel had come to it in a taxi-ship, signaled for the crowd to clear away above. The enormous bulk of the shining machine, the savior of Earth, had attracted a very great amount of attention, naturally, and thousands on thousands of hardy souls had braved the cold of the fifteen mile height with alt.i.tude suits or in small ships. Now they cleared away, and as the ship slowly rose, the tremendous concentrated mental well-wishing of the thousands reached the men within the ship. "That," observed Morley, "is one thing cosmium won"t stop. In some ways I wish it would--because the mental power that could be wielded by any great number of those highly advanced Thessians, if they know its possibilities, is not a thing to neglect."
"I can answer that, terrestrian," thought Zezdon Afthen. "Our instruments show great mental powers, and great ability to concentrate the will in mental processes, but they indicate a very slight development of these abilities. Our race, despite the fact that our mental powers are much less than those of such men as Arcot and yourself, have done, and can do many things your greater minds cannot, for we have learned the direction of the will. We need not fear the will of the Thessians. I feel confident of that!"
The ship was in s.p.a.ce now, and as Arcot directed it toward Ortol, far far across the Island, he threw on, for the moment, the combined power of s.p.a.ce distortion and time fields. Instantly the sun vanished, and when, less than a second later, he cut off the s.p.a.ce field, and left only the time, the constellations were instantly recognizable. They were within a dozen light years of Ortol.
"Morey, may I ask what you call this machine?" asked Torlos.
"You may, but I can"t answer," laughed Morey. "We were so anxious to get it going that we didn"t name it. Any suggestions?"
For a moment none of them made any suggestions, then slowly came Arcot"s thoughts, clear and sharp, the thoughts of carefully weighed decision.
"The swiftest thing that ever was _thought_! The most irresistible thing, _thought_, for nothing can stop its progress. The most destructive thing, _thought_. Thought, the greatest constructor, the greatest destroyer, the product of mind, and producer of powers, the greatest of powers. Thought is controlled by the mind. Let us call it _Thought_!"
"Excellent, Arcot, excellent. The _Thought_, the controller of the powers of the cosmos!" cried Morey.
"But the _Thought_ has not been christened, save in battle, and then it had no name. Let us emblazen its name on it now," suggested Wade.
Stopping their motion through s.p.a.ce, but maintaining a time field that permitted them to work without consuming precious time, Arcot formed some more cosmium, but now he subjected it to a special type of converted field, and into the cosmium, he forced some light photons, half bound, half free. The fixture he formed into the letters, and welded forever on the gigantic prow of the ship, and on its huge sides.
_Thought_, it stood in letters ten feet high, made of clear transparent cosmium, and the golden light photons, imprisoned in it, the slowly disintegrating lux metal, would cause those letters to shine for countless aeons with the steady golden light they now had.
The _Thought_ continued on now, and as they slowed their progress for Ortol, they saw that messengers of Thett had barely arrived. The fort here too had been razed to the ground, and now they were concentrating over the largest city of Ortol. Their rays were beating down on the great ray screen that terrestrial engineers had set up, protecting the city, as Earth had been protected. But the fleet that stood guard was small, and was rapidly being destroyed. A fort broke free, and plunged at last for the ray screen. Its relux walls glowed a thousand colors as the tremendous energy of the ray-screen struck them--but it was through!
A molecular ray reached down for the city--and stopped halfway in a tremendous coruscating burst of light and energy. Yet there was none of the sheen of the ray screen. Merely light.
The fort was still driving downward. Then suddenly it stopped, and the side dented in like the side of a can some one has stepped on, and it came to sudden rest against an invisible, impenetrable barrier. A molecular reached down from somewhere in s.p.a.ce, hit the ray screen of Ortol, which the Thessians had attacked for hours, and the screen flashed into sudden brilliance, and disappeared. The ray struck the Thessian fort, and the fort burst into tremendous opalescence, while the invisible barrier the ray had struck was suddenly a great sheet of flaming light. In less than half a second the opalescence was gone, the fort shuddered, and shrieked out of the planet"s atmosphere, a ma.s.s of lux now, and susceptible to the moleculars. And everything that lived within that fort had died instantly and painlessly.
The fleet which had been preparing to follow the leading fort was suddenly stopped; it halted indecisively.
Then the _Thought_ became visible as its great golden letters showed suddenly, streaking up from distant s.p.a.ce. Every ship turned cosmic and moleculars on it. The cosmic rebounded from the cosmium walls, and from the artificial matter that protected the eyes. The moleculars did not affect either, but the invisible protective sheet that the _Thought_ was maintaining in the Ortolian atmosphere became misty as it fought the slight molecular rebounds.
The _Thought_ went into action. The fort which remained was the point of attack. The fort had turned its destructive ray on the cosmium ship with the result that, as before, the cosmium slowly disintegrated into puffs of cosmic rays. The vapor seemed to boil out, puff suddenly, then was gone. Arcot put up a wall of artificial matter to test the effect. The ray went right through the matter, without so much as affecting it. He tried a sheet of pure energy, an electro-magnetic energy stream of tremendous power. The ray bent sharply to one side. But in a moment the Thessians had realigned it.
"It"s a photonic stream, but of some type that doesn"t affect ordinary matter, but only artificial matter such as lux, relux, or cosmium. If the artificial matter would only fight it, I"d be all right." The thought running through Arcot"s mind reached the others.
A tremendous burst of light energy to the rear announced the fact that a Thessian had crashed against the artificial matter wall that surrounded the ship. Arcot was throwing the Thessian destructive beam from side to side now, and twice succeeded in misdirecting it so that it hit the enemy machines.
The _Thought_ sent out its terrific beam of magnetic energy. The ray was suddenly killed, and the fort cruised helplessly on. Its driving apparatus was dead. The diffused cosmic reached out, and as the magnetic field, the relux and the cosmics interacted, the great fort was suddenly blue-white--then instantly a dust that scattered before an enormous blast of air.
From the _Thought_ a great sh.e.l.l of artificial matter went, a visible, misty wall, that curled forward, and wrapped itself around the Thessian ships with a motion of tremendous speed, yet deceptive, for it seemed to billow and flow.
A Thessian warship decided to brush it away--and plowed into inconceivable strength. The ship crumpled to a ma.s.s of broken relux.
The greater part of the Thessian fleet had already fled, but there remained half a hundred great battleships. And now, within half a million miles of the planet, there began a battle so weird that astronomers who watched could not believe it.