From behind the _Thought_, where it hung motionless beyond the misty wall, a Thing came.
The Thessian ships had realized now that the misty sphere that walled them in was impenetrable, and their rays were off, for none they now had would penetrate it. The forts were gone.
But the Thing that came behind the _Thought_ was a ship, a little ship of the same misty white, and it flowed into, and through the wall, and was within their prison. The Thessian ships turned their rays toward it, and waited. What was this thing?
The ovaloid ship which drifted so slowly toward them suddenly seemed to jerk, and from it reached pseudopods! An amoeba on a t.i.tanic scale! It writhed its way purposefully toward the nearest ship, and while that ship waited, a pseudopod reached out, and suddenly drove through the four foot relux armor! A second pseudopod followed with lightning rapidity, and in an instant the ship had been split from end to end!
Now a hundred rays were leaping toward the thing, and the rays burst into fire and gouts of light, blackened, burned pseudopods seemed to fall from the thing and hastily it retreated from the enclosure, flowing once more through the wall that stopped their rays.
But another Thing came. It was enormous, a mile long, a great, shining scaly thing, a dragon, and on its mighty neck was mounted an enormous, distorted head, with great flat nose and huge flapping nostrils. It was a Thessian head! The mouth, fifty feet across, wrinkled into an horrific grin, and broken, stained teeth of iron showed in the mouth. Great talons upraised, it rent the misty wall that bound them, and writhed its awful length in. The swish of its scales seemed to come to the watchers, as it chased after a great battleship whose pilot fled in terror. Faster than the mighty s.p.a.ceship the awful Thing caught it in mighty talons that ripped through solid relux. Scratching, fluttering enormous, blood-red wings, the silvery claws tore away great ma.s.ses of relux, sending them flying into s.p.a.ce.
Again rays struck at it. Cosmic and moleculars with blinding pencils of light. For now in the close s.p.a.ce of the Wall was an atmosphere, the air of two great warships, and though the s.p.a.ce was great, the air in the ships was dense.
The rays struck its awful face. The face burst into light, and black, greasy smoke steamed up, as the thing writhed and twisted horribly, awful screams ringing out. Then it was free, and half the face was burned away, and a grinning, bleeding, half-cooked face writhed and screamed in anger at them. It darted at the nearest ship, and ripped out that ray that burned it--and quivered into death. It quivered, then quickly faded into mist, a haze, and was gone!
A last awful thing--a thing they had not noticed as all eyes watched that Thing--was standing by the rent in the Sphere now, the gigantic Thessian, with leering, b.e.s.t.i.a.l jaws, enormous, squat limbs, the webbed fingers and toes, and the heavy torso of his race, grinning at them. In one hand was a thing--and his jaws munched. Thett"s men stared in horror as they recognized that thing in his hand--a Thessian body! He grinned happily and reached for a battleship--a ray burned him. He howled, and leaped into their midst.
Then the Thessians went mad. All fought, and they fought each other, rays of all sorts, their moleculars and their cosmics, while in their midst the Giant howled his glee, and laughed and laughed--
Eventually it was over, and the last limping Thessian ship drove itself crazily against the wreck of its last enemy. And only wreckage was left.
"Lord, Arcot! Why in the Universe did you do that--and how did you conceive those horrors?" asked Morey, more than a little amazed at the tactics Arcot had displayed.
Arcot shook himself, and disconnected his controls. "Why--why I don"t know. I don"t know what made me do that, I"m sure. I never imagined anything like that dragon thing--how did--"
His keen eyes fixed themselves suddenly on Zezdon Fentes, and their tremendous hypnotic power beat down the resistance of the Ortolian"s trained mind. Arcot"s mind opened for the others the thoughts of Zezdon Fentes.
He had acted as a medium between the minds of the Thessians, and Arcot.
Taking the horror-ideas of the Thessians, he had imprinted them on Arcot"s mind while Arcot was at work with the controls. In Arcot"s mind, they had acted exactly as had the ideas that night on Earth, only here the demonstration had been carried to the limit, and the horror ideas were compounded to the utmost. The Thessians, highly developed minds though they were, were not resistant and they had broken. The Allies, with their different horror-ideas, had been but slightly affected.
"We will leave you on Ortol, Zezdon Fentes. We know you have done much, and perhaps your own mind has given a bit. We hope you recover. I think you agree with me, Zezdon Afthen and Inthel?" thought Arcot.
"We do, heartily, and are heartily sorry that one of our race has acted in this way. Let us proceed to Talso, as soon as possible. You might send Fentes down in a sh.e.l.l of artificial matter," suggested Zezdon Afthen.
"Which," said Arcot, after this had been done, and they were on their way to Talso, "shows the danger of a mad _Thought_!"
Chapter XXI
THE POWER OF "_THE THOUGHT_"
But it seemed, or must have seemed to any infinite being capable of watching it as it moved now, that the _Thought_ was a mad thought. With the time control opened to the limit, and a touch of the s.p.a.ce control, it fled across the Universe at a velocity such as no other thing was capable of.
One star--it flashed to a disc, loomed enormous--overpowering--then suddenly they were flashing _through_ it! The enormous coils fed their current into the s.p.a.ce-coils and the time field, and the ship seemed to twist and writhe in distorted s.p.a.ce as the gravitational field of a giant star, and a giant ship"s s.p.a.ce field fought for a fraction of time so short as to be utterly below measurement. Then the ship was gone--and behind it a star, the center of which had suddenly been hurled into another s.p.a.ce forever, as the counteracting, gravitational field of the outer layers was removed for a moment, and only its own enormous density affected s.p.a.ce, writhed and collapsed upon itself, to explode into a mighty sea of flames. Planets it formed, we know, by a process such as can happen when only this man-made accident happens.
But the ship fled on, its great coils partly discharged, but still far more charged than need be.
It was minutes to Talso where it had been hours with the _Ancient Mariner_, but now they traveled with the speed of _Thought_!
Talso too was the scene of a battle, and more of a battle than Ortol had been, for here where more powerful defensive forces had been active, the Thessians had been more vengeful. All their remaining ships seemed concentrated here. And the great molecular screen that terrestrian engineers had flung up here had already fallen. Great holes had opened in it, as two great forts, and a thousand ships, some mighty battleships of the intergalactic s.p.a.ces, some little scout cruisers, had turned their rays on the struggling defensive machines. It had held for hours, thanks to the tremendous tubes that Talso had in their power-distribution stations, but in the end had fallen, but not before many of their largest cities had been similarly defended, and the people of the others had scattered broadcast.
True, wherever they might be, a diffused molecular would find them and destroy all life save under the few screens, but if the Thessians once diffused their rays, without entering the atmosphere, the broken screen would once more be able to hold.
No fleet had kept the Thessian forces out of this atmosphere, but dozens of more adequately powered artificial matter bomb stations had taught Thett respect for Talso. But Talso"s own ray screen had stopped their bombs. They could only send their bombs as high as the screen. They did not have Arcot"s tremendous control power to maintain the matter without difficulty even beyond a screen.
At last the screen had fallen, and the Thessian ships, a hole once made, were able to move, and kept that hole always under them, though if it once were closed, they would again have the struggle to open it.
Exploding matter bombs had twice caused such spatial strains and ionized conditions as to come near closing it, but finally the Thessian fleet had arranged a ring of ships about the hole, and opened a cylinder of rays that reached down to the planet.
Like some gigantic plow the rays tore up mountains, oceans, glaciers and land. Tremendous chasms opened in straight lines as it plowed along.
Unprotected cities flashed into fountains of rock and soil and steel that leaped upwards as the rays touched, and were gone. Protected cities, their screens blazing briefly under the enormous ray concentrations as the ships moved on, unheeding, stood safe on islands of safety amidst the destruction. Here in the lower air, where ions would be so plentiful, Thett did not try to break down the screens, for the air would aid the defenders.
Finally, as Thett"s forces had planned, they came to one of the ionized layer ray-screen stations that was still projecting its cone of protective screening to the layer above. Every available ray was turned on that station, and, designed as it was for protecting part of a world, the station was itself protected, but slowly, slowly as its already heated tubes weakened their electronic emission, the disc of ions retreated more and more toward the station, as, like some splashing stream, the Thessian rays played upon it forcing it back. A rapidly accelerating retreat, faster and faster, as the disc changed from the dull red of normal defense to the higher and bluer quanta of failing, less complete defense, the disc of interference retreated.
Then, with a flash of light, and a roar as the soil below spouted up, the station was gone. It had failed.
Instantly the ring of ships expanded as the great screen was weakened by the withdrawal of this support. Wider was the path of destruction now as the forces moved on.
But high, high in the sky, far out of sight of the naked eye, was a tiny spot that was in reality a giant ship. It was flashing forward, and in moments it was visible. Then, as another deserted city vanished, it was above the Thessian fleet.
Their rays were directed downward through a hole that was even larger. A second station had gone with that city. But, as by magic, the hole closed up, and chopped their rays off with a decisiveness that startled them. The interference was so sharp now that not even the dullest of reds showed where their beams touched. The close interference was giving off only radio! In amazement they looked for this new station of such enormous power that their combined rays did not noticeably affect it. A world had been fighting their rays unsuccessfully. What single station could do this, if the many stations of the world could not? There was but one they knew of, and they turned now to search for the ship they knew must be there.
"No horrors this time; just clean, burning energy," muttered Arcot.
It was clean, and it was burning. In an instant one of the forts was a ma.s.s of opalescence that shifted so swiftly it was purest white, then rocketed away, lifeless, and no longer relux.
The other fort had its screen up, though its power, designed to withstand the attack of a fleet of enormous intergalactic, matter-driven, fighting ships lasted but an instant under the driving power of half a million million suns, concentrated in one enormous ray of energy. The sheer energy of the ray itself, molecular ray though it was, heated the material it struck to blinding incandescence even as it hurled it at a velocity close to that of light into outer s.p.a.ce. With little sparkling flashes battleships of the void after giant cruisers flashed into lux, and vanished under the ray.
A tremendous combined ray of magnetism and cosmic ray energy replaced the molecular, and the ships exploded into a dust as fine as the primeval gas from which came all matter.
Sweeping energy, so enormous that the defenses of the ships did not even operate against it, shattered ship after ship, till the few that remained turned, and, faster than the pursuing energies could race through s.p.a.ce, faster than light, headed for their base.
"That was fair fight; energy against energy," said Arcot delightedly, for his new toy, which made playthings of suns and fed on the cosmic energy of a universe, was behaving nicely, "and as I said, Stel Felso Theu, at the beginning of this war, the greater Power wins, always. And in our island here, I have five hundred thousand million separate power plants, each generating at the rate of decillions of ergs a second, backing this ship.
"Your world will be safe now, and we will head for our last embattled ally, Sirius." The t.i.tanic ship turned, and disappeared from the view of the madly rejoicing billions of Talso below, as it sped, far faster than light, across a universe to relieve another sorely tried civilization.
Knowing their cause was lost, hopeless in the knowledge that nothing known to them could battle that enormous force concentrated in one ship, the _Thought_, the Thessians had but one aim now, to do all the damage in their power before leaving.
Already their tremendous, unarmed and unarmored transports were departing with their hundreds of thousands from that base system for the far-off Island of s.p.a.ce from which they had come. Their battlefleets were engaged in destroying all the cities of the allies, and those other helpless races of our system that they could. Those other inhabited worlds, many of which were completely wiped out because Arcot had no knowledge of them, were relieved only when the general call for retreat to protect the mother planet was sent out.
But Sirius was looming enormous before them. And its planets, heavily defended now by the combined Sirian, Terrestrial and Venerian fleets and great ray screens as well as a few matter-bomb stations, were suffering losses none the less. For the old Sixth of Negra, the Third here, had fallen. Slipping in on the night side of the planet, all power off, and so sending forth no warning impulses till it actually fell through the ray screen, a small fleet of scouts had entered. Falling still under simple gravity, they had been missed by the rays till they had fallen to so small a distance, that no humans or men of our allied systems could have stopped, but only their enormous iron boned strength permitted them to resist the acceleration they used to avert collision with the planet.
Then scattering swiftly, they had blasted the great protective screen stations by attacking on the sides, where the ray screen projectors were not mounted. Designed to protect above, they had no side armor, and the Sixth was opened to attack.
Two and one-half billion people lost their lives painlessly and instantaneously as tremendous diffused moleculars played on the revolving planet.