"He"ll wiggle if you start off with the beam. Train your sights on the nose of that first ship--when you"re ready, call out."
"Ready--ready--" Ten men replied. "Fire!" roared the technician. Ten t.i.tanic swords of pure ultra-violet energy, energy that practically no unconditioned metal will reflect to more than fifty per cent, emerged.
There was a single spot of intense incandescence for a single hundredth of a second--and then the energy was burning its way through the inner, thinner skins with such rapidity that they sputtered and flickered like a broken televisor.
One hundred and twenty-nine ships retreated hastily for conference, leaving a gutted, wrecked hull, broken by its fall, on Europa.
Triumphantly, the Europa IP station hurled out its radio message of the first encounter between a fort and the Miran forces.
Most important of all, it sent a great deal of badly wanted information regarding the Miran weapons. Particularly interesting was the fact that it had withstood the impact of that disintegrating ray.
VIII
Grimly Buck Kendall looked at the reports. McLaurin stood beside him, Devin sat across the table from him. "What do you make of it, Buck?"
asked the Commander.
"That we have just one island of resistance left on the Jovian worlds.
And that will, I fear, vanish. They haven"t finished with their a.r.s.enal by any means."
"But what was it, man, what was it that ruined those ships?"
"Vibration. Somehow--Lord only knows how it"s done--they can project electric fields. These projected fields are oscillated, and they are tuned in with some parts of the ship. I suspect they are crystals of the metals. If they can start a vibration in the crystals of the metal--that"s fatigue, metal fatigue enormously speeded. You know how a quartz crystal oscillator in a radio-control apparatus will break, if you work it on a very heavy load at the peak? They simply smash the crystals of metal in the same way. Only they project their field."
"Then our toughest metals are useless? Can"t something tough, rather than hard, like copper or even silver for instance, stand it?"
"Calcium metal"s the toughest going--and even that would break under the beating those ships give it. The only way to withstand it is to have such a ma.s.s of metal that the oscillations are damped out. But--"
The set tuned in on the IP station on Europa was speaking again. "The ships are returning. There are one hundred and twenty-nine by accurate count. Jorgsen reports that telescopic observation of the dead on the fallen cruiser show them to be a _completely un-human race_! They are of mottled coloring, predominately grayish brown. The ships are returning. They have divided into ten groups, nine groups of two each, and a main body of the rest of the fleet. The group of eighteen is descending within range, and we are focusing our beams on them--"
Out by Europa, ten great UV beams were stabbing angrily toward ten great interstellar ships. The metal of the hulls glowed brilliant, and distorted slowly as the thick walls softened under the heat, and the air behind pressed against it. Grimly the ten ships came on. Torpedoes were being launched, and exploded, and now they had no effect, for the Mirans within were protected.
The eighteen grouped ships separated, and arranged themselves in a circle around the fort. Suddenly one staggered as a great puff of gas shot out through the thin atmosphere of Europa to flare brilliantly in the lash of the stabbing UV beam. Instantly the ship righted itself, and labored upward. Another dropped to take its place--
And the great walls of the IP fort suddenly groaned and started in their welded joints. The faint, whispering rustle of the crumbling beam was murmuring through the station. Engineers shouted suddenly as meters leapt the length of their scales, and the needles clicked softly on the stop pins. A thin rustle came from the atostors grouped in the great power room. "Spirits of s.p.a.ce--a revolving magnetic field!" roared the Chief Technician. "They"re making this whole blasted station a squirrel cage!"
The mighty walls of eight-foot metal shuddered and trembled. The UV beams lashed out from the fort in quivering arcs now, they did not hold their aim steady, and the magnetic shield that protected them from atomic bombs was working and straining wildly. Eighteen great ships quivered and tugged outside there now, straining with all their power to remain in the same spot, as they pa.s.sed on from one to another the magnetic impulses that were now creating a t.i.tanic magnetic vortex about the fort.
"The atostors will be exhausted in another fifteen minutes," the Chief Technician roared into his transmitter. "Can the signals get through those fields, Commander?"
"No, Mac. They"ve been stopped, Sparks tells me. We"re here--and let"s hope we stay. What"s happening?"
"They"ve got a revolving magnetic field out there that would spin a minor planet. The whole blasted fort is acting like the squirrel cage in an induction motor! They"ve made us the armature in a five hundred million horsepower electric motor."
"They can"t tear this place loose, can they?"
"I don"t know--it was never--" The Chief stopped. Outside a terrific roar and crash had built up. White darts of flame leapt a thousand feet into the air, hurling terrific ma.s.ses of shattered rock and soil.
"I was going to say," the Chief went on, "this place wasn"t designed for that sort of a strain. Our own magnetic field is supporting us now, preventing their magnetic field from getting its teeth on metal. When the strain comes--well, they"re cutting loose our foundation with atomic bombs!"
Five UV beams were combined on one interstellar ship. Instantly the great machine retreated, and another dropped in to take its place while the magnetic field spun on, uninterruptedly.
"Can they keep that up long?"
"G.o.d knows--but they have a hundred and more ships to send in when the power of one gives out, remember."
"What"s our reserve now?"
The Chief paused a moment to look at the meters. "Half what it was ten minutes ago!"
Commander Wallace sent some other orders. Every torpedo tube of the station suddenly belched forth deadly, fifteen-foot torpedoes, most of them mud-torpedoes, torpedoes loaded with high explosive in the nose, a delayed fuse, and a load of soft clinging mud in the rear. The mud would flow down over the nose and offer a resistance foot-hold for the explosive which empty s.p.a.ce would not. Four hundred and three torpedoes, equipped with anti-magnetic apparatus darted out. One hundred and four pa.s.sed the struggling fields. One found lodgement on a Miran ship, and crushed in a metal wall, to be stopped by a bulkhead.
The Chief engineer watched his power declining. All ten UV beams were united in one now, driving a terrible sword of energy that made the attacked ship skip for safety instantly, yet the beams were all but useless. For the Miran reserves filled the gap, and the magnetic tornado continued.
For seventeen long minutes the station resisted the attack. Then the last of the strained mercury flowed into the receivers, and the vast power of the atostors was exhausted. Slowly the magnetic fields declined. The great walls of the station felt the clutching lines of force--they began to heat and to strain. A low, harsh grinding became audible over the roar of the atomic bombs. The whole structure trembled, and jumped slightly. The roar of bombs ceased suddenly, as the station jerked again, more violently. Then it turned a bit, rolled clumsily.
Abruptly it began to spin violently, more and more rapidly. It started rolling clumsily across the plateau--
A rain of atomic bombs struck the unprotected metal, and the eighth breached the walls. The twentieth was the last. There was no longer an IP station on Europa.
"The difference," said Buck Kendall slowly, when the reports came in from scout-ships in s.p.a.ce that had witnessed the last struggle, "between an atomic generator and an atomic power-store, or acc.u.mulator, is clearly shown. We haven"t an adequate _source_ of power."
McLaurin sighed slowly, and rose to his feet. "What can we do?"
"Thank our lucky stars that Faragaut here, and I, bought up all the mercury in the system, and had it brought to Earth. We at least have a supply of materials for the atostors."
"They don"t seem to do much good."
"They"re the best we"ve got. All the photocells on Earth and Venus and Mercury are at present busy storing the sun"s power in atostors. I have two thousand tons of charged mercury in our tanks here in the "Lunar Bank.""
"Much good that will do--they can just pull and pull and pull till it"s all gone. A starfish isn"t strong, but he can open the strongest oyster just because he can pull from now on. You may have a lot of power--but."
"But--we also have those new fifteen-foot UV beams. And one fifteen-foot UV beam is worth, theoretically, nine five-foot beams, and practically, a dozen. We have a dozen of them. Remember, this place was designed not only to protect itself, but Earth, too."
"They can still pull, can"t they?"
"They"ll stop pulling when they get their fingers burned. In the meantime, why not use some of those IP ships to bring in a few more cargoes of charged mercury?"
"They aren"t good for much else, are they? I wonder if those fellows have anything more we don"t know?"
"Oh, probably. I"m going to work on that crumbler thing. That"s the first consideration now."
"Why?"
"So we can move a ship. As it is, even those two we built aren"t any good."
"Would they be anyway?"
"Well--I think I might disturb those gentlemen slightly. Remember, they each have a nose-beam eighteen feet across. Exceedingly unpleasant customers."