Two Worlds for Conquest!
When Luda had given him the entire picture, Cloud saw that it was far from bright. Darjeeb’s coup had been planned with surpassing care and been executed brilliantly; his spies and fifth columnists had known exactly what to do and had done it in perfect synchronization with the armed forces striking from without. Drugged, betrayed by her own officers, Luda had been carried off without a struggle. She did not know just how far-reaching the stroke had been, but she feared that most of the fortresses were now held by the enemy.
Uhal probably had the advantage in numbers and in power of soldiers and warships then upon Lune—Darjeeb would not have made his bid unless he had been able in some way to get around the treaty of strict equality in armament. Dhil was, however, much the nearer of the two worlds. Therefore, if this initial advantage could be overcome, Dhil’s main forces could be brought into action much sooner than could the enemy’s. And if, in addition, the vortex could be extinguished before it had done too much irreparable damage, neither side would have any real tactical advantage and the conflict would subside instead of flaring up into another world-girdling holocaust.
Cloud would have to do something, but what? That vortex had to be snuffed out—but defended as it was by Uhalians in the air and upon the ground, how could he make the approach?
His vortex-bombing flitter was screened only against the frequencies of atomic disintegration; she could not ward off for a minute the beams of even the feeblest ship of war. His cruiser was clothed to stop anything short of a mauler’s primary blasts, but there was no possible way of using her as a vehicle from which to bomb the vortex out of existence. He had to analyze the thing first, preferably from a fixed ground-station. Then, too, his special instruments were all in the flitter, and the cruiser had no bomb-tubes.
How could he use what he had to clear a station? The cruiser had no offensive beams, no ordinary bombs, no negabombs.
“Draw me a map, will you please, Luda?” he asked.
She did so. The cratered vortex, where an immense building had once been; the ring of fortresses, two of which were unusually far apart, separated by a parkway and a shallow lagoon.
“Shallow? How deep?” Cloud interrupted. She indicated a depth of a couple of feet.
“That’s enough map then—thanks.” The physicist ruminated. “You seem to be quite an engineer. Can you give me details on your power plants, screen generators, and so on?” She could. Complex mathematical equations flashed through his mind, each leaving a residue of fact.
“Can be done, maybe—depends.” He turned to the Chickladorian.
“Are you a pilot, or just an emergency assignment?”
“Pilot—master pilot. Rating unlimited, tonnage or space.”
“Good! Think you’re in shape to take three thousand centimeters of acceleration?”
“Pretty sure of it. If I was right I could take it standing on my head without a harness, and I’m feeling better all the time. Let’s hot her up and find out.”
“Not until after we’ve unloaded the passengers somewhere.” Cloud went on, with the aid of Luda’s map, to explain exactly what he had in mind.
“Afraid it can’t be done.” The pilot shook his head glumly. “Your timing has got to be too ungodly fine. I can do the piloting—determine power-to-mass ratio, measure the blast, and so on. I’m not afraid of balancing her down on her tail. I can hold her steady to a centimeter, but piloting’s only half the job you want. Pilots don’t ever land on a constant blast, and the leeway you allow here is damn near zero. To hit it as close as you want, your timing has got to be accurate pretty near to a tenth of a second. You don’t know it, friend, but it’d take a master computer an hour to—”
“I know all about that. I’m a master computer and I’ll have everything figured. I’ll give you your zero in plenty of time.”
“QX, then—what are we waiting for?”
“To unload the passengers. Luda, do you know of a place where they will be safe? And maybe you had better send a message to Dhil, to call out your army and navy. We can’t blow out that vortex until we control the city, both in the air and on the ground.”
“That message was sent long since. They are even now in space. We will land your women there.” She pointed to a spot upon the plate.
They landed, but three of the women would not leave the vessel. The Manarkan declared that she had to stay aboard to take care of the patient. What would happen if he passed out again, with nobody except laymen around? She was right, Cloud conceded. And she could take it. She was a Manarkan, built of whalebone and rubber. She would bend under 3+ G’s, but she wouldn’t break.
The squatty insisted upon staying. Since when had a woman of Tominga hidden from danger or run away from a good fight? She could help the pilot hold his head up through an acceleration that would put Cloud into a pack—or give her that dureum axe and she’d show him how it ought to be swung!
The Chickladorian girl, too, remained aboard. Her eyes—not pink, but a deep, cool green, brimming with unshed tears—flashed at the idea of leaving her man to die alone. She just knew that they were all going to die. Even if she couldn’t be of any use, even if she did have to be in a hammock, what of it? If her Thlaskin died she was going to die too, and that was all there was to it. If they made her go ashore she’d cut her own throat right then, so there!
And that was that.
A dozen armed Dhilians came aboard, as pre-arranged, and the cruiser blasted off. Then, while Thlaskin was maneuvering inert, to familiarize himself with the controls and to calibrate the blast, Cloud brought out the four semi-portable projectors. They were frightful weapons, so heavy that it took a strong man to lift one upon Earth. So heavy that they were designed to be mounted upon a massive tripod while in use. They carried no batteries or accumulators, but were powered by tight beams from the mother ship.
Luda was right; such weapons were unknown in that solar system. They had no beam transmission of power. The Dhilian warriors radiated glee as they studied the things. They had more powerful stuff, of course, but it was all fixed-mount, wired solid and far too heavy to move. This was wonderful—these were magnificent weapons indeed!
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High above the stratosphere, inert, the pilot found his exact location and flipped the cruiser around, so that her stern pointed directly toward his objective upon the planet beneath. Then, using his forward, braking jets as drivers, he blasted her straight downward. She struck atmosphere almost with a thud. Only her fiercely-driven meteorite-screens and wall-shields kept her intact.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, chum,” the pilot remarked conversationally as the scene enlarged upon his plate with appalling rapidity. “I’ve made hot landings before, but I always figured on having a hair or two of leeway. If you don’t hit this to a hundredth we’re going to splash when we strike—we won’t bounce!”
“I can compute zero time to a thousandth and I can set the clicker to within a hundredth, but it’s you that’ll have to do the real hitting.” Cloud grinned back at the iron-nerved pilot. “Sure a four-second call is enough for you to get your rhythm, allow for reaction-time and lag, and blast exactly on the click?”
“Absolutely. If I can’t get it in four I can’t get it at all. Pretty close now, ain’t it?”
“Uh-huh.” Cloud, staring at the electro-magnetic reflection-altimeter which indicated continuously their exact distance above objective, began to sway his shoulders. He was more than a master computer. He knew, without being able to explain how he knew, every mathematical fact and factor of the problem. Its solution was complete. He knew the exact point in space and the exact instant in time at which the calculated deceleration must begin; by the aid of the sweep second-hand of the chronometer—one full revolution of the dial every second—he was now setting the clicking mechanism so that it would announce that instant. His hand swayed back and forth—a finger snapped down—and the sharp-toned instrument began to give out its crisp, precisely-spaced clicks.
“Got it on the hair!” Cloud snapped. “Get ready, Thlaskin. Seconds! Four! Three! Two! One! Click!”
Exactly upon the click the cruiser’s driving blasts smashed on. There was a cruelly wrenching shock as everything aboard acquired suddenly a more-than-three-times-Earthly weight.
The Dhilians merely twitched. The Tomigan, standing behind the pilot’s seat, supporting and steadying his wounded head in its rest, settled almost imperceptibly, but her firmly gentle hands did not yield a millimeter. The nurse sank deeply into the cushioned bench upon which she was lying, her quick, bright eyes remaining fixed upon her patient. The Chickladorian girl, in her hammock, fainted quietly.
And downward the big ship hurtled, tail first, directly toward the now glowing screens of a fortress. Driving jets are not orthodox weapons. But properly applied, they can become efficient ones indeed, and these were being applied with micrometric exactitude.
Down—down—down! The frantic Uhalians thought that it was crashing—thought it a suicide ship. Nevertheless, they fought it. The threatened fortress and its neighbors hurled out their every beam; the Uhalian ships dived frantically at the invader and tried their best to blast her down.
In vain. The cruiser’s screens carried the load effortlessly.
Down she drove. The fortress’ screens flamed ever brighter, radiating ever higher under the terrific bombardment. Closer—hotter! Nor did the frightful blast waver appreciably; the Chickladorian was a master pilot. Down!
“Set up a plus ten, Thlaskin,” Cloud ordered quietly. “I missed it a bit—air density and the beams. Give it to her on the third click from … this!”
“Plus ten it is, sir—on!”
A bare hundred yards now, and the ship of space was still plunging earthward at terrific speed. The screens were furiously incandescent, but were still holding.
A hundred feet. Velocity appallingly high, the enemy’s screens still up. Something would have to give now. If that screen stood up, the ship must surely strike it, and vanish as she did so. But Thlaskin the Chickladorian made no move nor spoke no word to hike his blast. If the skipper was willing to bet his own life on his computations, who was he to squawk? But … was it possible that Cloud had miscalculated?
No! While the mighty vessel’s driving projectors were still a few yards away the defending screens exploded into blackness. The full awful streams of energy raved directly into the structures beneath. Metal and stone glared white, then flowed—sluggishly at first, but ever faster and more mobile—then boiled coruscantly into vapor.
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The cruiser slowed—stopped—seemed to hang poised. Then slowly, reluctantly, she moved upward, her dreadful exhausts continuing the devastation.
“That’s computin’, mister,” the pilot breathed. “To figure a dive like that right on the nose an’ then to have the guts to hold her cold—skipper, that’s computation!”
“All yours, pilot,” Cloud demurred. “All I did was give you the dope—you’re the guy that made it good.”
High in the stratosphere the Chickladorian cut the acceleration to a thousand and Cloud took stock.
“Hurt, anybody?” Nobody was. “QX. We’ll repeat, then, on the other side of the lagoon.”
And as the cruiser began to descend upon the new course the vengeful Dhilian fleet arrived upon the scene. Looping, diving, beaming, often crashing in suicidal collision, the two factions went maniacally to war. Friend and foe alike, however, avoided the plunging Tellurian ship. That monster, they had learned, was a thing about which they could do nothing.
The second fortress fell exactly as the first had fallen, and as the pilot brought the cruiser gently to ground in the middle of the shallow lake, Cloud saw that the Dhilians, overwhelmingly superior in numbers now, had cleared the air of the ships of Uhal.
“Can you fellows and your ships keep them off of my flitter while I take my readings?” he demanded.
“We can,” the natives radiated, happily. Four of the armored bone-heads were wearing the semi-portables. They had them perched lightly atop their feeding heads, held immovably in place by two huge arms apiece. One hand sufficed to operate the controls, leaving two hands free to whatever else might prove in order.
“Let us out!”
The lock opened, the Dhilian warriors sprang out and splashed away to meet the foot-soldiers who were already advancing into the lagoon.
Cloud watched pure carnage for a few minutes. He hoped—yes, there they were! The loyalists, seeing that their cause was not lost after all, had hastily armed themselves and were coming into the fray. There would be no tanks—the navy would see to that.
The Blaster broke out his flitter then, set it down near the vortex, and made his observations. Everything was normal. The sigma curve was the spectacularly unpredictable thing which he had come to expect. He selected three bombs from the cruiser’s vast store, loaded them into the tubes, and lofted. He set his screens, adjusted his goggles, and waited, while far above him and wide around him his guardian Dhilian war-vessels toured watchfully, their drumming blasts a reassuring thunder.
He waited, eyeing the sigma curve as it flowed backward from the tracing pen, until finally he could get a satisfactory ten-second prediction. That is, he knew that ten seconds thence, the activity of the vortex would match, closely enough, one of his bombs. He shot his flitter forward, solving instantaneously the problems of velocity and trajectory. At exactly the correct instant he released the bomb. He swung his little bomber aside, went inertialess….
The bomb sped truly. Into that awful crater, through that fantastic hell of heat and of lethal radiation and of noxious gas. It struck the vortex itself, dead center. It penetrated just deeply enough. The extremely refractory casing of neocarballoy, so carefully computed as to thickness, held just long enough. The carefully-weighed charge of duodec exploded, its energy and that of the vortex combining in a detonation whose like no inhabitant of that solar system had even dimly imagined.
The gases and the pall of smoke and pulverized tufa blew aside; the frightful waves of fluid lava quieted down. The vortex was out and would remain out. The Vortex Blaster went back to his cruiser and stored his flitter away.
“Oh, you did it—thanks! I didn’t believe, really, that you—that anybody—could do it!” Luda was almost hysterical in her joyous relief.
“Nothing to it,” Cloud deprecated. “How are your folks coming along with the mopping up?”
“Practically clean,” Luda answered, grimly. “We now know who is who, I think. Those who fought against us or who did not fight for us very soon will be dead. But the Uhalian fleet comes. Does yours? Ours goes to meet it in moments.”
“Wait a minute!” Cloud sat down at his plate, made observations and measurements, calculated mentally. He energized his longest-range communicator and conferred briefly.
“The Uhalian fleet will be here in seven hours and eighteen minutes. If your people go out to meet them it will mean a war that not even the Patrol can stop without destroying practically all of the ships and men you have in space. The Patrol flotilla will arrive in seven hours, thirty-one minutes. Therefore I suggest that you hold your fleet here, in formation but quiescent, under instructions not to move until you yourself signal them to do so, while you and I go out and see if we can’t stop the Uhalians.”
“Stop them?” Luda’s thought was a distinctly unladylike one. “What with, pray?”
“I don’t know,” Cloud confessed, “but it wouldn’t do any harm to try, would it?”
“No—probably not.” And so it was done.
All the way out Cloud pondered ways and means. As the cruiser neared the on-rushing fleet he sent a quick thought to Luda:
“Darjeeb is undoubtedly with that fleet. He knows that this is the only inertialess ship in this part of space. He wants it worse than he wants anything else in the universe. Now, if we could only make him listen to reason—if we could make him see—”
He broke off. No soap. You couldn’t explain “green” to the blind. These folks didn’t know and wouldn’t believe what real power was. Any one of those oncoming Patrol super-dreadnoughts could blast both of these combined fleets clear out of space. Those primary beams were starkly incredible to anyone who had never seen them in action. The Uhalians didn’t stand the chance of a fly under a mallet, but they would have to be killed before they’d believe it. A damned shame, too. The joy, the satisfaction, the real advancement possible only through cooperation with each other and with the millions of races of Galactic Civilization—if there were only some means of making them believe—
“We—and they—do believe!” Luda broke in upon his somber musings.
“Huh? What? You do? You were listening?” Cloud exclaimed.
“Certainly. At your first thought I put myself en rapport with Darjeeb, and he and his people—all of us—listened to your thoughts.”
“But—you really believe me?”
“We believe, all of us, but some will cooperate only as far as it seems to serve their own ends to do so. Your Lensmen, if they are able to, will undoubtedly have to kill that insect Darjeeb and—”
The insulted Uhalian drove in a protesting thought, but Luda went calmly on, “You think, then, Tellurian, that your Lensmen can cope with even such as Darjeeb of Uhal?”
“I’ll say they can!”
“It is well, then. Come aboard, Darjeeb—unarmed and unarmored, as I am. We will together go to confer with these visiting Lensmen of Galactic Civilization. It is understood that there is to be no warfare until our return.”
“Holy Klono!” Cloud gasped. “He wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“Certainly.” Luda was surprised at the question. “Although he is an insect, and is morally and ethically beneath contempt, he is, after all, a reasoning being.”
“QX.” Cloud was dumbfounded, but tried manfully not to show it. “In that case everything can be settled without another blow being struck.”
Darjeeb came aboard the cruiser. He was heavily bandaged and most of his hands were useless, but he apparently bore no ill-will whatever. Cloud gave orders; the ship flashed away to meet the oncoming Patrolmen.
The conference was held, coming out precisely as Luda had foreseen. The fleets returned, each to its home world, and plenipotentiaries of Dhil and of Uhal held long meetings with the Lensmen.
“You won’t need me any more, will you, Admiral?” Cloud asked, a few days later.
“No. Nice job, Cloud.”
“Thanks. I think I’ll be on my way, then—clear ether!” And the Vortex Blaster, after taking leave of his other new friends, resumed his interrupted voyage—having added another solar system to the fellowship of Galactic Civilization!
^^^
This story, by E.E. Smith, PhD, originally appeared in Astonishing Stories, October 1942.
