“Gentlemen, a space man-o’-war is essentially no different from a large submarine. It is not and will not be a gigantic aircraft, up for a few hours or days and then back to solid ground again. Sloppy discipline, lack of routine, and bad morale are relatively unimportant to aircraft. But in a space man-o’-war we will have to return to the days of Nelson to discover the means of keeping crews in close confinement, in strict and alert obedience for possible years at a time.
“Have you ever thought of planetary blockade? I think not. Have you ever conceived the mathematics necessary to space gunnery where one ship’s speed combined with its opponent’s may amount to hundreds of light-speeds? I think not.
“A man-o’-war is essentially a gun platform. She is devoted to seeking and destroying enemies, to blockading and to punishing whole communities. She is a vibrant life force in herself and is not only a complicated mechanism of machinery but also a complicated and intricate problem in humanity.
“If you, gentlemen, with your aircraft, your infantry and your space transports, can solve these problems, then I willingly abandon this fight for my service. But you have not solved them, gentlemen. And there will come a time when the very existence of Earth itself will depend upon the learning and tradition which has now its last repository in a service you are disbanding—the United States Navy.”
They smiled and the chairman thanked him. And they cut off the last appropriation. And sitting here in the dark and rain with the final orders like an ache in his mind, old Admiral Barnell knew how much he had failed. But he was failing not only himself. He was failing the few hundred bright young officers and technicians and the few thousand men who remained. He was failing John Paul and Farragut. And he was failing Earth.
He was stiff and cold when he rose. Tomorrow he would have to brace into the last task. He had better go home and get some rest. He had dismissed his aide earlier with his car and he went down to the gate to find a cab. The two Marines in the box, apprehensive and sensing the doom which was overtaking their proud service in common with the Navy, hurriedly stood to attention while the corporal of the guard ducked across the street to the cab stand.
The old admiral stood, unseeing, beside the guardroom table, steadying himself with one hand. He felt strangely ill. The evening paper was under his fingers where the corporal had hastily dropped it. To distract himself from the way the room had sought to tip, he looked fixedly at the headlines.
COLONY BLOWN UP
JOHNSONVILLE ON TWAIN DESTROYED
EXPEDITION REPORTS DISASTER
Barnell shook his head sadly and was about to put the paper away from him when the text caught his eye:
“According to the expedition commander, the attack must have come from outer space. The 116th Cavalry post and the 96th Antiaircraft Battery were evidently unwarned and the majority of the soldiers were found in the ruins of their buildings. The entire area was still radioactive and Expeditionary Engineer Martin Thomas expressed the opinion that a crude order of atomic fission had been used, such as plutonium. The planes of the Twain continental patrol were still in their hangars.
“Discounting all possibility of alien invaders, pointing out that foodstuffs and equipment which would be known and useful only to men had been looted and that the wealth of Johnsonville radium had been the evident goal of the raiders, Extraterrestrial Secretary Sime warned against panic. ‘Earth,’ he said, ‘is amply and adequately protected against such raids and has been for the past century. There has been no relaxation of the atomic defense organizations nor will there be. This is obviously the work of some antisocial group of men who have possessed themselves of the means for one raid. We do not expect any repetition. I have asked the Army to send relief transports and further garrison to these invaluable possessions. . . .’”
Barnell had been holding the paper closer and closer to his face as he read. Now he thrust it from him with an anger which tore it. At that moment the corporal of the guard, startled by the expression on the admiral’s face and the sound of the paper, stood stiffly to attention.
“Your cab, sir.”
“Confound the cab! No, keep it there. Where’s your phone? Where’s your phone?” He snatched it off the desk and called the civil airfield.
The Navy had no planes now, having long since lost them to the Air Command of the Department of Military Defense. But his quarterdeck voice brought the admiral a civilian plane on charter in less than a minute. He rang again and futilely fumed into the mouthpiece at aides who disappeared when they were needed. Leaving orders for Lieutenant Mandville to follow him as soon as possible, he got into the cab, headed for the airport. Ten minutes later he was roaring upward through the rain toward the nation’s capital.
Washington received him coolly. It had no time at the moment for admirals. Officialdom was trying to press into service transport by which to send to outflung colonies the means of defending themselves against raids, and was discovering that whereas spaceships could carry men and animals and baggage with ease, the number of ships available which could transport a 10,000-ton psi-screen dynamo was exactly none.
Old Admiral Barnell spent what he considered three precious hours trying to catch Extraterrestrial Sime. Cooling his heels in that gentleman’s office put Barnell in no mood for further attempts. He took himself on an even more complicated search, the discovery of Defense Secretary Montgrove.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon before Admiral Barnell could finally lay a few salvos across the desk at this florid politician. Montgrove had been distractedly cordial at first greeting but that had cooled quickly when the admiral’s proposal was only half stated.
“My dear sir,” interrupted Montgrove, “you fail to realize that you have not, in all your organization, one man competent to pilot and navigate a space vessel. Further, there is no existing appropriation—”
Barnell exploded. “Confound the appropriations! Are you not aware, sir, that out there somewhere is a condemned, cowardly crew—a pirate, sir, a condemned pirate! And since when, in all the annals of time, can you find where the Army has run down pirates? You can’t, sir. I defy you to, sir. And all the antiattack forces in the world, mounted around the colonies, will not do more than protect the immediate confines of some town. Sir, you don’t understand the situation. It is beyond you, sir. And I am going beyond you, sir. I am going to the president by right of national security. Forbid me to see him, sir. I defy you to forbid me!”
Montgrove had been raised a ward heeler for all his bluster. He folded fast before the noble rage of old Barnell and was heard to utter a relieved “Whew!” when that officer had gone his angry way.
But the president, like all presidents, had “entrusted these matters to competent authority and reliable men” and “disliked to interfere with the duties of his departments.”
“You have no department with that duty, Mr. President,” said old Barnell. “I respectfully ask you to call any or all of your departments to discover whether or not there is a single effort afoot to patrol planets in outer space or even to perform that most vital function, the seeking out and shooting into splinters, sir, shooting into splinters of that condemned pirate!”
“There has never been an occasion,” said the president, “to delegate such a duty, but I am sure the Department of Air has some thought for this.”
“Call them!” demanded Barnell.
The call was made and then several calls. And at last, with a puzzled look on his face, the president stared at the old admiral.
“They hadn’t,” he said slowly, “thought of it. Not until just now. I—” His phone rang and he picked it up, talked for a moment and looked relieved. “Well,” he said, brightening, “I was wrong. The Army is going to man a transport and send it out looking.”
“A what?” cried Barnell.
“Why, a transport. One of their troopcraft. I imagine—”
“Mr.
President,” said the admiral, “since time immemorial the Army has had troop transports. And since the first day they got them the Navy has been pulling them off rocks and convoying them through danger.”
“But you have no crews. You have no competent navigators—”
And now Admiral Barnell could smile craggily. “Mr. President, in the past hundred and some years we have had very little work for our officers. We were called the idle service and the burden on the public purse. So we have been happy to loan officers to private enterprises.” He leaned forward in triumph. “Thirty percent of the membership roll of the Explorers Club is composed of naval officers or ex-naval officers. Navigation, sir, is the Navy’s strong forte! I have the men!”
This was a stopper to objection. But only for a moment. “My dear admiral, even if, as you say, naval officers have been commanding private expeditions for a very long time into space, there is still the matter of a ship. I am sure your sea vessels cannot cope with space, and I am equally sure that funds could not be made available in so short a time to purchase such a ship—”
“Mr. President, what are those things which whir past Washington every day hundreds of miles out? Sir, they are satellites.”
“But satellites! Good heavens! They’ve been abandoned for these many years. Just the other day the Army engineers were debating whether or not it was worthwhile to salvage them. They decided that until they were proved a serious menace to navigation they should remain—”
“I want those satellites!” said Barnell. “The Army put them out there a couple of hundred years ago. There is no corrosion in space. They have never served any purpose whatever. Now I want them.”
“But what could you possibly do with them?”
“A naval vessel is a gun platform. I’ve got the guns. I’ve got guns that will shoot charge enough to destroy a town five hundred miles away. But they need a platform—”
“This is going to take money,” said the president, getting confused.
“I have several old naval bases, two Navy yards and a few ships to sell for scrap. I can raise a hundred and ninety million dollars in twenty-four hours and use it, if you will direct that all naval property be struck off as expended.”
“Isn’t that a war measure?”
“This is war,” said old Barnell. And he so thoroughly looked it that by six he was in the one remaining office the Navy had left in the Defense Building, burning phone wires, authority gripped in a big, seamanlike hand.
And outside the window a newsboy was hawking his wares with “Mines on Ballerdice Raided! Five Hundred Dead in New Disaster! Army dispatching forces to stop space raider. Read all about it!”
Barnell didn’t care to read. From the files he had records of thirteen officers, engineers, ordnance men, former expedition men and electronics experts. And by long distance they were replying to his barked commands, “Aye, aye, sir. Right away, sir.”
Mandville, the aide, a harassed young man, entered, already briefed by the old chief yeoman in the outer office, somewhat stunned by all this activity in a place which had slept for generations.
“Any orders, sir?” said Mandville.
“Yes!” barked Barnell. “Get the chief of supplies and accounts and start him unloading naval property and have him grab up, commandeer if necessary, every scrap of space equipment on the continent not already in Army hands. Get recruiting to grab, press-gang if necessary, every space mechanic they can find. Tell hydrographic to collect all the space charts they can locate. And have ordnance down at Portsmouth start getting ready to receive Commander Stapleton tomorrow when he goes down to break out guns!”
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Oh, yes. Have somebody bring me in some dinner. On the double.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The United States Navy had begun to move into space.
During the ensuing days, while the newspapers unknowingly played up Army relief attempts and civilian experts offered sage opinions on how to make a colony safe, Admiral Barnell and a frantic staff scooped together the ingredients of the first space battleship. It would be cumbersome and uncomfortable and it would never be able to land anywhere. But it could carry guns—missile atom guns and lots of them.
In their files they had found the design, drawn by a naval architect long since dead, of an “ideal” space dreadnought. It had features which they could not even approximate, not for lack of technology but for lack of time. Appended to that drawing were a series of comments which had followed its publication in a magazine after the Navy had smiled on it. Chief among those comments was one which hurt.
“Who would be so stupid as to drain the public treasuries for the construction of such a useless monstrosity? It cannot carry freight. Its two-hundred-and-fifty-man crew would be useless in any construction project. Its bases would place undesirable populations in the vicinity of our colonies. . . .”
They could not build that battleship. They could not even attempt it. But it had several features which they used. Its principles were sound. A space man-o’-war would have to be able to depart from any course and assume new courses hurriedly. This meant “side-wheeler” drives which were mounted in turrets like guns and which could be swung in any direction, imparting, without upsetting the ship itself, new courses. Four such drives were instantly begun—exterior engine rooms to be fitted in a girdle around a hull.
The next principle was conservation of air in event of hits, which meant intricate compartmentation. The satellites had this but they planned to double it.
The next principle was steady gravity. An electronically inclined commander, by a simple device, tuned the ordinary gravity circuits to the engine throttles so that all acceleration would be attended by proper resetting of gravity, a thing which would keep men comfortable and, more important, would make for steadiness at the guns.
Another principle was the ordnance recoil adjuster which operated to adjust automatically the turret engines each time hits upset the speed and direction of the vessel.
A detector arrangement was developed and built in two hectic days which, using fifth-order magnetism, instantly located anything within four light-years and trained the guns upon it. They stripped twenty cargo vessels, hurriedly commandeered, of their drives to fit up the four turrets. They gutted them of gear. They compounded their meteor force screens into a kind of force armor. Then, in a mad scramble, they loaded all they had in the twelve freighters they had chartered and roared out in a ragged flotilla to intercept the first satellite. Out of the eight satellites available, Commander Simpson had chosen this one in an initial scout. But even so, its long-disused condition made the Navy men heavy of heart when they grappled to its sides and boarded.
These satellites had been built by dumping materiel in orbit and then assembling it in space at the speed of twenty-five thousand miles an hour. It had been quite a feat at the time—two hundred years before. The engineer and spotting crews, alert for atomic work below, had idly rebuilt the interiors now and then so that little of the original was as it had been planned.
Nevertheless, despite the ragged and insecure bulkheads, the ancient metal, the fouled oxygen machinery and a hundred other drawbacks, Admiral Barnell tackled the work with a fury before which anything would have surrendered.
Bluejackets in spacesuits swarmed over the old satellite, burning and welding, fitting and throwing away. For some thousand years or more before that ancient time, sailors had carried well the repute of getting things done. And their ingenuity was displayed now in a hundred ways.
For two weeks, living aboard the grappled freighters which remained while the balance ferried up new materials, officers and men hammered away at the satellite. And then, out there in the absolute zero of space, unattended by throngs or bands, old Admiral Barnell and his bluejackets cracked a bottle of champagne across her hitherto unchristened bows and blazoned upon her nose in red
lead the scrawled name “USS Constitution.”
A brief pause of pride and a few shy grins to hide emotion and that weary, grimy lot heaved aboard her supplies, pulled her throttles and broke her out of the orbit which she had followed for two centuries as a hulk.
Old Ironsides did not at first lend herself to man-o’-war routine. She was crude, cold and uncomfortable. Her “Officers’ Country” was a ledge of bunks with no springs just abaft her bridge. Crew’s berthing was anywhere a man could find to put his blankets down and not get stepped on. The galley for the first week consisted of burning torches aimed precariously at coffee pots. Her battle stations were wherever a man thought he should be when action came.
But there was Navy about her. Not just in the dungarees and the lace on the officers’ dirty caps. Boatswains’ pipes peepled and shrilled through her and commands were received with a cheery aye, aye. Where she was going now, heading out well over ten light-speeds and building up, up, up with every hour under the able hands of her conning officers, was known only to her captain and Admiral Barnell.
Her captain, “Ten-Ike Mike” McGranger, had received his orders in a brisk, brief quarterdeck snap and he was obeying them. He was a full captain and the veteran of five space expeditions on loan to the Explorers Club, and he had ten officers who had tasted space before.
“Sir,” said Admiral Barnell, “you will head in the general direction of Twain with all speed and there rendezvous with supply vessels. You will not, under any circumstances, contemplate the landing of this ship anywhere, since I conceive that battleships, to be effective, must be big enough to fight and that’s too big to handle alongside a planet. You will keep all detectors alert and report any other craft. And you will hold the usual drill and general quarters to fit the men for their duties. The ship is yours. I shall not interfere. Carry on.”