Masters of Space

  XIII

  For many weeks the production of Ardan warships and missiles had beenspiraling upward.

  Half a mountain range of solid rock had been converted into fabricatedsuper-steel and armament. Superdreadnoughts Were popping into existenceat the rate of hundreds per minute. Missiles were rolling off the endsof assembly lines like half-pint tin cans out of can-making machines.

  The Strett warcraft, skeletons and missiles, would emerge into normalspace anywhere within a million miles of Ardvor. The Ardan missiles werepowered for an acceleration of one hundred gravities. That much the Kedybrains, molded solidly into teflon-lined, massively braced steelspheres, could just withstand.

  To be certain of breaking the Strett screens, an impact velocity ofabout six miles per second was necessary. The time required to attainthis velocity was about ten seconds, and the flight distance somethingover thirty miles.

  Since the Stretts could orient themselves in less than one second afteremergence, even this extremely tight packing of missiles--only sixtymiles apart throughout the entire emergence volume of space--would stillgive the Stretts the initiative by a time-ratio of more than ten to one.

  Such tight packing was of course impossible. It called for many billionsof defenders instead of the few millions it was possible for the Omansto produce in the time they had. In fact, the average spacing was wellover ten thousand miles when the invading horde of Strett missilesemerged and struck.

  _How_ they struck!

  There was nothing of finesse about that attack; nothing of skill or oftactics: nothing but the sheer brute force of overwhelming superiorityof numbers and of over-matching power. One instant all space was empty.The next instant it was full of invading missiles--a superb exhibitionof coordination and timing.

  And the Kedy control, upon which the defenders had counted so heavily,proved useless. For each Strett missile, within a fraction of a secondof emergence, darted toward the nearest Oman missile with anacceleration that made the one-hundred-gravity defenders seem to bestanding still.

  One to one, missiles crashed into missiles and detonated. There were nosolid or liquid end-products. Each of those frightful weapons carried somany megatons-equivalent of atomic concentrate that all nearby spaceblossomed out into superatomic blasts hundreds of times more violentthan the fireballs of lithium-hydride fusion bombs.

  For a moment even Hilton was stunned; but only for a moment.

  "Kedy!" he barked. "Get your big stuff out there! Use the boosters!" Hestarted for the door at a full run. "That tears it--that _really_ tearsit! Scrap the plan. I'll board the _Sirius_ and take the task-force toStrett. Bring your stuff along, Skipper, as soon as you're ready."

  * * * * *

  Ardan superdreadnoughts in their massed thousands poured out throughArdvor's one-way screen. Each went instantly to work. Now the Kedycontrol system, doing what it was designed to do, proved its full worth.For the weapons of the big battle-wagons did not depend uponacceleration, but were driven at the speed of light; and Grand FleetOperations were planned and were carried out at the almost infinitevelocity of thought itself.

  Or, rather, they were not planned at all. They were simply carried out,immediately and without confusion.

  For all the Kedys were one. Each Kedy element, without any lapse of timewhatever for consultation with any other, knew exactly where every otherelement was; exactly what each was doing; and exactly what he himselfshould do to make maximum contribution to the common cause.

  Nor was any time lost in relaying orders to crewmen within the ship.There were no crewmen. Each Kedy element was the sole personnel of, andwas integral with, his vessel. Nor were there any wires or relays toimpede and slow down communication. Operational instructions, too, weretransmitted and were acted upon with thought's transfinite speed. Thus,if decision and execution were not quite mathematically simultaneous,they were separated by a period of time so infinitesimally small as tobe impossible of separation.

  Wherever a Strett missile was, or wherever a Strett skeleton-shipappeared, an Oman beam reached it, usually in much less than one second.Beam clung to screen--caressingly, hungrily--absorbing its total energyand forming the first-stage booster. Then, three microseconds later,that booster went off into a ragingly incandescent, glaringly violentburst of fury so hellishly, so inconceivably hot that less than athousandth of its total output of energy was below the very top of thevisible spectrum!

  If the previous display of atomic violence had been so spectacular andof such magnitude as to defy understanding or description, what of this?When hundreds of thousands of Kedys, each wielding world-wrecking powersas effortlessly and as deftly and as precisely as thought, attacked anddestroyed millions of those tremendously powerful war-fabrications ofthe Stretts? The only simple answer is that all nearby space might verywell have been torn out of the most radiant layers of S-Doradus itself.

  * * * * *

  Hilton made the hundred yards from office door to curb in just overtwelve seconds. Larry was waiting. The car literally burned a hole inthe atmosphere as it screamed its way to Ardane Field.

  It landed with a thump. Heavy black streaks of synthetic rubber markedthe pavement as it came to a screeching, shrieking stop at theflagship's main lock. And, in the instant of closing that lock's outerportal, all twenty-thousand-plus warships of the task force took off asone at ten gravities. Took off, and in less than one minute went intooverdrive.

  All personal haste was now over. Hilton went up into what he stillthought of as the "control room," even though he knew that there were nocontrols, nor even any instruments, anywhere aboard. He knew what hewould find there. Fast as he had acted, Temple had not had as far to goand she had got there first.

  He could not have said, for the life of him, how he actually felt aboutthis direct defiance of his direct orders. He walked into the room, satdown beside her and took her hand.

  "I told you to stay home, Temple," he said.

  "I know you did. But I'm not only the assistant head of your PsychologyDepartment. I'm your wife, remember? 'Until death do us part.' And ifthere's any way in the universe I can manage it, death isn't going topart us--at least, this one isn't. If this is it, we'll go together."

  "I know, sweetheart." He put his arm around her, held her close. "As apsych I wouldn't give a whoop. You'd be expendable. But as my wife,especially now that you're pregnant, you aren't. You're a lot moreimportant to the future of our race than I am."

  She stiffened in the circle of his arm. "What's _that_ crack supposed tomean? Think I'd ever accept a synthetic zombie imitation of you for myhusband and go on living with it just as though nothing had happened?"

  Hilton started to say something, but Temple rushed heedlessly on:"_Drat_ the race! No matter how many children we ever have you werefirst and you'll _stay_ first, and if you have to go I'll go, too, sothere! Besides, you know darn well that they can't duplicate whatever itis that makes you Jarvis Hilton."

  "Now wait a minute, Tempy. The conversion ..."

  "Yes, the conversion," she interrupted, triumphantly. "The thing I'mtalking about is immaterial--untouchable--they didn't--couldn't--do anything about it at all. Kedy, will you please tell this big goofus thateven though you have got Jarvis Hilton's brain you aren't Jarvis Hiltonand never can be?"

  * * * * *

  The atmosphere of the room vibrated in the frequencies of a deep basslaugh. "You are trying to hold a completely untenable position, friendHilton. Any attempt to convince a mind of real power that falsity istruth is illogical. My advice is for you to surrender."

  That word hit Temple hard. "Not surrender, sweetheart. I'm not fightingyou. I never will." She seized both of his hands; tears welled into herglorious eyes. "It's just that I simply couldn't _stand_ it to go onliving without you!"

  "I know, darling." He got up and lifted her to her feet, so that shecould come properly into his arms. They stood there, silent andmotionless
, for minutes.

  Temple finally released herself and, after feeling for a handkerchiefshe did not have, wiped her eyes with a forefinger and then wiped thefinger on her bare leg. She grinned and turned to the Omans. "Prince,will you and Dark Lady please conjure us up a steak-and-mushroomssupper? They should be in the pantry ... since this _Sirius_ wasdesigned for us."

  After supper the two sat companionably on a davenport. "One thing aboutthis business isn't quite clear," Temple said. "Why all this tearingrush? They haven't got the booster or anything like it, or they'd haveused it. Surely it'll take them a long time to go from the mere analysisof the forces and fields we used clear through to the production andinstallation of enough weapons to stop this whole fleet?"

  "It surely won't. They've had the absorption principle for ages.Remember that first, ancient skeleton that drained all the power of oursuits and boats in nothing flat? From there it isn't too big a jump. Andas for producing stuff; uh-_uh_! If there's any limit to what they cando, I don't know what it is. If we don't slug 'em before they get it,it's curtains."

  "I see.... I'm afraid. We're almost there, darling."

  He glanced at the chronometer. "About eleven minutes. And of course Idon't need to ask you to stay out of the way."

  "Of course not. I won't interfere, no matter what happens. All I'm goingto do is hold your hand and pull for you with all my might."

  "That'll help, believe me. I'm mighty glad you're along, sweetheart.Even though both of us know you shouldn't be."

  * * * * *

  The task force emerged. Each ship darted toward its pre-assigned placein a mathematically exact envelope around the planet Strett.

  Hilton sat on a davenport strained and still. His eyes were closed andevery muscle tense. Left hand gripped the arm-rest so fiercely thatfingertips were inches deep in the leather-covered padding.

  The Stretts _knew_ that any such attack as this was futile. No movablestructure or any combination of such structures could possibly wieldenough power to break down screens powered by such engines as theirs.

  Hilton, however, knew that there was a chance. Not with the first-stageboosters, which were manipulable and detonable masses of ball lightning,but with those boosters' culminations, the Vangs; which were balllightning raised to the sixth power and which only the frightfulenergies of the boosters could bring into being.

  But, even with twenty-thousand-plus Vangs--or any larger number--successdepended entirely upon a nicety of timing never before approached andsupposedly impossible. Not only to thousandths of a microsecond, but toa small fraction of one such thousandth: roughly, the time it takeslight to travel three-sixteenths of an inch.

  It would take practically absolute simultaneity to overload to the pointof burnout to those Strett generators. They were the heaviest in theGalaxy.

  That was why Hilton himself had to be there. He could not possibly havedone the job from Ardvor. In fact, there was no real assurance that,even at the immeasurable velocity of thought and covering a mere millionmiles, he could do it even from his present position aboard one unit ofthe fleet. Theoretically, with his speed-up, he could. But that theoryhad yet to be reduced to practice.

  Tense and strained, Hilton began his countdown.

  Temple sat beside him. Both hands pressed his right fist against herbreast. Her eyes, too, were closed; she was as stiff and as still as washe. She was not interfering, but giving; supporting him, backing him,giving to him in full flood everything of that tremendous inner strengththat had made Temple Bells what she so uniquely was.

  On the exact center of the needle-sharp zero beat every Kedystruck. Gripped and activated as they all were by Hilton'skeyed-up-and-stretched-out mind, they struck in what was very closeindeed to absolute unison.

  Absorbing beams, each one having had precisely the same number ofmillimeters to travel, reached the screen at the same instant. Theyclung and sucked. Immeasurable floods of energy flashed from the Strettgenerators into those vortices to form twenty thousand-plus first-stageboosters.

  * * * * *

  But this time the boosters did not detonate.

  Instead, as energies continued to flood in at a frightfully acceleratingrate, they turned into something else. Things no Terran science has evereven imagined; things at the formation of which all neighboring spaceactually warped, and in that warping seethed and writhed and shuddered.The very sub-ether screamed and shrieked in protest as it, too, yieldedin starkly impossible fashions to that irresistible stress.

  How even those silicon-fluorine brains stood it, not one of them everknew.

  Microsecond by slow microsecond the Vangs grew and grew and grew. Theywere pulling not only the full power of the Ardan warships, but also theimmeasurably greater power of the strainingly overloaded Strettsiangenerators themselves. The ethereal and sub-ethereal writhings anddistortions and screamings grew worse and worse; harder and ever harderto bear.

  Imagine, if you can, a constantly and rapidly increasing mass ofplutonium--a mass already thousands of times greater than critical, butnot _allowed_ to react! That gives a faint and very inadequate pictureof what was happening then.

  Finally, at perhaps a hundred thousand times critical mass, and still inperfect sync, the Vangs all went off.

  The planet Strett became a nova.

  "We won! We _won_!" Temple shrieked, her perception piercing through thehellish murk that was all nearby space.

  "Not quite yet, sweet, but we're over the biggest hump," and the twoheld an impromptu, but highly satisfactory, celebration.

  Perhaps it would be better to say that the planet Strett became ajunior-grade nova, since the actual nova stage was purely superficialand did not last very long. In a couple of hours things had quieted downenough so that the heavily-screened warships could approach the planetand finish up their part of the job.

  Much of Strett's land surface was molten lava. Much of its water wasgone. There were some pockets of resistance left, of course, but theydid not last long. Equally of course the Stretts themselves, twenty-fivemiles underground, had not been harmed at all.

  But that, too, was according to plan.

  * * * * *

  Leaving the task force on guard, to counter any move the Stretts mightbe able to make, Hilton shot the _Sirius_ out to the planet's moon.There Sawtelle and his staff and tens of thousands of Omans and machineswere starting to work. No part of this was Hilton's job; so all he andTemple did was look on.

  Correction, please. That was not _all_ they did. But while resting andeating and loafing and sleeping and enjoying each other's company, bothwatched Operation Moon closely enough to be completely informed as toeverything that went on.

  Immense, carefully placed pits went down to solid bedrock. To that rockwere immovably anchored structures strong enough to move a world.Driving units were installed--drives of such immensity of power as totest to the full the highest engineering skills of the Galaxy. Mountainsof fuel-concentrate filled vast reservoirs of concrete. Each wasconnected to a drive by fifty-inch high-speed conveyors.

  Sawtelle drove a thought and those brutal super-drives began to blast.

  As they blasted, Strett's satellite began to move out of its orbit. Veryslowly at first, but faster and faster. They continued to blast, withall their prodigious might and in carefully-computed order, until thedesired orbit was attained--an orbit which terminated in a vertical linethrough the center of the Stretts' supposedly impregnable retreat.

  The planet Strett had a mass of approximately seven times ten to thetwenty-first metric tons. Its moon, little more than a hundredth asmassive, still weighed in at about eight times ten to thenineteenth--that is, the figure eight followed by nineteen zeroes.

  And moon fell on planet, in direct central impact, after having fallenfrom a height of over a quarter of a million miles under the full pullof gravity and the full thrust of those mighty atomic drives.

  The kinetic energy of
such a collision can be computed. It can beexpressed. It is, however, of such astronomical magnitude as to becompletely meaningless to the human mind.

  Simply, the two worlds merged and splashed. Droplets, weighing up tomillions of tons each, spattered out into space; only to return, inseconds or hours or weeks or months, to add their atrociouscontributions to the enormity of the destruction already wrought.

  No trace survived of any Strett or of any thing, however small,pertaining to the Stretts.