Islands of Space
XVII
"Morey, pull down the wall over that door to block their passage," Arcotordered. "I'll get the other wall."
Arcot pointed his pistol and triggered it. The outer wall flew outwardin an explosion of flying masonry. He switched on his radio and called_the Ancient Mariner_.
"Wade! We were cut off because of the metal in the walls! We've beendoublecrossed--they tried to jump us. Torlos warned us in time. We'vetorn out the wall; just hang outside with the airlock open and wait forus. Don't use the rays, because we'll be invisible, and you might hitus."
Suddenly the room rocked under an explosion, and the debris Morey's rayhad torn down over the door was blasted away. A score of men leapedthrough the gap before the dust had settled. Morey beamed them downmercilessly before they could fire their weapons.
"In the air, quick!" Arcot yelled. He turned on his power suit and roseinto the air, signalling Torlos to grab his ankles as he had donebefore. Morey slammed another parting shot toward the doorway as helifted himself toward the ceiling. Then both Earthmen snapped on theirinvisibility units. Torlos, because of his direct contact with Arcot,also vanished from sight.
More of the courageous, but foolhardy Satorians leaped through theopening and stared in bewilderment as they saw no one moving. Arcot,Morey, and Torlos were hanging invisible in the air above them.
Just then, the shining bulk of the _Ancient Mariner_ drifted into view.They drew back behind the wall and sought shelter. One of them began tofire his compressed air gun at it with absolutely no effect; the heavylux walls might as well have been hit by a mosquito.
As the airlock swung open, Arcot and Morey headed out through the breachin the wall. A moment later, they were inside the ship. The heavy doorhissed closed behind them as they settled to the floor.
"I'll take the controls," Arcot said. "Morey, head for the rear; youtake the moleculars and take Torlos with you to handle the heat beam."He turned and ran toward the control room, where Wade and Fuller werewaiting. "Wade, take the forward molecular beams; Fuller, you handle theheat projector."
Arcot strapped himself into the control chair.
Suddenly, there was a terrific explosion, and the titanic mass of theship was rocked by the detonation of a bomb one of the men in thebuilding had fired at the ship.
Torlos had evidently understood the operation of the heat beam projectorquickly; the stabbing beam reached out, and the great tower, from floorto roof, suddenly leaned over and slumped as the entire side of thebuilding was converted into a mass of glowing stone and molten steel.Then it crashed heavily to the ground a half mile below.
But already there were forty of the great battleships rising to meetthem.
"I think we'd better get moving," Arcot said. "We can't let a magneticray touch us now; it would kill Torlos. I'm going to cut in theinvisibility units, so don't use the heat beams whatever you do!"
Arcot snapped the ship into invisibility and darted to one side. Theenemy ships suddenly halted in their wild rush and looked around inamazement for their opponent.
Arcot was heading for the magnetic force field which surrounded the citywhen Torlos made a mistake. He turned the powerful heat beam downwardsand picked off an enemy battleship. It fell, a blazing wreck, but theray touched a building behind it, and the ionized air established aconducting path between the ship and the planet.
The apparatus was not designed to make a planet invisible, but it made anoble effort. As a result one of the tubes blew, and the _AncientMariner_ was visible again. Arcot had no time to replace the tube; theSatorian fleet kept him too busy.
Arcot drove the ship, shooting, twisting upward; Wade and Morey keptfiring the molecular beams with precision. The pale rays reached out totouch the battleship, and wherever they touched, the ships went down inwreckage, falling to the city below. In spite of the odds against it,the _Ancient Mariner_ was giving a good account of itself.
And always, Arcot was working the ship toward the magnetic wall and thebase of the city.
Suddenly, giant pneumatic guns from below joined in the battle, hurlinghuge explosive shells toward the Earth-ship. They managed to hit the_Ancient Mariner_ twice, and each time the ship was staggered by theforce of the blast, but the foot-thick armor of lux metal ignored theexplosions.
The magnetic rays touched them a few times, and each time Torlos wasthrown violently to the floor, but the ship was in the path of the beamsfor so short a time that he was not badly injured. He more than made upfor his injuries with the ray he used, and Morey was no mean gunner,either, judging from the work he was doing.
Three ships attempted to commit suicide in their efforts to destroy theEarthmen. They were only semi-successful; they managed to commitsuicide. In trying to crash into the ship, they were simply caught byMorey's or Wade's molecular beam and thrown away. Morey actuallydeveloped a use for them. He caught them in the beam and used them asbullets to smash the other ships, throwing them about on the molecularray until they were too cold to move.
Arcot finally managed to reach the magnetic wall.
"Wade!" he called. "Get that projector building!"
A molecular beam reached down, and the black metal dome sailed high intothe sky, breaking the solidity of the magnetic wall. An instant later,the _Ancient Mariner_ shot through the gap. In a few moments, they wouldbe far away from the city.
Torlos seemed to realize this. Moving quickly, he pushed Morey away fromthe molecular beam projector, taking the controls away from him.
He did not realize the power of that ray; he did not know that theseprojectors could move whole suns out of their orbits. He only knew thatthey were destructive. They were several miles from the city when heturned the projector on it, after twisting the power control up.
To his amazement, he saw the entire city suddenly leap into the air andflash out into space, a howling meteor that vanished into the cloudbankoverhead. Behind it was a deep hole in the planet's surface, a mightychasm lined with dark granite.
Torlos stared at it in amazement and horror.
Arcot turned back slowly, and they sailed over the spot where the cityhad been. They saw a dozen or so battleships racing away from them tospread the news of the disaster; they were the few which had beenfortunate enough to be outside the city when the beam struck.
Arcot maneuvered the ship directly over the mighty pit and sank slowlydown, using the great searchlights to illuminate the dark chasm. Far,far down, he could see the solid rock of the bottom. The thing was milesdeep.
Then Arcot lifted the ship and headed up through the cloud layer andinto the bright light of the great yellow sun, above the sea of graymisty clouds.
Arcot signalled Morey, who had come into the control room, to take overthe controls of the ship. "Head out into space, Morey. I want to findout why Torlos pulled that last stunt. Wade, will you put a new tube inthe invisibility unit?"
"Sure," Wade replied. "By the way, what happened back there? We weresurprised as the very devil to hear you yelling for help; everythingseemed peaceful up to then."
Arcot flexed his bruised hands and grinned ruefully. "Plenty happened."He went on to explain to Wade and Fuller what had happened in theirmeeting with the Satorian Commander.
"Nice bunch of people to deal with," Wade said caustically. "They triedto get everything and lost it all. We would have given them plenty ifthey'd been decent about it. But what sort of war is this that thepeople of these two planets are carrying on, anyway?"
"That's the question I intend to settle," replied Arcot. "We haven't hadan opportunity to talk to Torlos yet. He had just admitted to me that hewas a spy for Nansal when the fun began, and we've been too busy to askquestions ever since. Come on, let's go into the library."
Arcot indicated to Torlos that he was to go with him. Wade and Fullerfollowed.
When they had all seated themselves, Arcot began the telepathicquestioning. "Torlos, why did you force Morey to leave the ray and thendestroy the city? You certainly had no reason to kill all thenon-combat
ant women and children in that city, did you? And why, after Itold you absolutely not to use the heat beam while we were invisible,did you use the rays on that battleship? You made our invisibility breakdown and destroyed a tube. Why did you do this?"
"I am sorry, man of Earth," replied Torlos. "I can only say that I didnot fully understand the effect the rays would have. I did not know howlong we would remain invisible; the thing has been accomplished in ourlaboratories, but only for fractions of a second, and I feared we mightbecome visible soon. That was one of their latest battleships, equippedwith a new, secret, and very deadly weapon. I do not know exactly whatthe weapon is, but I knew that ship could be deadly against us, and Iwanted to make sure we were not attacked by it. That is why I used thebeam while your ship was invisible.
"And I did not intend to destroy the city. I was only trying to tear upthe factory that builds these battleships; I only wanted to destroytheir machines. I had no conception of the power of that ray. I was ashorrified to see the city disappear as you were; I only wanted toprotect my people." Torlos smiled bitterly. "I have lived among thesetreacherous people for many years, and I cannot say that I had noprovocation to destroy their city and everyone in it. But I had nointention of doing it, Earthman."
Arcot knew he was sincere. There could be no deception whencommunicating telepathically. He wished he had used it whencommunicating with the Commanding One of Sator; the trouble would havebeen stopped quickly!
"You still do not have any conception of the magnitude of the power ofthat beam, Torlos," Arcot told him. "With the rays of this ship, we torea sun from its orbit and threw it into another. What you did to thatcity, we could do to the whole planet. Do not tamper with forces you donot understand, Torlos.
"There are forces on this ship that would make the energies of yourgreatest battleship seem weak and futile. We can race through space abillion times faster than the speed of light; we can tear apart anddestroy the atoms of matter; we can rip apart the greatest of planets;we can turn the hurtling stars and send them where we want them; we cancurve space as we please; we can put out the fires of a sun, if we wish.
"Torlos, respect the powers of this ship, and do not release itsenergies unknowingly; they are too great."
Torlos looked around him in awe. He had seen the engines--small,apparently futile things, compared with the solid might of the giantengines in his ship--but he had seen explosive charges that he knewwould split any ship open from end to end bounce harmlessly from thesmooth walls of this ship. He had seen it destroy the fleet of magneticships that had formed a supposedly impregnable guard around themightiest city of Sator.
Then he himself had touched a button, and the giant city had shot offinto space, leaving behind it only a screaming tornado and a vast chasmin the crust of the blasted planet.
He could not appreciate the full significance of the velocities Arcothad told him about--he only knew that he had made a bad mistake inunderrating the powers of this ship! "I will not touch these thingsagain without your permission, Earthman," Torlos promised earnestly.
The _Ancient Mariner_ drove on through space, rapidly eating up themillions of miles that separated Nansal from Sator. Arcot sat in thecontrol room with Morey discussing their passenger.
"You know," Arcot mused, "I've been thinking about that man's strength;an iron skeleton doesn't explain it all. He has to have muscles to movethat skeleton around."
"He's got muscles, all right," Morey grinned. "But I see what you mean;muscles that big should tire easily, and his don't seem to. He seemstireless; I watched him throw those men one after another like bulletsfrom a machine gun. He threw the last one as violently as the first--andthose men weighed over three hundred pounds! Apparently his muscles feltno fatigue!"
"There's another thing," pointed out Arcot. "The way he was breathingand the way he seemed to keep so cool. When I got through there, I wasdripping with sweat; that hot, moist air was almost too much for me. Ourfriend? Cool as ever, if not more so.
"And after the fight, he wasn't even breathing heavily!"
"No," agreed Morey. "But did you notice him _during_ the fight? He wasbreathing heavily, deeply, and swiftly--not the shallow, panting breathof a runner, but deep and full, yet faster than I can breathe. I couldhear him breathing in spite of all the noise of the battle."
"I noticed it," Arcot said. "He started breathing _before_ the fightstarted. A human being can fight very swiftly, and with tremendousvigor, for ten seconds, putting forth his best effort, and only breatheonce or twice. For another two minutes, he breathes more heavily thanusual. But after that, he can't just slow down back to normal. He hasused up the surplus oxygen in his system, and that has to be replaced;he has run into 'oxygen debt'. He has to keep on breathing hard to getback the oxygen surplus his body requires.
"But not Torlos! No fatigue for him! Why? _Because he doesn't use theoxygen of the air to do work, and therefore his body is not a chemicalengine!_"
Morey nodded slowly. "I see what you're driving at. His body uses theheat energy of the air! His muscles turn heat energy into motion thesame way our molecular beams do!"
"Exactly--he lives on heat!" Arcot said. "I've noticed that he seemsalmost cold-blooded; his body is at the temperature of the room at alltimes. In a sense, he is reptilian, but he's vastly more efficient andgreatly different than any reptile Earth ever knew. He eats food, allright, but he only needs it to replace his body cells and to fuel hisbrain."
"Oh, _brother_," said Morey softly. "No wonder he can do the things hedid! Why, he could have kept up that fight for hours without gettingtired! Fatigue is as unknown to him as cold weather. He'd only needsleep to replace worn parts. His world is warm and upright on its axis,so there are no seasons. He couldn't survive in the Arctic, but he'sobviously the ideal form of life for the tropics."
As the two men found out later, Morey was wrong on that last point. Themen of Torlos' race had a small organ, a mass of cells in the lowerabdomen which could absorb food from the bloodstream and oxidize it,yielding heat, whenever the temperature of the blood dropped below acertain point. Then they could live very comfortably in the Arcticzones; they carried their own heaters. Their vast strength was limitedthen, however, and they were forced to eat more and were more subject tofatigue.
Wade and Fuller had been trying to speak with Torlos telepathically, andhad evidently run into difficulty, for Fuller called into the controlroom: "Hey, Arcot, come here a minute! I thought telepathy was auniversal language, but this guy doesn't get our ideas at all! And wecan't make out some of his. Just now, he seemed to be thinking of'nourishment' or 'food', and I found out he was thinking of 'heat'!"
"I'll be right down," Arcot told him, heading for the library.
As he entered, Torlos smiled at him; Arcot picked up his thought easily:"Your friends do not seem to understand my thoughts."
"We are not made as you are," Arcot explained, "and our thought formsare different. To you, 'heat' and 'food' are practically the same thing,but we do not think of them as such."
He continued, explaining carefully to Torlos the differences betweentheir bodies and their methods of using energy.
"Stone bones!" Torlos thought in amazement. "And chemical engines formuscles! No wonder you seem so weak. And yet, with your brains, I wouldhate to have to fight a war with your people!"
"Which brings me to another point," Arcot continued. "We would like toknow how the war between the people of Sator and the people of Nansalbegan. Has it been going on very long?"
Torlos nodded. "I will tell you the story. It is a history that beganmany centuries ago; a history of persecution and rebellion. And yet, forall that, I think it an interesting history.
"Hundreds of years ago, on Nansal ..."