The Doomed Planet

  Satisfied that his wind devil diversion was keeping the perimeter defenders under cover for the moment, he slipped the tug through. There was an instant of nausea as time factors altered. One was immediately in the dimness of artificial light.

  He looked up at the looming mountain. It was impressively big. Beyond it would lie the golden, circular palaces, in all their artificially lit parks and splendors. All that was hidden from him as yet.

  Over on the other side he knew there would be forests of manned artillery today and troops beyond count. Although his absorbo-coat would make him relatively invisible, reflecting no light back, he was liable to get between some illumination on the mountain and observers down there and silhouette. He would be, at best, a sitting duck for them.

  He hadn’t had a Fleet base available to prepare his ship. He had done the best he could. He had mounted a couple of tubes on the top of the tug’s hull: he had no guns. He had mounted a container for mines under the tug’s belly.

  Suspending the tug in this twilight gloom, he lifted the T-shaped nose up. He only had one chance with this one: he had better not miscalculate.

  He pressed a firing button.

  With a swoosh, a hexagonally faced object flashed out of a tube. It soared higher and higher. It sailed over the top of the mountain. He could only hope that it would land properly on the opposite slope. It was an attractor-target. Any automatically aimed weapon, seeking to shoot, would find that target irresistible: even though his ship was spotted and fire opened up, the gun controls would choose instead the attractor-target—he hoped.

  So far so good. He now raised the tug’s nose a little higher. He might find it useful to create a new diversion. He had some radio-triggered balls in the second tube, several thousand of them. He pressed a second firing pin: a hundred thousand pellets spewed out, much like firing a sawed-off shotgun. In this high trajectory, they would patter down across dozens of acres, amongst the parks and palaces. Unless somebody actually got hit with one, he doubted they would even be noticed. He checked the remote firing box that would trigger them: its safety was on. He put it in his pocket.

  Now he would get to work.

  He had mounted what was called a disintegrator-slasher in the compartment over the flight deck.

  The plans that had been used to install this nuclear black hole were so long gone that he could only depend upon the rumors he had heard as a cadet. The black hole was, supposedly, in the upper third of the mountain.

  He turned on his screens and began to triangulate for position. There was a trickle of gamma rays to follow up—leaks from around the shielding, not dangerous. The hole itself was fully encased. Its power was bled off in line conduits. The microwave reflectors on the other side of the mountain were simply radiation detectors. He had already used them and he would not use them twice. They would be wise to that now.

  He fished in the black hole’s position by its leaks. It was not good news: the thing was at the absolute bottom of the third. It was a lot more mountain than he liked to tackle.

  You couldn’t put a beam into it: it would just absorb anything like that. You couldn’t throw a bomb at it: it would take half of Voltar with it. Heller was simply going to saw the mountaintop off and tow it away—if he could!

  He had the thing’s position now. He went to work with the disintegrator-slasher. It could make a cut one molecule thick through anything, but Heller did not think its manufacturer had ever intended it for use in sawing off the top of a mountain.

  A high, high whine began to hurt his ears. He stopped and put some earplugs in. The manufacturers had designed it for leveling building sites by making a cut and then removing sections. They had never thought a Fleet combat engineer would need QUIET! Sooner or later somebody down in Palace City was going to wonder where that twenty-thousand-cycle screech was coming from.

  The work was slow. He was going through basalt and it was HARD!

  A thin line of heat began to glow all along the mountainside. That meant there would also soon be a line like that on the other side of the mountain. VISIBLE!

  Heller jockeyed the tug back and forth, left to right. He could not tell how deep the cut was getting. All he could do was saw, saw, saw and hope.

  Surely sooner or later somebody would hear that whine. It was getting through his earplugs. It was LOUD!

  He had the horrible feeling that he was leaving skips—areas where the stone had not been sawed through. It was difficult to keep an even line: this equipment was supposed to be used from a stable platform sitting on the ground, not from a ship.

  Well, he couldn’t just sit here sawing the rest of his life. He would have to make a try of it.

  He turned off the disintegrator-slasher.

  He eased the tug over to the right. He was now in view of Palace City: there it lay in gold and green, bathed in artificial light.

  He flipped on the traction engines in the rear of the tug. He maneuvered to take a good, solid grip on the mountaintop.

  BLAM!

  A shell slammed into the mountain. They had spotted him!

  BLAM! BLAM!

  The attractor-target, thank heavens, was pulling the cannon wrong in aim. Just one of those shells landing and this tug would go up like smoke: no armor.

  Heller rammed open the throttles of the planetary drives. He yanked the Will-be Was time-drives full on.

  The tug lunged ahead. The traction beams strained.

  The tug began to thresh about.

  The mountaintop was NOT moving!

  Heller looked down the slope toward the city. Made small by distance, an infantry squad was coming. They stopped amongst the boulders, knelt and leveled blastrifles. Heller braced himself to receive a hit.

  The tug struggled to move the mountain.

  HIS WINDSCREEN SHATTERED!

  The tug’s automatic warning went on, “Sir, my starboard Will-be Was converter drum is overheating. Please ease off.”

  Heller took another lunge against the tow.

  An explosion sounded above him. A blastrifle must have hit one of the tube casings on top of the craft.

  This was getting too rough a situation.

  Suddenly he dropped the tow that refused to tow.

  He spun around to his right. He ducked behind the mountain out of the sight of the infantry.

  This was the time for the diversion. He took the remote out of his pocket, took the safety off and pressed it. It should begin to fire the pellets he had dropped into the city. They should begin to go off at intervals. That should make things interesting for them down there. And maybe he could complete his job.

  The trouble was, the mountaintop was not thoroughly cut through.

  In the tube underneath the belly, thinking this might happen, he had placed a hundred downblast shatter mines.

  It meant he would have to make a circle around the mountain. He hoped his diversion had worked. He began to move clockwise around the peak. Every hundred yards, at approximately the place he had made the cut, he dropped a shatter mine.

  His explosions began to go off with a crump as each one hit.

  He stuck the tug’s nose around the mountain shoulder, visible again from Palace City.

  BLOWIE!

  Something tore through the upper hull!

  His diversion had not worked!

  Then he realized he had made a mistake: he had been behind the mountain and the black hole when he hit the button, and the activating radio beam had not been powerful enough to get through!

  Well, diversion or not, he had to keep going.

  Dropping mines, air about him streaked with blastrifle charges, taking shots in his hull, he completed the circle.

  Smoke was rolling through the tug. More than one thing had been hit.

  Hoping against hope that he had completed the severance with mines, he ducked back of the mountain again.

  He couldn’t even see his screens.

  “Sir,” said the tug, “my Will-be Was engine room is on fire. Could I rec
ommend a visit to the nearest repair yard?” The idiocy of it made Heller realize that the computer banks must also have been hit. He pressed a manual emergency fire-suppression button. It was sloppy under his thumb. He glanced down: hydraulic fluid was pooling on the floor of the flight deck.

  Praying that his controls would still work, he worked the tractor engines to seize the mountain once again. He felt them grip.

  He opened the throttles of his planetary drives. He felt the tug take the strain against the beams.

  Praying, he opened the throttles of the powerful Will-be Was time-converter drives.

  It stopped the tug with a backward yank. He still had power.

  Something struck the tug from below. He could not see in all the smoke but he hazarded that some of that infantry had made its way around the mountain shoulder. His absorbo-coat must be ripped to shreds. He was visible!

  He began to work the throttles. He was making the tug lunge again and again against the dead weight of the mountaintop.

  A shot struck the underside of the star-pilot chair beside him. It began to smoke and crackle.

  The controls were getting sloppier and sloppier.

  He pointed the nose of the tug upward at an angle of forty-five degrees. He once more slammed the throttles open.

  There was a sort of roar behind him. It began low and then rose up the scale like something wailing.

  The tug was moving.

  The shots which had been lacing the air suddenly halted. That infantry back there must be now contending with an earthquake under their very feet.

  Heller couldn’t see. His screens were not working to be seen by.

  He could only guess what was happening.

  Was he going forward with the mountaintop towed behind or wasn’t he?

  PART EIGHTY-FIVE

  Chapter 2

  Many a fellow officer had often teased Heller about his “built-in compass.” Sometimes on a warship flight deck he would sense that the gyros were in error. Seniors would ignore him but he would persevere and they would, finally, to get some peace, order a technician check. An error was always found but sometimes it was as little as a thousandth of a degree. And even though this would make a significant mistake in course traveling at septuple light speed, nobody ever believed he could have detected it. Any gyro, they had said, is liable to be out a thousandth of a degree.

  Right now, astonishingly, he was totally uncertain which way he was going. He should have been able to detect, despite smoke, the north and south magnetic poles of Voltar. But he couldn’t.

  Then he realized he had never before tried to navigate inside a time/space warp and that was where he was now. The black hole he was or was not towing extended its influence sphere to encase the tug.

  He did not know how fast he was going or even if he was going.

  His object was to get this mountaintop several miles from Palace City. If he did that, the command area of Voltar would drop back those thirteen minutes and appear in the same time band as the planet itself. Then, unless something else happened, the rebel forces could launch an assault and, with luck, break the defense perimeters and seize the place.

  He did not at that time know of Hisst’s plan to hit the rebels’ rear with the Apparatus forces from the staging area. His whole purpose was to expose the palaces and parks so they could be targeted by direct frontal assault. The security net would be gone if he had removed the source of all the power used in Palace City.

  Right then he wasn’t thinking of anything except, “Where the blazes am I?”

  The tug was on fire. It might explode. If he dropped this load, it might fall right back on the remaining mountain if it had not moved at all.

  He got some sand goggles over his eyes so they would stop streaming.

  He got down and moved up close to a screen. Maybe he could see something on it. He twiddled knobs. The screen was blank. His electronics were gone.

  The tractor engines were raving with the strain of the pull. The Will-be Was drives were thundering, fire or no fire. The planetary motors were screeching. The smoke billowed.

  The broken windscreen didn’t seem to be letting in any air so that was no indicator of forward progress: rather it would seem to say that they were not going anyplace at all.

  He had a beltgun. With a sudden idea, he pulled it. Without being able to see its levers, he set it to impact-explosion.

  He reached out through the broken windscreen and fired straight down.

  It would be hard to tell above all this shrieking machinery. But he listened hard. He was counting.

  When that handgun charge hit the ground, wherever the ground might be, it would explode with a cracking sound. The number of seconds times the distance sound traveled on Voltar in a second would give him his altitude.

  He heard nothing.

  He fired again and began to count.

  Once more, nothing!

  The weird idea hit him that he might be flying upside down: that could happen around antigravity coils.

  It was getting too hot in here. Tongues of flame were licking through the passageway.

  Maybe he had moved the mountain. Maybe he hadn’t.

  “My Will-be Was starboard time-converter is melting,” said the tug. “I sincerely recommend you land somewhere and look into it.”

  This thing was going to blow up!

  Heller knew he’d have to simply take a chance that he had towed the mountaintop away.

  He shut down the Will-be Was drives.

  There was a sag.

  He cut off the traction engines.

  With a scream the planetary drives hurled the tug ahead like a streak of lightning!

  Heller was hit with the time-transition nausea!

  He shot through into planetary time!

  The desert sun glared!

  He hastily shut the planetary throttles. Instantly the tug began to fall.

  Then he saw what some of this was about.

  He had pulled the mountaintop fifty thousand feet into the air. The range of those shots was too extreme and they had also gone outside the space warp.

  His own built-in compass wasn’t working yet. He had no idea where he was.

  He grabbed the tug controls to right it.

  They did not respond!

  Heller groped behind him. He had parked the spacetrooper sled in the passageway. He had it.

  It was no time to be careful.

  He jumped on it and shot it through the shattered windscreen!

  PART EIGHTY-FIVE

  Chapter 3

  The sled was tumbling.

  His lungs were full of smoke.

  He coughed and it was a mistake. At fifty thousand feet there wasn’t enough air to take a decent breath.

  Head spinning for lack of oxygen, he blindly fumbled with the spacetrooper sled controls. He was trying to make it head straight down at power to an altitude where there was some air.

  He could feel wind begin to twitch at him now. Still, he wasn’t making the downward plunging speed he should. He had reached terminal velocity for a man for Voltar. Something was desperately wrong—he wasn’t diving anywhere near as fast as he knew this sled could.

  His sand goggles had whipped down across his mouth, letting the smoke out of his eyes. He was staring at the power meter of the spacetrooper sled that was embedded in the shaft.

  CHARGE ZERO!

  “Comets,” thought Jet, “I haven’t switched this sled off since I used it in New York! Missy is right. I’m getting too old for this racket. Senile!”

  The desert below was coming up in a huge cone: one spot in the middle was motionless, everything else was speeding away. “That’s where I splash,” thought Jet. Then he thought, “The blazes I do!” He still had the hand blastgun hanging on him by its lanyard. He recovered it.

  He could breathe now: the rush of passage was stacking up enough air to fill his lungs. He must be down to twenty thousand feet.

  His thumb flipped the levers of the gun.


  Ten thousand feet.

  Five thousand feet.

  Two thousand feet.

  Seven hundred feet.

  He pointed the handgun straight ahead at that motionless spot in the desert sand.

  Would it work?