Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (124 page)

“Yes, I got the specific detail for which Hetty’s mind had been directed to seek. Undoubtedly, the luminosities intended to suck her knowledge as she acquired it and take action accordingly.” He ripped a dangling pocket flap from his tattered jacket, scowled at it, flung it away. “If possible, she was to ascertain the location of any experimental group working on or near point five centimeters. Had she been able to identify them, they’d have been smeared around. Probably they’d have smeared other groups simultaneously, just to keep us confused. We’d have had no clue to a potent wavelength—but they’d have put finish to the one they fear.”

“Gosh!” Wohl registered a mixture of glee and admiration. “And that’s what you dived in to get? The Vitons might just as well have told you themselves!”

“They did,” was Graham’s succinct reply. “They informed us by proxy. Very kind of them—damn their guts!” He had a look at his watch. “We’ve to carry on from this point, getting results in a few precious hours. Polarization’s the trouble— we’re dealing with short radio waves, not ordinary light.”

“Never mind,” Wohl comforted. “So far you’ve done fine.”

“Me? You mean
we!”

“I mean you,” Wohl persisted. “You’ve done fine. Every cloud has a silver lining;”

“We’ll have to see that silver darned quick, else it’ll come too—” He stopped, rubbed his pulsing arm, stared at the other. “I seem to remember something about photons changing their double-eights to true spirals when rebounding from polished silver.”

“What of it? I spiral off glass—when it holds beer.”

“Silver might do it,” Graham went on, ignoring him. “The problem’s largely one of refraction versus reflection, but silver might do it. There’s a good chance that so short a wave might spiral if the beam could be bounced off a silver plate— especially if we use a Bergstrom magnetic field impeller to make the stuff hard and fast by cutting down absorption.”

“You bet!” Wohl’s grin was apologetic. “It ought to work just like you say. I get the whole idea so clearly I could see it with muffled ears in a dungeon next month.”

“The odd chance in a thousand,” murmured Graham. “It will be worth trying if Laurie hasn’t thought up something better.” Ceasing to nurse his injuries, he became suddenly dynamic. “Jump to it, Art—we’re going back to Laurie.”

A hundred highly skilled craftsmen now toiled and sweated inside the great Faraday shed. They had been commandeered from various local radio and scientific instrument works, and every man knew his stuff so well that Laurie and his little band could concentrate unhampered on their own special jobs.

Valuable hours of non-stop work were represented by the compact but complicated apparatus which glistened and shone in the center of the littered floor. Long, slender tubes sparkled in the assembly’s heart: cylindrical screens projected from its turntable framework beneath which were a dozen rubber-tired wheels. From its seat mounted before a small control board the entire setup could be moved and rotated electrically like a crane, drawing power from cables which snaked out of its end couplings and ran across the floor toward the generators.

Here, a worker bent over a true-surfaced peralumin disk and silver-plated it by wire-process metallization. While his electric arc sputtered its rain of minute drops, another worker close by plated another disk with granulated silver by-passed into an exo-acetylene flame and thus blast-driven into the preheated surface. Any method would do so long as there was someone capable of doing it with optical accuracy.

Another worker was burnishing a heavily plated disk on a confiscated buffing machine, frequently checking results with a micrometer gauge. Behind him, one of Laurie’s experts was completing the assembly of a hemispherical trellis antenna. Two more scientists fussed around a big, cylindrical funnel; one fitting front and rear skeleton-sights to its upper surface, the other making minute adjustments to its complex impeller.

Two hours to go!

Graham came in with an old-fashioned printed paper, rested one foot on the assembly’s turntable while he scanned the front page. Iowa threatened by battle for Omaha. Asian armor enters Luxembourg. Madrid obliterated in atom-blast. Scandinavia’s last stand today. More atomic rockets flay Britain. It was gloom, gloom, gloom all the way. His eyes found the side column just as Laurie came up. French collapse imminent. He shoved the paper into his pocket.

“Bad news?” inquired Laurie.

“Not so good. There’s something else, too. It came from Philly by ham radio. Veitch’s nearly completed apparatus was blown to pieces early this morning.”

“Ah!” Laurie’s bushy brows drew together in a frown. “That suggests he was on the right track. If he was on the right track, then we’re on the wrong one.”

“Not necessarily. Veitch had a dupe in his crowd. We warned him, and he said he’d kid the fellow along. He didn’t want to remove him in case he was replaced by another. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

“The dupe did it?”

“Yes-—killing himself in the blast. Honorable hara-kiri, sort of. A couple of others are wounded.” He looked meditative. “I’d have phoned Veitch before now if it hadn’t been that all his lines are reserved strictly for outgoing traffic. He ought to have been ready long before anyone else, since he had tons of stuff transported from Florida and it needed only reassembling.”

“H’m-m-m! Any other news?”

“Only that Sangster’s been located; I was worried about him. They found him in an underground hospital. He was in William Street when that big section of skyway collapsed. He’ll recover.”

Leaving Laurie, he visited the open space fronting the shed. Here, in the middle of the cleared area, was a ring of giant copper earths, all ready to connect with the multiple condensers of the transmitter’s intricate grounding system.

A parade of blue dots, made tiny by distance, wended its way far to the east, somewhere over Long Island. His eyes gleamed as he watched them. Nice fix they were in, he thought, with chronic disregard for his own greater fix. Like hundreds of worried bee-keepers trying to search thousands of hives containing tens of millions of bees. They could go here, and there, and to dozens of other places, but they couldn’t be everywhere at one and the same time. That was their weak spot.

His gaze returned to the copper earths, and he wondered whether even this efficient system would absorb the terrific shock imposed upon it by a vengeful enemy. He doubted it. A system ten times the size would not be sufficient to cope with the hell’s fury such as had fallen upon Silver City.

The most they could hope for was to destroy one Viton—and let the rest of the world know why Faraday’s had been thrown all over the landscape, let it thus know that there still was hope if the struggle could be maintained a little longer. Yes, the end of only one Viton would be enough.

Behind the transmitter’s intended site was a wide pit, its six-inch wall of sprayed-on, quick-drying cement diving into the depths like a gigantic pipe. There was a slidepole down its center.

One man was going to operate the transmitter. If he could do it, that man was going to try to save himself from the certain holocaust that success would bring by plunging down the shaft deep, deep into the ebon depths. It was a primitive sanctuary—but the fastest out that could be contrived in the circumstances.

Returning, he asked Laurie, “How long?”

“Fifteen minutes.” Laurie mopped his damp and anxious brow. “We’ll be all set in fifteen minutes. If it works, we’ll have the plant ready for ten more assemblies.” He waved a hand to indicate the bustling crowd. “And providing we don’t get slaughtered, we’ll fling them together in a couple of hours.”

“No you won’t.” Graham’s contradiction was flat and authoritative. “You’re going to rush those spares away to a safe distance right now. The whole area is liable to be tossed moonward when those Vitons get the rats, and the spares had better be someplace else during the showdown.” Finding a microphone, he chattered into it rapidly.

Three minutes later, a line of trucks swung before the doors, each picking up its load and lumbering heavily away. Workers departed in silent, ruminative groups, leaving behind a shop cleared of all but the polarized-wave projector shining in the middle of the floor. A quartet of scientists hurried to complete various connections, make a few last-minute adjustments.

He leaned on the turntable, watching them with a cold patience that surprised himself considering that the testing time was so near. After days of nervous strain, he was suddenly as impassive as a stone Buddha—like a man who finally finds himself in the dental chair after a jumpy hour in the waiting room. His gaze settled on one of the working four, a half pint individual with a tonsure around his balding head.

As this expert completed his task, Graham spoke to him in harsh, deliberate tones. “I don’t fancy handling a trick circuit jumping the power line to the impeller switch.” The concentrated venom in his voice appalled his hearers.

The runt he had addressed turned on him a wizened, monkeyish face in which pale blue eyes regarded him blankly. Dropping a piece of thin cable, he felt casually in his pocket as if seeking a pair of pliers.

Graham shot him where he poised, the powerful, pointblank blast fairly flinging the fellow backward. While Laurie and the rest looked on white-faced, Art Wohl stepped unconcernedly to the body, felt in its pocket, extracted a small, egg-shaped object.

“Holy smoke, a bomb! He’d have shredded us along with the dingbat!”

“Never mind. Fake it away, Art, and dump it in that reservoir out back.” He transferred his attention to Laurie. “Unhook that power bypass and check the circuit, Duncan. See if the output is all right. If so, we’ll run the thing out and tie it to those earths.”

A minute later, Laurie pronounced, “It’s ready for action. It’ll never function more perfectly even if it achieves nothing.”

“Good!” They drove it out, earthed it. Laurie departed with his three men, leaving only Wohl.

Graham sat high up in the assembly, the power, impeller, elevator and turntable controls within easy reach. A dull, cloudy sky was heavy overhead. He had an argument with Wohl as the smoke and spume of a rocket-shot sprang high in the south.

“Beat it, Art,” he ordered. “There are Vitons over there.” He indicated a horde of glowing balls roaming in from the northeast. “This is no time to squat here and debate with you. Chase after Duncan and the others—I’ll give you all a minute to get clear.”

“But—” began Wohl, protestingly!

“Scram!” roared Graham in a frantic voice.

He watched Wohl slouch miserably away, waited until he was out of sight beyond the hangar. Before him as he sat, the cylindrical funnel projected like the barrel of a monster gun. The approaching luminosities were now only a mile distant.

Wide-sighted eyes raked the sky as he gave Wohl time to gain safe distance. The origin of the Vitons would never be known, he decided. Their existence would remain as much a mystery as that of pneumococci, poodles, or any other form of life. But it was his pet theory that they were true natives of Earth, and it was also his hunch that they were about to be wiped off Earth forever—if not by one battling human group, then by some other.

Zero hour had come, the fateful moment had arrived. He swung the great funnel, lined it upon the advancing orbs. The funnel moved lightly on its gimbals, and the entire assembly spun smoothly on its turntable frame. He heard power being made by the whining generators in the hangar, and noted that the time was ninety minutes from Europe’s deadline. Snapping a switch, he let the power pour through.

There followed a few seconds’ pause while the tubes warmed up. Over there, in strategic posts ten or twelve floors high, distant observers watched through field glasses that trembled in their hands.

The half-centimeter beam fountained into the shaft, polarized, directable. It spiked from the funnel’s maw, the axis of its whirling impulses parallel with the skeleton-sights lined upon the Vitons.

This frequency lay beyond even the Bjornsen vision-range, and the beam could not be seen. But its effect was startlingly visible. The leading luminosity of a prowling string of ten stopped in mid-air as if barred by an unseeable obstruction. It turned deeper in color, from bright blue to dark purple, almost instantaneously switched to orange of extreme brilliance, then popped into nothingness. It was gone so utterly and completely that its going shocked the army of hidden observers.

The remaining nine Vitons bobbed around undecidedly, and another stopped, went through the blue-purple-orange-obliteration cycle before the rest scattered at top speed. They bulleted straight upward, into the clouds.

Somebody was bellowing like a mad bull as Graham elevated the funnel and caught a third in full flight. Somebody howled an idiotic remark about it being more sporting to get ’em on the wing.

With the tail of his eye, he saw an enormous gout of yellow-white flame vomit from the general area of Broadway. The noise followed, then the air-blast. It rocked him in his seat. His lips closed firmly, the strange bellowing ceased, and he realized that he had been bawling himself hoarse.

Some sixth sense—probably his extrasensory perception—made him whirl his assembly around. He spun dizzily behind the impeller casing, caught a line of spheres rushing him from the south.

He started yelling again as the leader went deep purple. The following luminosities slowed so suddenly that he fancied they had feet, braced forward, and still skidding. Their velocity was too great for that. They crashed headlong into their stricken fellow at the moment it flared into an eye-searing orange.

“One for Mayo!” he hollered, jigging on his seat. “One for Webb! One for Beach, you dirty, stinking gobs of parasitic lousery! Another for Farmiloe, and the whole damn lot of you for Bjornsen!”

Ceasing his insane howls, he watched the results of the aerial collision. For the space of a single heartbeat, the wildly whirling conglomeration of energy maintained enlarged but spherical form in the astounded heavens. Then it exploded with a terrible roar.