Gray Lensman (37 page)

And in the "reducer"—the standard, ten-foot tank in the lower well—the entire spectacle was reproduced in miniature. It was plainer there, clearer and much more readily seen: but it was so crowded that details were indistinguishable.

Haynes stood beside Kinnison's padded chair one day, staring up into the immense lens and shaking his head. He went down the flight of stairs to the reducer, studied that, and again shook his head.

"This is very pretty, but it doesn't mean a thing," he thought at Kinnison. "It begins to look as though I'm going along just for the ride. You—or you and Worsel—will have to do the fighting, too, I'm afraid."

"Uh-uh," Kinnison demurred. "What do we—or anyone else—know about tactics, compared to you? You've got to be the brains. That's why we had the boys rig up the original working model there, for a reducer. On that you can watch the gross developments and tell us in general terms what to do. Knowing that, well know who ought to do what, from the big chart here, and pass your orders along."

"Say, that
will
work, at that!" and Haynes brightened visibly. "Looks as though a couple of those reds are going to knock our star out of the tank, doesn't it?"

"It'll be close in that reducer—they'll probably touch. Close enough in real space—less than three parsecs."

The zero hour came and the Tellurian armada of eighty one sleek spaceships—eighty superdreadnoughts and the
Directrix—
spurned Earth and took its place in that hurtling wall of crimson. Solar system after solar system was passed: fleet after fleet leaped into the ether and fitted itself into the smoothly geometrical pattern which Grand Fleet Operations was nursing along so carefully.

Through the galaxy the formation swept and out of it, toward a star cluster. It slowed its mad pace, the center hanging back, the edges advancing and folding in.

"Surround the cluster and close in," the admiral directed; and, under the guidance now of two hundred Rigellians, Civilization's vast Grand Fleet closed smoothly in and went inert.

Drivers flared white as they fought to match the intrinsic velocity of the cluster.

"Marshals of all system-fleets, attention! Using secondaries only, fire at will upon any enemy object coming within range. Engage outlying structures and such battle craft as may appear. Keep assigned distance from planet and stiffen cosmic screens to maximum.

Haynes—off!"

From millions upon millions of projectors there raved out gigantic rods, knives, and needles of force, under the impact of which the defensive screens of Jalte's guardian citadels flamed into terrible refulgence. Duodec bombs were hurled —tight-beam-directed monsters of destruction which, looping around in vast circles to attain the highest possible measure of momentum, flung themselves against Boskone's defenses in Herculean attempts to smash them down. They exploded; each as it burst filling all nearby space with blindingly intense violet light and with flying scraps of metal. Q-type helices, driven with all the frightful kilowattage possible to Medonian conductors and insulation, screwed in; biting, gouging, tearing in wild abandon.

Shear-planes, hellish knives of force beside which Tellurian lightning is pale and wan, struck and struck and struck again—fiendishly, crunchingly.

But those grimly stolid fortresses could take it. They had been repowered; their defenses stiffened to such might as to defy, in the opinion of Boskone's experts, any projectors capable of being mounted upon mobile bases. And not only could they take it—those formidably armed and armored planetoids could dish it out as well. The screens of the Patrol ships flared high into the spectrum under the crushing force of sheer enemy power. Not a few of those defenses were battered down, clear to the wall-shields, before the unimaginable ferocity of the Boskonian projectors could be neutralized.

And at this spectacularly frightful deep-space engagement Galactic Director Jalte, and through him Eichmil, First of Boskone itself, stared in stunned surprise.

"It is insane!" Jalte gloated. "The fools judged our strength by that of Helmuth, not considering that we, as well as they, would be both learning and doing during the intervening time. They have a myriad of ships, but mere numbers will never conquer my outposts, to say nothing of my works here."

"They are not fools. I am not so sure . . ." Eichmil cogitated.

He would have been even less sure could he have listened to a conversation which was even then being held.

"QX, Thorndyke?" Kinnison asked.

"On the green," came instant reply. "Intrinsic, placement, releases—everything on the green."

"Cut!" and the lone purple circle disappeared from tank and from reducer. The master technician had cut his controls and every pound of metal and other substance surrounding the negasphere had fallen into that enigmatic realm of nothingness. No connection or contact with it was now possible; and with its carefully established intrinsic velocity it rushed engulfingly toward the doomed planet One of the mastodonic fortresses, lying in its path, vanished utterly, with nothing save a burst of invisible cosmics to mark its passing. It approached its goal. It was almost upon it before any of the defenders perceived it, and even then they could neither understand nor grasp it. All detectors and other warning devices remained static, but:

"Look! There! Something's
coming!"
an observer jittered, and Jalte swung his plate. He saw—nothing. Eichmil saw the same thing. There was nothing to see. A vast, intangible nothing—yet a nothing tangible enough to occult everything material in a full third of the cone of vision! Jalte's operators hurled into it their mightiest beams. Nothing happened. They struck nothing and disappeared. They loosed their heaviest duodec torpedoes; gigantic missiles whose warheads contained enough of that frightfully violent detonate to disrupt a world. Nothing happened—not even an explosion. Not even the faintest flash of light. Shell and contents alike merely—and Oh! so incredibly peacefully!—ceased to exist There were important bursts of cosmics, but they were invisible and inaudible; and neither Jalte nor any member of his force was to live long enough to realize how terribly he had already been burned.

Gigantic pressors shoved against it: beams of power sufficient to deflect a satellite; beams whose projectors were braced, in steel-laced concrete down to bedrock, against any conceivable thrust. But this was
negative,
not positive matter —matter negative in every respect of mass, inertia, and force. To it a push was a pull. Pressors to it were tractors —at contact they pulled themselves up off their massive foundations and hurtled into the appalling blackness.

Then the negasphere struck. Or did it? Can nothing strike anything? It would be better, perhaps, to say that the spherical hyper-plane which was the three-dimensional cross-section of the negasphere began to occupy the same volume of space as that in which
Jalte’s
unfortunate world already was. And at the surface of contact of the two the materials of both disappeared.

The substance of the planet vanished, the incomprehensible nothingness of the negasphere faded away into the ordinary vacuity of empty space.

Jalte's base, the whole three hundred square miles of it, was taken at the first gulp. A vast pit opened where it had been, a hole which deepened and widened with horrifying rapidity. And as the yawning abyss enlarged itself the stuff of the planet fell into it, in turn to vanish.

Mountains tumbled into it, oceans dumped themselves into it. The hot, frightfully compressed and nascent material of the planet's core sought to erupt—but instead of moving, it, too, vanished. Vast areas of the world's surface crust, tens of thousands of square miles in extent, collapsed into it, splitting off along crevasses of appalling depth, and became nothing. The stricken globe shuddered, trembled, ground itself to bits in paroxysm after ghastly paroxysm of disintegration.

What was happening? Eichmil did not know, since his "eye" was destroyed before any really significant developments could eventuate. He and his scientists could only speculate and deduce—which, with surprising accuracy, they did. The officers of the Patrol ships, however,
knew
what was going on, and they were scanning with tensely narrowed eyes the instruments which were recording instant by instant the performance of the new cosmic super-screens which were being assaulted so brutally.

For, as has been said, the negasphere was composed of negative matter. Instead of electrons its building-blocks were positrons—the "Dirac holes" in an infinity of negative energy.

Whenever the field of a positron encountered that of an electron the two neutralized each other, giving rise to two quanta of hard radiation. And, since those encounters were occurring at the rate of countless trillions per second, there was tearing at the Patrol's defenses a flood of cosmics of an intensity which no spaceship had ever before been called upon to withstand. But the new screens had been figured with a factor of safety of five, and they stood up.

The planet dwindled with soul-shaking rapidity to a moon, to a moonlet, and finally to a discretely conglomerate aggregation of meteorites before the mutual neutralization ceased.

"Primaries now," Haynes ordered briskly, as the needles of the cosmic-ray-screen meters dropped back to the green lines of normal functioning. The probability was that the defenses of the Boskonian citadels would now be automatic only, that no life had endured through that awful flood of lethal radiation; but he was taking no chances. Out flashed the penetrant super-rays and the fortresses, too, ceased to exist save as the impalpable infra-dust of space.

And the massed Grand Fleet of the Galactic Patrol, remaking its formation, hurtled outward through the intergalactic void.

They are not fools, I am not so sure . . ." Eichmil had said; and when the last forceball, his last means of intergalactic communication, went dead the First of Boskone became very unsure indeed. The Patrol undoubtedly had something new—he himself had had glimpses of it—but what was it?"

That Jalte's base was gone was obvious. That Boskone's hold upon the Tellurian Galaxy was gone followed as a corollary. That the Patrol was or soon would be wiping out Boskone's regional and planetary units was a logical inference. Star A Star, that accursed Director of Lensmen, had—must have—succeeded in stealing Jalte's records, to be willing to destroy out of hand the base which housed them.

Nor could Boskone do anything to help the underlings, now that the long-awaited attack upon Jarnevon itself was almost certainly coming. Let the Patrol come—they were ready. Or were they, quite? Jalte's defenses were strong, but they had not withstood that unknown weapon even for seconds.

Eichmil called a joint meeting of Boskone and the Academy of Science. Coldly and precisely he told them everything that he had seen. Discussion followed.

"Negative matter beyond a doubt," a scientist summed up. "It has long been surmised that in some other, perhaps hyperspatial, universe there must exist negative matter of mass sufficient to balance the positive material of the universe we know. It is conceivable that by hyperspatial explorations and manipulations the Tellurians have discovered that other universe and have transported some of its substance into ours."

"Can they manufacture it?" Eichmil demanded.

"The probability that such material can be manufactured is exceedingly small," was the studied reply. "An entirely new mathematics would be necessary. In all probability they found it already existent."

"We must find it also, then, and at once."

"We will try. Bear in mind, however, that the field is large, and do not be optimistic of an early success. Note also that that substance is not necessary—perhaps not even desirable—in a defensive action."

"Why not?"

"Because, by directing pressors against such a bomb, Jalte actually pulled it into his base, precisely where the enemy wished it to go. As a surprise attack, against those ignorant of its true nature, such a weapon would be effective indeed; but against us it will prove a boomerang. All that is needful is to mount tractor heads upon pressor bases, and thus drive the bombs back upon those who send them." It did not occur, even -to the coldest scientist of them all, that that bomb had been of planetary mass. Not one of the Eich suspected that all that remained of the entire world upon which Jalte's base had stood was a handful of meteorites.

"Let them come, then," said Eichmil, grimly. "Their dependence upon a new and supposedly unknown weapon explains what would otherwise be insane tactics. With that weapon impotent they cannot possibly win a long war waged so far from their bases. We can match them ship for ship, and more; and our supplies and munitions are close at hand. We will wear them down—blast them out—the Tellurian Galaxy shall yet be Ours!"

*

"Each vessel will direct its longest-range detector, at highest possible power, centrally upon the objective galaxy. The first observer to find detectable activity, however faint, will report it instantly to GHQ. We will send out a general C.B., at which every vessel in Grand Fleet will cease blasting at once; remaining motionless in space until further orders." He then called Kinnison.

"Look here," he directed the attention of the younger man into the reducer, which now represented intergalactic space, with a portion of the Second Galaxy filling one edge. "I have a solution, but its practicability depends upon whether or not it calls for the impossible from you, Worsel, and your Rigellians. You remarked at the start that I knew my tactics. I wish I knew more—or at least could be certain that Boskone and I agree on what constitutes good tactics. I feel quite safe in assuming, however, that we shall meet their Grand Fleet well outside the galaxy . . ."