It was an engaging tale. The State Sahara, a moldy old cruise vessel, had come upon the Changrin in the act of blowing the Gay Mistake Mining Company of Detroit off the face of New Kansas. The Changrin had landed to scoop up a few tons of bar iridium and had barely got into the sky again when the State Sahara struck.
It was one of those single-ship duels which were so dear to everyone’s patriotic heart before big fleet battles usurped the glory of single action. The Changrin, being ten times the weight of the State Sahara and with a million foot-pounds a second more firepower, had almost won. And then, with his last erg of charge in the gun condensers, Lorrilard had nailed the enemy through and through.
For two or three days it looked like a war with the Asians, but at length everyone decided not to risk it. Lorrilard became excited and said that white superiority in space was glimmering and almost gone and that his government was stupid. They let him resign from the Navy.
The Gay Mistake Mining Company of Detroit suddenly presented him with half the iridium he had recovered for them. The Hot Boy Exploit Company, which owned gem deposits on thirty worlds, gave him a check for five million dollars. The August Tart Interests handed him a medal which turned out to be worth twenty millions, being a pie-plate diamond from one of their space mines. And George Marquis Lorrilard presented a very innocent face to an astonished political front. He had not solicited anything or proposed anything—he said.
But in a letter to Jacob Unser, a man much interested in the destiny of white men in the universe and a later partner in crime, Lorrilard said, “I consider that forts are a sort of trap. However, all we can do is place a new Earth out there for a base and operate from it to defend. We cannot afford a patrol navy. We need a raiding base.”
Evidently he tried it. There are no records in existence which give any kind of picture of what they did attempt. But there are a few hints.
Lorrilard seems to have tried an inferior sort of cohesion barrier, lacking the answer to an Asian type. And behind its supposed safety, on a new world approximating Earth, yet nearer to wealthier planets, he tried to plant a colony which would maintain itself and support a patrol fleet.
However it was attempted, it failed. Some thirty-eight billion dollars and eighteen thousand lives were squandered in the effort to plant that colony—only to have the Asians wipe it out. This is known because a contemporary used the figures to prove that the planting of colonies in space “is folly which would be attempted only by such a hothead as Lorrilard, the cashiered naval officer.”
Other brutal opinions and a government distaste for him—for the Asians could invent weapons at will now behind their barrier, and a war would be a chancy thing—drove Lorrilard back into space.
He went at it hard-eyed now, an avowed exploiter. He pretended all the swashbuckle and the dollar-conscious conversation of your true man of greed. But one wonders if he was not hiding a rather large dream.
He began to raid exposed Asian points. At least fifty other men like him were beginning to engage themselves in this sport now. And Lorrilard became famous or, as his government said, infamous. They apprehended an Asian war as a result of such raids. The Asians apparently apprehended nothing but Lorrilard and his friends. And they rapidly fortified their areas in the outer worlds.
But it seems very peculiar, if historians of the period are right, that nothing was actually done to stop this raiding. Lorrilard landed and departed within United Continent territory at will. He banked fantastic sums, wet, as the Moscow press screamed, “with Asian blood,” and went forth for others.
He used up several space vessels in the next fifteen years and his losses in personnel were sometimes high. And yet his recruiting was easy indeed. He maintained at his own expense a laboratory in the Andes for research on weapons, battle methods and, fruitlessly, on cohesion.
Two other efforts were made in space to plant colonies which would act as strong points in rival to the Asians, both efforts private and both of them wiped out to a man. And although the United Continents officially shuddered on Earth, diplomatic relations with Asiana were politely maintained. No Asian army dared issue forth from that screen on Earth to attack the superior missiles and arcs of the United Continents, and no missile could penetrate Asia. And the blood continued to flow in space.
The name of George Marquis Lorrilard, as the years went on, became something that Asian mothers used to frighten their offspring into obedience, quiet or sleep. He was forty-six now, in the prime of youth in those times, a wise, cunning fighter who had risen far above mere law.
And the incident happened which brought him to Stella and started the chain reaction which was to end the deadlock. He was primed with new theories about cohesion barriers, loaded with new weapons and hungry for new gold.
He was familiar with Stella.
It had eight continents and was two-thirds covered by salt oceans, which is an approximation of Earth.
In age it had passed through its great mammal period and was entered upon man.
Yes; Man.
Not Homo sapiens, of course, but a very near approach, differing mainly in that he was blue. This humanoid had developed fire weapons, could work rudimentary electricity, had flight of a sort and built cities of considerable extent. He stood about two and a half meters tall, had a brain capacity of a comparative nature to pre-space man and was developed culturally into political entities.
His planet was amusing to rovers and of no value to exploiters. It was almost entirely lacking in precious metals and stones and in radioactive fuels. Therefore, it had been written up as something intriguing for the Sunday papers and otherwise left alone. Many space tramps harbored there, but inbreeding was eugenically impossible and the race stayed the way it was.
Probably colonization would have continued an entire fiasco for the next ten thousand years if it had not been for Stella.
Occasional Asian raids were made on the place to gather slave labor, but the undertaking was dangerous, no matter the value of these creatures to the Asians in extorting minerals from the infinity of worlds. The Asians, therefore, established a sort of super-state on Stella, not interfering with its politics but supporting several fortresses keyed by a main stronghold on a central continent.
Asian mine ships began to harbor there and build up financial reserves which it would be necessary to report to Asiana, and the Asian governor, a man named Kolchein, grew quite sleek. But he erred in setting up a cohesion barrier much larger than he needed and wider than any raider would suspect.
The Sudden Sunday, one of the exploiters, ran into this screen at an altitude of two hundred miles, tripped and crashed. As its mission was the peaceful one of landing to repair a depleted crew with Stellan converts, Lorrilard considered it a hostile act.
Perhaps he had never forgiven the Asians for certain actions they had taken against him while he was taking actions against them. Perhaps he was vengeful on account of Peter Gault, the skipper of the Sudden Sunday and Lorrilard’s friend. Perhaps he sympathized with the relatives of the dead in the city the Sudden Sunday had destroyed in crashing. However that may be, it was common knowledge in those times that several hundred billions in cached Asian loot rested under the protection of Kolchein. And Lorrilard’s Andes lab had lately sent him a large box.
Lorrilard, in the Angel’s Dance, a little cruiser of nineteen hundred metric tons and armed with scarcely a foot-pound for every thousand foot-pounds in the Asian fortress, set down on Stella.
He had a bully-boy crew of two hundred, five bucko officers, and a dozen technicians. His human odds were therefore a million to one against the Stellans and a mere hundred to one against the Asians. So he sent a polite note, carried on a dagger point, to the chief mandate of the Stellan Union of Countries, and actually expected a written reply. But they did not write. A Stellan tank corps flew in at eventide and began to bang away at the Angel’s Dance.
Some of Lorrilard’s hard certitude diminished. Space tramps had been at work with know-ho
w for a hundred years amongst the Stellans and an already considerable culture could protect itself effectively with a thing it called a “hand atomic weapon”—an obsolescence on Earth but a gruesome thing to breast nonetheless.
He lost eight men before he nailed the last remnants of the tank corps to their turrets and left them for the vultures. The attack angered him and an amazed Council of Countries dredged up the contents of their arsenals at the sight of the blue head of the tank corps commander, wrapped up in a big leaf and pinned into a package with his largest medal.
But Lorrilard was quite able. He wasn’t there when the newly mustered army arrived —he was waiting a thousand miles up with his fingers on his radiative meteor disintegrators. He did not much like to do it. Things often happened which were unpleasant when the beams, usually fanned out about a ship to wipe out space dust ten thousand miles around and about, were concentrated into one package and aimed at anything as solid as Stella.
Also, it was illegal.
The Stellan army was blackening the plains below and Stellan high-altitude stratosphere battleplanes were raking back and forth in hopes. Lorrilard briefly thanked them for avoiding the Asian main fortress so wide—it was on the north central plateau of another continent—and sighed over the release button.
“I only asked them to attack the Asians with me,” Lorrilard said to his chief mate, Roseca.
“Then they are more scared of the Asians,” said Roseca.
“You mean the Asians,” said Lorrilard, “are requiring them to fight. Well, here’s for eternity!”
The button went down.
An area two hundred miles in diameter, and comprising all the plain below, smoked, bucked, buckled and caved in. An ocean of molten rocks gushed forth. The beam penetrated the crust of Stella, ate through and reached the liquid core. The guts of the planet gurgled forth. Three-quarters of a million Stellans, the pride of the race, eddied as memories in the scarlet writhe.
A lookout crisply sang: “City on two o’clock quarter.”
Lorrilard looked at the city through his booster glasses, adjusted them for a smaller field and saw humanoids twisting through the streets, running raggedly and unsuccessfully between great gouts of walls coming down.
A lookout sang: “Seaport at nine o’clock. Tidal wave.”
The beam penetrated the crust of Stella, ate through and reached the liquid core. The guts of the planet gurgled forth.
And Lorrilard looked down at the seaport. But he was a little late. He saw only the top of the last steeple toppling, a weather vane still staunchly pointing to a second wave coming in. Lorrilard frowned. The wave should have departed to come back in hours or days and do its engulfing. And then he knew that he had seen the crest of one begun in the vanishing of half an archipelago off the coast.
A lookout sang: “Mountains at five o’clock quarter.”
And Lorrilard looked and the mountains were walking forward to meet the incoming sea and as he looked he saw a dozen cities die.
Instantly he was worried. “Roseca! Supposing the Asian fortress goes!”
And that finished the observation of this interesting phenomena, for that fortress contained several hundred billions in portable loot, small change perhaps to an exploiter if he mentioned it amongst his fellows, but not to be overlooked.
They shot away from there in a graceful swoop and approached the north continent and its plateau. And there in the early morning sunlight spread the majesty of Asiana, black-walled and grim, white-turreted and proud.
There was one wall fallen in part but every tower stood firm. The ground had moved, moved violently enough to throw a walking man heavily down and keep him there for several minutes through the successive waves. But every single ejector of the fortress was sending out screen.
“Barriers ahead,” said the electrar man at his post on the bridge. He adjusted his dials and read his meters. “Altitude one-tenth of a light-year, amplitude one hundred thousand square miles. Not conning. Not conning.”
“Steady on the jets,” said Lorrilard. “All directors stop. All brakes back one third. All directors stop. Brakes stop. Easy two o’clock jet. Meet her. Steady on the jets. All directors ahead one. All directors stop. Stand to battle quarters! I got a new wrinkle for you, my Asian friends.”
Gongs surged through the Angel’s Dance. Roseca acknowledged stations into his phones.
“All stations manned and ready, Captain,” said Roseca.
There was a lot of Navy about Lorrilard. There was a lot of Navy about the Angel’s Dance. And small wonder—since Lorrilard was an Academy product, lost to the Navy because it didn’t pay quite as well as other things, and the Angel’s Dance had been built for the United Continents service and had been bought from the building yard when a bought senator had had a bought secretary buy her, condemning her as “unacceptable.” Kolchein, down there, was finding her very unacceptable.
Kolchein was fat and Mongolian and apt to do idiotic and unprofitable things when confronted with certain semantic symbols. His fat jowls were bobbing with rage as he glared into the viewscreen in the command tower. The screen ran all around the tower as a panel of translucence, showing any visible object in its proper compass direction in any desired magnitude, and Kolchein ran all around the screen. He was looking for reinforcements. The earthquakes were unusual. They had upset him.
His cringing, whining second-in-command was also sick from the still trembling ground, but he was more acutely aware of the value of riches and so was more pained at their threatened loss.
“It’s a raid!” whimpered Sze-Quon. “It’s a raid!” And he wept into a perfumed handkerchief.
“Shut up!” screamed Kolchein. “Be calm! Talk rationally!” He threw a wild hand at the image of the Angel’s Dance. “You bag of air! You filth! You told me that our spies on Earth gave no slightest intimation of a United Continents expedition to anywhere! You told me their economy forbade long patrols this year! You said—”
“Think of all that beautiful gold!” wept Sze-Quon. “Think of my peach trees beside the gem pools in Shantung! Think of my lovely dancers with diamonds in their hair and my mansion wandering over seven sacred hills. Gone. All gone! Ohhhh!”
“Shut up!” shrilled Kolchein. “Don’t weep over what you never had! Think! Think calmly! Tell me any new weapon, any scrap of data!”
“I know I never had it,” sniffled Sze-Quon with all the famed stolidity of the Oriental, “but I can miss it, can’t I? There are no new weapons, Mighty One. All my intelligences—”
“Then what caused those earthquakes?” cried Kolchein, adding with malice, “Dropping the gold you filch from me?”
Sze-Quon dried up a good part of his tears and took his fragile self into the antechamber where the staff were gnawing scraggly mustaches. He came back in a moment, armed with technology.
“It was a concentrated guard-fan in a bundle. We have no concerns, Mighty One. To get close enough to touch this continent so would bring yonder vessel within our arcs.” He had taken heart in the anteroom and also a small shot of stedge, one of the Stellan fortifiers against melancholy.
Kolchein grimaced at the screen, glaring so hard that his personality force alone should have disintegrated the visioned ship. And then, abruptly, he stopped. The vessel had changed situation in a certain, precise manner—that was his first clue. Shiphandling was a rare art when it was that good. And only one—
His fear was instantly found to be founded solidly on fact.
A vital, authoritative voice came out of the emergency-band speaker, and a face glowed above it, and the eyes in the face were hard on the screen which mirrored them.
“Kolchein! You want a continent?”
It was good, clear Asian and the only accent in it came, most likely, from a contempt for the language. And it was a good, clear viewscreen.
“Lorrilard!” said Sze-Quon. Either the stedge or the sight of the face revived him. “It’s not a naval force! He won’t blast us! It’s Lorrilard a
nd he won’t blast us. You know what he wants! Gold! He won’t cut this continent out from under us. He won’t—” And then his jubilation changed to new tears. “He won’t leave any of us alive either,” he wept.
Kolchein had a suspicion of sweat on his brow. He commanded one of the strongest strong points in space. And cohesion beams were proof. He had weapons and he had numbers and he had engineers and war technicians. That was just one ship up there, the Angel’s Dance. But it had Lorrilard.
A vital, authoritative voice came out of the emergency-band speaker, and a face glowed above it, and the eyes in the face were hard on the screen which mirrored them.
“Shut up, you vile pig!” he screamed at the weeping Sze-Quon. “You predatil, you dourak, you soukine-sin! Command my batteries to shoot on first range! One hundred pounds of gold to the first technician who pots that svolotch! Tell them!”
Sze-Quon was just fleeing from the room in a billow of veils and sleeves when Lorrilard’s hard voice ate through the speaker netting.
“One thousand tons of gold and transport home to any predatil in that fort who will deliver it up to me!”
The speaker had been snagged by Lorrilard’s electrar man and now worked both ways.
It was a chilly thing. It was like a purchase already within the fort. And Sze-Quon, suddenly bright-eyed, halted in his tracks and looked at Kolchein.
“A thous—” Sze-Quon checked himself, licking greedy lips. He considered himself, in the tangled politics of those times, as a member of a conquered race and entitled to a freelance hand in saving his own skin. “Mighty One! Mighty One! Don’t!”
Kolchein’s hand weapon jerked twice and Sze-Quon stood for an instant, twisting in a pillar of flames. Then there was nothing where he had been and only his handkerchief remained, still wet with his tears for a mansion on seven sacred hills.
Kolchein jerked open the antechamber door and stood glaring at his staff. He read faces well, almost as well as he shot, and what he saw now colored him violently.