CHAPTER VIII
The Super-Ship Is Launched
After weeks of ceaseless work, during which was lavished upon her everyresource of mind and material afforded by three planets, the _Boise_ wasready for her maiden flight. As nearly ready, that is, as the thoughtand labor of man could make her. Rodebush and Cleveland had finishedtheir last rigid inspection of the craft and, standing beside the centerdoor of the main airlock, were talking with their chief.
"You say that you think that it's safe, and yet you won't take a crew,"Samms argued. "In that case it isn't safe enough for you men, either. Weneed you too badly to permit you to take such chances."
"You've _got_ to let us go; because we are the only ones who arethoroughly familiar with her theory," Rodebush insisted. "I said, andstill say, that I _think_ it is safe. I can't prove it, however, exceptmathematically; because she's altogether too full of too many new anduntried mechanisms, too many extrapolations beyond all existing orpossible data. Theoretically, she is sound, but you know that theory cango only so far, and that mathematically negligible factors may becomeoperative at those velocities. We do not need a crew for a short trip.We can take care of any minor mishaps, and if our fundamental theoriesare wrong, all the crews between here and Jupiter wouldn't do any good.Therefore we two are going--alone."
"Well, be very careful, anyway. Start out slow and take it easy."
"Start out slow? We can't! We can't neutralize half of gravity, nor halfof the inertia of matter--it's got to be everything or nothing, as soonas the neutralizers go on. We could start out on the projectors, ofcourse, instead of on the neutralizers, but that wouldn't prove anythingand would only prolong the agony."
"Well, then, be as careful as you can."
"We'll do that, Chief," Cleveland put in. "We think a lot of us, and wearen't committing suicide just yet if we can help it. And remember abouteverybody staying inside when we take off--it's barely possible thatwe'll take up a lot of room. Good-bye to all of you."
"Good-bye, fellows!"
The massive insulating doors were shut, the metal side of the mountainopened, and huge, squat caterpillar tractors came roaring and clankinginto the room. Chains and cables were made fast and, mighty steel railsgroaning under the load, the space-ship upon her rolling ways wasdragged out of the Hill and far out upon the level floor of the surfacebefore the tractors cast off and returned to the fortress.
"Everybody is under cover." Samms informed Rodebush. The chief wasstaring intently into his plate, upon which was revealed the controlroom of the untried super-ship. He heard Rodebush speak to Cleveland;heard the observer's brief reply; saw the navigator throw hisswitches--then the communicator plate went blank. Not the ordinaryblankness of a cut-off, but a peculiarly disquieting fading out intodarkness. And where the great space-ship had rested there was for aninstant nothing. Exactly nothing--a vacuum. Vessel, falsework, rollers,trucks, the enormous steel I-beams of the tracks, even the deep-setconcrete piers and foundations and a vast hemisphere of the solidground; all had disappeared utterly and instantaneously. But almost assuddenly as it had been formed the vacuum was filled by a cyclonic rushof air. There was a detonation as of a hundred vicious thunderclaps madeone, and, through the howling, shrieking blasts of wind, there raineddown upon the valley, plain and metaled mountain a veritable avalancheof debris: bent, twisted, and broken rails and beams, splinteredtimbers, masses of concrete, and thousands of cubic yards of soil androck. For inertia and gravitation had not been neutralized at preciselythe same instant, and for a moment everything within the radius ofaction of the iron-driven gravity nullifiers of the _Boise_ hadcontinued its absolute motion with inertia unimpaired. Then, left behindimmediately by the almost infinite velocity of the cruiser, all thismaterial had again become subject to all of Nature's everyday laws andhad crashed back to the ground.
"Could you hold your beam, Randolph?" Samm's voice cut sharply throughthe daze of stupefaction which held spellbound most of the denizens ofthe Hill. But all were not so held--no conceivable emergency could takethe attention of the chief ultra-wave operator from his instruments.
"No, sir," Radio Center shot back. "It faded out and I couldn't recoverit. I put everything I've got behind a tracer on that beam, but haven'tbeen able to lift a single needle off the pin."
"And no wreckage of the vessel itself," Samms went on, half audibly."Either they have succeeded far beyond their wildest hopes or else ...more probably...." He fell silent and switched off the plate. Were histwo friends, those intrepid scientists, alive and triumphant, or hadthey gone to lengthen the list of victims of that man-killingspace-ship? Reason told him that they were gone. They _must be_ gone, orelse his ultra-beams--energies of such unthinkable velocity ofpropagation that man's most sensitive instruments had never been ableeven to estimate it--would have held the ship's transmitter in spite ofany velocity attainable by any matter under any conceivable conditions.The ship must have been disintegrated as soon as Rodebush released hisforces. And yet, had not the physicist dimly foreseen the possibility ofsuch an actual velocity--or had he? However, individuals could came andcould go, but Triplanetary went on. Samms squared his shouldersunconsciously, and slowly, grimly, made his way back to his privateoffice.
He had scant time to mourn. Scarcely had he seated himself at his deskwhen an emergency call came snapping in; a call of such import that hissecretary's usually calm voice trembled as she put it on his plate.
"Commissioner Hinkle is calling, sir," she announced. "Somethingterrible is going on again, out toward Orion. Here he is," and thereappeared upon the screen the face of the Commissioner of Public Safety,the commander of Triplanetary's every armed force--whether of land or ofwater, of air or of empty space.
"They've come back, Samms!" the Commissioner rapped out, withoutpreliminary or greeting. "Four vessels gone--a freighter and a passengerliner, with her escort of two heavy cruisers. All in Sector M; Dx about151. I have ordered all traffic out of space for the duration of theemergency, and since even our warships seem useless, every ship ismaking for the nearest dock at maximum. How about that new flyer ofyours--got anything that will do us any good?" No one beyond the"Hill's" shielding screens knew that the _Boise_ had already beenlaunched.
"I don't know. We don't even know whether we have a super-ship or not,"and Samms described briefly the beginning--and very probably theending--of the trial flight, concluding: "It looks bad, but if there wasany possible way of handling her, Rodebush and Cleveland did it. All ourtracers are negative yet, so nothing definite has...."
He broke off as a frantic call came in from the Pittsburgh station forthe Commissioner, a call which Samms both heard and saw.
"The city is being attacked!" came the urgent message. "We need all thereinforcements you can send us!" and a picture of the beleaguered cityappeared in ghastly detail upon the screens of the observers; a viewbeing recorded from the air. It required only seconds for thecommissioner to order every available man and engine of war to the seatof conflict; then, having done everything they could, Hinkle and Sammsstared in helpless, fascinated horror into their plates, watching thescenes of carnage and destruction depicted there.
* * * * *
The Nevian vessel--the sister-ship, the craft which Costigan had seen inmid-space as it hurtled earthward in response to Nerado's summons--hungpoised in full visibility, high above the metropolis. Scornful of thepitiful weapons wielded by man she hung there, her sinister beauty ofline sharply defined against the cloudless sky. From her shining hullthere reached down a tenuous but rigid rod of crimson energy; a rodwhich slowly swept hither and thither as the detectors of the amphibianssearched out the richest deposits of the precious iron for which theinhuman visitors had come so far. Iron, once solid, now a viscous redliquid, was sluggishly flowing in an ever-thickening stream up thatintangible crimson duct and into the capacious storage tanks of theNevian raider; and wherever that flaming beam went there went also ruin,destruction, and death. Office buildings, s
kyscrapers toweringmajestically in their architectural symmetry and beauty, collapsed intoheaps of debris as their steel skeletons were abstracted. Deep into theground the beam bored; flood, fire, and explosion following in its wakeas the mazes of underground piping disappeared. And the humanity of thebuildings died: instantaneously and painlessly, never knowing whatstruck them, as the life-bearing iron of their bodies went to swell theNevian stream.
Pittsburgh's defenses had been feeble indeed. A few antiquated railwayrifles had hurled their shells upward in futile defiance, and had beenquietly absorbed. The district planes of Triplanetary, newly armed withiron-driven ultra-beams, had assembled hurriedly and had attacked theinvader in formation, with but little more success. Under the impact oftheir beams the stranger's screens had flared white, then poised shipand flying squadron alike had been lost to view in a murkily opaqueshroud of crimson flame. The cloud had soon dissolved, and from theplace where the planes had been there had floated or crashed down alitter of non-ferrous wreckage. And now the cone of space-ships from theBuffalo base of Triplanetary was approaching Pittsburgh, hurling itselftoward the Nevian plunderer and toward known, gruesome and hopelessdefeat.
"Stop them, Hinkle!" Samms cried. "It's sheer slaughter! They haven'tgot a thing--they aren't even equipped yet with the iron drive!"
"I know it," the commissioner groaned, "and Admiral Barnes knows it aswell as we do, but it can't be helped--wait a minute! The Washingtoncone is reporting. They're as close as the other, and they have the newarmament. Philadelphia is close behind, and so is New York. Now perhapswe can do something!"
The Buffalo flotilla slowed and stopped, and in a matter of minutes thedetachments from the other bases arrived. The cone was formed andiron-driven vessels in the van, the old-type craft far in the rear, itbore down upon the Nevian, vomiting from its hollow front a solidcylinder of annihilation. Once more the screens of the Nevian flaredinto brilliance, once more the red cloud of destruction was flungabroad. But these vessels were not entirely defenseless. Theiriron-driven ultra-generators threw out screens of the Nevians' ownformulae, screens of prodigious power to which the energies of theamphibians clung and at which they clawed and tore in baffled, wildlycoruscant displays of power unthinkable. For minutes the furiousconflict raged, while the inconceivable energy being dissipated by thosestraining screens hurled itself in terribly destructive bolts oflightning upon the city far beneath.
No battle of such incredible violence could long endure. Triplanetary'sships were already exerting their utmost power, while the Nevians,contemptuous of Solarian science, had not yet uncovered their fullstrength. Thus the last desperate effort of mankind was proved futile asthe invaders forced their beams deeper and deeper into the overloaded,defensive screens of the war-vessels; and one by one the supposedlyinvincible space-ships of humanity dropped in horribly dismemberedwreckage upon the ruins of what had once been Pittsburgh.