Part Two of

THE MIGHTIEST

MACHINE

by John W. Campbell, Jr.

 

UP TO NOW:

It was Aarn Munro's idea—the Spencer Research Laboratory No. 6. Aarn Munro was the director of the research department of the Spencer Rocket Co., and, incidentally, Russ Spencer's best friend. Russ Spencer, rocketship designer, and grandson of the famous Russel Spencer who founded the Rocket company a century before, in 1979, was to see realized the dream of his father and his grandfather before him—a ship that could make the interplanetary journey without fear of meteor or thought of power shortage.

Aarn Munro's father had helped Russel Spencer II, the present Russ

Spencer's father, had taken part in the colonizing experiment, and, with twenty others, the Munros had been marooned on Jupiter—marooned because Jupiter's great gravity prevented the early rockets from leaving the planet after landing.

Aarn Munro was born there; he was twenty before he saw a ship land that could at last escape. Then, the Jovianborn human, superhuman in strength and speed from Jupiter's harsh training ground, had studied at terrestrial universities.

Now, Spencer, Munro, and their close friend, Don Carlisle, head of the chemical-research department of Spencer Rocket, have embarked in Aarn Munro's latest ship-laboratory, the No. 6.

Aarn's three great inventions are getting their first tests—the antigravitor, the transpon beam, and the momentum-wave drive. The antigravitor makes possible their "aggie" coils, storing the tremendous power their projected, conducting transpon beams steal from the mightiest machine that ever was—the Sun, and the momentum wave makes possible their drive.

Following the wave theory of the atom, Aarn learns how to produce in actuality the waves the theory had predicted as being momentum waves—waves created artificially in space which ARE momentum. They are testing this new ship—their coils full charged—and for the first time in the history of space travel they exceed twenty miles a second, and multiply this old record by two thousand. At forty thousand miles a second—

At forty thousand miles a second their ship, officially the No. 6, familiarly the SUNBEAM, is protected against damage by three layers of force—the magnetic atmosphere, a layer of magnetic field that will stop any conductor moving toward the ship; the antigravity field, which tends to repel any body not already weightless; and the momentum-wave apparatus, which likewise hurls away anything that would tend to change the momentum of the ship.

At forty thousand miles a second the SUNBEAM had the momentum of a major planet—concentrated. And at forty thousand miles a second she struck a planetoid. The magnetic atmosphere blasted the hundred-thousand-ton mass of metal to gas—but it still had a hundred-thousand-ton mass. The antigravitor repelled it, and called on the great aggie-coil storage bank for support; the momentum waves lashed at it, and called on the stored power of a sun for aid—

The fabric of space tore open under that terrible stress. The SUNBEAM ceased to exist in time and space—

 

VI.

 

A BLAST of light that was almost physically painful struck Aarn Munro, and he moved restlessly, then jerked abruptly erect. He was facing the control window, and outside there he could see six strange ships, each about two hundred feet long, needle-slim, with a tiny visible control-room port, and a ring of projections studding the nose. And the nose of each pointed toward the Sunbeam steadily; only occasionally did one swing and dart suddenly to a new position. Powerful beams of bluish light were sweeping over their ship as they apparently investigated.

"What happened?” asked Spencer tensely, suddenly coming up beside Aarn.

"Struck a big meteor. Don't quite know what happened. Ever see ships like those?"

"No known and recognized shipyard of the system ever turned those out," snapped the designer.

"I didn't think so. Did you notice the stars beyond?"

Spencer looked, puzzled, at his friend, then out toward space beyond. But it wasn't, he suddenly realized, black space. It was silver. It flamed and glowed and sparkled like a curtain of the magnetic atmosphere. There were stars, great brilliant white-hot suns scattered so thickly that space could scarcely show through. The heat from those myriad suns was almost palpable even here.

"Where art we?"

"Don't know—only know where we aren't," replied Munro, his eyes darting swiftly over his instruments.

The ships outside were circling closer now. They had evidently decided the ship was totally dead.

"We aren't in the solar system. I—I've an idea. It seems rather fantastic —but it would explain it, perhaps. You have to admit we are at least one hundred thousand light-years away from where we started—farther really—because those suns I see out there would make the Milky Way a dim thing. The Milky Way flung across that bunch would show up as a dark ribbon—literally. Actually we must be a million light-years away. Or more.

"That's a globular cluster and it's about one hundred thousand light-years or more in diameter, at the minimum. I've spotted three supergiant, type-O stars. That's hot enough to melt the rivets out of a solar investigator at half a light-year. Those three can't be closer than one hundred thousand light-years.

"Those fellows outside are getting bolder. They'd come in but the magnetic atmosphere has them worried. I see it's still on. The momentum oscillations have broken down. A transpon beam lead gave way. The antigravity field has collapsed, and we're falling freely into the local sun. There is one, though we can't see it just now, and it must he a hot one. Look at the color of the light on those ships. It's violet—positively violet.

"They'll try to crack us soon. Take these controls. I'm going back." Aarn leaped. The artificial-gravity apparatus was still functioning, but an Earth gravity didn't bother Aarn much. He met Carlisle on the way back. Carlisle was looking over the air apparatus, which seemed to have stopped functioning.

"Your transpon lead has failed," snapped Aarn as he passed. "I'm going to set it up in a few seconds."

Martin, Spencer's man, who had been brought along in his capacity of chief cook and bottle washer, was just coming out of his galley, his head in his hands. The acceleration neutralization was not quite perfect down so far from the center of the ship, and when they struck the meteor, he had been somewhat shaken up.

"Martin—come along. And call Bob."

Bob was the assistant electronics engineer whom Spencer had brought along. Bob was actually Dr. Robert Canning, and besides being an electronics engineer, he was a clever and skilled mechanician.

 

AARN was in the control room. In fifteen seconds he had found the defective lead, cut it out with a pair of bolt clippers, and was disconnecting the studs when Canning showed up with Martin.

"Hey, lazy, get a new number twenty-seven lead. Martin, you get the liquid copper, will you?"

"Sorry—didn't come to right off. Saw the planetoid just before we hit, and passed out. What's the matter?"

Canning was back with the bus bar and snapped it in place. Aarn ran down the studs and painted it with the electrocopper solutions Martin brought, solutions which would make the two copper surfaces knit electrically, but not too firmly physically.

"Plenty—we aren't in the solar system—strange ships—looks like attack."

Aarn was busy with the sun beam controls. He was thinking rapidly, and changing settings slowly, he examined the aggie-coil charges, and found that the banks were still about one third charged. He tested the connecting transpon beams to the momentum apparatus. Something more delicate had given away, also, for there was no response whatsoever.

"Nuisance—isn't it?" said Aarn.

He dived across the ship as though there had been no artificial gravity, then leaped halfway to the control room and took over the controls again with less than two minutes' absence.

"They've been sticking instruments into our field," said Spencer moving out of Aarn's way. "They probably detected your actions when you changed the aggie-coil-power distribution. What's up?"

"Wanted current. No great voltage," replied Aarn. "The momentum apparatus is dead, and Canning's working over it."

"The air's working again," said Carlisle, entering. "I've been looking at the stars. Where are we?"

"Too far away to say. I think, though, and hope, that we are in another four-dimensional space. We've gone from our universe to another one through perhaps a five-dimensional nothingness. Like going from one three-dimensional world to another three-dimensional world through a four-dimensional nothingness.

"That's a high-explosive torpedo of some sort he's sending over. I noticed they stripped the hide off of it."

A long, slim device, perhaps a foot in diameter, and twenty long had started out of one of the projections on one of the ships. "High explosive—or I'm a chemist instead of a physicist."

The torpedo drifted swiftly, under air pressure evidently, for about a hundred yards, then abruptly the tail became wreathed in smoke, and the thing hurled itself forward violently. It darted at the Sunbeam—and suddenly exploded half way.

"Hmmm—pardonable mistake. They thought that brass and copper would be unaffected by the magnetic field. Stripped off the iron evidently."

Aarn was busy. He was checking, instrumentally, a dozen circuits. At last he called out: "Canning—test circuit MM 433-a."

"That's it," came back the reply. "Compensator broke down. The damping effect when the meteor struck was too great for it. Need's a whole new circuit. Take me at least four hours. Shall I start right now?"

"Well, if you can think of some other way of making this bathtub move, all right, but I thought fixing it might be best," suggested Aarn gently. "What else might we do? Get going."

Aarn was busy with something else. He had the television device working now and was rapidly fitting the heavy mirror-polish steel shutters over the ports of the control room.

"Martin—hey, Martin! Get busy slapping on the port shutters. Fast!"

"Why? Rays do you think?" Carlisle anxiously. "We have no defense at all."

"Yes—rays of a sort—light rays; nothing much more dangerous. But light rays could blind us. Remember that the televisor eye there is a photocell of the newest Dinwiddie type. They can handle the Sun's radiation at the surface, fifty horse power per square inch. Also, curiously, they are supersensitive. Result—we have an eye out there now that can stand anything any projectors they have can handle."

"Suppose it's a heat ray?" suggested Carlisle.

"Suppose it's your grandmother's pet boogey! Get this through your head, Carlisle: Any weapon that depends on pure energy to destroy is a double-ended weapon, as deadly at the sending end as at the receiving, and probably more so. In other words, to project a heat ray requires the projection of, at least, ten thousand horse power in a beam of not more than half a square foot of cross section. That's not going to be any too bad. But if it's half a square foot at the receiving end, it can't be larger at the sending end, and will probably be smaller. Then it is bound to be more deadly to the projector than to the receiving surface.

"Same's true of anything of the sort. Bombs are like that. They blow themselves Ah—here he comes."

 

A RAY of light. It was a terrific stabbing searchlight intended for the sole purpose of blinding the enemy, if it was humanly possible. It would have been effective but for the fact that the televisor simply arranged itself for the necessary load and showed each ship as a single point of bluish light, not too bright. Then a series of splashes of reddish light began to spread over the surface of the magnetic atmosphere.

"I only fear we are like the oyster and the starfish." Aarn sighed. "They can't break our shell at the present rate, but, on the other hand, we can't run away for a while. But if they just go right on pulling long enough they may open us up eventually."

The pyrotechnic display stopped abruptly, the searchlights went black, and the television screen showed again the simple ships, their tiny noses an almost impossible target for any weapon.

"Those," said Aarn at length, "are what the old navies would have called destroyers. Speedy, probably, fairly powerful fighting weapons, and a very small target."

"What are they going to do next?"

"How in blazes do I know? I guessed the searchlights because it's obvious. The next may be anything from a radio-frequency pencil of energy designed to heat us generally—that being a possibility because, Carlisle, it starts out as electric forces, and doesn't become destructive unmanageable heat till it's absorbed, but it can't be used as a concentrated beam for cutting holes, because it won't focus that sharply. Or their next attack may be some kind of a tractor beam with which to tow us home where the big battleships can be turned loose on us, to crack the nut; or open the oyster, as I said before."

"What do we do in that case?"

"We help Canning with his repairs as much as possible. And at the end of about four hours, we run away from the bad boys. By the way, we're turning slowly, and we get a peek at the sun in a few minutes. I didn't look when I was back.

"Hmmm—our friends evidently chose the tractor beam. In this case a series of powerful electromagnets on the ends of cables."

The enemy ships were lowering toward them something cylindrical, and roughly fashioned, at the end of long cables. The devices came from somewhere behind, for the cables hung along the side of the ships.

Aarn smiled. "My brethren, we shall now demonstrate the old Australian custom, or 'How to Make a Boomerang go home and Spank Papa.' They went to the trouble of making those bar electromagnets to act on our unipolar field. Nice of them—"

Aarn was adjusting something, and he had a switch—a two-way switch—under his hand. The bar magnets the enemy were lowering were taut on their cables now, straining at the powerful unipolar field of the Sunbeam.

And with a gentle sigh, Aarn reversed the Sunbeam's magnetic pole. Instantly, the half-ton magnets were under the influence of a tremendous magnetic field of the same sign—and they were repelled with all the power that had attracted them, plus a little extra Aarn had added to the field.

Straight and true the great lumps of steel shot backward and toward the needle ships. Two ships avoided their flying magnets, four were struck and dented, one actually torn by the great flying projectile.

"How sweet the uses of adversary!" misquoted Aarn. "But they won't assume we are dead any longer. The fact of life has been adequately proved."

Whoever "they" may have been, "they" didn't. The six ships spun with startling speed into a hemisphere, all ships pointing straight toward the Sunbeam, but so arranged as to offer the absolute minimum target, and the absolute optimum of effectiveness. Then they began running through their armory vigorously.

They started with shells. And they weren't all metal shells this time ; a lot of them were evidently made of synthetic plastics, and they shot through the magnetic atmosphere unhindered, but now Aarn had reestablished an antigravity field, and the great shells bounced one after another into flaming destruction.

 

THE TERRIFIC searchlights flamed again. And spheres of blue radiance. They shot out swiftly from the ships, sped straight toward the Sunbeam—and then started circling it. They circled steadily, swiftly, expanding slowly, glowing brighter, and staying at a uniform distance from the ship—a distance of about half a mile.

A shell struck one of them, and shell and blue sphere of radiance vanished together in terrific electric flame. Half a hundred of the strange spheres spun about harmlessly now, and when they came near each other, they shied violently away.

"Wavering planetary paths! That's controlled ball lightning! What I'd give for the secret of that!" gasped Aarn.

"Why isn't it striking us?"

"Circulating in the magnetic field. Say—look!"

The thermometer was rising. It was rising smoothly, and steadily. The room was getting uncomfortably hot, and their own bodies began to get warmer, perspiration stood out on them, and little blue sparks began to jump from bead to bead of that perspiration. Then their keys, their coins, all their metal objects began to have live sparks like a halo about them.

"Damn—ouch—" Aarn reached and held firmly to his controls. "Radio frequency—and plenty. Well—our turn now."

Something hummed vividly in the power room behind. A sudden explosion of air as tremendous power leaped into a transpon beam that smashed its way through the ship's atmosphere.

And a sudden white-hot globule of molten metal where an enemy ship had been.

The hum died, and the air exploded back into the partial vacuum the beam had cut in it.

Again a whine, a clap of thunder, and a blazing white-hot spot of light where a ship had been, exploding light.

"How sweet!" murmured Aarn, and swept his deadly probe about through space. He was using no power till the beam met substance. "It's the transpon beam working in reverse. It's supposed to take power from a sun for our coils. I'm taking power from the coils, and making miniature suns out of those ships."

Another ship suddenly blazed up and died, and then the remaining ships vanished abruptly as they raced away. The Sunbeam had raised its first blisters. Two of the remaining ships began to accelerate gradually, and then moved more rapidly away.

"They aren't all dead yet," said Aarn respectfully. "Those boys make battleships. The darned things are so long, I'd have to melt down two hundred feet of ship before they'd all be gone. And they are supposed to be able to move. You know, I'll bet they haven't got any energy weapon like that transpon beam, and they probably wonder what manner of heat ray I have."

"I thought," said Carlisle, "that you said energy rays—rays that depended on energy for destruction—couldn't be made."

"I did. And I meant it. Figure it out," returned Aarn with a grin.

"I figure," said Spencer, "that the beam is not dangerous—it's what it carries. Does that make any real difference?"

"That's the answer—and it does," replied Aarn. "No sound can be heard three thousand miles away; no sound can cross space; but we can hear sounds which originate on Earth, clear out on Jupiter. How come? The sound doesn't get there—it's carried there by something else. Sound hasn't the penetrative power of radio.

"In this case, a beam, can't be handled by a projector if that beam is so destructive to the matter of a ship. But now we have the transpon beam which doesn't destroy—it's quite a harmless little thing, perfectly innocent. Only somebody poured poison in it. It conducts.

"Here's an illustration of the case. Take that piece of wire there—a piece of copper. I can truly and safely say that a wire as thin as the lead of a pencil can't be made the shaft of a machine carrying ten thousand horse power twenty miles. Impossible! But that doesn't mean that ten thousand electric horse power can't be conducted through it. As a driving shaft, as direct mechanical energy in other words, it would be impossible. As a conductor for a second-hand energy, it is possible.

"In general, the only effective rays possible as weapons will be in two classes, the catalyst rays, and the conductor rays.

"By catalyst rays, I mean rays which cause effects at a distance, not by doing work but by giving a signal. A radio beam that releases the explosion of a ton of dynamite might come under that class. A death ray would also come under that class. A ray which set up interference such that the fleet could not communicate, and hence the signals were misunderstood, would also be a catalyst-type beam.

"The conductor beams are, of course, such beams as the transpon.

"The enemy have retired in disgrace. What next? Where do we go from here?"

"Find out where we are first," suggested Spencer.

"The ship's got to be fixed up before we go at all," Carlisle reminded him.

"Oh, I know it! And I know now as much about where we are as I can in less than five years. We are in another space. I know why we are in this particular other space, too. This space is in a sort of strained condition already. Look at the size of the stars we can see. I recognize a number of spectral classes there, and every doggoned one of them is a supergiant! This is a globular cluster of gigantic stars."

"How can you tell, only glancing at them?" demanded Spencer.

"Experience—I am really guessing, but it is a pretty fair guess. Those spectra look hot. Even allowing for the fact that the light is slightly changed due to different space conditions here."

"And what if they are supergiants, why does that explain anything?"

"We got here by passing through the wall of our space, into a sort of fifth-dimensional interspace. From that interspace we had to enter some other normal four-dimensional space, because we weren't normal to that space at all.

Then we took to the one which was easiest of entry—this one, which is strained almost to the breaking point in spots, itself, or at least far nearer that point than any other normal space.

"Those enormous stars simply make great strain spots in the fifth-dimensional interspace side of these spaces. Those strains in the surface attract any unnatural strain in the interspace. Probably anything that leaks through from any of those other spaces ends up in this space."

"Why near this particular star, then?" asked Spencer. "By the way, I haven't seen it, and I'm going back to look."

"You needn't. It's just a bright spot, and you couldn't tell a thing. I'm going to take some readings presently, and send out a sunbeam and get some results. I've started warming up the tapper tubes. If my suspicions are correct, this is a huge star, far larger than the average, even here. That particular strain spot attracted us."

"Why didn't we land in the star then?"

"What threw us through here? A collision? Do you think we went through just so we could have another and be sent back? Naturally we rolled off the sides of that star's field to some extent before breaking in here."

"Then this is the biggest star in this space of supergiant stars! Wheeee—"

"No; it doesn't have to be at all, Russ," replied Aarn. "It is probably the nearest-biggest star in this space to the side of our own space through which we came. Get it?"

 

AARN was working over his instruments now, making adjustments and readings. Gradually a look of puzzled amazement came over his face. More and more carefully he made adjustments. At last he sighed gently and looked up.

"Sweet stellar cycles! It's a Cephid variable or I'm an asteroid. And it's a Cephid of a class you and I never even heard about. Russ, you must be right. That must be the largest star in this whole darned space of supergiants. It is a Cephid with a period that can't be more than a few hours at the outside; it's tremendous. It's gigantic. Maybe it isn't a Cephid, but a different kind of variable that's twice as big.

"I took a radiation measurement on it, and at our present distance it's about as strong as sunlight, but the maximum is in the blue range. Then I took a gravity reading on it and a few other readings—electronic and magneto-metric.

"The answer seems to be that that little foot warmer is about one hundred million times as bright and potent as old Sol! We are ten thousand units from that sun's center! About, that is to say, ten thousand times one hundred million miles, or about one million million miles. In round figures, at a distance of one trillion miles, this sun is as hot as ours is at a distance of a hundred million. Shall we go lay an egg on its surface?"

"Great orbits! How big is the thing?" gasped Spencer.

"It's hard to say." Aarn sighed. "I'd like to know accurately, and will, of course, later, but all I can do is estimate from the known effect of the gravity decline. It seems to be of the order of five hundred million miles in diameter at present and growing larger."

"Larger than Antares " said Spencer softly.

"But Antares isn't as bad as this, man. Antares is cold. Its surface temperature is so low it doesn't compete. It has a temperature of about three thousand. That thing—Heaven alone knows what the temperature is. I can't tell after the light has struggled out against that gravitational field. That field must drag it back through six shades of blue."

"How do we get power? Tap that thing? Say, the Sun is a mild little old dry cell, plugging along peaceably. That's a dynamic, roaring, pulsating furnace."

"We can tap anything," said Aarn firmly. "I've already started the beam."

"Haw—when do we get power? Next year?"

Aarn sat slowly upright and looked at his friend in horrified surprise. "I didn't stop to think. One trillion miles! Over fifteen hundred hours!" Aarn's face paled slowly. "We're stuck unless —" He fell silent and thoughtful.

"Are there any planets?" Carlisle interrupted him.

"Eh—planets?" Aarn looked up, annoyed. "Dozens. Couldn't separate their effects."

"Dozens?" gasped Spencer. "What kind of a system is this?"

"Those planets," said Aarn, "were probably the throw-offs, the bits of matter swept out by the natural antigravitational fields. On stars that size, there must be billions of tons of stuff thrown off every week. That stuff gets swept up and turns into planets. Probably, though, the process actually is kept going by frequent passages of near-stars. In a globular cluster, where the distances between stars aren't more than a light-year or two, and the darned things have gravitational control extending for nearly that far, the effects would be rather powerful, and more continuous.

"We are probably moving in an orbit such as a meteor might follow, else we'd be bathed in them. I'll bet worlds here have a constant shower that's worse than the Leonids or any other shower back home."

"Nice place for space ships."

"What of it? You can't change things. Look—that star there. I swear I can see a disk, and it's so bright I can scarcely look at it."

"Sunlight from this sun is coming in —we're turning," said Carlisle almost simultaneously.

A stream of almost liquid blue light cascaded through one of the ports in a thin, thin crescent, and struck the opposite wall. A bright, harsh blue competed with the gas-glow lights.

"If we want to get away from here before those ships go home and tell mamma, we'd better do some work," suggested Aarn. "Canning," he called, "how you making out?"

"This cockeyed, misbegotten inspiration of a half-baked imbecile has more misconceived and willfully aborted circuits than a centipede with locomotor ataxia," Canning roared back. "Come here and see if you can figure it out; I'm about through."

"Spencer, will you take that over? I've got some things I want to do," said Munro. "Want to make some calculations."

"Right enough. But what calc have you in mind?"

"How to go faster than light." Munro grinned and vanished toward the rear.

"All right; don't tell me if you don't want to," snapped Spencer.

 

MUNRO found Canning engaged in trying to replace the various pieces of apparatus he had been forced to remove to get at the defective circuit. The actual repair had been made, and within twenty minutes he'd have it back together. Then would come the delicate task of tuning the device.

Hour after hour passed as the two engineers struggled over it, and Carlisle and Aarn, both excellent mathematicians, struggled over the math machines.

They had got their first glimpse of the sun when they went back to the calculation room, a bright blue disk, little larger than some of the very near and very large stars.

"There must be a planet near here," said Carlisle, "or those ships wouldn't have been out here."

"There must be two," replied Munro, "two, or more. Those ships were loaded for b'ar, and that means either they were pirates preying on commercial interplanetary shipping, or police, after any strange craft or, far more probable conclusion, warships.

"Either of the first two presupposes other space craft. There are no space ships if they have no goal. Hence, two worlds. War rockets for planetary war wouldn't be attacking strange ships millions of miles from home. Interplanetary war is indicated.

"Further: They are near-by planets, because of the size of this system. Do you realize that those planets must have orbits with circumferences of the order of three trillion, one hundred and forty-six billion miles?"

"Interplanetary war wouldn't last a year here!" Carlisle laughed.

"Hmmm—maybe it would last that long, if it wasn't too active—if the forces were too nearly matched. Remember a year, though, would be about eighty thousand of our years."

"But the planets would get so far apart! If they were on opposite sides of their orbits, the contestants would have to quit. Suppose we were fighting Mars, and Mars got on the other side of the Sun. We'd probably declare a temporary peace."

"Yes; true enough. But if Neptune and Pluto were fighting, it would be a thousand years before one would get on the opposite side of the Sun. Here the case is even more extreme, because the difference in their orbits is so small a per cent."

They set to work, though, while the blue disk of the sun crept slowly across their port, and "sank" on the other side. Martin declared a meal, and announced it, while still Spencer and the too-optimistic Canning labored over the job that was to have taken four hours.

After the meal Aarn seemed strangely pleased as he considered the results of the mathematics. Carlisle had performed a number of derivations for him, but had not understood the meaning of the results, as had Munro.

"What is it that's so pleasing?" asked he, at length.

"A chance to go places," replied Munro with a laugh. "I have some apparatus to make. Canning can have that job, while I finish his."

"All right by me, I assure you. My job is distinctly discouraging," snorted Canning.

Aarn grinned, and showed the mechanician-engineer what he wanted made. The man become more and more puzzled as he examined the pattern.

At last he said: "I can make the thing, but darned if I can see why."

"I can," said Munro simply. And that was that.

In half an hour the physicist had done what the engineers had been unable to accomplish, for, when he applied himself, Munro could do delicate work. The circuits were balanced, and he tried them out a bit. The ship moved gently and turned about.

In another hour the simple-complex device Aarn had requested was made. It looked, and was, mechanically simple, but its theoretical implications were enormous.

"Now you have it, what have you?" asked Spencer.

"Mahomet's decision." Munro grinned.

"Oh, blazes, what is it?" snapped Spencer.

"Mahomet's decision," replied Aarn evenly.

 

AN ALARM chose that minute to make its presence known. Aarn jumped. "Great Jupiter—they're back. I'll bet papa and big brother Bill are along to—"

He was out of hearing in the control room. In an instant he was in his seat. A far-flung screen of magnetic force had been disturbed by the approach of a fleet of eight ships. Two were recognizable as the undamaged members of the late adversary. The rest were new.

They were of two new types. The long needle shape was missing in them, and promptly Aarn realized he was seeing now space cruisers and battleships. The two little destroyers led the way, darting rapidly from side to side. Slower, four greater cruisers came up, and behind them two great battleships.

Spencer gasped. "Great planets and little asteroids! It's a battle fleet."

"The destructive beam. They must want the secret of that thing. We're sunk. I'll bet those battleships have noses of ten-foot steel, and the walls for a hundred feet back must be the same," Aarn replied.

A great battleship turned slightly askew, and they got a glimpse of its length. It was a full thousand feet in length, with a series of projecting turrets along her sides and top.

"What a monster—and two of them." Spencer stared aghast.

"The cruiser's not bad," said Munro judiciously.

It wasn't; it was perhaps six hundred feet long, with fewer and smaller turrets, but still a far, far different thing from the destroyer.

As yet the enemy were looking over the Sunbeam with caution.

"I wish," said Aarn, "that the aggie coils were full. I'll have to start carving on that battleship, or they won't believe me, and if the thing is all metal, they may be able to get rid of the heat. If it is by any chance silver, we're sunk before we start."

Munro had been busy. With a sudden flick of his finger, a series of relays shot home, and suddenly great beams clapped into action behind him some where. And on the bow of the great battleship appeared a spot of flaming, white-hot incandescence. It grew and spread, and the ship jerked wildly.

A great mass of white-hot metal was thrown off by the motion of the ship, and a pit five feet across and two feet deep was left. The beam found lodgment again, and again the metal burned white-hot.

The enemy fleet went into action with their heating rays, their greatest guns, and far greater lightning balls. No result, because of the magnetic atmosphere, from any save the induction ray. The Sunbeam became unbearable.

Aarn shifted his attack from the almost-impregnable battleship to the nearest cruiser. A five-foot hole appeared in her side, drove swiftly straight through her interior, and smashed its way to her power compartment inside of fifteen Seconds. The control cable had been severed before the ship could be moved, and before a second control could be brought into action, the power storage was reached.

The cruiser disintegrated in the most frightful burst of sheer blue-white incandescence the solarites had ever witnessed. Enormous chunks of flying metal smashed their way through everything within range—save the magnetic atmosphere and the terrific walls of the battleships.

One destroyer was riddled and rolling away a lifeless hulk. A cruiser was wounded and moved hastily away.

 

MOMENTARILY the attack on the Sunbeam was stopped. The terrific heat did not abate, but the painful, continuous electric sparks did.

"It's a wonder our circuits don't go dead under that," said Spencer.

"To much metal—too much grounding—too much shielding of every sort," snapped Aarn.

He spun his controls, lined up his beam, and let go at another cruiser. A white-hot needle smashed its way through the outer wall of two-foot steel, and an inner wall of one-foot steel, and was messing up a kitchen within, when the ship darted away.

"Our coils will be dead in about one and a half minutes." Aarn sighed. "Once I've discharged them—"

He lined up his beam and let it go again. This time the damaged battleship received the dose where it had been hurt before. The metal incandensced and exploded outward in a stream of white-hot sparks. The beam punished its way through an inner one-foot wall and ate a channel straight through the heart of the great ship in a matter of split seconds, for under that terrific drive, a wall of metal only an inch or two thick meant almost nothing at all.

It struck the engine room. To do so it ate its way through another one-foot wall, but something was the matter, and the great ship was unable to move. The engine room of the battleship was suddenly an inferno of white heat that spread like a widening pool, eating at the heart of the ship. A dozen trapdoors all over the ship opened, and tiny forms shot out into space, making swiftly for other ships.

"I hope they retire," said Aarn wistfully. "We've got about enough power left Ta cook dinner, and I'd hate to use that up too."

And then—from somewhere behind something white and gleaming, a long slim body, roared forward. It was twenty-five feet long, and not a foot in diameter, but it had a rocket motor, and it had intentions of damage. It missed the nose of the battleship, which was still in good condition, by about two feet and a skillful maneuver, and struck the injured battleship. A series of explosions that lasted a full thirty seconds followed, and when they were over, the rocket torpedo had eaten a hole through the four-foot armor and was floundering about inside the ship.

A flock of those torpedoes was flying now, and all directed toward the attacking cruisers and battleship. Shells seemed to be invisibly on their way, for huge gouts of white flame sprang up all over the great metal walls and pits appeared. Occasionally a trapdoor was found, and then a great pit appeared which was immediately the target for a hundred shells.

The attacking battleship had evidently had more than enough. It retired rapidly, and for the first time the solarites saw their rescuers.

Four great battleships, eight cruisers, and a fleet of destroyers. Every one of those ships was shaped almost exactly like the Sunbeam herself, with lines distinctly at variance with those of the other fleet's ships.

"Now what?" asked Spencer in a tired voice. "Do we fight or what?"

"We what," replied Aarn. "They must be friends. They evidently consider any enemy of their enemies a friend. Very useful frame of mind. Probably just as interested in finding out how in the name of blazes we burned holes in that battleship as the enemy were. We've got to signal. How? They don't know what's a beam of destruction and what's a beam of light. And we haven't any more power to argue with, except for what's in the indispensible magnetic atmosphere."

"Can't we signal from—"

"Ah—power!" interrupted Munro, with a smile of pleasure. "That's an easy signal of friendship."

"What is? That we've got power?"

"No; that we haven't. The man you do a favor for," said Aarn, working rapidly, "is twice your friend."

 

THE LIGHTS aboard the Sunbeam began to fade slowly, growing dimmer and dimmer. A searchlight reached out suddenly from the solarian ship and died slowly in redness as the lights faded rapidly to darkness. The strangers watching from outside saw a number of small bobbing lights move about inside the ship. Presently a doorway opened, and a light, a dim, dim light shot out in a curve, something trailing along behind it like a tail.

A destroyer maneuvered cautiously over to it and picked up the dim light and the trailing thing. It was an incandescent bulb. The trailing thing was a piece of twisted pair wire, the wires connected to the bulb. It was a very dim bulb. It told a long, and complete story to the highly intelligent men of the Magyan ships.

It said in brief: This ship uses electric power. It has used all its power in fighting, so thoroughly that even the lights have failed. This wire has been tossed over to us that we may supply power. It gives us a means of measuring the voltage of their power system, determining whether they want a.c. or d.c., and many other things are suggested, such as the fact that the stranger ship is indeed in trouble and lost.

The Magyan destroyer captain consulted his superiors, while his engineers made tests on the wire. The voltage they determined. It was about a hundred and eighty-six, on our scale. They then connected the light bulb to a source of potential and ran it up till the bulb was glowing at the greatest safe temperature. The voltage they used in this was two hundred and thirty. Therefore they pumped over current at two hundred and thirty volts.

Immediately the lights on board the Sunbeam flashed up once more, and three solarites gave a cheer of joy.

"Step number one!" called Carlisle.

"We've got to talk to them. Let's hope their language isn't too hard," mourned Spencer, "I never was good at languages."

"I think I'd better stay here," said Aarn, "and finish fixing this boat. You'll have to go over there— Whoa, some one is coming. Spence, take the control room. I'm working in the air lock, and I intend to pass that bird right into the lounge. Meet him there."

For the first time the solarians got a view of a Magyan. Anto Rayl was to be a friend to them. He was six feet tall, and absolutely human in every character.

His eyes were gray, with speckles of golden color floating in them, his face was tanned deeply, a lean, strong face with wide, high cheek bones, a straight, thin nose with delicate nostrils, his chin firm and square, his hair was black as space and cut square and short in front, with a straight bang across the back of his neck.

His uniform was some woven-elastic fiber that evidently was capable of stretching in all directions. It fitted him closely, revealing a body that was muscular and well-proportioned. His chest was deep and wide, and his bones strong.

He looked at the Terrestrians interestedly and with some peculiar anxiety and surprise. His eyes darted swiftly about the power room, and a slight look of disappointment came into them, for absolutely nothing was readable to him now, since all the mechanisms were covered, as understandable as an automobile with the hood down.

Then suddenly he noticed the form of the Jovian, half hidden where he had been opening the lock door.

The Magyan slowly pulled a tiny metal tab, and the absolutely transparent envelope that had protected him in his short trip across space fell away. He was still looking at the Jovian, and at last turned away, a distinct look of displeasure on his face. Aarn was himself annoyed by this—then suddenly grinned widely. He laughed softly, and the Magyan turned toward him.

Aarn stepped forward with a friendly smile and stretched out a hand in greeting. Hesitantly the Magyan reached out his own hand. With a slight smile, Aarn shook hands, keeping his fingers flaccid. The Magyan would learn the Jovian's strength later.

"Greetings, friend, and you sure fill the definition of a good one!"

"Ahtop ah-menahep—etran matral hepanet."

"Hmm—we won't get anywhere that way. Look," said Aarn distinctly. "I am—Aarn."

"Aarn?"

"Yes—Aarn. He—Russ. He Car."

"Ahm—Ahm—Aarn—Russ—Cah."

"That's it. Who are you?"

"Anto Rayl," replied the Magyan.

"Anto Rayl. Good! Now to learn a language. It had better be theirs if we possibly can. Let's see. How can I ask?"

Spencer smiled. "Easy!" He picked up a chair that was near by, held it before him, and pointed with his other hand. "Chair," he said distinctly. "What?" he inquired.

 

FOR A MOMENT Anto Rayl was puzzled; then he grasped the idea. In a moment he had pulled a small instrument from his pocket and was talking rapidly. Aarn looked at the thing closely and reached forward and pushed it away from him. He shook his head, and then put a hand to the instrument. His hand undulating, he moved it across the room till it struck the metal wall, then he simply smashed his hand flat against the metal.

"No. Won't go."

It wasn't the metal. It was the magnetic atmosphere, but there was a wall which radio wouldn't penetrate easily.

In an hour, a teacher had come from one of the other ships, a skillful artist. He, with Anto Rayl, started teaching them, and evidently Anto Rayl's people didn't know the meaning of fatigue, for they kept at it for ten hours straight. And it was a pure, intensive course. So intensive, and so purely lingual, that absolutely no information passed. In the meantime a heavier cable had been run in from one of the battleships, and the great aggie coils of the Sunbeam were slowly being charged. However, Anto Rayl did stop once to inquire where in the name of something or other all the power was going to. It seemed that about one quarter of the battleship's power had been sent over, and that was all they could spare. Aarn grinned and took Anto Rayl to one of the doors in the wall of the Sunbeam. Behind was one single group of coils. Aarn pointed to them, and indicated they were about one tenth full. Then he pointed to another group barely visible, and indicated they had no charge at all. Anto looked incredulous. The labor of learning a language, even passably, is terrific. It is so great that the author of fiction invariably is tempted to resort to telepathy as a short cut. Aarn and his friends retired with the firm conviction that some such thing was badly needed. All they seemed to have learned was an incredible number of words, such simple words as "go" and "away" and "be" and such, and they realized that they could not so much as give a sensible sentence. "The chair is up there," was about their limit. "At any rate," said Spencer with a groan, his head between his hands, "they don't go in for declensions, conjugations, and dual, plural, and singular voices, and there seems to be some rhyme and reason in some of it, anyway."

"Maybe," said Carlisle disgustedly. "Also a headache."

Martin had breakfast ready when they awoke in the morning, and Canning announced that he had finished the connections Aarn had prescribed for the new apparatus.

Anto Rayl was not back yet and did not show up when their activity began. Aarn went over Canning's connections and tested them carefully. Next he took some power readings and determined that he had enough power for what he wanted to accomplish.

 

 

"This," he said with a smile, "will surprise our friends immensely. It will also surprise you."

"It will," agreed Spencer. "You haven't yet told your employer what you have been doing."

"My employer has become merely a supernumerary here." Aarn smiled. "We are about to go to the mountain, if you must know."

"You mentioned that," replied Spencer. "I took it to mean that since Anrel—as Anto Rayl called the sun here —won't come out along your beam in anything less than half a year or so, you plan going there. Fine! Just tell me, though, how, in the sacred name of the nine known planets, you expect to accomplish that which every physicist since Einstein has said was impossible."

"None of them said it. We've already done it."

Spencer looked at him silently for a moment. "All right, I am a liar. Now prove it."

"How far is it back to Earth?"

"Uhhh—that's not a distance."

"All right, then. We aren't going a distance. Only we're going to wind up somewhere near that sun," said Aarn, and started putting up the remaining shutters.

All but the ones in the pilot room were up. In a moment only the television served to show them the Magyan patrol about them.

"Well, good-by," said Aarn.

He depressed a control. Instantly the Magyan patrol became a two-dimensional picture of a Magyan patrol. The battleships were silhouettes, and the whole thing vanished in a puff. The sun, Anrel, alone remained unchanged as minute after minute sped by. Then, at last, even it began to show signs of growth. But something else was growing off to one side—a world that flashed larger and larger, that twisted and turned as their ship fled past it at a velocity that was preposterous, impossible.

"We aren't," explained Aarn, "really going through space. We're going round it and keeping contact rather slightly. We're half out of space. We had just enough power to build up that condition, thanks to the Magyan battleship."

"How fast are we going?" demanded Spencer.

"We aren't," said Munro blankly. "Grrrr—how fast would be going if we were?"

"About twenty-five hundred times as fast as light. That means that where light would take about fourteen hundred hours, it will take us a bit more than half an hour. We won't go all the way, though. I'm stopping several million miles short. And making another slight modification in space as soon as I get the power."

 

THE SYSTEM was simple enough, when understood. The ship, in crossing from one normal space to the other, was in an interspace where it did not belong and was instantly shoved to a place it could exist. In being pushed through that strange interspace, the meaning of distance was forgotten. It could have alighted anywhere in the other space. Aarn was intentionally shoving himself half way out of the normal space into that interspace and then coming back where he wished.

Anrel grew larger. The great blue-fire disk grew with astonishing slowness, for they were covering billions and hundreds of billions of miles with every second. But the titanic sun was so distant that, even so, change was slow.

"That's about enough," Munro said at last, when Anrel was a disk of blue fire that spread over half the firmament, blotting everything else from sight.

The television eye was cut down to a minimum, and a diversion-shunt circuit called into play to handle the enormous influx of energy. The temperature of the ship was rising rapidly even here in the interspace condition.

"Look out!" warned Aarn.

He cut a switch. Instantly he threw a second. In that momentary lapse of time, the shutter before their eyes had grown red-hot, and the television screen was blank.

"Radiation!" Spencer exclaimed and fell silent.

God's mighty experimental laboratories, the suns of space, did make the weapons of humankind seem futile. The mere exhaust energy of this star had nearly fused that heavy metal shutter in a fraction of a second.

"What's cooling us?" Spencer asked at length.

Aarn was silent—and busy. "I'd like to know this sun's frequencies better.”

"What's that mean?" asked Carlisle.

"It means I may hook onto about a million times as much energy as I want," replied Munro. "And we aren't being cooled. I worked this out from the same interspace idea. That inter-space experience was a great thing for me." He grinned. "I've made the ship invisible."

"Invisible?" gasped Carlisle. "I can see it—"

"Certainly, defect. But it's invisible from outside. I've shunted the incident electromagnetic energy through ninety degrees into gravitomagnetic energy, and back again on the other side. We aren't absorbent to gravitomagnetic radiation, and it passes right through."

"Gravitomagnetic—what's that?"

"Electromagnetic energy is energy which is cyclicly transformed from an electric field to a magnetic field and back again, and possesses the property of traveling as radiation through space at a speed of a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Gravitomagnetic energy is the same, except that the change is between gravitational and magnetic fields."

"Does it occur in nature?"

"Naturally."

"Why hasn't it been detected and used before this?" asked Spencer.

"I just gave the reason. It passes through any physical body unhindered. Only certain force fields can detect and handle it. I detected it against my gravitational fields, naturally. It won't go very far, anyway, before it gets broken up into a different form of energy. I think it's the source of cosmic rays. Gravitational fields tend to combine, and unlike electromagnetic radiation which always goes down the scale, gravitomagnetic radiation is willing to go up the scale.

"That beam ought to be getting near the surface layer now. I've got it cut down to nothing. I hope it leaves me something either of the power or the ship." Aarn read his instruments carefully.

"Anyway, here is the result. I can get near this sun, by-pass the radiation, and live to tell about being here."

"Is the television burned out?" asked Carlisle. "I'd like to watch that star."

"I just got through saying that the light and heat were by-passed," said Aarn patiently. "We can't see out. I can make a small hole in the screen if I want to, and I'd not live long enough to close it."

"Will this invisibility be useful in fighting! Oh, oh! We'll have some fun with the—Tefflans, Anto Rayl called them."

"Wrong," replied Aarn, his eyes on the instruments. "They'd spot this field a billion miles away, when they couldn't see us at all if we were in normal space. That beam is just—about—here."

He waited expectantly, the whole ship quiet in suspense. Still minutes passed.

"It didn't get anywhere at the outer layer," said Aarn softly. "It's going deeper."

 

A DEAFENING explosion echoed through the ship, a tremendous glare of blue light that burned through it, a deep-throated hum of rushing power that made the entire ship vibrate with its beat. Rapidly Aarn was cutting down the power.

"Everything's—full—nearly."

The power died, the blue glare faded gradually, and finally was gone.

"Done!" Aarn sighed as he cut his beam. "Got a stock of power now that counts, and I'm going to have more shortly. If we want to get back, Russ, we'll have to rip out some of those nice extra bedrooms, and the lounge goes, and the lab will have to be filled with coils. That lab can be set up on Magya and we can work from there as a base. It may be years before we get back, for we've got a thousand observations to make. We've got to find our own particular space to get back to. It has no extra-great tension so that we can find it easily."

The ship seemed to reel, then suddenly the television was working again ; it showed the star spinning across the screen, then rapidly retreating as they headed back to the Magyan patrol.

"How will you find our space?" asked Spencer after a moment of horrified thought. He'd not thought of that angle.

"Take a chance, largely, if necessary. The quickest way home, if it will work, is to go after the space fields of antigravitor apparatus. We know they have that on Earth, and it isn't like a natural field, so we know intelligent beings live there.

"But they may not be our intelligent beings, and we may simply land in a third space. There may be a way to localize the thing, though.

"But first—I'm interested in the Magyans. I noticed something you may not have done. What's their word for mother?"

"Matra," replied the puzzled engineer.

"Father?"

"Paldri."

"That's the thing I noticed. Just think. See if it isn't a series. Padre-pater-paternal-Vater- father-pere-paldri . And madre-mater-mutter-mere-mother matra. I swear those similarities are not chance. There were others I noticed. That is an Earth-human race. They were perfectly, absolutely human. You saw that.

"We're getting back to that squad now, and I'm going to learn their story. They're too human to be anything else. And this is the place where anything cast adrift from the planet would inevitably land. I want to hear that story —and about those Tefflans. I saw—one of them. Did you?"

"Saw one? When?"

"In the battle. It was red. And—it wasn't human. I hated it at sight. It was—a devil! Tail—horns—"

 

VII.

 

ANTO RAYL eyed them uncertainly as he entered with the artist-teacher. "Where did you go?" he asked.

"To the sun," replied Aarn, almost as surprised to find he could answer as at the fact that Anto had asked an intelligible intelligent question in the new language.

"You went red, then went black, then went out of seeing," said Anto Rayl.

"You can make sense with those fool words we learned yesterday," said Carlisle.

"We went to the sun. The sun is far. We went fast. We went more fast than light, so we went out of seeing," Aarn answered Anto.

Anto looked puzzled. His question was quite evident to the Jovian. He was puzzled, because he knew that nothing could go faster than light, and because these men were learning the language. Now the strangers might be able to do the impossible; on the other hand they certainly could get mixed up in their language.

Aarn spoke again: "We went fast—very, very very more fast. So fast that light was slow. It went red, then more fast, and it went black, so we went out of seeing."

Anto smiled his understanding. "Why?”

Aarn explained briefly, and with every word and phrase his surprise and shock grew. He found himself talking a sort of pidgin language that consisted principally of basic, simple ideas such as go, be, live, die, power, fast, slow, heat, cold, air, and such, and a number of modifiers. The result was a language which lacked all signs of beauty or nobility, but had every possible desirability as a quickly, easily learned language. One did an enormous amount of "going" and "being" but the result was intelligible.

To attempt to maintain the peculiar jerky style of that simple but ungraceful language is useless. In giving Anto Rayl's story I abandon it completely for the English translation which gives the thought, not the words.

Anto Rayl listened with astonishment to Munro's description of the source of the Sunbeam's power. He gaped in amazement and stared with a new respect at the hulking form of the antigravity field. No ship of theirs had ever attempted to approach the sun, not only because of the terrific distance—so great that it would have taken a lifetime almost for a space ship going at any safe speed—but because of the terrific gravitational field.

"Doesn't that enormous energy burn out that coil? If it contains energy sufficient to lift this ship those trillions of miles against the terrible gravity of Anrel, I should expect it to be consumed," he said wonderingly.

"It doesn't contain the power. That's the point. Quite the opposite. It keeps the space around it from containing that energy. It prevents the energy's existence. Therefore it contains none and is under no strain."

"But the power coils?"

"An altogether different thing. They build up a field instead of tearing one down.

"But tell us your story. We feel sure that your race and ours are blood kin. How can this be? We came through the wall that leads from space to space."

 

"MANY, many, millas—periods of a thousand-thirty-hour-days—ago, in a world on the other side of the Wall of Naught, our forefathers lived," said Anto Rayl. "It was a green world about the size of Magya, but slightly smaller, and made up of fair lands and broad seas. And in the middle of the greatest sea of all, lived the Ma-jhayanhu, the mother race.

"They built great cities, carved great monuments on their broad, flat continent, and developed a great civilization. They were a people who roamed little, who multiplied slowly, and they did not search the world and colonize it widely. As their ships grew greater, and their air flying machines came they visited all the continents. In some they found wild savages, hairy and bestial. A different race altogether. They were almost apes. Colonies were not needed, none established.

"Then—the year of the calamity. There was a shaking of the ground, and a great cleft appeared in the side of the sacred mount, where lived the rulers of the Ma-jhay-anhu. And from it came the Teff-Hellani. They were—something else, a misbreed; something the processes of life should not have produced. They were, we believed, the result of the evolution of a strange crossing of utterly different races, the primates and the goats. A million years ago, perhaps, these things had been locked under the Earth in a vast system of caverns beneath the continent of Mahu, and in the strange light of strange elements they developed.

"Their faces were long and narrow, and they had horns, but their eyes and their noses and their mouths were something like those of humans. They had a torso and a pair of true hands, but their feet were the feet of goats, and their bodies were hairy. And the strange light had bred something into them that made them red, for the light was greenish in hue. They were hideous. It was hot in those depths, and they loved heat. Only in summer could they endure the outside air. Then they were always hugging great fires.

"But they were intelligent, and their vitality was terrible. They were carnivorous. They captured our people and carried them off, women and children—for meat supplies. They had never had any before. They bred them down there in their foul caverns, and some few escaped to tell of the horrors.

"And the Ma-jhay-anhu fought with more and newer weapons. Those two races hated each other instinctively. They always have. They always will, for that matter.

"The warfare lasted longer than we know, save that it began with arrows and with swords, and ended finally with space ships and deadly rays.

"Tsoo-Ahs was the last great ruler of Ma-jhay-anhu. He saw that never could hope of the end come till the last member of one race or the other was wiped out. Both had airships now, so no colonies had been established, neither the Teff-Hellani nor the Ma-jhay-anhu had dared a small colony. But now Tsoo-Ahs sent thousands of young men and young women into all the corners of the world, hastily, for a plan had been made and it must be executed before the Teff-Hellani learned of it.

"The expeditions set out—half equipped, uninstructed, without plan. And Tsoo-Ahs, who had invented two great things that were to make this thing possible, set to work. He had learned to extract the secret energy store of the indivisible particle. And he had learned to hurl the deadly ball of electric energy."

"Great glory! Tsoo-Ahs. Zeus!" exclaimed Spencer.

"Naturally. Sit down and shut up. Ever hear of Mu? That's what's left of Mahu. Ever hear of Easter Island, and the remains of the great city out in the middle of the Pacific? That's more of Mu—or Mahu. Now shut up and hear how came. Also hear how come Mayans built pyramids and the Egyptians built pyramids and the Babylonians or some race around there built a tower. And why the Greeks and other races kept showing and talking about human torsos on human bodies," said Aarn.

 

"TSOO-AHS sent messengers to all his kingdom to hold a great feast," Anto Rayl went on. "And while the feast was in progress, and there was great merrymaking, and all laws and restrictions were relaxed, for he knew that all must die, Tsoo-Ahs began his work. He had made five great ships of a wonderful new kind which needed no wings and could go beyond the air. And he sent them up over the great crevice that was the entrance to the kingdom of the Teff-Hellani.

"The ships began a bombardment which fused the rock and split it open. The great crevice spread more and more, and presently an army of the Teff-Hellani swarmed up, and an air fleet, but the army was annihilated and the air fleet blown out of the air, and the great crevice widened, and stretched half a mile nearer to the blue-deep waters of the great sea.

"And just as the waters of the sea roared suddenly downward into the mouth of the great caverns, a ship shot out, a ship not unlike our own, and it spit forth a series of great torpedoes that shot forward and buried themselves in the sides of four of the ships of the Ma-jhay-anhu, and the four ships were destroyed.

"A fifth torpedo was fired, but the skillful ones aboard the remaining ship dodged it, and sent a lightning bolt toward the Teff-Hellani ship. The Teff-Hellani was forced to flee. His guns made no impression and the lightning balls pursued him. His torpedoes were exhausted, and now, so great a volume of water flowed down the mighty mouth to the sunken caverns, the ship could not reenter, but could only watch and attempt to stop the flow. It was hopeless.

"In an hour the world shook, and the vast continent of Mahu settled somewhat. Tsoo-Ahs had expected that, for he knew. Worlds are made of blocks, like many huge boats floating close together in water. When one block gets too heavy, it will sink. Mahu had been balanced. She was full of great caverns, but her rocks were very heavy. Then the caverns were filled with quintillions of tons of water, and Mahu grew heavy, and the great continent sank.

"She sank and sank, till only the tops of a few volcanoes protruded, and then the violent action that shook the whole world took place.

"And now, remember, there remained two ships capable of fighting in the emptiness beyond worlds, the ship of the Teff-Hellani, and the remaining ship of the Ma-jhay-anhu. Now the five ships of the Ma-jhay-anhu were intended to have carried the last load of colonists to the five great colonies, and they were to have been the means of communication, and they carried tools and supplies and seeds.

"But four were destroyed, and the fifth was busy—busy seeking that last ship of the Teff-Hellani.

"They got on the trail of that ship at last by means of an instrument whose nature we cannot understand, and they followed it, faster and faster—faster —and each was protected by a powerful force that hurled meteors from its path, a reversing of the effect of gravity.

"They engaged in battle, and the Teff-Hellani had the advantage because their shells would pierce the protective meteor shield and were attracted to their victim by some means, while the ball-lightning was not attracted, but tended to follow only a straight line, while the Teff-Hellani dodged about.

"Both were too busily engaged. Across the small expanse of that little planetary system they had chased and fought, and now an incredibly rugged and dark mass of matter—a broken fragment of a world—loomed before them. Both struck it.

"They were separated when they discovered themselves in this strange space. They each hoped the other was dead—destroyed. The space was too great. They could not locate themselves. Their ships were damaged, and each sought a planet.

"We know of eighty-seven planets which revolve about this sun. There are more. And each of those two ships landed on a different planet. The Teff-Hellani picked one nearer the sun—warmer. But they could not get the warmth they wanted before their ship would give out, for this system is too vast. So they chose the planet we know as Teff-el. Our forefathers chose the planet we know as Magya.

"The people were in a peculiar situation. They had started out to colonize, but not in such a place. They had expected many other people to aid them.

Fortunately there were both males and females in the ship, so that life should not die, but there were no teachers, no thinkers, and no mechanicians. They were able to make, when they had tools and power to work with, and supplies of metal and chemicals. But they did not know how to find those supplies. They had never had to.

"In a generation the ship was a temple where the children worshiped the knowledge of their forefathers of the old world blindly. Then, as generations passed, a stone temple was built about the now-ruined ship. Finally the stone temple crumbled from neglect, and the Magyans spread over their planet as savages, but never totally lost to knowledge, for the legends persisted. And gradually civilization roused itself once more and grew, and the legends were thought of only as foolish sayings, tales for children, and disregarded, the ancient ideas of gods and goddesses—superstition.

 

"TEN hundred millia ago a man crossed space. He went to the nearest of our four moons. Then he went to the outermost. A crude rocket device. Again the thing was done. Then a ship finally took off from the fourth moon and went to the nearest planet. It was to have taken a millia. The ship never returned, but another went. It did not return. The third did not. The fourth came back, its rockets exhausted, and three greater rockets close on its heels. It was a greatly improved model, or it would never have escaped as it did, nor lasted so long in the chase. Signals had preceded it, so there were half a dozen other rockets out to meet it, and the convoy drove off the rockets which had pursued across five hundred million miles of space.

"Fortunately the rockets which went out to rescue the hard-pressed interplanetary rocket were a new experimental type. They were very swift and very agile. The Tefflan rockets were equipped with guns. Our rockets had none, but one clever rocket-pilot had a man stand in the air lock with a space suit on and throw heavy crates and castings about.

"The pilot headed his rocket straight for the enemy, then just short of a crash he changed his course abruptly, the heavy castings smashed their way straight on and ruined the ship. The others tried the same thing. One ship was punctured and died. The others retired hastily.

"The returned rocket explorer, Harn Malto, told what had happened. The others had landed on Teff-el and been killed instantly. For the Tefflans had their ancient legends as we had ours, and they, too, had seen in the humans the hated enemy. Harn Malto saw in the Tefflans the hated enemy of legend.

"The legends revived. And war rockets were made instantly. Some wild terrorist shouted that the cities would be destroyed and only underground was it safe. A man by the name of Hero Shal arose. He made a device which would crumble rock—a peculiar slow-explosion torpedo. He could dig his way into the hardest rock with amazing speed. The thing exploded grain by grain, only one grain at a time, but all in less than a second. It shattered rock, and the stuff came out dust. He was of course accused of attempting to advertise his product.

"Six tiny Tefflan scout rockets dropped noiseless and sightless from the sky, and wiped out Mag-harun, our largest city, in thirty-five seconds. The scout ships were piloted by Tefflans who went uncomplaining to suicide. Each was a five-ton missile of metallic sodium, which exploded and cast the flaming, liquid metal all over the city. The entire city was a single sheet of flame in seconds. Thousands and tens of thousands died through fire; as many more were killed by the poisonous, consuming dust that rose from the burning sodium.

"It happened that Hero Shal had lived there and built his underground home there. He was unharmed and, when the blazing ruins cooled, walked out.

"In a month cities were drilling their way underground; war rockets were being equipped with the deadly Shal torpedoes. Nothing could stop them. Even to-day the mightiest battleship armor frequently falls before them if they are not torn loose in time."

"Was that what we saw used?" interrupted Aarn.

"Yes. Those first rockets carried small ones, propelled by compressed springs. When the Tefflans came again, they destroyed another city, but there were few people in it, for, thanks to the wonderful Shal-crumbling bombs, great underground cities had been dug. They were half a mile below the surface. We had descended even as the original Tefflan race.

"And our archaeologists were seeking that ancient temple. Millias passed in unavailing search, while the rockets grew more and more deadly. Bases were established on the outer moons and fortified. They were our centers of defense. And at last a fleet of ten rockets set out for Teff-el. Each rocket carried a tiny scout rocket which was to do most of the fighting.

"That was the expedition of Tarnel Car. There followed expedition after expedition, and gradually the rockets improved.

"Then, only about one hundred years ago, the Tefflans found the remnants of their ancient flyer. They found also the remnants of its engine. The engine had been protected by the very nature of it, and still existed intact. The driving apparatus, the disks, existed also intact, and that was enough. They made one of the new ships. They attacked us when they had three completed, and they destroyed utterly the bases on our moons, they destroyed our fleet, and they tried to destroy our cities. "But we made little scout cruisers that shot out of hidden holes in the ground at night, careened suddenly toward their huge armored battleships, and loosed a Shal torpedo. They had never learned the secret of the Shal torpedoes, have not yet. They destroy themselves, and are always destroyed in a damaged ship before it is abandoned. "The Shal torpedoes at last were made large enough so they ate holes in the giant battleships; Then rocket drives were added to the torpedoes so they destroyed the armor and went on drilling through to the inside.

"Shal torpedoes loaded with poisons finally forced the Tefflans off the planet. They set up bases on our moons and began bombarding our cities. They were slowly eating their way inward when a Magyan discovered the secret of atomic energy independently. He was disappointed; it was not what he had hoped for. It has always annoyed us. We require, still, great amounts of fuel, though theory shows that an engine could be made which would require so little a single man could carry it."

"How do you do it?" interrupted Aarn once more.

`The atoms of two metals are mutually destructive in certain conditions. I cannot show you now. It would take too long. The destroyed atoms fly about at tremendous speeds in all directions, the various electrical charges blending in a sort of continuous flame.

"This process is carried on in the center of a great boiler filled with a liquid metal. The flying atom-parts are captured in the metal, stopped, and become only heat and gas. The heat boils the metal and runs turbines; the gas is exhausted into space. But we are still limited, because while there is a great deal of energy in the fuel, and it comes off as rapidly as we wish, the electric generators are not capable of handling more than a certain load, and are heavy."

"Wouldn't water be better in your boilers than mercury? It isn't so terribly dense," suggested Spencer.

"No; it isn't dense and won't stop the flying ions," Aarn reminded him. "Besides it would be smashed to atoms, literally, and give you something besides steam. Mercury is already smashed to atoms. But continue your story."

"It is short, now," Anto Rayl said. "With atomic power we succeeded in repulsing the Tefflans. We discovered our own ship soon—the ancient one, and the ball-lightning device. Sadly, the Tefflans have learned that secret now. It will be so much longer before the last Tefflan is killed. If only the worlds were nearer that we might fight better and finish this!"

 

VIII.

 

"I THINK," said Spencer, "that we can tell you what became of the other part of your race—the part that remained behind. The colonists were in terrible condition, because now they had no means of acquiring tools, they had no supplies, they could not communicate, for their planes, I suppose, ran out of fuel quickly, and they had not carried sufficient apparatus to make more.

"They, too, lost their civilization. Now some of those colonists had settled in Europe as we call it to-day. They met there a race of terrible savages, short, squat men, incredibly ugly, cannibalistic. They called them 'ogres,' and the myths of that savage race exist still. We know them scientifically as Neanderthals. These ogres were afraid to attack grown men, but they stole children, and some women, but eventually through ages of fighting were wiped out, and civilization grew again. "And a portion landed in Africa and started a colony in Egypt. There were natives already there, and the natives were not intelligent, so the colonists learned the language of the natives, since the natives were too stupid to learn their language. And the colonists declined through several generations, while dragging the natives out of the utter abyss of ignorance, and then all advanced slowly to a high civilization, till at length the blood of the colonists was overcome by the poorer blood of the many native strains, and the civilization vanished.

"And another group landed in America, and they found natives, as had those who landed in Egypt, and they followed a very similar process, and again the civilization died. In each case, when the blood of the old Ma-jhay-anhu was diluted, it won for a time, then died.

"What happened to the others, I cannot guess. Maybe they landed in India. "But only the undiluted Ma-jhayanhu blood lived to reach a civilization once more that endured fairly well.

"And now, Anto Rayl, we have come through the Wall of Naught to join you. We shall go back, but this now is your life, your space, and your world. We shall open up paths of commerce between the worlds, perhaps?" Spencer turned to Munro questioningly.

"Not till we learn how to find our own space," he answered. "That may require years of observation and calculation."

Anto Rayl looked at Munro with interest.

"What you need exists, I believe," he said at length. "An old legend: the captain of that ancient Majhay-anhu ship wanted to go back through, and he was a scientist, and he spent many years observing and calculating, and in the end learned what he needed to know. But he found that the ship was no longer capable of making the trip, for parts had decayed in the more than thirty millia that had passed.

"And the Teff-Hellani were exploring and found our world, attacked suddenly, and wiped out half the colony, one of the two cities. And they landed and looted the city, and among the loot was the book of data, inscribed on plates of an alloy of three noble metals which would not rust or decay, nor would change with time, according to the legend. For the old captain was not dead. But he said that the Teff-Hellani scientists would not be able to go through any more than he, but that one day the plates would be recovered from the Teff-Hellani. 'The Plates of the Secret will be recovered, and the last of the Teff-Hellani will be destroyed by a great world.' Those are the words of his prophecy. I do not understand the meaning of the last. But if you need data, I am sure those stolen plates, which we have never troubled to recover, will contain it."

"We've got to get them," snapped Aarn. "It took that old captain nearly a lifetime, and we don't want to wait as long as that!"

"We're with you, Anto Rayl. Those Teff-Hellani might decide to try going back themselves, since we came through," said Spencer grimly.

 

THERE was a restlessness among the ships of the Magyan squadron, and the great battleships swung slowly around and headed off to one side, towing behind them the massive wreck of the Tefflan battleship. The cruisers swung into position around the monster ships, and the destroyers and smaller craft followed. Only Anto Rayl's ship remained in attendance. A cylinder electromagnet suddenly shot out from it, and fixed itself in the magnetic pole of the Sunbeam. Immediately a slight jerk, and the destroyer started off towing the Sunbeam.

Aarn grinned as he saw it. "Where's your planet, Auto Rayl?"

Anto Rayl pointed it out, and Aarn made some adjustments. Suddenly the electromagnet shied away, a half dozen instruments on the control panel changed abruptly, the destroyer slipped rapidly to one side, then behind—and held steady. But the spot of light that was Magya was suddenly shifting slowly and steadily.

A flash of light past the windows indicated the battle fleet as the Sunbeam, with the destroyer now in tow, swept past.

"By the Lords of Space! How fast are we going? Why was there no acceleration?" exclaimed Anto Rayl.

"I can't explain offhand, Anto Rayl. It depends on a question of the structure of space. We are going rapidly, and every atom of us was accelerated uniformly. This drive is not suitable to your great battleships—that is we can't install it in those already made, but we can install acceleration neutralizers, and if that space disk you talked about is what I think it is, we can get real speed out of those big fellows. Your people will have to make a lot of things for me," Aarn went on.

Ahead the planet Magya was looming larger, rapidly. And off to one side three moons showed. A dozen huge ships were swinging swiftly around the world to intercept them, and Aarn slowed. A light broke out on the destroyer, a bluish light that winked and trembled rapidly, then died into blackness. Instantly an answering light broke out on one ship below, and the squadron of the home guard swung into a ring formation, and picked up speed as the Sunbeam and its escort dropped slowly toward the planet.

The ships were four huge battleships, like those that had come to their rescue out in space, but surrounded by a perfect cloud of small ships, some little larger than torpedoes.

"What different ships does your navy consist of?" Aarn asked Anto Rayl.

"There are six main classes of fighting machines. The great battleships are first, weighing in the neighborhood of one million five hundred thousand tons.

"A battleship is almost indestructible. Even when blown completely in two, it is exceedingly dangerous, as it maintains maneuverability, and fighting power. They are armed with the lightning apparatus, one set for each engine. Great guns, with armor-piercing Shal shells; Shal torpedo tubes, gas guns, thtivo induction beams, and every known weapon, in the greatest possible size.

 

"THE HEAVY battle cruisers come next. Did I say that at present we have a total of fifty-six serviceable battleships? Two are in the Ma-kanee base. That is on our fourth moon. They are being repaired after a battle with the Tefflani. Three more are under construction on the ways at Santoa. There are always three under construction. We are soon going to start manufacturing four, for a new steel process has made this increase possible. Also, we are now recovering all broken derelicts of space for their metal.

"Of the heavy battle cruisers we have a total of a hundred and five in condition. Twenty-three are in repair docks on Ma-nayo, the third moon. There was a heavy engagement recently that sent them there. The heavy cruisers weigh about five hundred thousand tons and are equipped with two sets of engines, smaller lightning apparatus, heavy accumulator banks, lighter guns, but numerous torpedo tubes. Their armor is two and a half feet thick, enough to stop heavy shells, but not capable of stopping torpedoes.

"They are half as powerful and a third as heavy as a battleship, so their movements are somewhat more rapid. They are very dangerous craft.

`The next are the light cruisers. We have a hundred and eight of them now in commission. They are much the same as the heavy cruisers, with lighter engines, lighter accumulators, and much lighter armor. Their task is to punish the destroyers.

"We have over five hundred and eighty destroyers, about five thousand scout ships, and about ten thousand spy ships. The destroyers carry a light ball-lightning apparatus."

"I've always read," said Carlisle, "of space fleets meeting with seven thousand battleships from here, and twenty thousand from there, and so on."

"Neglecting," said Spencer, "the fact that a battleship represents something like a hundred million credits in hard cash. It represents a year or more of hard work, over a million tons of steel and a lot of complex delicate apparatus, plus a population running into the thousands.

"How was it, Anto Rayl, that we were able to destroy that Tefflan battleship?"

Anto Rayl smiled, and Aarn was similing, too.

"The answer is," said the latter, "that we didn't, I suspect."

Anto Rayl nodded. "You didn't. But you hopelessly crippled it. They had already noticed our approach, and being so badly crippled, and expecting a further dose any minute, they left in haste. They didn't know your power was gone."

"It was," said Munro grimly. "It isn't now. I see we seem to have arrived."

They had been shooting over mountains and lakes, over a green world of plains and hills and great blackened, torn bare spots.

"Bombs," Anto Rayl explained. "Radio-active. It will be dead for a century."

Now they had reached the border of a great sea, where a huge mountain range seemed to run off into the water in a series of islands. Their escort had taken the lead and was hovering over one of the islands now.

Suddenly Aarn gasped, for the tiny blazing blue sun and the deep violet sky were obscured by a mist that grew more and more dense, a rapidly rising, vapory cloud that swept up from the sea. In a minute the entire district was veiled in an impenetrable fog. Even the television was badly hampered, so badly it could show but a few hundred feet ahead as they followed closely the leading ship. Anto Rayl was silent, intently watching the screen.

 

THE DESTROYER ahead was making straight for the largest of the near-by islands. And as they neared it, a peninsula a quarter of a mile long slid silently out to sea and sank beneath the waves. A. great metal-lined bore was revealed, and instantly the destroyer dropped into it. The Sunbeam was directly behind. That bore was an oval cylinder five hundred feet wide, and two thousand long, and extending down beyond sight, curving into the bowels of the planet.

The lighted bore was suddenly darkened by the settling of the great rocky lid back in place.

The tunnel had straightened out. Now, suddenly, they came upon a great factory, a huge, brightly lighted underground workshop. Gigantic forms were in construction off across the big pillared cavern.

"This is San-toa," said Anto at that moment. "We wish to show you our ships. You have shown us yours—"

Aarn laughed good-naturedly. "Haven't shown you anything," he replied.

Anto looked down at the shorter man in surprise. "Nothing?" he asked in surprise. "But surely we have seen the machinery?"

"You could not duplicate it. It is hidden within itself. But I will show you things which you must make. Those two new battleships—have them tear out the accumulators you have. I will give them a better kind. The type you are using we have had on Earth for many years, and this type is far better. Further, I must have a power ship built—"

Aarn Munro talked rapidly. He talked, in the end, to a hundred scientists of this world, Magya, and showed them a thousand things. And he gave them specifications. Then he talked to the space-force staff and showed them a greater source of power lay in the sun.

"To fight successfully, you need power. I will give you three things that can be installed in all your battleships; the accumulators, the so-called aggie coils, the magnetic atmosphere which renders the Shal torpedoes useless and stops the lightning balls, and the transpon beam, which will cut holes in battleships. To do this, the battleships must have a greater power supply. A fourth thing I may be able to install, an automatic acceleration neutralizer that will release your men of the strain of motion.

"The power supply will be obtained in this way: A series of four mother ships, with their thin walls, their huge accumulator volume, must be stripped at once, and the new type accumulator put in, and with it such apparatus as I shall show you. These ships will make the trip to the sun, faster than light, collect the needed energy, and return loaded. They can charge four battleships, eight heavy cruisers, or twelve light cruisers. That must be done for victory!"

 

To be continued.