Chapter 11

Buck Kendall entered the Communications room rather furtively. He hated the place. Cole was there, and McLaurin. Mac was looking tired and drawn, Cole not so tired, but equally drawn. The signals were coming through fairly well, because most of the disturbance was rising where the signals rose, and all the disturbance, practically, was magnetic rather than electric.

“Deenmor is sending, Buck,” McLaurin said as he entered. “They’re down to the last fifty-five tons. They’ll have more time now--a rest while Phobos sinks. Mars Center has another 250 tons, but--it’s just a question of time. Have you any hope to offer?”

“No,” said Kendall in a strained voice. “But, Mac, I don’t think men like those are afraid to die. It’s dying uselessly they fear. Tell ‘em--tell ‘em they’ve defended not alone Mars, but all the system, in holding up the Strangers on Mars. We here on Luna have been safer because of them. And tell--Mac, tell them that in the meantime, while they defended us, and gave us time to work, we have begun to see the trail that will lead to victory.”

“You have!“ gasped McLaurin.

“No--but they will never know!” Kendall left hastily. He went and stood moodily looking at the calculator machines--the calculator machines that refused to give the answers he sought. No matter how he might modify that original idea of his, no matter what different line of attack he might try in solving the problems of Space and Matter, while he used the system he knew was right--the answer came down to that deadly, hope-blasting expression that meant only “uncertain.”

Even Buck was beginning to feel uncertain under that constant crushing of hope. Uncertainty--uncertainty was eating into him, and destroying--

From the Communications room came the hum and drive of the great sender flashing its message across seventy-two millions of miles of nothing. “B-u-c-k K-e-n-d-a-l-l s-a-y-s h-e h-a-s l-e-a-r-n-e-d s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g t-h-a-t w-i-l-l l-e-a-d t-o v-i-c-t-o-r-y w-h-i-l-e y-o-u h-e-l-d b-a-c-k t-h-e--”

Kendall switched on a noisy, humming fan viciously. The too-intelligible signals were drowned in its sound.

“And--tell them to--destroy the apparatus before the last of the power is gone,” McLaurin ordered softly.

The men in Deenmor station did slightly better than that. Gradually they cut down their magnetic shield, and some of the magnetic bombs tore and twisted viciously at the heavy metal walls. The thin atmosphere of Mars leaked in. Grimly the men waited. Atomic bombs--or ships to investigate? It did not matter much to them personally--

Gresth Gkae smiled with his old vigor as he ordered one of the great interstellar ships to land beside the powerless station, approaching from such an angle that the still-active Mars Center station could not attack. One of the fleet of Phobos rose, and circled about the planet, and settled gracefully beside the station. For half an hour it lay there quietly, waiting and watching. Then a crew of two dozen Mirans started across the dry, crumbly powder of Mars’ sands, toward the fort. Simultaneously almost, three things happened. A three-foot UV beam wiped out the advancing party. A pair of fifteen-foot beams cut a great gaping hole in the wall of the interstellar ship, as it darted up, like a startled quail, its weapons roaring defiance, only to fall back, severely wounded.

And the radio messages pounded out to Earth the first description of the Miran people. Methodically the men in Deenmor station used all but one ton of their power to completely and forever wreck and destroy the interstellar cripple that floundered for a few moments on the sands a bare mile away. Presently, before Deenmor was through with it, the atomic bombs stopped coming, and the atomic shells. The magnetic shield that had been re-established for the few minutes of this last, dying sting, fell.

Deenmor station vanished in a sudden, colossal tongue of blue-green light as the ton of atomically distorted mercury was exploded by a projector beam turned on the tank.

It was long gone, when the first atomic bombs and magnetic bombs dropped from Phobos reached the spot, and only hot rock and broken metal remained.

Mars Center failed in fact the next time Phobos rode high over it. The apparatus here had been carefully destroyed by technicians with a view of making it indecipherable, but the Mirans made it even more certain, for no ship settled here to investigate, but a stream of atomic bombs that lasted for over an hour, and churned the rock to dust, and the dust to molten lava, in which pools of fused tungsten-beryllium alloy bubbled slowly and sank.

“Ah, Jarth--they are a brave race, whatever we may say of their queer shape,” sighed Gresth Gkae as the last of Mars Center sank in bubbling lava. “They stung as they died.” For some minutes he was silent.

“We must move on,” he said at length. “I have been thinking, and it seems best that a few ships land here, and establish a fort, while some twenty move on to the satellite of the third planet and destroy the fort there. We cannot operate against the planet while that hangs above us.”

Seven ships settled to Mars, while the fleet came up from Jupiter to join with Gresth Gkae’s flight of ships on its way to Luna.

An automatically controlled ship was sent ahead, and began the bombardment. It approached slowly, and was not destroyed by the UV beams till it had come to within 40,000 miles of the fort. At 60,000 Gresth Gkae stationed his fleet--and returned to 150,000 immediately as the titanic UV beams of the Lunar Fort stretched out to their maximum range. The focus made a difference. One ship started limping back to Jupiter, in tow of a second, while the rest began the slow, methodical work of wearing down the defenses of the Lunar Fort.

Kendall looked out at the magnificent display of clashing, warring energies, the great, whirling spheres and discs of opalescent flame, and turned away sadly. “The men at Deenmor must have watched that for days. And at Mars Center.”

“How long can we hold out?” asked McLaurin.

“Three weeks or so, at the present rate. That’s a long time, really. And we can escape if we want to. The UV beams here have a greater range than any weapon the Strangers have, and with Earth so near--oh, we could escape. Little good.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I,” said Buck Kendall, suddenly savage, “am going to consign all the math machines in the universe to eternal damnation--and go ahead and build a machine anyway. I know that thing ought to be right. The math’s wrong.”

“There is no other thing to try?”

“A billion others. I don’t know how many others. We ought to get atomic energy somehow. But that thing infuriates me. A hundred things that math has predicted, that I have checked by experiment, simple little things. But--when I carry it through to the point where I can get something useful--it wriggles off into--uncertainty.”

Kendall stalked off to the laboratory. Devin was there working over the calculus machines, and Kendall called him angrily. Then more apologetic, he explained it was anger at himself. “Devin, I’m going to make that thing, if it blows up and kills me. I’m going to make that thing if this whole fort blows up and kills me. That math has blown up in my face for four solid months, and half killed me, so I’m going to kill it. Come on, we’ll make that damned junk.”

Angrily, furiously, Kendall drove his helpers to the task. He had worked out the apparatus in plan a dozen times, and now he had the plans turned into patterns, the patterns into metal.

Saucily, the “S Doradus” made the trip to and from Earth with patterns, and with metal, with supplies and with apparatus. But she had to dodge and fight every inch of the way as the Miran ships swooped down angrily at her. A fighting craft could get through when the Miran fleet was withdrawn to some distance, but the Mirans were careful that no heavy-loaded freighter bearing power supply should get through.

And Gresth Gkae waited off Luna in his great ship, and watched the steady streams of magnetic bombs exploding on the magnetic shield of the Lunar Fort. Presently more ships came up, and added their power to the attack, for here, the photo-cell banks could gather tremendous energy, and Gresth Gkae knew he would need to overcome this, and drain the accumulated power.

Gresth Gkae felt certain if he could once crack this nut, break down Earth, he would have the system. This was the home planet. If this fell, then the two others would follow easily, despite the fact that the few forts on the innermost planet, Mercury, could gather energy from the sun at a rate greater than their ships could generate.

It took Kendall two weeks and three days to set up his preliminary apparatus. They had power for perhaps four days more, thanks to the fact that the long Lunar day had begun shortly after Gresth Gkae’s impatient attack had started. Also, the “S Doradus” had brought in several hundred tons of charged mercury on each trip, though this was no great quantity individually, it had mounted up in the ten trips she had made. The “Cepheid,” her sister ship, had gone along on seven of the trips, and added to the total.

But at length the apparatus was set up. It was peculiar looking, and it employed a great deal of power, nearly as much as a UV beam in fact. McLaurin looked at it sceptically toward the last, and asked Buck: “What do you expect it to do?”

“I am,” said Kendall sourly, “uncertain. The result will be uncertainty itself.”

Which, considering things, was a surprisingly accurate statement. Kendall gave the exact answer. He meant to give an ironic comment. For the mathematics had been perfectly correct, only Buck Kendall misinterpreted the answer.