Chapter 13: Attacked

The Ancient Mariner stirred, and rose lightly from its place beside the city. Visible over the horizon now, and coming at terrific speed, was a fleet of seven Thessian ships.

They must do their best to protect that city. Arcot turned the ship and called his decision to Morey. As he did so, one of the Thessian ships suddenly swerved violently, and plunged downward. The attractive ray was in action. It struck the rocks of Neptune, and plunged in. Half buried, it stopped. Stopped--and backed out! The tremendously strong relux and lux had withstood the blow, and these strange, inhumanly powerful men had not been injured!

Two of the ships darted toward him simultaneously, flashing out molecular rays. The rays glanced off of Arcot’s screen already in place, but the tubes were showing almost at once that this could not be sustained. It was evident that the swiftly approaching ships would soon break down the shields. Arcot turned the ship and drove to one side. His eyes went dead.

He cut into artificial space, waited ten seconds, then cut back. The scene before him changed. It seemed a different world. The light was very dim, so dim he could scarcely see the images on the view plate. They were so deep a red that they were very near to black. Even Sirius, the flaming blue-white star was red. The darting Thessian ships were moving quite slowly now, moving at a speed that was easy to follow. Their rays, before ionizing the air brilliantly red, were now dark. The instruments showed that the screen was no longer encountering serious loading, and, further, the load was coming in at a frequency harmlessly far down the radio spectrum!

Arcot stared in wide-eyed amazement. What could the Thessians have done that caused this change? He reached up and increased the amplification on the eyes to a point that made even the dim illumination sufficient. Wade was staring in amazement, too.

“Lord! What an idea!” suddenly exclaimed Arcot.

Wade was staring at Arcot in equally great amazement. “What’s the secret?” he asked.

“Time, man, time! We are in an advanced time plane, living faster than they, our atoms of fuel are destroyed faster, our second is shorter. In one second of our earthly time our generators do the same amount of work as usual, but they do many, many times more work in one second, of the time we were in! We are under the advanced time field.”

Wade could see it all. The red light--normal light seen through eyes enormously speeded in all perceptions. The change, the dimness--dim because less energy reached them per second of their time. Then came this blue light, as they reached the X-ray spectrum of Sirius, and saw X-rays as normal light--shielded, tremendously shielded by the atmosphere, but the enormous amplification of the eyes made up for it.

The remaining Thessians seemed to get the idea simultaneously, and started for Arcot in his own time field. The Thessian ship appeared to be actually leaping at him. Suddenly, his speed increased inconceivably. Simultaneously, Arcot’s hand, already started toward the space-control switch, reached it, and pushed it to the point that threw the ship into artificial Space. The last glimmer of light died suddenly, as the Thessian ship’s bow loomed huge beside the Ancient Mariner.

There was a terrific shock that hurled the ship violently to one side, threw the men about inside the ship. Simultaneously the lights blinked out.

Light returned as the automatic emergency incandescent lights in the room, fed from an energy store coil, flashed on abruptly. The men were white-faced, tense in their positions. Swiftly Morey was looking over the indicators on his remote-reading panel, while Arcot stared at the few dials before the actual control board.

“There’s an air pressure outside the ship!“ he cried out in surprise. “High oxygen, very little nitrogen, breathable apparently, provided there are no poisons. Temperature ten below zero C.”

“Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuited them.” Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking.

“Nervous shock,” commented Zezdon Afthen. “It will be an hour or more before we will be in condition to work.”

“Can’t wait,” replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too.

“Morey, make some good strong coffee if you can, and we’ll waste a little air on some smokes.”

Morey rose and went to the door that led through the main passage to the galley. “Heck of a job--no weight at all,” he muttered. “There is air in the passage, anyway.” He opened the door, and the air rushed from the control room to the passage till the pressure was equalized. The door to the power room was shut, but it was bulged, despite its two-inch lux metal, and through its clear material he could see the wreckage of the power room.

“Arcot,” he called. “Come here and look at the power room. Quintillions of miles from home, we can’t shut off this field now.”

Arcot was with him in a moment. The tremendous mass of the nose of the Thessian ship had caught them full amid-ship, and the powerful ram had driven through the room. Their lux walls had not been touched; only a sledge-hammer blow would have bent them under any circumstances, let alone breaking them. But the tremendously powerful main generator was split wide open. And the mechanical damage was awful. The prow of the ship had been driven deep into the machine, and the power room was a wreck.

“And,” pointed out Morey, “we can’t handle a job like that. It will take a tremendous amount of machinery back on a planet to work that stuff, and we couldn’t bend that bar, let alone fix it.”